Is There Anything You Want?

by Margaret Forster

  His panic was foolish. Just before he left the sanctuary of the wood he paused to scold himself. It was always the same, he dreaded these kinds of encounter, and there was no need to. He could see the waiting person clearly now. It was indeed a woman, a young woman. She let him climb the stile and then, as he stepped backwards off it, she said, ‘Hello. I’m so glad to see you. I thought I’d be stuck here for ever. Not another car has passed since I got back half an hour ago.’ She pointed at her own car and he saw the flat tyre. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I see. I’m afraid I won’t be much good to you. Dreadful admission, but I don’t know how to change a tyre, terribly sorry.’ She would ask for a lift. He would have to give her a lift to the town, to a garage, which would mean a longish drive and having to talk to her – oh, stop it, he told himself, this attitude is unchristian and absurd. But she didn’t want a lift. What she wanted was to borrow a jack, if he had one, claiming to be perfectly capable of changing her own tyre. To his own surprise, he did find a jack in the boot of his car, though he had no recollection of having put it there. He was about to say that she could keep it, and that he must go, but then she would be bound to want to return it and would need his address and might turn up . . . No, he would have to wait. So he stood watching the young woman, her deft performance making him feel more incompetent than ever. She had the job done quickly, and handed back the jack. He felt obliged to say how he admired her ability to change a tyre, more to prove that he was not boorish as well as unskilled at such tasks. And then he found himself actually asking her a question. It was only a simple, obvious inquiry, but he was startled at his own daring.

  ‘Do you live near here?’ he asked. She said no, and named the town thirty miles away. ‘I’m a solicitor,’ she volunteered, and then stopped abruptly, and blushed, as though startled at what she’d told him, ordinary piece of information though it had been. She said she belonged to a gliding club, and that after her lesson she had gone for a walk. As she finished speaking, a glider came into view and they both stood in silence watching it soar higher and then float away in the distance. ‘So graceful,’ he murmured, and then ‘Do you fly alone?’ She said she hadn’t yet done so, that it would take her another six months before she would be able to, but that she was longing to reach that stage. It was she who said goodbye first, and got into her car with another expression of thanks. No names had been exchanged. Too late, he regretted not introducing himself, but then as he drove home decided he was glad this had been a brief meeting of strangers, one of whom had helped the other. There was something pure about the interchange which appealed to him.

  He tore up the sermon he’d prepared as soon as he got to the vicarage. Making some rapid notes first about his climb and his feelings during it and then about the young woman and the changing of the tyre, he went on to weave all the topics together until he felt he had an original and uplifting new sermon to deliver on the subject of chance and how God allowed for it and valued it. His argument took cunning twists and turns – he had to admit that there was some forcing of connections – but the end result was, he judged, powerful. He strode across to the church inspired in a way he had not been for a long time. There were only twelve people in the congregation but this did not depress him. In a clear, strong voice he delivered his sermon and was for once sure that he held everyone’s attention and that he had been understood – there was no coughing, no fidgeting, and he had a strange impression that if this had been a theatre and not a church then applause would have followed.

  He went to bed almost happy.

  *

  He slept well that night, the first time for ages that he was not plagued with dreams in which he was forever stretching out his arms and begging to be held. Refreshed, he dressed carefully for his visit to St Mary’s Hospital, choosing his one good dark suit, though he disliked wearing it. At the end of his convalescence, he had gone for a holiday to Italy and had been so happy to dress in white or cream trousers and delicately coloured shirts, lilacs and blues – he had felt better, quite liberated (though that feeling had almost been his undoing again). But today he had to look like a vicar and so his dark suit and clerical collar and highly polished black leather shoes were appropriate. He put his notebook and a pen in an inside pocket, and his spectacles in another. They were unattractive spectacles which did not suit the shape of his face, but he had been unable to bear looking in the mirror in the optician’s while choosing them – his own image had repelled him and he had made too hasty a decision. Still, the unfortunate spectacles made him look suitably serious and grave, which was a good thing. Everything was an act, after all.

