Is There Anything You Want?

by Margaret Forster

  ‘Thank you for coming, sweetheart,’ her mother said, quickly.

  ‘What?’ said Sarah.

  ‘Thank you, dear, for coming. When you’re so busy, when you haven’t been well . . .’

  ‘No, I heard you, it’s your thanking me I can’t believe. I’m your daughter, Mum, I’m not some guest you have to be polite to. You shouldn’t even think of thanking me, you should be wondering why I don’t come often, why we don’t see each other all the time.’

  Her mother looked bewildered. ‘But it’s your father, he . . .’

  ‘I know why, Mum, that’s not what I’m asking.’

  Then suddenly, there was a noise, a roar, and the crash of something falling over. Her mother was up on her feet instantly and rushing to the door. ‘Dot! Dot! Where the hell are you?’ they both heard. Her mother turned to her as she went through the now opened door and said, ‘Sssh!’ and indicated in sign language that she should go out by the front door. She blew a kiss, and hurried down the hall to the living-room. Sarah stood and watched her reach the door and open it, and she heard again her father bellowing her mother’s name, and then her mother’s soothing tones, her ‘there, there’ and ‘just knocked the stool over’ and ‘cup of tea’, then a series of grunts from her father. She went on standing there, toying with the idea of confronting him. She could just march into that living-room and say she’d had enough of this ridiculous never-darken-my-doorstep stuff, and if he didn’t want anything to do with her, her mother did. But it would be useless. Her mother wouldn’t back her up. She wouldn’t say yes, Sarah is quite right and I won’t be forced into keeping her away. She would only cause more trouble, and her mother would suffer.

  Instead, she slipped along to the front door and, opening it with only a little click of the lock, left the house. Heaven to be outside. She almost jumped down the steps in one bound, so relieved to be free, but then as she began to walk along the street she was overcome with a vision of her mother trapped in that house with her bad-tempered, miserable father. She’d struggled for years to try to understand how such a union had come about. Once, she’d tried asking her aunt Phoebe, the eldest of her mother’s sisters, dead now. Phoebe hadn’t looked like Dot. She was much taller and stronger, and she had none of Dot’s nervousness – she was tough and sharp-tongued and independent-minded, a business woman running her own little empire, owning three hat shops and very successful with all of them. So Sarah, in early adolescence, when she was at her most bewildered and distressed about why her sweet, patient, gentle mother had married her sour, impossibly bad-tempered father, had begged Aunt Phoebe to tell her how and why it had happened. But Phoebe had been reluctant, for once, to talk. She had been discreet, though not entirely unhelpful. For answer, she had first pulled out an old photograph album and pointed silently at a picture of Adam Nicholson on his wedding day. Handsome, very. There was no doubt about his good looks. Tall, broad-shouldered, square jaw, thick black hair swept back from a noble brow . . . yes, handsome. ‘See?’ Aunt Phoebe had said, after Sarah had looked. ‘And he set his heart on our Dot, wouldn’t rest till he had her, she’d no say in the matter.’

  This was the bit Aunt Phoebe hadn’t been either able or willing to explain, the ‘no say in the matter’ part. Was it even true? ‘She can’t have married him just because he said she had to,’ the young Sarah had protested. ‘Ah, girl, you’ve a lot to learn,’ Aunt Phoebe had sighed. Sarah had said: ‘But she must have liked him, it can’t just have been his looks.’ ‘Well,’ Phoebe had said, carefully, ‘she did fall for him, he could be charming when he wanted. A lot’s happened since, Sarah, he’s changed, we all change. You can’t expect to see him as he was when he went after your mother.’ What had changed to account for her father now being so horrible? That had been her next question. Aunt Phoebe had asked if she knew why her mother had had only her, and Sarah had said that, of course, she knew about the first baby dying, how could she not when every anniversary was marked with visits to the cemetery and she was obliged to go too and put a posy of flowers in front of the small white marble headstone. ‘It hit your father hard,’ Phoebe had said. ‘For a man, he took it very hard, you’d be surprised. I’d never seen a big, grown man cry the way he cried when that baby boy died. Your mother cried too, of course she did, and she’d been through all the carrying and having of him, and she wasn’t well for months after the birth, but your father took it very hard. He couldn’t believe you’d survive when you came along, he was that anxious. But he couldn’t forget that boy. Nobody to follow him, I suppose, as he followed his father and grandfather, he knew a girl would never be a butcher.’

