Free Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood Page B

that Siberia started at Hove,” Aunt Lavinia said. “Ivor was so divine. It’s too dreadful that you will never know him.” It was then that I asked her why my father seemed to have had such a curious attachment to his grim old grandmother.
    Aunt Lavinia refused to believe that my father had ever been in the least attached to Great Granny Webster. “Who ever gave you such a terrifying idea? I’ve never heard of anything more creepy. No one in their right mind could possibly form an attachment to such a gruesome old water-drinker.” As she spoke she was diluting a huge mug of Guinness with some vintage champagne. She always claimed the mixture was the best pre-lunch drink, because it had some kind of alkaline effect that counteracted last night’s hangover. “Oh no ... It wasn’t in the least like you think, darling. Your father was one of the most impractical men in the whole world—but occasionally he could be quite crafty. Ivor was always in debt, as you know—his affairs were always in a mess. I think he suddenly remembered he had this old relative in Hove, that there she was, like an aged hen, squatting on her enormous fortune, and no doubt he saw his trips to Hove as quite a foxy future investment. Knowing Ivor, I would imagine he must have stoked himself up on brandy the whole way down on the Brighton train. So when he arrived he was probably so pie-eyed she couldn’t asphyxiate him with the boredom of her company. I’m quite sure that if your father is looking down on us all from some cloud he would be the first to see the joke. Who would ever have thought that it would be Great Granny Webster who would be the one to out-fox him in the end? When Ivor wasted so much time making all those dreary train trips down to Hove he really would have had to laugh if he had known that she was the one who was going to send him the wreath.”
    My father had been killed in Burma when I was nine, and I found it almost impossible to remember what he had been like. Death had obscured him as a reality and turned him into a phantom who remained completely elusive, because his image was always in a state of flux. He had become for me nothing more than a fluid, shifting composite of memory and fantasy, in which sometimes he could appear glorified and attractive, at other times much less so. I could remember a black-haired man playing tennis in white flannels, a black-haired man flushed from drinking port as he shouted and argued with his Oxford friends. The man seemed very ancient, but I realised that even this had to be a distortion, because at that time he had still been in his twenties. I found I could remember the smell of his tobacco when he came into my bedroom to say goodnight, that he had once told me to read Shakespeare because when I grew up and was very unhappy I would find every kind of human unhappiness perfectly expressed there. But all these memories were so arbitrary, misty and superficial that they in no way added up to any kind of satisfactory portrait, and they would all suddenly seem to be completely blotted out by a much more vivid, cleanly-etched and final image of three brown telegrams from the War Office, the first announcing his death, the second regretting the error and denying it, the third regretting that His Majesty had to confirm the information in the first.

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    S OON AFTER Aunt Lavinia’s attempted suicide I had lunch with a man who had been a close friend of my father and known him since he was a child. Tommy Redcliffe was a semi-successful biographer. He was a gentle pleasant man, at that time in his middle-thirties. His hair was turning grey and his eyes looked wise and disappointed. He had an artificial limb, for he had lost a leg in the war. He had the manner, both retiring and restlessly enervated, of the cured alcoholic.
    Tommy Redcliffe talked about my father with amused affectionate nostalgia, remembering the insanely drunken parties they