Is There Anything You Want? (8 page)

When Harry came in, she was rolling out pastry, but the Primo Levi biography was on the table in the conservatory where he settled himself for a drink. She finished making the chicken pie, put it in the oven, and joined him. The book separated their two glasses. ‘Still reading this?' Harry said. She nodded. ‘I might give it a go sometime. On holiday. Except it would fill a suitcase.' She smiled, but said nothing. He would never, of course, even open it. He read crime fiction on holiday, or else sports biographies. She didn't want him reading it in any case. It was too precious to her. He would madden her by fidgeting and yawning and reading so slowly he never seemed to turn a page. But she knew that she in turn irritated him by becoming so absorbed in the books she read that, though she heard his voice, she couldn't pull herself out of them to answer him. The pull of what he was saying was not as strong as the pull of the print. She didn't want to leave the alternative world she was inhabiting even if it was Auschwitz. It made him jealous, though he was not a jealous man. ‘Talking of holidays,' Harry was saying, ‘how about being adventurous for a change and going to Thailand?' ‘Thailand?' she queried, astonished. Harry usually thought it madly adventurous to go to Scotland. ‘Well,' he said, ‘the young seem to like it. Laura loved it, and Emma's dying to go.'

‘We're not young, Harry.'

‘We're not old.'

‘No, but we don't back-pack, we like a bit of comfort. And Emma wouldn't come with us, she's finished with family holidays, you know that.'

‘Finished with wet weeks in Scotland,' said Harry, ‘but I bet she'd be keen to have her fare paid to Thailand whoever she was going with.'

‘I doubt it. She's got a Saturday job anyway. You said she had to earn her own pocket money, remember?'

‘She could still take two weeks off.'

‘I don't know. I don't know if I want to go to Thailand. I mean,
why? Why Thailand? Why not Greece or Italy? We've hardly been anywhere, why go so far?'

‘Because we can.'

‘Oh, Harry . . .'

‘And we should. We're stick-in-the-muds.'

‘What's got into you?'

‘I feel restless, sort of restless.'

He got up suddenly and asked if she wanted some more wine. She said no. She watched him go through to the kitchen and refill his glass. He wasn't a big drinker, two generous glasses of wine before his meal was unusual. She saw him stand, glass in hand, facing the wall. He stood quite still. She knew what he was looking at: the calendar. Well, she hadn't specifically marked the clinic day on the kitchen calendar, just put a tiny cross by the date, he would see nothing significant there. She didn't need to write down clinic appointments anywhere. The date, even a year ahead, was fixed in her mind. She kept her hospital card in her jewellery box, in a little drawer at the bottom of the two-tier box, a place neither Harry nor the girls would ever have cause to look. Harry came back into the conservatory and sat down. She knew what was coming. ‘It was yesterday, wasn't it?' he said. ‘What? What was yesterday?' she asked. ‘Don't be silly, Edwina, you know what. Don't play these games. Was everything OK? I assume it was good news.' ‘Oh, do you?' she said, and got up and went into the kitchen and began banging about.

He sat on, not moving. She was being unfair, of course. It was ridiculous, her anger, her fury that he hadn't remembered till now. Why should she expect him to remember a date a year ahead when she'd taken such care to hide it? Nothing he could do or say was ever right. She didn't even know what she would have wanted him to say or do. From the very beginning it had been like this, distancing herself from him on clinic days, freezing him out, and then raging because he wasn't giving her the nameless something she wanted. She blamed herself for this state of affairs, but she also blamed him. It was his refusal at the beginning to consider the possibility that the treatment might fail and that she might die which had separated them. She'd wanted to contemplate the worst outcome and he'd refused, point-blank
refused. There was no need. She was going to be fine. She would not only survive, she would flourish. He even said that he was sure there had been a mistake and there was nothing wrong with her; though he admitted he knew at the same time that this was absurdly wishful thinking. He had said – his only concession to the kind of discussion she wanted – that if she did only have a short time to live (though he had referred to this as ‘if things go wrong') he didn't want to waste it talking about her dying. He wanted it to be a happy time.