  All that had made some sort of sense to Sarah then. It was sad, of course it was, but she wouldn’t have it that it entirely accounted for the onset of his gloomy personality. She’d pressed Aunt Phoebe further and then heard more about his accident when he was 40, falling on an icy pavement when he was carrying a whole pig carcass into the shop and damaging his right shoulder so badly that he was never pain-free again. ‘Terrible thing, for a butcher,’ Phoebe had said. ‘He had to employ people to do the work he’d always done himself, and he didn’t like it, not at all, he wasn’t good with staff.’ Sarah could imagine that easily enough. And yet still, in spite of feeling some sympathy, none of these attempted explanations for why her father was as he was, were adequate. There must be something else, something Phoebe was holding back, to account for the degree of bullying and nastiness inflicted on her mother by her father.

  But if there was, and Phoebe knew of it, she wasn’t telling. There were no other useful relatives to bother with her questions. Her father’s one brother was unapproachable and Sarah hardly saw him, and both sets of grandparents, who might have been the most useful informants, were dead by the time she was old enough to want to grill them. She remembered her paternal grandparents clearly, though. They were both quiet and somehow shy with her, and she’d always been confused, thinking that they must surely be her mother’s parents, not her father’s, because they fitted in with her better. She liked them, liked visiting them in their cottage and playing with their two dogs, and collecting eggs from the chickens they kept. It was a mystery to her why her father never seemed to want to take her there – it was her mother who did – and even as a small child she’d noted something odd about the way Grandma Nicholson asked if Adam was all right, was he ‘behaving’, and the relief on her face when her mother had said he was fine, everything was fine.

  All I’ve ever learned, Sarah reflected as she got on the bus, is that my father is an embittered man who takes his bitterness out on my mother. What I’ve never been able to learn is why she not only allows this but seems to encourage it. Is it love? Or is it his need of her that she loves? She smiled, and saw her uncertain smile reflected in the bus window. She tried to concentrate on the idea that her mother loved her father, full stop. Loved him more than she loved her only child. Loved him differently, anyway. And I am making a big fuss about it, she thought, I’m jealous. I always have been, and I still am, even though I have someone now who loves me enough to make this not matter. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to get home and prepare a welcome for Mike – champagne, smoked salmon, his favourite olives, a feast. And a smile on her face, the one she’d been unable to put there weeks ago when the good news came.

  *

  She woke in the early hours of the morning and, though her head ached and she felt slightly sick, she still felt comfortably happy. Just before dawn she fell asleep again and didn’t hear the alarm go off or Mike get up and tiptoe out. There was a note from him on the pillow when she woke again, saying that he loved her and that last night had been ‘bliss’. She smiled as she read it. Really, it was easy to be happy. She’d been absurd not to realise this. She’d be late for work herself, but she didn’t care. Slowly, savouring her lightness of spirits, she got up and showered, unafraid to touch her own body, and went downstairs. The post had come. She saw the St Mary’s Hospital stamp on the buff envelope. Well, they’
d said they would send her an appointment for next year. She wasn’t afraid to open it. There it was, the date, the time, to be at the clinic. It was ages away. She wasn’t going to think about it, not for a single minute.

  But would she be able to help it, or would the same old anxiety grow?

  11

  Last Will and Testament

  MRS HIBBERT WORRIED about her will. She knew, through having worked so many years for a solicitor, all about the trouble caused when people of substance failed to make a will before they died. She also knew that ‘substance’ did not have to be very great either for the trouble to be considerable. Anyone who owned a house, anyone who had any investments, anyone who had any money at all in the bank: they should make a will. But her own mother, who had inherited everything when her husband died – he, of course, had made a will – had had a superstitious dread of leaving her affairs in similar good order. ‘In due course,’ she had said, when the family solicitor had tried to get her to make her will. She had never got round to it, and Mrs Hibbert’s sister, the long-suffering widowed Rose, who had returned home and so faithfully nursed her, got no more than the others.

