Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  Chapter Twenty

  The Next Morning Amelia got the keys to the dairy from the estate agent and wandered round the empty shop playing Bach on her Walkman. She liked Bach, the orderliness that would erupt into passion. She hadn’t got Selma’s and Dagmar’s ability to play music but she had got their love of it: Mozart, Chopin, Beethoven, Bach, their music played like drums of war whenever she wanted to attack a new idea, because if mere humans had created beauty like that surely everything was possible. Or so she thought as long as the music lasted.

  She pulled her right index finger lazily across the dusty wooden shelves and thought of Henry returning from sea, surprising her as she served a customer or arranged books along the shelves. And what then, she thought sourly to herself? What do I do then? Rape him? Do I confess to needing love like a stomach needs lining, a base before anything else can be successfully added.

  She climbed the creaking oak staircase and, as her favourite passage of the concerto played, she thought of Selma whose decline had been gentle until Willoughby died, then it became a free-fall.

  She remembered coming with Selma to the dairy to restock their empty egg boxes. Selma would let her pick out the large, white eggs one by one, making sure she checked them for cracks. Amelia could almost feel the shell between her fingers now, cool and grainy as if covered in goose-pimples. Then they’d buy the cream, thick yellow cream, like soft butter. She sighed. Maybe it should stay a dairy. Remain as a stubborn unprofitable memorial to the days when people still found minutes in the day to queue up at more than one counter. God knows how they did she thought when, thanks to all the cholesterol-ridden dairy products, their days must have been fewer anyway.

  As she walked upstairs to the flat, she thought that, to her, maybe to all the customers, Mrs Philips, owner of the dairy for more than thirty years, round and apron-clad, began and ended with the handing out of cream and butter and eggs, only to vanish like Brigadoon to the place where all the people in the service industry go when their customers have done their business. So standing there in Mrs Philips’s flat, peeking through into the tiny kitchen, inspecting the narrow bedroom where the multi-coloured roses on the wallpaper waged war against the peonies on the curtains, was a little like glimpsing suddenly an actor’s legs sticking out from underneath the television set.

  Before she left, she stood for a moment by the sitting-room window looking out at the grey, foam-tipped waves. It was a good view for a poet.

  Later that afternoon she told Selma, ‘I’m thinking of buying the old dairy. Mrs Philips is selling up and moving to Portugal. I’d like to turn it into a bookshop with a café part. Or maybe it’s a café with a bookshop part?’

  ‘That’s very nice, darling.’ Selma paused and thought for a moment. ‘But why don’t you keep it as a dairy. People need good cream and eggs. Mrs Philips always had the best, fresh from the farm.’

  Amelia laughed. It made her happy when Selma said something like that, something perfectly normal and quite logical. Rosalind smiled in much the same way when Ronnie waved his fat little hand in a goodbye or held his own bottle.

  ‘I thought about that. But it was making a terrific loss. No-one uses the little shops any more, the speciality ones. It’s simpler to go to the supermarket and get everything from one place.’

  ‘Young woman today are very lazy,’ Selma said. ‘They can’t even be bothered to push a pram. They dress their poor little babies in boiler suits and strap them into these striped deck-chair things you trip over.’ She lifted her coffee cup and saucer to her lips, her hand trembling so it seemed impossible that her lips and the rattling cup would ever meet.

  After a small wait, Amelia took the cup and saucer gently from her and held the cup steady for Selma to drink. It was a simple enough movement but, as Selma sucked at the coffee, Amelia felt that at Cherryfield it was showing off the most precious commodity of all, youth and an obedient body.

  ‘I’ve still got your old pram. It’s in the garage I think,’ Selma said. ‘It should clean up beautifully.’

  Miss White had been craning her neck in their direction for some time, her lips moving in sympathy with every sentence they spoke. Seeing an opening, she moved in. ‘Expecting a little one, are we?’ she twinkled at Amelia.

  Selma gave her an evil look which Miss White studiously ignored.

  Miss Hudd sat in the high-backed chair in the Admiral’s old place by the replenished fish-tank. ‘I like babies,’ she said in her deep voice. ‘Babies and rabbits, no bad in ’em.’

