Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  ‘It’s for your own good, madam. If you don’t watch yourself next thing you’ll fetch up dead and might take someone else with you into the bargain.’

  ‘Would you say that death’s a “bargain”, then, officer?’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam…?’

  What is a ‘bargain’, anyway? Bridget reflected, having parted with her driving licence in return for an ominous-looking green form. Something of value, got cheap? Maybe it was life, then, that was the ‘bargain’? Could you call all that she had been through ‘cheap’: her father, running away, working in the hotels for peanuts? But there had been compensations: Sister Mary Eustasia, Shakespeare, Peter—and now, though she hardly dared to voice it, even to herself, there was Stan.

  With the green form in her bag, she drove with studied correctness so that it was late when she finally reached Fulham where she was glad to find that Zahin was not at home. Fond as she had grown of him she needed to be alone. Or, perhaps not quite alone…

  ‘Peter?’ she asked—for she was almost sure that was his particular piece of darkness, in the corner of the bedroom by the big French armoire. ‘Come out, it’s quite safe.’

  Zahin was definitely off somewhere, she had checked—there was only her in the house, in the bed that she had once shared with the man whose apparition stood wordlessly across the room from her.

  Silence, except for the drone of traffic, ploughing its way up and down the Fulham Road. The seahorses rose and fell in their colourful, hypnotic rhythm.

  ‘OK,’ Bridget said, ‘be like that! I just thought you might like a chat.’

  She was dropping off to sleep, and beginning to dream of Stanley Godwit, walking with him down the lane at Farings, when a familiar voice spoke.

  ‘It’s not as easy as all that.’

  ‘Peter?’

  She had sat bolt upright, hitting the back of her head on the metal-work art nouveau lily, whose sepals unfurled—dangerously proud, Peter had always said—from the bedhead.

  ‘Peter?’

  ‘Who else did you think it might be?’

  ‘O Pete! Is it really you?’

  It was many years since she had called him ‘Pete’; not since the first day she had suspected his infidelities.

  ‘I suppose it depends what you mean by “really”.’

  ‘You haven’t lost your sense of humour, at least!’

  He had emerged now from the shadows and she saw that he was dressed in his old tweed jacket and cords. His face was clean-shaven, with none of the dark stubble which had grown so fast on his jaw in life, giving him, she had used to say, the look of a Mafia boss turned respectable. He was, in fact, exactly, but without the disfiguring cuts and bruises of the accident, as she had seen him last—in his coffin.

  ‘I suppose you don’t have to shave any more?’

  ‘It’s one of the compensations.’

  He had moved closer to the bed and she patted the place beside her. ‘Do you want to sit down?’ It was where he used to sit when he sometimes brought her tea, after her trips away—when, most often, he had been trying to make something up to her. ‘Can you, in fact, sit?’

  ‘Yes, but there’s not the same need—to take the weight off one’s feet, I mean.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  A slight awkwardness fell. What did you say to a dead husband you had known for over thirty years? ‘How is it being dead?’ That sounded too brutal, but she wanted to know.

  ‘Much like life—hard work.’

  ‘Pete—did you just read my mind?’

  ‘Another of the compensations—if that’s what it is.’

  ‘I suppose that can have drawbacks.’ She might have added, that she, being a fair mind-reader herself, knew this from having lived with him, but that would have been impolite.

  ‘I do know, now, what it must have been like for you.’

  ‘You really can read minds, then—I was just a good guesser.’

  ‘Pretty good, I’d say!’ He smiled fondly.

  ‘So, if it’s not a rude question, what are you doing here? Not that I’m not delighted to see you, mind.’

  And she was—truly delighted. She wondered if it had anything to do with her having fallen in love with Stanley Godwit and then quickly tried to expunge the thought.

  ‘You can’t unthink a thought—and yes, partly, it is that you are feeling more chipper.’

  Here was a turnabout; now she was the one with the reason to feel embarrassed.

  As if sensing this the thing-that-had-been-Peter went on. ‘We don’t appear to those who aren’t up to it. We need the right reception, shall we say.’

  ‘But I saw you before…’

  ‘I couldn’t have spoken to you before. Are you going to run away with that man?’