  She intended there to be absolute clarity about her own will. There was quite a lot of money to leave, though she carefully concealed how wealthy she was. She had never even told Francis how much she was worth. Sometimes she had felt guilty about this, it did not seem quite right to conceal something so important from her husband, but they had separate bank accounts, in different banks, and she did not know what Francis was worth either. He never asked her for details, and she never asked him. They split bills between them and it all worked smoothly. When he died, she was astonished to find he left her so little because he had so little to leave. He left his sister £1,000 and his niece the same, and she got the rest. The rest was a mere £9,852. Knowing that Francis had had a good salary all his working life, Mrs Hibbert couldn’t think what he had done with his money. It rather troubled her: she didn’t like to dwell on it.

  She often thought how, if it had been the other way round and she had died before Francis, he would have been startled to discover how much he had been left – he probably wouldn’t have been able to credit it. In the first year after Francis’s death, she changed her will four times as some people, and various charities, went up and down in her estimation. It was a costly and exhausting business, but at the same time it gave her a sense of her own power which she relished. What she had also begun to relish was the secrecy. This had started when she decided to make a few personal bequests, to people she wished to reward. She loved thinking about how astonished and thrilled these lucky individuals would be, and could hardly refrain from giving them a few hints as to what was in store for them. She didn’t, though. She was especially careful not to give Dot a clue. Dot was to be left £5,000.

  Mrs Hibbert had a copy of the will, of course, and took it out every now and again, usually on a Sunday afternoon, to cast her eye over it. It helped her get through that day, which she disliked intensely. Sunday was the hardest day, especially in the winter – she was never going to forget a certain Sunday in January – when she came dangerously near to feeling depressed, which she absolutely would not allow. She had trained herself to study the local paper on Friday evening and mark any events which could serve as focal points for Sunday expeditions – open days at stately homes, concerts, meetings, flower shows – and she had been very successful at it. Most Sundays, she managed to have plans. But lately, nothing had seemed to appeal. She found herself up and dressed by nine o’clock on wet, dull Sunday mornings when gardening was out of the question, and she dreaded the hours to fill before something acceptable appeared on television. It made her cross with herself but she couldn’t help it.

  If only she had remained a church-goer, like Dot and Ida, then the problem of how to spend Sunday would have solved itself. All her childhood, Sunday had meant church, morning and evening, and no choice about it. Her family had had a pew right at the front and they always filled it. She’d felt quite proud as they all marched down the aisle to it, passing lesser mortals (like Ida and her grandmother, and Dot and her mother and sisters) who did not have a special pew. When she returned to the town she went only a few times, to show that she was back home as much as anything. It seemed embarrassing to be all alone in that prominent pew and she no longer liked to claim it. In her will, she had instructed that her remains were to be cremated and that there was to be no service. The last burial service she had attended had been her husband’s and she had been deeply shocked by the new words used. If she had known that the traditional service was not to be followed she would have objected, but by the time she heard the flat, ordinary phrases of the modern prayer book it was too late. What had been done to the beautiful language of the old prayer book was unforgivable. As she was always telling Dot, the reasons she didn’t attend church were not to do with having lost her faith – she was not an atheist, or even an agnostic – but with the mess the Church had got itself into.

  It had been hard, having to follow Francis’s wishes as laid out in the will he’d written a couple of years before. He’d wanted a full-scale church funeral and had used to tease her about it, saying he certainly didn’t want to go anywhere near one of those unspeakably ugly crematoriums. He wanted her to play the part of grieving widow to perfection . . . ‘the deepest black imaginable, including a veil,’ he’d said, laughing. It was not a joking matter, as she’d told him when he vowed to have this written in his will, but she had done what he had wanted. Indeed, to her surprise, there was some small comfort in doing so. She bought a very expensive black cashmere-and-wool coat, black court shoes, black leather handbag and quite a large black hat with a veil so thick she could hardly see through it and felt like a beekeeper. When she did peer at herself in the mirror before leaving for the church, she thought she looked like the late Queen Mother at the funeral of her husband George VI (which, actually, had been a rather flattering comparison even if she’d had to make it herself). The church had been full of flowers (not lilies, but roses, as decreed by Francis) and lit by dozens of candles, though it was not a Roman Catholic church. She’d wept, but nobody saw, because of the veil, so after all she’d been grateful for it. But the whole business had been a terrible ordeal.

