Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  She rattled the handle pushing with her shoulder against the door. Hell and damnation, what was this? From inside the bathroom there came a voice.

  ‘Mrs Hansome…’

  ‘Zahin?’

  A bell-like giggle.

  ‘I thought you had gone to the country, Mrs Hansome.’

  Standing in bra and knickers, locked out of her own bathroom, Bridget felt foolish. She had been sure the house was empty; the discovery that Zahin had been in all along disconcerted her. But she was also grateful.

  ‘I was going to have a bath before I left,’ she called through the door. An unmistakable scent of meadow flowers drifted out to her with the chiming voice, ‘A thousand sorries, Mrs Hansome, I have finished in here—I will run your bath for you now.’

  It was past nine when Bridget finally set out for Shropshire. Next door, Mickey had long finished her dinner and was looking for entertainment through the window. She had observed Bridget’s encounter with the man on her doorstep, just as earlier that same evening she had watched a young, dark-haired girl, in a leather jacket, saunter up the same garden path. ‘I suppose Bridget knows her own mind,’ she remarked. Joan Clancey was visiting her sister in Dulwich and Mickey was spending Easter alone; for the time being there was only the unimpressionable air to take her meaning.

  27

  There was no one either, when she woke the following morning at Farings, for Bridget to observe to that she had been right about bank holidays. Rain was cascading from the gutter on to the flower bed, flattening the daffodils and narcissi. Across the field she could hear the sound of St Anselm’s bells, brazenly inviting the parishioners of Merrow to share the Word with Rector Dark.

  Count me out! Bridget thought.

  The chance meeting with the man on her doorstep had illuminated her own isolation. That and Zahin’s clear expectation of her absence. He had charmingly made her tea and toast, had run a bath, filling it with the bath oil he had obviously helped himself to, and had been as full of courtesy as ever; but there was no gainsaying a sense of the cat being away…

  The rain looked as if it was well set in and Bridget, who had planned to garden, decided to go for a drive. Perhaps the weather might pick up elsewhere.

  At the garden gate she met Stanley Godwit walking down the lane. ‘Hello there. Lovely weather for ducks!’

  ‘I was going for a drive,’ Bridget said.

  ‘Ah, well, drive carefully now—visibility’s poor. I’ve just sent my lot off in the van to Gloria’s sister’s.’

  Sometimes life gives us a chance to practise. Bridget, who had regretted not inviting the stranger in for a drink, was better able to offer an invitation now. ‘I’ve never visited Ludlow—would you like to come?’

  ‘Is it the castle you’re off to?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought—but if it’s there…’

  Ludlow Castle was built on a corner of the important manor of Stanton, held in 1066 by the de Lacy family. Protected by the rivers Teme and Corve, and the steep slopes to the north and west, it stands in a fine defensive position. The castle, constructed of chunky Silurian limestone quarried from its own site, was one of a line of Norman castles along the Marches, built by the Conqueror to pacify the local countryside and hold back the unconquered Welsh.

  Bridget, who was Irish and mistrusted conquerors, was grudgingly impressed. ‘It’s not as intransigent as most.’

  They had walked up to the castle along a lane where the first crinkled young hawthorn leaves were showing. ‘Bread and cheese!’ the sweep had said, picking a few tender green leaves and tasting them. Now he said, ‘You don’t like castles?’

  There had been violets at the foot of the hawthorn hedge; Bridget would like to have been offered ‘bread and cheese’ too. ‘I don’t like what they stand for.’

  Or the memories they held…

  The time she saw Hamlet, just before she left Limerick, it was in the grounds of the local castle. Sick with excitement, she had sat on the hard chair with Sister Mary Eustasia’s red-bound book fast under her thighs, safe against any forgetting. Far west as they were, the light was fading from the rose-dredged sky, so that when the first edgy lines of the play were spoken, it was against the eerie sound of the birds, which the Irish call by their generic name of crows (only later did Bridget learn to call them rooks), returning, in the eldritch light, to their nightly roosts in the trees.

  Who’s there?

  Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

  They walked across the drawbridge and round the walls, stopping to examine the bailey. ‘Brass-monkey weather!’ said the sweep. ‘Shall we find somewhere will give us a snack?’

  The town boasted a proper tearoom with a crackling fire, china dogs and copper pans. At the far end was a bookstall, which also offered souvenirs.

  They both ordered beans on toast and the sweep toffee ice cream for afters. ‘Gloria laughs at me for this,’ he said, indicating the ice. ‘Calls me a baby.’

  ‘Your wife can drive then?’ Bridget asked; she felt the spectre of Mrs Godwit’s health should be faced.

  ‘Not since the MS got worse. Corrie drove her and the kids over to her sister’s.’

  ‘She doesn’t mind your spending Easter Day away?’

  ‘Reckon we see a fair bit of each other most days—anyway, I had to see a man about a dog,’ the sweep concluded enigmatically.

  That seemed to be enough of that. Bridget lit a cigarette and looked about for conversational inspiration. The bookstall revealed a uniform selection of local guides—nothing to talk about there—also some novels, the kind Bridget avoided, and, surprisingly, a collection of contemporary poetry. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘H.V. St John.’ The poet H.V. St John was enjoying a late revival.

  The sweep raised his eyebrows.

  ‘You don’t know her?’

  Glad of the chance to depart from the topic of the Godwits’ family life, Bridget went over to the bookstand and took down a slim volume.

  ‘Listen.’ She opened a page.

  Small children like tragedies,

  They do not mind Lear’s madness,

  They recognise our maladies

  In Hamlet’s sadness.

  Large states are compassable,

  Childhood nights prepare us for such pains;

  It is the matters risible,

  The small affairs, which maim.

  The letter unarriving,

  Which brings us to our knees,

  Contains a power harrowing—

  The stuff of comedies.

  ‘And that’s true too,’ said Stanley Godwit. ‘Reckon I’ll buy a copy of that for Gloria.’

  By Monday morning the God of Bridget’s childhood had proved Himself; the rain had not abated. There was no chance of any gardening. Better to make the best of a bad job and try to beat the holiday traffic by starting early for London.

  Zahin greeted her affectionately; if he was displeased at her early return he showed no sign, but ushered her into the kitchen where he was making pancakes.

  A bunch of magazines lay neatly piled on the kitchen table—Vogue, Harpers, Marie Claire. The trip to Ludlow had unsettled Bridget. If Peter had been alive she might have picked a quarrel—though, of course, if Peter had been alive she would have had no occasion to visit Ludlow. ‘Have you seen your sister lately, Zahin?’

  ‘Sadly, she has had to return home.’

  The boy spoke with finality. Did he mean Iran or merely the family the girl had been lodging with? There was an air to Zahin’s manner which an impartial observer might have detected in Bridget’s own—polite as it always was, it forbade incursion.

  Bridget flicked idly through the magazines.

  ‘Look, Mrs Hansome, this on you would look so fine, see, with your English skin.’ Zahin had come over and, crouched beside her, was indicating an expensively simple linen dress. The boy had an eye—maybe he should be a fashion designer rather than a cook.

  ‘And this here, Mrs Hansome—so soft, for you so flatte
ring.’ He pointed to a blue pashmina.

  The scarf Peter had bought her had been that very colour. ‘Thrush egg’ she had called it and had quoted Hopkins to him, ‘“Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens”.’

  Peter had been rather proud of the way his current date broke into lines of poetry. He was suspicious of anything too intellectual; but Bridget was Irish, and for the Celts, poetry is the natural language of the heart. She never used it to make out she was superior; only, as with the scarf, for a mark of approval.

  It may be that the scarf—and Bridget’s poetic reaction to it—was a determinant in Peter’s decision to ask her to marry him. They had gone away for a weekend in the Cotswolds, which might have turned out badly, as Bridget was against anything which invoked picture postcards; so it was fortunate that the weather had been poor and she caught cold, which did away with that danger.

