Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  Some say the world will end in fire,

  Some say in ice.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire,

  I hold with those who favour fire…

  Even so, Peter made no connexion between his desire for Zelda and eternal damnation. The human mind is endlessly plastic, and the intensity of Peter’s desire felt to him like something elevated, purifying even. And yet, without question, what he was engaged in was, in the eyes of his Church—certainly Father Gerard would have said so!—a mortal sin. And mortal sin, he was warned, if unrepented, led straight to that unimaginable place, well-represented by artists, until the twenty-first century, with pictures of horned devils almost cheerily tossing condemned souls into blazing pyres or icy wastes.

  ‘What happens if a man dies without being able to confess his sins?’ Peter had once asked, and Father Gerard had explained that in that event allowance was made for an act of perfect contrition. ‘If a man truly hates his sin at the moment of death, Peter, then that is sufficient to ensure God’s infinite mercy comes into play, in which case all other bets are off!’

  Mercy—infinite or otherwise—is probably better comprehended through experience than description. One of its less subjective, more universal, manifestations might be the tendency of danger to promote in human beings some saving answering power. At the moment of his death Peter saw in his mind’s eye three persons—and saw them, for the first time, as they really were.

  Another aspect of objective mercy might be associated with clearness of sight. To see ‘truly’ is perhaps what is meant by seeing under the gaze of eternity, which is another way of saying ‘with the eye of God’. At the moment of death Peter saw truly and understood—and, understanding, forgave what he saw.

  Bridget knew that Peter was not a presence in the bedroom that night. There was only the darkness which reflected back the unmediated darkness within herself. Unable to sleep, she put on Peter’s dressing gown and went outside.

  Bridget made her way barefoot down the path to the bottom of the garden. The sky was lightening in the summer dawn and the glints of red above echoed the still smouldering remnants of Zahin’s fire.

  Picking up an unburned stick Bridget poked into the glowing embers a remnant of clothing—something white. Now why was Zahin burning what looked like a perfectly good pair of jeans? What a strange boy he was. She wished she knew what Peter had thought of him.

  50

  By July Bridget knew all about the letter ‘unarriving’ and could bear it no more. Despite the green form, she drove like a maniac up to Farings and then spent the Friday evening unable to do anything with herself.

  On Saturday she forced herself to garden. The runner beans had come on and she picked a trugful—more than enough for a single person.

  She had just finished digging out some potatoes when the gate clicked, and turning round with an answering ‘click’ of the heart, she saw not Stan but his daughter.

  ‘Oh, hello, Cordelia.’

  Cordelia was frowning—but that was nothing new; she came and stood too close to Bridget peering at the garden fork.

  ‘What kind are they?’

  ‘Desiré3, I think.’

  ‘Funny name for a potato—“Desired”.’

  ‘Did you come about anything special?’ asked Bridget, who considered it best to keep things as clear as possible.

  Cordelia sat down on the bench which Bridget had bought on the last French-buying round before Peter died. It hadn’t been a successful trip; but the old bench she had liked and had hung on to.

  ‘This needs a coat of paint,’ said Cordelia, staring critically at the peeling slats of timber.

  ‘Do you think so? I like it as it is.’

  ‘I like our life here too as it is,’ said Cordelia, bluntly.

  There was a silence during which Bridget did some rapid assessing.

  ‘Rector Dark spoke to Mum.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘He said you were in the van, with Dad.’

  ‘We were birdwatching,’ said Bridget, wondering why what was almost the truth sounded so lame.

  ‘He hinted to Mum there was more to it—not that he actually said anything—it was more his manner.’

  It was never wise to reject people outright. ‘Yes,’ said Bridget, ‘I know that manner.’

  ‘Anyway, Mum’s upset so I thought I’d come and speak to you.’

  Bridget looked over towards the constant rooks. The feather she had found she had kept as a bookmark in Sister Mary Eustasia’s Shakespeare. This feather stirs; she lives! King Lear says of the dead Cordelia, before he dies himself. If she is dead—Shakespeare suggests that Lear doesn’t think so. Was it just delusion then, or had the imagination—or love, or the mix of the two?—the power to hold back death? But the converse was also true.

