Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  There was no more talk now of her moving back to her old room. The darkening evenings and the cold winds were kept at bay by electric light and central heating but, like wolves howling at the door, they still seemed to threaten the residents of Cherryfield.

  ‘We always lose a few more in winter.’ Nurse Williams said.

  A week later Mrs Ambrose died. They had brought her husband in to sit with her and Selma spent the day in the Residents’ Lounge before being allowed back to the room with its empty second bed. She didn’t ask about Mrs Ambrose, so no-one told her.

  The new vicar went his rounds though, and he even mentioned a rabbi friend to Amelia. ‘When the devil gets old he becomes religious,’ Selma used to say. But she was in no more mood for religion now in her dying days than she had been before. Amelia thought it was because she didn’t know she was old.

  ‘Your grandmother seems much more settled these days, don’t you think?’ Sister Morris moved her lips in the direction of a smile as she passed Amelia in the passage.

  ‘I was thinking of taking her over to my mother’s flat for the day,’ Amelia said.

  Sister Morris had only paused briefly on her clip-clop along the glossy floor, but now she stopped again. ‘I don’t know Miss Lindsay. We normally encourage outings, but with those burns only just beginning to heal … The skin is as fragile as tissue paper.’

  Back at the flat, Dagmar washed her hands three times at the news. ‘I feel guilty. You don’t know how many snide little remarks I get from people. Some of mother’s old cronies have even called up to tell me they think I’m a bad daughter for not having her to live with me.’ She rubbed some handcream into the cracking skin on her hands. ‘Not one of them, other than old Evelyn, of course, has bothered to visit her but they all know that I should have mother here with me.’

  Amelia had written an article for the local paper on the importance of helping old people to keep their pets. She had since been asked to do another on the topic of old age. The editor had suggested ‘The Care of Our Elderly: Shame or Shambles?’

  ‘Shame and Shambles,’ Amelia had corrected him mildly. But

  she had admitted she could think of no clever alternatives to that particular mess.

  ‘How to care for Selma?’ she asked now, more to herself than to Dagmar, as she followed her into the sitting room. She knew it was one of life’s unanswerables.

  ‘I love William Hurt, don’t you?’ Dagmar put a tape in the video and settled into the sofa, her long legs tucked under her. As the credits were running she asked Amelia, ‘Are you sure you want to settle in a little hole like Kingsmouth? Isn’t London really the place?’

  About to answer, Amelia felt all wrong, like a pink button on an orange cardigan. She knew she should love London for its galleries and theatres, its shops and restaurants. And she did love it, as a visitor. But she had tried living there and the loneliness froze her, slowing her down until just getting out of bed was an effort.

  ‘I only like the rich extravagant bits I can’t afford,’ she said, portioning out the truth to her mother in bite-sized chunks because who wanted, at thirty-one, to admit to their mother that living in a big city frightened them? ‘I’ve tried to like the squalid bits. Tried calling them cosmopolitan and full of flavour, real and alive.’ She threw herself down on the small sofa. ‘Anyway, why is it that what’s scruffy is described as real as if anything else is not? Why are quiet leafy terraces and tea at the Ritz not deserving of the label? It is the reality for some. Lucky sods.’

  ‘Hush.’ Dagmar turned the sound up on the video.

  In her bed, Selma rolled about uneasily and when her arm hit the hard edge of the bedside table she woke. For a few moments her thoughts floated round pleasurably as if in a warm lagoon, then unease seeped through. This was not just another day, pleasantly filled with family routines, about to begin.

  Bang! It hit her like a tidal wave of misery and she struggled to sit up. Daniel, Daniel was dead, that letter had said so. She opened her mouth and screamed, ‘Daniel!’

  Footsteps hurried towards her and a bright striplight was switched on. ‘Mrs Merryman, Mrs Merryman! What’s the matter? Are you all right?’

  There was much shaking of heads that afternoon when Dagmar and Amelia visited. Nurse Williams sucked in air through the gaps in her teeth and said, ‘She was totally confused. Going on and on in some foreign language …’

  ‘Swedish,’ Amelia said.

