Is There Anything You Want?

by Margaret Forster

  ‘I’ve survived so far,’ she said. ‘I’m in continuing remission, Harry, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s all? That’s everything.’

  ‘Yes, it is, but it’s not what you think, what you keep trying to make it out to be.’

  But he was so happy, singing away (tunelessly) a Beatles song, smiling to himself as he cleared the dishes, and she felt envious. Emma came home while he was stacking them in the dishwasher and asked him what he was so cheerful about. She’d only been 8 when all this began, and Laura 10. Harry had told them that Mum had a bad bit in her breast and was going to have it taken out in hospital. Like in an apple? Emma had asked. Yes, Harry had said, like in an apple. That had quite satisfied Emma, but not Laura. She’d tied her father in knots with her demands for explanations and no talk of bad bits in apples had satisfied her. But after Edwina came home and was well, and hadn’t needed any more treatment, even Laura had lost interest. Sometimes, Edwina reckoned, her entire family had forgotten what had happened. A good thing, of course. What she wanted, she supposed. Her own mother had been such a trial with her overwhelming concern, but she was the only one who had reacted with horror, and she was dead now. No one left to weep and wail over the words ‘tumour’ and ‘malignant’ and ‘cancer’, and watch her so intently that it had been a relief, always, to leave her presence.

  Emma didn’t really listen to the explanation Harry was giving for his high good humour (to do with trying to persuade your Mum to come on an adventurous holiday, he said), but then she rarely listened to the answers to her own questions. She had no, or only a slight, interest in her parents’ lives. Harry hadn’t even finished replying before she’d cut in with complaints about how little she was going to be paid for the gardening job she’d just got. ‘She’s a funny old woman,’ Emma told them (in contrast to how she listened to them, they hung on her every word), ‘sort of posh. It’s a big garden, really beautiful. She’s got a man who comes to do the hard stuff when it needs doing, but she needs me to follow her round and do all the bending. At least it’ll be easy.’

  ‘You don’t know a thing about gardening,’ Harry said, laughing. ‘You don’t know a daisy from a snowdrop, and you wouldn’t recognise a weed if your life depended on it. I can’t think why this poor woman’s taking you on.’

  ‘I’m young and willing. She can train me.’

  ‘Wish I could,’ Harry said, and pointed out to his own garden. ‘There you are,’ he said, ‘I’ll train you out there, if you’re so willing.’

  ‘That isn’t a garden, not compared to hers,’ Emma sneered, ‘and anyway, you wouldn’t pay me.’

  ‘No, I certainly would not.’

  ‘Well, then, I need the money. You said I had to earn my own pocket money now.’

  ‘At 18, you should.’

  ‘I’m not 18 till August.’

  Edwina had gone into the sitting-room. Their voices drifted off behind her. She’d brought her book through from the conservatory, and now she switched on a lamp and sat down, but she didn’t start to read again. Emma probably wouldn’t come through from the kitchen. She’d find something to eat and eat it standing up and then rush upstairs and ring Luke. Luke never came near the house, though Edwina had suggested inviting him for a Sunday lunch when his name was so often on Emma’s lips. It would be nice, she’d said, to get to know this boy. Emma had groaned, said she wouldn’t think of inviting him, for heaven’s sake. But Edwina had caught sight of him in town. She hadn’t liked what she had seen, but had chided herself for being prejudiced, because Luke looked dirty and unkempt and he smoked. She just hoped Harry, if he came across the boy, would show the same restraint.

  ‘Mum?’ Emma said, suddenly appearing in the doorway. ‘Could you lend me a fiver? Dad won’t, and I really need it to pay Luke back.’

  ‘What do you owe him for?’

  ‘Mum, that’s not the point, I just need the money. I really need it, please, I’ll pay you back when I start this job at the weekend.’

  ‘My bag’s in the hall. Bring it here.’

  She held the five-pound note out, trying to meet Emma’s eye, but failing. The money was almost snatched, with a quick thanks, and Emma had gone leaping up the stairs to ring Luke from the extension on the landing. Laura never borrowed money. Laura looked like her father but she was like Edwina, quiet and reserved and careful – or, as Emma put it sarcastically, ‘a paragon of all the virtues’. Yes, if those were virtues.

