Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  ‘I meant to tell you yesterday but you were asleep.’ She spoke softly. ‘The Admiral was involved in a car crash. They say he didn’t …’

  ‘I know,’ Selma interrupted. ‘Poor old boy. Awful shame. We shall miss him.’ But she directed her next remark at Alan, eager to snatch back the conversation from Miss White. ‘Of course it’s her endings I find a little disappointing.’

  Amelia had let go of Selma’s hand and now she stared at her open-mouthed.

  ‘Shut your mouth, darling,’ Dagmar said unnecessarily, as she moved her shoe away from Simon who lay prostrate on the carpet, his adoring gaze following her every move.

  Amelia kept looking at Selma. Was this another display of dignity and a stiff upper lip from a member of the generation that lived through a world war, or had senility blanked out compassion and affection too? Maybe Selma spoke so little of her grief for Willoughby not because she was brave, but because she didn’t really feel any? Had age blunted love and loss like waves blunting bits of glass on the shore, until they were smooth and round, unable to hurt you?

  Selma was taking a lot of trouble to ignore Miss White, arranging her lips into a supercilious half smile every time the little woman spoke.

  Maybe you can’t love me any more either, Amelia thought, and she sniffed and blinked away a tear. Oh my grandmother, what have you become?

  ‘My God he stinks!’ Dagmar leapt from the chair and pointed at Simon who placed his plump behind on her shoe, looking up adoringly, the tip of his tail wagging slowly, expectantly, like a snake sizing up its prey. The two old women stopped glaring at each other and stared instead at Dagmar, loose-mouthed. As the room fell silent, Dagmar’s cheeks turned slowly pink.

  ‘What’s the matter, dear?’ Alan asked, his voice chilly. Amelia couldn’t smell a thing but she chipped in hurriedly, ‘He does stink a bit.’ Dagmar’s addiction was to fear rather than drugs or alcohol but Amelia was, all the same, an addict’s child; her mother might drive her to despair, irritate her more than a sackful of red ants, but it was Amelia’s job to make sure no-one else got to share those feelings. ‘It sort of hits you in wafts,’ she added for good measure.

  Alan bent down and, putting his hand out, called Simon over. ‘Hi there fellow. What’s all this about you making smells?’ He sniffed the puppy’s neck. Simon, snout lifted, black gums stretched back, grinned at him. Then Alan slid his hand under Simon’s collar before smelling his fingers. ‘I’d say he’s had a bit of a roll. Must have been when he ran loose from the car,’ he said to Dagmar. ‘You, little fellow, will get into the tub when we get home.’

  ‘By car?’ Dagmar looked near to tears.

  ‘Well, you don’t expect the little fellow to walk to Exeter do you?’ Alan laughed up at her.

  ‘I’m sure there’s a tap outside,’ Selma said. ‘Why don’t you wash him off there?’ Dagmar and Amelia looked at Selma, shocked by the sense of her suggestion.

  Alan said, ‘It’s OK, thanks but we’ll …’

  ‘I’ll do it straight away.’ Dagmar was up from the chair already, a too bright smile on her lips. She grabbed the lead from Alan giving it a little jerk. ‘Come on, Simon darling.’ Her voice was so tense, Amelia thought, you could shoot arrows from it.

  Simon remained sitting.

  ‘He doesn’t want to come,’ Miss White said.

  ‘Oh do shut up.’ Selma frowned.

  ‘Mrs Merryman really!’ Miss White looked around her with relish as if to say, ‘There did I not tell you she’s a naughty girl.’

  ‘Dagmar for God’s sake, can’t we just forget about Simon for a minute. We’re upsetting the good folks here.’ Alan glared under thick eyebrows.

  Dagmar ignored him, but regretfully, as if she wished she didn’t have to. ‘Come on Simon, we’re off.’ Dagmar gave the lead such a tug that Simon, still sitting, slid on his bottom across several yards of high-gloss floor, the collar riding up over the folds in his fat little neck and up across his ears. Then suddenly he got up and trotted out of the room behind Dagmar as if that’s what he’d intended all along.

  ‘Temper, temper,’ chirruped Miss White.

  Old age makes you evil, Amelia thought.

  They sat in silence as a nurse brought a middle-aged woman to see Mr Ambrose, who had melted chameleon-like into the taupe cover of his armchair, a little away from their group.

