Is There Anything You Want? (12 page)

‘Listen,' the woman said, whispering, ‘listen, I've something to tell you, something personal. I've got cancer. There. Did you hear me, did you hear what I just told you?'

‘Yes,' Rachel said, startled and horrified, and this time she did manage to stand up, yanking sharply at her jacket.

‘Don't run off,' the woman said, ‘it isn't infectious. You can spare me the time of day, can't you? You can give me five minutes when I've told you something like that. You've got a heart, haven't you?'

‘I'm catching a bus,' Rachel mumbled.

‘Then sit down, you've a long wait, there isn't another for half an hour, I know the buses round here. What are you frightened of? Why can't you sit?'

‘I'm not frightened,' Rachel said, but she did sit down again. The woman, she'd seen, was not old or senile, and in spite of the bottle and the smell, her eyes were sharp enough to show she was not really drunk.

‘I am,' the woman said. ‘I'm frightened. Wouldn't you be? Told you've got cancer? Told there's nothing can be done about it, and you're going to die?'

‘Yes,' said Rachel, hating having to respond at all.

‘Well then, there you are. That's what it's about, that's why I'm making an exhibition of myself.' Rachel noticed that the words were not slurred so much as spoken very slowly, each one carefully enunciated. The woman gave a little cough, and then groaned. ‘Have you got a good doctor, dear?' she asked.

‘I think so,' Rachel said.

‘I haven't. My doctor's crap. Eight weeks, and still no X-rays.'

Rachel knew this didn't make sense, but she kept quiet. She had given the woman a couple of minutes, and that was enough. ‘I'll have to go,' she said. ‘If there isn't a bus, I'll have to walk.'

‘Meeting someone, are you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where?'

‘In town.'

‘A man, is it?'

‘Yes,' Rachel lied.

‘Good luck to you, then. Go on then, run away. I'd run away if I could. I would, I'd run away, run, run, run, rabbit, run.' She drained the bottle and handed it to Rachel. ‘Here, put it in the waste bin over there. I like to be tidy. I might have cancer, well excuse me I
do
have cancer, but you won't catch me chucking bottles about. Off you go then.'

Rachel took the proffered bottle, standing in front of the woman now, facing her and able to see her clearly for the first time. Her face was bloated, her skin poor, but it had obviously been pretty once. It seemed cruel to leave her on the bench, without even the comfort of her lager, and looking as if she was going to fall asleep any minute. Indeed, as soon as she was relieved of the bottle, she put her hands in her pockets, and her head fell forward and she started to snore. Rachel stood and
stared at her, wondering what to do. She looked around desperately, but there was no one else about. The woman, she reasoned, couldn't actually come to any harm – she would just sleep off the lager in the sun and then wake up and make her own way to wherever she lived. There was no need to feel she had any responsibility for her, no obligation to look after her. Her sleeping was perfectly healthy.

Slowly, Rachel walked, not to the road to wait for a bus, but towards the steps. She kept looking round at the slumped figure on the bench until the steps took her out of view, and even then she didn't feel comfortable. Distracted, she went back over the bridge and then took the river path once more, thinking that she'd never seen anyone in the clinic in the state that woman was in. No woman had ever arrived there drunk, or if they had been drinking it was never evident. Afterwards, maybe, some rushed to the bottle, but she doubted it – there was something about the clinic experience that made the thought of alcohol sickening. Her stomach wouldn't have tolerated it. What would the woman have said if Rachel had told her that she too had cancer? But she knew that never, under any circumstances, would she have done what that woman had just done, chosen to tell a stranger. The idea appalled her. It was no one's business but her own.

She went home by a different route, turning left at the end of the river path to make her way through the old warehouses, now being converted into expensive flats. Some workmen high up on scaffolding looked down and whistled at her and shouted, ‘Hello, gorgeous!' She shouldn't have laughed but couldn't help it – they sounded not so much offensive as cheerful, harmless, just having a bit of fun. She was still smiling when she came out unavoidably at the bottom of the hill crowned by the main building of the hospital. A woman who was coming down the path leading from it almost bumped into her. She was half running, and not looking where she was going, and when she grazed Rachel's shoulder as she rushed past, she said, ‘Sorry.' Her eyes were full of tears. Rachel walked on, no longer smiling but thinking now not about the stranger on the bench but this other stranger, escaping from the hospital and on the edge of
weeping. She thought how odd it was that crying was almost encouraged when one was given bad news. It was definitely all right to cry when you were told you had cancer. She remembered how the doctor's voice had lowered and softened dramatically – it was laughable, that special ‘caring', creepy tone. It had made her scornful, and probably the contempt she had felt had shown in her face.