  ‘… then she switched to English but we were hardly any the wiser because she kept on talking about her husband having just died and calling him Daniel but we all know her husband was called Willoughby.’

  After that, Selma’s decline seemed to Amelia like one of those speeded-up sequences in a nature film; almost before her eyes she folded and wizened. She always recognized Dagmar and Amelia but the smile now seemed joyless, accusing almost, and each time Amelia stood up to leave she felt the barrier come down between the visitor free to go and the prisoner who was not. Sometimes she wondered if Selma hated her.

  She bought the dairy. She had to call in a removal firm to bring her things down from Abbotslea. The day she was there packing it all up, Gerald took a couple of hours off work to be there too. He made her sad by the charm and kindness he exuded so carelessly in her direction, smiling at her with a warmth he had not shown since he stopped loving her. By showing his pleasure with her for disappearing from his life with comparatively little fuss (as he so rightly pointed out, you could hardly see the scratches on the car from when she had parked it in the sitting room and the carpet cleaned up beautifully) he came close to rekindling her love for him.

  When, a day later, she shopped in the supermarket next to her new home, she looked enviously at the tired looking young woman in front of her stacking the conveyor high with food, her two small children squabbling somewhere at hip level. Amelia looked at her own basket, she didn’t even merit a trolley, and thought, I’m turning into that awful cliché: the one-chop woman.

  Soon, though, she got into a soothing routine and she found, as always, that inactivity had one busy trait; it begot more of the same. She got up no earlier than eight and padded down the bare-board stairs to the front door where the papers waited on the mat. She took three papers, two national and one local, and she read them all while she ate slices of toasted wholemeal bread with butter and Devon honey. At around ten she was dressed and ready to work on her articles before going for a long walk along the cliffs. She had forgotten how much she enjoyed the sight and smell of the sea. The walk was the time for some fairly vigorous day-dreaming of poetry readings in the café, and of bus loads of London critics squeezed in around the little tables downstairs. She hadn’t yet found furniture that she both liked and could afford, so the tables and chairs these phantom poets and journalists were offered varied: sometimes the chairs were bentwood, placed round cloth-covered tables and sometimes the tables were oak and the chairs became pews.

  After lunch she would work some more on her articles and she studied her correspondence course in accountancy, and around tea-time most days she wandered up the hill to Cherryfield.

  No, for me, all is for the best, in this the most static of all possible worlds, she sighed, as she sat by Selma in the Residents’ Lounge; and what would Henry think of me now, after all my bold words when we parted?

  All through the autumn, Amelia had gathered the brightest autumn leaves off the ground and pressed them between the pages of Strindberg’s Collected Plays, and by the time the Christmas lights had replaced the last leaves on the oaks in the little park by the harbour, she had put them in a huge padded envelope and sent them to Henry. He loved autumn in England, he’d said, just before the ship sailed, and now he wrote to her of the heat that lay like cling-film across the ship, suppressing all spare energy, and of how instead of dolphins playing on the pressure waves at the bow, there were the bloated bodies of dead sheep tossed overboard from some livestock transporter bound for Daman.

  When Amelia walked
in the garden at Cherryfield she found little pieces of boiled carrot in the grass under the Cherry tree where Miss Hudd’s rabbit lay buried.

  ‘I’m taking my grandmother home for Christmas,’ she said to Sister Morris.

  Sister Morris puckered her lips. ‘We do encourage Christmas visits with friends and family but Mrs Merryman really isn’t in a fit state to be moved. She’s such a weight for a start, I doubt you’ll even get her out of the car and as you know she’s quite unable to help herself in the smallest way now.’

  ‘She sort of dresses herself. A bit.’

  Sister Morris didn’t answer.

  ‘The burns are healed now. I really can’t see why nothing is being done about the foot. It’s been getting steadily worse since she came here.’ Amelia felt that for once she had Sister Morris on the run.

  ‘Come into my office would you, Miss Lindsay?’ Sister Morris said.

  She offered one of the two hard chairs in the closet-sized room to Amelia and sat down herself. No fees had been siphoned off in the direction of the office, Amelia thought, handing a sour little portion of approval to Sister Morris as she waited for her to speak.