  ‘You know what,’ Bridget said, ‘your father told me you were brave. You are. Like your namesake.’

  ‘Oh, her! I can’t stand poetry and all that stuff. Dad was always on about it.’

  Oh! the difference of man and man, Bridget thought.

  ‘I’m sorry about your mother.’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ said Cordelia looking at Bridget unflinchingly. ‘She smelled your cigarettes on Dad the day we went to Aunt Karen’s. And she found that book you gave him. Poetry, wasn’t it? Mum’s like me—she doesn’t like poetry.’

  It seemed best to leave at once. Bridget drove back to London the same night. How ironic that Gloria Godwit should believe she had bought Stan the H.V. St John poems. Through her mind ran obsessively a fragment of another poem, one that Peter had liked, about the end of the world. They were right, the poets—desire was a kind of hell, no, not ‘a kind’—there was nothing ‘kind’ about it—it was hell, plain and straightforward!

  By some lucky chance—or perhaps she was reckoned to have had her fill of bad luck?—the car was not picked out by a single speed cop or camera. Bridget had left Farings at seven and arrived, in record time, at the Fulham house just before ten. Zahin was sitting at her dressing table when she came into the bedroom. Not expecting Bridget back until the following day, he had failed to take his usual precaution: an old metal dustpan against the front door, an alarm against unexpected intrusions.

  Speech is slower than instinct. ‘Zelda?’ enquired Bridget.

  ‘O Mrs Hansome.’

  ‘Zahin!’

  The look of dismay deepened. Zahin sat, pathetically squeezing in his hand the ball of cotton wool with which he was removing his eye make-up. The dressing table was strewn with foundation, lipstick, powder, eyeshadow, all the paraphernalia of a last outing for Zelda before the full responsibilities of ‘Zandwiches Zpecial’ were to be taken on—Bridget recognised the blusher she had worn for Stan.

  ‘O Mrs Hansome…’ Zahin repeated. His usually melodious voice, rising to a sharp wail, sounded like a cat’s fighting.

  ‘Let’s have some tea,’ said Bridget, ever pragmatic.

  In the end there wasn’t much to say. That her lodger was in the habit of dressing as a girl was not in itself very interesting to Bridget. What bothered her was something else—something which at first struck her with almost palpable force, and then neatly and suddenly slotted into place. It explained why Zahin had come to find Peter in the first place; but it was something she most certainly did not wish to discuss with the boy. There was only one person alive with whom she could ever imagine having that conversation.

  The sobs had abated as soon as Zahin was satisfied that Mrs Hansome would not tell his family. It appeared there really was a sister—a girl of exceptional modesty; it was imperative that no one get to hear of her brother’s activities lest it permanently blight her chance in the marriage market.

  ‘Of course I shan’t tell anyone, Zahin. People’s sexuality is their own affair.’

  But was that still the case if you shared that sexuality with your wife? And also with your mistress?

  51

  Even to herself Bridget had found it hard to explain
why, with Peter dead, she had stopped going to France. On the face of it the only impediment to her going had, so to speak, been removed…Her husband had never liked her regular visits abroad.

  Bridget had been aware that this, in part, had led to Peter’s wanderings. But it is difficult to curtail any activity on another’s behalf, the more so when it seems innocent—what she had been engaged in was merely a matter of business, hardly wine and roses. Since escaping home, and her father, she had never compromised her own freedom, at least where she was sure no harm was meant by it. But maybe that had taken too little account of the sensibilities of the man she had lived with.

  It had occurred to Bridget that in this matter she had had some hand in Peter’s search for alternative company, and this, no doubt, had its place in her acceptance of Frances. Although she would never have admitted it openly, to have Frances to talk to had been a comfort of its own kind. That there were limits to Frances’s understanding was, to be honest, an aspect of that comfort: Peter might have felt more salient with Frances, better able to conceal, or at least skirt round, his sense of his own infirmities; but with Frances alone he would never have felt fundamentally secure.

  But now, when she, Bridget, was in need of an understanding which, in particular, was capable of transcending limits, those ‘limits’ of Frances’s left Bridget also on her own. If not Frances then France was an older, more sophisticated friend it was safe to confide in.