  Edwina started reading again. She was dreading getting to Primo Levi’s death. She knew, because she’d been unable to resist looking it up, that he was thought to have committed suicide many years after surviving the camp, and she couldn’t bear to contemplate such an end or what it signified – all that struggle, all that endurance, for nothing, a life once so valuable it had been clung on to during the whole ordeal of Auschwitz, and then suddenly, in better times, worth nothing, found unbearable. And yet, preparing herself to read about it, she thought for some reason of how she felt each time she came away from the clinic with everything all right – no joy, no instant happiness that her little ordeal was over, but instead such grief, as though instead of being cleared she had been condemned. She strained to make a connection, however tiny, however absurdly different in scale, with Primo Levi’s ultimate response to the safety and ease of his life so long after coming out of the camp, but it made no sense. It was outrageous for her to seek any empathy with such a man. All she had in common with him was a kind of survival ludicrously different from his own.

  But what was she doing with her survival? Jogging along in the same old way, not using it at all for her own benefit or anyone else’s. She’d isolated herself, tried to protect herself these last ten years by not allowing herself to feel anything. That was why reading had become so important, why it was comforting – within the life in the books, she could feel. But keeping herself apart had damaged her too. She was remote from her family, she’d trained herself to be. Harry didn’t seem to mind. He just thought she had become a calmer person, and he approved. But she wasn’t calm. Inwardly, she seethed with all kinds of unreconciled emotions that only erupted on clinic days and then subsided.

  It had to stop. Her control had had its use, but it was time to let the brake off.

  ‘Harry?’ she called.

  3

  Is There Anything You Want?

  THERE WAS NO one watching, but Mrs Hibbert turned away abruptly from the glass door opening into her porch as though she were trying to hide. She screwed the beastly letter up, then passed it from hand to hand before throwing it into the waste-paper basket in her kitchen. She stood and looked at the offending little ball, lying in the corner of the otherwise empty basket. Ten seconds later, she bent down and took it out and, smoothing the paper as best she could, reread the letter. Her face burned. She was mortified. She wished the letter had arrived the day before, on a hospital day when, doing her job as a Friend of St Mary’s, she would have soon got things in proportion and laughed it off, whereas today she would have to struggle to do so. She was always tired on Fridays – it took more out of her than she ever let anyone realise, being on her feet for four hours in that hospital. But now she badly needed to be busy, to get over the nasty letter, and so she was glad she had Dot to take shopping.

  She took the crumpled paper to the table and told herself to be sensible. It was not a nasty letter at all, merely an official one. It declined her offer to help in the Mental Health Research charity shop, saying that the charity’s policy was not to employ people over 70 because it was felt the standing required was too wearing for them. Such nonsense! Those women sat most of the time. She’d seen them. There were two chairs behind the counter where one went to pay and they sat on them. Some of them didn’t even stand up to take the money, they were so lazy. And rude. As for not employing people over 70, that was ridiculous – there was hardly anyone working there under 70. Lucy Binns was probably only around 50, true, but Adelaide Priest was definitely either 70 already or jus
t about to be, and as for Mrs Jarrett, she was indisputably nearer 80. Why was she being told this lie about age? She peered at the signature again. Barbara Bell. She didn’t know any Barbara Bell, or a Barbara, or even a Bell. It said ‘coordinator’ in brackets beside the name, whatever that meant. Probably someone in head office, not anyone local. Her own letter offering her services had been passed on. She wondered how many people would have read it. Would anyone in the shop itself have seen it? Had any of those women there read it and thought, oh heavens, here is that bossy Mrs Hibbert showing off? It made her shudder. She wished passionately that she had not put that bit in about having time now that she was no longer a magistrate. (And if she hadn’t said that, it occurred to her, no one would have known her age and she somehow doubted if it would have been asked for.)

  Suddenly, screwing the wretched letter up yet again, Mrs Hibbert dropped it this time into the bin where she put potato peelings and used tea-bags and other such waste. She would not now be tempted to take it out again. For a moment, she thought about writing back to Barbara Bell, thanking her for her communication and then, just in a casual fashion, throwing doubt on the age of certain women who already worked in the shop. She wouldn’t, of course. She was not small-minded or malicious. She had her pride. Determined to be busy, she pulled out the cutlery drawer and emptied the contents on to the kitchen table with a curiously satisfying clash of metal. The drawer had long needed tidying. As she sorted out the fish knives from the steak knives (neither used since her husband died) she decided she would most likely have been terribly bored working in that pathetic shop. And, she remembered, it had an odd smell, rather unpleasant, fusty. It was alleged that all the clothes they received were either washed or dry-cleaned before being put out for sale, but Mrs Hibbert doubted this. It was one of the things she would have been interested in establishing as true or not. That, and how prices were decided on, because, frankly, it seemed to her that the pricing policy was entirely haphazard. The books, for example: she had found three copies of Monica Dickens’s One Pair of Hands on the shelves, all priced differently and yet all in paperback and all in the same condition. She had felt obliged to point this out to Mrs Jarrett, who was on duty that day. She’d shown her the pencilled-in prices: 70p, 75p, £1.10. And what had been that silly woman’s reaction? She’d laughed. She’d said how funny, and that it didn’t matter, and that Mrs Hibbert could have any of the three for the lowest price, for 70p. As if the price was the important thing and not the discrepancies! And in any case she’d read all of Monica Dickens’s books years ago. What Mrs Jarrett had failed to understand was how foolish, dishonest even, it made the shop and therefore the charity itself look. How would someone feel if they’d bought the £1.10 copy and then later on saw the other copies so much cheaper? Cheated, that’s what.