She didn't hide the scar. She had no need to do so, from Harry's point of view. He wasn't squeamish and it wasn't a very big scar, but on the other hand she became expert at turning away when she was dressing and undressing, turning away at just the right moment. In bed, Harry's fingers sometimes strayed towards the scar and she pushed them away. She didn't want it touched. He obeyed. He didn't want to do anything to upset her and there was all the rest of her body to fondle. Her illness hadn't made any difference to his desire for her, or hers for him, which seemed to her extraordinary enough to make her weep sometimes. She even felt, at the beginning, soon after the tiny tumour was removed, that all her fear was moving out of herself when she was making love – for that short while the pleasure annihilated the sickening worry. But then, later, as the years went safely on, that had ceased to be true. Panic over, the anxiety had burrowed deeper and dulled her senses, the terror had withdrawn from the forefront of her mind to bury itself cunningly in the very centre of her body, biding its time. She could never be sure when it was going to surge through her again and this made her first tense and then numb. It was the strangest feeling, one she couldn't have begun to explain to Harry even if he had wanted to listen. He seemed to notice nothing. It amazed her.

‘Dinner's ready,' she called. They hadn't spoken for a full half-hour. Harry had gone on sitting in the conservatory, she'd stayed in the kitchen watching the vegetables simmer, peeping unnecessarily at the pie in the oven. He came through and sat down, looking wretched. She knew she was being cruel, refusing to tell him about the visit to the clinic. ‘There was nothing to tell,' she said, ‘so it didn't seem worth mentioning it, that's all.' He stared
at her, food untouched. ‘What?' she said, eating her own food with exaggerated enthusiasm. ‘Ages since I made this,' she said. ‘It's good, don't you think?' Slowly, he began to eat. After a few mouthfuls, he nodded, but still he didn't speak. The clink of their knives and forks on their plates was awful. When they'd finished, he cleared his throat and said, ‘They must have said something.'

‘Who?'

‘Please, Edwina.'

‘Oh, you make such a performance of it. They said I
seemed
fine. They said that if I still
seem
fine next year they won't see me again.'

His face expressed such delight she could hardly bear it. ‘But that's terrific!' he said. ‘That's brilliant news, how can you say there was nothing to tell, it's wonderful!'

‘Is it?'

‘Yes, it is, how can you not think so, what more could you want? We should celebrate, it's incredible how well you've done.' He got up and came round the table to her and tried to hug her. She felt like weeping.

‘I've survived so far,' she said. ‘I'm in continuing remission, Harry, that's all.'

‘That's
all
? That's everything.'

‘Yes, it is, but it's not what you think, what you keep trying to make it out to be.'

But he was so happy, singing away (tunelessly) a Beatles song, smiling to himself as he cleared the dishes, and she felt envious. Emma came home while he was stacking them in the dishwasher and asked him what he was so cheerful about. She'd only been 8 when all this began, and Laura 10. Harry had told them that Mum had a bad bit in her breast and was going to have it taken out in hospital. Like in an apple? Emma had asked. Yes, Harry had said, like in an apple. That had quite satisfied Emma, but not Laura. She'd tied her father in knots with her demands for explanations and no talk of bad bits in apples had satisfied her. But after Edwina came home and was well, and hadn't needed any more treatment, even Laura had lost interest. Sometimes, Edwina reckoned, her entire family had forgotten what had happened. A good thing, of course. What she wanted, she
supposed. Her own mother had been such a trial with her overwhelming concern, but she was the only one who had reacted with horror, and she was dead now. No one left to weep and wail over the words ‘tumour' and ‘malignant' and ‘cancer', and watch her so intently that it had been a relief, always, to leave her presence.