  Bridget decided to make a run to the area north-east of Paris. This took her by Rheims where she planned to stop for the first night. She was out of practice with Continental drives; an early stop would do no harm and give the chance of a good start the next morning.

  Having found the reasonable hotel—improbably owned by a smart young Chinese couple—where she had stayed before, Bridget went out to take a stroll.

  The town of Rheims, as with many French towns of similar age, is formed around its cathedral, approached by an avenue flanked with lime trees, where long ago the kings of France came to be crowned.

  Bridget, in the tracks of the long-dead kings, strolled up towards the western face of the flat-faced edifice, whose porches are carved with grotesque examples of human foible and the forms of smiling angels. It was a close afternoon, and already the midges hung in dizzy clouds, occasionally nipping her bare arms. Irritating creatures. She lit a cigarette.

  The high wooden doors were wide open, as if ready to embrace her, and a priest in need of a shave emerged through them blinking into the light.

  Even if one is not of a religious turn of mind a great cathedral can offer a rest from the world—but Bridget turned aside from the invitation to enter. It was too long since she had been inside any place of worship. Her flight from religion had been total—well, almost total, there had been Sister Mary Eustasia. But in the face of this crisis even the understanding of her old teacher, whose willingness to vault limits (you could almost see the relish with which she would tuck up her habit the better to get a decent run), God knew, had taken her pupil to unsuspected heights, seemed to falter…

  Bridget walked round to the south side of the building, where more angels aloft bent their vague beam upon her. She sat down on a bench and lit another cigarette.

  Possibly this idea she had conceived about Peter and Zelda was all lurid fantasy—the human imagination, of this she had long been convinced, often most resembles a cesspool. But sitting with the insistent, whining midges, beneath the old angels, who had shared their mild, myopic gaze with centuries of human folly, Bridget knew the sudden insight which had visited her the night she had surprised Zahin was not fancy: Peter had not only known Zahin—he had ‘known’, in the other sense, Zelda as well.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said down the phone at the hotel. ‘It’ll be the once only. There’s something I need to talk about.’

  No answering spark: Stanley Godwit’s voice came back at her, depressingly flat and formal. ‘We’ll see what we can do.’

  ‘I’m calling from France,’ Bridget said, trying to keep her voice on an even keel. ‘There’ll be no number recorded on your phone. You can say I’m a customer calling from a mobile, with birds in the chimney—or bats in the belfry, if you like!’ and hung up before she became too arch.

  Stan called at Farings the following Saturday. Bridget, back from France, had driven at once up to Shropshire. It was a lowering, moody, brutal-seeming day.

  ‘Like to come to the sea?’

  ‘Have you time? And should you?’

  ‘I have permission, this once.’

  Astonishing how two events, otherwise identical, can be poles apart: even the rooks, combing in droves the stubbled fields, appeared to have taken on a different character—like aged, stooped clergymen stretching their legs on some high-minded ecclesiastical outing. The same drive, through the same high lanes laced with the fecund-smelling flowers, seemed, now, to brood only anger, jealousy, hurt—all the plagues I believed I had escaped for good, Bridget reflected. But then nothing is ever quite for good…

  At the head of the cliff path she stopped and recited:

  ‘The very place puts toys of desperation,

  Without more motive, into every brain

  That looks so many fathoms to the sea

  And hears it roar beneath…’

  ‘Hamlet, act one, scene four?’

  ‘The same!’

  This time he did not jump her down the cliff path.

  They sat on the beach, side by side on his anorak, not quite touching.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bridget said again. As if silence was all that remained to them, they had spoken of nothing in the van. ‘Only there’s something on my mind, and I need someone sensible to talk to about it.’ It struck her that she had never really viewed Peter in that capacity.

  ‘Fine,’ said Stan.

  A fool could see it wasn’t. He picked up a flint washed smooth by the relentless action of the sea, and threw it at a post on which a herring gull was perched. The stone hit the post but the gull, never flinching, continued to sit magisterially.

  ‘It’s about the boy who has been staying with me at my house.’

