Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  GUPPIES FOR TEA

  Marika Cobbold

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Epigraph

  Do not go gentle into that good night,

  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Dylan Thomas, 1914–53

  For Richard

  with love

  Chapter One

  ‘And there’s the admiral.’ Sister Morris gave a cheery wave into the gloom of the Residents’ Lounge. ‘We like to sit him by the aquarium; reminds him of his sea-faring days, I always think.’

  Standing behind Sister Morris, a firm grip on the handles of his mother’s wheelchair, Robert Merryman looked around him approvingly. Had it not been for the smell of disinfectant one could almost believe one was in a private house.

  Sister Morris led the way upstairs. The walls of the first-floor landing were painted soft grey-green and on each white glossed door hung a ceramic tile, a number painted on it, garlanded with pastel flowers. She stopped at the third door on the right where a five tangled with a blue clematis.

  ‘And here it is!’ Sister Morris sounded as if she was about to announce the winning ticket in a raffle, ‘Number Five.’

  She lowered her voice and added, ‘If you knew how many enquiries we’ve had about this room since it became vacant …’ She flung open the door.

  Robert leant over the wheelchair and peered inside.

  ‘It’s a very well-appointed little room, Mother, you’ll see,’ Robert said heartily, feeling like a Ford car salesman who knew that at the end of a day he’d be driving home in a Jaguar.

  Selma Merryman, hunched in her wheelchair, tried to turn her head to look at her son. ‘Robert, I don’t wish to see. I have a perfectly comfortable room at home.’ Her voice trembled, ‘There really is no need for me to be here, my toe is healing very well.’ But the protests by now had become mechanical, hammered too feebly into the wall of family decisions surrounding her. She was wheeled inside.

  Number Five was a small room, the shape of a shoe box, and the smell of disinfectant was stronger in spite of the open window at the far end. The walls were off-white and there was a narrow bed with an orange nylon bedspread. High above the dressing-table, with its easy-to-clean melamine top, hung a bright water-colour landscape adorned by an ice-cream-pink sunset. Under the window with its moss-green curtains stood a chair, its seat striped beige and brown. It was the kind of chair, Robert could not help thinking, that you would never find in anyone’s home.

  ‘We’ve had new curtains put up, and there’s a new floor. Well we had to, with the floor.’ Sister Morris pursed her thin, cyclamen-pink lips. ‘Even with the toilet just round the corner.’

  ‘It’s not a bad room,’ Peggy Merryman whispered to her husband as Sister Morris busied herself around the place closing the window and fluffing up a cushion. ‘Very clean.’ Peggy, looking unhappy, pulled the collar of her green husky closer around her thin neck.

  ‘You’ll be much more comfortable here, Ma, you’ll see,’ Robert said, his voice like that of Sister Morris, a little raised.

  ‘I’m in a wheelchair Robert, it does not automatically follow that I’m deaf.’

  ‘Of course not, Mother, of course not.’ Robert smiled nervously at Sister Morris, whose sandy eyebrows had jerked upwards at Selma’s words. He walked around and squatted down, level with his mother. ‘We’d better be off, I’m afraid. Time and tide wait for no man and we’ve got a long drive home.’ He took Selma’s hands.

  At the word home, Selma looked up, fixing him with eyes like pebbles, dulled by sand. She snatched his right hand back against her chest and held it there. Robert tried to ease himself free. ‘Dagmar will visit while we’re away, and Amelia of course; it’s a good thing she’s back in the country.’ Still, Selma would not let go of his hand, her grip was surprisingly strong.

  ‘Well, off we must go.’ And with a yank Robert finally managed to pull his hand away. He kissed Selma on both cheeks, then gave her an awkward little pat on the head before leaving the room, his shoulders a little hunched as if he was avoiding a low beam. Peggy embraced her mother-in-law, tears in her eyes, and then they were gone, followed out by Sister Morris.

