Guppies for Tea Page 2

  ‘She’s not ill?’

  ‘She might well have a sick mind after what she said to that young nurse, but physically your grandmother is as well as can be hoped. I can expect you tomorrow then.’ And Sister Morris hung up.

  Chapter Two

  All that Evening Amelia fretted. What could be wrong with her grandmother? What made Uncle Robert think he had the right to scuttle off to Brazil, leaving Amelia and a useless Dagmar to cope? On and on she worried until Gerald snapped, ‘Why don’t you just call up and find out exactly what is wrong, not that you know anything is, instead of sitting round whingeing at me?’ Then he strode up to bed.

  ‘I can’t call now, it’s too late, I’ll wake them all up.’ Amelia called feebly after him, remembering the days when he would have put his arms round her and told her gently not to be such a worrier.

  The next morning she drove to the station in Basingstoke, having first fed the hens and watered the tomato and aubergine seedlings in the greenhouse.

  Rich, black soil clung to the heels of her red court shoes and she had forgotten to put on the belt that, Gerald said, really made the skirt and jumper she was wearing. Amelia well knew the value of the right accessories but she often had her mind on other things. Not always more important ones, just different.

  She arrived at the station in good time, she always did at railway stations and airports, and found a seat in a no-smoking carriage.

  As the Plymouth train pulled away from the platform, Amelia picked up a novel from her large black velvet bag. Finding the right page, she gazed over the top of it, out at nothing in particular.

  She thought of Willoughby, Selma’s husband, dying in the Kingsmouth Cottage Hospital, the curtains drawn round his bed, separating his dying from the supper-time chatter on the ward. It was the night before Willoughby died that Uncle Robert first brought up the idea of a Nice Home. Amelia had been trying to sleep, lying in the high, mahogany bed where great-grandfather Jocelyn had died forty years earlier: peacefully, Amelia had been told. But she had always hated the bed; she knew that Jocelyn had lain tied to that bed by his own withered limbs, silently screaming, unable to fight off death’s unsolicited advances. Now, she had thought, it was Willoughby’s turn to lie fighting the Grim Rapist.

  She had switched on the light and looked at her watch, it was three-fifteen. She had been about to switch it off again, when she saw her grandmother in the doorway, the two cats, Tigger and Tim, circling her feet.

  ‘There you are darling,’ Selma said. ‘I don’t seem to be able to get this damned thing open. Here, you try.’ She held out a tin of Whiskas. ‘There’s the opener, it’s terribly stiff.’

  ‘Mother, what are you doing up.’ Robert, his hair ruffled but his tartan dressing-gown tightly belted, had appeared on the landing. He looked into the room and saw Amelia sitting on the bed, a tin of cat food in her hand. ‘What’s going on, Amelia?’

  ‘The cats dear,’ Selma said in a patient voice. ‘They haven’t had their dinner.’ Robert had stared after her as she took the open tin and disappeared out on to the landing, the mewling cats in her wake. It was then that he had mentioned the idea of a Nice Home.

  The next day, Willoughby died. The family, Robert and Peggy, Amelia’s mother Dagmar and Amelia herself, had stayed on for the funeral and Selma was grateful to them all.

  She shouldn’t have been, Amelia thought as she turned back from the train window and flicked over yet another unread page of the novel, because that week she had been on trial. The fridge filled with out-of-date yoghurt and small, carefully wrapped remnants of long-ago meals, the endlessly repeated questions, the fruitless shopping expeditions that turned into hours of aimless wandering, everything was taken down and used in evidence against her. Taken down by the loving, spying eyes of her family.

  Peggy had stood speechless, peering into a greaseproof-paper parcel.

  ‘Lamb chops,’ Selma, who had just appeared in the kitchen, said helpfully. ‘I wondered where they had got to.’ She picked up a fork and stabbed one of the chops. Lifting it out of the paper she had looked thoughtfully at the mould that clung to it with spindly tentacles. ‘I think they might be a little off. I really wouldn’t eat them if I were you, dear.’

  Then there had been Dagmar, wandering backwards and forwards to the bathroom to wash her hands and carefully spreading Kleenex tissues over the seats of the comfortable, shabby armchairs, before sitting down.