  St Mary’s was easy to find but the entrance to it was not. He had to go twice round the one-way system before he found it and was irritated with himself for becoming flustered. Once, he’d negotiated the streets of Manchester easily but already his living in a small country town appeared to have eroded his driving skills and made him nervous in traffic. Given more time, he could see he would end up like the majority of his parishioners, scared to drive anywhere busy. Finding the room where the committee meeting was to be held took almost as long as getting into the hospital itself – he seemed to trudge miles, constantly bewildered by signs and having to ask directions in spite of them. St Mary’s, he discovered, was a rabbit warren of a building, full of odd connecting passages which sometimes seemed more like tunnels and came out at different levels. He started to perspire, not with any physical effort but with the memories. He’d walked other corridors such a great deal, backwards and forwards for hours, needing to keep moving, until the drugs had calmed him and made him sleepy.

  They were all waiting for him, though he was not late. He hated entering a room full of people already seated and staring at him. Most of them half rose, some smiled and nodded, and the man at the head of the table, obviously the chairman, welcomed him. There was only one vacant chair, next to a large, imposing woman who looked vaguely familiar and yet he was sure he had not met her. ‘Mrs Hibbert,’ she said, sticking out her hand. ‘We live quite near each other, I think. So pleased you could join us.’ There was a general clearing of throats and then the chairman said how glad they all were that the Rev. Cecil Maddox had accepted the invitation to see how the Friends worked. If, during this meeting, he had any questions he must feel free to interrupt and ask them. Cecil stared straight ahead, avoiding all eyes, and composed himself to listen. The woman next to him, Mrs Hibbert, had a great deal to say, and the more she said the more obvious it was to him that the chairman could not bear her. He was wary of her, though. Every time he tried to cut across her interruptions he did so with suspiciously excessive politeness. Taking quick looks round the table, Cecil could see that everyone found Mrs Hibbert annoying, but nobody appeared to have the nerve to object to the way in which she was dominating the meeting.

  ‘It is quite ridiculous,’ she was saying, ‘to spend money on refurbishing the chapel. It is hardly used, and it is not in any case our responsibility.’

  ‘But the legacy is to the Friends, Mrs Hibbert,’ said the chairman, ‘and therefore the spending of the money is our responsibility.’

  ‘We have many other calls on our purse,’ Mrs Hibbert said.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ agreed the chairman, ‘but, with respect, you are forgetting that our benefactor specified that she wished some of her money to be spent on the hospital chapel –’

  ‘Then she should have left it to the hospital, or the church, whichever church looks after the chapel.’

  ‘But she didn’t, she left it to us, with this one request –’

  ‘It is only a matter of buying some paint to freshen the walls, and material for new altar curtains,’ a woman, timidly ventured.

  ‘That is not the point,’ Mrs Hibbert said. ‘The point is, it would be a waste of good money. Patients who go to the chapel, and precious few even know where it is, don’t care what the walls or curtains are like. They simply don’t notice such details.’

  ‘Far be it from me to question your k
nowledge, Mrs Hibbert, but how do you know this?’ the chairman asked.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Mrs Hibbert said. ‘I’ve witnessed patients there. They don’t notice anything. They go there as a last resort, depressed people who are desperate.’

  ‘Our benefactor’s husband was apparently a manic depressive,’ said the chairman.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Mrs Hibbert.

  ‘I’m not sure – I may be very stupid – that I do know where I am, where we are in this discussion,’ he said.

  ‘We are at the point when it ought to be obvious that newly painted walls and fresh curtains make no impression on depressed people –’

  ‘Mrs Hibbert,’ the chairman said, interrupting her for the first time, ‘I must emphasise that the legacy is bound by the terms surrounding it. Whether we approve or not is irrelevant, whether depressed patients will benefit or not is equally irrelevant.’

