Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  ‘Bloody piss, this,’ Painter remarked.

  The young sculptor jerked round and for a moment Frances thought he was going to hit the older man. ‘He means the wine,’ she explained.

  Painter gave a farmyard bellow. ‘Don’t read a word the arseholes write about you, will you!’ He brought a fist down on the shoulder of the younger man—who reeled backwards as much at the unexpected compliment as at the force.

  Frances, seeing Patrick into a taxi, said, ‘That was kind of you—he went the colour of your socks!’ at which Painter went quite pink himself.

  ‘How’s the widow?’

  Frances had told Painter, when she last visisted, that she had been staying with the widow of ‘an old friend’. Now she explained that she had been invited to the country with Bridget again but hadn’t gone on account of the show.

  ‘I’m an “old friend” too, aren’t I? Come and visit me instead. Fred and Ginger would like to see you…’ he yelled through the open window as the taxi pulled away.

  Back home, Frances ran a bath under Peter’s watchful eye. He waited, like a fussy nurse, to see that she had rubbed and patted dry all the crevices of her naked body, before he slipped back, through the hole in reality, into the windy dark.

  20

  It is easier to refuse an invitation if you have a guest staying. Part of Bridget’s reason for asking Frances up to Farings again was a hesitation over Mr Godwit’s promise to take her birdwatching. So when the offer showed no sign of being renewed she was at first relieved—then, perversely, a little annoyed. It was one thing to turn down an invitation; another to have the prospect withdrawn.

  Bridget took herself into the garden and did some heavy digging; the ground was clay and she had to work hard to clear the patch of ground where she had decided to grow beans.

  ‘“Nine bean rows will I have there,”’ she intoned to herself, ‘“…And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”’ What did the young Yeats want with nine bean rows? Nine bean rows would feed an army.

  Bridget had never quite trusted the poetic grasp of the natural world since she had detected a confusion between ‘alder’ and ‘elder’ in the work of a contemporary poet. She had written to the poet to point out the error but, unsurprisingly, had received no reply. It was not a mistake you would find Shakespeare making even though he was sometimes shaky on his geography. Maybe it was just a matter of what one felt was important—for her, and for Shakespeare, the difference between elders and alders mattered—for other people it might be the nonexistent coastline of Bohemia.

  Bridget was lighting a fire when someone rapped on the window. Looking out she saw the sweep.

  ‘Meant to call earlier—you’ve been gardening.’

  Bridget explained about the bean rows.

  ‘Going to put any broad beans in? They’re my favourite—the first broad beans with potato and mayonnaise—a meal for a king!’

  There was tea brewing in the brown pot.

  ‘That’s apple you’re burning.’ The man sniffed like a connoisseur. ‘How are the rooks doing?’

  ‘“The rook-delighting heaven”,’ said Bridget automatically. As she spoke a cloud passed across the face of the sun, darkening the room, and she shivered. A goose walking over her grave. She hoped whatever it was that had looked like Peter wasn’t cast out naked.

  ‘Ah yes, Yeats—the “injustice of the skies”. I like that one. One I don’t like is “Innisfree” with the “evening full of the linnet’s wing”. The linnet’s wing is brown—it’s the head that’s pink, if he wanted to talk sunsets. Still, you can’t have everything.’

  ‘How funny,’ said Bridget, ‘I was just thinking about that, too. I was thinking that nine bean rows was far too many for a single man.’

  ‘Unless he meant bean poles,’ said Mr Godwit. ‘Nine bean poles in a wigwam. He’s a great poet—I suppose we should give him the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘Then he should have said so!’ A poet should be accurate.

  There was a pause.

  ‘It could be he didn’t mean to refer to the colour pink at all,’ Bridget said, relenting. ‘It might just be the wings—that peculiar whirring sound of birds’ flight you get just before dusk—that he felt the evening was full of, and the pink heads get confused with sunsets…’

  Shyness mingled in the air with the apple smoke. Mr Godwit drank his tea and they both stared at the fire as if it held some arcane secret.

