Instances of the Number 3

7

Frances and Peter had been away together only a few times. Twice she had travelled with him to Scotland, where Peter had gone for business reasons. On those two occasions they had stayed in the Edinburgh flat of an old school friend of Peter’s, a bachelor who travelled abroad, and was grateful to have the flat occupied during his frequent absences. Nor was he fussy about the moral conduct of his guests. Another occasion had been when they had gone to Paris.

The visit to Paris had remained to Frances a kind of touchstone of what people meant by being ‘happy’. They had stayed on the Left Bank, in a cramped, almost drab hotel—so dim was its lighting, so very ancient its threadbare furnishings.

It was in Paris that Peter had begun to call her ‘France’ the diminutive which he alone was allowed—all other, and previous, attempts, such as ‘Francie’, or ‘Fran’, or, once—quite frightfully—‘Frannie’, having been instantly squashed by one of her looks—the ‘basilisk look’ Peter called it. There had been only one other to whom any abbreviated form of address had been permitted: her brother—not James, the judge, but her younger-by-two-years brother Hugh, who had been killed on his motorbike when she was nineteen.

Hugh had driven the bike full tilt into the stone gatepost of the country house of a friend, whose family was grand enough to own a drive down which one could drive at 70 mph. Hugh had also called her ‘France’; that there had existed certain resemblances between Hugh and Peter was a secret which was now known only to Frances.

Perhaps it was that likeness to her younger brother which had prompted a kind of playfulness with Peter. In Paris they had been like children: it was cold, and Frances had taught him how to keep warm by skipping, and hand in hand they had skipped along by the Seine looking, as Peter had said, ‘like geriatric kids!’ But they had had their moments as lovers too.

It was on a morning after a night of lovemaking that she had wakened to find Peter, in his socks, about to tiptoe from the room. The lovemaking had been of the kind which routs paranoia, so her first thought was not, as it might have been: He is leaving me! Instead she said, still half asleep, ‘Where in the world are you off to at this hour?’ and he, slightly embarrassed, had murmured, ‘Mass. Go back to sleep.’

Frances had submissively rolled down the dip in the aged mattress. When Peter returned she was propped up against an unyielding bolster reading about Matisse.

‘It’s nice when one’s prejudices are confirmed,’ she said, noticing his slight awkwardness. ‘I always suspected Picasso was a bastard. He encouraged his toadies to throw darts at poor Matisse’s paintings.’ Then, seeing he was still fiddling with the change in his pocket, ‘I waited breakfast for you—I must love you a whole lot because, frankly, my dear, after last night I’m ravenous!’

At that, Matisse was tipped to the floor and it had been some time, after all, before breakfast was ordered.

She had not enquired about the Mass, sensing that this was a subject which, if it was to be raised at all, must be so by him. And two nights later, over dinner in a restaurant in Montmartre, he did himself bring it up. ‘When I was in Notre-Dame,’ he dropped the name casually, ‘there was a beggar woman some rows in front of me—pretty tatty and quite niffy, I should think. When it came to the Sign of Peace everyone kissed her or shook her hand most courteously.’ They were discussing declining standards of manners in Britain.

‘But mightn’t that be true also at an English service?’ She was shy of speaking the word ‘Mass’.

‘Maybe. But afterwards she was looking a bit unsteady on her pins and a young man, a very well-dressed young man—good clothes—took her arm and helped her down the aisles outside. He wasn’t a relative, or anything to do with her—I was watching: he went off afterwards in a quite different direction.’

‘Do you think it’s their being French or being Catholic that makes the difference?’ she had said, feeling bold enough to broach the topic.

And he had replied, quite casually, ‘I’m a Catholic, if it comes to that, but I’m not sure I have their manners—really, it does seem to be a different culture here.’

That Bridget was unaware of her husband’s faith was something which Frances had suspected before Peter’s death. Just as well, as it turned out, for otherwise, she could have put her foot in it. Peter could never have guessed that the two would become such intimates—if that was what they were, for ‘friends’ did not quite capture it—no, ‘friends’ wasn’t it at all, Frances thought, leaving the house that afternoon when the young man had so disarmingly referred to her and Peter as ‘sweethearts’.

‘Sweethearts, we are sweethearts,’ Peter had said to her. In the ‘childlike’ spirit he had bought her a bag of coloured sugar hearts. How could that young Iranian have known? Frances, nostalgically remembering the sagging French bed and the hard usage they had put it to, wondered again if it was the lovemaking which had occasioned that early-morning visit Peter had made to Notre-Dame…

Bridget, as it happens, had found a rosary hidden in one of the small interior drawers of the oak desk but she had thought little about it: Peter was a man who collected talismans—worry beads from Greece, Maori carvings from New Zealand, fragments of lichen-covered marble from abandoned Turkish temples. Rosary beads were merely one among the many superstitious fetishes which had accumulated at the close of Peter’s truncated life.

