Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  ‘It’s famous for birds, Farings,’ said Mr Godwit. ‘Tell you what, if you like, next time I’m going to the coast I’ll take you down there with me birdwatching.’

  Bridget, who was unexpectedly pleased by this offer, had trouble finding her bag to pay him. In the end it was the sweep who found it, wedged behind a box of books. A red-leather-bound Shakespeare lay on the top.

  ‘You like to read then? That’s a tenner.’ For all his good humour he gave the impression of being a shy man. ‘Shouldn’t be surprised if she did have a father complex—my daughter. Called Cordelia, she is. The wife’s idea, not mine!’

  It was not until supper—cheese on toast by the fire—and listening to the radio that Bridget remembered that the clocks went forward that night. Marianne, a hypochondriacal woman who painted furniture, was supposed to be delivering some chests to the Fulham house because for reasons to do with her health—which she would always go into—she could not manage deliveries during shop hours.

  Bridget had asked Zahin if he could be at the house to take in the chests on the Sunday. ‘But of course. It will be the utmost pleasure, Mrs Hansome.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, Zahin,’ said Bridget, laughing.

  ‘O Mrs Hansome…’

  ‘All I need is to be sure you will be there. Marianne is a pain, if you want to know. If there is no one in she will just go off and then God alone in his mystery knows when I shall get the chests.’

  ‘Mrs Hansome, like the Lord Himself I will be there. You can rely on me!’

  But she hadn’t remembered to tell him about the changed hour.

  Bridget rang the London number and got the answerphone. Damn. She had no idea if Zahin listened to it. Probably he did, but better not bank on it. No good phoning Marianne either. If one tried to explain things to her there would certainly be a muddle. And she couldn’t be sure of Mickey’s feelings towards Zahin; it wasn’t safe to ring there.

  In the end she rang Frances. ‘Look, this is a cheek but…’ and she explained about the hour.

  ‘I’ll go round,’ Frances said. ‘It’s no bother, really. I’ll call at a respectable hour and tell him about the clocks.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘If I did I wouldn’t say!’

  Frances had been feeling better since her visit to the Tate. Perhaps it was that man in the crowd who had reminded her of Peter? The week which followed held fewer nights of anguish. In some way, she wasn’t sure how, the lunch with Bridget had helped.

  And she didn’t—or she would not have joked about it—at all mind putting on her tracksuit the following morning and driving past the Fulham house on a roundabout route to Richmond Park. She was, she had decided, getting fat and needed exercise.

  The upstairs curtains were drawn when she rang the bell at 11.15 a.m. Perhaps a note would do? She was rummaging in her bag when the girl answered the door.

  ‘Oh, is Zahin there?’ The girl shook her head. ‘Mrs Hansome asked me to call. Will he be back?’

  A nod. A pretty girl, with two scarlet velour flower grips in her hair.

  ‘Could you give him this then?’

  Frances wrote: Zahin—Mrs Hansome rang me to let you know that the clock has gone on one hour. Please be in for Marianne at 4 o’clock (what was 3 o’clock!)

  Would that do? Or would it, as was so often the case with explanations, only cause more confusion? Well, she had done her best.

  Running round Penn Pond, Frances thought: I wonder who she is…?

  Bridget rang Zahin. ‘Zahin, did they arrive?’

  ‘Oh, of course, Mrs Hansome, and I was there on time to receive the lovely chests.’

  ‘And Frances told you about the hour?’

  ‘I had already moved the clocks.’

  Frances had decided there was no need to worry Bridget about the girl. But Marianne had the effect of making people fuss out of character, so Bridget rang Frances to check the chests really had arrived, and then it seemed pointless to conceal the encounter.

  ‘What was she like?’ Bridget asked, more intrigued than offended.

  ‘Very pretty. I wondered if she was his sister…’

  When Bridget returned home the following evening she found an opportunity to say, ‘Zahin, do you have any family here?’ and with the perfect concordance with her thoughts which, almost eerily, he often betrayed, the boy replied, ‘There is my sister, Zelda—she is staying here in England presently.’

