Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘Our toilet difficulties,’ Sister Morris explained helpfully.

  Selma couldn’t turn away, but for a moment she closed her eyes. Then she said slowly, ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now if you’d excuse us, I’d like to give Amelia some tea. Amelia darling, could you help me into the drawing room?’

  Inside, Selma hailed an auxiliary. ‘Would you be so kind as to bring us some tea.’

  ‘Tea’s not until half six Mrs Merryman, you know that.’

  ‘I was not referring to supper.’ Selma, crumpled in her wheelchair, hand shaking, attempted haughtiness. ‘If it’s not too much trouble we’d like a cup of tea please and a slice of cake and a biscuit or two.’

  ‘You’ll have your biscuit with your cocoa, Mrs Merryman.’ The young nurse spoke firmly now, but she turned to Amelia with a friendly grin. ‘They get ever so greedy you know,’ she said in a stage whisper.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Selma said to Amelia, ‘I don’t seem to be able to offer you tea.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Amelia said quickly. ‘I had an enormous lunch on the train.’

  By the fish-tank something stirred. ‘Nonsense, damned cheek. If you want a cup of tea, you should have one.’ And the Admiral sank back in his chair.

  ‘Good afternoon everyone.’ A small figure being wheeled into the lounge, raised an emaciated arm and gave a cheery wave.

  Selma looked up with distaste. ‘There’s that tiresome woman. She never stops talking.’ Ignoring her furious shaking of the head, the nurse transferred, first the inco pad, then the woman herself, to the chair next to Selma. ‘Here’s Miss White for you.’ She sounded congratulatory.

  Miss White was aptly named, Amelia thought, as the tiny woman continued to beam at her. Her large eyes were of such a watered-down blue that they seemed almost colourless, and the face, its complexion the texture of crumpled tissue paper, was framed by white curls tumbling over her tiny shoulders. She sat upright in the chair, the edges of the inco pad showing at the sides of her baby-blue polyester dress.

  ‘I’m Phyllis White.’ The little woman reached out a surprisingly large hand for Amelia to grasp. ‘I’m a new girl like your nan. It’s lovely here, don’t you think? Always someone to chat with. Of course some of the old things are a bit quiet, but even a quiet one is better than no-one, that’s what I say.’ She laughed uproariously and Amelia looked across at Selma who sat scowling and jealous at Miss White’s hijacking of her visitor.

  An hour later, Nurse Williams came in with a young auxiliary in tow. ‘Tea-time,’ she announced cheerfully, as they began helping the residents back in their wheelchairs. The Admiral and some others needed help only to get out from their chairs, then with the aid of walking frames they proceeded with surprising speed towards the dining room.

  The evening meal, any meal, Amelia thought, must be a break from the monotony of the Cherryfield day, a Geriatric Happening, even when it consisted of three pilchards and half an egg on a lettuce leaf.

  ‘Darling, don’t go yet.’ Selma’s voice was light but her podgy hand gripped Amelia’s wrist like a trap.

  ‘I’ll walk you to the dining room,’ Amelia said. ‘And I’ll be here again tomorrow morning before I go back.’

  Once at the table though, seated between the Admiral and Miss White, Selma seemed not to mind Amelia going. She obediently turned her face up to be kissed then, as Amelia walked off, she lifted a piece of hard-boiled egg carefully to her mouth. Pale yellow crumbs settled on her lips and chin as she chewed and picked at her food.

  ‘Now then Mr Hurst!’ Amelia turned in the doorway to see a nurse hurrying over to the table next to Selma’s, where Mr Hurst, a fit looking elderly man with a mild, faraway expression stuck his fork purposefully into his neighbour’s pilchard. The nurse directed his hand back over his own plate before hurrying over to another table, where some milk had been upset. As Amelia left she saw Mr Hurst calmly attacking his neighbour’s plate once more.

  Chapter Three

  Amelia Lay on the bed in her room at the Anchor Inn, a picture of sloth.