  ‘I’ll go and give my mother a hand with Simon.’ Amelia got up.

  ‘Stand still! Stand still I tell you.’ Dagmar stood, feet wide apart, clutching a gushing hose in one hand and the puppy’s lead in the other. Simon was making little leaps in all directions to avoid the sharp jet of cold water. The whites of his eyes were showing but his tail was attempting a wag.

  ‘If you move away once more …’

  With a squeal of terror the puppy hid from the jet behind Dagmar’s legs. ‘Go away! You little bastard, go away, do you hear me!’ Dagmar grabbed the end of the lead, lashing the puppy over and over across his chubby back. Simon screamed and, pulling loose, tore past Amelia on her way out.

  Dagmar, red-faced and panting, looked up to see Alan staring at her from the terrace. ‘You beat that little dog,’ he said and strode off after Simon.

  Chapter Seventeen

  For a child, the unpredictability of a neurotic parent was terror in an apron. Even now, at thirty-one, Amelia was shaking as she led her sobbing mother to the bathroom. Her heart was still racing, her windpipe still felt as if it had shrunk two sizes, as she sat on the edge of the bath, watching Dagmar wipe the smudges of mascara from her cheeks.

  Dabbing at the paper-thin skin under her eyes with the corner of a rough towel Dagmar turned her streaky face to Amelia. ‘I didn’t mean to hit Simon. I just don’t know what came over me.’ Sobbing, she leant against the wall, burying her face in the crook of her arm.

  The usual I expect, Amelia thought. She felt only a little pity for Dagmar, little and highly diluted by pity for Simon and for herself. One day, she thought as she waited for Dagmar to stop crying, I’ll tell Henry what it’s been like. ‘How would you feel,’ I’ll say to him, ‘if your God suddenly started hurling bricks at you as you stood chatting to him by the altar? What would it do to your confidence if he returned your prayers with a string of four letter words? Because that’s how it feels for a child having the grown-up in her life go mad.’

  With a deep sigh she got up and walked across to Dagmar. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, putting her arm round her mother’s thin shoulders that were so like her own. ‘It’s all right.’

  Alan waited unsmiling in the hall with the puppy, wet and shiny, curled up at his feet. As Dagmar came down the stairs he said nothing, but looked pointedly at his watch. Simon unscrambled himself and padded up towards Dagmar, a questioning little wag to his tail. Looking up at Alan, she kneeled and put her hand out and Simon stretched out his fat neck towards it, sniffing it as if it was hot.

  ‘Let’s go shall we?’ Alan’s voice was cold. ‘I’ve said goodbye to your ma.’

  ‘I haven’t yet. I won’t keep you a moment.’ She almost ran from the hall, knees a little bent.

  ‘Well it was nice meeting you.’ Alan put his hand out to Amelia with a smile big enough to be polite but too tight to be warm.

  ‘I’ll see you again soon I expect.’ Amelia poked at his anger, testing it.

  Alan shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Maybe.’

  Dagmar returned to the hall so flattened by what she had done that she might have been her own shadow slinking through the doorway. When she kissed Amelia goodbye she held her cold cheek against hers for a long moment.

  ‘We had planned for you to join us for lunch in town, but I think under the circumstances maybe not,’ she whispered. In the doorway she turned and shrugged her shoulders with a little smile before going off after Alan.

  Alan held the door of the estate car open for Dagmar, before lifting Simon into the back and walking round to the driver’s seat. She’s done it again, Amelia thought sadly
, she’s seen an opportunity for happiness, grasped it with both hands … and throttled it. She gave a little wave to the departing car and closed the door.

  * * *

  Back in the Residents’ Lounge a tiny woman sat in a wheelchair next to Mr Ambrose, head flopping as if it was too great a burden for the thin neck. Now she got a kiss from her visitor. ‘You take care, Mother. See you next month as usual.’ The Ambroses’ daughter-in-law nodded and smiled at Miss White who sat engrossed in a holiday programme on television, then she made for the door with such hurried little steps that she almost bumped in to Amelia.

  ‘So sorry,’ the woman mumbled but there was no hiding the relief in her face: it was over for this time.

  What could one do when old, Amelia wondered, to avoid putting such an expression on a loved one’s face? Tell jokes, tap-dance, hand out large sums of money?