  ‘Well, I must be going.’

  ‘Thank you for coming then,’ Bridget said politely.

  ‘Goodbye then,’ said the sweep. He went out of the door and down the path.

  Bridget thought: I didn’t want to go anyway. I wouldn’t have known what to talk to him about.

  ‘Just thinking,’ said Mr Godwit, putting his head back round the door. ‘If you’d like to come to the coast with me tomorrow…? There’s been talk of sightings of choughs.’

  The air was sharp with the scent of incipient spring and the sun on the field was laying the lightest benediction on the pale ranks of spring wheat when at 8 a.m. the sound of a diesel engine could be heard coming up the lane.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind leaving at this hour,’ Mr Godwit enquired, declutching to negotiate the steep mud ruts. ‘Only, by this time of year the traffic gets going early at the weekends.’

  In near silence they drove through the greening Shropshire countryside. Occasionally Mr Godwit pointed out objects of local interest: the old cottage hospital, now being turned into tasteful apartments; the house where a local bigamist had lived, supposedly with a third wife under the floorboards; an oxbow bend in the river—good for frogspawn. Bridget’s mind roamed back to Peter—or whatever it was that had looked like Peter in her bedroom. Speculating about the place into which she had watched her husband vanish, she hoped it might be soft and warm—like down feathers plucked from the breast of some vast night-plumaged goose. Peter—wherever he was—would need comfort. Had she given him comfort? Probably not enough; but then, maybe nothing one gave another person was ever quite enough…?

  Bridget might have been pleasantly surprised to learn that Peter himself had no complaints on this score. Had he been asked—as he might have been, for who knows the form of that measureless infinity which Bridget had been contemplating—he would have answered that his life with Bridget had been better than he could ever have expected—much more than he deserved, for deep down he was a modest man.

  As we know from his early declaration to Frances, Peter loved his wife and admired her well-delineated character. If his own character was more susceptible to influence, and, as a consequence, more shifting, he accepted that as a fault on his part and a virtue on hers. Her uncompromising nature made him feel that, even if he had not found them for himself, there were certainties in the world.

  For Peter the prospect of certainty was a kind of grail. His first wife—whom he married because she flattered his vanity—had delivered all certainty an almost fatal blow when she dismissed her own prenuptial declarations as, ‘the sort of things people say—of course I didn’t mean them!’ Odd as it may sound, the idea that people might say things they didn’t mean was a difficult one for Peter, though he himself could hardly be said to be always quite square with the truth. But the gap between what we are ourselves and what we want others to be is rarely measured, and a certain simplicity—naivety, almost—was part of Peter’s character. In fact this was one of the traits in him which Bridget later found attractive.

  Bridget and Peter met at a café in Notting Hill in the days when Bridget was still running her stall in the Portobello Road. She was sitting at a table reading when Peter entered the café in search of some refuge against the sudden sweep of nauseous dizziness with which he was occasionally afflicted. Peter noticed at once the aura of calm which surrounded Bridget and which was to make up a strand in her attraction for him. He sat down, near her table, and tried to make out what it was she was reading.

  In a moment of hilarity afterwards, Bridget
suggested that it was usually women who resorted to such tricks; having failed to see what it was that so absorbed the handsome blonde that she had no mind to notice him, Peter made as if to get himself another cup of coffee at the counter, staggered, grabbed at the table where Bridget was sitting, and thus, finally, succeeded in drawing her attention.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he had said, dramatically impersonating the giddiness he actually felt, ‘let me get you another,’ for in the cafuffle he had engineered, her cup of tea had spilled.

  The tea had penetrated the leaves of The Inferno and the discovery of the name of the engrossing book had given Peter pause: he was not sure he was up to a woman who read Dante.

  ‘But it’s not a bit “intellectual”, really,’ Bridget had said, on the mirthful occasion on which the subterfuge had been acknowledged. ‘It’s full of sense. Just what hell would be like—if there was a hell. But then I was brought up a Catholic so I’m conditioned to notions like hell and purgatory.’

