Is There Anything You Want? (24 page)

He got his bike out of the shed and checked the tyres. It was
only a couple of miles to Mrs Hibbert's, a nice little ride, especially on such a morning. He'd taken his power saw and his strimmer by car to her house the day before, on the way back from another job, leaving him able to cycle today. He looked forward to working in Mrs Hibbert's garden – of all the people who employed him, she had the best garden – but Ida didn't like him to say so. She had never liked Mrs Hibbert, declaring that the woman was a snob, and bossy, and an interfering bitch who thought herself a great deal better than she was with her voluntary work – ‘She's too good to be true,' Ida said. The first time they'd gone to the clinic, Mrs Hibbert had been on duty as a Friend, standing right in the middle of the entrance hall, and Ida had insisted on turning round and going out again and finding another way in. It had been excruciatingly embarrassing to realise Mrs Hibbert had seen them and watched them flee in such an undignified manner back out the way they had come. They had then trailed round to the side of the hospital and gone in through the A & E department, which had meant walking along miles of corridors and using two lifts before at last finding their way to the clinic. Ida had been in a rage, saying she wasn't going to set foot in St Mary's again, which was a ridiculous thing to say when she knew perfectly well there was no other hospital for miles around. Martin's own worry had been what Mrs Hibbert would say to him when next he saw her. But she had been tactful, discreet, never mentioning having seen him and Ida. He had reported this to Ida, asking her to give credit where credit was due, but none had been forthcoming.

He thought about Ida's intense dislike of Mrs Hibbert as he cycled along, wondering as ever what on earth had caused it. What, he'd asked his wife, had the woman done to deserve such implacable hostility? Nothing, so far as he knew. In reply, Ida had told him he must have his eyes shut and be deaf if he couldn't see and hear what Mrs Hibbert was like. Hadn't he seen how snooty she was, looking down on folk as though they had a bad smell? Hadn't he heard her being sharp and sarcastic, cutting people down to the size she thought they should be? Martin said no, he hadn't, and asked for examples of such behaviour. Ida gave them to him but Martin had failed to see their significance.
He couldn't agree that Mrs Hibbert was anything but a sensible, intelligent, highly organised woman for whom it was always a pleasure to work. Ida snorted, and said she could tell him a thing or two which might change his mind. Invited by Martin to do so, what she did tell him didn't seem adequately to account for her hatred of Mrs Hibbert. It was a tale about Ida's grandmother having been a charwoman for Mary's mother. Something had been stolen and Ida, who as a child accompanied her Nan when she cleaned, had been accused. Nothing had been proved, but her Nan had been dismissed. Ida had gone up to the Lawson place and made a scene. She was only about 8, but she had screamed abuse at Mrs Lawson, and when Mary had appeared and tried to close the door, Ida had hit her. There'd been a fight between the two children and Mary had been badly scratched. There'd been talk of Ida being taken from her Nan and put into a foster home, but Mr Lawson had sorted things out and everything had quietened down. Ida had hated Mary ever since. There was still some other mystery, Martin sensed that. He sensed that not only did his wife resent Mrs Hibbert but that she was in some way jealous of her. Once, when he first started helping her in her garden, and they had chatted to each other while at work, he had told Ida what an interesting conversation he'd had about global warming, but Ida hadn't wanted to hear. It had been as though he'd implied he never had interesting conversations with her – which was true. It had been true for years. They hardly talked to each other at all, and when they did it certainly was not about global warming. Ida, if she did talk, gossiped about the church, about the vicar and what was happening at the Women's Institute and at Fellowship meetings.

Last week, he and Mrs Hibbert had talked about the so-called war on terrorism and what had happened in Iraq. They'd sat outside her house drinking tea, after he'd toiled for three hours trimming all the beech hedges, including the long back one which needed a stepladder to do it properly. She'd insisted he sit down, in comfort, though he was very conscious of his filthy hands – he hadn't worn gloves to gather up the cuttings – and of the leaves and bits of twig caught in the hairs on his chest. She'd stated her own views first (strong ones, as usual) and then invited
him to share his with her. This was what she always did and, though at first he had been bashful and hesitant, she had encouraged him and gradually he had grown more confident, and these days positively eager to express himself on any number of issues. Unlike Mrs Hibbert, he didn't read a daily or Sunday newspaper – he took his news from the television and sometimes the radio – but often she would save pieces she'd read in the
Daily Telegraph
and give them to him so that they could discuss them. He felt flattered that she bothered.

