Is There Anything You Want? (27 page)

‘Oh, this is nice, this is a treat,' her mother said, ‘but if only I could make you a cup of tea and get a bit of cake. I think I could, Sarah, he's sound asleep. I could nip into the kitchen and make some tea in no time.'

‘No,' said Sarah. ‘No, Mum, I don't want any tea, thanks. How have you been, then?'

‘Not so bad,' her mother said, smiling. ‘Mustn't complain. But your father, he's . . .'

‘I don't want to hear about him. I want to hear about you.'

‘Oh, I'm fine, a bit tired, but at my age it's to be expected, getting tired, a bit breathless sometimes. I'm fine. And you, Sarah? You look well, your cheeks are pink, lovely.'

‘I've been walking. I walked from the crossroads, it's the fresh air. In fact, I haven't been well, it's quite serious that's why I got Mike to ring you. I had a lump in my breast again.' She saw her mother flinch, and then she gave a little cough, a sign, Sarah knew, of embarrassment. Breast was not a word used in the Nicholson household. She should have said ‘chest' – how ludicrous it would have sounded, a lump in my chest, but not to her mother.

‘But it was all right, I expect, it was harmless, I expect,' her mother said, her face eager with hope.

‘Yes, this time,' Sarah said. ‘But they want to keep an eye on me at the hospital, at the clinic there. I have to keep going back.'

Her mother, to her surprise, nodded. ‘They're very careful,' she said. ‘Mary Hibbert told me, she works there, you know . . .'

‘Not
works,
Mum, you make her sound like a doctor or a nurse. She's only a sort of guide there, she helps people find where to go, she doesn't work there.'

Her mother looked humble. ‘Sorry,' she said. ‘Sorry. I just meant that Mary told me how careful they are and if anyone's worried they have them back even if they don't really need to come.' And then, seeing her daughter's expression, ‘Sorry, sorry, Sarah, I didn't mean . . .'

‘I know what you meant, Mum, and . . .'

‘Oh, don't let's quarrel, sweetheart. I didn't mean anything, let's not talk about it, let's talk about your job. How's it going, how's work been?'

Her agitation was so great, her hands clasping and unclasping so frenetically and her brow creased into such a deep frown, that Sarah let it go. She said the job was enjoyable, she liked the work and the firm was doing well. Mike had the right ideas, she said, it was all down to him, the success they were having. She watched her mother, carefully, to see her reaction to Mike's name: nothing, not a flicker of recognition or interest. ‘I wish you'd come and meet Mike, Mum,' she said. ‘You'd really like him. You'd see what a good man he is. Why don't you come? Dad need never know. Mrs Hibbert could drop you off on your shopping day, and Mike or I could run you back. It wouldn't take long, Dad wouldn't have any reason to feel suspicious . . .' But her mother was shaking her head, and looked terrified. ‘Oh no, sweetheart, I couldn't do that, it would be wrong. I couldn't deceive him.' Sarah stared hard at her. ‘You could, if you cared enough about me,' she said.

Without meaning to, she had raised her voice and was almost shouting. Her mother had her hand over her mouth, as though it was she who was doing the shouting. Abruptly, Sarah started prowling round the room, touching things, picking up brass candlesticks and putting them down again with an unnecessary bang. She wanted to do something outrageous like smashing the long line of hideous toby jugs on the marble mantelpiece, or pull the dark green plant from its copper pot, and only with difficulty stayed her hand. All this
stress,
and stress was bad for her, especially this kind, this emotional stress. She felt, turning to
look at her mother sitting hunched in the uncomfortable chair, that she was in the wrong. She was behaving in a bullying manner, just like her father, but her mother had provoked her. ‘Oh, what a mess,' she said, wearily, ‘I'd better go.'

‘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?

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.