Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  After five minutes she reached the start of a footpath. She turned left on to it and, when she found a large flat rock, she sat down, stretching her legs out in front of her. Looking across town to the green terraced hill and Cherryfield, she thought how soft the light was in Devon, as if the rain never quite left but only hung back a little distance, filtering the sunlight, ready for its next appearance. She rested her elbows against the warm rock and closed her eyes; it had been a bad week and she was tired.

  Dagmar, sitting at the piano, had seemed surprised at Amelia’s distress but she had allowed herself to be led into the bathroom. Amelia had found the ripped and empty Hoover bag behind the sofa and the fluff and dust had insinuated itself into every cranny of the room so that with each step they took it rose on the air like a fountain.

  ‘Being clean causes so much misery,’ Dagmar said reasonably as Amelia stripped her down to bra and pants and pushed her towards the bath-tub.

  Amelia tipped half a bottle of apricot bubble-bath into the hot water and, having watched the foam rise, she turned the taps off. ‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ she said in a small voice.

  She had found the number of Dagmar’s GP. ‘There’s no chance of an appointment today I’m afraid, none at all.’ The receptionist spoke with quiet satisfaction at an obstacle well placed.

  ‘But this is an emergency. My mother is insane.’

  ‘Could you hold please, there’s a call on the other line.’

  Amelia listened for sounds from the bathroom and as there were none she had visions of Dagmar floating in the bath like an elderly Ophelia, grey tentacles of fluff instead of flowers trailing from her hair. ‘Come on, come on,’ she muttered into the phone.

  ‘Yes?’ the receptionist had returned, and sounded as if she had hoped Amelia would have given up.

  ‘My mother; she’s gone mad.’ Some people lied in times of stress, Amelia always got an urge to be truthful, flawlessly exact. She added, ‘More accurately; she’s gone madder.’ She paused again. ‘A lot more mad.’

  The doctor came. By then Dagmar was sleeping, warm and clean, in her bed. ‘In there.’ Amelia opened the bedroom door gently to let him in. Outside she paced the sitting room like an expectant father in a fifties comedy.

  ‘What do you think?’ She pounced as Dr Norland reappeared.

  ‘She’s quite calm now.’ The doctor, young and tweed-clad, perched on the arm of the nearest chair.

  ‘Quite calm now.’ Amelia had visions of a raging ape, bellowing and rattling the bars of its cage before sinking to its haunches, silent, hands still clinging on to the bars. ‘Quite calm now.’

  ‘I’ll admit her to the psychiatric unit overnight, for observation. I don’t hold with doling out pills willy-nilly but see she takes these for the next month, just to help her over the acute stage of her problem.’ Dr Norland held out a prescription.

  Amelia remained standing. If she settled down in a chair it might scare him off, make him think she was going to keep him there talking for a long time.

  ‘There’s a question I’ve wanted answered all my life,’ she said. ‘What exactly is my mother’s problem?’

  Dr Norland closed his bag and stood up. ‘Not all that much. She’s an obsessive of course. Today’s incident was an extreme reaction to stress. I doubt it will recur.’ He moved towards the front door.

  ‘But Dr Norland.’

  He stopped and turned. ‘Yes.’

  ‘This whatever it is, this obsessiveness has blighted her life, and mine. Today she tipped the contents of a Hoover bag over her head whilst playing the “Warsaw Concerto”. How can you say it’s nothing much?’

  ‘Because in a way it isn’t.’ He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Anxiety is natural. We need it to survive. Our fore-fathers were busy doing just that, surviving, but increasingly the everyday threats, the ones we could see and hear and identify, have been removed from our lives, leaving us free to worry about remoter and vaguer issues that are almost always beyond our control. The anxiety increases, but its focus is blurred. That in itself induces stress. Your mother is a naturally anxious person, probably with low self-esteem, and her unfocused anxieties have been allowed to take over. In due course some sessions with a therapist would not be a bad idea.’ He opened the door but turned on the threshold. ‘You’ve heard of rebels without a cause. Well, my surgery is full of worriers without a worry.’ With a quick smile he was off, running down the stairs.

