Great Granny Webster Read Free Page B

intellectual or emotional motivation, like a piece of dried-up antique brown moss that can mysteriously survive without water, simply by clinging to the hard cold surface of a rock.
    Sometimes, cruising along with her in the Rolls-Royce, I felt I might suffocate just from being so enclosed with her. Although with her frugality she was happy to allow her house to be as chill as a morgue, she had a perverse terror of draughts and the tiny chink of air that was all she would allow into the car was never enough. I used to feel that she had sealed me off from the world forever. We were both like figures in a glass case in some museum separated from everything that was alive by the closed windows and the glass of the Rolls-Royce’s partition. Inside that car there was nothing to breathe except her silent and stoical despondency.
    â€œVery disappointing weather,” Great Granny Webster would say finally to the chauffeur, having been driven for an hour totally silent, and very upright, with the usual pained expression on her long lugubrious face and her knees tightly wrapped in a tartan rug.
    â€œVery disappointing, Mrs Webster. It started nice this morning—but now I’m afraid it seems to be clouding over.”
    â€œWell, I think that will really be quite enough for one day. Could you please now drive us home.”
    After the glare on the sea-front her house never appeared darker than when we got back from our afternoon drives. It seemed like a great gloomy, mysterious shrine that had been piously erected to commemorate something even more gloomy and mysterious than itself. It was as if every object that it contained had been chosen merely because it was heavy, expensive and sombre. Great Granny Webster seemed to hate colours. Almost everything she owned was either black or dark brown.
    â€œYou can read now,” she would say, pointing to a chair as we came into her icy, ill-lit drawing-room. “Dinner will not be served until seven.” And the rest of the evening would stretch in front of me as dark as her furniture, like a pitch-black tunnel that would never end.
    Great Granny Webster always liked to see me read while she sat hour after hour doing nothing in her drawing-room.
    â€œI’m glad to see a young person who still enjoys reading good books,” she would say. “Nowadays no one seems to want to read anything worthwhile any more.”
    Although she liked the idea of people reading good books, she had none herself. The books in her house were all on angling or nautical subjects. I sometimes wondered if she had them on her shelves as mementoes because her dead husband had once liked them. I also wondered if she had not chosen them herself because they matched everything else in her house—they were all so expensively bound, so dingy and brown.
    Once a week, on the way back home from our seafront drives, she would allow me to stop at the Hove library. I noticed that she had not the slightest interest in looking at the titles of any of the books I chose. When I was sitting with her in her drawing-room reading hectic romantic historical novels, she automatically assumed that what I was reading must be “worthwhile.” She saw me as her descendant, and although I very much disliked the idea of being in any way related to anyone so old, and arid, and charmless, she was convinced that a taste for “good things” had to have been passed down as if by a law of nature, from her, to me, in my blood.
    When Great Granny Webster used the word “nowadays,” she always stressed and separated each syllable and managed to make it sound like some lethal poison which was responsible for destroying everything in the universe that she had once found a little good.
    â€œ Now-a-days no one appreciates beautiful pictures any more,” she would murmur. She herself owned only a few dull and undistinguished portraits of her own dead ancestors. One or two pompous, fierce-faced