  ‘I see.’ Pause. ‘Did she visit you here, in the house this weekend? By the way, “presently” means “in a while”—not, as you used it just now, “at the moment”.’

  ‘O Mrs Hansome I was going to tell you presently, I promise…’

  ‘Zahin, get up from the floor, please, there is no need for this exaggerated display…’

  ‘Where does she live?’ Frances asked. She was amused to have been the instrument of the uncovering of Zelda.

  ‘With some sort of relations in St John’s Wood.’

  ‘They must be rich, this family,’ Frances said. ‘Zahin seems to have plenty of money. I hope you’re charging him a proper rent?’

  Bridget, who did not care about money—Zahin’s or anyone’s—had concluded that Zahin was fearful that the news he had relations in London might precipitate his departure from her house. That he was keen to stay with her—almost fantastically keen—was touchingly apparent. The discovery of Zelda’s existence brought on a bout of intensive cleaning.

  Bridget had considered making some demur when she saw the latest cleaning programme had reached Peter’s study—she had not been able to touch it herself. But then, as with the knickers and petticoats, she thought: Why not? It was Peter who had first befriended Zahin—she must assume he would not have minded.

  And why, anyway, did one bother about what a dead person might or might not ‘mind’? ‘You know,’ she remarked to Frances, ‘I still can’t register that Peter doesn’t exist. It’s not that I can’t cope with it, it’s that it doesn’t go in.’

  ‘No,’ said Frances. The nights of weeping had been exchanged for a series of erotic dreams. Most of these were more satisfying than any real-life encounter with Peter had been.

  Frances had never given Peter reason to suspect that there was anything wanting in his lovemaking because it had never entered her head that there might have been; her interest in him had not been primarily physical anyway. To suggest that she pretended with him would be to overstate: she did not exactly pretend, but played, as it were, to his idea of himself. That this idea included some notion of a more than ordinary virility was something she grasped implicitly; it was tacit between them that theirs was a violent passion.

  It may be the case that wherever large and romantic notions crop up in human associations they cover some corresponding lack. And it may also be true that where, in a couple, one party is straining a little, the strain will be matched somewhere in the other too. Perhaps what we like to call ‘love’ is, in part, the willingness to keep such strains from the other’s knowledge, and mutual ‘love’ a reflection of the desire to protect? Just as Peter was less contrived in bed with his wife than he was with Frances, Frances, when lovemaking with Peter was successfully concluded, was often somewhat relieved—although this was something she never told Peter, nor ever made quite conscious at the time.

  17

  Peter had no thought of falling in love when he first saw the girl in Malaya. He had had girlfriends up at Cambridge: a trainee teacher from nearby Homerton, a nurse from Addenbrooke’s, nearer still, and he had dutifully put his hand inside the brassieres of each of these girls (a disconcertingly grubby pale blue in the case of Homerton, a more stimulating black in the case of the nurse) and, as dutifully, been slapped down—for such was the custom of the times. He had not, as had the more persistent of his peers, pressed forward, ignoring these quite standard, and insincere, put-downs in pursuit of something more rewarding.

  This did not mean that Peter was not endowed with a normal sexual appetite
. He had been through the usual stages, being first the object, and then the instigator, of homosexual crushes at school, graduating to girls when that possibility became more available. He liked girls but he was shy—and it was the kind of shyness which lay concealed beneath a veneer.

  As a result, at Cambridge he got a reputation for being a heart-breaker, merely because when a girl responded he tended to pull back. The myriad influences of sexuality are subtle and hard to account for: it takes a very advanced person to comprehend his own sexual make-up, and if Peter himself did not quite know why he hung fire, most who have been in that boat will sympathise.