  ‘Don’t go yet, dear,’ Selma called out, sitting where they had parked her, unable to turn around even to see them leave. ‘Don’t go.’ But as she sat listening to the silence, she knew it was no good. Just as it had been no good when she had stood on the large stone steps at school calling after her parents; just as when, later, she had pleaded with Daniel at the quayside not to sail for Germany. If they wanted to go, there was nothing, nothing at all, she could do to stop them.

  Sometime later, she was not sure how much – she got confused over time – there was a yank at the back of the wheelchair and she felt herself being moved.

  ‘I’m Nurse Williams, Mrs Merryman. You come along with me and I’ll introduce you to our other residents. You’ll soon make friends, you’ll see.’

  ‘I’d rather not.’ Selma raised her voice. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather stay in my room.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ answered Nurse Williams cheerfully. ‘You don’t want to sit here all by yourself.’

  ‘I hated boarding school as a child,’ Selma said as she was wheeled out of the room.

  ‘Did you, dear?’ All the staff were told to use the residents’ names, not ‘dear’ or ‘love’, but Nurse Williams tended to forget.

  ‘Hated it!’

  ‘Well, this isn’t a boarding school, it’s Cherryfield.’ Nurse Williams sounded as if a problem had been solved.

  They passed the kitchen, its swinging door allowing the smell of boiled fish to mix with that of the ever present disinfectant. ‘That will be your cod for tea,’ Nurse Williams said.

  Selma straightened in her chair. ‘Cod for tea?’

  ‘Fish is food for the brain,’ Nurse Williams chanted briskly.

  ‘I don’t have cod for tea. A sliver of smoked salmon on thin brown bread, yes; a small sardine sandwich maybe; but not cod, not for tea.’ Selma’s voice, with its breath of a Swedish accent, was firm.

  ‘Call it supper then if you prefer.’ A note of irritation crept in amongst Nurse Williams’ determinedly cheerful tones. ‘Here we are anyway, this is the lounge.’ She pushed Selma’s wheelchair into the centre of the room.

  Wine-red Dralon curtains were half drawn against the spring afternoon and, from a huge television set, Blue Peter blared into every corner. Two upholstered armchairs flanked the French windows at the far end of the room, and opposite the television, lined up against the wall, stood a row of beige, imitation leather chairs, each occupied by an elderly resident.

  Selma looked with mounting panic at the row of old people, some returning her gaze with littl
e nods and smiles, the others continuing to stare ahead at the television.

  ‘… and then you fold it like so.’ The Blue Peter presenter, a purple tinge to her long hair, flipped back the corners of an empty box of cornflakes. ‘And here you have it.’ Her young face beamed out across the room. ‘Your own stables!’

  ‘If you don’t mind, I’d like to go to my room now. I can’t read with all this noise.’

  ‘Funny how the old dears will get on their high horses all of a sudden,’ Nurse Williams would say later to Sister Morris, over a cup of tea.

  ‘Who are all these people?’ Selma fretted. ‘What is this place?’

  In the still, auntly drawing room of the Old Rectory, Abbotslea, Gerald Forbes looked up from the file on his knee. ‘A café! No, I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Amelia. You very sweetly gave up a perfectly good career to come and look after me, and to be free, you said, to write on your own terms. Not to become a café owner.’ He looked down again at his file.

  He’s going bald, Amelia thought. His hair is all black and silky, and just at the top of his head there’s a little pink patch. She said, ‘Don’t say “café” in that way.’

  ‘In what way? How should one say it?’ Gerald looked irritated.

  ‘You say “café” meaning “nasty little place where you stop reluctantly for a greasy sausage because the pubs are shut.” What I’m going to have is a haven. A place where writers write, artists sketch, shoppers rest and aspidistras grow.’ Amelia was smiling again as she perched on the arm of Gerald’s chair.

  ‘If you expended a tenth of that imagination and energy on your articles, you’d be appearing in every magazine in the country,’ Gerald said.

