Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘I stood on the quayside in Gothenburg, waiting each morning for the ferry that would bring him and his parents and sister back from Germany,’ Selma had told Amelia.

  ‘I was like the statue of the Seaman’s Wife, looking out over the harbour entrance, hoping, watching. The ferries came and ships too, and there were refugees onboard, but never Daniel or his family. Your grandfather was a brave man; he went back to Germany knowing what might happen.’

  Selma never wanted to talk about what followed, but there was the postcard, in a hand quite unlike that in the old love letters from Daniel that Amelia had found in a silk-lined box at the back of Selma’s huge walnut closet. The uncertain writing on the card said in German, ‘I’ve been taken to a detention camp for my own safety, and am well and healthy.’ But Daniel had died in Belsen, and in a drawer in Selma’s desk was the letter from Daniel’s mother before she too was taken. Only Selma could read the spindly writing, but they all knew the letter, Tante Magda’s last letter in its yellowing envelope. There were some photographs too, snapshots of a long-ago summer holiday. In one, Daniel, tall, auburn-haired like Amelia, smiled into the camera, his arm round Selma’s shoulder. In another, Tante Magda sat in the shade of a parasol with Ella, Daniel’s little sister, at her side. Some letters, a few photographs, were all that remained of a family.

  Amelia sat at Cherryfield, thinking of her grandfather Daniel who had died when he was younger than she was now, and she knew that against his suffering the mislaying of Gerald weighed less than a feather.

  When she was small and feeling sorry for herself, Amelia, like most children, had been told to think of those who were worse off. It had always worried her, this summoning up of images of suffering just so that her infinitely lighter burdens would seem even slighter. What was it other than the exploitation of tragedy? Who was there to ask? Selma, more often that not, averted her eyes and mind from that which disturbed her, homing in instead on what was pleasant, a flower, a pretty face, a swath of material just right for the dining-room chairs. Dagmar, on the other hand, seemed convinced that suffering lay in wait behind every poor dupe engaged in carefree pleasure, so rather than be taken unawares, she would seek trouble out, take it by the hand and invite it into her life. Then of course, she could sit back, relax for a moment even, and say, ‘There, I told you, we’re none of us safe.’

  Amelia turned her chair away from the sun that shone low and straight through the window, making her eyes ache.

  ‘What was that darling?’ Selma jerked awake in her chair, gazing sleepy-eyed at Amelia.

  ‘I ought to go soon,’ Amelia said. ‘It’s nearly your supper-time. I’ll be here most of tomorrow, maybe we could go down to town.’

  ‘Don’t leave yet,’ Selma said as she always did. ‘There,’ she pointed at the glass doors leading in to the lounge. ‘There’s Admiral Mallett, you must stay and meet him.’ She raised herself a little in the chair and waved. Smiling at the Admiral who had spotted them, she mouthed, the smile still in place, ‘Poor old Admiral Mallett, he’s a dear, sweet man, but, between you and me, I think he’s just the slightest bit potty.’

  The Admiral, leaning heavily on two sticks, turned to speak to someone and Henry stepped into view, guiding his father through the doors.

  Her voice, carrying, gracious, Selma called out, ‘Admiral, how are you today? Do come and join us.’ She indicated an empty chair with her good hand and, as she moved, Amelia noticed for the first time that the bandage which used to reach Selma’s ankle bone was now spiralling its way up the leg like a pale serpent. Amelia shuddered and searched Selma’s face for signs of pain, but Selma looked relaxed, smiling at the Admiral.

  ‘I’ve just promised my grandmother that she’ll be back home soon.’ Amelia bent close to Henry, speaking in a low voice that could not be heard over Selma’s conversation with the Admiral.

  ‘That’s nice,’ Henry said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’

  ‘I don’t know your telephone number, or your address.’

  ‘Nor you do.’ Henry smiled at her.

  ‘The point is,’ Amelia paused, irritated by the intense way he was looking at her, as if, she thought, he’s expecting me any moment to perform a particularly stunning card trick. ‘The point is,’ she tried again, ‘there is no house. It’s been sold. Now do you see?’

