Guppies for Tea

by Marika Cobbold

  It’s like the New York subway here, Amelia thought as she moved in front of the wheelchair; nobody dares to care. She took Selma’s hands. ‘It’s you who decide,’ she said in a clear slow voice and, as she spoke, she felt those words were about as important as anything she’d ever said.

  ‘Would you be so good as to stop by my office on your way out.’ Sister Morris spoke in the dangerously perky voice of a teacher who has finally given up on a pupil.

  ‘Wait here,’ Amelia said unnecessarily to Selma before hurrying off.

  Sister Morris handed Amelia a form. ‘Sign here please.’ She indicated a gap in the print towards the bottom of the page. ‘It’s to say you accept that Cherryfield carries no responsibility whatsoever for your grandmother whilst she is in your care. Have a nice Christmas, Miss Lindsay.’

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Many years before, willoughby’s old boxer had come home after a journey to the vet’s from which no-one had expected he would return. Lifted out from the back seat of the car, he had limped inside with all the speed he could muster, making straight for his favourite spot on the hearth rug. He had circled it once before lying down and then, with a little wag of his stumpy tail and a sigh of contentment so deep it sent a shudder through his whole body, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

  Some things were the same for people as they were for dogs; coming home after you’ve had a bad time, when you thought you might never make it, was one of them, Amelia thought as she put another log on the fire. Selma, dozing in her old armchair, stirred and mumbled and, even as she slept, the smile was there at the corners of her mouth together with the froth from the milk she’d been drinking. By her side on the three-tier cake-stand stood her mug with Willoughby’s mend running like a black thread through the marmalade fur of the painted cat. Amelia thought Willoughby would be amused to think that his repair had lasted longer than him.

  On the drive back to Ashcombe, Amelia had explained to Selma by way of cunning little lies that seemed to spawn ever more intricate deceptions, why she would find her home changed. ‘Someone has been living at the house whilst you’ve been away. Sort of house-sitting. They moved quite a lot of their own things in with them. Their own house got flooded so that seemed the sensible thing to do. Of course the woman is allergic to cats … and we haven’t quite got it all back to normal yet …’ Hearing the thinness of her explanation stretched to breaking point, Amelia shot Selma a worried glance as she parked the car by the front door. But Selma just smiled and nodded and said she understood perfectly and Amelia wondered at the need for self-delusion, every bit as strong as the will to live.

  ‘I’ve made up the chaise-longue for you in the study,’ she said now as Selma woke in her chair and smiled hazily at her. ‘Just until your leg gets better.’

  It was a large room, the study, but it had never been heavily furnished; books, the chaise-longue with an old Chinese screen to partition it off from the rest of the room, Willoughby’s old desk by the window, and the room belonged to the Merrymans once more.

  Selma was undressed and resting between her own patched and thinning linen sheets. Amelia was about to leave the room when she noticed Selma’s lower lip wobbling and the pale brown eyes brimming with tears. Amelia stood, looking at her horrified, like a mother who’s carefully picked, beautifully wrapped gift has just been kicked across the room by her darling’s sandalled foot.

  ‘What’s wrong? Oh dear, whatever is wrong now?’ she pleaded, scratching at the small chapped patch on her hand until a tiny, almost transparent, drop of blood appeared.

  Selma sniffed and smiled, holding her good left hand out to Amelia. ‘Nothing is wrong, darling. I’m just so happy to be back.’ She gave Amelia’s hand a trembling squeeze and said with a little laugh, ‘I know it was silly of me, darling, but I was beginning to think I was never going to come back home.’ The tears ran down her cheeks, making snail-trails in the thick powder and her hand shook so hard it was as if she was trying to shake it right off the arm. ‘Darling, I was so frightened.’

  And I was about to tell her that she’d have to go back to Cherryfield after Christmas; Amelia looked helplessly at Selma who was smiling again. ‘Well you’re home now, that’s all that matters.’ Amelia stood up, tucking the sheet in tighter round Selma, raising the pillow a touch. ‘Comfortable?’

  ‘Mmm,’ Selma’s smile glowed. ‘Thank you, darling.’

