Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  Later she sat in bed with a mug of tea and a plate of chocolate biscuits trying to repaint the evening in more pleasing shades. The telephone rang. She grabbed the receiver hoping for a miracle, for it to be Alan saying what a truly lovely evening it had been.

  It was Amelia. ‘I’m at the hospital,’ she told Dagmar. ‘It’s Selma. I’m afraid she set fire to herself.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Amelia Spent Most of the night staring at Selma who slept sedated at the hospital in Basingstoke. Rasping breaths were forced from her smoke-damaged lungs, a curtain had been drawn round her as it had been round Willoughby. Amelia felt she was in a capsule floating through space. Now and then sounds would reach them from faraway earth, muted clatter of heels on vinyl, whispers.

  The curtains opened and a nurse told her to go home and get some rest.

  At the Old Rectory, Gerald slept in the wing-chair in front of a flickering television screen. Gingerly Amelia picked the remote control from his lap and pressed ‘Off’. She stood for a while just looking at him. She felt like a cannibal feasting on his youth and wholesomeness, listening to his breath that pulsed lightly and easily from his parted lips. She knelt by him, putting her cheek close to his face, feeling the warm breath against her skin. Gerald stirred and she got up quickly.

  ‘You looked so, so … unsinged.’ She smiled, embarrassed.

  ‘I heard about the fire.’ Gerald sat up straight, brushing the hair from his eyes. ‘When Mrs Jenkins called, I came immediately. I’ve checked the damage upstairs.’ To her surprise he smiled. ‘It could be worse.’ Crossing one long leg over the other he asked, ‘What about your grandmother, how is she?’

  ‘I don’t really know.’ Out of habit Amelia perched on the arm of his chair. ‘She was smoking in bed; I should have thought of that one. But she’s hanging on, and the hospital doesn’t think she’s in any immediate danger. Whether she will recover fully or not is another matter.’ She spoke calmly, then suddenly she bashed her forehead against the palms of her clenched fists. When she looked up again, there were tears in her eyes. ‘God help me Gerald, I don’t even know if I want her to.’

  Gerald pulled her down on to his knee and put his arm round her shoulders. He made little comforting noises to stop her crying. ‘It’s the shock,’ he mumbled, ‘it’s the shock.’

  The worry and guilt that had been like a grinding fist in her stomach began to ease and she was almost asleep when she felt Gerald’s arm pull away from behind her back.

  ‘Blast! It’s five o’clock, I have to get home.’ Nudging her off his knee, he sprang from the chair.

  Amelia looked at him sleepily. ‘I thought you’d come back.’

  Gerald sighed. ‘You have to accept it’s over between us.’ He took a step back towards her. ‘God Amelia, I didn’t mean to give you the wrong idea.’ He looked pityingly at her. ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’ He patted her cheek.

  She shied away, drawing in a long, shivering breath. She could see him back at Clarissa’s place. ‘Poor old Amelia,’ he’d say. ‘It’s pathetic really the way she clings on.’

  If my head split open this moment she thought, hot anger would spew out and drown us like the great flood. She clenched her fists, staring after Gerald who was walking towards the door, stiff-backed, eyes ahead as if he believed one backward glance would turn him into salt. I’ll give Selma a blowtorch next time, she thought. But before I die, I’ll hang that big-assed Sloane by her thick ankles and choke her with her own Laura Ashley skirt.

  ‘No, no I’m sorry,’ she called after him. ‘I can’t think what got over me. It’s the shock as you said.’ She forced a smile to her lips and left it to fight with the expression in her eyes.

  Selma surprised everyone but Amelia by remaining alive. A week after setting fire to her continental quilt she was still coughing painfully from the smoke and her legs were covered in weeping burns, but she was alive and her heart stayed strong; it seemed to have marched to a different tune from the rest of her used-up body.

  The hospital needed her bed.

  Amelia phoned Cherryfield and asked to be put through to Sister Morris.

  ‘And who shall I say is calling?’

  ‘Judas,’ Amelia mumbled. ‘I mean to say, it’s Miss Lindsay.’

  ‘Sister Morris here.’

  Amelia had sprung Selma from Cherryfield and now, on the eve of recapture, she was actually finding the voice of the Chief Warden comforting. Sister Morris told her that there would be no problem having Mrs Merryman back as the payments had been kept up.