  Henry stopped smiling. ‘Yes, I do see.’

  ‘Just don’t start preaching to me about the sin of dishonesty,’ Amelia snapped. ‘I couldn’t take it.’

  ‘Now you’re being unfair,’ Henry corrected her mildly. ‘I only preach on Sundays and Wednesdays, anything else would have to be considered overtime. What I was going to say,’ he stretched his rather heavy legs out in front of him, ‘is that you’d better start working on a plan of action.’

  Amelia frowned. ‘What do you mean, “Plan of Action”?’

  ‘I mean that you need to work out how you are going to get your grandmother back home.’ And he turned to his father who was trying to attract his attention with a series of ‘I say old chap’.

  Amelia stared for a moment at Henry’s serene profile, the firm, short chin, the slightly stubby nose, and thought he must be very thick.

  Selma put her chubby hand on Henry’s arm, she’d always needed to touch, to hold on and caress. ‘Your father has just promised to come to my little party. You must come too. Amelia will bring you. Now don’t you forget, sixteenth of August. You put that in your diary.’

  Amelia had to listen to Selma chirruping about her plans interrupted only by the twittering of Miss White, who, on joining them, had immediately secured an invitation by demanding one. ‘You get nothing in life if you don’t ask.’

  ‘Will you have dinner with me tonight?’ Henry’s voice was casual, but his eyes, squirrel brown Amelia thought, were fixed on hers.

  She was starved of admiration. She felt she was a little like one of her own neglected pot plants. That’s right, she thought, I’m like that poor African violet who should be fed with tomato fertilizer once a fortnight but is lucky if it gets a drop or so every other month, its blooms growing fewer and fewer until there’s just dense, dull-green foliage.

  She smiled and said she’d love to have dinner with him and was rewarded with a huge grin of pleasure and relief.

  Amelia too felt grateful. She was saved from an evening waiting for a call from Gerald that would not come, saved from yet another dinner on her own in the small dining room of the hotel. Those lonely mealtimes always reminded her of awful teenage dances she was forced to attend, when cropped red hair and a flat chest had very little appeal when compared to long blond tresses and a size 36D bust. Once, at a party in a village hall, a left behind brochure on woodworm infestation had provided relief. She had sat gazing earnestly at its pages, able to pretend, at least to herself, that the last thing she wanted to do at a dance was dance and that, seeing she was so busy with her brochure, it would be a miracle if one could be fitted in, should anyone ask. She had reached ‘The Woodworm and your Heirlooms’, when a boy with spreading wet stains under his arms finally asked, by the way of an elegant lead in, what it was she was reading.

  ‘Proust,’ Amelia had answered, and she hadn’t danced that dance either.

  Now at each lonely meal, as she sat engrossed in the wine list and the bit at the bottom of the menu about Cromwell having been there first, she felt she could discern a whiff of pesticide in the air.

  With a warm smile, she said to Henry, ‘I had planned to wear a sign round my neck tonight, with “I’m eating on my own because I’ve got leprosy”, written on it, and now I won’t have to.’

  Then it was six o’clock and there was tea or, as Selma insisted, supper-served-far-too-early, in the dining room.

  ‘We’re abandoning them to that.’ Amelia standing with Henry in the doorway, pointed at the plates of corned beef and limp lettuce being handed round.

  Henry said nothing but, as he turned his face away, she saw his cheeks redden.

/>   Looking out over the tables of old people raising forks to their mouths, stabbing at the food, drinking water from thick, cloudy glasses, she felt as if she was watching a programme with the sound turned off, the room was so quiet. The strain of staying alive another day had taken its toll on the residents of Cherryfield; there was no energy left for conversation.

  Amelia and Henry walked through the empty Residents’ Lounge and into the hall, guilt padding behind them like a big-eyed mongrel refused a walk.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m crying,’ Amelia apologized to Henry as an auxiliary locked the front door behind them. ‘But today in particular, I feel life’s very sad. “Often sad, but never serious.” Who was it who said that?’ She dabbed at her eyes with a Swiss, embroidered handkerchief that Selma had given her.

