Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  Sister Morris turned, a rebellious bloom in hand. ‘Really Admiral, is that wise?’

  ‘Entirely,’ he replied. ‘I possess a valid licence.’

  ‘But Admiral …’

  ‘Now I mustn’t keep you, Sister. Good day.’

  He hadn’t driven the car himself since he moved to the wretched place, when was that now? Late April, three months already. Silly not to have done so, he thought, as he reversed the car from the Cherryfield parking lot. His reactions might not be as quick as they were, but he made up for that with experience. Experience did still count for something, he told himself as he drove out from the drive and on to a clear road. At the next junction a tractor pulled out in front. Admiral Mallett didn’t mind, he was in no hurry. It was good to have a reason to slow down in fact. Henry had been clever persuading him to get an automatic, saved the hip. Leaning forward a little in his seat, he flicked his eyes over to the left, enjoying the sight of the three large oak trees that stood in the centre of the vast field, defying the farmer’s wish for uncluttered progress.

  A flash of red screeched past the Admiral’s Rover, swaying back to the left side of the road ahead of the tractor before disappearing round the twist in the road, ‘Bloody fool,’ the Admiral muttered to himself.

  A few hundred yards down the road the tractor turned left. The Admiral slammed on the brakes. The man hadn’t indicated, he could have sworn it. Behind him the Volvo Estate stopped inches from the back of the Rover. The front of a white Audi, nosing the rear of the Volvo, folded like a fan as it clanked into the metallic-blue boot.

  The Admiral saw the crash in his rearview mirror and pulled on to the verge. Pushing the door open, he heaved his legs on to the ground. He grabbed his stick and got to his feet. Peering at a passing car he stepped across to the site of the accident. By the side of the Volvo a woman stood crying, clutching a small girl by the hand. The Audi driver, a young man, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, stared red-faced at the folded front of his car.

  Wobbling on his feet, the Admiral shook his head and tuttutted sympathetically. Turning to the weeping woman, he cooed, ‘There, there, young lady, it’s not so bad, no-one’s hurt. Worse things happen at sea eh?’ He smiled at the little girl who smiled back, a small smile.

  The young man glared. ‘You know,’ the Admiral jabbed the stick at him, ‘this is what comes of not keeping your distance.’ He turned back to the woman. ‘Are you sure you’re all right, madam? Would you not like me to drive you to a doctor. And the little girl?’ Taking a couple of steps towards them he smiled again, competent, in charge; that was service training for you.

  ‘You silly old fart.’ The words came slowly, steeped in contempt, making him turn around, stooping over his stick, cheeks colouring. ‘Stupid old sod, you shouldn’t be allowed on the road.’ The young man with his heavy arms crossed over his chest was shouting at him. Somehow this all appeared to be his fault; the crying woman and white-faced child, the concertinaed car, were all his fault. The Admiral blinked and swallowed hard.

  ‘Don’t speak to him like that.’ The woman had stopped crying and now she glared at the Audi driver. She took a step towards the Admiral and said soothingly, ‘There’s no great harm done as you said, no-one’s hurt.’

  ‘No harm done, you silly cow, what do you think this is?’ The young man aimed a kick at the smashed-in front of his car. ‘It’s all right for you in that bloody tank but what about this? “No harm done.”’ He mimicked her voice.

  That young man should not be allowed to speak to her like that. I should stop him, the Admiral fretted. But he was frightened, just a frightened old man who was no use to anyone. For the second time that day he felt close to tears.

  ‘Don’t you worry.’ It was the woman comforting him once again. ‘It’s difficult sometimes to see the indicator in this bright light.’ She turned to the young man who had sat down in the passenger seat of his car, his feet on the road, his head in his hands. Now he looked up miserably.

  ‘It’s a new car. My own too, not the firm’s.’ He sighed, not even bothering to look at the Admiral. ‘Tell the old fart to piss off and let us get on with it. You are insured, aren’t you?’ he asked the woman.

  She nodded, then took the Admiral by the arm. ‘You just drive on home,’ she said, escorting him back to the Rover. ‘We’ll be fine.’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ the child echoed, speaking for the first time. ‘But you should go home. My daddy says old people shouldn’t be on the roads.’

