Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  Outside the weather rained down tears. Bridget thought: She’s not too bad, and felt it was not impossible that she might, one day, drop tears too.

  ‘You don’t look like the kind of woman who “needs to talk”,’ Bridget said. ‘I’d better say, frankly, from the outset, that “talking” is not part of my plan. However—’ she went on, as if there had been an attempt to interrupt, which was not the case, for Frances was listening in silent fascination—‘it seems discourteous, somehow, to Peter if we don’t meet, though I hardly know how we should conduct ourselves.’

  What Frances thought was: Why does she have to be so different? Aloud, she said, ‘I don’t know that I want so terribly to “talk” either—though there are things I could probably only say to you.’

  ‘That’s true,’ conceded Bridget, and lapsed into morose silence.

  Frances tipped tea around the cup and watched a couple across the way having a row. ‘You’ve always fancied her—don’t bother to deny it!’ she heard the woman say—a woman with badly applied make-up and backcombed hair. At least, Frances thought, we are spared scenes like that. For the first time it crossed her mind that they were a threesome—herself, Peter and Bridget. Were a threesome, she supposed she must think of it now.

  ‘There’s a concert on at the Wigmore Hall—’ Bridget said, suddenly coming to—‘Schubert—which I like—and Mahler—which I don’t, but we could sneak out after the interval—unless you like Mahler, that is?’

  Frances said that she had no particular view on Mahler. As it happened, she had no particular view on Schubert either.

  3

  ‘The point is,’ Bridget said, sucking noisily at a bone from the remains of her coq au vin, ‘Schubert is never bogus—but Mahler can be.’

  They were eating, after the concert, at a restaurant which each woman had visited with Peter. Neither made even oblique reference to this. Tactfully, they commented on the decor, the stylish young waiters and waitresses, with no suggestion that they might have shared opinions on such matters with the dead man who had brought them together.

  Frances said, ‘I’m ignorant about music—but I suppose like it better when it isn’t too loud.’

  ‘Quite right,’ Bridget agreed. ‘Symphonies are overrated.’ She tapped a cigarette from a blue Gauloises packet. ‘Do you mind?’

  Too late if I do! thought Frances. ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You never know these days.’

  Frances thought: She must have been pretty once with that colouring.

  Bridget thought: I wouldn’t have minded a nose like that, beaky and aristocratic.

  The waiter came and flirted idly with the two women, but more with Bridget because of her French. Bridget asked which part of France he was from and there followed an animated conversation on Arlesian sausage.

  ‘How did you learn?’ Frances asked.

  ‘Practice. I learned most haggling. The French respect you more if you bargain hard—but you need the slang to keep up.’

  ‘I’m not good at languages,’ said Frances. ‘That’s two things you’re better at—languages and music.’

  ‘It’s not a competition!’ Bridget remarked coldly.

  Frances always travelled to work by tube so Bridget drove her home. Passing Turnham Green Bridget said, ‘It’s where they turned’em back, isn’t it?’

  ‘Back?’

  ‘The Civil War,’ Bridget explained. ‘The Roundhead apprentices turned back the Royalists here—hence “Turn’em Green”—it was the site of a battle.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Frances was not really listening. Bothered over what she should do about asking Bridget in when they reached the flat, she preferred not to be lectured to about her own neighbourhood. She wanted to dispel the annoyance by saying, ‘That’s three things then you know more about than me: music, languages and local history.’ It was the kind of remark she might have made to Peter and it would have made him laugh. That she could no longer say such things suddenly depressed her. She decided she wouldn’t ask Bridget in after all.

  ‘Would you like to come in for a drink?’ she heard herself saying and was doubly angry when Bridget accepted. I am managing this badly, she thought, ushering Bridget into the flat where she had been used to receiving Bridget’s husband.

  Frances’s flat was like Frances. Drifting round the room Bridget noticed the books were all in alphabetical order. Few ornaments, but three very good paintings on the sunflower-yellow walls.