  ‘Oh, Pete, I don’t know. I shouldn’t think so. He’s married.’

  ‘The wife’s rather a pain. I checked her out.’

  ‘But you know that’s got nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Oh, I know that now!’

  ‘Can you tell me…?’

  ‘Some day—not yet.’

  They sat and looked at each other in the cautious silence. Bridget tried, unsuccessfully, not to think how different this was to looking at Stanley Godwit. It seemed discourteous to be so transparent—and yet her thoughts about Peter were also those of love. Later she wasn’t sure how much time had passed with him there before she fell asleep and woke at dawn to the sound of the door closing not quite quietly enough in the hall. Zahin coming home after some night-time activity. What a blessing she had no children and hadn’t to lie awake at night, worrying about their safety. She wondered if Peter missed not having had children with her, now he was…wherever it was that he was…

  Or again wasn’t, she supposed, drifting back again down the green Shropshire lane, her hand in the hard palm of Stanley Godwit, on their way to an unknown destination.

  47

  Zahin was not at all put out when Bridget informed him that she would be away this weekend as well.

  ‘Not to worry, Mrs Hansome, I will look after the house.’

  ‘You sure you don’t mind?’

  ‘There is my studying to do, Mrs Hansome, and Mrs Michael has asked me over to watch The Crying Game.’

  This was a departure—Mickey watching a film with no Clint in it. ‘Was that your idea, Zahin?’

  ‘It is good to change our habits, Mrs Hansome.’

  Well, I’m certainly changing mine, Bridget said to herself, motoring down the M4 towards the M5. In the past, she would never have missed a trade fair—since Peter died, she had hardly even been to France. The recognition produced a pang of guilt: she knew Peter had missed her, yet she had never tried to accommodate his dislike of being left alone. But now, when Stanley Godwit wanted her, she was running up to see him at his first request. He had sent a picture postcard of an Arctic tern with a single line written on the back: Hope this isn’t the stuff of tragedies—so he had been reading the St John. Did she love Stanley more than she had loved Peter? Or was it that now she knew what loss felt like she was more afraid to lose him? How could you calculate? Anyway, what had Sister Mary Eustasia said about comparisons…?

  Zahin was delighted at Bridget’s change of plan. Too guarded ever to let feelings show, he gave no outward sign of what he felt at being able to get on with experimenting with his sandwich fillings. He was not a person of intense pleasures but his pleasures, when he felt them, were satisfying. He had put into play some further market research, visiting a huge variety of sandwich joints about town. Now he was ready to develop his own menus.

  He had decided to adopt a ‘This Week’s Star Filling’ policy, to spice up the more conventional items which, following the results of his questionnaire, would be staples of the sandwich menu. With Bridget out of the way—and wearing, he detected, a new perfume: Mitsouko by Guerlain—Zahin was able to roll up his sleeves and spread out all the ingredients on her kitchen table. Today he would be trying out crayfish with aprico
t, beetroot and spicy sausage, and his own personal favourite: smoked duck with red onion and salsa. Later, when he was satisfied with the results, he might ask Mrs Michael over to sample them. Although she didn’t always like what he had produced heknew she liked to come across to Bridget’s kitchen and poke about. Then they would go back to her house together, and watch the video and discuss plans for ‘Zandwiches Zpecial—The Last Word in Sandwiches’, which was what the business was going to be called.

  Stan had arranged to meet Bridget early on the Saturday morning. The plan was that they would drive to the coast where they had been before to go birdwatching. This meant Bridget had the whole of Friday evening to get through before she saw him, so she wasn’t as put out as she might have been to see Bill Dark making his way up the path—at least it would fill in time.

  ‘Hello, Bill.’

  ‘Bridget, I saw your car and thus took a liberty…How splendid to see you up here again so soon.’

  Seeing the direction of his glance Bridget put him out of his misery. ‘Sherry, Bill?’

  ‘Good idea. I must say, you’re looking well, quite radiant, if you don’t mind my saying?’

  A compliment from the wrong person is worse than useless. Bridget stole a look at herself in the lavatory looking glass. He was right, though, she did look well—she had lost weight and her cheekbones had begun to show again.