  It was ten o’clock at night. She had had dinner in the small dining room: roast shoulder of lamb with potatoes and two vegetables. She had called home. Gerald had sounded in a hurry but said he was staying in watching television. He had used that voice too, his Star Wars voice, able to destroy any attempted intimacies before they hit him. These days everything she did seemed to irritate him. Take the other evening. She had run herself a hot bath, scenting it with half a bottle of gardenia oil. Then she had waited for his car to turn up the road before running to the bathroom and jumping into the tub, only to leap out again as she heard the front door slam. All so she could greet him in the hall, wrapped only in a towel, her body warm and scented from the water. Of course it had been a bloody silly idea, she thought now, wiping a tear from her eye, but still, there had been no need for him to be so unpleasant. She winced at the memory: ‘Have you got nothing better to do with your day than lounging around in the bath. I would have thought the least I could expect after a hard day is to find you dressed.’ So embarrassing. And so unfair: on that particular day she had started and all but finished a major article on the Hampshire watercress beds she was doing for a Swedish magazine.

  She sighed, Gerald was right though, generally she was disorganized, completely lacking in any sense of urgency. She lay on the hotel bed, weighed down by the heap of things she ought to be doing: about Selma, about the collection of poems Gerald had rightly predicted would never be completed, and about the unanswered correspondence that piled up with the unread books on her bedside table back at the Old Rectory.

  This lack of self-discipline was what Amelia most disliked about herself, the way she had of floating away from tasks, of knowing exactly what needed to be done, and then doing nothing.

  Sighing, she sat up on one elbow, staring out of the window and at Ashcombe across the harbour. The house was in darkness. Had Selma still been living there, lights would have come on in room after room like bright beads threaded on a dull string, as she pottered through the house in her emerald green, velvet dressing-gown.

  She would feed the cats, dust a little if the urge took her, chatter to her husband, her voice sometimes within hearing distance, sometimes not. Neither of them minded, it was the comfortable knowledge of the other being there that mattered.

  Soon she would pour hot milk into two mugs, hers, twice mended and decorated with a marmalade cat, and Willoughby’s owl with the hairline crack running through. Both mugs had been Christmas presents from Amelia over twenty years earlier.

  Willoughby had been good at mending china. The restoring of an object to usefulness always gave him great satisfaction.

  Amelia had always loved the oldness of the things in her grandparents’ house, the familiarity of them. In the bright flat she shared with her mother things never grew familiar, they were thrown out before there was time. As Dagmar’s obsession with cleanliness grew stronger, the life expectancy of possessions, clothes, shoes, ornaments, kitchen utensils, became shorter. Once when Amelia was nine she had asked her mother, half jokingly, half apprehensively, if she, Amelia, got really dirty, would her mother throw her out too?

  Dagmar had looked at her and laughed for such a long time that Amelia had got bored waiting for an answer. Then, suddenly, the laughter had turned to crying and Dagmar had fled the room.

  ‘You must be patient with your mother,’ Selma had said later when the child told her what had happened. She took Amelia’s hand. ‘She’s frightened you see.’

  Amelia liked the feel of her grandmother’s hand, soft like the chamois leather she used to polish the windows in the flat. Her mother’s hand felt more like a nutmeg grater. ‘Frightened of what?’ she had asked.

  Selma had shrugged her shoulders and looked sad. ‘Life, I think. And that is too big a fear for anyone to cope with. So what does your mother do?’

  Amelia, her slanted eyes fixed intently on Selma’s face,
shook her head.

  ‘She carves the fear up, like you’ve just cut that big piece of chocolate cake I gave you, into manageable pieces. She creates little fears, bite-sized ones and concentrates on them. So many times I’ve talked to her, tried to winkle the problem from her like meat from a crab claw.’ She shook her head.

  ‘I wish she was more like you,’ Amelia had said, looking adoringly at her grandmother.

  Selma had been a child’s, or a man’s, idea of beauty. There were no edges to her, everything was rounded, arms, chin, even the tip of her nose. She wore soft, flowing dresses and Amelia had never seen her in trousers. Her hair, black, then slowly turning bluey-grey, was brushed smoothly from her forehead and behind the ears, cut in softly at the nape of the neck.

