Instances of the Number 3

by Salley Vickers

  But what are we, and who is watching us? Bridget had silently wondered.

  ‘Stan, the day we went to Ludlow, was it me you were coming to see when I met you at the gate?’

  ‘Who else, Bridget?’

  ‘I wondered.’

  ‘I couldn’t wait for them to get out of the house.’

  ‘Now he tells me!’

  ‘I couldn’t have told you before.’

  No, he would never be disloyal. ‘Thank you for telling me now.’

  And the book of poems she had innocently been the instrument of his buying. ‘You never gave that book, did you, to your wife?’

  ‘I bought them for myself because you liked them.’

  The stuff of comedies!

  ‘What are we, Stan? Human beings, I mean, not just you and me. What’s the point of us? Are we someone or some thing’s entertainment? Like Hamlet’s “Mousetrap”?

  What are we for?’

  ‘I’m not clever enough for that either. Love, maybe?’ Together they watched the same round ruby sun drop towards the wide arms of the same sea. ‘The thing is,’ Stan said, ‘I can’t leave my wife—not in her condition.’

  The price of a good woman is beyond rubies.

  ‘I understand.’ Bridget shifted her gaze from where the sun had finally yielded itself up to the sea’s fiery embrace and fixed it instead on the herring gull.

  ‘And with someone like yourself I—’

  ‘I understand,’ said Bridget again. ‘Don’t say any more. Please.’ The herring gull left the post and took off loftily into the indifferent sky.

  After a while Stanley Godwit said, ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? You meet someone and you know that if you had another life you could have done as well with them, better maybe, but you can’t because of the life you’ve already chosen.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bridget. With the herring gull gone there was only the sea to stare at. And not even the allembracing, everlasting, multitudinous seas could absolve this.

  ‘Makes you wish you had foresight—but then, lack of foresight’s what marks us out as human, I guess.’

  ‘Do you know, you are a very annoying man,’ Bridget said, finally turning her gaze from the encroaching tide. ‘What you keep saying about not being clever—I believe you have spent most of your life concealing the fact that you are really extremely clever!’

  They looked at each other and she knew that what she was doing was trying to etch on her memory the strange sea colour of his eyes.

  ‘Not clever enough to have found you in time,’ Stanley Godwit said.

  52

  Stanley dropped Bridget at Farings and she drove back to London the same night. The house was quiet when she returned, too quiet for Zahin to be in residence.

  By Zahin’s standards the kitchen was unusually untidy. Some of his milk had been spilled on the floor by the fridge. Too tired for sleep Bridget, with the energy of exhaustion, looked beneath the sink for a cloth to wipe up the milk. There was a pair of Zahin’s surgical gloves there. Picking them up she saw a bulge in one of the flaccid fingers and when she shook the glove something small and hard and round fell out.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Peter said. He had approached the bed but not yet sat down upon it. Perhaps he was waiting to see how she had taken the truth she had discovered? ‘Cut my throat and hope to die, I didn’t realise that she—he—was a boy.’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s such an impressive oath in the circumstances. But didn’t you when you…?’

  ‘No, that’s it, you see. We never did. Mostly we just fooled about. I thought it was because I was different from her—I’m sorry, he’s still a “she” to me—other clients and that she wanted me to treat her with respect.’

  Bridget, forgetting Peter’s immortal powers, thought: How naive!

  ‘It was, very, but then “naive” is what I am—was. That’s part of what I have to make up for here, now.’

  ‘What are you doing here, Peter?’

  She had asked the question before; now surely she had a right to know.

  ‘I’m in purgatory—pure and simple—and it is very pure and very simple, when you understand it. It’s like Father Gerard used to say—you get punished by your sins, not for them.’

  ‘Father Gerard?’

  ‘A Catholic priest I used to know. He wasn’t right about everything—it’s not what you’re forgiven when you die, it’s what you forgive that counts.’

  Bridget’s mind conjured Old Hamlet, the ghost of Prince Hamlet’s father, whose thorough-going unforgivingness had wrought mortal havoc on the human beings he left behind. ‘I think I could have told you that.’

  ‘I doubt you’ll spend long in purgatory, Bridget.’

  ‘I don’t know—I seem to have acquired a taste for adultery lately.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry about Stan.’

  He looked mournful. Bridget, observing this, wondered if anyone looked after him now—or was that, too, part of what he had to learn.

  ‘Perhaps it doesn’t matter,’ she suggested. ‘Perhaps if you love somebody who or what they are, or whether they stay or go, or you stay or go, isn’t important.’ The remark was either extremely banal or extremely wise. ‘What does purgatory consist of, these days?’ she went on hastily. ‘It can’t be like it is in Dante, can it?’

  ‘Dante!’ said Peter, and he gave a ghost of a laugh. ‘You were reading him when I met you. I fell in love with you just like that!’

  ‘It strikes me there’s been rather too much of the “just like that” sort of thing in your life.’ Bridget, who wanted to put her arms round him, played at being crisp.

  ‘That’s another of the consequences I have to bear now—watching the results of that “sort of thing” as you call it, looking on at the two of you.’