Walking through the park, she tried to shake off this memory and all the other musings to do with cancer – it was so maddening to find her head full of the subject when she'd set out determined to enjoy a long walk without a thought of it. She was sick of it, this constant, repetitive going over of old ground. She didn't want to do it, she wanted to fill her mind with other concerns. Work, for example.

On Monday, she was going to represent a client before an employment tribunal. It was a case of unfair dismissal and she was looking forward to fighting it. Her client was a funny little woman, not impressive in appearance and with an unfortunate stutter which sometimes made what she said unintelligible. But the story she had to tell had roused Rachel to fury on her behalf and she had worked long hours meticulously amassing evidence of malicious treatment by the client's employer. She was going to show him for what he was: a bully, a cheat, a man who had done his best to humiliate and distress her client in order to make her resign, and then, when he had failed, had concocted the most absurd charge of negligence against her, giving him grounds for dismissal. Rachel could hardly wait to stand up and face him.

But before that, there was a weekend ahead, and the Sunday would see her begin to do something she had wanted to do for a long time. She was going to learn to fly, to fly a glider. She was going to learn to get as near to the flight of a bird as possible, to soar over fields and rivers in perfect peace and quiet, leaving all the cares of earth behind.

STANDING IN HER
garden, waiting for the girl to arrive, Mrs Hibbert watched a small plane fly away to the east, towards the aerodrome, and then she looked at the lilac trees. She had three lilac trees, two of the purple variety and one white. She had planted them herself when she first bought her house and they had thrived over the years so that now they were indeed proper trees and not bushes. She loved them, both for their scent and their beautifully shaped blossoms. She filled jugs with the lilac she picked and distributed throughout her rooms so that the whole house smelled of them – intoxicating!

Her grandfather had wanted her to be named ‘Lilac', a ridiculous idea, laughed to extinction by her mother. Nobody was called Lilac. Rose (her sister's name), Daisy, Iris, Violet, Lily – plenty of flowers gave their names to girls, but not lilac. It was her Grandfather's fault, though, that she had been christened not Mary (the name she told people was hers) but Marigold. Her parents had found Marigold acceptable, and they had wanted to please the old (and wealthy) man. Besides, they had quickly seen that Marigold could be shortened to Mari and, when grandfather Lawson died, turned into Mary, which was precisely what happened. She hated her real Christian name, though liked the flower and always had marigolds in her borders. All massed together they made a gloriously cheerful sight. Francis had been
amused when, on their wedding day, she had been obliged to divulge it. He had often thereafter-referred to her as his sunny little marigold, usually when she was being cross. It had made her laugh, and brought her out of her temper.

Nobody called her Marigold now, and only Dot addressed her as Mary. To everyone else, she was Mrs Hibbert, and proud of it. She couldn't understand the modern fashion for married women keeping their maiden names and being known as Miss or, absurdly, Ms. Her status as a married woman had pleased her and once she had been widowed the prefix ‘Mrs' had comforted her. It meant nobody could mistake her for a spinster. She remembered how her grandfather used to refer to his own wife as Mrs Lawson when in company, never as Clara, even if those present were family. As well as a liking for formality, it was from her grandfather she had inherited a love of gardens and gardening.

His garden had been a work of art (that was how it had been referred to locally, in the most reverential way). It was not part of his house, which had only a thin strip of land round it, but was separated from it by a field. The garden he had created was enclosed by a wall, built with mellow, old yellow bricks. Along the outside he'd planted pear trees so that in the spring the wall was almost obliterated by white blossom. It was quite a walk to the garden, across the road (a quiet, little-used road, barely wide enough for a large car) then along a track down the side of the field and over a stream at the bottom. Her grandfather enjoyed the walk, liked seeing the cows grazing. He owned the field, and all the fields surrounding his garden, and let them out to farmers to graze cattle or sheep. Because of the trees and the high, solid wall, these animals were no threat to his garden, entered through strong oak doors. It was always exciting for Mari to watch her grandfather lift up the metal bar which held the double doors together and step over the threshold to be met, in the summer, by the sight of scores of rose bushes, all of them in shades of red. He would walk her round the roses, telling her their names, and it was like a kind of poetry, reciting them after him.