  Dagmar thought the call from Amelia strange. ‘What do you mean, come and spend Christmas at Ashcombe instead of your place? All right I won’t ask questions. I’ll be there tomorrow. Twelve o’clock.’ Dagmar put the phone down and went to fill the kettle. She was intensely curious as to what Amelia was up to. Who wouldn’t be under the circumstances, she thought. The whole thing sounded like an adventure. Dagmar had always felt that she was meant to be quite a different person from how she’d turned out: bright, exciting, like a Renaissance painting before the grime of centuries distorted the intentions of its creator. Someone who would love adventure, that is, if she’d allow herself five consecutive carefree minutes to do so.

  So what could Amelia be doing? Dagmar poured herself a cup of tea and curled up in the large armchair by the window, ready for pleasurable contemplation, but her thoughts wouldn’t play ball. Since her Little Turn, as she referred to her breakdown, her fear of germs and worms had faded a little, turned soft at the edges. But there had been no respite, because a new enemy had formed out of the anxiety that lurked in the layer just beneath reason: I’m sure there was something I was meant to remember, she would fret, what was it now? She felt she had to catch and hold every thought: amongst the flotsam and jetsam of the mind something of importance might be hiding. Something that, if not dealt with, could cause harm, but the thoughts would drift off, just out of reach, like thoughts will, leaving her scrabbling in the dark.

  Now she packed her bag with clothes and parcels, called her neighbour to say she’d be at a different address if anything should happen, wrote the note to cancel the milk, all while she scratched round inside her mind: the bank, maybe that was it? Or was it to do with work? Anyway, how had Amelia got the Hamiltons to let them spend Christmas at Ashcombe? Long red skirt for Christmas Day, red blouse, pine-needle green velvet jacket. She loved Christmas and every year she hoped she might enjoy it.

  Christmas Eve morning was mild and misty. Dagmar rang the doorbell at Ashcombe and Amelia opened, snatching her inside. ‘Did anyone see you?’

  Dagmar looked offended. ‘Happy Christmas, Amelia. What do you mean, “Did anyone see me?”?’

  Amelia took her into the kitchen and Dagmar wrinkled her nose at the newly installed, leaded, dark oak cupboards that had replaced Selma’s white and blue painted ones. ‘Ye Olde Yuk,’ she said, sitting down.

  When Amelia had finished explaining, Dagmar burst out laughing. Then she said, ‘How will you get her to go back?’

  Amelia was pouring water into Selma’s silver coffee pot. ‘I don’t know.’ She put the kettle at the side of the old beige Aga, left from Selma’s days, and sat down. She smiled at Dagmar but she kept rubbing her forehead hard with her fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘But that’s no good,’ Dagmar said getting up and pouring herself a cup of coffee.

  ‘All right!’ Amelia shouted. ‘I’ll tell more lies, that’s how I’ll do it. I’ll tell lies until I can’t tell any more and then I’ll have to drag her back and that’ll destroy her and Sister Morris will tell me she always knew it would end like that, and you’ll say something helpful like “Amelia, that’s no good”, and bloody Uncle Robert will make a miraculous return to England just in time to tell me I should never have interfered. Of course the only person who won’t come back is Henry because he really would be of some use and we can’t have anything nice happen now, can we?’

  ‘Now you’re being silly,’ Dagmar said.

  Amelia buried her head in her arms for a short comforting while, inhaling the faint tra
ces of her favourite jasmine scent.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, lifting her head again and smiling across at her mother. ‘But at least something Selma wanted to happen is happening. She wanted to spend Christmas at home and now that’s what she’ll do. That must count for something. It will show her she’s not entirely without say in her own life. When you have no control you have no hope. When you have no hope you’re better off dead.’ She stood up looking at her watch. ‘Come and say hello. It’s time for her pills anyway.’

  It was Christmas Day, and the mist from the day before lay frozen across the lawn, and the sun shone pale and wintry as it should.

  ‘Thank you, God,’ Amelia said as she stood by the open window in her old bedroom. ‘Can we please go on this way?’

  Selma drank her cup of tea in bed, with Amelia and Dagmar sitting at the foot of the chaise-longue. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t made you up a stocking this year, darling,’ Selma said, lifting the cup to her lips and snatching a drink before it came clattering back down on the saucer. ‘I don’t seem to have had as much time as usual.’ She caught an irritated glance from Dagmar and put her hand over her mouth. ‘I didn’t say something I shouldn’t?’ Then she laughed. ‘Of course I didn’t. You’ve known for ages it was granny.’

