Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  At this Gerald couldn’t help enquiring, ‘Is that the only reason you know what decade it is, because you’ve seen it on the box?’

  ‘Oh never mind that.’ Norman Forbes slid his middle finger along the inside of his collar. ‘What I’m trying to say is; it’s time you and Amelia got married, time you had a family too for that matter, although that of course is none of my business. With Amelia having passed the thirty mark though …’ He caught Gerald’s eye and clearing his throat, went on, ‘This bohemian bit, it’s a phase you go through, like having a crush on a chum, that sort of thing.’ For a moment, Norman looked wistful.

  Gerald was drumming a little tune on the desk with his fingers.

  ‘Living in sin,’ Norman said, ‘people expect that sort of thing from an artist, positively good for business I shouldn’t wonder. But let’s face it, you’re a solicitor now, and that makes it all different, well in Hampshire it does, anyway.’

  Gerald sighed, ‘That’s exactly what Amelia keeps saying.’

  ‘Well she’s a sensible girl. Now I’ve told you my opinion, as your father and senior partner in the firm. But of course it’s your life and your decision entirely.’ And Norman had coughed in an encouraging manner and, looking well pleased with himself, strode from the room.

  Gerald had banged his fist against the frame round the closed door, very hard, several times, then he had gone in to Clarissa’s small office next door and given her some extra work to keep her late.

  Back in his own office, he had sat in the brown leather wingchair he’d inherited from his grandfather and thought of how he agreed with his father and Amelia. It really was time he got married and had a family.

  There was one point, however, on which he differed from them; it was not Amelia, but Clarissa he wanted to share this new life with. It was Clarissa he wanted to marry, and to be the mother of his children. Clarissa with her solid good sense and her working girl independence, tempered so nicely, he couldn’t help thinking, with a good deal of respect for Gerald himself. Amelia, he thought, is a constant reminder of all those past dreams that crash-landed on impact with reality.

  ‘You’re not exactly sparkling company.’ Amelia, careful not to sound whining, leant across the kitchen table, smiling at Gerald who sat staring morosely into the huge vase of daffodils. She sniffed the air and sat up straight. ‘Your scent clashes with mine.’

  ‘What? Oh.’ Gerald cleared his throat. Here was his chance. The moment, handed to him on a plate, to come clean. ‘Sorry old girl,’ he would say, ‘there’s someone else. It’s her scent, Diorissimo, you can smell on my lapel.’

  He drained the almost full glass of champagne. ‘Oh that,’ he said. ‘One of the girls, temp as a matter of fact, spilt a whole bottle of the stuff over a brief I was handling.’ And that was that. He’d blown it. ‘Quite a nice scent really,’ he added pathetically.

  Later that evening, Gerald lay, unable to sleep, on his side of the wide brass bed. What kept him awake was the unfairness of everything. How could he rest when the world around him was so utterly unreasonable? After all, here he was, an increasingly popular and successful solicitor of thirty-five, unable to marry the nice, perfectly respectable and above all, reasonable, helpmate that was Clarissa. Unable to marry her because of his mistress.

  He threw his part of the duvet aside and sat up, noisily splashing Evian water into a glass from the bottle on the bedside table. ‘Mistress’ was a dated concept, he knew that. He drank down the water in great gulps. But his mistress was what Amelia was. It would have been nice to add ‘kept woman’, to ‘mistress’, but he knew that would not be fair. After all she earned quite a bit from her freelancing and there was the money from the sale of her flat.

  But she had the mentality of a kept woman then, he decided angrily as he threw himself back down on to his pillow. Come to think of it, he was surprised that she was as successful as she actually was at her work.

  He remembered the first time he’d met her, at the exhibition. ‘Will you model for me?’ he had asked pretty soon after first being introduced. ‘I’m planning a nude,’ he’d said, looking deep into her slanted grey eyes. ‘A sort of eighties Rubensesque effect; the lusciousness of the past, with the new, more angular woman of today.’ He had drained his wine glass, expecting her to either laugh or be offended.

  But she’d just smiled and said, ‘I’d love to. When?’