  ‘May I just add,’ Cecil said, quietly, ‘that in my experience not everyone who goes into a hospital chapel is depressed. Some patients go there to find peace and comfort. They may be frightened rather than depressed.’

  ‘Same thing,’ Mrs Hibbert snapped.

  Cecil took care to keep his tone light. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said.

  ‘Same thing,’ Mrs Hibbert repeated.

  ‘I beg to differ,’ Cecil said. ‘Fear and depression are not the same thing.’

  ‘They are linked,’ Mrs Hibbert said. ‘Depressed people are all frightened of something, or they wouldn’t be depressed. It might just be that they are afraid of their own inadequacy, but frightened they are, and their fear is what makes them depressed. Simple. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.’

  Nobody knew how to react. Embarrassment was as thick as smoke in the air. Cecil felt stunned, and then outraged, but before he could comment on how extraordinary he found Mrs Hibbert’s self-confident statement, the chairman took charge. Volunteers were called for to buy paint and material, and others to do the painting and sewing. They duly came forward and other business was moved on to. Throughout it, Cecil was acutely aware of Mrs Hibbert, sitting with a fearsomely straight back at his side, rigid with what he interpreted as hostility towards himself. He should not have spoken. The last thing he should have done was get drawn into any discussion about the causes of depression, and he was grateful that the chairman had put a stop to it before he had become properly engaged. But he pondered during the rest of the meeting over Mrs Hibbert’s views. What did she know about depression? It seemed most unlikely that she had ever suffered from it herself, but one never knew. At the end of the meeting, he tried to linger behind so as not to exit with his neighbour, but she waited for him at the door. ‘I wonder, Vicar,’ she said, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘if I could drive you back?’ Politely declining her offer, he pointed out that he had his own car. ‘I thought perhaps you were not up to driving yet,’ she said, in a tone of such sympathy that an irrational rage almost overcame him and he had to take refuge in a fit of coughing. ‘I’m quite well, thank you,’ he gasped at last.

  Longing to escape her attention he was nevertheless obliged to wait for the lift with her and one other person, a nurse. Everyone else had gone in other directions and it was too late to follow them. He stood in one corner of the lift when it came, and Mrs Hibbert in the other with the nurse in between. The moment the nurse got out, Mrs Hibbert asked if he had yet visited the hospital chapel. He said no, but that he was about to, when he’d attended to another matter (the last thing he wanted was for her to offer to take him there). ‘Strange places, hospital chapels,’ she said, just before the ground floor was reached, ‘but then the older I get, the stranger I find churches themselves. My late husband found churches inspiring, but I can’t say I have ever done so. I can do without them, my own faith is independent of them.’

  Cecil, watching Mrs Hibbert stalk off, thought he had enough clues now. The woman was one of those people, he deduced, who blamed the Church for some tragedy. They invariably resented that a relative or friend had found refuge in a church and appeared controlled by what they heard there. Either that, or they blamed a vicar for not being able to help their loved one in their hour of need. He’d been involved in a case like that himself. Once, a bereaved woman had hit him, shouting that her son had come to him for help and that he had been turned away, and that this had precipitated his suicide. It was all untrue, he had never turned anyone away, and he had spent hours with that particular young man (though it was true he had not been able to give him the answers he wanted to his impossible questions). But Mrs Hibbert did not seem like that grief-stricken mother. She seemed too sensible. On the other hand, as he reminded himself, the sensible can become foolish under intense strain, and he didn’t know enough about Mrs Hibbert to be familiar with what had happened in her past.