Ida, of course, said that he
was
just being flattered. Perhaps it was true. Mrs Hibbert did make him feel clever, though he knew he was not. He had no qualifications, had never even sat a single exam. He didn't read books, it just never occurred to him to want to. But he wasn't stupid, he'd never thought of himself as stupid. But Ida never listened to him. Instead, she would interrupt – ‘Stop spouting, for heaven's sake,' she'd say – and if he tried to discuss something serious she walked away. They had never talked properly about her illness. She told everyone about it outside the house, but she wouldn't discuss it with him. She wouldn't even have it mentioned at home, and this bewildered him. He'd told Mrs Hibbert about Ida's operation and the radiotherapy sessions and she'd been reassuring. She was tactful and also sympathetic, a cheering combination in his opinion. Cancer, she'd told him, was not the automatic death sentence it used to be, and was thought by some still to be. She reeled off statistics to prove that Ida had every chance of surviving many years. But even if Ida had not forbidden him to discuss her with Mrs Hibbert, he would have found it hard to confide to anyone what was really bothering him. It was too delicate, too embarrassing. Ida wouldn't let him touch her. Ever since the operation and then the six weeks' radiotherapy she hadn't wanted to be touched. She wouldn't let him hold her or kiss her, never mind anything else. He could understand this at first, it even seemed natural, but as time went on and she was recovered, well, it became bewildering. His attempts to caress her were met with a sharp ‘Don't!', as though he were going to attack her. He stopped at once and said he was sorry. He would have to be patient, and he was. He was a very patient man anyway. He
could see how unhappy Ida was, but there seemed nothing he could do to help. Going to their doctor wouldn't help – he could just imagine old Dr Marr's face if he appeared before him saying Ida wouldn't let him touch her. But it had occurred to him that Mrs Hibbert might have had some good advice. There'd been an inkling that she understood such mysteries during the time she'd employed that girl Emma.

She'd liked talking to him about Emma. ‘You'll never guess what that silly girl's done now, Martin,' she would begin, and then describe the girl's behaviour in detail, commenting that Emma's relationship with her boyfriend was all about sexual infatuation and nothing more. ‘God knows why she's attracted to him,' Mrs Hibbert had said, ‘considering he is so ill-kempt, but she is. It's pure lust. She thinks it's love, but it isn't.' Martin had shifted a little uncomfortably on the bench where he was sitting with Mrs Hibbert and had said nothing. He just filled his pipe and puffed on it for a bit, until Mrs Hibbert pressed him – ‘Don't you agree, Martin? You've seen the two of them, don't you agree?' Weakly, he'd said he didn't know, and mumbled something about one man's meat being another's poison, and young folk these days being hard to fathom. Mrs Hibbert had been exasperated – ‘Oh, come on, Martin, you're not thinking, you're not remembering what it was like at that age – all lust, nothing else.' More shifting on the bench, more puffing on his pipe, and then Martin had been overcome with a flood of memories – Ida looking like an angel in the choir, Ida in a white blouse and summer skirt sitting by the river, Ida at the works' Christmas party in a shimmering red dress. He'd cleared his throat and said, ‘You're probably right, but it might mean something all the same, it might go deeper. You can't tell at first, now, can you? It has to start with the attraction, and then time will tell.' Mrs Hibbert had said, very firmly, that because young folk today leapt into bed when they'd known each other a mere five minutes, there was no time to tell anything. They began with sex, they didn't work up to it. ‘Not like our generation, Martin,' she ended.

