Is There Anything You Want? (28 page)

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 wealthier 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.

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.