  The chapel in St Mary’s, when he did find his way there, was shabby. Complaints about the state of it were correct. The room itself was small, a mere slot of a room with a low ceiling, making it claustrophobic. Some of the polystyrene tiles were coming away from the ceiling, hanging limply and yet threateningly from the corners. The walls were panelled in fake wood which had been varnished a dull yellow. Only the cross on the little altar table denoted that the room was a chapel – otherwise, it could, with its sad rows of chairs, have been just another waiting-room. There was a faint antiseptic smell which he suspected came from a concealed air purifier, of the sort used in lavatories. There was no natural light, no windows. He pressed a switch near the door and a harsh fluorescent light dazzled him. Quickly, he put it out. He didn’t need such overpowering illumination. Leaving the door slightly ajar so that the light from the corridor gave him some sense of direction, he moved towards the altar and knelt before it. This chapel had, he was sure, witnessed much suffering and agony of mind, and it shamed the trivial nature of his own feelings about Mrs Hibbert. His irritation with her, and his aversion towards her, showed him how far he had yet to come in his constant battle with his own nature. Head bowed, he prayed for tolerance towards others and for the gift of being able to help those who wanted help.

  *

  Edwina, passing St Mary’s at the beginning of the long drive home, saw the vicar driving out of the car park. He had to wait at the lights, where the road she was on passed the main entrance, and she could see him clearly, his clerical collar standing out. He’d brought her luck, or rather her visit to his church had. That very day there had been a postcard from Emma – she’d gone home, upset at her own foolish behaviour, and there it had been, lying on the mat inside the door. It was a cheap, violently coloured card – the sea a garish turquoise, the sand impossibly white – and all it said was ‘Cheers! Love, Emma and Luke.’ It did exactly what it said, cheered her up. Scrutinising every inch of the card, she saw that it was from somewhere in Greece, though she couldn’t make out exactly where. The postmark was blurred and the name of the place written in what she recognised as Greek without being able to understand it.

  More cards followed, of the same beach. In fact, they were the same cards with the same message, only the date of the postmark different. Harry was not at all amused. It was, he said, a sign of laziness and of complete indifference to parental anxiety, but Edwina was determined to see it as a joke. She propped the cards up on the kitchen window-sill, and while she washed pans she smiled to see them – they were silly but amusing, surely. They meant Emma was safe and happy, and at least caring enough to establish some minimum contact. But the sight of these cards became less reassuring when, after another two weeks, nothing else had arrived. A month went by and then, just as Edwina was becoming truly worried and had taken the cards down, because suddenly they didn’t comfort her, a letter arrived. With it was a photograph of Emma and Luke, obviously taken in some kind of booth, maybe at an airport. It was only a tiny black and white snap, but Emma was smiling (Luke was sticking his tongue out) and looked happy and healthy. The letter was hardly a letter. It was, as Harry pointed out
, a paper serviette which had not taken the Biro very well. All it said was that Emma was having a brilliant time, the weather was heavenly, the swimming perfect, and that soon she and Luke would be travelling on but were not quite sure where.

  The next card was posted in Tripoli. It said ‘Africa! Yeah! On our way south!’ Edwina rushed for the atlas. South? South from Tripoli would mean Niger or Chad. The thought horrified her – she was sure Emma would not have had all the necessary inoculations against nasty diseases like cholera and yellow fever and typhoid. Surely, Luke would not think of taking her through those countries. For once, Harry was consoling. South, he said, would just mean in general south. They would probably work their way along the north African coast and go south through places like Egypt. Even so, Edwina could not sleep for images of Emma dying of thirst in the desert. Then another card arrived, from Gibraltar. ‘Whoops! Change of plan!’ it said. That was all. Gibraltar made Edwina happy. It was so near, so healthy. She could tolerate Emma being in Gibraltar easily, even with Luke (who, she tried to remind herself, she might have misjudged).

  She wondered, driving home, if she should perhaps ring Mrs Hibbert. It would be kind to let her know that Emma seemed safe, considering how concerned the woman had been when she disappeared. But then Edwina recalled that Mrs Hibbert had been not so much worried as furious that she had been let down. She suspected that Mrs Hibbert might be outraged rather than relieved to be told that Emma was having fun in Gibraltar. Better to do nothing. When Emma returned, she could go and apologise to Mrs Hibbert herself. An apology was what she most wanted.