To the end of that life Bridget remained ignorant of her husband’s faith and her own role in his observance of it. Without other information to go on Bridget had chosen the cremation service for Peter on the basis of her own preferences. It would suit her to become ashes—‘ashes’ was what she, herself, felt like; to have her husband rendered into an ashy condition seemed perfectly acceptable. She enjoyed shocking the cremation officials by asking scientific questions about what the post-cremation remains were actually composed of. ‘What about the coffin?’ she had asked, when solemnly presented with the casket. ‘Solid oak—I paid through the nose for it. How can I tell which of the cinders is expensive coffin and which dead husband?’

In fact Peter’s attendance at the Paris Mass had not arisen, except in an indirect sense, from the night’s abandonment with Frances. Mistresses fill many needs, not exclusively sexual, and if truth were told Peter had often found more satisfaction in making love to Bridget than to Frances. This was not due to any deficit in Frances, other than a sensitivity in her which Peter sometimes found daunting. If Bridget’s wordless and robust responses suited him better, it was because they relieved him of the requirement to worry about how she was finding things. Not that he would ever think of revealing this to Frances—he was not without sensitivity himself, and it was alive to him that it was as a desirable lover that she gained part of her self-esteem. Nor was it something he could say that the morning visit to Notre-Dame had nothing to do with their unusually satisfactory time in bed.

On the whole, Peter restricted his extramarital activities to those times when his wife was away—her absence, he might have argued, legitimising any steps he took to make time pass without her less disturbing. As he had frankly told his mistress, he loved his wife and made his own efforts to behave honourably to her. But honour is not a commodity you can ration: almost by definition there is a place for honour towards one’s mistress as well.

Honour, however, is not the only engine of erotic escapades; and perhaps this is as well since history suggests actions performed for lofty motives are more likely to be dangerous than those performed for selfish ones. Peter may not have noticed this himself but he took his mistress to France after a period during which his wife had visited that same country three times in as many months. Bridget, busy buying for an international antiques fair, had made more than her usual quota of trips abroad: there was a current craze for rural French cribs and she had tracked down a number of possible sources; then there was the old lace she had been partly responsible for making fashionable—and wicker garden furniture was making a comeback. She set off on these trips, often in the small hours of the morning, leaving Peter to the ostensible care of Mickey. So, Peter might have argued to himself, if he chose to take Frances, who was looking peaky after a bout of flu, to Paris, it could be said that his wife had left the door fairly open to that possibility.

Yet, waking in the musty erotic aftermath in the Paris hotel, beside Frances’s warm body, Peter had felt the painful lance of remorse; it was this which had taken him out into the pearl-quiet morning and along by the placidly flowing Seine to the service in the cathedral where the light, filtering the amethyst and blue of the great north rose window, hinted, he reflected as he bent his knees, at some oblique promise of a life to come.

Perhaps it was the effect of that sincere blue light which had prompted him to tell Frances, over the intimate Montmartre dinner, the tale of the young man’s courtesy to the beggar woman, the story which had harbingered the admission of his faith. The next day they had passed a flower seller, where Frances had pointed to some brilliantly coloured flowers—pink, red and the lambent blue and purple of the stained glass in Notre-Dame. ‘Look, lilies of the field! Did you know they were anemones?’ Happy that, for the moment, his faith had lain down like a lamb with his worldlier self, he listened as his lover explained that this was the flower in the parable which, arrayed like ‘Solomon in all his glory’, had no need to toil or spin.

On that misty October morning when the journalist friend telephoned with news of the fatal accident, the biblical flowers came into Frances’s mind. Peter had said, ‘They’re awfully merry,’ and he had bought her a bunch, adding casually, ‘when I die, you can send me some of these.’

In the split second before he died Peter remembered these words, and remembered that, unlike Bridget, Frances had not disputed the likelihood of his death.

8

‘Does Zahin know about me and Peter?’ Frances asked.

They had been shifting furniture for hours. The coolness over the Christmas bowl had been patched up—or, more accurately, had been passed over, since neither woman wished to be thought undignified. It was Bridget, though, who had made the peacemaking gesture, asking Frances if she was free for a weekend at Farings, the Shropshire house.