  At this time Peter was not a Catholic himself. When later he became one we know he never let on to his wife. The cautious part of him feared a jocular response from Bridget—and caution is often a sound guide. It is likely that though Bridget would not have openly mocked him for adopting the religion she had fought to escape, her humour might have been too rough to bear without resentment—and instinctively Peter knew that resentment is an enemy to marriage.

  Bridget nearly cried out when the sweep’s van came in sight of the long, low line of shining, shivering grey. She loved the sea: an ancestor had been a pirate and privately she liked to imagine that piratical blood flowed in her own veins. Perhaps, she had speculated as a child, the man had been hanged? Why, when the thought of hanging made her feel sick, was the idea of it in connexion with a relative so intoxicating?

  She got out of the car rubbing her back which had seized up during the journey.

  ‘That’s the way down, there,’ Stanley Godwit pointed. ‘It’s pretty steep, mind.’

  ‘Damn!’ Bridget said, ‘I forgot to bring boots.’

  But this proved no deterrent. ‘What size are you? Six, I’d say. You can use Corrie’s boots. She keeps them in the van—you and she’ll be about the same size.’

  Cordelia—King Lear’s daughter—‘Choughs are those birds with red bills, aren’t they?’—there were choughs in King Lear.

  ‘Part of the rook family. Used to nest here common as gulls a couple of hundred years ago.’

  When blind Gloucester, seeking to end his life, stands on the edge of the cliff which, even in the play’s terms, isn’t really there, his son, Edgar, to support the delusion, describes the dizzy heights his father imagines he stands on the verge of: The crows and choughs that wing the midway air/ Show scarce so gross as beetles…But could Shakespeare, living only in London and Warwickshire, ever have seen the sea? Bridget wondered, her ankles bending against the steepness of the descent. Her grandfather, who swore the playwright had been to Ireland and back, would have said so. And when you heard how Shakespeare wrote about the sea, it seemed incredible if he had never seen it. Was it possible that, like the cliff where the supposed choughs are sighted, Shakespeare’s ‘sea’ was merely spun from his imagination? But then so was everything else he wrote ‘spun’: Hamlet, Lear, Gertrude, Cordelia—like the choughs, you could hardly say they didn’t exist, they were realer than most people. What kind of existence did a character in a play have? Did Shakespeare’s characters ‘exist’ in another world, in your mind, the way that a memory did—or a dead person, as Peter now seemed to…? But where, or what, was Peter’s world now? Was what she had seen real, or was it just in her mind…?

  But then she herself, she had often speculated, was no more than a dramatic construction, made up of fleeting feelings, idle introspections, vain wonderings—glimpses in the ‘glass of fashion’, she thought, taking hold of the sweep’s hard hand as he helped her down the drop to the uneven, many-pebbled shore.

  21

  Although Frances had now met his sister, she had not seen Zahin since the day she called round with the Chinese bowl, when he had referred to her and Peter as sweethearts. The odd pronouncement—Peter’s own word for them—remained for her a conundrum. She had not mentioned it to Bridget for she was well aware that, despite their quirky acquaintance, Bridget retained an understandable hostility to the affair.

  Lying in bed one morning, Frances wondered how the boy could have come by his knowledge of her and Peter, and was suddenly overcome by remembrance.

  What she was recalling, in particular, was the summer after they had first met at Mickey’s, when she had gone regularly to the open-air baths to swim. The purpose of the exercise had been to trim the body which Peter seemed so to like, but the swims had evolved into a ritual through which, mad as it seemed even to herself, she sought to keep him.

  ‘If I swim another seven lengths,’ she used to incant, ‘he will ring me tonight.’ The seven would be followed by another seven—and so on. When, returning home exhausted, her hair damp and smelling of chlorine, she heard his voice on the answerphone, she tasted triumph.

  It has been suggested that what we want and pursue with a whole heart we can always have. Who can tell the validity of this proposition—yet there are people whose conviction is strong enough to steer fate. It may be that without Frances’s propitiating swims—or what lay behind them—Peter’s interest in her might have waned. Certainly, at the simplest level, he responded to her need of him—as a man who has been abandoned always will.