  All so typical of Amelia, he thought bitterly. That immediate and surprising yes, her turning up all smiles in his studio the next afternoon, as agreed. And then panicking, flatly refusing to place her slender, naked right leg across the arm of the chair in the pose he required.

  ‘I’m sorry, I really am,’ she had sobbed, ‘but I can only model with my legs together.’

  Raising himself on one elbow, Gerald looked down at Amelia sleeping at his side, her wavy, auburn hair spread across the white pillow-case, her cheek with its sprinkling of pale freckles, resting on her hand. For a moment, quite against his will, tenderness replaced anger. He bent down and brushed her cheeks with his lips then, sighing deeply, he rolled on to his back and closed his eyes.

  Hitler had been a handwasher, Stalin too, Dagmar had read somewhere.

  I’m not keeping very nice company, she thought, and she couldn’t help smiling, a sad flash of a smile. She was sitting in bed, wrapped in misery as if it was a second blanket. She was in no doubt that the misery was self inflicted and wholly unnecessary, but that, she thought, was about as much help as knowing that you should never have walked under that bus.

  I drove away my husband, worried him away. And I’ve lost Amelia’s respect for ever. Dagmar wiped tears from her eyes and, taking a fresh Kleenex from the box at her side, blew her nose noisily. How could a child ever respect a mother like Dagmar? One who, while all normal mothers fretted over the Cold War and what Mick Jagger’s lips might do to their daughter’s innocence, spent precious hours and days worrying whether or not a door handle could pass on a deadly disease.

  And now I’m fifty-five, she thought, and still worrying about the wrong things. All over the world, women were voicing their concern over nuclear power and Aids, and the safety of hormone replacement therapy. But Dagmar was not amongst them. Her thoughts would often drift towards these topics, hover anxiously, touch down briefly. On the whole the resulting conclusions were sensible, robust even. ‘Make him use a condom if you are at all unsure,’ she would say to Amelia. ‘And cold hearted as it might seem, I would think twice before giving mouth to mouth, especially if there are bleeding gums involved.’

  But then these were normal concerns and when you’ve spent the day disinfecting clothes pegs, there was so little time left for normality.

  And now, sitting in the king-sized marital bed she never could make herself throw out, she thought for a moment of all the squandered years, of all the planes that had flown overhead, whilst she was stuck on the ground with her unnecessary luggage. She could only dwell on it for a moment though, any more and the thought of all that waste became unbearable.

  She reached for the books on the bedside table. She’d read some Wodehouse, she decided, he never failed to cheer her up. It was a new trade paperback of collected novels, her own copy. She had stopped borrowing from the library after discovering that people really did pick their noses whilst they read.

  She opened the book at the start of the second story. She read a few lines but she couldn’t concentrate. Her hands needed washing. She told herself there was no reason to wash them. ‘Look,’ she said to herself, ‘look, they’re clean, perfectly clean.’ But she couldn’t enjoy Madeleine Bassett’s soppy speeches or laugh at Bertie’s struggles with his aunts, not whilst her stomach felt as if it was filling up with performing fleas.

  Again she stretched her raw hands out in front of her. ‘Look you stupid woman, there’s nothing on them, can’t you see?’ She was pleading with herself now, but it didn’t work, the fleas were performing a clog dance round her guts by now. Near to tears once mo
re, she put the book down carefully on a pristine part of the bed cover and padded across to the bathroom.

  That was the trouble with germs, she sniffed to herself as she soaped and scrubbed her hands under the scalding water, they could not be seen. She wished the little buggers could be. They should wear scarlet sweat-shirts with ‘I’m a Harmful Germ’ blazoned across the chest.

  She got back into bed, stretching her legs out, the fleas were gone for now. Next time, she promised herself as she picked up the book, she really would not give in.

  At Cherryfield, Selma too was in bed. She’d been there since nine o’clock. She had slept a while, now she dozed. Her bed was warm and soft, the room dark. Her toe wasn’t hurting. When Willoughby came to bed she would tell him. He was worried about her, she knew from the way he looked at her when he thought she didn’t notice, half affectionate, half exasperated.

