Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  22

  Bridget, shopping in the village, bumped into Stanley Godwit in the company of a man with a ginger moustache and a cross-looking young woman.

  ‘My daughter, Corrie.’ Stanley made the introductions. ‘And this is my son-in-law, Roland. Mrs Hansome.’

  ‘Bridget,’ said Bridget, staring at the moustache. The owner of it had a roly-poly look. Well named, she thought, Was he really a psychoanalyst? The humorous sweep could have been having her on.

  ‘I took Mrs…er…Bridget birdwatching a fortnight back.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  Bridget, who had brought pebbles back from the beach, fingered them smooth and hard in her pocket. The eyes of the sweep’s daughter were somewhat pebbly.

  ‘Your father showed me some waders. Turnstones and golden plovers.’ She remembered the names but did not mention that they had also seen a whimbrel—a slender, solitary, grey-plumaged bird, smaller than a curlew, with long elegant legs and an aristocratically curved beak. There in the high street the bird suddenly reminded Bridget of Frances.

  ‘There were said to be choughs but—’

  ‘—we didn’t manage to see any,’ Bridget interrupted. She had been disappointed not to see the fabled rook-like bird with the scarlet beak and matching legs. She didn’t mention that she had worn Cordelia’s boots. Stanley Godwit seemed uncomfortable and, wanting to ease things for him, Bridget invited them all round for a drink. ‘Your wife too, Mr Godwit, of course.’

  ‘My wife, bless her, is in a wheelchair. She doesn’t go out much.’

  Hell, why hadn’t he mentioned this during their trip? To her alarm Bridget found she was blushing.

  The daughter furrowed her brow and said, ‘We should be getting back, Dad,’ and grabbed his arm, which made Bridget remember the conversation about father complexes.

  ‘Are you really a psychoanalyst?’ Bridget asked.

  As if to keep her company the roly-poly flushed too. He had the kind of complexion which at best tends towards pink.

  ‘I work at the Paddington Clinic and Day Hospital in London.’

  ‘Heavens,’ said Bridget, noticing that he was wearing bicycle clips, ‘that sounds pretty terrifying!’ The bicycle clips gave a rather endearing look.

  ‘Better watch it or he’ll lock you up!’ said Stanley Godwit, laughing loudly. Bridget, recognising this as the mirth of social embarrassment, let the Godwit party go. She had come to the village more to explore than to make any radical purchases. It was easy to bring stuff with her from Fulham. Nevertheless, it was useful that beside a tea shop with the legend ‘Daisy’s Teas’ in green and white, there was a chemist, a dull-looking greengrocer’s and what looked like a proper butcher’s. There were pigs’ trotters in the window; also tripe. Bridget did not much care for either but she liked to see that they were still in supply. Peering into the shop’s interior she could see a whole pig’s head, waxy-yellow with wide, red, splayed nostrils. A pork butcher’s then? She decided to show goodwill by buying sausages.

  But the experience was disappointing. The woman serving smiled—to disguise ill temper—and the diplomatically intended purchase did not go well. All the sausages of Shropshire, it appeared, had already been snapped up.

  ‘You need to order in advance for the weekend. We’ve sold right out, I’m afraid.’ The woman’s voice reflected satisfaction at being unable to meet this new customer’s demands.

  ‘How fortunate for you that your business is thriving,’ said Bridget and bought chump chops instead. ‘Is this local lamb?’ she enquired, but the woman sucked her teeth as if being required to solve a deep, theological question.

  ‘I couldn’t say. Welsh, I would think.’

  So much for welcoming locals, Bridget thought. The scowling Cordelia and the pork butcher’s assistant were not great adverts for the community.

  She drove home, passing, on the way, the psychoanalyst, pinker than ever and pedalling hard on a state-of-the-art-looking bike. A wish not to be influenced by her unaccountable embarrassment made Bridget wind down the window and yell, ‘I meant what I said—do come round and have a drink some time, any of you who feel like it…’ and he gestured and waved back in quite a friendly way. Probably frightened of his wife, Bridget thought.