  Amelia suddenly wished, as much for the two childless old ladies as for herself, that she could conjure up an infant to match the excitement in their eyes and their softening gaze. ‘No baby just at the moment,’ she said, not wanting to close the door on the idea completely.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, that’s what I say,’ Miss Hudd nodded knowingly. ‘These things take time.’

  ‘Particularly,’ Selma said, ‘when there’s no father involved.’

  ‘I absolutely must get some greens for the rabbit.’ Miss Hudd made a show of ignoring Selma’s scorn. ‘You did get the oats, didn’t you?’ She leant towards Amelia, staring expectantly at her.

  Amelia blushed. ‘I’m terribly sorry, I forgot.’

  Miss Hudd moved agitatedly in her chair. ‘But that won’t do. It won’t do at all.’

  ‘Oh shut up, you silly old woman,’ Selma cried.

  Miss Hudd opened her eyes wide, then burst into tears. Like boys, large girls don’t cry, or so they are told. Miss Hudd, like someone having their first taste of a forbidden luxury, wept diffidently, carefully at first. Then, as seconds passed and no thunderbolt struck, she abandoned herself to the experience, crying in great snuffling sobs until Sister Morris appeared in the doorway. Taking one look at the scene in front of her, she hailed a nurse, much in the way of a head waiter directing the attention of his staff towards a soiled ashtray, and Miss Hudd was removed.

  Amelia was shocked at the pleasure that lit up Selma’s eyes at Miss Hudd’s humiliation. Miss White sat very quiet, her back pressed hard against the chair.

  The evening sun was autumnal, its light paler than only a week before. Selma dozed: the enlivening effect of spite, like that of most pick-me-ups, was short-lived. Nurses clip-clopped in and out of the room, checking on the residents, sometimes removing one, as if they were dead-heading a plant, Amelia thought, and now and then they would check on Selma to see if she too was ready for plucking. The room was hot, they must have turned the heating on already, and the television droned away, not quiet enough to be ignored, yet not loud enough to make sense. Amelia wondered what had become of the Rosenthal coffee cups that Selma liked to drink her morning coffee from at home. Selma stirred uneasily in her chair as her stomach thundered. Amelia sighed, the price of life was high, that was for sure.

  Back in Dagmar’s flat she asked, ‘Have you got the Rosenthal cups?’

  Dagmar shook her head. ‘They must be in store with the rest of the things. Why? Do you want them?’

  ‘No, no it’s OK, only asking.’ Amelia turned over the page of her book, How to Set up your own Business – Beat Recession at its own Game.

  ‘Play something please,’ she said after a while, nodding towards the piano. Obediently, Dagmar got up from the sofa where she had sat leafing through Vogue.

  Amelia listened to ‘Traumerie’ and thought that nothing, nothing at all, had changed in the neat little flat. Since her collapse, Dagmar had slowly returned to her old shape like a tired piece of elastic. She had lost what was probably her last chance of love and companionship and she had scattered her nerves all over her life, yet nothing at all had changed. What a waste of suffering.

  When Dagmar had finished playing Amelia asked her, as she had asked Selma, ‘Why did you not make a career of your music?’

  Dagmar did not get up from the piano, but swivelled round slowly on the stool. She shrugged her shoulders with a little smile, poised for an excuse as always, Amelia thought.


  ‘I like music too much,’ Dagmar said. ‘I have too much respect for the great composers. They deserve to be performed only by the best. I was never going to be more than adequate.’

  Amelia felt the old irritation spread like a rash inside her. ‘How can you possibly know? You never tried hard enough. I read Dylan Thomas but I still dream of becoming a poet.’

  Dagmar got up from the stool, scanning the seat cover, smoothing down her skirt. ‘Well, then you’re very brave, darling,’ she said.

  Amelia was crushed. After a short pause she said, ‘Have you got the address of the storage people? I promised Granny to check that everything was in good order.’ Telling Dagmar a blatant lie made her feel better.