  Amelia wondered why Lewis Carroll felt he had to use a white rabbit to take Alice into Wonderland; a white-haired grandmother would have been quite sufficient.

  At twelve o’clock the doorbell rang. Amelia, kneeling by the oven, basting the turkey, kept down. The bell kept ringing, drilling through the voice of the boy soprano carolling on the radio. Amelia stayed kneeling, knees aching, praying her mother would stay out of sight. There was a pause, then another ring. Amelia reached up with one hand, searching the worktop above her head for her glass of champagne. Feeling her fingers touch the cold crystal she pulled the glass along the surface, lifting it down. She sat back against the cupboard and sipped the wine. Selma never cooked a Christmas lunch without several glasses of champagne to spur her on. ‘It’s a good way of getting through the less exciting bits of the day,’ she used to say. By the time Amelia had finished the glass, the door bell had stopped ringing.

  Moments later Dagmar hurried into the kitchen glancing over her shoulder several times. Checking for wolves, Amelia thought.

  ‘Fill up?’ Still on the floor she reached up for the bottle.

  Dagmar shook her head. ‘I’ve still got some. So has Mummy. I’m sure she shouldn’t really have any.’ She opened the oven door and glanced absent-mindedly at the sizzling turkey. ‘Maybe we should have answered the door. If whoever it was asked, we could have said we’d just popped in on our way from church to make sure everything was all right. Or something.’ Her voice rose a little. ‘Maybe whoever it was had already seen us and is ringing the police this very moment.’

  Amelia looked at her mother and took a long gulp from her glass. Actually, she thought, at this precise moment, Gerald and Clarissa are celebrating Christmas together in my home. My Gerald, my home; all gone.

  ‘You’ll get tipsy.’ Dagmar raised a pencilled eye-brow.

  ‘I hope so.’ Amelia got up from the floor and put the water on for the sprouts.

  In the sitting room the white Christmas lights sent a shimmering haze through the baubled branches of the tree, holly twigs rested on the gilded picture frames and a fire burnt in the grate. Amelia had covered the Hamiltons’ table with a red cloth embroidered with cross-stitch holly leaves and snowflakes, and set it for three with Selma’s blue and gold china.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind eating in here,’ Amelia had said to Selma. ‘But the heating doesn’t seem to be working in the dining room.’ It was another lie of course.

  Selma didn’t mind at all. Amelia and Dagmar had helped her dress in a loose-fitting peacock-blue cashmere dress that they had given her that morning, and now she sat, a smile on her face like someone three lines behind in the telling of an amusing anecdote.

  ‘No pad?’ Dagmar had hissed after Amelia had placed Selma in the chair.

  ‘No pad,’ Amelia had whisped back. ‘I want the seat of her dress to touch the seat of her chair with no go-between.’

  ‘Why?’ Dagmar had signalled back. Amelia wasn’t sure. ‘Just a feeling.’ She shrugged her shoulders.

  When Amelia put a plate of smoked salmon in front of her, Selma looked up with that puzzled look in her eyes again, although she was smiling. ‘I’ve been away you know.’ The smile turned shaky. ‘I didn’t enjoy myself very much at all.’ After that she ate with quiet concentration, crumbs of turkey, rivulets of gravy and flakes of sprouts settling in the soft folds of her dress. Dagmar had cut the food in neat little squares on her plate and Selma had made no objections. She had come to accept her reliance on others, that much Cherryfield had done for her.

  Amelia had lit candles all across the room: on the coffee table and the card table, in the window-seats of the bay and on top of the chimney-piece. They sat circled by candles while outside the light slowly died.

  ‘Though I say it myself,’ Selma said, her cheeks a little pink from the wine and the warmth of the fire, ‘it really is a lovely turkey.’

  She’s happy, Amelia thought. She sits there, an old woman with a rotting leg, dying of at least three separate complaints, and she’s happy. And it’s all thanks to me. She got up to fetch the Christmas pudding and returned, holding it high over her head to show off the blue-burning flame.

  ‘Bravo the cook!’ Selma laughed and clapped as Amelia put the pudding in front of her and they watched as the blue flames sank and drowned in the sugary liquid.

  ‘Don’t throw the left-overs away now, will you?’ Selma said, nodding at the sticky heap left on the serving plate. ‘It will be delicious fried tomorrow.’