  It is a stereotype that men are sexual aggressors: knights in armour, full of buck and swagger—potential rapists, no less. But in truth men—indeed most of humankind—are far more fragile than is commonly supposed. Peter was no exception. His love for his mother had left him vulnerable; the loss of her had left him fearful. And, to date, none of the girls he had met had aroused the protective tenderness that is often needed to overcome a disabling fear.

  Peter met Veronica by the river where, on a free day, he had gone to swim. Tired of the company of his men, he had made an excuse and gone off on his own, feeling that slight sting of guilt which can plague the sensitive when they follow their own whim.

  He had dried himself and was dressed when he observed a girl swimming with her friends and was struck by her natural grace and the sweetness of her smile. So that when he saw—or supposed he did—that she was having trouble in the strong current, he stripped off his clothes and dived, manfully, in.

  Veronica—an orphan, brought up by Catholic nuns and named for the saint who wiped Christ’s face—was, in reality, a strong swimmer and was merely fooling around in the water, pretending to drown to amuse her friends. She allowed herself, however, to be assisted to the bank by the tall English officer and thanked him charmingly for his intervention. (The true nature of this event was revealed much later amid much teasing and giggling.)

  At the right moment, after the appropriate number of other meetings, Veronica translated her thanks into something yet more gracious. The remaining time spent in Malaya was, as a consequence, like the homecoming he never had—a miracle of happiness for Peter.

  When the time came to leave Peter thought seriously of throwing over his commission and staying on; just as, a year later, the stint in the army behind him, he thought about returning to find the girl who had finally cracked the straitjacketing shyness. But upbringing sticks; he had lost the one resource—the regular contented congress with Veronica herself—which might have made such a departure from custom possible.

  Thus Peter put away that small peculiar taste of paradise, believing, with the genetic optimism of youth that one day, another—more suitable—paradise would supplant it.

  18

  The night light Bridget had bought at John Lewis had been installed beside her bed. The purchase may have been initiated by a wish for distraction before the meeting with Frances. However, in the months which followed, Bridget had grown attached to the translucent column, with its tiny voluptuous mermaid and the bobbing coloured seahorses.

  She was finding that she missed Peter at night. From the time she left home and could afford not to sleep with a knife under her pillow, she had been, with one or two ups and downs, a sound sleeper. But since Peter’s death she found that sleep had become a kind of circle of hell—one in which, nightly, she was judged guilty of crimes, from which she woke into yet more terrible daylight misery. She missed not only Peter’s demanding ways but—even more strongly—his sleeping form beside her.

  ‘You are like a pig!’ she had once remarked when he apologised for his snoring. ‘I like it—it’s reassuring.’

  Without Peter’s familiar porcine presence the nights had grown hostile. Incidents from her past arrived in ravening packs: the man she had slept with who turned out to have a wife who had tried to kill herself; the flat from which she had done a flit where the landlord had trusted her; letters she had pretended had never arrived she had let go unanswered; the bangle she stole from a school friend—she had had no idea that she possessed a conscience, yet here it was, a baleful, many-headed Cerberus.

  During one such sleepless night Bridget, whose early exposure to Catholicism had formed in her the mental equipment, if not the spirit, to engage with such matters, read of an anthropologist who had hung the religious totem of some primitive tribe on his wall. As a form of self-experiment the anthropologist had begun to worship the totem himself. To his astonishment he had found a belief in the totem’s numinous power had grown in him, as if the act of worship carried within it some invisible seed which could take root even in the most inhospitable crannies.

  The article was in one of the anthropological magazines to which Peter had subscribed, and which, after his death, Bridget had somehow not got round to cancelling. Maybe, then, it influenced her when she found herself counting seahorses.

  The light was constructed so that the seahorses rose and fell according to the expansion of the water, which in turn was governed by the heat emitting from the light bulb. ‘When I have counted twenty-one rise-and-falls,’ Bridget decided to herself one night, ‘I shall fall asleep.’