  Amelia had expected some cataclysmic change in her mother, whether for better or for worse she didn’t know, but surely no-one could go through such turmoil and come out the same? But Dagmar, returning from hospital, was quiet but otherwise how she had always been; a little distracted, a little irritable, busy worrying away at her worries.

  Amelia stayed on though, just in case. In case of precisely what she didn’t know but, when she set off for the Admiral’s funeral on the Wednesday, she kept thinking of those films where people clear away ropes and sharp instruments from the suicidal and she wondered briefly if maybe she should hide the Hoover.

  Henry had assisted the vicar of Kingsmouth at the funeral service. He had looked pale but he had smiled at Amelia when she entered the church and he had read the lesson with a steady voice. It was only when he had stood up again to speak those lines by Tennyson, that his voice had faltered.

  Lying on the warm rock, looking at the clouds appearing over the hills, Amelia said them to herself: ‘“Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar, When I put out to sea.”’

  Then the vicar had led the mourners into the churchyard, and a high wind had driven the rain into their faces like a shower of tacks. At Willoughby’s funeral the sun had been shining from a high February sky. Amelia remembered thinking it almost an insult, like giving a painting as a birthday present to a blind man. No, Amelia had approved of the rain and the wind as she followed the vicar, watching his huge black cloak dance round his ankles with the prematurely fallen leaves. There it goes, she had thought as the coffin was lowered into the ground, the universe according to John Mallett.

  It was Sunday now, a week exactly since Dagmar’s breakdown. ‘Breakdown,’ Amelia mouthed the word to herself as she got up from the rock, it makes her sound like a beat-up old mini. She checked her back pocket for the notebook and began the walk down to the ferry where Gerald’s car was parked. Dagmar was as able to cope now as she had ever been, so there was no reason not to go back to the Old Rectory: it was still her home for another two weeks.

  ‘Five Warden-Assisted Bungalows – Buy Now, Pay later.’ Was that really what it said? Driving into Abbotslea, she turned and looked over her shoulder, ‘Five Warden-Assisted Bungalows, For Sale,’ she read on the large sign by the new development she had just passed. Then, as she slowed down for the blind corner at the crossroads, she thought quite calmly, I’m going mad. She found herself relax at the thought. After all Selma was going mad slowly, through old age. Dagmar had simply gone mad. If some biblical curse or, if that was being pretentious, maybe a more ordinary gypsy one, had been lobbed in the direction of her family why not just give in? No more responsibilities; now there was a nice thought.

  She slammed on the brakes, narrowly avoiding Old Mike Aylard wandering round in the middle of the street with his deer-stalker and his wife’s fox collar to keep him warm in the July sunshine. Far from getting a sense of fellow feeling, she had a sudden urge to run him down. Maybe it’s the competition, she thought. She could stay in Abbotslea, buy herself a little place, but would there be room for two afflicted in the village? Could she hope to oust Old Mike from his position as village fool?

  She saw Rosalind and Ronnie coming out of the stores and gave them a cheery wave.

  Now Mrs Wetherburn-Pryce, for example, had never invited Amelia to one of her coffee mornings. Amelia had never wanted to go to one, but she resented not being asked. There were no real gentry in Abbotslea so the Wetherburn-Pryces, residing at The Poplars, the larg
est house in the village, and possessing a double-barrelled name, were commonly agreed to be the next best thing. Rosalind had explained as tactfully as she could to Amelia, when she had first moved in with Gerald, that it wasn’t that dear old Janet didn’t like her, more that Amelia confused her, refusing to be placed.

  ‘She feels you are People Like Us, really,’ Rosalind had mumbled the phrase a little shamefacedly, ‘but she can’t cope with the thought of you living with Gerald and not being married. She was very fond of his aunt.’