  The belief that we are worth loving is a blessing granted to very few and with that one blessing all others become redundant. To Peter Hansome, the idea that he might be the object of another’s desire was inherently unbelievable. And yet there had been Veronica…

  Peter was too untried at the time to perceive that the uncomplicated merging of body and emotion he had known in Malaya was one of those gifts which, through its very simplicity, gives an illusion of being commonplace. He had taken the whole experience simply, very much in the manner with which he had caught up the gold-skinned girl’s body in his arms and threatened, amid squeals of delight, to ‘crush it to death’. That mix of amorous sadism and erotic masochism was too fine-blent—in those days, too far below the surface of conscious thought—to be recognisable to Peter for what it was: a complete compatibility of disposition and longing, an example of natural partnership—in other words, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  It has been told how, on the discharge of his commission, Peter had contemplated returning to Malaya to marry Veronica. What has not been told is how letter after letter had arrived—all in the childlike cursive handwriting taught by the Sisters of Mercy—how these had been read more and more sketchily until, finally, they had been put away, unopened, in a far recess of the oak bureau. (That these were not among the relics later found by Bridget was because, long before, during his first marriage, Peter had consigned the collection of manila envelopes, addressed in the round hand, to a purpose-built fire in the back garden, and had gone out afterwards to a nightclub in Soho where the ‘waitresses’ were obliging.)

  It would be easy to assume that it was that lack of commitment with which women these days so often charge men, which led to Peter’s seeming brutality. Veronica, back in Malaya, was first worried, then hurt, then, finally, angry when, after a few increasingly terse cards, she heard nothing back from the man who had ‘died’ inside her with the most unguarded expressions of ardent adoration. But guarded men do not always care to recall their unguarded moments; it was the memory of that uncollected wash of feeling which was partly responsible for shoving away to the back of Peter’s mind, as well as his desk, the envelopes written by the slender hand which had so often—and so unexpectedly—brought him such exquisite delight.

  But just as memory can recede more swiftly than we expect so the opposite is also true: people do not fade away inside us as easily as we sometimes hope. There came moments when, before he had consciously formulated the
reason, Peter’s heart would quicken and lurch, as, in the distance—perhaps walking down the street, or at the far end of a carriage on the tube—his eye was deceived by the sight of some slender, gold-skinned girl into believing his first, misprized love had returned.

  The onset of significant developments in our inner lives is not easy to date: often they drift upon us casually, like snowflakes which do not announce the speed and severity with which they will become a storm. Peter could not have precisely said when it was that, in the act of making love to a woman, there began to come always a moment when she turned into Veronica.

  At first he had been disgusted with himself. We know that in his fashion he was faithful, and the idea of super-imposing another on to the body of the woman he was making love to, tarnished his own picture of himself. But no one has ever found a successful counter to the anarchic forces the heart is host to—and, in the end, Peter had to accept that whenever, or however, he made love, and with whatever degree of fervour, there would always be three present: himself, the woman—and Veronica.

  Some say this is what is meant by the law of karma, a stepping aside from a moment of possibility only to be for ever haunted by its unrealised spectre. If this is the case it seems hardly fair on those who have had no part in, yet suffer, the consequences of such derelictions. But here too there may be some pattern, and perhaps it is as well that whatever runs the system which is life has not found time to read the Declaration of Human Rights. By the time Peter met Bridget and Frances, both women to whom he longed to give his ardour unconfined, he found, when making love, he was impossibly and inescapably merged with the ephemeral body of a young Malayan girl, who by now if not, conceivably, dead was certainly middle-aged.

  Frances was entrusted with the knowledge of her lover’s faith but he never divulged to her his love for Veronica. Nor could she have borne that knowledge. Lying in bed months after her lover’s death, she resolved the mystery of the young Iranian’s clairvoyant insight with the consoling thought that the passion she and Peter had shared was so tremendous it had manifested itself to others, even after death.