Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  ‘How can you, when you knew I wanted to see you?’ Painter sounded genuinely peevish.

  ‘Well, I was going to do that when I’d got the difficult calls over first.’

  ‘There’s no one’s more difficult than me,’ said Painter, who was rarely far from the truth.

  Although by the time she reached Isleworth it was by most people’s reckoning dinner time, Painter offered Frances tea and biscuits. ‘No thanks. I’m not drinking any caffeine.’

  ‘Not on one of those piss-awful diets, are you?’ Painter asked mildly. ‘I was reading about one of those in the Sunday Sport. Sounded to me as if you give up everything you like and then you feel so bloody miserable you shoot yourself. Not that I need any excuse to do that…’

  ‘Picture trouble?’ Frances asked. She was grateful not to have had to explain the reason for her giving up caffeine.

  ‘In a way,’ said Painter, mysteriously. ‘Come and have a look.’

  One of the tortoises, which, since it took the best light, liked the room where Painter habitually worked, was noisily crunching a lettuce leaf. Ginger, Frances supposed—the female was slightly bigger than her mate.

  ‘She’s picking up her energy after laying,’ Painter nodded towards the mottled, chomping shell. ‘Seven eggs, so we might have little ones soon.’

  ‘Where does she lay them?’ asked Frances, with a new interest in the reproductive habits of all species.

  ‘In the garden. They bury them—I dig ’em up and put them in sand in one of Mother’s flowerpots and keep’em in the linen cupboard.’

  ‘And how long is the gestation period?’

  ‘Eight weeks. When’s yours due?’

  Frances, who was looking at a large canvas on which a series of lilac and cream squares made receding three-dimensional curves of the two-dimensional space, felt a shock like electricity run through the crown of her head to the soles of her feet. ‘How did you know?’

  Painter was looking at her full on. His green eyes, slightly out of true, were gleeful. ‘I was painting women’s bodies since before you knew what they were meant for. Time before last when you came round I spotted it.’

  ‘I didn’t know myself then!’

  ‘Ah well, now, I did wonder…’

  It appeared that not much was wrong with the picture after all. Frances had supper with Painter and his mother on a card table in the conservatory. They had slices of tinned ham from Denmark, tomatoes and radishes from Mrs Painter’s garden, cucumber and salad cream from the corner shop. Afterwards there was jelly with tangerines in it, which Frances refused. She also rejected the tinned Ambrosia rice, which Mrs Painter suggested was good for the baby’s bones, but accepted a triangle of processed cheese in silver paper, something she had last eaten at kindergarten. Painter forbade her alcohol even though she assured him that Ms Nathan of Upper Wimpole Street had agreed a glass of white wine was perfectly in order.

  ‘Don’t trust doctors,’ said Painter. ‘Where are you having it, anyway?’

  Frances said she had decided on the local NHS hospital which had a good reputation and where Ellen Nathan was a consultant. ‘She’s keen for me to go there and on the whole I think the nursing’s better. I’ll be happier with ordinary people.’

  Painter said he believed that wise; ‘the rich’, he said, wanted to dodge pain and were therefore offered too many drugs. He himself was worth several million, but it was doubtful he considered himself among their number.

  42

  Although Bridget had been distracted at her drinks party she had not been unobservant of her guests. She had considered it best to leave Stanley Godwit alone, but she had tackled his uncommunicative daughter.

  ‘I never asked what you did?’

  Cordelia volunteered that she had once been an accountant, but was now a tax inspector.

  ‘Heavens,’ Bridget exclaimed, ‘I thought it was supposed to be the other way round.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Being a tax inspector—I thought that generally came first and then you used your know-how learned as an inspector to help people dodge tax.’

  This turned out to be a mistake.

  ‘Dodge tax? No one who has worked for the Revenue would do any such thing.’

  In King Lear the last we hear of Cordelia concerns her frown. It looked as if this characteristic had been bestowed on her namesake.