  Three days later she was rummaging through the tea-chests full of china and silver and books, measuring the length and breadth of furniture that had once combined to create a home and were now just listed items in the store room of Grant & Son, Removals and Storage. The gilded lion’s paw of Selma’s empire chaise-longue peeked out from under a dust sheet, making Amelia think of those mortuary scenes from American films where all you could see of poor Mr X was his pallid, labelled toe sticking out from under a shroud on the trolley.

  She found the ring-binders where Selma had pasted in magazine cuttings with pictures and information of all manner of beautiful and useful things: hand-painted chairs, Victorian tiles, shoe-tidies, cut-price linen sheets, Edwardian storage jars, china tooth-brush mugs. There were ticks against the things she needed straight away, crosses against the things she hoped one day to acquire, and at the back of each binder was a section marked ‘Babylon’ after the Hanging Gardens. On those pages were pictures of the unattainable: a painting by Monet, a Chippendale chair or Flora Danica china. Yet Selma had never seemed materialistic, more an artist perfecting an ever-changing picture. ‘Come in, come in,’ she would say like a benevolent spider inviting a visitor into her enchanted web.

  Wrapped in plastic and stacked behind a large sideboard were Selma’s hatboxes. She had collected them for years; extravagant, inessential, striped and spotted, they had paraded along the shelves in the hall. ‘Just a bit of fun, my dears,’ Selma would say showing them off.

  Amelia lifted the boxes from their plastic wrappings and stacked them on the chaise-longue. She pulled the whole lazy-looking, sumptuously gilded piece over to the only open space in the store-room and, looking around her, picked up her black notebook from her pocket and checked the list. She moved Selma’s favourite armchair across to the chaise-longue, together with two small coffee tables, a display cabinet, two smaller chairs and a foot stool. She pushed it all close together then measured the space it all took up. Ticking items off the list, she unpacked several tea-chests, picking some things out and adding them to the court around the chaise-longue, putting others back in the chests. Finally, before leaving, she brought out two large blankets to cover the collection of bits.

  That night she telephoned Henry onboard his ship. She launched her question with little prelude. ‘I know you’re not a Jesuit, but in your view does the end ever justify the means?’

  Henry did not seem surprised by her question nor did he ask why she wanted to know. Amelia liked him more than ever for that. ‘It depends, I think, on the end you’re trying to achieve and the means by which you intend to achieve it. Boring answer I know.’

  Amelia paused before saying, ‘That’s all I’m going to get?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Henry sounded amused. ‘If you’d like to tell me more I’d be very happy to listen.’

  ‘Oh Henry, I don’t know. My first instinct in any situation is to confess, shift my great dripping burden on to someone else, but this time I think I’ll wait.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ he said. ‘We sail on Monday, first thing. I was going to ask if you’d like to spend the weekend with me. I’ve got a friend’s cottage in Cornwall for a couple of days while he and his family are away. It would be great just spending some time with you.’

  Amelia said she thought it was a lovely idea, and they arranged to meet at the flat on Saturday morning.

  Maybe it’s a mistake to think too hard about these things, Henry thought as he stepped into his car and started off towards Exeter. Maybe with Amelia too, it’s just a question of faith, of taking the leap. He had been in love before, of course, with glowing cheerful girls who studied, or cooked or cared for little children, but most of all cared for him: Alice, Arabella, Olivia and Jane, nice girls with even teeth and even tempers who didn’t complicate life unduly. And now there was Amelia. He had began to see that one of the reasons he was falling in love with her was the way she made him feel about himself; like an engine on permanent boost. She made him feel, well … He searched his mind for a word … Essential, that was it. And she was so pretty. He sighed and pushed his hair back from his forehead with a hand that was becoming embarrassingly damp.

  Amelia was finishing her packing. She looked at the small suitcase lying open on the floor. A moment ago it had been on the bed, but Dagmar had come in and shuddered and asked if she realized the amount of dirt a suitcase accumulated on its travels in the boots of cars and holds of aircraft, let alone on those filthy conveyor belts. And did she not see that all those germs and disgusting bits were transferring on to Dagmar’s bedspread that had to be drycleaned. Amelia had pulled the case off on to the floor without protest and now she looked at it, shaking her head. It really wasn’t very small at all. She always aimed to go away with just a holdall or, best of all, a rucksack with some clever mix and match in uncrumpable cotton that would take her everywhere. But she never did. There was the midnight-blue silk jacket; it just didn’t roll up well. And the linen shorts and the chiffon skirt in a pattern of faded flowers, and shoes and make-up. She knew she looked good in the soft straw hat with the upturned brim. She glanced at her watch; it was eleven o’clock and she was expecting Henry to arrive at any moment.