  ‘Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde?’ Henry reeled the names out with a smile, but his voice sounded thick, as if he too was crying.

  Amelia tried to say something that would cheer him up. ‘What about Jesus, what would he say?’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me please,’ Henry said quietly as he opened the car door for her. ‘Not just now.’ And he slammed her door shut and walked round to his side before she had time to answer.

  They left the car by the ferry and went for a drink at a pub nearby, before wandering the cobbled streets looking for somewhere to eat.

  ‘Not Wimpy,’ Henry said as they passed one, ‘or Kentucky Fried Chicken. What we need is something French and pretentious, or Italian and lingering. Italian, I think, with dripping candles stuffed into green bottles.’

  But Kingsmouth these days was short on anything lingering and long on anything to do with fast food. ‘“Tato n’topping”,’ Henry read on the sign. ‘I don’t think so.’ But as they turned up the hill from the harbour they heard faint piano music coming from further up the dark street.

  ‘That used to be rather a shabby boarding house.’ Amelia looked at the floodlit façade of the building, where baskets of geraniums were suspended from wrought-iron hooks. The music had stopped, but inside Henry pointed triumphantly to the round tables, each with a lit candle in a wine bottle placed on the check cloth.

  ‘Perfect,’ he sighed happily.

  As they sat sipping their wine, a tiny dapper man with unnaturally black hair entered through a back door. Stooping slightly, he made his way across the restaurant with quick steps, past a trolley laden with cakes and puddings, and over to the upright piano in the far corner. He lifted his right hand high in the air, before striking the first chord of ‘The Blue Danube’.

  ‘Can one ask for more?’ Henry said, sitting back in his chair.

  The little man played on as the restaurant filled with people. He played waltzes and polkas and marches while Amelia and Henry ate their whitebait and the Roman pork (‘We find there is a certain resistance to veal amongst our British diners,’ the head waiter had explained) and, after the final medley, he lifted his hands high in the air once more for a final onslaught on the keys. Then he leapt from the stool with surprising speed and, as Amelia and Henry applauded, acknowledged them with a graceful bow before disappearing out the way he had come.

  ‘Selma would love him,’ Amelia said. She paused for a moment, thinking. ‘It’s funny really that classical music or poetry or pictures are regarded as luxuries when they are actually tremendous equalizers. I mean …’ Finding Henry looking as if he was actually listening to her, she stopped for a moment, giving him a quick smile before continuing, ‘You don’t need to be able-bodied or employed or even sane to get the same kick out of those things as the rest of us. My grandmother can’t produce or nurture, she can’t explore. She has no say even in her own life and I very much doubt she would survive on her own for more than a week. But Mozart and Strauss, a poem read aloud, a beautiful painting, can still open the same doors to her as they do to us, give the same peace or elation, the same peek at immortality.’ Amelia, feeling she was talking too much, drained her glass of red wine, her cheeks a little pinker than usual.

  ‘Maybe that’s why so many men at the front write poetry,’ Henry said. ‘I hate to talk shop but, as the Bible says, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”’ He spoke the words softly, but with an intensity that made Amelia feel sorry when he stopped with an ‘etc etc’.

  She wished too that he wouldn’t assume she knew the rest of the quote; she didn’t, not exactly, and she would be too lazy to look it up later. ‘All right, so I’m not an original thinker,’ she laughed.

  The little man returned to the piano and, settling again on the round stool, began to play ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.

  Whilst she listened, Amelia looked around her at the other diners. At the table behind Henry, five women were chatting and laughing, constantly and easily. At the other tables sat mostly couples, eating their food in near silence, scattering a word here, a comment there, like Amelia chucking corn at her bantams.

  Maybe a good gauge of the dynamism of a love affair was not how often you made love, she thought, but how much you talked to each other in restaurants. It was not so long ago that she had been smugly aware of the wealth of things that Gerald and she would find to talk about when they were out. They’d sit, heads close together, forgetting even to eat at times, but lately, lately they had been more like the silently chewing couples she used to despise.