  ‘That’s a Kavanagh, isn’t it?’ Bridget peered at a picture of a nude in high heels, reading in a striped deckchair. (Peter, in fact, had bought it for Frances’s thirty-seventh birthday. ‘I thought she was like you,’ he had said, removing all her clothes but her shoes.)

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances, shortly, glad she had her back to Bridget and was occupied with pouring whisky and water.

  Bridget, who had her country’s usual measure of telepathic powers, smiled rather nastily at the back. The nude’s resemblance to Frances had not escaped her; Peter liked that sort of statement: he had once given Bridget a small, powerful bronze of a woman naked on a horse.

  She lay back, deliberately sprawling across the clean lines of the sofa, imagining her husband here. He would have drunk whisky and water too. Frances had poured Jameson for her, the whisky Peter had liked. Frances herself, she noticed, was drinking brandy.

  ‘It’s funny,’ Bridget said, conversationally, ‘I can’t believe he’s dead. Do you weep at all, yourself?

  ‘Not at all,’ Frances lied. She didn’t want this. ‘I’ve been too busy,’ she added, unnecessarily. It wasn’t true; time had hung about her like a moody adolescent.

  ‘You see,’ said Bridget, ignoring Frances’s efforts at camouflage, ‘a person—I expect you know this—isn’t only flesh and blood. A person exists inside one, informing one’s state of mind. There were whole weeks when Peter and I were apart—of course, you know that too!—so my system hasn’t got the habit of the difference. I keep expecting to come home and find him there. And when I don’t, when I walk in and everything’s as I left it, my system just thinks: Oh well, he’ll be along later, what’s all the fuss about?’

  Frances, who had noted the parenthetical ‘of course you know that too’, was partially reassured. ‘I haven’t got used to it, either,’ she agreed. ‘But then I saw him in patches anyway.’ She felt better with the matter of her arrangements with Peter broached.

  ‘A thing of something and patches,’ said Bridget, lazily. ‘What’s that…?’

  But Frances didn’t know. She was thinking it mightn’t be so hard for Peter to have been in love with his wife. This thought only faintly troubled her: Peter had needed her too, needed her orderliness. Bridget had the air of something frightening about her: she might be amused by, even entertain, perturbation.

  ‘Hamlet,’ Bridget said suddenly. ‘Of course, it’s Hamlet, I’ll forget my own name next. It’s “king” not “thing”—“a king of shreds and patches”.’ She fell backwards on the pale sofa, triumphant.

  ‘We did Hamlet at school,’ said Frances, determined this time not to be outdone. ‘I played Gertrude; I didn’t like her.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Bridget, unconvinced. She had some sympathy for the queen who had married her husband’s killer. ‘Hamlet’s a case in point.’ she said darkly. ‘Look what happens when Hamlet’s father dies—he doesn’t go away. Quite the reverse. He comes back and rants like all get out!’

  ‘I do hope Peter won’t come back and rant,’ said Frances, feeling it was safe now to risk humour.

  4

  It seemed obvious that Frances should be the first to be told.

  ‘I’m buying a house in Shropshire,’ Bridget had said.

  ‘But you’re not leaving Fulham altogether, are you?’ Frances had asked, with an odd sense of being abandoned.

  By now Frances and Bridget had met several times. More regularly, Frances suggested, trying somewhat to mollify Bridget, than she had met with Peter. Bridget, however, had not be
en mollified. She was quite able to like Frances without liking what Frances had meant to Peter.

  Most women in Bridget’s shoes as a matter of course would have detested Frances. But this is not an account of feminine jealousy, or even revenge, and not all human beings (not even women) conform to the attitudes generally expected of them. Bridget was interested in Frances because Peter had been. She did not enjoy the fact that Frances had been her husband’s mistress, but she was aware that her thoughts or feelings could now have little impact—if they ever had—on the hard facts of Peter’s liking for another woman.

  Frances, equally, might have disliked Bridget, except that in Frances’s case, with Peter gone, it was almost as if Bridget was a point of contact with him.