  By avoiding a funeral for herself, she was avoiding humiliation after death. This pleased her. The avoidance of humiliation was not the same thing, in Mrs Hibbert’s opinion, as having pride. She was often too proud to submit to certain indignities but could, nevertheless, be humiliated by having them imposed upon her, and it was important to resist. Humiliation for the single, elderly woman lurked everywhere. It was at its worst in hospitals. Her feeling for the women she guided to the clinic during her work as a Friend arose out of her own experiences at the hands of doctors, though she never spoke of them. She knew her own body was not a pretty sight (though she also knew that, unlike her face, it once had been), but she didn’t want the attitude or expression of a doctor to tell her that. Even when she was dead, she wished to retain her privacy, and so in her will she had even described the nightdress she wished her corpse to be clothed, and burned, in. It was an exquisite garment, of finest lawn cotton, with lace at the neck and the cuffs, and lots of tiny tucks across the bodice which fastened with minute pearl buttons. It was the very devil to iron, but she’d enjoyed doing it. She’d only ironed it twice, once before the only time she’d worn it and once after it had been washed, later. It was lying ready, wrapped in tissue paper in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers in her bedroom. The night she’d worn it had been her wedding night. If she had been anticipating the loss of her virginity then she would never have chosen such a nightdress, but it had seemed to her appropriate to the occasion. Francis had admired it, and she’d been pleased.

  Both sides of her family had cared about clothes. No Lawson or Ellis ever looked scruffy – even the working clothes (of those few who had really worked) had been neat and appropriate to the task in hand. The weal
thier members, particularly on the Lawson side, had worn tailored garments of good fabric and she had inherited their taste for these. The shoddy workmanship of so many modern garments appalled her – seams coming apart, hems fraying, buttons hanging by a thread. The clothes she herself had were good clothes, properly made, and made to last. She looked after them well, as she had been taught. She’d been brought up always to lay out the clothes she would wear the next day on the night before and to check each item for cleanliness and for its state of repair. Any hole or tear discovered had to be mended before going to bed, or else another garment selected. In the days of silk stockings, she’d learned how to mend ladders and was an expert at darning the heels of woollen ones. She’d also been trained to match colours carefully. Coordination was important, the picking out of a red thread in a patterned red-and-grey-black skirt by the choice of an exactly matching red blouse, for example. Mrs Hibbert was very good at this. She never had to take a skirt with her to find a match for it – she could carry the colour in her head. Many elderly women, she had noticed, seemed to decide to forgo colours and stick to navy and black and brown and grey, but she remained faithful to the vibrant pinks and reds and blues she loved so much. The only colour she kept away from was yellow. Her cousin Roberta had pointed out years and years ago: ‘Marigold, yellow does to you what navy does to me.’ She hadn’t known what her cousin meant but she’d understood the message and never worn yellow again. It had seemed hard, in the circumstances, to be named after a yellow flower.

  There was a bit in her will about clothes. Clothes made a statement, after all. One of her great terrors was that when she died her clothes would be taken to a charity shop and she absolutely could not bear, dead though she would be, the thought of Adelaide Priest or Lucy Binns or Mrs Jarrett getting their hands on her clothes, pawing them, pricing them, and hanging them on those ruinous wire hangers. What she would really have liked to decree was that everything should be burned in her own garden, one great big pyre of clothes blazing away down in the far corner beyond the rhubarb patch. But that would be a waste, positively sinful. There were Harris tweed skirts of the finest quality among her things, and cashmere jumpers, and fine lambswool cardigans, and silk underwear that had cost so much money she’d felt guilty at indulging herself for garments no one would see except herself. She had tossed and turned many nights, trying to solve this dilemma, and had then come across a solution quite by accident. In the local paper, the amateur dramatic society had advertised for clothes of good quality, any clothes, to be given to it for use in future productions. Mrs Hibbert knew it was odd, but she had immediately been attracted by the idea of an actress wearing her clothes. She spent a happy few minutes every now and again imagining the kind of plays for which her wardrobe might be suitable – Terence Rattigan’s Separate Tables, perhaps, or anything by J. B. Priestley. It made her smile with pleasure to think of her clothes lovingly looked after by a wardrobe mistress.