The cynical part of Frances had suggested, when she arrived at the slightly austere brick house, that she had maybe been invited as a useful pair of hands. Bridget had piled a whole lot of furniture into the downstairs rooms with no apparent plan as to where it was to end up. Frances had hauled and dragged, pushed and shifted until her back and ribs protested. Finally she sat down on a roll of carpet. ‘Where am I sleeping, as a matter of interest?’

‘Hell!’ said Bridget. ‘I forgot. No bed.’

‘What?’

‘There’s only one bed—I was planning to bring one of the ones from the shop—it’s a sweetheart bed, with intertwined hearts on the head and foot. But I never picked it up.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Frances. ‘Sweetheart’ made her think of the boy’s odd, telepathic comment. Which was when she asked, ‘Does Zahin know about me and Peter?’

But Bridget was preoccupied with the sleeping arrangements. ‘There’s the sofa but I don’t even think I’ve brought enough bedding—damn.’

‘Don’t bother,’ said Frances, coolly, ‘I can stay at the hotel.’ She suspected the forgotten bed and bedding were a ploy and that Bridget preferred her not to sleep in the house after all.

Bridget, sensing this, said, ‘The hotel’s closed down—I noticed as we were passing—the nearest other one’s miles away. But if you didn’t mind we could always share—I mean, it’s a big bed, it was Peter’s and mine!’

Looking at Frances she started to laugh, and Frances, seated on the dust-filled Indian carpet, caught the mood and began to laugh too. Helplessly, the two women wheezed and Bridget all but rolled about the room.

‘Oh dear,’ said Frances, wiping tears from her eyes—brought on as much by the dusty carpet as the laughter. ‘We’ll be able to tell no one—people will think—I don’t know what they’d think!’

‘Who cares?’ Bridget was soberer now.

‘What would Peter think?’ Frances asked as a while later together they made the bed upstairs.

Bridget reflected a moment. Outside, through the west-facing window, the far hills were turning indigo—‘blue remembered’, she thought, like Housman’s.

‘He’d have been sorry not to be joining us,’ she finally announced.

It was not that Bridget had failed to hear Frances’s question about Zahin but that she had decided to ignore it. She hadn’t yet assembled her impressions of the boy. Christmas had been…she needed time to ponder…

Except in the first years of their marriage, Christmas with Peter had never been a tranquil event. Bridget’s consciousness of a regular Christmas Eve assignation, long before she met the object of it, caused her bridled indignation. To say she was without ill feelings towards Peter’s other ‘associations’—as it was her habit to call them—would have been stretching a point. Possibly there are people large-hearted enough to offer perfect charity towards those with whom they are asked to share the person of their beloved; but purity must be its own reward: while commendable it is hardly interesting, and anyhow Bridget was not among this angelic band. On the other hand, she had learned the dangers of bearing grudges.

Bridget had been born and bred in Limerick, in the south-west of Ireland. Her father had been tricked by a phantom pregnancy into an ill-matched wedding. When, in time, a child was eventually born, she received the brunt of a resentment which had had five years in which to accrue. Among families, resentment is often expressed indirectly. To Joseph Dwyer’s fear of his wife was added an even greater fear of her brother, Father Eamonn, priest to the neighbouring parish and spoken of as ‘episcopal’—even ‘cardinal’—material. Unhappily for Bridget, her father kept his interior rage for the family who had curtailed his snappy-bachelor freedom, while he vented it more openly upon his daughter.

Bridget was born curious. She questioned her mother, her grandparents—who lived a village away—her uncle the priest, her teachers—most of all she questioned her father, to the point where her mother finally abetted her daughter’s flight from home, lest, as Moira Dwyer confessed to her brother, ‘there be a murder in the house’.

That there was not a murder was due to Bridget’s early discovery that life tends to be unyielding to our desires. She was unusual in perceiving so soon the gap between what we want and what is possible; more remarkable still, in time she came to recognise the distinction between what she felt was her due and what was actually on offer—a distinction which stood her in good stead when, years later, on Christmas mornings, having returned late from Turnham Green, her husband would say, in varying accents of agitation, ‘I’m sure I did buy you something—no, hang on, I know I did—let me think a moment while I remember where I put it…’ or ‘Good God, have I left it behind in the shop…?’

All this might have been easier to accommodate had not Bridget, not meaning to pry, once come across a small box, which curiosity had made her open and which had shockingly revealed a costly looking square-cut sapphire ring, a particularly brilliant blue. It was, in fact, the sight of this ring on Frances’s finger, which had sparked the moment of tension over the Christmas bowl. Seeing it, Bridget had felt a return of the nauseous rush of jealousy which had accompanied the original discovery of the ring in its expensive leather hiding place.

