Read Online Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood - Free Book Online

mentality one has to admit there was something quite individual about the little pig all the same ...”
    Aunt Lavinia blew impatiently on her wet nails.
    â€œI wonder why so many men love to think that all one’s other lovers have always cheated one and let one down. It’s such a very common masculine notion. The idea seems to tickle their vanity and it makes them feel powerful and potent or something. I’ve always found that whole concept the most footling rubbish. If I’ve ever had the feeling of being cheated, I’ve never felt it was the fault of men ...”
    Aunt Lavinia shook her fingers impatiently.
    â€œHow boring nails are. I can’t think why one bothers with them. It’s like Chinese torture, waiting for them to dry. I’ve been talking a blue streak. You are certainly very kind the way you come round to listen to the blather of your silly old suicidal aunt. You are so young still. You are not quite out of the gawky listening stage. I feel guilty that I take advantage of you. I can still dazzle you with all my nonsense.”
    For a moment I wondered whether there had ever been such a figure as Dr Kronin, whether she had invented him or drastically improved him in order to shock and entertain me. The stories Aunt Lavinia told tended to be extremely vivid and somewhat surrealist, and she liked to tell them with great emphasis and well-planned timing. It was the zest and joy with which she told them that gave them their validity, and she made it hardly matter whether all the details were strictly true.
    â€œIt’s heaven for me that you have come to visit me on my red-letter day, the first day of my deliverance.” Aunt Lavinia blew me a kiss from her bed. “Never having had a daughter of my own—it’s a delight for me to have someone younger to laugh with and confide in ...”
    Aunt Lavinia’s slanted brown quizzical eyes examined me appraisingly, as I sat sunk down in the squishy cushions of her comfortable chintz-covered armchair.
    â€œAs you may have noticed, it’s also fun for me to have someone that I can boss around a bit,” she said. “I feel I have the right to be frank with you. I can tell you when your clothes really strike me as too deeply awful.”
    The sun was streaming through the impeccably polished panes of Aunt Lavinia’s large bay windows and creating brilliant pools of light on her white carpets. All at once she placed her hand across her eyes, and her newly varnished scarlet fingernails were like oval spots of blood against her pale forehead.
    â€œThe sun looks very odd to me today,” she said. “It’s like meeting some old friend one went to school with and never quite expected—or in some way never hoped—to meet again.”
    Aunt Lavinia was a chain-smoker and she lit another Turkish cigarette, which she first placed in an amber holder. The sweetish, musky smell of her tobacco mingled with the powerful, haunting smell of her beautiful lilies.
    â€œTo get back to you,” Aunt Lavinia said, “I thought about you a lot when I was lying there in the hospital—that is, of course, when the peccadillos of my psychiatrist and my other various vicissitudes were not preoccupying my mind. I don’t know why, but I found myself feeling very alarmed for you.”
    She pointed to her windows.
    â€œPlease, darling. Could you please pull a bit of curtain. The sun is wonderful, of course. But somehow I can’t face quite so much gorgeous sun right now.”
    I got up and pulled her curtains, and she thanked me.
    â€œYou are an angel,” she said. “I am lucky to have a niece who bothers to bother with her capricious old aunt at all.”
    She smoked silently for a moment, drawing the Turkish smoke into her lungs and then blowing it out in deliberately careful rings.
    â€œI don’t quite know why I felt such a curious anxiety for you when I was in hospital. I imagine