  ‘I hope mine does!’ said Bridget undaunted. ‘She’s a very nice young woman called Saskia, about your age.’ Cordelia looked as if at any moment she might demand to know the address of this perfidious representative of her previous profession so Bridget steered the conversation on to other lines. ‘And your husband the psychoanalyst. That’s a fascinating job, now, unravelling the minds of the tormented.’

  ‘He’s not a psychoanalyst,’ said Cordelia. ‘He’s a psychiatrist.’

  ‘And that’s different?’

  ‘Completely,’ said Cordelia and asked where the bathroom was to be found.

  Frances had already left for London when Stanley Godwit called the following morning.

  ‘Nice party.’

  ‘It wasn’t really,’ Bridget said. ‘I’m a poor hostess.’

  ‘Corrie said she had a nice talk with you.’

  Bridget, who doubted this, felt that a cup of tea was in order. Sister Mary Eustasia’s Shakespeare was open at Hamlet on the table by the sofa and when she returned from the kitchen with two mugs of tea, the sweep was reading it. He put it down and remarked that there was a divinity which shaped our ends, rough-hew them how we will.

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  She had noticed before that he blinked when asked a direct question.

  ‘It makes sense.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to think it’s all been decided for us.’

  ‘Shakespeare says “shapes”, doesn’t he—not “makes”? That’s not deciding for us.’

  Bridget wished she had some cake. There were some Cheese Thins left over from the party, rather stale by now, everything else had been scoffed by Bill Dark. It seemed unlikely she would ever have a conversation with him about predestination. ‘Was it really your wife who called your daughter Cordelia?’

  Stanley Godwit picked up the Shakespeare and flicked through the pages as if seeking the answer to her question. ‘Guess it was my idea.’

  ‘I don’t have children,’ Bridget said. ‘But if I had I’m not sure I would have dared call a child after someone who dies so appallingly.’ She seemed unable not to say things which might sound rude.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Stanley Godwit, drinking his tea unperturbed. ‘But it’s a question of attitude—you get the feeling that she doesn’t mind death herself, Cordelia. Fearless! Corrie, now, is brave. You could count that as an asset to a person.’

  Peter had always half expected death, which is not the same as welcoming it. Yet there was something attractive in the prospect too—he couldn’t have said quite what, maybe the absence of responsibility that it would bring. Father Gerard changed all that.

  ‘Life doesn’t end with death, oh dear me no,’ he exclaimed, lunging forward in his chair as if to demonstrate in his own person the position necessary to adopt for the life to come. ‘We might even say that death is only the beginning!’

  Peter accepted this new ordering of things with the compliance which was part of his character. If he lamented the loss of a place where all obligations were to be dissolved, he never admitted as much to his instructor. It sometimes crossed his mind, though, that Father Gerard would be well employed by England’s rugby team, his exhortations were so muscular and rousing.

  ‘You see, Peter, if we die with all our misdemeanours full about us, through the process of purging—and the helpful prayers and actions of those we leave behind, of course—gradually our souls are cleansed of sin. It’s rather like—’ Father Gerard struggled just a second—‘yes, it’s rather like a tablecloth stained with the marks of too many good dinners, being washed and rewashed in an eternal
washing machine!’

  Father Gerard explained there were other sins than the venial kind. There was mortal sin, for which more was apparently needed than the eternally recycling washing machine. And then there was the sin which seemed to come merely from being born. About this sin Father Gerard was no less enthusiastic.

  ‘Original sin, or the sin of our origins, our first mum and dad. As I like to say,’ the potato face prepared itself for mirth, ‘it’s not “original” at all, of course! No one escapes it so you might say it’s as common as dirt!’

  Peter might have been troubled in his mind as to whether Zelda constituted a mortal sin. However, much of the time he pushed such considerations to the back of his mind. Zelda herself was untroubled by moral questions of any kind, although Peter did once confide in her about Frances.

  ‘You have a sweetheart, apart from me?’

  The good thing about a whore is that there is no need to lie. Yet, in a sense, Peter’s answer was a lie, for, by omission, it left Bridget out of the picture. ‘I have a mistress—her name is Frances.’

  ‘And she is beautiful? And you love her?’