Christmas with Zahin could hardly have been more different. He had arrived, with his things from St John’s Wood, late in the day on Christmas Eve. How in that short space of time he had managed so to infer her tastes and buy accordingly, Bridget could never fathom. She had popped out and bought him a rather dull shirt, feeling that to do more on such a short acquaintance would be overdoing it. But no such reserve had apparently constrained Zahin.

Bridget had woken on Christmas morning to find a pile of glitteringly wrapped gifts at the foot of her bed. Wonder vying with a sense of slight fear—caused by the appearance of something at once so long desired and so unexpected—she had gathered up the colourful, gleaming parcels and returned, like a child, with them to bed. Here she undid swathes of tissue paper with the astonishment of one schooled in deprivation. Silk scarves, silver bangles, a stole, scent, a gilt peacock, a leather-bound diary, a pair of velvet slippers—it was like produce from some fabulous dream, or bazaar in the Arabian Nights.

Downstairs in her kitchen she found Zahin had also been at work. The table was laid with a length of some old lace he must have found in the linen cupboard and adorned with scarlet poinsettias, pink azaleas, golden roses. The smell of superior coffee mingled with the scent of roses to perfume the room, like incense from some exotic temple.

‘Zahin?’

‘O Mrs Hansome,’ the boy had cried. ‘How pretty you look! It suits you—look how it suits your colouring!’

Bridget, who had strung the scarves round her neck and wound the stole round her shoulders, glanced over to where he had gestured towards the long glass which hung by the kitchen door. It was a glass which Peter had used to scrutinise his carefully accoutred frame, before meeting the world.

Handsome is as handsome does—her own mocking words came back to her,

‘Zahin—I am overwhelmed. There was no need for all this.’

‘But I like to.’ The boy spoke with an odd note of authority. ‘Now, I make you coffee, and toast. You like jam, honey? See, I have also made pancakes.’

Bridget had not noticed the sapphire ring again until Frances took it off and placed it in a saucer beside the bed at Farings before visiting the bathroom. Bridget waited until Frances had left the bedroom and then examined the ring under the bedside light. No doubt about it—it was the same. She considered stealing it and then denying all knowledge. But what would she do then—throw it away? She could hardly wear it herself! Or she could raise the matter with Frances and they could have a tremendous row. That might be satisfying but in the end she felt she couldn’t be bothered.

‘Turn out the light when you’re ready,’ she said when Frances came back, steamy, from the bathroom, and surprisingly middle-aged in a washed-out candlewick dressing gown. ‘I’ve put a bolster between us in case one of us kicks.’

‘I don’t kick.’ Frances was not looking forward to a night spent with Bridget.

‘Well, I can.’

Peter had said so. But Bridget kept this from Frances. Turning her back to her bed companion, she had a sudden flash of Peter’s face, should he see them there—his mistress and his wife—tucked up together in his bed.

That night Peter Hansome did indeed come to the room where the two women lay side by side in the bed which had once been his. For some while he remained looking down at their sleeping forms. Then, when a cock crowed, and the green dawn light began to seep through the curtains, he vanished back whence he had come.

9

Frances had wondered whether it was wise to wear the sapphire ring to Farings. Apart from other considerations it hardly seemed polite. But she was also apprehensive, staying in Bridget’s house, and glimpses of the blue square offered little oases of reassurance.

Peter had given Frances the sapphire the Christmas after Paris. Opening the compact leather box she had exclaimed, ‘Notre-Dame blue!’ which made Peter, who had worried, pleased he had bought it after all.

It might have surprised Bridget to learn that her husband was aware that, in matters such as this, he might be said to favour his mistress over his wife. Yet, essentially, he was not an unfair man.

No one has ever fully explained why humankind so resists a sense of requirement. Perhaps it is this very propensity which constitutes what it means to be ‘human’—certainly it seems to have been at the bottom of the debacle in the Garden of Eden, or so the story goes. In Peter Hansome’s case the tendency expressed itself towards Bridget because she was his wife: within the convention he was reared to she came with perceived obligations. He did not allow his inability to be demonstrative when it was expected of him to trouble him much of the time; but times of celebration, especially Christmas, had the effect of exposing a moral nerve.

Peter would not normally have risked his conscience so far by making such a one-sided gesture as the gift of the sapphire ring. It was the extraordinary colour of the stone which had drawn him—that ethereal blue—the colour of Paris. Perhaps—he didn’t know—it was the colour of his soul? If he had a soul…