Martin couldn't speak. This was different from discussing capital punishment or the horror of metric measurements. He
didn't know which was more excruciating to think about, himself and Ida ‘working up to it', or Mrs Hibbert. He couldn't associate sex with her at all, even though she'd been married. Nobody here had known her husband Francis, and there were those (Ida among them) who sometimes doubted he ever existed. Mary Lawson had gone south and come back years later widowed (or, as Ida put it, ‘saying' she was widowed). Nobody knew much about Francis Hibbert at all. There were no children, which fuelled the gossip. As far as Martin was considered, Mrs Hibbert was a childless widow and that was that. But there she was, presenting herself as a woman who might apparently have worked up to sex, and expecting him to know what she meant. Well, he did. Two years he'd courted Ida and it had been hell. They'd kissed and cuddled and fondled, and she'd loved it as much as he'd done, but there'd been nothing else till they had married. A white wedding, four bridesmaids, himself in a hired suit. And then the honeymoon, and at last what had been worked up to actually took place. Jim born nine months and one week later, Steve a year exactly after that. A lot had been worked up to. He felt he was letting Mrs Hibbert down by not being open and honest and saying what he thought about young Emma. ‘It seems to me, Mrs Hibbert,' he said ponderously, ‘that contraception being what it now is, the pill and that, it's changed everything. No sense in working up to things, is there? Might as well get cracking and enjoy it.' ‘Martin!' she said. ‘You don't really think that, do you? Surely you don't think sex should start things off?' ‘Well, Mrs Hibbert,' he said, ‘it shouldn't be the carrot for the donkey either.'

He never reported any of this conversation to Ida, of course. She'd have said Mary Hibbert fancied him and that this was disgusting. Ida was always thinking that women fancied him, which was so daft he never replied to her taunts. Ida knew he was faithful and that he always had been. She was his one and only woman, which might have surprised some people. He'd watched Jim and Steve grow into teenagers and been half appalled and half admiring at how many girlfriends they'd had. Over and over again, while his sons were growing up, he'd pondered the same questions: would he have married Ida if he
could have had sex with her without marriage? Had he confused lust with love? There had been no other girl he had ever wanted or loved. Only Ida, ever. He'd chased her, pursued her, besieged her. But supposing she had been happy to have sex with him as soon as he'd asked her out, the way his sons' girlfriends did, because they wanted to, not because they were forced, what then? Would he have discovered that he didn't love Ida at all? Because that was what had happened soon enough, this separation of physical passion and emotional feeling. Once Ida had given birth to Steve, she had hardly ever wanted sex. He'd had to plead, and she gave into his pleading only grudgingly, but he never forced himself upon her. His need of her humiliated him – it wasn't as though Ida was attractive any more and yet he still wanted to make love to her. This urge to do so seemed to exist independently of Ida herself, almost as though he was willing her to be the girl he had once been so overpoweringly attracted to. And now, of course, since the operation, that side of their life appeared to be over, and he didn't know what to do about it.

He'd never thought life was meant to be all about pleasure, but nevertheless there had to be some pleasure in it to make it tolerable. Where did he find pleasure in Ida these days? There was none. She didn't gladden his heart. At the best, what he felt for her was pity, that she should be so miserable and afraid all the time, and beyond that only a kind of affectionate loyalty because of their history together. They'd been so young, and their youth had made all the struggling to carve a decent life for themselves easier, both of them good workers, both healthy and strong. It had been a pleasure, then, to come home to Ida after he'd worked such long days. She'd been cheerful and welcoming, thrilled that they had their own two rooms, excited about the coming baby. And when Jim was born this happiness had continued for a while. Ida was always singing, the baby contented, what more could he have wanted? Weekends they went for walks. Ida liked to walk then, she liked pushing the pram. She'd made picnics, just a few sandwiches and a bit of cake and a flask of tea, and they'd walked along the river and found a nice spot and sat there and sometimes he'd fished (illegally).

All gone, long since. But would his life be better, happier,
without Ida? He couldn't bring himself to think so. If Ida died and he survived, what would his survival amount to? Lying awake into the early hours, as he often did now, he'd got into the habit of staring at the ceiling, tracing the cracks in the plaster over and over again in the dim light, and longed to be back in his own big double bed with Ida beside him. But they had been ‘put asunder' – it came to him suddenly, the words of the marriage service, ‘let no man put asunder'. Except it wasn't a man that had parted them but disease, and before that ageing and time and familiarity. Cancer had only finished the process off, or nearly. Death would finish it off. He wanted back what he had once had, and if that meant he still loved his wife then something would have to be done to bring her back to him, but what? Still cycling along, he thought of Mrs Hibbert again, and wondered what she would make of it all.