The roses grew wild and straggly when he died. Mari's father
had wanted to sell the garden itself and the fields, but her mother, Irene, had protested that this would be an act of vandalism, so her father had agreed to keep the garden (though he went ahead and sold the fields except the one giving access to the garden) with one proviso: Irene should be responsible for its upkeep. This alarmed Irene who knew nothing at the time about gardening, but she agreed. She kept on Mr Thompson, who had been Grandfather Lawson's chief gardener, and hired a young boy, Adam Nicholson, the local butcher's son, to help him. She got Mr Thompson (though he thought it a form of heresy, and muttered on about its being a scandal) to dig up most of the roses and began to plant shrubs instead. She liked lavatera and lavender and other flowering shrubs. She also had Mr Thompson make a little pond at the far end of the garden and round this she grew purple iris and blue-flowering hostas. Her whole idea was to create a natural, graceful bower and do away with the formality of the rigid rows of roses. Blues and pinks were her favourite colours and she was delighted when bluebells naturalised (Mr Thompson had vowed they would not) and forget-me-nots flourished. It took several years, but by the time Mary was ten, her mother had the kind of garden she wanted.

Mary used to go with her mother down to the garden every day in the spring and summer. She would come home from school – this was before she went to boarding-school – and change her clothes, and hand-in-hand the two of them would set off, her mother carrying a basket to fill with flowers for the house. Mary was always glad when she could see that neither Mr Thompson nor Adam was in the garden. She wasn't afraid of Mr Thompson, it was just that she felt awkward when he spoke to her because she couldn't understand his accent, but she was afraid of Adam Nicholson. He was a big boy, bigger than she, though they were roughly the same age, and he had a habit of stopping whatever he was doing to stare at her in the most disconcerting way. He stared first at her feet (which were large, she knew, but not monstrously so) and then slowly moved his stare up her body, taking a very long time to get to her face. When he did, he always dropped his stare and turned away. It
made her blush. She thought him impudent, and complained to her mother. Her mother had a word with Mr Thompson, and the next time she met Adam in the garden, sent there early one evening to deliver a message to Mr Thompson, he blocked her path. She'd told him to get out of her way, but he'd stood his ground, and stared. It was she who stepped off the path and ran home, telling her mother she couldn't find Mr Thompson. She said nothing about Adam, feeling, as she did, confused about her feelings, and sensing she'd somehow lost a peculiar contest of wills.

Irene taught Mary how to prune and graft, how to nurture seeds, how to treat the various diseases to which plants were prone. When people asked Mary what she wanted to be when she grew up she said: ‘A gardener.' This amused them, but she was not taken seriously. Gardening, for a girl, was a pleasant enough hobby in the 1930s and 1940s – it went with being a home-maker – but it was not a career. A career, in any case, was not something the Lawson parents envisaged for their daughters. A daughter's role was to stay at home and look after her parents in due course. One of them might get married. Till that happened, they could both occupy themselves with church activities and good works in the neighbourhood. It was their brothers who would have the careers, one in law, one in business.

The Second World War changed things for the Lawson girls. The fortunes of the family suffered a reversal of a kind Mary never quite understood – suddenly, her parents were no longer well-off and Grandfather Lawson's money had been used up. She did once ask what exactly had happened to cause the frightening talk of tightening belts and doing without, but nobody ever enlightened her. She had hoped to go into the sixth form but was abruptly taken out of school when she was 16, in 1946, and was told she must get a job to help out. ‘What job?' she had asked her father, and he had been cross. ‘Any job,' he'd said, ‘anything that will bring in a little money.' To say this was a shock was not precisely true – ‘shock' implied something unpleasant, and Mary had not thought of it like that. She'd been excited at the prospect of being allowed to
earn money.
Until, that
is, she tried to do so and found how hard it was going to be. Once more she had ventured to suggest she could find employment as a gardener, but her father had been furious, saying they had not come to that yet, that he felt disgraced enough by having to tell her and Rose to get jobs without having to witness his daughter being a manual labourer.