  She had the cutlery all lined up on the table and now she cleaned the compartments of the box she kept it in. Placing the knives and forks and spoons back in the compartments pleased her. She liked order; confusion and muddle irritated her. She had so longed to sort out the manifest confusion in that charity shop. Some charity shops, she’d observed with approval, had the clothes colour-co-ordinated, but not this one. This one, the one to which she had offered assistance, had everything jumbled up with the only distinction one of separating men’s and women’s and children’s clothes. In fact, the look of the shop was what upset her most. A mess. It unsettled her. Her hands always itched to start reorganising it. Take the window for a start (and it was the start, after all). A large, plain, open-style shop window, crying out for an attractive display. And what did people looking into it see? A scruffy pile of jig-saw boxes in the centre, some shoes next to them on one side and three hideous vases on the other, one containing dusty ears of corn and the others empty. Otherwise a great void. Yet inside the shop she’d noticed a beautiful, almost complete, set of blue willow-pattern china which could have been displayed with great effect on one of the pristine lace table-cloths draped at the back of the shop over a chair. Nobody had any idea, and it grieved her.

  She knew she was getting in a state over nothing and that she must control herself. Dot would be waiting. She could not let her down, especially this week when the poor woman would have been worried to death by that daughter of hers. Mrs Hibbert had spotted her going into the clinic but had managed to make sure Sarah didn’t see her. She’d been with that ghastly boyfriend of hers. He’d been half carrying her along. It was a dreadful thing to say, but Mrs Hibbert suspected there was not much wrong with Sarah Nicholson. Women who attended Mr Wallis’s Thursday clinic did not always have something wrong with them. She knew they’d often just been sent by GPs for reassurance if they were the neurotic type, and Dot’s daughter was certainly that. But Dot wouldn’t have it. She didn’t see how Sarah manipulated her. She was such a foolish girl, always had been, and she caused her mother endless anxiety. She could not help having cancer (if indeed she did have it, which was by no means yet proven) but she undoubtedly could have helped taking up with Mike Allen, a married man with three children, all young. However, best not to mention to Dot her feelings about that man. Maybe Dot guessed she did not approve of him – she was aware that she tightened her lips when he was mentioned and that her expression probably betrayed her – but she would never say anything.

  Her coat on, she picked her car keys off the hook behind the door. She must have another key made for the garden shed so that this girl who was coming to help could get into it for tools if she was out, not that she intended to be until she’d trained her. It would take some doing – the child clearly had no idea what to do in a garden, but she’d seemed nice-natured and was eager for the job (yes, for the money, Mrs Hibbert knew that) and she’d been the only person to answer the advert in the post office. It had taken Mrs Hibbert a long time to face up to the fact that she had to have more help in the garden – she hated the thought – but though she had Martin Yates for the heavy work she. needed someone to help her weed, now that her arthritis increasingly troubled her. She didn’t want her beautiful garden to fall into the same state as Dot’s. She didn’t blame Dot, none of the neglect was Dot’s fault, it was all Adam’s. Once he’d become crippled himself he should have organised help, but he had been too stubborn (always expecting to get better) and too mean to see to it. How Dot had stayed married to that man Mrs Hibbert could not imagine. He was a bully and a tyrant, whereas her Francis had been a gentleman, and a truly gentle man.