  ‘The gangrene is spreading.’ Sister Morris looked straight at Amelia, a business-like tone in her voice. ‘We could amputate but that would almost certainly kill her. Her blood pressure is very high, she’s got early signs of Parkinson’s. I’m sorry but there really is very little we can do. We are managing the pain very successfully and, quite honestly, all we can do now is continue to make her comfortable and hope the infection doesn’t spread above the knee.’

  ‘How long has she got?’ Amelia asked and she blushed as she realized that a part of her felt it would be easier if it, death, happened before Christmas. Then she remembered Selma’s face when she had begged her not to let her die at Cherryfield.

  Sister Morris sighed and shrugged her shoulders. ‘It could be a few weeks, it could be months. Who’s to say?’

  ‘There seems to be a general assumption that it’s God,’ Amelia snapped. ‘And by what right, I sometimes ask myself.’ She enjoyed Sister Morris’s look of horror before getting up to leave.

  She walked past the Residents’ Lounge with its smell of stale urine, its grunts and murmurings, through the corridor to Selma’s room. Hell, she thought, was most probably not fire and brimstone, but acres of passages with super-polished floors where each poor sinner’s footsteps showed against the high gloss, and the air was heavy with disinfectant.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  On the Twenty-Third of December Amelia stood in the hall at Ashcombe for the first time since the house had been sold back in the spring. She had put her old key in the lock, turned it easily, and here she was inside, running her hand along the familiar ochre walls that were lit by milky winter sunlight. She wandered round the house, amazed at how little seemed to have changed. There was less dust around than in Selma’s latter days and the smell of cats had gone, allowing the pot-pourris that Doreen, like Selma, kept in bowls around the rooms, to exude their scent unchallenged. It was a blessing that Doreen had always admired what she called, the country house style. The rooms themselves: the study with its bookshelves and carved pine fire-place, the sitting room with its deep bay looking out over the garden, the sunny passages, they all had character of their own so that any change of furnishings altered them only slightly, like discreet makeup on a strong featured face. Only the dining room was really different, not golden yellow any more as if it had its own sun in residence, but dark green and hunting-print adorned.

  Having toured the house, Amelia went outside again and, as she unloaded the hired van she had parked in front of the garage, she felt thankful for the tall yew hedges that shielded the house and drive from the lane, and the neighbouring gardens.

  She worked hard, singing as she went, ‘The bells of hell go ding-a-ling-a-ling,’ returned for a second armchair, ‘for you but not for me.’ She dragged the chaise-longue along the gravel path and into the study. ‘Ding-a-ling-a-ling,’ put the tea-chests in the hall and dumped the pile of sheets and blankets on the old card table. When she stopped for a moment to wipe the damp hair from her forehead she decided that if she did go to hell as a result of what she was doing, she’d at least go there a better person.

  By the time the light was going, she stood in the sitting room, a bunch of holly twigs in her arms, surveying her work. Unfamiliar tables had become Selma’s again because Amelia had draped them with the Christmas cloths Willoughby’s mother had embroidered. The two Swedish oils of Gothenburg and the west coast archipelago flanked the fire-place and Selma’s armchair was in its place by the bay window.

  Once, long ago, Amelia had asked Selma if she wasn’t offending her Jewish faith by celebrating Christmas with such enthusiasm. Selma had been decorating the tall tree, standing on top of the library steps, a box of baubles in her hand. Amelia could see her now, looking down at her, smiling. ‘Jesus was a great Jewish man, why should I not join in the celebrations?’ and she had fixed the final decoration, a gold star Amelia had helped her make, at the top of the tree.

  The last thing Amelia had brought from the van outside was a six-foot Christmas tree. She had decorated it with the contents of four cardboard boxes that she’d found amongst Selma’s stored belongings. The star, a simple shape cut in cardboard and covered with gold paper, caught the light from the electric candles and Amelia saw now that it was remarkably like a Star of David.

  ‘Tasteful Christmas trees are an aberration,’ Selma had always said. She would like Amelia’s tree. It stood in the bay so laden with tinsel, lights and baubles that it had become one solid glittering pyramid. Amelia took one final look around before slipping out of the front door and locking it behind her.