  Although Bridget had discarded her country’s faith, it is harder to rid oneself of the superstition which is the ancestor of religion. Ireland is a country where, long before St Patrick set foot, magic reigned. Indeed, belief in religion is possibly dependent on superstitious magic and the number 21 is famous for its power to charm. The night light had seven seahorses trapped within its transparent walls; Bridget decided that the charm which would put her to sleep would consist of watching each of the seven seahorses rise and fall three times. On the other hand, she thought, she could ring the changes by watching three of the seahorses make the same motion seven times.

  The elaboration of this ritual, as with countless of its primitive predecessors, was worked out over successive efforts. It was weeks before the finished form became established; and not until after Christmas that the alternative form was devised. The ‘seahorse effect’ was needed only in the Fulham house. Already she had established that at Farings no such soporific was required. It had to do with Peter’s missing presence—other people would call it ‘mourning’—but then, she never took much account of what other people called things.

  So when, having got to the third seahorse, in what had become a regular ritual count, she looked up and saw Peter in the corner of the bedroom, she was startled of course, but not altogether surprised.

  Months later, when trying to recover that first shimmery snatch of him—‘first’ in the sense that it was the first time she had seen him since he had died—she decided that what he most resembled was the mummified starling which Mr Godwit had fetched down from inside the chimney. At the time she said, simply, ‘Peter?’ at which the thing-which-had-been-Peter folded back into the rooky darkness.

  19

  Frances had had to turn down a second invitation to Farings. There was a show on at the gallery and she had to be on hand to organise the moving in of the works of the young sculptor who was showing there. Roy, whose taste had made the gallery, was a puzzle to Frances. ‘How can someone with such an aesthetic gift be so personally unpleasant?’ she had once asked Peter. To Peter this was no contradiction. ‘Some of the nicest people I know have the most terrible taste,’ he objected, ‘and vice versa. You seem to expect people to be the same all through!’ ‘You mean like that toothpaste—’ Frances had asked—‘with mouthwash in the stripe, or jam in a Swiss roll?’ ‘Talking of rolls…’ he had said (they were in bed at the time).

  The sculptor arrived and fretted as the van containing his work was unloaded. Frances understood this: she knew about artists’ anxiety from Painter. ‘You’ve only yourself that really knows,’ he had declared, when she had tried to reassure him after a critic had damned with faint praise his latest show. ‘The arsehole thinks that just because it looks easy it isn’t deep.’

&nb
sp; Frances herself was not sure if she would recognise ‘deep’ but she knew the sculptor was not being grandiose when he fussed about the transport of his pieces; or how they were placed around the gallery, whether or not in the right light. ‘It isn’t egotism,’ she had said to Peter once, of Patrick in fact. ‘It’s a kind of self-respect.’

  Patrick, unusually, had agreed to attend the opening. It was part of Frances’s value to the gallery that she had a gift for getting people along to functions; but even with her influence over Patrick it was unusual for him to put himself out for a fellow artist.

  ‘I’ll come,’ he had said, ‘provided I don’t have to talk to anyone but you,’ which wasn’t so easy, Frances reflected as she steered him through to the drinks table.

  Painter was wearing a bubblegum-pink waistcoat and matching socks. With his black beetling eyebrows, springy, untameable hair and the hum of fantastic energy which almost audibly came off him, it was impossible to miss the fact that here was someone who ‘counted’.

  The concept of those who ‘count’ was one which Frances had learned from her brother Hugh who had counted so much that the loss of him shattered for ever the weak ties which held the Slater family together. Neither his father nor his mother, it was understood, had ever recovered from the death of their dashing youngest child—who claimed men and women alike. And James, poor James, had had to grow insufferable as a result—his only means of combating the dead charm. She herself, she knew from the way in which her presence made so little difference to her parents’ grief, had never counted. In fact, she was aware her mother often wished it was her only daughter who had been killed instead of Hugh.

  Patrick, a glass of Roy’s cheaper wine (a special offer at Majestic) held grimly in his fist, had, against all precedent agreed to speak to the young sculptor, who stood guarding his prize exhibit, a massive boulder within which were carved intricate and delicate fronds of fern.