  Passing a haberdasher’s in Chipping Camden, Peter had spotted the scarf in the window and suggested buying it to protect her throat. It was a shade of blue which showed off her fairness and both had been surprised by the success of the transaction: Bridget for the concern she was unused to, Peter for her patent pleasure in the gift.

  Peter expected not to have an effect on people. It was his impact on Veronica—audible and visible—which had so enchanted him; that the handsome, composed Bridget, who had the air of always knowing her own mind, should be capable of being moved by a simple gesture of his, proved a powerful aphrodisiac…

  Seeing the blue stole on the magazine model, Bridget could not for the life of her remember where her own little scarf was. Was it in the hall drawer? or in her bedroom?

  ‘Zahin, excuse me.’

  Upstairs, she rifled through drawers; then, finding nothing, pulled them all out in turn and tipped out all Zahin’s careful arrangements: belts, buckles, handkerchiefs, lavender bags, even a solitary suspender adrift from its partner—but no sight of the thrush-egg blue. She clattered downstairs.

  ‘Mrs Hansome, can I help you? You have mislaid something?’

  ‘A scarf.’ She was too agitated to keep the impatience from her voice.

  ‘It is a valuable?’

  ‘To me, yes!’ Too bad if she sounded curt; she couldn’t always be minding the boy’s feelings.

  It was not in the hall drawer either.

  ‘Hell!’ said Bridget, close to tears.

  ‘Mrs Hansome, Mrs Hansome, is it this that you are seeking?’

  At the top of the stairs Zahin stood with the blue scarf round his neck.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  Overwhelmed by the feeling which was swelling up in her, she wanted to fly up the stairs and snatch the precious relic from him.

  ‘It was in the chest of drawers in my room.’

  Of course. She had put away things she hardly used there in the bottom drawer. Coming down the stairs he unwound the scarf and held it out to her and she smelled the scent of meadow flowers.

  ‘Zahin, has someone been wearing my scarf?’

  ‘Maybe when my sister came over she borrowed it…’ Bridget was not, openly, violent but she knew she had left home for fear she might kill her father. Since that time, knowing that for her it was potentially lethal, she had tried to steer clear of hatred.

  ‘When did your sister come over, Zahin?’

  ‘O Mrs Hansome…’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘Maybe over the weekend.’

  ‘When “over the weekend”?’

  ‘Maybe Saturday…’

  So it was his sister he had been expecting when she had returned from the shop.

  ‘And you let your sister use my things?’

  ‘Maybe just some bath oil, a scarf maybe…’

  The memory of that chilly weekend, in Chipping Camden, smote something deep and unexamined in Bridget. She had not given so much to Peter that she could afford to have forgotten his scarf.

  ‘You and your sister can fuck off!’

  ‘Mrs Hansome…’

  ‘Fuck off! Fuck right off out of here and find some other fucking fool to fucking well take you in!’

  Trembling, exhilarated, Bridget was conscious of having crossed some shadowy boundary. She rarely swore. The odd ‘damn’ or ‘hell’, hardly ever sexual obscenities.

  The boy turned and ran like a kicked dog up the stairs, and Bridget turned too, from a fantasy of hurling him down them—and went into the kitchen. After some time she heard the front door close but she sat a while before getting up to see if he had really gone. She felt dizzy, and there was a buzzing in her ear. At last she moved out into the hall and listened. Dead quiet. She went upstairs to the spare room, reproachfully clean and empty of any possessions—save one.

  The Chinese bowl. Bridget took the bowl and bashed it hard against the corner of the chest of drawers, bought at knock-down price in a Normandy sale. But defiantly, the blue bowl, more solid than its appearance suggested, remained intact.

  28

  Frances was sorting tights when the phone rang. Because her clothes were in neutral colours—grey, black or navy in the colder months, taupe and cream in the summer, her tights were these colours too. The different shades were supposed to be kept in different bags but in the period after Peter’s death chaos had seized its opportunity and made confusion.

  Opening her drawer that morning, after her shower, Frances, naked on the bed, began to sort things out.

