Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood Page B

Monday, and when they were reheated later in the week they had much the same anaemic and wizened inedibility as the game birds.
    When the shooting season was over, the Dunmartin food sank to even deeper depths of dullness. Day after day, there would be cold ham with beetroot salad, and only occasionally would there be the variation of hot ham fried in some coarse and glutinous batter accompanied by tinned peaches.
    Tommy Redcliffe remembered the meals that were served on his first visit to Dunmartin Hall as much the worst that he was ever to have to eat in that house. This was in large part the fault of an unnerving situation created by Grandfather Dunmartin, who still refused to abandon the idea that it was important for his wife’s self-esteem and her emotional well-being that she be allowed to choose the food that was to be served that day in her household.
    Every morning, following out one of the rare instructions of my grandfather, the youngest of the English footmen, walking with his cumbersome rubber-booted tread and wearing the grimly apprehensive expression of someone carrying out an unpleasant military mission under enemy fire, would leave Dunmartin’s dark and dirty kitchen and after winding through various semi-basement passages would eventually start to climb the great steps of the majestic stone front staircase with its resplendent and dizzying spiral of wrought-iron bannisters. On reaching the top landing, he turned left and headed down the long, musk-smelling corridor which led to my grandmother’s bedroom. In his hand would be a wine list and a variety of menu cards, on which alternative suggestions for the day’s meals had been written out in inaccurate and wobbly French by the Dunmartin cooks. My grandmother was expected to read through all these menus, to place a tick next to any of the suggested items that she approved of and to cross out the ones that did not appeal to her. She was then meant to go through the list from the Dunmartin cellar to choose wines which were appropriate to go with the different courses she had selected.
    When my grandmother heard the footman knocking on her bedroom door, she reacted in different ways, depending on the mood she happened to be in when he arrived. Some mornings she asked him to come in. She would take the menus from him and, while he waited uneasily, glance down them with the unseeing eyes of someone in a dream, and finally place a few impatient random ticks next to some of the names of the French dishes which had been suggested to her. On other mornings, the sound of his knuckles knocking with politely trained yet remorseless insistence on her door had the effect of inflaming her most paranoid and irrational terrors. Giving a piercing little scream, she would dive for cover under her bed, where she would lie quaking, with her arms clutching the cold surface of the white chamber pot which was placed there nightly because her room was so inconveniently far from the nearest bathroom. There she would remain until Grandfather Dunmartin, looking stupefied and haggard, came in to visit her and by various reassurances, like someone oozing a pinned winkle from its shell, managed to persuade her that it was safe to come out.
    There were also worse occasions when her reaction to the footman’s knock would be much more frenetic and sinister. Making a rush to her door, she would fling it wide open and stand there with her golden hair in a dishevelled mop and her breasts poking out of her slinky silver-threaded nightgown. Glaring at the young man with the suspicious and provocatively rolling eye of a woman confronted by a strange potential rapist, she asked him what the hell he wanted and then, screaming obscenities, started to curse him for having dared to come to disturb her.
    Stuttering because he was both embarrassed and enraged by the foolish situation in which he was continually being placed by Grandfather Dunmartin, the English footman tried to explain