  The Admiral drove off. He could still hear the level toned insults spouted at him by the Audi driver, wounding words lobbed at him with the indifference of a kick aimed at a stray dog. And the little girl, ‘Daddy says old people shouldn’t be on the roads.’ In the eyes of those young people he, Rear-Admiral John Mallett DSO, DSC, was an alien life form. As if on entering his eighth decade he had simultaneously exited the human race. Could they really not see that he was just like them, only a few years on? After all, he had not entered this earth a scraggy, trembling old man.

  He passed two teenage boys on their bicycles, rucksacks slung over one shoulder. They were calling to each other, laughing. I’m your future don’t you see! he wanted to cry out after them. You’re my past. That’s all it is.

  He turned off the main Totnes road on to the quiet lane leading to Harbertonford. There was no-one behind him, no-one in front. He dared take his eyes off the road to feast them on the lush greens and bright yellows of the fields. He took a double bend expertly.

  ‘Not so fast, Johnnie.’ He heard a soft voice, half scared, half excited, in his ear. Lydia, the girl who had become Henry’s mother, had clung to him like a soft baby vine on that first drive together. A London child, dressed for the country in a cotton shift dress and with a white floppy hat on her long, straight hair, she had found the Devon lanes wild, she told him.

  ‘Wild,’ he had repeated smiling down at her. ‘I never thought of them as that.’

  He was forty-nine and an Admiral already. She was twenty-four and liked the Beatles.

  ‘You must have been in the war?’ she had asked at the London drinks party where they met.

  ‘Which one, the big one or Korea?’

  ‘You mean you were in both?’ Her huge, black-fringed eyes had gazed blue at him. ‘Crikey!’

  She had chatted and laughed on that drive to Devonport, and he, quiet as always, hadn’t tired of hearing her voice, small and breathless, fluttering in his ears like puffs of dandelion seeds. She had touched the dark hair on his forearm with her pink-frosted nails. ‘I love your arms. They’re so reassuring. Boys my age are all such weeds.’ Her skinny shoulders heaved in a sigh. He could feel her look on him. ‘You’re sexy.’

  The car had jerked to the right.

  ‘You don’t mind me being honest, do you? I think if one feels something positive about another person, one might as well tell them. Don’t you?’

  Heart beating faster, mouth twitching into a smile, he had said, ‘I think I do.’

  The lorry looming in the rearview mirror brought him back to now with angry hooting. He glanced at the speedometer and saw the needle at twenty. Putting his hand out of the open window he gave a little wave as if to say, ‘Sorry, old chap, I’ll get on with it.’ He put his foot down. The lorry stayed close up. He pressed his foot harder on the accelerator, went faster than was comfortable, but the lorry was always there, its cab in the rearview mirror almost on top of the Rover.

  Round the next bend was the crossroads. He had to turn right on to the main road to get back to Kingsmouth. The light was fading. He edged the car out to get a better view past the tall hedges. The cars ran in a steady stream from both directions. Opposite, somebody was waiting too. The chap wasn’t signalling so he’d be wanting to cross straight over: his right of way. The Admiral leant far over the wheel, eyes right, eyes left, right again as if he was watching a tennis match. There was a gap. He stood back for the other car to cross. The lorry hooted. ‘All right, all righ
t,’ the Admiral muttered, but he was fretting. The car had crossed but there was another one now. No more gaps in the traffic either, just a road like a conveyor belt, pushing out car after car. The lorry driver put his fingers on the horn and kept them there. The Admiral glanced in the rearview mirror, then stretched further over the wheel, heart pumping, eyes flicking from side to side and across. His mouth tasted sour. He ran his tongue across his cracked lips. He needed a pee too.

  The lorry driver had stopped sounding his horn. The Admiral sat back a little and some of the tension left his neck and shoulders.

  ‘No need to panic old boy,’ he told himself. Bound to get across eventually. The blighter will just have to wait.

