Is There Anything You Want?

by Margaret Forster

  She still had the blue frock she’d worn for her wedding day thirty years ago. It was a very pale blue with a white broderie anglaise collar and cuffs, and it had a deep blue soft leather belt which had emphasised her slim waist. She’d fretted that it might be too girlish for a woman of 40, but she hadn’t been able to resist it. Over the frock, she had worn a dark blue linen coat, and of course she had worn a hat. She would have kept the hat (she had a vast collection of them) which was a pretty navy blue straw trimmed with a white grosgrain ribbon but, unfortunately, Francis had inadvertently sat on it in the train and ruined its shape for ever.

  They hadn’t had a proper honeymoon, but then they hadn’t had what others might call a proper wedding. She and Francis had married in a register office. She couldn’t bear the thought of looking foolish in a church, walking down the aisle at her age, and Francis wanted only to do what she wanted. They had a blessing later in church, which Francis had wanted, discreetly arranged on a weekday morning. Only Francis’s sister and her husband were present at the register office, as witnesses. She’d worried that it might all feel hole-in-the-corner, furtive, but it hadn’t done. They’d had lunch afterwards at an hotel, and then immediately departed for Bath. Francis’s choice. He’d called her Mrs Hibbert at every opportunity and she’d loved it.

  The complicated train journey (they had to change twice) was something of an ordeal. She’d felt tense the whole time, worrying about the night ahead. She knew quite well that Francis would imagine she was an aged virgin, terrified of sex. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t a virgin and she wasn’t terrified of sex. It troubled her profoundly that she had not told him about her previous experience and nor had she tried to explain her extremely complicated feelings towards him. It was a case of loving him, but . . . and that ‘but’ somehow too dangerous to expand on.

  She had once been a very foolish girl. No one would believe it of her, but she had acted completely out of character in a ridiculously silly way. Whenever she thought of this episode in her past (which occurred soon after she had started working in Manchester), she felt herself blushing. Gradually, she’d trained herself to blot out the memory, so that by the time she had become such friends with Francis she hardly thought of it at all. But deciding to marry him had resulted in such constant flashbacks to what had happened with Stephen Fleming, a man she’d met at the Gardening Club she’d joined, that she had struggled to control the impulse to tell Francis about it. What had stopped her was not knowing how to tell him – it was a question of language again. Only ugly words came into her head when she thought of trying to describe how she had felt about Stephen, words like ‘besotted’. Nor could she bring herself to use the modern phrase ‘fancied him’. She hadn’t been that young either, certainly not young enough to excuse the madness which had overtaken her. She’d been 26, young but not a teenager. Stephen was 42, and though she didn’t know when she set her cap at him – yes, she’d made the first advance, another thing impossible to admit to Francis in any words whatsoever – a married man with three children.

  Stephen had not been to blame, or only a little, in that he didn’t confess he was married when first she asked him out. She’d bought tickets for a concert and then lied and said her friend was ill and couldn’t accompany her and would he like to? He’d said he’d be charmed, and offered to pay for his ticket but, of course, she hadn’t allowed that. It was 1959, women didn’t take the lead like that, and doing so, having the nerve, had excited her. Nothing happened after the concert. They had a drink, and he saw her home and bade her a polite good night. But then, a week later, when she had learned how to function in spite of it, he asked her if she’d like to go to the theatre, to see Much Ado About Nothing. Nothing happened afterwards. For weeks they went together to plays, concerts, art exhibitions, even lectures. She knew by then that he was married, but she didn’t let that put a stop to her hopes, as it ought to have done. Still nothing happening. By the end of the summer, she was longing for him to seduce her (that was the word she used to herself, and shivered) but beyond a friendly kiss and some hand-holding, there was nothing.