  Bridget studied his face: it looked—what did it look? Honestly, just plain tired. ‘Not for too long, I hope,’ she said. ‘Anyway, why just the two of us? What about Zahin—Zelda?’

  ‘That’s different. Zelda wasn’t real, you see, so she died when I did. Only the real survives here.’

  Bridget was overcome by her need to comfort him. ‘Well, Frances has her—I should say, your—baby and you know I’m always all right. So if it just depends on us you should be free, soon, to go off to wherever it is you go to after this. What is it, by the way?’ ‘Unspeakable.’

  ‘Oh dear!’

  ‘No, really, I mean it. It can’t be spoken of. Just as well considering the nonsense human beings have spoken over such matters.’

  So already he saw himself as other. ‘Will you be OK?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  He was just the same as when he was alive, Bridget thought, and yet there was a difference. ‘You mustn’t worry,’ she said.

  ‘I do though.’

  That’s what was different. Not that he worried but that he knew he did. ‘We’ll be OK—all of us. People are. They say they won’t get over things, but they do. It’s human nature.’

  ‘Oh, human nature!’

  ‘Don’t be so snooty—just because you’re not one of us any more.’

  He smiled at her, misty and congenial, and she knew he would soon be leaving.

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ she said, wanting to have said it first.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Did you know “Goodbye” means “God be with you”?’

  She wanted to cry out: You know, don’t you, that I always loved you, and love you every inch as much, even though you aren’t alive. But he knew that now; that was the other difference.

  ‘Know-all!’ She looked at the seahorses. ‘It’s funny—there seems always to have been three of us until now. First you, me and Frances, then me, Frances and Zahin. Now Frances has Petra and Zahin has his sandwich business it’s finally just you and me.’ And finalities, good or bad, bestow a certain relief. ‘I suppose soon even you will peter out…’

  ‘That’s a terrible joke, Bid! I was really on my own all the time until I came here, you know.’


  This made her sad. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Don’t be sad for me. I’m here to learn.’

  ‘Well, I’ve been learning too since you’ve been gone.’ Though he hadn’t gone—that was the oddest thing; for all his seeming invisibility he was here with her now more truly than he had ever been. It struck her that maybe for the first time there was a complicity between the two of them, like herself and the rooks…She remembered something. ‘I wondered, I half thought I saw you with the rooks once…?’

  ‘Oh yes, the rooks! It was fun flying.’

  There didn’t seem much more to be said.

  ‘Will you give me some sign then, I mean when, you know, you go for—?’

  ‘I’ll give you a sign.’

  ‘—good—or bad?’

  He nodded. ‘Good or bad. By the way, I’m sorry about the ring.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The sapphire ring—the one I gave Frances.’

  ‘I got over that a long time ago.’

  The death-pale face looked at her.

  ‘Oh, all right then, I did mind, still do a little…Remember, I’m only human!’

  But this time he didn’t smile and when he spoke it was with the voice of the real. ‘I am sorry—it wasn’t that I loved you less.’

  Bridget thought: Most necessary’tis that we forget/To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt.

  ‘That’s the first time you’ve ever told me you were sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that too. I wish you’d taught me about Shakespeare.’

  ‘You know, Pete, I’ve learned more about Shakespeare from you than anyone—you and Sister Mary Eustasia. Though she was wrong about Gertrude—Gertrude didn’t marry again because she was venal, it was because she was lonely.’

  ‘I’m sorry you’re lonely, Bid.’

  ‘Well, that’s what being human is, isn’t it? Being lonely. I suppose it’s different with you…?’

  ‘It’s different, yes…’

  Wordless, they exchanged looks, until even in the tactful darkness she had to look away. And when she next looked up there were only the seahorses, rising and falling, giving the illusion they would go on for ever.

  53

  In the end the only way for Frances to stave off Ed Bittle, Painter insisted, was for her to pose for him. ‘You never did sit for me anyway.’

  ‘You didn’t want me! You were into abstracts.’

  ‘I never remember not wanting you!’

  He worked steadily, sizing her up with his dispassionate, lop-sided gaze. ‘A life drawing is like making a baby,’ he said once. ‘There’s you, there’s me and there’s the picture. You only get the picture right if there’s a fit with the other two.’

  Ed called and went away offended. He confided to Lottie, whom he had met at the hospital when they were both visiting Frances, ‘She promised she would sit for me!’

  ‘I’ll sit for you,’ said Lottie, who was taken with Ed’s motorbike leathers.

  Frances had planned to leave the Painters after a week—but somehow the ‘week’ drifted into September. The late summer was unnaturally hot; Petra lay on the rug on the lawn without nappies, and the Ginger Nuts—the seven tiny tortoises—took the sun alongside her. It seemed a pity to break up the nursery, Painter said.

  He also insisted in paying Frances when she modelled for him. ‘But Patrick, I can’t take this—if anything I owe you for board and lodging!’

  ‘I suppose you think I can’t afford it,’ said Painter, choosing to take offence. ‘Sit up straight, woman, your left dug’s drooping!’