  This sparked other thoughts: back at Farings one of the sudden swinging moods of listlessness, which had visited since Peter’s death, swept over her—everything seemed too much trouble and pointless—there was no one who cared whether she was alive or dead, she had no child, or god, nothing to lend purpose to existence. Not even the book she was reading seemed worth the trouble—a modern book, one of those published to extravagant acclaim, none of it borne out by the experience of reading it.

  Bridget had been a reader since the age of four, when she had found that, by concentrated staring, she could make sense of the magazine called Housewife which her mother was sent each month by a cousin who had married into the north. It was in Housewife, a few years on, when the habit of reading had become compulsive, that Bridget had read The Greengage Summer, and it was from this that she had learned about forbidden passions.

  It was the kind of story which her mother’s brother, Uncle Father Eamonn, would have censored had he been aware of its content. But Bridget learned self-preservation from her mother, and the clandestine affair between the older man and the young girl, which Moira Dwyer and her daughter devoured, was described to Father Eamonn by his sister as ‘a great story about a fruit farmer’.

  From Housewife Bridget had graduated to The Famous Five, White Boots, Treasure Island, Jane Eyre (with whom she formed a certain fellow feeling) and finally, and permanently, Shakespeare. After that there was to be no equivalent love, as a disgruntled boyfriend later commented.

  Bridget was introduced to Shakespeare by Sister Mary Eustasia who taught her in the first year of secondary school. Sister Mary Eustasia had a shrewd expression and the kind of voice which does not need to be raised. ‘Now I want no nonsense, mind,’ she would say. ‘Any girl giving me any nonsense and it’s extra homework and staying behind after school, make no mistake.’

  Where there is true authority there is no need for punishment; there were few enough occasions when girls were made to stay behind. If Bridget was an exception it was because she preferred to remain in the company of the strict Sister Mary Eustasia than face the erratic justice of home. If her father was in when she got back, the chances were she would end up eating her supper in the yard, with Cindy the dog.

  On the whole, Bridget liked animals, but Cindy, her father’s pet, an ill-disciplined, bad-tempered bitch, had picked up her master’s habits and would snap and snarl at Bridget, as if currying favour with the father when the daughter was in disgrace. Not only Bridget’s fingers and toes but also her knees developed chilblains during the colder months, a fact which was not missed by the sharp-eyed Sister. When Bridget had attracted attention to herself yet again, by talking during a silent period for the third time in as many weeks, Sister Mary Eustasia called her over to her desk and said, with, for her, unusual mildness, ‘I’ll see you after school and have your English book ready to show me as well, will you?’

  When the time came it was not the English book which Sister Mary Eustasia seemed concerned with. Instead she pulled from the pocket of her habit a book bound in dark red leather with a gold script.

  The Works of William Shakespeare, Bridget read.

  ‘Have you read much of him yourself?’ Sister Mary Eustasia asked, and it was only many years later that Bridget realised that this severe, exact woman had dropped her usual tone and spoken to her almost as a colleague. When Bridget said she hadn’t her teacher went on, ‘Well now, he’s the very best. People say you should start with the comedies but for myself I got to like them only later. Life isn’t comic when you’re young, would you agree? Start with Hamlet, I think is best; you won’t go wrong there.’

  And, slightly bewildered, Bridget had seen that the red book, with its gold italic lettering and g
rand binding, was meant for herself to borrow.

  From there began a routine whereby Bridget stayed behind after school while Sister Mary Eustasia marked books, wrote reports, or tidied out her desk. Later, driving through the gloam-lit evening lanes, Sister Mary Eustasia’s occasional post-school garrulity would lapse, and there would be moments of tranquil silence. Neither Bridget’s parents, nor the girls at school, ever commented on this unusual arrangement and this was how Bridget learned that if you behaved as if your differences from other people were to be expected, they would be allowed to you.

  Lying on the sofa at Farings, watching through the window a wren weave its way through the lords and ladies which grew at the foot of the hedge, Bridget recalled that first evening by the stove in the corner of the classroom, reading, with Sister Mary Eustasia passing the occasional comment.