  In the Residents’ Lounge at Cherryfield, a plastic tree twinkled in the gloom. The traffic-light colours of the fairy lights flashed, throwing their colour across the magnolia walls and the grey faces of the residents, and jazzed-up carols played from a cassette recorder on the coffee table.

  ‘You shouldn’t worry about your gran,’ Nurse Williams said. ‘We do a lovely Christmas here: turkey with all the trimmings, it has to be carved the day before of course on account of the kitchen staff but they always do us proud, Christmas pud, no charms because of our teeth, but everyone gets a pressie.’ She dazzled off a smile at Amelia.

  ‘You think of everything.’

  ‘Oh yes, I almost forgot, there’s the crackers: green and gold this year.’

  ‘With paper hats?’ Amelia asked in a voice as if a lead weight had been attached to her vocal chords.

  ‘Of course with hats.’ A wailing noise came from a small woman hunched in a chair by the French windows and, hurrying away, Nurse Williams said, ‘Your gran is having a little rest in bed today, so you’ll find her in her room.’

  Amelia turned in the doorway. ‘What if they don’t like paper hats?’

  Nurse Williams looked puzzled for a moment then her face cleared. ‘Everyone likes a hat for Christmas, don’t they?’

  Amelia had not slept well. She had kept on waking with her mouth dry and her heart going so fast it seemed it was trying to run right out of her chest and she was sure she had acquired at least one extra arm expressly to get squashed under her body as she tried to ease herself into a comfortable position.

  As she went to find Selma, she tried to calm herself. Nothing had been done yet that couldn’t easily be undone. When it came to it, maybe Selma didn’t really want to leave. After all, she was used to Cherryfield now. It was warm and quite comfortable and … there was always someone about.

  I shall tell her that I’ll spend the whole of Christmas Day here with her, she decided. I can bring chocolates, dried fruit, cake, champagne even. She opened the door to Selma’s room.

  ‘There you are at last, Amelia. I’ve been waiting.’ Selma sat in bed, a shabby Gucci headscarf tied under her chin, an accusing look on her face. She seemed to be wearing the entire contents of her jewellery case; two g
old chains hung round her neck and three sizeable brooches were pinned anyhow across the chest of her purple cardigan, the gem-stones twinkling amongst the spills and stains.

  ‘I’m all packed,’ she said, pointing.

  Amelia looked at the small suitcase lying on the chair, bits of material sticking out from under the soft bulging lid, a stocking foot peeking out at one side, then she looked back at Selma. She took a deep breath and, moulding her voice into something cheerful, sensible sounding, she asked, ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay here where you are all snug and comfortable?’

  Selma’s laugh was scathing. ‘Of course not. I want to go home.’

  ‘Ah.’ Amelia nodded emphatically as if the rhythmic movement could calm her. ‘Right.’ She picked up the suitcase and a bead necklace dropped out, falling rattling to the floor.

  Amelia pushed the wheelchair out from Honeysuckle. She stopped outside the Residents’ Lounge. ‘Do you want to say goodbye to anyone. I can see Miss White and Mr Ambrose there.’

  Sister Morris too was in the Lounge. She looked at the suitcase in Amelia’s hand and said, ‘Mrs Merryman is going off for the festivities then.’ She opened her eyes wide making them round and incensed looking and the loose flesh under her chin trembled.

  Christmas time, Amelia thought, and even Sister Morris makes me think of turkey.

  ‘You’ll miss all the fun,’ chirruped Miss White. ‘We’ve been promised a party.’

  Sister Morris’s expression softened as if she was hearing the words of a favourite child. ‘Indeed you have Miss White, and a very jolly party it will be too.’

  Selma had been looking from one speaker to another, her fingers gripping tighter round the arm of her wheelchair. She opened her mouth and a shriek came out. ‘I’m not staying here, do you understand? I’m not staying!’ Her arms flayed about her as she tried to twist round to see Amelia behind her. ‘I’m going home.’

  Apart from Miss White who looked up at Sister Morris as if to say, Now there’s a naughty girl for you, no-one took any notice but continued to stare at the walls or the turned off television. The carols played on from the tinny sounding tape recorder.