  Now, on the other hand, Amelia thought cheerfully as she drove up outside the Old Rectory, I might well get her racing over with an invitation, just by strewing ashes in my hair and ambling through the village dressed in a dustbin liner; thereby qualifying as A Worthy Cause. In fact, by the simple task of going completely mad, I might achieve the social acceptance that has so far eluded me. She yanked the hand-brake tight and got out of the car.

  There was a note for her on the hall table: ‘Please return car immediately. Love, Gerald’.

  She crumpled the white paper and left it on the table. It was nice to be in possession again of something he desired. She sniffed the air, scenting the prickly smell of wet paint. Had Gerald had the spare room redecorated already? She passed the sitting-room door and the smell got suddenly stronger. Opening the door carefully, as if expecting to see a rotting corpse on the hearth rug, she stopped, looking in amazement at the strange room she had entered. Gone was the slightly shabby creamy-yellow of the walls. Instead they had been ragged or dragged, she wasn’t sure which, with a vivid shade of coral that seemed to prise her eyes open as she looked at them. And the books, where were they? And the bookcases on either side of the fireplace? Amelia took quick steps into the room, looking around, bending over and peering down as if she hoped to find them hiding behind the sofa. Then she saw the second note, written on the same thick paper as the one in the hall and placed on a green china plate in the shape of a flattened cabbage. Clarissa’s plate she thought as she picked the paper up and read: ‘Thought that as you weren’t coming back for a while we might as well do the sitting room too. Books in the garage. Love, Gerald’.

  She stared at the note as she sank down into the old armchair that was as vast as a two-seater sofa and blessedly familiar. ‘Books in the garage. Love, Gerald.’

  That was it. It really was all over. Deep down in the small, steel-enforced compartment of her mind where the really big dreams were stored, she had kept the hope of Gerald returning. Those words blew it open as if they were gelignite, and out hope hobbled, gasped and died.

  ‘It’s your loss Gerald Forbes,’ she said out loud. ‘You’re stuck for ever now with a woman who came into this world wearing a calf-length pleated skirt.’ Then she cried.

  After a while, when her crying had made the sides of her face ache, and the light outside was going, she pressed her mind gingerly for a beautiful phrase; surely all this sadness could result in one decent line of poetry. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and got up to find a notepad and pen. At least they had left her desk untouched.

  In Swedish, she thought, heart and pain obligingly rhymed, a godsend for bad poets. But no lines, bad or good, came to her, only the memory of the evening shortly after they had moved into the Old Rectory when Gerald and she had unpacked the tea-chests with their respective books, comparing taste and showing off with heavy titles.

  ‘I enjoy Proust tremendously,’ she remembered saying as Gerald picked up her unbroken copy of Swann’s Way, ‘it’s just that once I put him down, I find it rather difficult to pick him up again.’

  She thought of the evenings they had sat a little self-consciously in front of the fire reading aloud to each other from novels as dense as German bread and finding they actually enjoyed them. Amelia sighed and scribbled on her pad.

  ‘Heart … ? Fart. Although you are a great big fart, your name is engraved all over my heart.’

  The telephone rang. It was Henry.

  ‘Thank you again for coming to the funeral, it meant a lot.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘Anyway, how are things?’

  ‘Gerald and Clarissa have just turned my home into a bookless mixture of Laura Ashley and a tart’s boudoir.’

  ‘That’s bad luck,’ Henry said. ‘Actually I called to say I’ve seen this place for sale in Kingsmouth that might do for your café. It used to be a dairy.’

  ‘Is it the one by the harbour?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Amelia said unsatisfactorily, waiting for Henry to say, ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’

  Instead, he said, ‘At my father’s funeral, in the middle of all the sadness, the thought went through my mind that you look really good in black. I feel pretty awful about that.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t, and you know that. Anyway, your father liked me, why would he mind that you thought I looked nice at his funeral?’ There was no answer so she asked, ‘Henry, how are you coping?’

