Cuatro mujeres, cuatro generaciones. La bisabuela Webster, guardiana de la "corrección" de la familia que nunca ve. Su hija, la abuela Dunmartin, recluida también en una colosal casa solariega en el norte de Irlanda. Su hija, la tía Lavinia, entre grandes fiestas e intentos de suicidio. Y, por último, en la rama más joven de esta excéntrica genealogía, una joven huérfana de padre, aún en "la fase de escuchar torpemente".

Fiction truer than non. ( )

sad story of a crazy family. ( )

Caroline Blackwood, aka Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, was well-known for her journalism and her novels, and also for her high-profile marriages, the first of which was to the artist Lucian Freud. This novel is largely autobiographical and depicts her great-grandmother, whom the narrator in this story spent some time with as a convalescing teenager in postwar years because the old woman lived close to the sea near Brighton and it was hoped the young girl would benefit from the sea air. Great Granny Webster was a humourless, austere and loveless old woman who passed the better part of her days in a wooden upright chair which seems more suitable as a decorative hallway ornament than for actual human usage, sitting in it in a ram-rod straight posture not uttering a words while staring ahead with an unhappy expression on her face. This likely caused her great discomfort, but the narrator explains to us that Great Granny Webster made it her duty to make life as unpleasant as possible. The one time she left her torture device was to go on daily drives:

     Great Granny Webster knew that I was meant to need sea air, and this suited her very well because apparently she needed it herself. At four o'clock every afternoon a hired Rolls-Royce from a Hove car firm appeared at her door with a uniformed, unctuous chauffeur, who would then drive both of us, as if he was driving two royalties, at a slow creep along the bleak misty sea-front of Hove. To and fro, to and fro, we would drive for exactly an hour while one of the windows of the Rolls-Royce was wound down just enough to let in a very small sniff of salt and seaweed-smelling air. There was something memorably awful about those pointless and monotonous afternoon drives in the vast, soft-wheeled, swaying black car with the silver emblem of a dashing sea-horse on its bonnet. In that car I felt that I was much too near to Great Granny Webster. Sealed off behind the glass partition that separated us from the driver, I felt that I could actually smell the acid scent of her old age—smell the sourness of her displeasure with everything, past, present and future.

She goes on to describe to us her father's family, who lived in an unlikely mansion in the Irish countryside which was falling apart so badly that it likely drove her grandmother to complete and utter madness, though one could be excused for thinking being saddled with that old biddy, Great Granny Webster for a mother would be enough to have driven her into the loony bin for the rest of her life, which the old biddy in question did facilitate by signing the papers to ensure this was indeed done. To lighten things a little, there is the wonderful Aunt Lavinia who couldn't stand Great Granny Webster and insisted on being light and frothy and gay and had many loving ex-husbands who financed her very expensive and lavish lifestyle, but still somehow attempted suicide and eventually succeeded to do away with herself, on the very day she'd acquired a very sweet pekinese puppy, leaving behind no hint of unhappiness, much less a suicide note. A dark novel with appealingly eccentric characters, it has the kind of Gothic fascination which will engage those who can laugh at the more morbid side of life. ( )

"Un día la vio bailando sola en la sala de baile que no se utilizaba. Allí el tejado estaba especialmente mal, y en el suelo se desplegaba una mezcla de tarros de mermelada, sartenes, cubos para los caballos y antiguos jarrones chinos distribuidos meticulosamente para recoger chorros y goteos. Tommy Redcliffe tuvo la deprimente sospecha de que se creía un hada, y había sido un triste espectáculo ver a aquella mujer demente bailando sin música, rodeando lentamente los obstáculos desparramados por el parquet sin encerar, y escapando del agua de lluvia que caía monótonamente por las innumerables grietas del techo" ( )