  Slumped in her wheelchair, Mrs Ambrose’s lips moved ceaselessly, churning out mumbled, jumbled phrases; words without end, Amen, Amelia thought as she stepped over the woman’s twig-like legs to get across to Selma who slept in the chair by the French windows.

  ‘Don’t trample me.’ The voice was strong and firm. ‘What I’m saying is: you don’t pay all this money to sit here being trampled on.’

  Startled, Amelia turned to look into Mrs Ambrose’s lifted face. Her eyes, large and sky-blue, were smiling.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Amelia mumbled.

  Mr Ambrose looked up from his crossword puzzle. Taking his wife’s hand he said, ‘It’s all right Dorothy, you’re quite safe,’ and once more Mrs Ambrose’s head dropped down on to her chest, like a wind-up doll who had sprung alive, done its turn, then fallen still.

  Would Gerald have become her comforter when she got old and made no sense? Amelia wondered as she sat down next to Selma. She didn’t think so. He had often said, with the air of one confessing to an endearing quirk in their personality, ‘I know it’s silly but I’m just no use at a sick bed.’ Not many men were, she had noticed. He’d probably be safe with Clarissa though, it was difficult not to feel she would be as crisply put together at ninety as she was now.

  Selma slept on. Amelia wondered if Dagmar had been forgiven. Maybe this very moment they were making up in bed. Amelia, though pleased at the thought, blushed. Teenagers refused to contemplate that their parents’ sexual organs were there for anything other than show, rather like a false pocket or a button without a button hole, once they themselves had been achieved. At thirty-one you knew better, but that didn’t mean you had to like it. Amelia looked surreptitiously at the Ambroses. And when did it stop anyway? Was it sudden or gradual? A situation reached multilaterally or unilaterally?

  Just then Mrs Ambrose raised her head, giving Amelia the uncomfortable feeling she might have spoken the question aloud, but Dorothy Ambrose just gazed at her husband with huge, clear eyes. Mr Ambrose seemed to feel his wife’s eyes on him and, looking up from his paper, he took her hand once more, giving it a little squeeze.

  Amelia, feeling moved by the little scene, smiled, just as Mrs Ambrose, her eyes fixed on her husband’s face, bared her teeth, good teeth still, and sunk them into the fleshy part of his palm.

  Miss White was bored with the television. Mr Ambrose’s small cry of pain and Amelia’s sharp intake of breath provided a welcome break. She prodded Amelia with her stick as Mr Ambrose, quite composed again, gently released his hand from his wife’s teeth. ‘Mrs Ambrose bites I’m afraid,’ she explained in a loud whisper. ‘I don’t know why.’

  Mrs Ambrose smiled cheerfully at her husband. ‘Silly old fart,’ she said.

  Selma had woken up and now Miss White turned to her with a self-important air. ‘I said, I don’t know why Mrs Ambrose bites.’

  Amelia made herself small, avoiding looking at Mr Ambrose, but Selma didn’t seem surprised. She nodded, her faded eyes grave. ‘They’re the worst,’ she said. ‘Human bites are the worst.’

  For the first few miles of their journey back to Exeter, Dagmar thought there was a chance that Alan might forgive her. He chatted amiably enough, complimenting her on Selma and Amelia as if, Dagmar thought, I could take credit for either. But she smiled modestly and said she had tried her best.

  ‘It hasn’t been easy, being a single parent.’ Growing in confidence she carried on, ‘I used to read these books about beautiful women hurling themselves off cliffs and under trains rather than living with their lover’s betrayal. At the time it seemed rather a good option, but then I looked at this chubby red-haired little thing, my daughter, and thought it would be the worst betrayal of all.’ She laughed as she always did when talking about what was serious.

  When Alan neither looked at her nor spoke, Dagmar knew she had lost him. For the rest of the journey she might as well have been appearing on a television set with the sound turned off; her lips moved, she sang her heart out, but not a sound reached through to her audience.

  They drove up in front of Dagmar’s block of flats and Alan, as always, dashed around to open the car door for her. ‘Here we are.’

  He makes the little phrase seem so final, Dagmar thought, like a coach driver in a Hammer horror pulling up outside the Castle of Doom. ‘Here we are Miss.’ Dagmar burst into loud giggles.

  Alan didn’t bother to ask why, but walked around the back to let Simon out from the boot, handing her the lead.