  ‘Beeeep!’ It started up again, and now others joined in, a chorus straight from hell. The shock sent tears to his eyes. His eyes darted from side to side as he jerked the car out on to the main road. Another horn made him look right. He saw the open mouth of the driver of the van. This is it, he thought, and everything was sound: crashing, splitting, shattering. Then silence.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Henry Mallett Stood in the garden at Cherryfield, his back to the French windows. He stood quite still under the cherry tree, his head slightly raised. Talking to God maybe, Amelia thought as she came up quietly behind him. He turned and, when he saw her, a slow smile of pleasure softened his face. Amelia thought it must have taken a lot of effort to find a shirt as awful as the one he was wearing – turquoise with an asymmetric pattern in black and lime-green.

  Henry looked as if he was about to kiss her cheek, then thinking the better of it, he took her hand instead in a firm handshake.

  ‘Pleased to meet you I’m sure,’ Amelia simpered but he ignored her and said, ‘I heard about the fire. Thank God you’re both OK.’

  Amelia stopped simpering. ‘I’m OK, Selma is in Death Row.’

  ‘I heard that too. I’m sorry. How is she taking it?’ He waited for her answer in that way he had of cocking his head slightly towards you as if he couldn’t bear to miss a word you said. It always made her feel she ought to reward his attentiveness with a comment of earth-shattering profundity.

  ‘Badly,’ she said.

  Still, Henry’s attentive silence, as they wandered across the lawn, seemed to suck thoughts from her she hadn’t even admitted to herself.

  ‘I wish she was dead.’ She looked up at him, half expecting him to raise a condemnatory finger with a flash of Old Testament fire. But he didn’t. He just kept listening, so she went on talking.

  ‘Selma’s the only person left whom I really love and who loves me back, and still I wish her dead. That’s how badly she’s taking it.’ She flung herself down on the dry grass. ‘I might be wrong of course.’ She turned to him as he sat down next to her. ‘Of course she might have taken one look at the Annexe and thought, “This is the place for me, I’m happy,” but somehow when a person sits slumped in a wheelchair, tears trickling down their face, their poor, useless hand jerking and dancing on the end of the arm like a badly managed puppet, I reckon they’re not so happy after all.’ She glared at him. He smiled back at her. She stopped glaring and asked, ‘Is your father well?’

  ‘Not too bad. He’s out for a drive apparently. It’s good news that, I think. He’s not been out on his own since coming here.’ Henry changed tack seamlessly. ‘Your mother, don’t you love her?’

  As she thought about it, Amelia pulled a tuft of grass from the lawn and scattered it over her legs. ‘Maybe, I suppose so. But it’s like sunlight trying to penetrate so many layers of atmosphere that, when it finally arrives, it’s weak. Selma was life enhancing. My mother is life denying. I worry that I might be like her.’

  ‘Your poor mother, she must be very unhappy,’ Henry said.

  Amelia gave him a dirty look. ‘And this time I promised Selma she’d be home for Christmas.’ She made it sound like a challenge to him: so what does someone like you, with your faith and your energy, do with someone like me, so shiftless and feeble?

  ‘How long are you going to go on lying to her?’

  Amelia had no fight left in her. ‘Oh Henry, I don’t know. It’s like paying off one credit card with another; sooner or later it will end in tears.’

  ‘But what are you going to do about it?’ Henry insisted.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ she whined. ‘You always say, “What are you going to do about it?” in that revoltingly energetic way. But I’m tired.’ Her voice rose in pitch. ‘I’m tired of worrying about Selma, tired of feeling sorry for her. It’s not fair.’ She finished pulling the petals off a daisy and looked up at him. ‘Isn’t it the Bible that says, “For everything there is a time”? Well, this is the time for me to be concerned with three months colic and the aluminium content in baby formula. Or at least to be left in peace to get on with being a self-centred thirtysomething minding my brilliant career. Instead, pity for Selma rides my back like a witch whose claws dig deeper into my shoulders each time I try to shake her off.’

  Henry cleared his throat and Amelia added quickly, ‘And please don’t tell me to get my pleasures from helping others and to look forward to an absolutely stunning afterlife. I couldn’t take it just at the moment. I’ve got a dreadful headache.’ The face she raised to him was pallid in the strong light, each gold-brown freckle showing against the white skin.

  ‘It’s obvious you haven’t been to church for some time if that’s your idea of preaching,’ Henry said dryly, but he looked concerned.