  Robert, who didn’t see much of his half-sister, had taken it all as further proof that their mother’s days as a housekeeper were over. Amelia wondered at how her mother’s obsession could once again spread like an ugly stain across other people’s lives.

  ‘I miss him, I miss him so terribly.’ Selma’s tears, her eruption into grief after days of stoical control, had interrupted The Nine O’Clock News and embarrassed them all.

  Robert turned the sound of the television down, before turning to his mother with an air of infinite patience. ‘You know, we all feel you would be so much happier at a Nice Residential Home, rather than wandering around this great barn of a place all on your own and with constant reminders of Pa.’

  ‘I’m not likely to forget your father,’ Selma had looked at her son with a small smile. ‘Whether I’m here or somewhere else; I was married to him for nearly fifty years.’

  Then Peggy found out that Selma had not had a bath since the day of Willoughby’s stroke, since the day he had not been there to lift her into the tub. ‘You must see that you need looking after,’ Robert had said more sternly this time.

  Amelia had turned to Selma. ‘What do you think?’ she had asked.

  Slowly Selma had lowered the coffee cup towards the saucer, concentrating on her shaking hand, willing it to still. Her movement accelerated and the cup clattered on to the saucer. She looked up at Amelia with eyes that seemed to have faded, as if all the tears had finally washed the colour away. ‘I want to stay here. This is my home.’

  A month later, five days ago, Selma’s house had been sold and Selma herself moved to Cherryfield. Amelia’s objections had been strongly felt but weakly supported by word or action.

  So, sitting on the Plymouth train, Amelia worried as much about herself, about her lack of loyalty and strength of purpose.

  The taxi ride through the small town of Kingsmouth took Amelia past Ashcombe, once Selma’s and Willoughby’s house, now soon to be the residence of Mr and Mrs Desmond Hamilton, a local builder and his wife. Amelia looked up at the whitewashed house on the hill above the creek, its green lawns sloping down towards the water, yellow with the hundreds of daffodils that Willoughby had planted. The car turned a corner and Ashcombe disappeared from view.

  Cherryfield stood square in its own grounds at the other end of the small town. It too was on a hill, it too was white painted with green windows, and Robert had debated whether the proximity and likeness to her old home would pain or please his mother. Would it comfort her to see across the river her home of fifty years? Would the view over the water from the green windows of Cherryfield make her feel secure? Or would it be to her, gentle, well-meaning torture?

  ‘I think a move right away from here would be worse,’ Robert had declared finally. And Selma, with the ill-fitting deference of an old woman to her son, had said to him, ‘I know I’m a nuisance dear, but can’t I just stay here, at Ashcombe? I promise I won’t be any trouble.’ She had given a little laugh that meant, ‘As if I ever would be,’ but her eyes were fixed intently on Robert’s.

  Robert had exchanged glances with his wife who, when Selma rose laboriously from her chair, nodded towards the spreading dark patch on the seat.

  At Cherryfield a pretty, blonde nurse opened the door. As she stepped out to greet Amelia, a white petal from the cherry tree at the side of the porch drifted across on a gust of wind and settled in her curls. The nurse looked charming and very young. ‘If you’d like to wait here,’ she indicated a chair in the hall, ‘Sister Morris will be with you in a second.’

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sp; Amelia sat down, feeling all at once quite calm. Nothing seemed to be seriously wrong and Cherryfield was at first glance as nice as Robert had described it.

  She looked approvingly at the large vase filled with blossoming cherry branches that were reflected in the highly polished mahogany table, and at the Redoute prints on the whitewashed walls. The sun shone through the coloured glass at the top of the door creating a drifting pattern across the brown carpet. There was a certain tranquillity about the place, Amelia felt, as she leafed through last month’s copy of The Field.

  ‘Leave me alone you bloody woman! I’m not sitting on that thing.’ Amelia scrambled to her feet as she recognized Selma’s voice, accented and furious.

  ‘I’m telling you for the last time, I’ll sit where I want and I’ll pee where I want and that’s all there is to it. I pay you enough.’

  The inner door of the hall opened and a round woman in her fifties entered. ‘Miss Lindsay, I’m Sister Morris.’ She held her hand out, then withdrew it the moment it touched Amelia’s. ‘I assume you heard our little outburst. We have them all the time.’ Sister Morris’s sandy eyebrows jerked upwards and she clamped her lips together, as if to say that although far harsher words were queuing up to leave her mouth, she was manfully stopping them.