  ‘Go and see Dr Scott, there’s a good girl,’ he had said as her toe got steadily more painful, as the dark shadow on the skin grew in diameter.

  But Selma never visited the doctor and Willoughby, bless him, knew that.

  She smiled to herself in the darkness of the room. ‘Dear, dear Willoughby,’ she mumbled sleepily. How lucky she was to have found him. He had married her when she had felt she had nothing to share but grief. He had been as loving and patient a father to Dagmar as he had been to his own son.

  ‘I came to Sweden to look for iron ore and what did I mine but pure gold,’ he would tell anyone who’d listen, anyone who’d ask how he went to Sweden to return with a beautiful, Jewish wife and a small, blonde daughter.

  Selma drifted along on her good memories. Then, as her gaze fell on unfamiliar objects, she tried to sit up. Where was the large painted mirror that lived on her dressing-table? And her mother’s chaise-longue? Where was Willoughby?

  She felt the side of the narrow bed. ‘Willoughby!’ she screamed.

  There were footsteps outside the room, then slowly the door opened, letting in a silver of light. Shuffling steps approached the bed. Out of the darkness, a hand appeared, groping round the top of the bedside table. Muttering to himself, the Admiral reached into the glass where Selma’s teeth lay. Drying them in a perfunctory manner against the silk lapel of his dressing-gown he dropped them into a sponge bag where they clattered on top of the five other sets already gathered up.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Selma’s voice trembled as she searched for the light, her blanket pulled up to her neck. ‘Who is that? What’s going on?’

  But the Admiral had retreated.

  Chapter Seven

  The Next Morning Amelia woke feeling hungover and miserable. It was Gerald’s fault. She’d been forced to drink almost the whole bottle of champagne herself last night, he’d refused even a second glass. She rested her throbbing temples against the cool palms of her hands. With all his talk of a recession, she thought angrily, how could he expect her not to feel she had to finish the bottle. And now he’d gone off without waking her.

  Brushing her teeth, thirty seconds on each one as her dentist had told her (it seemed less of a bother than having to decide what next to do) she looked at her face in the mirror. Not too bad, she thought, wiping the toothpaste from her mouth, considering how rotten she was feeling. She didn’t think Gerald really looked at her any more; it was a shame. Soon all those little plump cells would become desiccated and the skin would support her flesh no better than a washed out bra or one of those net shopping bags that expanded downwards with every new pound in weight added.

  Arching her back, she wondered idly whether a pencil would still drop to the floor if placed under her breasts. She thought she’d better not put it to the test.

  It was not that thirty-one was old, she thought, more that nowadays the streets seemed full of people younger.

  She pulled the nightdress over her head and, stepping over it as it lay crumpled on the floor, wandered in under the shower.

  Even forty wasn’t old, it was just that much nearer to fifty. She tried unsuccessfully to rub up some lather with the Strawberry Body Shampoo. Life, she thought, was just a rush from one birthday to another. You were born, had a quick dance round the flame, then Cherryfield.

  Maybe, she thought as she dried herself with Gerald’s towel – hers was still in a heap in the bedroom – maybe he was suffering from the male menopause? Her married friends used the phrase frequently on the subject of their husbands. It was a useful blanket explanation of course, as it covered as many sins as the husbands themselves. Anything from unprovoked bursts of fury, bad tempered remarks like, ‘So what, grilled lamb chops have always been my favourite, they damn well aren’t now!’ to erratic behaviour in bed.

  She dressed and slapped some sun-block on her face while she waited for two aspirin to dissolve in a glass of Gerald’s fizzy water. She felt she could understand what these men were going through, not excuse them, but understand. She could see them young and confident, so sure they would matter, believing the world to be a mess just waiting for them to clear up. Then all too soon there they were, knocking on the door to middle-age, powerless to change anything much but their wives.

  But Gerald was still young. She looked at his photograph taken the summer before, as she sprayed herself liberally with Shalimar. She liked to wear Shalimar when she gardened, it was so unsuitable. There was still time for him to appear on breakfast television as their legal eagle, or to fight to save the rainforests.