  This was the worst bit. She’d invited him to have tea one Sunday afternoon. A cold autumn day. They’d been glad to come in from the park out of the bitter east wind which had sent the leaves whirling round them as they’d walked. They’d toasted crumpets in front of the fire. She’d spilled her tea, deliberately, and she’d taken her blouse off in front of him, pretending the tea was scalding her. Her breasts had always been her best feature. His face had changed, and he’d given a sigh and held out his arms and she’d thrown herself into them. Thrown herself. ‘I’m married, Mary . . .’ he’d reminded her, and she’d said she didn’t care, and at that moment she didn’t. He’d started to say other things, but she’d stopped his mouth with her kisses. He’d tried to resist, but she wouldn’t let him, she’d given him no option. She’d wanted him to make love to her so badly, but ‘love’ was not exactly what was made. He took her virginity, as she had wanted him to, but the experience was not what she had imagined. She’d been left utterly confused and he’d been so apologetic, saying over and over again how sorry he was, how thoughtless he’d been. She’d told him it didn’t matter, without stopping to wonder what it was that didn’t matter. All that excitement she’d felt, all that thrilling need, had somehow ended in pain and mess. The tidying up of themselves had been awful, the disarray of their clothes acutely embarrassing. He had been so crestfallen, and in such a hurry to leave, with yet another litany of sorrys. She’d taken a long time to calm herself, and had only managed to hold the tears back by assuring herself that next time would be better.

  But there was never a next time. She never heard from Stephen again. She’d been left desolate, inconsolable, and with a feeling that she’d humiliated herself. For the next eight years, till she met Francis, she had trouble making friends with any man, afraid as she was that she would once more come to want physical affection which would lead to another disaster. No man, in fact, ever made any romantic approach, though there were a couple who did become friends and she was glad of their company. Platonic friendships, she concluded, were the best kind. It relieved her not to be in any danger of becoming ‘besotted’ again and it made her realise how special Stephen had been to arouse such feelings in her. Sometimes, with one man in particular, she had found herself half hoping an approach would be made, just to test her response, but it never happened. It must, she decided, have just been Stephen who could have this effect on her, and that made her pursuit of him seem not so wrong. Sad, but not wrong, to have given herself to the one man capable of bringing her to a state of such passion.

  Passion, she discovered in those years, did not exist on its own. She was not plagued by merciless feelings of frustration, though occasionally, usually after watching a film or reading a book, she would experience a slightly disturbing racing of the pulse and an uneasy shifting inside herself which she rather dreaded and tried to quieten with physical exercise. This worked, and she was grateful, fearing what might have happened if she had stayed still and found her body wanting something she didn’t care to think about. Was it a waste, to suppress whatever it was she was suppressing? She didn’t know, and felt she could now never know, and so she should be sensible and not dwell on it. It hurt though, when people took it for granted that she knew nothing of desire and had her labelled as frigid. Sometimes she was tempted to put them right, but always resisted this temptation, and in any case, as she settled into accepting she was never going to be attracted to anyone that way ever again, it was not so hard to allow herself to be wrongly categorised. By the time Francis came into her life, she had convinced herself that even fantasies of a passionate nature were over.

  This, then, had been the problem with Francis. When he touched her, there was none of the immediate response she had experienced with Stephen. He could hold her hand, or kiss her (both these gestures lightly done), and she felt nothing. He was a handsome (though more beautiful than handsome
) man, but his looks were immaterial. What she felt in Francis’s company was comfortable, and this seemed highly significant to her because she was rarely truly comfortable or relaxed in anyone’s company. She was always aware, to a lesser or greater extent, of playing a part, or performing. Francis required no such falseness. He made her laugh (not something she did a great deal) and he shared so many of her interests that they matched each other perfectly. He was intelligent of course, and far better educated than herself, but he never flaunted his Oxford degree. They got on famously. In due course, they swopped personal histories, as people do, and she fully expected to hear that, like Stephen, he was married, or at least that he had had lots of girlfriends, because it did not seem likely that such a man could have remained unattached, but he appeared to have had no significant girlfriend. It was puzzling. Eventually, when they had got beyond the need for tact about such queries, she asked him why. He said he expected it was because he hadn’t met the right woman.