  Sitting about stark naked was, Peter had been fond of saying, one of the things Frances might have been ‘made for’. As a matter of fact, she had once been an artists’ model and had achieved minor fame when her nude form had been rendered even flatter in a pink perspex sculpture entitled Frances Seated (or was it Frances Standing?—she never could remember). The sculpture had been bought by the Tate and the sculptor, a tiny, intensely bearded Dane had, more as a mark of gratitude for their combined achievement than for any real erotic interest, made a pass at her which she had judiciously ignored. Possibly it was his sense of relief at this—shortly after, he left his solid Danish wife and took up with a vulpine young racing driver—which had prompted the sculptor to introduce her to Painter.

  Painter, who had just started his abstract period, had not needed a model, but it was through him she had met Roy, and this was how she had come to manage the Gambit Galleries.

  There were times when Frances missed her former occupation—as we miss what we have talent for. She had been a good model, having a capacity for stillness and the kind of body which reflects planes of light. And she had liked, too, the mysterious conjunction between her body and the artist and the way a third entity, the painting, would emerge. When Peter had made it plain that he liked her to do so, Frances began to spend more time in his company without her clothes.

  Sitting on the bed Frances, for the first time since her lover’s death, inspected the body reflected variously back to her in the angles of the dressing-table glass. Deprived of Peter’s attentions her once familiar shape had grown into something she didn’t quite recognise. Her breasts, in defiance of the lack of recent interest in them, seemed to have grown fuller; a sign of impending menopause, Frances concluded gloomily.

  When the phone rang she considered ignoring it: the bit was between her teeth and almost all the grey and cream tights had been returned in neat balls to the designated bags. But there was a part of Frances which was always half expecting tragedy, it wasn’t safe to leave a phone to ring—and indeed the voice which spoke to her did have a tragic tone.

  ‘Miss Slater?’ For a minute she didn’t grasp who it was. ‘It is I—Zahin.’

  ‘Zahin? Where are you?’

  ‘At a phone box, Miss Slater.’

  ‘Frances, please. Is Bridget all right?’

  She had a fleeting vision of Bridget running into Peter’s arms.

  ‘She is angry with me, Miss Slater. She has chucked me out.’

  So Bridget wasn’t dead—at least she hadn’t cheated her with Peter.

  ‘Where are
you?’ Frances asked again.

  ‘At the station, at Turnham Green. Forgive me but I could only think of you…’

  Climbing into her clothes, Frances lamented the tights abandoned again to anarchy. The child would be here in five minutes. She rushed a brush through her hair and put on lipstick and the kettle.

  ‘Come in, Zahin. Would you like some coffee? No, you prefer milk, don’t you?’

  Twenty minutes later she said, ‘I suppose you can stay here for a night or two but my spare room’s not large.’

  ‘Anywhere with you would be paradise, Miss Slater.’

  ‘Frances!’ said Frances, vexed. Zahin’s extraordinary way of talking got on her nerves. He was a self-indulgence of Bridget’s, part of her deliberate, refractory quirkiness for which she, Frances, was now carrying the can. ‘It can’t be for long,’ she said trying to sound businesslike, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not like Mrs Hansome—Bridget,’ she corrected herself. Really, there was something almost hypnotically compelling in the boy’s habits of speech.

  He smiled now, radiant, all traces of tragedy dispelled. ‘I will be the best guest you ever had!’

  That is not the point, Frances thought. I never wanted a guest at all. More socially adjusted than Bridget, Frances was in some ways more particular; it was not entirely an accident that she had never married.

  Zahin unpacked his bag and Frances resumed the sorting out of the tights. But with her clothes on, and her privacy gone, the occupation was no longer fun. She began to hoover the bedroom and was astounded when Zahin burst in.

  ‘Miss Slater, let me, I am a “dab hand” with the vacuum cleaner.’

  ‘Dab hand’ is Bridget talk, Frances thought.

  ‘Zahin, I like to do my own hoovering. And please, if you are to stay with me, we must have some rules. I can’t have you coming into my bedroom.’

  To her alarm the blue eyes welled and tears began to course down the golden cheeks.

  ‘Zahin, please. I didn’t mean to speak sharply…’