  She could hear him swallow hard. ‘When someone you love, dies,’ he said, ‘it’s as if they leave you with half shares of your life together. The person you were in their eyes dies with them.’ He paused, and just as Amelia was trying hard to think of something to say that was comforting and not commonplace, Henry went on, ‘I just miss him. Anyway, I thought I’d let you know about the dairy.’ He hung up so quickly Amelia hardly had time to say goodbye.

  Amelia spent the evening packing. She put her clothes in three suitcases and two dustbin liners. She put the bin liners and one of the suitcases in the garage where the books lay in neat stacks. Then she fixed little stick-on labels, marked with a large red A, on everything in the Old Rectory that belonged to her: two Swedish oil paintings given to her by Selma, three English water-colours she had bought herself, a couple of small tables, some chairs, ornaments, kitchen utensils. On things they had bought together or been given as a couple, she stuck labels with a question mark. By ten o’clock it was all ready and she wandered up to the bedroom wondering how many times Clarissa and Gerald had made love in the bed.

  ‘They can’t always want to use the chair,’ she said trying to cheer herself up. Before turning off the light, she phoned Dagmar who answered in a polite, detached little voice and said that all was well.

  How nice it would be, Amelia thought after ringing off, if she had had a mother to whom she could say ‘I’ve arrived back at my home to find it in the process of metamorphosing into someone else’s. In the sitting room and in the spare room the transformation is almost complete, and I daren’t go to sleep for fear of waking up in a mock-virginal chamber with frilly dressing-table and ruched blinds at the windows.’

  She lay for a long time flat on her back staring at the shadows on the ceiling, then she threw off the duvet and ran downstairs. She switched the light on in the sitting room and went across to the French windows, unlocking them and flinging them open so that they hit right back against the wall of the house. She stood for a moment breathing in the cool night air before hurrying out on to the terrace in the path made by the beam of light from inside. Shivering in her short nightshirt, she ran round to the front of the house and got in to the car, starting the engine. With the headlights full on she mounted the lawn and continued through the opening between the yew-hedge and the house, back towards the terrace, scratching the paint of the car as she forced it through the narrow gap. The wheels ran smoothly across the lawn and she lined the Citroën up opposite the wide-open French windows. For a second the wheels lost their grip and slithered as she forced them up the low verge, then she was up and edging through into the sitting room, stopping neatly in front of the fireplace. She tightened the hand-brake and switched off the engine before letting herself out.

  She was shivering as she got back into bed but she pulled the duvet up close and within minutes she was asleep.

  The next morning she called a taxi and walked out of the Old Rectory for the last time. On the hall table was a note. ‘Car’s in the sitting room. L
ove, Amelia.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Amelia went to stay with an old colleague in London. Her friendship with Kate had been a mostly apologetic affair over the telephone since she moved away to the country, but when you’re fleeing, Amelia thought, there’s no time for pride. She stayed with Kate for two weeks, helping her with some research and writing a feature on ‘The New English Novel’ for a Swedish magazine. She had posed the question, ‘What is the New English Novel?’ in the article and counted herself lucky that no-one seemed to expect an answer. It had brought her a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds. Then she had gone to Dagmar, home to mother, telling herself she was doing Dagmar a favour.

  Dagmar told her the burns on Selma’s legs were healing. They had stopped weeping and had kept dry for a whole week, enough of an improvement for Amelia to ask Sister Morris if it wasn’t possible to move her back to her old room in the main part of Cherryfield.

  ‘She hates being sidelined,’ Amelia explained, keeping up with Sister Morris’s brisk step along the glossy corridor. ‘It’s important for her to feel the pulse of life. However weak. Sister Morris, please, I hate talking to a moving object.’

  Sister Morris stopped and turned, her hand on the kitchen door.

  ‘Sister Morris, my grandmother doesn’t feel she belongs in a nursing home at all …’

  ‘Few people do Miss Lindsay.’

  ‘… let alone in Honeysuckle. She thinks she only gave up tennis because of her injuries in the fire.’

  Nurse Williams came bustling out from a Staff Only room, wanting to know if Sister Morris knew where Thursday’s clean sheets had got to.