  Amelia always saw her visits to Ashcombe as a boat ride in the sunshine down a smooth lazy river. With her mother the boat was out at sea and you never knew when the next storm would gather. Maybe it was because Ashcombe had for so long been a refuge from the newness and brightness of the flat that Amelia had not noticed when it slid from cosy disorder into squalor. Dagmar, of course, had stopped visiting after Tigger the tom had been sick in her suitcase as it lay open on the spare room bed, waiting to be unpacked. But as silent dust settled layer upon layer on every surface, dulling the colour of the china ornaments as passing centuries muted Old Masters, Peggy had said something would have to be done.

  Then Willoughby died and the thin mask of competence had been torn from Selma, revealing a frightened and confused old woman who did not always remember to grieve for the husband she had adored.

  Reluctantly, yawning, Amelia heaved herself off the bed and walked into the bathroom to remove her make-up. She slapped a large clot of expensive night cream on her clean skin and wondered why people said ‘as natural as brushing your teeth’. Brushing teeth was a bore, particularly when there was no-one next to you in bed to repel with your bad breath.

  Alone or not, Selma would never have gone to bed without brushing her teeth, Amelia thought. Dagmar, strangely enough, would. Amelia’s mother was selective in her quest for cleanliness, she had to be. When you have disinfected all the hangers in your wardrobe twice in a day, there is so little time and energy left for normality.

  Amelia pottered back to bed feeling angry. Gerald was right; her mother was bonkers. Selma, therefore, had no right to abscond into old age; Amelia needed her. Drifting down a stream of self-pity, she fell asleep.

  ‘I’ve brought you some clotted cream fudge from the Dairy.’ The next morning back at Cherryfield Amelia kissed Selma and handed her the small, wrapped box.

  ‘What a sweet girl.’ Selma smiled, then began to untie the string. It seemed impossible that, with her shaking right hand, she would ever succeed, but Amelia knew better than to offer her scissors; her grandparents had never been mean, but string was untied and carefully rolled and stored.

  ‘I haven’t got my glasses on,’ Selma said. ‘You try.’

  The box was opened and placed on the teak-veneered coffee table. Selma was silent as she bent over the fudge, carefully choosing the largest piece. While she chewed it, slowly at the front of her mouth, her fingers were already searching for another one.

  Amelia looked away, out over the garden where the wind strewed the cherry blossom across the grass. She could not bear to watch Selma, frowning, rapt with concentration as if a box of fudge was an event.

  ‘You have one, darling,’ Selma said finally, putting yet another sweet in her mouth before giving the box a little push in Amelia’s direction. Then she looked at her hard and added with studied nonchalance, ‘Of course Robert promised I would be back home by my birthday.’

  Amelia, about to have a piece, stopped, her hand halfway to her mouth. ‘Robert said that?’

  ‘I don’t see why you should be so surprised. You weren’t surely expecting me to stay in this place for ever.’ Selma laughed a little at the absurdity of the idea. ‘My toe is healing very well as a matter of fact.’ She stretched her bandaged left foot in its Scholl sandal out for inspection, wincing as it touched the leg of the chair.

  ‘They are trying their best here, I can see that,’ she conceded. ‘The staff on the whole are very nice, but I couldn’t live here. Those dreadful old people.’ Selma paused meaningfully, rolling her eyes in the direction of a couple of her fellow residents propped up in chairs along the conservatory wall. ‘The only one worth talking to is Admiral … Oh dear, I can’t seem to think of his name.’

  Amelia sat quietly, feeling as if she was talking to a robot which’d had a small but essential part from its control panel removed, making its behaviour just one step to the side of normal. ‘So Robert said you would be home for your birthday?’ she repeated.

  ‘I just told you so, darling. Are you not paying attention? Oh look, there’s the Admiral now.’ Selma raised herself up a little in her chair and gave a small wave.

  Admiral Mallett was steered through the conservatory doorway by a large young man in his mid-twenties, with untidy brown hair and a strong-featured, but amiable face.

  ‘I don’t believe you know my son, Henry.’ The Admiral looked on proudly as Henry shook hands first with Selma and then Amelia. As if he was doing something outstandingly clever, Amelia thought, amused.