  After several glasses of sherry the Rector snuggled down the sofa towards Bridget and made a pass.

  This was too much.

  ‘Oh, come now, just a little cuddle between friends. No harm done!’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Bridget, springing up and walking across to the other side of the room, as far as it was possible to be from the sofa, ‘but time for you to leave, Bill, I think.’

  ‘Nothing venture, nothing win, I always say.’

  ‘And I say, “Nothing doing”,’ said Bridget, firmly, bolting the front door behind him.

  After that it was bath and bed; but she couldn’t sleep. She began to read King Lear—but the sight of the name, Cordelia, felt like a reproach and in the end she just lay in the dark trying—since she knew how dangerous it was to anticipate—not to feel excited.

  The morning crept flirtatiously through the curtains with intimations of impending heat. Bridget, who had put on, then taken off again, three different outfits—all chosen for their seeming indifference to appearances—finally settled for a faded cotton dress she had bought in a Montelimar market years ago. At least it would be easy to remove. After looking at her face in the bathroom mirror she also put on some blusher—which she had been surprised to find when, back in Fulham, she had ransacked her dressing-table drawer looking for make-up.

  Then there was nothing for it but to wait and not drink too many cups of tea, to be sure she didn’t have to stop on the way to the sea.

  At 7 a.m. she heard the noise of a diesel engine and was at the top of the lane so there was no need for Stan to turn the van round.

  ‘You’re punctual.’

  ‘I should be—I’ve been up since five.’

  ‘Me too!’

  They grinned at each other, shy and conspiratorial.

  The white van drove through flower-crowded, steep-banked lanes. The air was steamy with damp clay and bracken, and the musty almond smell of meadowsweet, whose delicate cream-froth bracts were pierced by the long phallic heads of loosestrife. Gertrude’s flower: the long purples,/That liberal shepherds give a grosser name…

  ‘What name do you suppose that was, now, Bridget?’ Sister Mary Eustasia had asked. ‘Do you see how delicately Shakespeare suggests the queen’s venality? She’s sex mad, that’s what it is—can’t keep off the subject, even when reporting poor Ophelia’s drowning.’

  Bridget had sometimes wondered what Sister Mary Eustasia would have made of Peter. She herself doubted that ‘sex mad’ was the right diagnosis of Gertrude. Hamlet’s mother needed to belong, that’s what it was, to anyone, even if he were—maybe even because he was (for aren’t sex and death incalculably linked?)—the murderer of her dead husband. Maybe, like for Peter, sex for Gertrude was a play of intimacy? Sister Mary Eustasia, eager to demonstrate her readiness with the taboo topic of sex, for once had missed the point. If there was a point, which Bridget also now doubted. The ‘point’ about Shakespeare was probably that he saw the dangers of having any ‘point’ at all…

  Her mind, free and expansive, flowed into another June day, more than thirty years ago, when she had found purple loosestrife growing along a riverbank in Oxfordshire. She had been with a man who had sold watches in the Portobello Road, on the stall next to her own. Keith, he was called. Later he had been angry with her when she told him about Peter. ‘But I never gave you grounds to think this would be permanent!’ she had protested. As if anything was permanent anyway. But she had been unfair to Keith: she herself had thought Peter ‘permanent’.

  It was easy being with Stan. His silences merged with hers. And he knew when to break them.

  ‘There’s a thermos of coffee if you’d like to wet your whistle.’

  ‘Does your wife mind you coming out like this?’

  ‘Gets me out of her way.’

  Bridget told him about Bill Dark. ‘Bloody cheek of it—I’ve a good mind to go round and punch him on the nose!’

  ‘That’s rather sexy,’ said Bridget, pleased.

  The sea was mint green. They descended, Bridget more ably this time, the steep path to the tiny deserted beach. Stan jumped her down the last plunge into his arms. ‘I wanted to do this when we were here before.’

  ‘You should’ve—I wouldn’t have stopped you.’

  The sea was cold despite the sun, but Bridget took off her French frock and ran through the waves. ‘Come on in!’ she bellowed.

  ‘Looks as if it’d freeze the balls off.’

  ‘You know that’s a naval term, don’t you, not filthy at all?’