  ‘They say that Shakespeare was a Catholic, of course, but if so it’s a damn queer ghost, coming out of Purgatory, as it tells us it does, and trying to entice young Hamlet to commit a murder! But then if it’s a Protestant ghost there wouldn’t be mention of Purgatory at all—the Prods don’t believe in it—so it’s a puzzlement, wouldn’t you say?’

  Bridget had heard of purgatory—of course she had; you did not grow up in Uncle Father Eamonn’s ambit ignorant of the ‘fires which cleanse and purge’. ‘The smallest pain in Purgatory is greater than the greatest on earth,’ he liked to tell his captive congregation.

  For Bridget this meant the place where she might be rid of pardonable sin resembled something along the lines of a particularly horrible supper with her father. Possibly breakfast, lunch and supper lumped together—rather like the school holidays but with no time off for reading in between. Her mother—who, much later Bridget saw, used religion as a trade unionist might use statutory sick leave: as a means of taking legitimate absence from the regular bind—had taken Bridget during one such holiday to St Patrick’s Purgatory. This was to be found on Station Island in Donegal, a location where Christ was popularly alleged to have revealed to St Patrick an entrance to purgatory and—presumably from there—a successful route to paradise.

  The trip was not a success. The Irish summer, always unpredictable, was more than ordinarily inclement and they had had to queue up for the holy site in driving rain. A priest, in the crush to see the sacred spot, had taken the opportunity to crush himself against Bridget’s thigh and in retaliation she had bitten his hand. Uncle Father Eamonn had smacked her hard on the same thigh—which Bridget had loudly asserted she greatly preferred to having ‘that old priest press his old thingy there’—for which she got smacked again rather harder, this time round the head.

  Thereafter, in Bridget’s mind, purgatory became a kind of amalgam of that visit: an unholy mix of freezing wetness, lecherous priests, discarded cigarette packets, sweet papers and crisp bags—left by the pious pilgrims—and the sickening buzz in her ears while Uncle Father Eamonn dealt out righteous punishment upon them.

  The idea, therefore, that purgatory might be a concept appropriate to a great play was intriguing. On that evening when she had first remained behind in the classroom with Sister Mary Eustasia, Bridget read the story of Prince Hamlet and his father, the old king, who had been murdered, poisoned through his ear by his ambitious brother while sleeping in an apple orchard. (‘A reference to the Garden of Eden, wouldn’t you say, Bridget?’ Sister Mary Eustasia, in her collegiate way, had remarked.)

  There was one line in particular which attracted Bridget. The murdered man had been Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin/Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled.

  Bridget liked the sound of ‘unhouseled’. Sister Mary Eustasia explained to her that it meant that Hamlet’s father had died without benefit of the ‘housel’ or Eucharist. ‘What we call the Blessed Sacrament, Bridget. “Disappointed” is a fine, rich word, too, look. It means the old king died without having made the proper “appointments” with death—the chance to make confession and receive absolution.’

  What Bridget concluded from this was that she herself must have failed to make some similar appointment. She had learned disappointment early and one consequence of an education in disappointment is that you learn not to take your own desires too seriously. Or you learn to defend them, if at all, by stealth.

  So when the travelling theatre came to the city with a production of Hamlet, Bridget didn’t even consider seeking permission to go; she embarked at once on a scheme to see the drama which had so momentously altered her mental life.

  23

  In the plan to see Hamlet as usual it was Sister Mary Eustasia who came to Bridget’s aid; more properly, the image of her, since Sister Mary Eustasia, in person, was away, taking her annual vacation in Galway. But invoking her name was a powerful amulet against her father and Uncle Father Eamonn, so that when Bridget said, ‘Sister wants me to stay over and help her with a play she’s doing with the third years,’ no one raised any objection—though Joseph Dwyer did mutter, ‘What she want to fill them babbies’ heads with that for? Where’s that going to teach them how to mend the shirts off their men’s backs?’

  Truth is often the safest form of deception. Bridget went on to explain that the play was by Shakespeare, who was familiar to Joseph Dwyer from the legend which claimed that the playwright had visited Youghal, Dwyer’s home town, as part of a travelling band of players invited by Sir Walter Raleigh. The Irish, always ready to be allied with genius, swore that the character of Shylock was based on Youghal’s Jewish mayor of the time. Had it been at all possible, they would have claimed Shakespeare too for one of their countrymen.

