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grandmother was quite normal even when she was young,” Cousin Kathleen told me. “It never really surprised me when I heard that she had ended up in a lunatic asylum. Even when your grandfather first married her, although she was very pretty and enchanting, rather like an elf, I never quite liked her being so fey. When I look back now, I think there was always something very wrong with her—although somehow one accepted it at the time, she was so vivacious and delicate-looking, and if she wished she could be very charming. When I think back now—there was something slightly peculiar about a newly married young woman who insisted she had to walk alone round the damp cold woods of Dunmartin at midnight because she had learned the secret of talking to the trees.”
    â€œWas Great Granny Webster there when her daughter went mad at the christening?” I asked.
    â€œOf course she was there,” Cousin Kathleen answered. “Naturally your great-grandmother travelled over to Ulster for such an occasion—a woman like that only lives in order to be correct. Naturally she went over for the baptism of her first male great-grandchild.”
    â€œWhat did she do when my grandmother picked up the baby?”
    â€œShe didn’t do anything. As far as I know in all her life that woman has never done anything. She just stood watching the whole terrifying scene without having any visible reaction. I can see her now in her black turban hat all dressed up in special black furs and shoes as if she was dressed for a funeral rather than a christening. She looked imposed-upon and disapproving, but then that was nothing new. For as long as I have known her she has always looked that way. Afterwards she never mentioned her daughter’s behaviour—no hint of an apology.”
    â€œBut what do you think she felt underneath?” I asked. I had hardly ever seen Great Granny Webster at that time, and yet her feelings interested me. She was little more to me than the silhouette of a formidable old woman dressed in black who appeared occasionally at family gatherings and made us feel that she was taking a dangerous risk with her upright spine when circumstances forced her to bend over and kiss her great-grandchildren. She always managed to indicate that these kisses were very distasteful to her, and she would take care only to hold her cold pursed mouth against our fore-heads for the most fleeting of seconds. Then she would instantly straighten up, looking just a little bit more martyred and weary than usual, and at once start irritably adjusting her black hat and her furs.
    â€œWhat did she secretly feel?” Cousin Kathleen repeated the question. “What a silly thing to ask me! When you have a dour old piece of Scottish granite like your great-grandmother —how can you tell what a woman like that secretly feels?”
    And marooned with Great Granny Webster in her drawing-room I found I could never guess what she was thinking as she sat there silently on her chair. She was not in the least senile. She could truthfully boast that her brain was now as active as it had ever been. What did that active brain think about all day long? What did it think about in the nights, for she claimed she hardly slept? When she sat there frowning, were her thoughts taking her back to some uniquely disagreeable moment in her past which engrossed her to a point at which she temporarily forgot the terrible tedium of her present? Was her brain trying to think up wily stratagems which might help her avoid the unpromising possibilities of her future?
    I sometimes wondered if she ever gave a thought to her daughter, as she sat there glowering and stirring the saccharine in her coffee. I had the feeling that she was totally immune to the fate of anyone except herself, that her ego was totally concentrated on her own pugnacious struggle for survival. If her daughter existed for her at all any longer, I had the suspicion