  It took him a long time to convince her that she was the right woman. When he first suggested marriage (suggested it, rather than actually proposed) he had done so in such an offhand way that she had been rather offended. He’d said it would be the ‘obvious’ thing to do since they spent so much time in each other’s company. She’d replied that she could see nothing obvious about it, and that she was perfectly happy with how things were. Then the lease on his flat came up and he said he thought he would buy another in the block where she lived, ‘Or I could move in with you. What do you think?’ he’d added. She’d said she didn’t think that would be a good idea. Her flat was small. It only had one bedroom. He’d laughed, and apologised, and said, of course, what had he been thinking of. But what had he been thinking of? She wondered. What exactly was going on? They were friends, companions, colleagues (though she, by then a legal assistant, was not to be ranked beside him, a solicitor) but they were not lovers, nor ever would be. At least, not as far as she was concerned. Yet more and more she’d felt she did love Francis, and the thought of spending the rest of her life living with him was attractive. Except for the awkwardness of not being physically attracted to him in the way she remembered being attracted to Stephen. It made her hesitate. It was an awful thing for anyone, man or woman, to have to tell another: I do not think I find you attractive enough to sleep with (though the sleeping part would be no bother – another failure of language).

  There was also the age factor. She was five years older than Francis. Not worth mentioning if it had been the other way round, but somehow embarrassing because it was not. There was one woman in the office who, noting the friendship between her and Francis, had made a comment about cradle-snatching. It was clearly meant as a joke, and Mary had to take it as such or else reveal how much this hurt. If she and Francis got married then she would have to endure expressions like that from others and she didn’t relish the prospect. It didn’t help that she looked older than her years and Francis considerably younger than his – they would always strike people as oddly matched. He might be thought to be her brother rather than her husband. She pointed this out to him and he said he couldn’t believe that she cared what people thought. He said that, for his part, he would be happy to share a flat or house with her without being married, but he assumed she wouldn’t be comfortable with this arrangement, with her prim fears of what people would think, and so marriage was the solution, ‘to make it decent’, he teased.

  What had persuaded her to marry him after all, in spite of her worries, had been finding the house. Francis had been living, after the lease on his flat ran out, in part of a vicarage where an old friend from Oxford was the curate, but a few months into this arrangement the friend was moved elsewhere and Francis had to leave. He said he was tired of renting and wanted to buy a place, and she’d gone house-hunting with him to help him decide. They looked at awful flats and maisonettes and then, one snowy Saturday, they went to see a small house which was being sold in a hurry (they never knew the reason). The house was indeed small, only two bedrooms and a not very large living-room and kitchen, but the garden was huge. In spite of the snow, they could both see how mature it was, with trees and shrubs they recognised under their icy coverings, and the suspicion of massed roses all along the surrounding walls. It was the garden that did it. Francis sighed and said he couldn’t afford the house, though he would love it, and she found herself saying, ‘I could contribute.’ After that, not to live in the house and enjoy the garden with him seemed ridiculous. She had agreed that marriage was the only way to make this respectable.

  Once the decision had been made, she’d been surprised how happy she’d felt about it. It was Francis who had brought up the matter of what would happen after they were married. She’d been acutely aware that he appeared to think that she would want reassurance that nothing would change. Didn’t she agree, he’d asked, that friendship, companionship, shared interests and genuine affection were enough for any marriage? She’d said that yes, of course she did. He’d seemed so relieved. ‘We’ll go on just as we are,’ he’d said, ‘no need to worry that getting married will spoil anything.’ She ought to have challenged that. She ought to have asked him to explain himself because she didn’t really understand what he was getting at. But what had held her back were the suspicions she had about Francis which she did not want confirmed. She had been cowardly and everything that had followed had been her fault. The fact that her suspicions had been quite wrong made it all the worse.