  ‘It’s The Merchant of Venice, Da,’ Bridget explained, ‘the one Grand-Da used to tell me about, you know?’—and in this way won her small freedom.

  ‘You see, Bridget,’ Sister Mary Eustasia had said, by the stove that first November evening, when the centre of gravity in Bridget’s world shifted, ‘Hamlet was a sweet prince, with a noble mind, and that old misery guts of a ghost came and corrupted it with all that talk of the torment he was suffering—how, if you were to hear about the dreadful time he had been having, it would make your hair stand on your head like the quills on the “fretful porpentine”—for Heaven’s sake! And people imagining Shakespeare could possibly have endorsed such terrible self-centred nonsense! But that’s “people” for you! They say the young prince dithered instead of getting down to it—but “people” don’t think! It was a mortal sin he was being asked to commit—and his not the soul for it at all.’

  Bridget watching the play that first time recalled her teacher’s words and asked herself: Whose soul is?

  Vengeance, then, and its attendant dangers, were already on her mind when she arrived home.

  ‘Where were you then, you little whore?’ her father asked knocking her down.

  To give herself courage, before setting out for the play, Bridget had inexpertly applied make-up. Now she vaguely wiped her hand across her mouth, smearing the blood, which was streaming from her lower lip, into Rimmel’s ‘Honeykisses’.

  ‘I’ll wipe that whore’s muck off your fucking face, so I will!’

  Economy with lying is sometimes as important as economy with the truth.

  ‘It’s Maeve Whelan as is playing the part of Portia,’ Bridget had thrown off as she was leaving, the copy of Shakespeare already tucked inside her coat, a scarf loosely draped around her face to cast a shadow over the illicit make-up. An unnecessary fiction; but Bridget was human and only sixteen, and had not had time to learn that simplicity in fiction (and lies are only one of fiction’s many forms) is generally best. She had elaborated—dangerously, as it turned out when Mrs Whelan had called by and remarked in passing that her Maeve had gone with Joan MacCormack to visit Joan’s nan up in Sligo. This news in itself would have been safe enough—Moira Dwyer not being one to rock the family boat—had Joseph Dwyer not thought to remind his wife that he would be off for a spot of fishing in the morning and she would need to get his dinner in time for an early start. It w
as to deliver this edict that he was entering the kitchen when Maeve’s mother blew Bridget’s cover.

  ‘She’s in a play by Shakespeare, though, your Maeve?’ Joseph was proud of his knowledge of the so-called English ‘bard’.

  Mrs Whelan was not an ill-meaning woman; the last thing she would have wanted was young Bridget, who sometimes helped out with looking after her youngest, getting into trouble. But she was not quick enough on the uptake to avert a crisis.

  ‘What play’s that now, Joseph?’

  ‘Are you sure now it’s not a case of better the devil you know, Bridget?’

  Sister Mary Eustasia’s grey eyes looked tired. Bridget, who had come to return the Shakespeare before leaving, found herself, not for the first time, wondering what in the nun’s own life had led her to take the veil.

  ‘Mam says she’s scared I’ll kill him.’

  ‘And you would, would you…?’

  ‘If he ever hits me like that again I will.’

  ‘In that case maybe you are better gone.’

  By this time Bridget was tall enough to look down on her teacher. Addressing the well-governed face, which had seen her through so many family crises, she said, making a joke out of the subject which had brought them close—for she found that some table between the two of them had turned and now the responsibility of making the atmosphere right had fallen on her—‘I’ll be best off in England. Didn’t Hamlet say they’re all mad there anyway?’

  ‘Remember now where you came from,’ Sister Mary Eustasia had said, ‘the land of St Patrick, who was crazy enough to survive anything.’

  By this time Bridget had thought more about St Patrick’s Purgatory and the ghost in Hamlet who was doomed for a certain time to fast in fires. ‘Sure, St Patrick didn’t have childer to take it out on, Sister!’