  It was also interesting to Bridget that she and Frances talked on the phone, because Bridget was not, as she liked to say, a ‘phone person’. ‘I prefer letters,’ she had explained to Peter when, still married to someone else, he had reproved her for being brusque with him when he rang unexpectedly from a coin box. ‘With letters you can be sure you are not interrupting someone.’ ‘I’m sorry if I was interrupting,’ he had declared, slightly huffily.

  Bridget had found the house when she had gone away for a weekend to a country hotel. The hotel was a reward for having finally steeled herself to go through Peter’s bureau drawers—an exercise to which she had not been looking forward. She had never been what Peter had referred to as a ‘rummager’. Whatever Peter kept in his drawers was his own affair: Bridget had never had the faintest temptation to pry.

  This lack of temptation proved unhelpful when it survived her husband’s death. Certain forms of intimacy seemed out of place to Bridget within the cool depths of her union with Peter. She did not warm to the kind of relationship which shares bathrooms, just as she felt there were other matters which should be kept private. On several occasions she had opened the desk, taken out a few papers and felt a strong inclination to make a bonfire of them. As it happened, she had just braved the first pile of bank statements when Frances made her introductory phone call and it was relief at this distraction which had prompted Bridget’s suggestion that they meet. Maybe it was the stimulus of meeting Frances, but after that long, peculiar day—the tea at John Lewis’s followed by the Wigmore Hall and ending with the whisky at Frances’s flat—Bridget set to work, ‘like a Trojan!’, and polished off the contents of the oak bureau with surprising speed. It was after this that she had gone to stay in Shropshire.

  The hotel had been shabby, with chestnut-wood fires and wild duck on the lake—also on the menu. It was in the hollow of time before Christmas and the hotel was empty except for herself and a couple conducting an illicit affair.

  Bridget scrutinised the couple with more-than-usual intensity. They seemed much too merry for her, with none of the easy familiarity which she had known with Peter. Possibly Peter had been ‘merry’ with Frances? One day, she speculated, she might ask.

  On the Saturday morning Bridget had set out to follow a footpath across a ploughed field, bare but for a grounded flock of strutting lapwing. ‘O green-crested lapwing, thy-eye screaming forebear-air,’ sang Bridget at the top of her voice. ‘I-eye charge thee disturb not my-eye slumbering fair,’ passing, at the first stile, the young woman from the hotel alone, and in visible tears. Well, if that was going to be the penalty of merriment! Not wanting to be dogged by this picture of woe, Bridget had turned off the footpath and followed along a hawthorn hedge to a lane.

  The lane resolved into a red-brick house with four chimneys and a ‘For Sale’ sign stuck on a post in the garden. Hearing footsteps, and fearing pursuit from the tear-stained young woman, Bridget veered into the porch.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she apologised to the man who answered the door. ‘But I saw the sign.’

  The oak bureau had lately yielded up the news that Bridget would be £250,000 better off from a life-insurance policy. It seemed fitting that this should turn out to be the figure quoted for the Shropshire house, which Bridget bought at the asking price without even benefit of survey.

  ‘There was no need for one,’ she explained to Frances when she telephoned her. ‘It smelled dry, there are fireplaces and there’s a view.’ Of hills—remote, misty. There was also a rookery in the elm tree at the bottom of the garden but that she kept to herself.

  What Bridget found she wanted, once she had begun to assimilate the fact that Peter would never return, was a place where there were no associations. It was not so much Peter himself that she needed the rest from, but the effect of his dying. The dying had eaten into her reserves: the people, the pitiless paperwork, the exhausting failure to weep. The house where they had spent their married life seemed filled with bewildering and demanding turmoil. She resented the expense of trying to meet all this—that was why she wanted to get away—among the rooks.

  ‘It’ll only be for weekends,’ she reassured Mickey.

  Bridget had decided to give Mickey something from Peter’s alleged will. In fact, everything had been left, in her lifetime, to Bridget, but this did not hinder Bridget from interpreting the will in her own way. Mickey had stood in for Peter’s wife in her absences; it was appropriate Mickey should be rewarded. A thousand pounds seemed the right sort of sum.