  He really was so nice. She knew that, to many of her friends, nice was not an adjective that made them adjust their clothes and put on fresh lipstick but, to her, it was about the best compliment she could give anyone. Henry was the nicest man she had ever met. His smile lit up his face and he laughed a lot. He listened to her. He was so … so positive. She had needed a friend and he had been there.

  As she got her sponge-bag, she glanced at her folder with poems lying next to it on top of the chest of drawers. Some of the work in there was good, some of it, and not necessarily the best either, had been published in magazines, but there just wasn’t enough there to send off to a publisher. On the cover of the folder she had quoted Elizabeth Smart: ‘I must satisfy Nature before I invite God.’

  That, Amelia had thought, is a slightly pompous way of saying what I’ve always felt: I have to get my love life sorted out before I can write; pompous but clever. But now, now she felt she knew the quotation across the folder for what it was; an excuse to put life on hold. It might in all fairness, she thought, have worked for Elizabeth Smart, but it’s done nothing for me. What good anyway could come from inviting anyone, Nature or God, into a shaky building? She sighed as she packed her nightdress, smoothing out the folds of peach-coloured silk with the back of her hand; a shaky building, not a nice image to have of oneself, not an image she would ever want to see mirrored in Henry’s eyes.

  Then she thought of the trip ahead and, slamming the case shut, she said out loud, ‘Bugger it! What harm can a weekend do?’

  Henry took her for lunch at a small pub in Modbury, and not once did they mention Selma or the nursing home. It was, Amelia thought, as if they were testing each other out, making sure that they had somewhere to go beyond Cherryfield. She remembered Rosalind sitting in Amelia’s kitchen with Ronnie on her lap saying sadly, ‘All Chris and I can talk about is the baby. These days we seem to be rushing through life on different tracks, converging only on Ronnie, and when we run out of chat about him, we just sit there in polite silence, waiting for his next step, or tooth, or word, to rescue us.’


  She thought suddenly of Gerald dressed in prickly silence as if it was a cactus skin. Henry would never be like that. He threw himself into every conversation like a puppy attacking a new friend. And all that energy: in a midday heat that made even the buzzing of the bees sound like a tired gesture, he made sitting down seem like freeze-framed action rather than a rest.

  During lunch he had wanted to hear all about her plans for the dairy: was she serious about opening the café, was she continuing with her journalism?

  Amelia began to feel like one of those middle-aged mothers with a miraculous first baby, exhausted, a little frustrated but charmed.

  ‘I’d love to see some of your poems,’ Henry said.

  Amelia gave him a lazy smile. ‘Little Bo-Peep has lost her sense and doesn’t know where to find it.’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ Henry said.

  ‘You shouldn’t ha ha,’ Amelia said reproachfully. ‘I’ve had to take on writing jingles for Happy Thoughts Greetings Cards, to support my granny habit.’

  ‘Really?’ Henry looked interested.

  ‘Really,’ Amelia said. ‘They rejected my last lot though.’

  ‘You must try again,’ Henry said.

  He kept humming as, later on, they drove towards Cornwall, happy little hummings from no particular song that Amelia knew. He didn’t have a bad voice, deeper than his speaking voice. He would sound good in church, she thought. She pulled her fingers along the naked skin in the crook of his arm. It was a hot day and his skin was damp.

  ‘You’ve got nice arms,’ she said.

  Henry turned pink. ‘Apparently,’ he smiled suddenly, ‘my mother used to say that to my father. He couldn’t work out why she had married him, he was almost fifty, twice her age, quite staid and boring he said. I remember him laughing about it. “It must have been my arms; she thought my arms were sexy.”’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Now Amelia was laughing. ‘Your arms are sexy too.’