  ‘I feel so responsible.’ Amelia humbled herself. ‘She had taken up smoking again, I think she’d forgotten she ever gave it up. But I never thought … It was awful. There she was like one of those toadstools, you know they look like an upside-down skittle and give out puffs of smoke. She wore her hairnet too.’ The picture was vivid before Amelia’s eyes and somehow the hairnet added to the horror, she wasn’t quite sure why. ‘There’s no doubt she needs better care than I can give her. It’s all my fault, I should never have taken her away.’

  In victory, Sister Morris was magnanimous. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself Miss Lindsay, you did what you thought best. Although, as we professionals know only too well, with our elderly that’s seldom enough. Now if you could give me the name of the doctor in charge of your grandmother.’

  ‘I can’t wait to get out of here. I do so detest hospitals.’ Selma greeted the news on Saturday morning that she was being discharged, with a self-congratulatory little smile. ‘I’ve had far worse burns than these,’ she gesticulated in the direction of her bandaged legs, ‘so I really don’t see what all the fuss is about.’

  She raised her arms out obediently for the nurse to dress her, and Amelia stared at the bones that seemed like a giant clothes hanger holding up the sagging flesh. She glanced at her own arms, bare in a short-sleeved T-shirt, as if making sure of their firm roundness and the honey-tone of the skin before turning away guiltily.

  Gerald’s Citroën was parked outside the hospital. When he came around to measure up the spare room for wallpaper, Amelia had asked to borrow it for the trip down to Cherryfield.

  ‘I’m sure Clarissa has a Fiat Uno or something to take you around in, and I bet she calls it Algie,’ she had added ungratefully.

  ‘Hughie actually.’ Gerald had smiled briefly before remembering where his loyalties lay.

  Now Selma was installed in the front seat of his car, padded legs stretched out in front of her, the seat pushed back as far as it would go. Amelia waved her thanks to the orderly as she drove out of the hospital car park.

  ‘I hate hospitals,’ Selma said again, then she coughed, a racking cough that wrenched mucus from her nose and eyes, a cough that doubled her over and sucked the energy from her so that when it finished she sat back, grey faced, moist eyes staring, and said nothing for a long time.

  Amelia suffered with her, driving along on the motorway, unable to stop the car and put her arms round her to comfort. Chopin had died playing his ‘Polonaise’, coughing blood until there seemed to be more over the ivory of the piano than inside his own frail body, or so Selma had told her once. Maybe, Amelia thought, that was a better death; a great fountain of agony in the midst of life and beauty? It had to be better than what Selma was going through; having life sucked from her in little painful spurts.

  They were on the A303 driving west, when Selma spoke again. ‘I thought I was going home with you. We seem to have been driving for an awfully long time.’

  ‘Do you need the loo?’

  ‘No, darling, I said we seem to have been …’

  ‘Cherryfield,’ Amelia interrupted, pity and shame making her brusque. ‘We’re going to Cherryfield. You need looking after properly and it’s a lot better than a hospital. You’re lucky to be alive.’ The phrase slipped out and they both considered it in silence.

  ‘I suppose I am,’ Selma said finally to Amelia’s astonishment. Was it an automatic response, or did she actual
ly mean it? Amelia glanced at Selma’s profile. Did she really feel lucky to be alive? Did she even remember Cherryfield?

  ‘Admiral Mallett will be pleased to see you,’ Amelia tried. Selma didn’t seem to have heard.

  Gerald’s mother had said once that she wanted Gerald to put her down if she ever got senile. ‘Put her down,’ that was the phrase she had used and she had spoken in earnest. Amelia had asked Gerald later, ‘Why are people so scared of becoming senile? After all you yourself, are the one person who won’t know. There you’ll be making everyone else’s life a misery, but you won’t know or care.’ A senile mind, she had imagined, was like a wiped-clean video, all gone, blank. She had been so wrong. The film was still there, but with scenes cut out at randon, replaced out of sequence, rendering the whole senseless. Familiar faces turned up in strange places, flashbacks made more sense than the dislocated present. No, senility offered no escape. She put her foot down on the accelerator, watching the speedometer rise to eighty. You were condemned to stay snatching at bits of reality as tantalizing as sunbeams and as hard to hold.