  Laughing and thinking about tomorrow, Amelia continued saying to herself as she cleared the plates: And it’s all my doing.

  When they had finished eating, Selma asked Amelia to get her jewellery box. ‘It’s still in my case I think.’ She looked up, explaining, ‘I’ve been away you see.’

  Amelia remembered unpacking the small leather case and she fetched it in from the study.

  Selma bent low over the box, riffling through its contents. ‘I’ve got some little things for you.’

  ‘But you’ve already given us some lovely presents.’ Amelia gesticulated towards the little heap of things; a couple of books, a scarf, a bottle of scent, lying on the seat by the fire. Gifts from Selma to her and Dagmar that Amelia herself had carefully chosen and wrapped.

  ‘Oh those, that’s nothing.’ Selma waved her hand dismissively. ‘I don’t seem to have had much time to do my shopping this Christmas,’ she turned to Dagmar, ‘but I’d like you to have this, it’s from your father’s family, from Germany.’

  The brooch was shaped like a basket of flowers and set with diamonds and rubies and Dagmar fastened it on to her red blouse. ‘It’s beautiful. I’ve always loved it,’ and she got up to kiss her mother.

  Selma gave Amelia a jade bracelet and lastly she brought out a large signet ring. ‘It was Willoughby’s. You remember it don’t you, darling? Robert has got his grandfather’s, so I’d like your young man to have this. It should be worn. It’s no use lying here in this box.’

  Amelia glanced across the table at Dagmar. They both wondered which young man it was that Selma was thinking of.

  ‘Come on darling, take it,’ Selma prompted. So Amelia took it and thanked her. ‘That’s wonderful, he’ll be thrilled.’

  Selma looked pleased. ‘You didn’t think I had forgotten your presents now, did you?’ she said and then she added, ‘I don’t think I’ve had a proper look at my cards.’

  Amelia tried to avoid her eyes. ‘No,’ she said weakly, ‘nor you have.’

  Selma turned her head to the chimney-piece, then back to Amelia. ‘In fact I can’t even remember opening them. Aren’t I silly?’

  Not really, Amelia thought, seeing that I put them there straight from the packets just
before you came.

  ‘So darling, could you take them down for me?’ A touch of impatience had crept into Selma’s voice. ‘I don’t seem to be able to get up as easily as I normally do. Too much good food I expect.’

  ‘Shall I crack a nut for you?’ Dagmar asked, reaching for the bowl that she had made in woodwork when she was nine.

  Selma ignored her and kept on looking keenly at the row of cards. With a deep sigh she couldn’t help, Amelia got up from the table and picked out a winter scene in a Dickensian Trafalgar Square. She had thought carefully before buying it as it had cost over a pound just for the one.

  ‘I’ll read it, shall I?’ she said. ‘It’s rather dim in here and I don’t know where you put your glasses.’ Selma didn’t object, so she began, reeling off polite, Christmassy phrases of good cheer and well wishes, recalling the names of Selma and Willoughby’s friends, as she went along. ‘… all the best, Gordon and Sheila.’

  Selma had smiled and nodded at each familiar name but now she looked up with a frown. ‘Gordon’s dead.’

  Amelia felt like a captain of a ship illicitly slipping anchor under the protection of fog only to find beams of sunlight breaking through, scattering the mist and making his deception clear to the world.

  ‘Sheila, she must have signed automatically for both of them, it happens, I hear,’ she added weakly.

  ‘Not from the grave it doesn’t,’ Selma said. ‘Poor Gordon was a widower for years.’

  Amelia was tired. And why, she thought viciously, is it that your memory gets busy only when it’s not wanted?

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to prepare a pecan for you? They’re lovely.’ Dagmar insisted.

  ‘And here’s one from the Hammonds,’ Amelia exclaimed, waving a glossy, gold-edged card at Selma. The Hammonds were definitely not dead, she’d seen them in the supermarket only the other morning. But Selma had lost interest by now. The colour had gone from her cheeks, turning them the shade of unbleached writing paper, and her eyelids kept closing. Dagmar got up and began clearing the discarded wrappings from the floor. She was about to drop a shiny green sheet into the fire when Selma put out her hand and said, ‘Don’t darling. It’ll do for next year,’ and she took the paper and placed it across her chubby knees, carefully smoothing the creases with trembling fingers.