  ‘That means it’s time for Petra’s feed.’

  Bridget visited once with an altered Zahin. He called Frances by her first name, and gave Petra a velveteen rabbit with which he tried, quite ordinarily, to make her smile.

  ‘She’s not old enough to smile yet, Zahin.’

  Zahin told them all about his sandwich business and Mrs Painter found a recipe for soda bread. His voice had lost the bell-like tone and had become quite gruff—suitable for a young man about to make a fortune.

  Before Zahin and Bridget left, Frances politely asked after Zelda. But Zelda, Bridget explained, had gone back to Iran, wasn’t it sad?—though another sister of Zahin’s might be coming over soon—and his mother had also promised to pay a visit…

  ‘That boy behaved unusually normally,’ said Frances, after the two had left. ‘I suppose everything’s all right there?’

  ‘That Bridget’d sort anyone out—she’s a tough nut!’

  ‘You take too much notice of appearances.’

  ‘What else would an artist take notice of? Sit up—you’ve collapsed into a coil.’

  But with September drawing towards its end Frances felt it was time to leave. ‘I must go, Patrick, or I’ll never get my independence back.’

  ‘So?’ The green eyes looked enquiringly.

  ‘I can’t—we can’t—live here with you for ever.’

  ‘Why not?’ Painter had an exhibition coming up; meticulously, he was repainting imagined defects in the tiny coloured squares.

  ‘You’ve got your painting…’

  ‘What’s that got to do with the price of eggs? What’s wrong with living with me, anyway?’

  ‘It would be an unusual arrangement.’

  Painter turned round. ‘I’m told I’m considered “unusual”, but what’s so funny about asking a pretty woman to live with you?’

  Frances felt herself colour. ‘But Patrick…’

  ‘You think I’m queer, don’t you?’ Painter said. He was looking at her sideways from one out-of-true eye.

  Frances flushed deeper. ‘Well—’

  ‘Just because a man loves his mother doesn’t make him queer! I never took you for conventional.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with being homosexual.’

  ‘Speak for yourself!’ said Painter, rudely.

  ‘It wasn’t just that!’ protested Frances.

  ‘What then?’

  ‘You never had any girlfriends.’

  ‘There’s hardly any women I find attractive—Celia Johnson’s dead and Anne Bancroft’s spoken for. You’re one of the very few available women I fancy.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Frances; she felt chastened.

  ‘So how about it? You can come and live here.’

  Frances thought about it. ‘I don’t think I’m cut out for marriage,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? There’s no need to marry, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Living with just one person—it’s too much for me. I think that’s why I’ve been a mistress. I seem to work best in a three.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Painter, ‘I’m ideal. There won’t just be me—there’s Mother!’

  ‘But she might die,’ Frances blurted out.

  ‘She’ll die, but there’s Petra—and I’ll die, and then you’ll die—we’ll all die one day. Even Petra. What does it matter?’

  Perhaps it doesn’t, Frances thought. Perhaps I’ve taken everything too seriously.

  Something sharp attacked her toe. Frances looked down to see a tortoise nibbling at her feet. ‘Hey!’

  ‘It’s your red nail varnish—thinks you’re a tomato!’

  ‘I’ll think about what you say,’ said Frances, ‘but I must go home first.’ She was flattered by the tortoise’s nip.

  ‘Promise you’ll think? By the way, I’m glad you’ve stopped wearing all those dreary colours. That varnish’s a good colour on you, goes with the silver sandals—what’s it called?’

  ‘It’s called “Persian Nights”.’

  ‘You thought I fancied that pretty Persian boy, didn’t you?’ said Painter, and laughed raucously.

  He helped to pack her belongings into the car and carried Petra out in her Moses basket.

  ‘Ginger and Fred’d like it too.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘They like you,’ Painter said.

  ‘You mean they like my toes, rather, for lunch!�
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  ‘That too. But they respond to your voice. Some voices they tuck their heads in—with you they stick ’em right out, always have. It’s the best test.’

  Frances didn’t ask of what. She drove off waving her hand.

  Painter was still standing outside the house when, minutes later, she drove back again.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I was thinking—if it’ll please Ginger and Fred…’

  54

  There was no longer any pretence of Zahin studying. The sandwich business was up and running: there were the supplies to order for Mrs Michael, deliveries to arrange, the bank manager to be consulted and most of his spare time was spent devising fillings in Bridget’s kitchen. He seemed to have wholly forgotten the part he had once played so convincingly for her husband.

  One day he came by Bridget’s shop. ‘Your computer, Bridget, I was wondering, for my cash spreadsheets…?’

  Bridget had been turning things over in her mind. ‘Sure. I may be able to let you have it outright, soon.’

  The new Zahin was matter-of-fact. ‘I can give you a good price.’

  But Bridget was curious. Taking advantage of the offer of her computer she asked, ‘Does your family mind that you’re not going to be a chemical engineer?’

  ‘They will mind much more if I tell people I was a prostitute. I have decided to say I will tell, if the family don’t let me do as I like.’