  Why was Gerald so discontented? Amelia stabbed at the heavy, black soil with a massive garden fork, attempting to dislodge the last of the season’s leeks.

  It had rained during the night and the sun refracted through the drops of water collected in the pale green foliage. The fruity scent of the slowly warming soil mixed with the sour smell of the leeks, and a few steps away at the edge of the vegetable garden, the cypress was flowering with tiny pink tips at the end of its coniferous leaves.

  Amelia straightened up, holding the trug heavy with soilladen leeks. Looking around her, she listened to the comforting counterpoint of rumbling traffic and bird song; I love this place, she thought.

  On her way inside, the phone rang and, not bothering to take off her boots, she hurried through the kitchen and into the hall.

  ‘It’s Henry Mallett.’ His voice sounded lighter than she remembered. ‘They gave me your number at Cherryfield, I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not at all,’ Amelia said as she perched on the edge of the hall table, idly watching the mud slide off the sole of her boots and on to the fawn-coloured carpet.

  ‘Sister Morris said she was sure you wouldn’t. “You are a man of the cloth, after all, Mr Mallett.”’ Henry managed a passable imitation of Sister Morris. ‘Actually I wondered if you were planning to come down again soon. We might have dinner together?’ There was a slight pause. ‘It would cheer me up.’

  ‘I’m afraid Gerald takes a pretty dim view of me going down too often,’ Amelia said. ‘I wasn’t planning to go for another week or so.’ She paused. ‘Is anything wrong that you need cheering up?’

  ‘No, not really. There’s been a bit of trouble over my father, nothing much, something to do with dentures. I’ll see you next time you’re down.’ And he said goodbye.

  Amelia replaced the handset with the uneasy feeling of having let someone down.

  At just that time, Sister Morris was sitting in the kitchen at Cherryfield, gazing in despair at the heap of dentures that lay before her on the formica-topped table. In the dining room, the residents were getting restless.

  ‘I just don’t know how we’ll ever work out which belongs to whom.’

  ‘Be Prince Charming.’ Nurse Williams breezed in with a couple of empty jugs in her hands.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ Sister Morris glared at her.

  ‘You’ll just have to go round all the kingdom trying them on.’ And Nurse Williams was gone.

  ‘Very droll.’ Sister Morris returned her disapproving gaze to the dentures. Shaking her head she said to the
cook, ‘They’ll have to have tapioca, Ruth, there’s nothing else for it.’

  ‘No tapioca,’ said Ruth, who rationed her words as if they were taken from her own meagre salary. ‘Wednesday’s All Bran.’

  ‘But what are we to do?’ Sister Morris wailed. ‘Just think what All Bran will do to their gums.’

  ‘Rather not,’ said Ruth.

  When Gerald returned from the office that evening, making Amelia run to her typewriter in the bay of the sitting room pretending she had been working all along, he announced, ‘I’m taking a week off, to go fishing with Nick and Tom.’ He said it rather angrily. As if, Amelia thought studying his face, he was reacting to a fuss not yet made. ‘Oh,’ was all she said.

  ‘All right, out with it, you’re upset.’ Glowering, Gerald threw his jacket on the armchair. ‘You don’t own me you know.’

  ‘I never …’

  ‘You really have to develop some independence.’

  ‘… said I did.’

  ‘Learn to be on your own a bit.’ Gerald picked up the magazine on Amelia’s desk, looked at the open page and slammed it down again.

  Amelia looked at the page too, it was a perfectly harmless one, she thought, unhappily, on the subject of religious festivals.

  There was a fizzing noise as Gerald opened a tonic bottle. Then he swore as the tonic overflowed on to Aunt Edith’s rosewood card-table. ‘Someone’s been shaking the bloody bottle,’ Gerald said slowly.

  Amelia had had enough. ‘That was me,’ she said, ‘I ran out of maracas. As for you going fishing, you are perfectly entitled to go where ever you like, after all, we’re not even married.’