  ‘I know Admiral Mallett, nice man,’ Selma said, answering suddenly.

  Amelia looked out at the rape fields and the rich green meadows, bright as a flea-market picture, as if it was her journeys through the English summer landscape that were numbered, not Selma’s.

  ‘You do remember Cherryfield?’ she asked quietly.

  Again there was a pause, as if they were communicating by satellite.

  ‘Of course I remember it, awful place. Robert tried to persuade me to move there for good.’ Selma turned to look at Amelia. ‘Where is Robert? I don’t seem to have seen him for ages.’

  ‘Brazil, he lives there now …’ She was about to add, remember? But she said instead, ‘He knows about the accident. He’ll phone as soon as you’re back.’

  ‘I must go over and visit him,’ Selma declared.

  At Cherryfield, Sister Morris greeted them in front of the house, a large, ginger-haired man in tow.

  ‘Welcome back, Mrs Merryman,’ Sister Morris smiled, her lips moving not up, but horizontally before springing back to their usual defensive position clamped across her teeth. ‘This is Mr Jones, he’s joined us in your absence to help behind the scenes: fetching, carrying, that sort of thing.’

  Amelia looked at the hefty, grinning Mr Jones and imagined him bounding up and down the passages and stairs of Cherryfield on all fours, old people dangling like wounded birds from his jaws. But he was gentle as he eased Selma from her seat, transferring her to the wheelchair parked on the grass verge.

  Amelia hauled a small case from the car boot. ‘I left most of her clothes here. They should all be in her room still.’ She started to walk towards the house.

  ‘She’s not in her old room.’ Sister Morris, to Amelia’s surprise, coloured, lowering her gaze like a guilty child. Any moment now, Amelia thought, she’ll be scuffing her white lace-ups against the gravel.

  ‘Is there a good reason for moving her?’ Amelia asked.

  Sister Morris looked up as Selma was wheeled past by Mr Jones. ‘At this present moment in time,’ the round-about phrase gave Sister Morris time to recover her breezy confidence, ‘we feel Mrs Merryman would benefit from a higher degree of care. So we put her in Honeysuckle.’ She added the last sentence speedily as if to race through any objections Amelia might have.

  ‘But that’s the Annexe.’ Amelia was horrified. She felt like a mother who having persuaded her child to have a verruca removed finds the surgeon poised for an amputation. ‘You can’t do that, she couldn’t take it.’ And as Sister Morris started towards the door she called after her, ‘She calls it Death Row you know!’

  Sister Morris continued inside. ‘And that’s not a helpful attitude, not at all.’ She chucked the words over her shoulder at Amelia. ‘We are only doing what we think best for our residents. If I may remind you, it’s that kind of emotional response which got your grandmother into this sorry state in the first place.’

  It was Amelia’s turn to hang her head. Sister Morris was right. It had been a panic withdrawal, removing Selma from Cherryfield. It had done only harm.

  ‘My room is upstairs.’ Selma tried to look over her shoulder at Mr Jones. ‘I’m sure of it. Amelia are you there? Could you please tell this man that my room is upstairs.’

  Again, Amelia thought how easy it would be to cruise along on Selma’s senility, to say with absolute conviction that she was mistaken yet again, that her room was, and always had been, in the Annexe; as easy as pulling the lifebelt from a drowning man.

  Mr Jones had stopped at the bottom of the stairs with a helpless glance at Sister Morris. Amelia hurried up to Selma and knelt at her side.

  ‘It’s all right Grandma, it’s just for a little while.’

  ‘What is?’ Selma’s voice rose to a squeak.

  Amelia looked up reproachfully at Sister Morris, then she put her hand on Selma’s. ‘They’re moving you into the Annexe just while your burns heal. It’s not an age thing, nothing like that. It’s only because of this nasty accident. I mean, if it was I who had got burnt, I’d be in a hospital ward now.’

  ‘So why am I not? Why am I not in hospital?’

  Amelia had tears in her eyes when she looked at Selma. ‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘I’m trying.’

  ‘I want to go home.’ Selma snatched her hand away. ‘I want to go to Ashcombe. I miss the cats.’ She looked hard at Amelia. ‘Where are the cats?’