  ‘Not as beautiful as you—but, yes, I love her.’

  Possibly it was some sense of self-protection which made Peter say nothing about Bridget. Perhaps it was some feeling that, deep down, a mistress and a whore had things in common and could therefore, without disloyalty, be disclosed. Or perhaps it was a literalness in his character which made him merely answer the question asked, for it is true that ‘sweetheart’ does not, as a rule, imply ‘wife’.

  ‘The sins of omission are every bit as serious as those of commission,’ Father Gerard had advised. ‘If you do not declare your income to the Inland Revenue then that is theft, according to the law of the land, as surely as if you were to steal from Woolworths.’

  Peter had never had any desire to steal from Woolworths, and his income tax forms, filled out by a pretty girl found by Bridget, so far as he was aware were innocent of any lack which properly ought to be disclosed. The fact that he had failed to disclose to Zelda that he had a wife, however, made him feel guilty.

  The guilt was not so much about Bridget, but about Zelda—or perhaps not Zelda herself so much as the role she had come to play within him.

  Philosophers have debated whether the source of wonder lies in the observed or the observer. Peter was not a philosopher and did not try to make this artificial distinction. Zelda had recovered for him a sense of wonder he had only experienced once before—with Veronica. Therefore whatever Zelda was, to him she was wonderful.

  A consequence of this was that the sense of the precious became transferred to life itself. For the first time Peter found he actively wanted to be alive, and this was a novel sensation. The triangle formed by his imagination whenever he made love to his wife or his mistress had shifted: now in place of Veronica it was Zelda he always saw in his mind’s eye.

  By the time he met Zelda he had already been taken into the Catholic Church but the words of Father Gerard often came back to him.

  ‘The Trinity is a great mystery—perhaps the greatest,’ Father Gerard had asserted. ‘God in three persons, like the different flavours of a Neapolitan ice, Peter—strawberry, pistachio and chocolate, each distinct in its own way and yet each an essential part of the whole ice cream…’

  Peter wanted to be obliging but even he could not quite accommodate this image from the helpful imagination of his instructor; the association of ice-cream wafers was too close to the other kind of wafer he tasted at the Mass, in which, it was said, lay dormant the very substance of the body of his Saviour. It was as well for his indefatigable mentor that he never came to know Peter’s own model for the tripart nature of his God: the associated persons of his three mortal beloveds—Bridget, Frances and Zelda.

  ‘I like Donne for the same reason,’ Bridget was saying. She and Stanley Godwit had continued their discussion of Shakespeare. ‘He understood human foible too. Even when he was Dean of St Paul’s he never allowed himself to forget that he had charmed the drawers off countless mistresses.’

  She had made a second pot of tea. All the awkwardness of the previous encounters had evaporated.

  ‘Did they wear drawers by then?’ Stanley Godwit’s eyes were the grey-blue of the Irish sea. Thinking of the day he had helped her down the cliff path, she glanced down at his hands.

  ‘How do you know so much about poetry?’ she asked quickly; though it was true she also wanted to know.

  ‘I was an “English” HMI—a schools inspector, but I quit when they introduced the National Curriculum. My dad was a sweep—he taught me the trade when I was still a kid. It’s a clean occupation compared to most.’ The hard palm wrapped itself round her softer one.

  ‘Like Matthew Arnold? Sweetness and light?’

  ‘I doubt if Arnold’d have made a sweep. He was a fair enough schools inspector though.’

  Later Bridget said, ‘You can see the hills from here, through the elm trees. Housman’s hills. He was right they are blue.’ The guilt seemed to have gone.

  ‘Poor sod,’ said Stanley Godwit, putting on his socks. ‘Living with all that under wraps.’

  ‘You mean his sexuality?’

  ‘I mean loving young whatsit and not being able to say so.’

  ‘I wonder if it really matters who you love,’ Bridget wondered. ‘It’s that you love that counts, isn’t it?’

  43

  It turned out to be easier than expected to tell Bridget about the baby.

  ‘Yes, I noticed at Farings.’