  Amelia appeared not to have heard. ‘And I must have a trio. You know, an old boy at the piano and two large, grey-haired ladies playing the cello and the violin. They have to be large so that one can see them above the aspidistras.’

  She kissed Gerald absent-mindedly on the bald patch on his head. ‘In the old days in Gothenburg, Selma would meet her friends in a place just like that, twice a week on a Monday and Friday, and sometimes in between.’ Amelia leant back against Gerald’s shoulder and looked dreamily ahead.

  ‘Of course they wore hats. I’m not sure I could enforce a hat rule. What do you think, Gerald?’

  Gerald sprang up from the chair, giving her a little shove on the way. ‘I think you’re waffling. I thought you said supper would be ready at a decent time tonight.’

  Amelia sat down in the vacant chair and looked at him, hurt. ‘Two years ago you were a struggling artist looking for a muse, your head full of Pre-Raphaelites and artists’ communes. Now you’re back to being a country solicitor, the rules are changing.’ She added, ‘If at least we had children,’ managing to seem longing and encouraging both at once.

  ‘I can’t see the rush. Lots of women have their first baby in their thirties. One of the girls at the office was reading this article the other day which actually said that older women make better mothers.’ Gerald had walked over to the drinks tray and was pouring himself another gin and tonic, ‘Top up?’ He held the whisky bottle up to Amelia who shook her head.

  ‘Poor Aunt Edith only left you the house in the hope that we’d fill it with the children she could never have,’ she said.

  ‘Aunt Edith was a dike.’

  ‘That’s what I said, she couldn’t have children. Anyway, you can’t be a country solicitor without having a big family. Watch any television series and you’ll see.’

  ‘You watch too much television. Clarissa Edwards, our new clerk, gave her set to Oxfam the other day.’

  ‘That’s kind of her,’ Amelia said. ‘But she’ll regret it in a day or two, people who get rid of their sets nearly always do. They have a honeymoon with themselves, reading all the books they always meant to read but never found as engrossing as Dallas. They play patience and discover silence, and after two weeks you’ll find them next door, watching their neighbour’s set.’

  ‘When did you say supper was?’

  Amelia sighed and got up from the chair. ‘In two minutes.’

  ‘Is this wise, my darling?’ Selma had said when Amelia had told her she was moving in with Gerald. Sitting in the bay of her Devon drawing room pouring strong coffee into two tiny, gold-encrusted cups, Selma looked at her granddaughter over the spiralling steam.

  As she moved, Amelia sniffed the air, drawing in the comforting scent of tea-rose, as much part of Selma as if she had been the rose itself. ‘I’m doing it for love,’ she had answered simply.

  She reminded herself of that now, as she stood in the kitchen of the Old Rectory taking a casserole out of the combination micro-oven that had been Aunt Edith’s last purchase. Amelia hated it and wished it was an Aga.

  ‘Anyway, is it wise do you think …’ She turned as she heard Gerald’s voice uttering Selma’s lines. ‘… For you to have children, with your family history, I mean?’ Gerald stood leaning against the kitchen door, drink in hand, his eyes carefully avoiding hers.

  Amelia looked at him appalled. ‘What do you mean, “my family history”?’

  ‘You know. Your mother, she’s bonkers after all.’

  Amelia continued to stare at him. She felt like someone who had shared her innermost secret with a friend only to find the same friend busy pinning it up on the school notice-board.

  Then the telephone rang and Amelia hurried from the room. There were tears in her eyes, Gerald could see. With a mournful look at his near-empty glass, he drained what was left of the gin and tonic and thought of Stewart.

  Stewart, his boyhood friend, had owned a pretty red setter and one day he beat it. It had been a careless beating, delivered with scant vigour, the cause of it soon forgotten. But before long Stewart was giving the dog regular whippings harder and harder, his face red with guilt and pleasure.