  If Dot was not ready and waiting she would be annoyed. Being annoyed with Dot was something she had to struggle with continually – Dot was annoying, and the most annoying thing about her was how she let Adam take advantage of her. On the occasions when she was not standing outside on Fridays at the agreed time, it was always because Adam had demanded attention just as she was putting her coat on. Dot would whisper as an excuse that he had needed help to get to the bathroom and this enraged Mrs Hibbert. Adam claimed he couldn’t walk without assistance but why in that case did he not use sticks or crutches? Anyone sensible, and wanting to be independent, and eager to spare his wife would do so. Dot was tiny and fragile, under 5 feet tall and weighing a mere 7 stone, whereas he was huge and heavy. Leaning on her shoulder he was in danger of fracturing it with his immense weight. ‘Get him crutches,’ Mrs Hibbert had told Dot, but Dot said that when she had suggested this to Adam he had been furious and had shouted that resorting to crutches would signify the end and he was not ready for that yet. He had had his bed moved downstairs so that he had only a few steps to get either to the bathroom or the kitchen, but whenever he wanted to move at all he summoned Dot. The rest of the time he lolled in their living-room watching television with the sound very loud even though he had a deaf aid and could hear perfectly well with it when he wanted to. It was an awful life for Dot.

  She knew, or rather guessed, that people found her friendship with Dorothy Nicholson a little odd. Partly, it was a matter of class, and matters of class were still alive and well in their part of the wo
rld. Mrs Hibbert, in local terms, came from a well-off, once landowning family. She had been educated privately and spoke without a trace of the regional accent. Dot, on the other hand, was a tenant farmer’s daughter, a tenant of the Lawsons in the old days. As a girl, Mary Lawson (as Mrs Hibbert then was) had been in the habit of going to the farm to collect eggs and it was Dot who took her to the shed and picked the eggs out for her. She was such a tiny, thin scrap of a girl, and so eager to please, and she’d always seemed to admire Mary, regularly marvelling at how tall she was and how nice her nails were (Dot’s were bitten) and how pretty her dresses (Dot was dressed in awful hand-me-downs which drowned her, with her older sisters being so much bigger). They became not exactly friends – the gulf in social status was too great – but pleasant acquaintances. When Mary Lawson returned as Mrs Hibbert after her years down south (though ‘south’ had been still north, in effect) Dot was about the only person who had bothered to welcome her. At the time Mrs Hibbert came back, Dot had been married to Adam Nicholson for fifteen years and had a 5-year-old daughter. Mrs Hibbert had felt even more protective than she had done years ago when they were both children.

  She drove the mile or so to Dot’s house reflecting that this shopping trip to the out-of-town supermarket must be the one bright spot in her friend’s life. Heaven knew, there was nothing very thrilling about going shopping, or not this sort of mundane shopping, but it meant Dot got away from Adam and had a ride in a car (the Nicholsons no longer had a car) and had someone to talk to. It pleased Mrs Hibbert to think she was providing such a treat, but it did not please her when Dot took advantage. Taking advantage meant not being ready and waiting. In Dot’s place she would have positioned herself at a window ten minutes before the friend was due, her coat already on, key in her pocket, shopping list in hand, and she would have been out of her front door the moment she saw the car turn the corner. But Dot was never ready. Sometimes, like today, Mrs Hibbert had to peep the horn, and still no sign of her. Well, she was most certainly not going to get out of her car and go up those steps and ring the doorbell. It was bad enough being obliged to turn the engine off. She peeped once more, and looked at the clock. She would wait two more minutes and then she was just going to drive off. But then, as she was checking her watch against the car clock, the front door opened. Dot stood there, smiling and waving and mouthing something. She did not, Mrs Hibbert noted, have her coat on. She disappeared back into the house leaving the door open and then a minute later reappeared pulling her coat on as she closed the door. Half-way down the six rather steep steps, she stopped. Exasperated, Mrs Hibbert lowered her car window and shouted, ‘Dot! Do come on! I haven’t all day!’ But Dot had retreated back up to her door and was taking her coat off again. Furiously, Mrs Hibbert watched as Dot struggled to remove the apron she had just remembered she’d left on and tried to shove it through the narrow slit of the letter-box. Oh, as if it mattered! But apparently it did, because Dot would not give up until the yellow spotted material had finally been disposed of. She trotted to the car, pink-faced and breathing heavily. ‘Sorry, Mary,’ she whispered, ‘it was just that as I was getting ready Adam wanted . . .’ ‘I don’t want to know what Adam wanted,’ Mrs Hibbert snapped. ‘I have no interest in the matter, or anything to do with him, as you very well know. You are quite aware, Dot, of how absurd I think it is that you let yourself be a slave to that inconsiderate man. Now, get in and settle down.’