  Amelia stood up. And what do I say now? Do I look her in the eyes and say: Ashcombe is sold. Your things are in storage waiting for you to die so they can be divided up between your children. And the cats? They were put down. We tried to find a new home for them but they were too old and smelly, no-one wanted them. Was that what she was meant to say? She sighed. ‘Let’s get you settled in your room shall we?’

  ‘Amelia.’ Selma grabbed her elbow, looking at her as if there was no-one else in the world. ‘I know I won’t get home for my birthday, not now I’ve had this stupid accident.’

  She’s giving up, Amelia thought, distressed, relinquishing hope.

  ‘But Christmas, darling,’ Selma continued, ‘that’s altogether different. I’ll be one hundred per cent by then.’ She put her hand on Amelia’s arm and whispered, ‘I couldn’t bear not having Christmas at home.’

  Amelia just stared after her as Mr Jones began to push the wheelchair towards the Annexe.

  ‘Amelia!’ Selma sounded terrified now.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Amelia said quickly, ‘of course you’ll be home for Christmas.’ And merry little devils danced through her mind chanting, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’

  She followed Mr Jones through the double swing doors at the end of the long passage. A stocky young nurse, her starched cap perched on spiky black hair, hurried towards them with a big smile. ‘We haven’t met,’ she said to Amelia, putting out her hand. ‘I’m Nurse Scott.’ Then she bent down over the wheelchair, putting her face close to Selma’s. ‘We’ll look after you, Mrs Merryman. There’s nothing for you to worry about.’

  ‘Oh bugger off,’ Selma said.

  The nurse pretended not to hear. She took the wheelchair from the silent Mr Jones and pushed it inside a brightly lit, sparsely furnished room. As she took Selma past the first bed, she said, pointing, ‘That’s Mrs Ambrose. Her husband’s over in the main house. They’re new this week, in fact.’ She parked Selma at the foot of the second bed by the small window.

  The table by Mrs Ambrose’s bed was cluttered; there were several photographs, unframed ones, leaning against the carafe of water and against the small vase of roses, and two in silver frames of the same young man in an RAF cap. A Bible lay nearest the bed and a rosary of milky beads rippled across the leather cover. Over the bed was pinned a drawing of a matchstick boy with an enormous head, playing on a beach, and written across the bottom was ‘To deerest Grany, from Joe’.

  Amelia took a step closer, peering down at the bed. But where w
as Mrs Ambrose? She had an image of a skeleton in a frilly nightie jumping up from under the smooth pink counterpane crying, surprise, surprise!

  ‘I don’t think she’s here.’ Amelia turned to Nurse Scott. ‘Mrs Ambrose, she seems to have disappeared.’

  Nurse Scott turned briefly from undressing Selma, who seemed for the moment to have stopped protesting. ‘She’s in the Lounge, visiting Mr Ambrose. Now, while I do Mrs Merryman’s legs, why don’t you have a nice walk round the garden. Come back in fifteen minutes or so.’

  From the open door of his room, Admiral Mallett watched the girl in her pale blue and white uniform collect Mrs Merryman’s clothes. The bundle, three patterned summer dresses, a couple of cardigans, a gabardine mac that had ceased to be beige in favour of motley grey, hung over the girl’s sturdy freckled arm as she clip-clopped along the landing.

  ‘What’s going on, Nurse? Mrs Merryman is coming back, isn’t she?’ In his mind his voice was firm, the words casual. What he heard was an old man’s croak pleading for assurance. People kept leaving, dying, and he could do nothing to stop it.

  The nurse didn’t answer so he called out again, ‘Nurse!’

  Now she turned. ‘Admiral Mallett, I didn’t see you there. Yes Mrs Merryman is back, we’re moving her across to Honeysuckle.’ And she was off, brisk heels across polished boards.

  Poor little Mrs Merryman. An old man’s tears, quick to appear, welled up in his eyes. How she will hate it. He turned and stuttered across to the huge mahogany chest of drawers brought from home. The keys to the Rover lay in the top right drawer. He slipped them into his trouser pocket and, refusing the chair-lift, laboured downstairs holding the banister tight with both hands, moving crab-like down the steps.

  In the hall, Sister Morris stood by the large vase on the refectory table, subjugating a bunch of gladioli.

  ‘I’m off for a drive,’ the Admiral said airily as he passed.