  Mickey had taken the money with a lack of resistance which made Bridget wonder if the apocryphal legacy should have been rather more; nor had Mickey been reassured by Bridget’s account of the house in Shropshire.

  ‘If it’s weekends you’re thinking of going there and you away all that time abroad, I shan’t hardly see you, then.’

  ‘Not every weekend.’ Bridget had tried to be placating. She had, in fact, hired an assistant to serve in the shop at weekends so theoretically she could be away every one if she wished.

  ‘I’d say it was dangerous, leaving your house with no one there like that. Course I’m next door but I’m only an old woman—no match for any burglar or whoever chooses to call!’ her neighbour had said with unconsoled relish.

  5

  Mickey’s words stuck in Bridget’s mind. Perhaps it was foolish to leave a London house regularly unattended? How she wanted to get away, though, and be by herself. It seemed as if she had never been by herself, not since she married Peter. So when the boy turned up it was almost like an answer to a prayer.

  The doorbell rang one Saturday morning when, dressed only in one of Peter’s Vyella shirts, she was trying to steel herself to face Peter’s papers and was tempted not to answer. She had found Peter’s dressing gown and had it clutched about her when she got to the door and saw the boy walking back down the path. Thanks to the many occasions she had crept home from trips abroad in the small hours, the hinge of the door had been worked on to open quietly, so he did not hear her and she could have let him go altogether and resumed her vague sortings of the papers into toppling piles. It was the sight of the sharp little protruding shoulder blades, almost like wings, she thought, which made her call out, ‘Did you want something?’

  The boy turned at her voice and she saw a young face which was, as she phrased it later to Frances, ‘as beautiful as the day—quite breathtaking!’ Frances, who had so far encountered only the firmer of Bridget’s surfaces, was momentarily surprised and then amused at the hyperbole. (That this was not hyperbole but the straightest report became clear only much later when Frances also met Zahin and described him, in turn, as like a ‘dark Apollo’. By then the ‘Apollo’ was staying in Bridget’s house—but this is to anticipate.)

  The boy hesitated, then moved back up the path towards her. Bridget noticed that he had plucked a soft green frond of the rosemary which grew in an aromatic bush by the front door. He was neatly dressed, the boy, in a white shirt, navy sweater and grey trousers. The trousers gave the impression of having been pressed for the occasion.

  Moved by the sight of the tender spear of rosemary twisting in his hand Bridget thawed. ‘Hello?’

  The boy did not smile but bowed his head a little. When he looke
d up she saw that despite his dark hair and complexion he had eyes of the deepest blue. ‘Excuse me please.’

  ‘Can I help you?’ He had a small gold earring in his right ear.

  ‘I was looking for Mr Hansome.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bridget, ‘in that case you’d better come inside.’

  He stood in the middle of the kitchen in an attitude of respect so that Bridget felt she had almost to push him down into a chair. ‘Would you like coffee?’ He shook his head. ‘Tea?’ Another shake. ‘What can I offer you to drink then?’ If this young man was unacquainted with Peter’s death he might need to be fortified against the news—or she, at least, needed to be fortified against telling it.

  ‘Please, a glass of milk?’

  Grateful for this temporary relief Bridget took down one of her glasses that she had brought back from Limoges and filled it to the brim; the white milk glowed green behind the thick glass. She poured herself coffee and sat down opposite the boy across the kitchen table. ‘I am Mrs Hansome,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if this is a shock to you but Mr Hansome, my husband, is dead. He was killed in a car crash some weeks ago.’ It would soon be Christmas; almost two months since she herself had received the news from the policewoman with the guarded face.

  An expression of intense surprise flickered across the blue eyes. ‘But he is married…?’ It was as if the other news had passed quite over him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bridget amused. ‘He is, or was married. I am his wife,’ she repeated, ‘or his widow, I suppose now.’ And indeed this was the first time she had consciously applied the word to herself.

  The boy put his head upon the table and began to cry. The crying made big searing sobs so that Bridget hearing them was filled with something like admiration. To be able to weep like that—it was remarkable!