  Until the first beating Stewart had been fond of the dog, but soon he hated it.

  Gerald got up and put the casserole dish back in the oven. I could never hate Amelia, he thought, any more than I could hit her, but she irritates the shit out of me.

  When he first met Amelia, at an art exhibition preview a little over two years earlier, she had just come back to England after three years away. ‘Why Sweden?’ he had asked, thinking that a long absence abroad would explain the air she had of looking at, rather than participating in, the scenes around her; an air of being permanently surprised.

  ‘My mother’s Swedish. Also, I fell in love with the son of her oldest friend,’ she had said almost in passing, as they admired a large, gouache nude. ‘He was married,’ she had added. ‘And one day I bumped into his wife and three children. Three children, all small and golden haired.’ She had turned and looked at him directly now, her almond-shaped eyes opened wide at the unfairness of it all. ‘They were feeding the seals at Slottskogen and that was it; I left him and came back here.’ Then she had wandered across the room to study a seascape.

  As he got to know Amelia better, Gerald found that her air of being a little at odds with her surroundings was constant and a source of regret to her. It seemed she had spent most of her childhood curled up in a chair reading and dreaming, feeling more at home in the world of her books (where children came in fives, mothers smiled serenely and fathers, stern but loving, steered their children through a life of mild adventures and cosy morality) than in her progressive boarding school or the immaculate flat where she lived alone with her mother.

  ‘My father buggered off and left us when I was two,’ she told Gerald on their second meeting, her soft voice enunciating the swear-word in clear, precise syllables. ‘Then he died.’

  When they made love for the first time it was her turn to surprise him, first by her passion, then afterwards by her obvious distress, as she dressed hurriedly and refused to speak of their lovemaking.

  Weeks later he had said to her accusingly, ‘Each time after we’ve been in bed together you behave like a deflowered virgin.’

 
She had thought a while before saying wistfully, ‘I always hoped to be a virgin when I married, but it didn’t work. Actually,’ she went on, answering his question thoroughly, as usual, ‘I was only sixteen when I first slept with my boyfriend. It was very odd,’ she sighed. ‘At school all my friends were desperate to lose their virginity but few of them actually did. I, who had a drawer full of white lace cotton nighties, fell practically into the first pair of outstretched arms. I didn’t seem to be able to help myself.’ She looked intently in to his eyes, as if she hoped he might be able to explain her life to her.

  ‘I just wasn’t prepared for it. I mean look at them: Pollyanna, Anne of Green Gables, the lot of them, cruising from girlhood to mother of multitudes with a purity that would have impressed the Virgin Mary.

  ‘I ran off to my grandparents and locked myself away with Winnie the Pooh for a week. I lay on my bed there, crying for hours on end, banished by every upstanding, God-fearing character in every decent novel I had ever read. Banished to the world of Kitty, a Teenager in Love, and Sister Barton Gets a New Doctor.’ Amelia had smiled weakly and shrugged her narrow shoulders.

  Gerald could hear the soft, slow voice speaking, could remember everything it had told him, but now the words only annoyed him. He got up from the table and slammed the glass down on the sink. ‘Why does everything always have to be so bloody complicated?’ he shouted. ‘Why the hell can’t you just be normal?’

  Out in the hall where the last shafts of evening sun were still coming through the leaded window, Amelia stood with the phone in her hand. ‘Miss Lindsay? Miss Amelia Lindsay?’ The voice on at the other end did not wait for confirmation of this before continuing in an aggrieved voice, ‘Miss Lindsay this is Sister Morris from Cherryfield Residential Home for the Elderly. I know we are expecting you at the weekend but I’m afraid that won’t do.’

  As the voice paused for breath, Amelia asked, ‘You don’t want me to visit my grandmother?’

  ‘Oh, but we do. We most certainly do. But at once. It has to be at once I’m afraid,’ Sister Morris said with the grim satisfaction of the bringer of bad news.