  When Amelia said nothing, Sister Morris drew her breath in between her teeth and said ‘I’m afraid it’s all having a very disruptive effect on our other residents, not to mention the staff. Only yesterday one of our girls actually went home in tears.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Amelia said at last. She could think of nothing better. Then, as Sister Morris looked expectantly at her, pale green eyes protruding, she added, ‘What can I do?’ clinging a little longer to a world where grandparents disciplined their grandchildren, not the other way around.

  ‘It’s quite simple,’ Sister Morris assured Amelia. ‘Your grandmother must, I emphasize must, be made to understand that as a guest with us here at Cherryfield she has a duty to behave according to our rules and regulations …’

  Amelia had a vision of Selma manacled to the wall of an immaculate torture chamber with Amelia herself standing beneath, shouting out the rules of Cherryfield Residential Home for the Elderly.

  ‘… and that includes sitting on an inco pad on the chair especially allotted to her.’ Sister Morris’s voice quietened and her cheeks ceased to vibrate. Almost confidentially now she added, ‘It’s very strange how upset she got at my suggestion that she discuss her little problem with her family. I fear you can’t be very close.’

  Amelia was about to object that feeling close to someone didn’t automatically mean you cared to have little chats about your urinary tracts with them, when Sister Morris spoke again. ‘You know, I’m sure this refusal to look her incontinence in the eye and face up to it is half the problem. Now if it was me,’ her face took on an expression of awe-inspiring jollity, ‘I would say, “I’m afraid I’m incontinent so where would you like me to sit?”’

  Sister Morris tore herself back to a less amiable reality. ‘It’s all about facing up to things, you know. You’ll find your grandmother in the conservatory, she seems to like it out there. Have a heart to heart.’

  ‘About peeing?’ Amelia asked, but Sister Morris had already disappeared through the double doors.

  In the conservatory, where scarlet begonias trailed from white plastic pots along the sills, Sister Morris stopped to point an accusing finger at the far end of the room. ‘There she is, still in her wheelchair I see. Her toe was in a frightful state, I don’t know what her doctor can have been thinking of.’ And she bustled back into the lounge.

  Amelia looked past the row of Cherryfield residents, most of them connected like electrical appliances to bottles and stands, towards the far corner where Selma sat like a baby elephant, her bent, chubby back half turned to the room.

  She did not look up as Amelia walked towards her along the row of chairs. A couple of the old people, ‘Old Folk’ she felt sure Sister Morris would call them when in a better mood, responded to her ‘Good afternoon’, the others continued to stare wordlessly out at the garden or inwards, to their own vaguely remembered, subsiding pasts.

  Gently, Amelia put her hand on Selma’s shoulder. Like an old-fashioned computer, slow to load the new information, Selma took her time reacting. Her head turned and as her matt-brown eyes focused, the expression of angry confusion gave way to a wide smile. She straightened a little in her wheelchair and put a small hand to her hair. It had lost its blue-toned smoothness and was set in the little scalp tightening curls she had always despised.

  ‘Amelia darling, how lovely to see you.’ She turned her face up to be kissed and Amelia flinched at the sight of the hair on Selma’s upper lip and chin, normally smooth and petal-pink powdered. Embarrassed for them both, and attempting to disguise the gesture, Amelia swatted at a non-existent insect that disturbed her with its imaginary buzzing.

  ‘When was it we saw you, last week was it not?’ Selma added with studied nonchalance as she looked intently at Amelia. ‘You’ll think I’ve gone dotty but I can’t seem to remember.’

  Amelia paused before answering. It was tempting to say in the same casual tone, ‘That’s right, last week,’ instead of the truth, that she had not seen her grandmother since the funeral four weeks earlier. That same evening, Selma had sat at the head of the table, still pretty in a black velvet dress, dignified in her laced-up sorrow. She had adored her husband but there she had sat, making conversation, facing her balding middle-aged son across the table in his father’s chair.

  But she was still the mistress of her own house then, and senility could be called forgetfulness as she moved around her own, comfortably arranged, household.

  ‘It’s been a little longer than that I’m afraid,’ Amelia said finally, ‘I seem to have been terribly busy.’