Emma didn't really listen to the explanation Harry was giving for his high good humour (to do with trying to persuade your Mum to come on an adventurous holiday, he said), but then she rarely listened to the answers to her own questions. She had no, or only a slight, interest in her parents' lives. Harry hadn't even finished replying before she'd cut in with complaints about how little she was going to be paid for the gardening job she'd just got. ‘She's a funny old woman,' Emma told them (in contrast to how she listened to them, they hung on her every word), ‘sort of posh. It's a big garden, really beautiful. She's got a man who comes to do the hard stuff when it needs doing, but she needs me to follow her round and do all the bending. At least it'll be easy.'

‘You don't know a thing about gardening,' Harry said, laughing. ‘You don't know a daisy from a snowdrop, and you wouldn't recognise a weed if your life depended on it. I can't think why this poor woman's taking you on.'

‘I'm young and willing. She can train me.'

‘Wish I could,' Harry said, and pointed out to his own garden. ‘There you are,' he said, ‘I'll train you out there, if you're so willing.'

‘
That
isn't a garden, not compared to hers,' Emma sneered, ‘and anyway, you wouldn't pay me.'

‘No, I certainly would not.'

‘Well, then, I need the money. You said I had to earn my own pocket money now.'

‘At 18, you should.'

‘I'm not 18 till August.'

Edwina had gone into the sitting-room. Their voices drifted off behind her. She'd brought her book through from the conservatory, and now she switched on a lamp and sat down, but she didn't start to read again. Emma probably wouldn't come through from the kitchen. She'd find something to eat and eat
it standing up and then rush upstairs and ring Luke. Luke never came near the house, though Edwina had suggested inviting him for a Sunday lunch when his name was so often on Emma's lips. It would be nice, she'd said, to get to know this boy. Emma had groaned, said she wouldn't think of inviting him, for heaven's sake. But Edwina had caught sight of him in town. She hadn't liked what she had seen, but had chided herself for being prejudiced, because Luke looked dirty and unkempt and he smoked. She just hoped Harry, if he came across the boy, would show the same restraint.

‘Mum?' Emma said, suddenly appearing in the doorway. ‘Could you lend me a fiver? Dad won't, and I really need it to pay Luke back.'

‘What do you owe him for?'

‘Mum, that's not the point, I just need the money. I really need it,
please,
I'll pay you back when I start this job at the weekend.'

‘My bag's in the hall. Bring it here.'

She held the five-pound note out, trying to meet Emma's eye, but failing. The money was almost snatched, with a quick thanks, and Emma had gone leaping up the stairs to ring Luke from the extension on the landing. Laura never borrowed money. Laura looked like her father but she was like Edwina, quiet and reserved and careful – or, as Emma put it sarcastically, ‘a paragon of all the virtues'. Yes, if those were virtues.

Edwina started reading again. She was dreading getting to Primo Levi's death. She knew, because she'd been unable to resist looking it up, that he was thought to have committed suicide many years after surviving the camp, and she couldn't bear to contemplate such an end or what it signified – all that struggle, all that endurance, for nothing, a life once so valuable it had been clung on to during the whole ordeal of Auschwitz, and then suddenly, in better times, worth nothing, found unbearable. And yet, preparing herself to read about it, she thought for some reason of how she felt each time she came away from the clinic with everything all right – no joy, no instant happiness that her little ordeal was over, but instead such grief, as though instead of being cleared she had been condemned. She strained to make a connection, however tiny, however absurdly different in scale,
with Primo Levi's ultimate response to the safety and ease of his life so long after coming out of the camp, but it made no sense. It was outrageous for her to seek any empathy with such a man. All she had in common with him was a kind of survival ludicrously different from his own.

But what was she doing with her survival? Jogging along in the same old way, not using it at all for her own benefit or anyone else's. She'd isolated herself, tried to protect herself these last ten years by not allowing herself to feel anything. That was why reading had become so important, why it was comforting – within the life in the books, she could
feel.
But keeping herself apart had damaged her too. She was remote from her family, she'd trained herself to be. Harry didn't seem to mind. He just thought she had become a calmer person, and he approved. But she wasn't calm. Inwardly, she seethed with all kinds of unreconciled emotions that only erupted on clinic days and then subsided.

It had to stop. Her control had had its use, but it was time to let the brake off.

‘Harry?' she called.