  Sighing, she said suddenly to Henry, ‘Gerald, that’s who my grandmother thinks you are, Gerald might be having an affair.’ And she looked up, astonished at her own words, admitting to him what she hadn’t even admitted to herself until then.

  Henry did not seem surprised, but just looked thoughtfully at her, his head a little to one side, like an overlarge bird, listening for the song of another.

  Amelia smiled weakly, ‘It’s a bit upsetting actually as I love him with all my heart and that sort of thing.’ She looked thoughtful, ‘I suppose that to you, to most people, I’m an affair already, so where that leaves his new relationship I don’t know. Tell me, Henry, what would the Church say? Has a deceived mistress got any rights? Can she in fact ever be deceived or just punished?’

  ‘Never mind that for the moment,’ Henry said unexpectedly. ‘You must ask him straight out if he’s playing around. If he is, leave him.’

  Amelia looked at him. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘You’re very young.’ Amelia touched his cheek. ‘Funny how having something strategically placed round your neck, a stethoscope, microphone, dog-collar, makes people expect great wisdom from you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Henry looked embarrassed.

  Amelia smiled and shook her head. ‘No I’m sorry, I was rude. It’s very kind of you to listen to me. I feel quite alone sometimes. My mother is fine until something really interesting, like a dog’s mess, catches her attention. I adored Willoughby but he’s dead. I sometimes feel Selma might as well be.’ She looked at Henry. ‘What’s your view on euthanasia?’

  ‘No,’ Henry said.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because only God has the right to take a life.’

  ‘God giveth and God taketh away,’ Amelia mumbled. Then she said, ‘But he doesn’t decide on giving life, we do, the man and the woman. It’s we who decide whether to have a child or not.’

  ‘God gave you that ability.’

  ‘He’s given me the ability to take life too.’

  ‘The ability, yes, but not the right.’ Henry’s amiable face had taken on a stern look. ‘What you can do, what you are doing, is to ease the pain, make what’s left of someone’s life as bearable as possible.’

  ‘But what you are saying is that you can condone the killing of perfectly healthy young men in a war, or I presume you do as you’re in the Navy, but you can’t accept the easing of the dying of very old ladies?’

  Henry poured what was left of the wine into their glasses. ‘You have to stand up to evil. Sometimes, in doing that, you might need to use forc
e. There’s St Augustine’s Doctrine of the Just War; it may have been conceived to justify Rome’s colonial wars, but the idea itself is sound. Humans are imperfect.’ He smiled. ‘Some are a lot less perfect than others. When Hitler rampaged through Europe, should chaps like me have stood back and said to the men and women risking their lives to put an end to some of the worst suffering in the history of mankind, “Thou shalt not kill”?’ Henry shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. You have to build your life on certain principles but, for mere mortals, I do believe it’s a mistake to etch them in stone.’

  ‘Wasn’t it George Bernard Shaw who said to a lady sitting next to him at dinner, “Now all we’re doing is arguing about the price”?’

  Henry looked at her, his face serious. ‘No, not at all. What we are arguing about is right or wrong as we perceive it, honestly and in our hearts. I believe and so, I’m sure, do you that it is right to defend a child from a brutal killer, even if that means using force, the minimum force necessary to save the child. But who is your grandmother threatening? Your peace of mind?’ Henry leant closer to Amelia, putting his hand over Amelia’s. ‘If you asked her if she wanted to die, what do you think she’d answer?’

  Amelia, looking flushed, snatched her hand away, glaring at Henry as if he was personally responsible for the injustices of the universe. ‘And that’, she said, ‘is just the final little nasty thrown in, the ultimate trap, this absurd instinct of survival that we’ve got. This pathetic desire to cling on long after we know the party is over. Not that it’s often much of a party anyway.’

  ‘Tut, tut,’ Henry said. ‘What a cynic you are.’

  ‘Not a cynic,’ but Amelia couldn’t help smiling. He is like a sponge, she thought; any anger thrown at him gets soaked up and dissipated. ‘No, not a cynic at all. I’m just possessed of what Selma calls “a black bottom”. I think what she means is a melancholy disposition.’