  Had everyone seen she was pregnant but herself? ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ asked Frances, irked.

  ‘Not my business. I presume it’s Peter’s?’

  ‘Unless it is an Immaculate Conception it could hardly be anyone else’s.’

  Bridget snorted disconcertingly at this and offered Frances coffee.

  ‘No thanks, I’ve given up caffeine.’

  ‘I hope you’re not going to become a health bore?’

  ‘Probably, until I have the baby,’ said Frances a trifle stiffly.

  They were in Bridget’s kitchen. Frances had called, steeling herself with a sense of duty. Bridget seemed remarkably relaxed. But you could never tell with Bridget; she might turn savage at any moment and bite your head off.

  ‘Where’s Zahin?’ Frances asked after a minute. She was hoping not to have to see him.

  ‘Gone to see his sister, I think.’

  ‘Have you met her?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Bridget. She was having trouble bringing her attention back from thoughts of Stanley Godwit; so that she could enjoy these properly—‘improperly’ was closer—she wanted Frances to leave.

  ‘I’d better go, then,’ said Frances feeling slightly defeated but not sure why.

  But at that moment the bell rang and it turned out to be Marianne with a delivery of painted chests. Bridget, conscious that her desire for her guest to leave may have made itself felt, became unusually solicitous.

  ‘Marianne, my friend Frances—Frances is having a baby. Tell you what—we’ll get Marianne to do a special chest for the baby’s toys—she paints things trailing with leaves and daisies.’

  Marianne insisted the crystal she wore round her neck be suspended over Frances’s stomach.

  ‘That’s a little boy,’ she announced. ‘Clockwise is a boy, anti’s a girl—I’ve never known it fail. What are you going to call him?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought,’ said Frances. She had particularly requested that she not be told the baby’s sex when the results of the scan came through.

  ‘What’s his daddy want to call him?’

  Bridget, aware that Frances might think this was said deliberately, said, ‘Marianne, could you get me the next delivery in time for the end of July?’ This had the desired effect: a flood of excuses meant that the paternity of Frances’s baby was forgotten.

  ‘Listen,’ Bridget said when Marianne had finally departed promising the painted
furniture no later than August—which meant September—‘If I were you I’d get this all over with in one boiling. Tell Mickey while you’re here, why don’t you…?’

  The tea leaves in Mickey’s cup indisputably indicated a girl child. ‘Now you listen,’ Mickey said, ‘my mum swore by the tea leaves. She knitted an entire outfit in pink for me when I was born. Same for my brother, Sean—a whole set in blue: the tea leaves don’t lie.’

  ‘Which means either Marianne’s cosmology or Mickey’s is going to suffer a blow,’ Bridget remarked when told. ‘Unless you’ve got twins in pod?’ But Frances knew that wasn’t so.

  ‘I’m too small and anyway they would have mentioned it when they did the scan.’ She felt that Marianne was right and that the child she was carrying was Peter’s son; but when you thought about it anyone had a fifty per cent chance of guessing a baby’s sex!

  Zahin, when he returned on Sunday morning, was enthusiastic at the news. ‘O Mrs Hansome, a baby, a miracle!’

  ‘Well, not quite, Zahin, I dare say it was produced under the usual conditions.’

  Bridget had not bothered to form any view of Zahin’s life beyond the domestic role he pursued with her. He had never made any mention of girlfriends, nor, except for the elusive Zelda, were there any signs of him having female companions. It seemed quite possible he was ignorant of the usual preoccupations of men and women. Or perhaps he just liked the company of older women better? Certainly he and Mickey had become very close.

  Zahin, in fact, was engaged on a project: he hoped to persuade Mickey to start up a sandwich business with him and had already made enquiries about a franchise at a local set of offices. If this came off he might be spared having to train as a chemical engineer. Although he was fond, in his way, of Bridget, he preferred it when she went off to her country home and he could get the house just as he pleased. With Zelda there was nothing to do but experiment with her hair or make-up, there was only so much you could do there; he was careful these days, since the fright over the scarf, not to let Zelda put on any of Mrs Hansome’s clothes.