  Of course he did.

  Bridget showed off, humping her bottom out of the water.

  ‘You look like a pink dolphin!’ Stan was impressed. ‘“His delights/Were dolphin-like, they showed his back above/The element they lived in”—which play?’

  ‘Antony and Cleopatra!’ she yelled back.

  The sun spangled the assenting sea as their arms thrashed, making diamond-bright fragments of the water. Across the bay a vista of light and shadow receded hazily towards the steep cliff where they had descended. Above the clifftop soared the seabirds, pearly, dreamlike, their wings carving scimitar arcs into the vaulting sky.

  Bridget’s eyes, dizzy with water drops, saw Stan’s head rear up from beneath a great wave; around him, as if he were some ancient god, her salty lashes created a penumbra of light. Thank heavens! For a heartbeat she had thought him gone to Davy Jones.

  ‘Here’s one for you!’ she yelled in relief. ‘ “Though the seas threaten, they are merciful!”’

  ‘Dunno. The Tempest?’

  ‘Right!’

  Afterwards they rubbed each other dry on a single, stiff towel, because Bridget had brought none and Stan had dared risk only the one being found missing from his linen cupboard at home. But they had each brought sandwiches and they fed each other—ham and mustard, cheese and pickle, ‘The stuff of life,’ Stan said. Then they lay down on the yielding pebbles and the overseeing sun warmed their bones and their bodies, and soon one thing led to another…

  ‘I’ve never been happier,’ Stan said, as they began the drive home, their faces and shoulders burning.

  ‘Shh! A bad fairy might hear.’

  ‘I believe in fairies.’

  ‘Of course you do, a sensible man like yourself!’

  Perhaps, then, it was a bad fairy that had the Reverend Dark pass by the top of Bridget’s lane when Stan dropped her there that evening.

  ‘Evening, Mrs Hansome. Evening, Stanley. Lovely evening.’

  ‘Hello, Bill,’ said Stan, trying not to look sheepish. ‘You’re a bit out of your way, aren’t you?’
r />   Bridget said, ‘Were you going to call on me, Bill?’ and looked at him hard.

  ‘Just taking a constitutional—doctor’s orders, you know!’

  ‘You shan’t want a lift back to the village, then?’

  ‘Thank you, Stanley, no. I’ll accompany Mrs Hansome down the lane, if I may?’

  Stan shot a look at Bridget—who turned away so that she wasn’t looking when the van drove off.

  Halfway down the lane Bridget said, ‘If you say anything to anyone about this I’ll suggest you sexually assaulted me.’

  ‘Now what would I say to anyone…?’

  ‘You heard,’ said Bridget emphatically, turning into her gate, ‘and I am not inviting you in!’

  Sunday was agony: Bridget tried to read, then she made a stab at weeding the garden. After that she lay on the grass and did nothing. Every fibre of her body ached for Stan—for the pressure of his body on hers.

  She thought of herself and Peter, back in the days when he had bought her the thrush-egg scarf. What a meal she had made of that with Zahin and his sister. Why was that? You made ‘a meal’ of things when the thing wasn’t quite true—no, that wasn’t it, it was true she had loved the scarf. But the emotion she had recalled it with, was that ‘true’? There was some unpleasant taint—to do with jealousy, or guilt?—about Peter. Perhaps this emotion she felt now wasn’t ‘true’ either, this feeling of being stooped double with desire…?

  Far up, the rooks wheeled and swirled, their wings drawing ellipses, hooping in interconnected arcs the mercilessly cheerful, forget-me-not sky. Bridget’s eyes, dazed by staring into the sun, made mirages of the clouds. Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish…That’s what poor Antony had said, contemplating his own vicissitudes before he committed suicide—or tried to. A ‘bungler’ he called himself, when he botched the job. Antony, Cleopatra’s lover, was not unlike Peter—though she herself was hardly Cleopatra!

  ‘Peter?’ she called to the roofless sky, but not even the rooks returned an answer.

  One of the birds’ long, sooty feathers on the ground caught her eye. She picked it up for a bookmark. But there was no concentrating on a book—not even one given to her by Stanley Godwit.