  I could cover his nice, firm mouth with passionate kisses, Amelia thought. That would make him run off and leave me alone.

  ‘I was actually about to offer some constructive advice,’ he continued.

  ‘I don’t want that either. I just want to be left alone to get on with my life.’

  ‘Get on with dreaming about how to get on with your life, you mean. Waiting for Gerald to marry you. Waiting for children to be born who can do everything you never had the guts and energy to do yourself.’

  Amelia didn’t even bother to look offended. ‘Gerald’s left me for an independent career woman, the sort, in fact, that I was before I gave it all up for him.’ She added thoughtfully, ‘Of course I was better looking.’

  ‘Are better looking,’ Henry surprisingly corrected her. Then he mumbled dutifully, ‘I’m sorry to hear it though,’ before allowing his normal expression of barely harnessed eagerness to return. ‘But now it’s happened, take the opportunity to do something positive with your life. Take charge. See that witch on your back as a jockey spurring you on. Cherryfield is not that far away from any of us, so get on with life. Grab it by the neck, wrestle it to the ground and say “I’m on top”.’ Henry’s bright brown eyes were round as he looked intently at her.

  ‘That’s the naval part of the chaplain speaking, is it?’ Amelia couldn’t help smiling. She scratched her right knee thoughtfully; her tights were itching in the heat but she refused to go barelegged. When Gerald had asked her why she seemed to be the only female still wearing tights in the summer she had said, ‘Blue-tinged, freckled legs just aren’t nice.’ Of course stockings were cooler, she thought now as she scratched on absent-mindedly, but the suspender belt kept slipping down over her hips, making the stockings wrinkle. Hold-ups were positively dangerous, she was sure of it, the way they gripped the flesh part of your thighs like a tourniquet.

  ‘Penny for them?’ Amelia looked up to find Henry gazing at her.

  She stopped scratching and smiled suddenly. ‘Would you believe: stockings and suspenders?’

  He grinned back. ‘As it’s you, yes.’

  ‘I do have something planned you know,’ she said, serious now. ‘I want to open a café. The old-fashioned continental kind. Somewhere where elderly matrons can catch their breath after a hard day’s shopping for darning needles and corn plasters. Somewhere where they can slam down their copious shopping baskets on the table with a sigh of contentment as they order fattening pastries. I picture them wearing hats,’ she
said. ‘I find the hats important you see, because it takes a person in control of their life to wear one regularly.’ She looked at Henry with a little smile. ‘I don’t suppose that’s the sort of thing you mean.’

  Henry looked a little taken aback. Amused, Amelia noticed that he was trying hard not to look at her legs.

  ‘What about your journalism?’ he asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I should never have left the paper. It’s not easy to break back in, particularly in the present climate. It’s almost all dead men’s shoes. I could try the provincials of course, but it would be a step back.’ Hoping to impress him a little she added, ‘About the café; I thought of arranging poetry recitals, that sort of thing, and there’ll be the antiquarian books. I want people to be able to look at them while they eat. I’d have to be careful about stains, of course.’

  Whilst she spoke, Henry was looking intently at her and she paused, as always a little disconcerted to find herself listened to. ‘I can’t see my matrons buying many books really, they prefer the library, but younger people, the kind who think old ladies are trendy …’ She fell silent, looking out over the garden. It was only July but the soft mist that rolled in from the sea, settling across the beech hedges, belonged to autumn. She liked autumn; no hot days demanding you made the most of them.

  ‘Why don’t you open your café down here?’ Henry asked. ‘You’d be near your mother and grandmother. And me.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She smiled up at him. ‘I like London, but I didn’t enjoy living there much. I prefer little nosy places.’

  ‘Well get on with it then. Go down to the estate agents in town and see what they’ve got.’

  I’m so weak, Amelia thought, that I will even turn decisive on someone else’s say so. She looked him in the eyes. ‘OK, I will. I’ll check on Selma and then I’ll go.’ She stood up and brushed the grass from her skirt.

  Henry got up too. ‘I wonder where my father is?’ Glancing at his watch, he frowned. ‘He should have come back by now.’