  Dagmar pulled her hand away and shook her head. ‘You take him, please.’ Simon tried to lift his leg against the porch and lost his balance.

  Alan nodded but he was looking pityingly into her eyes as if he had already broken the bad news. ‘Goodbye Dagmar.’ He pronounced her name as he always did, with the emphasis on the ‘r’. ‘You take care now.’

  Shall I scream, she thought, throw myself at his feet and beg, cling to his legs as he walks away? ‘Goodbye then,’ she said.

  Alan walked off to the car and started the engine.

  Dagmar looked around her at the sitting room: tables shining with beeswax, spotless carpet, clear-surfaced ornaments, dustfree picture frames. Lots of people chose the colours for their home according to how easily they showed the dirt. Dagmar knew she was different in as much as she picked the ones, dove greys, pinks and yellows, that showed it most. That way she could identify the enemy. At the furniture store she had shuddered at the golden-brown carpet – God only knows what could be lurking in there – and shaken her head at the practical chintzes.

  She wandered through into the kitchen where the kitchen cupboards dazzled white. She made herself a pot of tea and sat down at the high-gloss table. ‘There,’ she said out loud, clanking the teaspoon down on the saucer. ‘I’ve managed to drive away everyone I’ve ever cared for, but through it all I’ve kept my flat clean.’ Then she threw the cup across the room.

  As soon as Amelia entered the lobby she heard the playing.

  The more she had thought, as she sat in the Lounge at Cherryfield, the surer she had become that Alan would be giving Dagmar a hard time. ‘If he even bothered to do that,’ she muttered as she dialled her mother’s number. Someone the other end had lifted the receiver and then hung up immediately. Amelia had worried some more and then got into Gerald’s car and driven off to Exeter.

  Now she hurried up the stairs, wondering briefly why steps always seemed constructed for someone with a natural one-and-a-half-step stride, when she noticed the difference in the playing from upstairs. Dagmar’s music tended towards the ladylike; there was no excess in the playing. But the notes now echoing down the stairwell seemed to be hounded from the instrument, fleeing, stumbling.

  Out of breath, she reached the second floor and rang the bell but the playing continued. She rang again, but as there was still no answer she tried the door and finding it unlocked, stepped inside. At the entrance to the sitting room she stopped dead.

  Dagmar sat crouched over the piano keyboard like a bird of prey. Mould seemed to be growing from her head and shoulders, the blue-grey spores covering her hair and hanging in furry threads from her a
rms as she lifted them before letting her hands crash down for the final crescendo.

  ‘Oh my God.’ Amelia rushed over to Dagmar who merely swivelled around slowly, a sweet smile on her lips.

  ‘There you see,’ she said, opening her eyes wide. ‘It really doesn’t matter being dirty.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was a remark in the Kingsmouth Post Office a week later that had caused Amelia to sit as she did now, crouched in the shrubbery that sheltered Ashcombe from the lane running past the front of the house.

  ‘Those Hamiltons, no sooner have they got that house than they are off on holiday. “And while I’m about it,” she says, “cancel the papers for the Christmas period too, we’re off to our little place in Antigua.”’ Mrs Hodges, the newsagent, made a passable imitation of Doreen Hamilton for the benefit of her customers.

  ‘They’re away over Christmas too, are they?’ Amelia paid for Selma’s Good Housekeeping.

  Mrs Hodges nodded and pursed her lips. ‘Three whole weeks. They’re always moving house those Hamiltons but they never seem to take much pleasure in what they get. Not like your grandmother. She loved that place, she did.’

  ‘She loved that place, she did,’ Amelia repeated to herself as, knees aching, she watched Doreen Hamilton lock the front door on her way out. By the look of the large, old-fashioned key in her hand the locks hadn’t been changed.

  As Doreen click-clacked down the hill in her high-heeled sandals, a wicker basket dangling from the crook of her arm, Amelia emerged from behind an oleander shrub and ran through the heavy wooden portal that led into the main garden. Looking around to make sure she was on her own, she walked up to the French windows and pressed her nose against the glass, framing her face with her spread-out fingers. She stood for a while peering into the sitting room before stepping back and pulling a small black notebook and a pencil from the back pocket of her jeans. She wrote intently in the book for a minute or two, looked into the room again before checking her notes, then, putting the book and pencil back in her pocket, she hurried back on to the road.