  It was exciting keeping their wedding day secret from everyone they worked with – they’d had bets as to who would notice her wedding ring first. Both of them had been wrong. It wasn’t one of the women. It was one of the senior partners, Mr Mason. She took a sheaf of papers in to him and as she placed them on his desk he’d said, ‘Why, Miss Lawson, do I see a happy event has taken place?’ He congratulated her profusely, luckily in the privacy of his office, and asked to whom was she now married. When she told him, his astonishment was almost comical. He stared at her, his mouth literally open in surprise, and then coughed and spluttered and said, ‘Dear me’ several times and ended this confusion with ‘How very extraordinary’. It was impossible not to feel offended, but when she described Mr Mason’s reaction to her news to Francis, watching his expression closely, he laughed. ‘Probably thought I wasn’t good enough for you,’ he said, but she’d felt that wasn’t what Mr Mason had thought at all.

  Other colleagues were equally amazed but much more tactful. There was a hurried whip-round, and at the end of the week she was presented with some modest gifts – a pair of wooden salad servers, a coffee pot, some linen table napkins and a vase. They were nicely wrapped and had cheerful messages written on the tags attached to them. Mrs Hibbert kept the tags. Nobody sniggered when Mr Gilbert, the other senior partner, made a little speech, and there were no lewd jokes. Everyone was perfectly polite, and called her Mrs Hibbert thereafter in an easy, natural way. She quickly decided that it had been a very good idea to marry. She’d lost nothing by it, and gained a great deal. Francis had his bedroom in the newly purchased house and she had hers and there was none of the awkwardness she had feared. The only tremor of unease she had experienced had been when they’d arrived at the hotel in Bath. They found they had been booked into a room with a double bed. But Francis had acted quickly. He had immediately produced from his wallet a letter from the hotel confirming his booking of a room with two beds, and the matter had been put right at once. He had slept in one bed, she in the other and, though she slept badly, he had slept well, never moving all night. They had each dressed and undressed in the bathroom without any agreement to do so being necessary.

  At home, they had separate bedrooms. Separate bedrooms had not turned out to mean an entire absence of physical contact though. They always embraced when they said good night, and when they watched television together they sat thigh-to-thigh, with Francis’s arm round her shoulders. They kissed sometimes, though not on the lips, just friendly kisses on each other’s cheeks. There wa
s absolutely no comparison with how Stephen had kissed her. She wondered if their marriage was one of what was termed ‘convenience’, and somehow didn’t like the idea. Convenience there might be, but it was not the whole story – there was real feeling, and regard of a high order, in their relationship. Their marriage did not feel a sham even if in one respect she was bound to admit it might qualify as such. Who was to say every marriage should be the same?

  She knew, though, that Francis and she seemed odd as a married couple, there was no point in pretending they didn’t. Doubtless a certain amount of prurient speculation went on at work, and it certainly did in the mind of her sister-in-law. Sandra had once tried to have a conversation of an unpleasantly intimate nature with her, during the one weekend she and Francis had stayed with her and her husband Brian. She’d chosen the Saturday evening, when the men had walked along to the village pub (not that Francis had wanted to go but he was indulging Brian). Sandra lit the log fire and said, ‘Let’s be cosy.’ Mrs Hibbert had no desire to be any such thing but she was trying that weekend to be amenable and pleasant. She’d hardly met Sandra – only that short time on her wedding day – and wanted to get to know her, for Francis’s sake. Sandra was all the family he had and he seemed fond of his sister though not close to her. So the two of them had sat in front of the fire, one on either side, and apart from the glow from a pink silk-covered lamp in the far corner of the room, the only light was from the crackling flames. Sandra was knitting a jumper for her little daughter Chrissie, and Mrs Hibbert had been reading but had given up because she was straining her eyes and yet didn’t want to risk spoiling the ‘cosiness’ by asking for more light. Sandra chatted as she knitted, hardly pausing between anecdotes, illustrating the infant Chrissie’s precocious talents, and accounts of how she had been cheated in the butcher’s. Asked to agree how difficult it was to match embroidery silks and required to give her opinion on the best way to worm dogs, Mrs Hibbert had struggled to say anything at all. Then the impertinent questions had begun.