  ‘The Iranian lad?’

  ‘Zahin. Yes.’ It was tempting to read contempt into the herring gull’s cruel yellow, red-spotted bill.

  ‘You like him.’ It was a statement rather than a question.

  ‘I do. I like oddballs—“lame dogs”, Peter used to call them.’

  ‘He’s a lame dog?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I suppose we all are in a way.’

  There was a cold breeze coming off the sea and the dark, petrol-coloured water was fringed with spume and lightly choppy. Bridget sat watching the waves, insurgent and actual, beat their way towards where the two of them sat on the shingle, with not even a sandwich to share—she and Stanley Godwit, who had made what felt like true love on the same spot just a month before. Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,/So do our minutes hasten to their end…

  ‘I’ve been telling myself travesty isn’t as odd as all that. I mean, look at Shakespeare.’

  ‘He’s a cross-dresser, the boy?’ What a godsend there was no need with him to spell things out.

  ‘And, I suspect, a prostitute, yes.’

  ‘I see.’

  Stanley Godwit appeared to contemplate the same sea. We’re all in the same world, but do we see it the same? Bridget wondered. What had her husband seen in a young boy’s play of womanhood?

  ‘And the lad was a friend of your husband’s?’ The sea-grey eyes looked shyly.

  ‘Yes,’ and then going on because it was clear he wasn’t going to, ‘I think Peter was a client. I sensed there was something, now I look back on it, because I was careful to avoid enquiring too far into their—acquaintance, if you know what I mean?’ And there was that caller at the house, the one she had toyed with going to bed with herself! The one who had reminded her of Peter. Even from the eyes of her own curiosity she had turned away.


  ‘Didn’t want to know?’

  ‘Well, would you?’

  Stanley Godwit threw another pebble; this time it missed the post. ‘Depends. I like the truth, myself, it feels safer.’

  But ‘what is truth?’ Bridget asked herself. Do we ever know? Could Peter really not have known that Zahin—Zelda—was a boy? Perhaps he hadn’t. That inability—or unwillingness?—to look beyond the way the world presented itself to him had been part of Peter’s charm. An innocence. It was not an innocence she had shared, even as a girl, and she saw that this had made up part of her resentment towards her husband. She had presented herself to him, fair and square, as she was, and he had paid her back by preferring a fake—a fictional version of femininity.

  ‘It’s the audacity I can’t quite take in.’

  ‘I tell you what—’ said Stan, after a pause in which Bridget calculated how many pebbles it would take to make a successful drowning—probably about six of the really large ones in each pocket, but then there was the problem of the pocket size—‘there’s a scene in Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra talks about the humiliation of having “Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness”. D’you know the one I mean?’

  ‘When she’s worried she might be taken prisoner by Caesar?’

  ‘I reckon only Shakespeare could have done that: had the greatest female sex symbol of all time, played, as we know, by a boy actor, talk indignantly about how if she’s led captive in triumph before the mob, the Romans will have some boy actor got up to impersonate her—to insult her femininity. Now there’s audacious for you! It’s a sleight of hand, but it tells you something!’

  ‘What does it tell?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Stanley Godwit. ‘I’m not clever enough to say. All I know is that, in Shakespeare, anyway, disguise has a meaning. But what the meaning is is a mystery…’

  ‘My teacher used to say something like that.’

  ‘The Players, you see, Bridget,’ Sister Mary Eustasia had said, ‘with them, now, Hamlet knows where he is. The young boy who plays the part of the queen—we know he is a boy because Hamlet lets us know this when he begs to hope the young man’s voice hasn’t broken. Think of the Elizabethan audience, though! They are watching a play, which has inside it another play, with a young boy in it—the young player—playing the part of Hamlet’s own mother, who is herself a character we are watching on the stage, who is also sitting watching a play. So, we, the audience, are watching a play about an audience watching a play in which a young lad is dressed up to play the part of the woman who is watching him. And her part is also played by a boy, but this time we are supposed to be fooled by it! And what is it all for—this “glass of art”? To reflect back to us our own preening, pretending selves. Can you ever imagine a more amusing introduction to the enigma of “reality”?’