  ‘Sailor, like his old man,’ the Admiral said, as Henry helped him into the chair next to Selma. ‘I married late you know. Henry here came along when I was practically in my dotage.’

  ‘I was just telling my granddaughter that I’m not expecting to stay here for very long,’ Selma said rather grandly.

  ‘Good for you,’ said the Admiral. ‘Jolly good for you.’ He cleared his throat noisily. ‘Of course I’ve sold my house. Voluntary confinement this. The old place became much too large once my sister kicked the bucket, bless her soul. And of course Henry isn’t around very much.’ He shrugged his shoulders and grinned. ‘Well that’s the Service for you.’

  ‘The Navy could stand on its head and blow raspberries at my father and he would smile indulgently and say, “Well that’s the Service for you,”’ Henry said, smiling indulgently himself. He had a surprisingly boyish, light voice coming from such a large frame, Amelia noticed.

  ‘Well this isn’t a bad place, food’s all right, what there is of it. The nurses are nice enough gals.’ Admiral Mallett spoke with all the determination of a man persuading himself. ‘Of course the place advertises itself as “For the Active Elderly”. Can’t say that I’ve seen much of the active so far, present company excepted of course.’ He indicated Selma with a little bow.

  ‘It’s my wretched toe,’ Selma said.

  ‘And then there’s Death Row,’ the Admiral continued.

  ‘Death Row?’ Amelia shot Selma an anxious glance.

  ‘That’s the other part of Cherryfield, the Annexe,’ Henry explained with a little smile, choosing his words carefully. ‘For the less active residents, the ones needing a little more care.’

  ‘For the chronically dying, shall we say,’ the Admiral intercepted with a hoarse laugh that ended in a loud cough.

  Selma stirred uneasily in her chair. ‘Of course I haven’t played tennis for months,’ she said. The Admiral and Henry looked a little surprised.

  ‘Look, coffee.’ Amelia pointed to the door where Nurse Williams came in, carrying a huge tray of blue, plastic cups and saucers. Behind her followed a procession of wheelchair-bound residents in various stages of awareness, a kind of geriatric pageant, Amelia thought.

  ‘I said to Sister Morris, why don’t we have our coffee in the conservatory, it’s such a lovely morning!’ Nurse Williams exclaimed to anyone who cared to listen.

  ‘Over here, Orderly,’ Miss White commanded with some authority, ‘with my new friends.’ She was placed between Selma and the Admiral. ‘And who is this?’ She twinkled at Henry who had stood up as she arrived. ‘Navy like your father, I say. Have you been to Crete? You must have been to Crete. I had such a wonderful trip there. We went by bus, the whole way.’r />
  Henry smiled encouragingly at her and Amelia wished he hadn’t. ‘Of course there was the ferry … But we were still on the bus, if you see what I mean. Lovely people they were on that trip. Then I’ve always been lucky that way. Some were not as nice as they could have been though, I must say, a bit offhand. That courier girl. She wasn’t what I would call nice. No … I told her I liked a seat at the front, but after the first day she changed me right to the very back of the bus. I felt the motion of the vehicle very badly. But people are ever so nice.’ Miss White paused at last, to help herself to a biscuit from the plate Henry held out to her.

  Selma’s cup clattered as she placed it back on the saucer, Miss White dunked her biscuit and sucked noisily on it before munching it between thin lips. ‘I wrote travel features for the Hereford and Worcester Gazette,’ she said, having finished her biscuit and established there were no more to come. ‘“A Spinster’s Journey: Europe Through My Bus Window”. Very popular they were. Until the fashion changed.’

  ‘Amelia dear,’ Selma said, ‘take me out in the garden, there’s a sweet girl.’

  Amelia stood up with an apologetic smile.

  Outside, Selma lifted her face to the sun, closing her eyes and sighing contentedly. The warmth of the sun on your skin, Amelia thought, was one of life’s few enduring pleasures.

  Until Willoughby died Amelia had never worried about what happened to a corpse once inside the grave; she only knew she didn’t like the thought of being cremated. But, since the funeral, she had been unable to ward off images of Willoughby’s kind face and short-sighted blue eyes at various stages of decomposition that haunted her with no warning.