  ‘Haven’t we all?’ Selma on autocue agreed as she was flung back to the days where she had indeed been busy.

  ‘Jane Austen again.’ Amelia picked up the thick paperback omnibus edition that perched on top of Selma’s handbag.

  ‘Have a sweet?’ Selma bent down over the bag with a movement as if filmed in slow motion. Her hand shaking, she fished for the handles. Amelia was wondering if it would be tactless to help, when Selma caught the bag, only to lose it halfway in the air. As it fell, a bunch of keys dropped out followed by three boiled sweets, unwrapped and covered in fluff, a selection of copper coins, a flurry of credit card receipts and a Chanel lipstick. Last, a white lace handkerchief floated down, settling on the coins like a shroud.

  ‘Silly me,’ Selma said with a little laugh, then, ‘You take the keys to the house darling, make sure the heating is put back on.’

  Amelia was about to reply when she heard the sound of crying, snuffling, abandoned weeping. She turned to see a big-boned woman wedged into a dainty chintz-lined basket chair, like a large child in a doll’s seat, tears rolling down her smooth cheeks.

  A nurse appeared with a watering-can and began watering the begonias. After a couple of minutes Amelia went up to her, tapping her softly on the shoulder to catch her attention. ‘She seems distressed,’ she said pointing to the weeping woman.

  The nurse turned round and smiled soothingly at her. ‘Oh that’s all right, that’s Mrs Wells.’ And that apparently explained all. She continued to water the plants, and after waiting a moment, Amelia went back to Selma, looking surreptitiously as she passed at the still weeping Mrs Wells.

  ‘I’ll take you outside.’ Amelia picked up Selma’s things and began pushing the chair, careful to avoid the rubber tubes and thin legs stretched out under crocheted blankets.

  Selma looked around her with distaste. ‘Who are these people?’ she asked in a carrying whisper. ‘I can’t remember asking them here.’

  Amelia brought Selma into the dappled shadow of a large cherry tree. She secured the brakes and sat down herself on the wooden bench splattered with bird-droppings.

  ‘Ghastly lot of old people in t
here,’ Selma said conversationally. Then, ‘How’s the poetry?’

  ‘Oh that,’ Amelia said, surprised that her grandmother should remember. ‘They say it’s difficult being a genius. I would say not half as hard as not being one.’

  ‘Don’t I know, don’t I know.’ Selma rocked in her wheelchair, laughing quietly. ‘When I was a girl, how I longed to hear people say, not, “Doesn’t Selma play well,” but, “Listen to Selma, she plays like an angel.”’

  And Amelia felt happier; her grandmother was not so much changed after all.

  A cherry blossom fell from the branch above, landing at Selma’s feet, then another. Like a snowflake, Selma thought. How long since she had seen snow.

  As she closed her eyes she could almost feel the crunch under her soles of the crisp, early morning snow as she ran through the streets back home, late for school as always, her breath ahead of her like a smoky standard. That piercing scream from above, a sound, she had thought, like that of the peacocks at home being chased across the lawn. When she looked up, she had seen Mrs Hollander, all dressed in white, standing on the roof of the great apartment house. Another piercing scream and Mrs Hollander lifted her shrouded arms and leapt. In front of Selma’s eyes she fell through the air like a giant snowflake, down, down, spinning, before hitting the pavement, turning the fresh snow red. ‘Poor flying Dutchman,’ Selma said out loud.

  ‘What was that, Grandma?’ Amelia leant forward on the bench. But before Selma had time to answer, they heard a voice calling.

  ‘There you are.’ Sister Morris stepped determinedly towards them through the daisies in the damp grass. ‘Had our little chat?’

  ‘Mrs…? Oh you must think I’m dotty but I can’t remember your name,’ Selma laughed merrily.

  ‘Sister Morris, Mrs Merryman, I’m Sister Morris.’

  ‘Of course you are. I don’t believe you know my granddaughter.’

  ‘Oh yes, we have met. In fact we’ve only just had a little talk. About our problem.’ Sister Morris bent down to come face to face with Selma, her expression one of jollity. She’s going to pinch her cheeks, I know it, Amelia thought, but Sister Morris straightened up, contenting herself with a conspiratorial little nod in Amelia’s direction. Selma looked uncomprehendingly at her.