Instances of the Number 3

10

Journeys offer opportunity for reflection. Driving back to London, Frances allowed the night’s events to seep into her mind. She eyed the square blue gem on the fourth finger of her right hand—the ring finger of the unattached—as it grasped the wheel. Well, there were worse things than unattachment. It had been less of an ordeal than she had expected to share a bed with Peter’s widow…‘Widow’—what a word! Bridget wouldn’t thank her for it! How funny she should have spent the night dreaming of passionate sexual congress with Peter. The dream reminded her of Paris—perhaps it was because she had been wearing the sapphire…?

Back at Farings, Bridget was also considering the insubstantial. She had found, and opened, a second bottle of sherry which she was downing, with bread and cheese, by the fire. The dream she had had in the bed with Frances was also filtering back: in this case there had been no vigorous coupling; rather, a walk—down a lane where purple flowers were growing—near Farings, she felt it was…?

Bridget was not the sort to analyse her dreams but she wondered if this one had some message for her. Perhaps it meant she should settle here? Give up the shop and the house next door to Mickey and up sticks altogether now she was, more or less, alone.

If she was alone. There was Frances, and Mickey, too, of course—and then there was the boy.

Bridget had never wanted children so she was relieved rather than disappointed when it became clear that Peter was a far from paternal man. His children—a boy and girl—by his former wife seemed to embarrass him. They came to stay at weekends during which everyone behaved with unnatural stiffness and Bridget was thankful when the time came for them to be returned to their mother’s house in Barnes: she could hardly bear the sight of Peter trying so hard—with so little aptitude—to be jolly.

Peter’s first wife had remarried—a solicitor in a City firm—and she was now buffered by demonstrable prosperity. Nevertheless, she continued to receive Peter—still more Bridget, should Bridget happen to be the one to chauffeur the children home—in the manner of a mendicant, whose impoverishment should be laid at the door of her former husband. Hopeless to try and suggest—as Bridget did—that his children’s mother’s attitude was injurious, not only to relations with their father but also to the children themselves. As Bridget came to see, Peter did not greatly care what his children felt or thought about him. She suspected they irked him; and that he was glad when the regular visits tailed off and he was released from the pressures of family obligation.

The children, now adults, had appeared at the funeral and the girl had cried, mildly obedient to some atavistic sense of her loss—while the young man, a stockbroker in the City, in his new dark suit had hung his head sheepishly. Bridget had felt sorry for them: they had no language with which to mourn their father.

Their mother, Peter’s former wife, had sent a massy wreath of ostentatious whiteness, and a card with sentiments on it which had left Bridget particularly cold.

No, there was little enough love lost between Peter and his children which is why it was mildly surprising to discover his attachment to Zahin.

Back in London Mickey said to Jean, ‘It doesn’t seem right that boy having a girl round there like that with Bridget not at home. I don’t know if I should say anything.’

‘Perhaps she said he could?’ Jean was more phlegmatic than her friend.

‘What if she didn’t?’

‘Girlfriends aren’t any harm, are they?’ Jean didn’t think Bridget seemed the type to lay down draconian rules.

‘She looked a forward little thing if you ask me. All tarted up in them platform heels, with what you could see of her BTM—which wasn’t much of one anyway—stuck out. And plastered all over in make-up. A young girl does better showing off her own skin, in my view.’

‘It’s the way with modern girls…’ Jean’s more charitable nature suggested.

‘Better say nothing this time,’ Mickey decided. ‘But if it’s going to keep on happening, I’ll have to. My conscience wouldn’t let me off otherwise,’ she concluded with stark satisfaction.

11

Bridget had not started back to London as early as she had planned. The chimney had smoked and she had taken time to ring round the Yellow Pages in search of a sweep. A Mr Godwin was found who promised to visit when she returned in a fortnight. And she lingered on after the matter of the chimney had been resolved, dawdling and watching the rooks, reluctant to have to make the effort of the drive.

Zahin was at the gate when Bridget arrived and took the holdall from her.

‘Zahin! How did you know I was back?’

‘Instinct, Mrs Hansome.’ She had tried, and failed, to get him to call her ‘Bridget’.

‘I didn’t even know myself when I would get here.’

‘The traffic was heavy.’ He had a way, she noticed, of making questions statements.

‘As life!’

‘You are tired. Come in, please, and relax.’

Sitting with a glass of Jameson, Bridget thought: If only Peter could see this! Chaotic himself, he had the obsessional nature which sees chaos in others’ mess but not his own. Bridget was no housewife and Peter’s fussy comments had been a source of ruffled feelings. Yet now, with Peter gone and unable to appreciate it, the house gleamed with the patina of dedicated care. Upstairs a bath was running and a scent drifted down to her.

‘Zahin, what is that you have put in my bath?’ she called upstairs.

‘I bought it in the King’s Road, Mrs Hansome. Meadow flowers—it is very you!’

Flowers had been in the dream of Peter. Or had they? The mind played tricks—she was aware of the human tendency to weave ‘reality’ out of wishes.

‘You are too kind,’ she called again. Zahin’s politeness was catching.

‘Oh, but it is not kind to look after one who is beautiful!’

Zahin had appeared at the top of the stairs which, in the Hansomes’ house, descended to the sitting room. Bridget had taken time to persuade Peter that the removal of a wall, and the inclusion of the space which had been the hall and stairway into the living area, would give an added dimension and light, but it took Zahin, standing like a model or a film star, to show off the alteration. He was dressed in a vivid blue silk shirt which Bridget had not noticed when he appeared so miraculously at the gate, and which brought out the colour of his eyes.

‘Zahin,’ she said, ‘that is called hyperbole.’

But she was not displeased. She was not beautiful, nor had ever been—but it was a long while since anyone had even pretended that she might be.

‘Oh, but you are.’ The boy was down the stairs now and plumping cushions. Bridget could make out the shoulder blades which she had fancied resembled incipient wings. ‘Beautiful in your spirit. I see it.’ He stared at her and to her chagrin she found she was blushing.

‘Get away, child!’ she said, and his voice followed her as she hurried up the stairs,

‘I know what hyperbole is, Mrs Hansome—and it isn’t you!’

No, indeed, she thought, lying in the bath, where she had brought up the tumbler of golden whisky, she was not much given to exaggeration. Peter had, one had to admit it, embroidered—improved on life, as he might, if challenged, have put it. But she herself did not wish such improvements. Not for reasons of greater honesty than her husband (about human honesty, even her own, Bridget was firmly sceptical) but because it wasn’t safe, she felt, to polish things up, or dim them down. Not to name things as you found them put you more at their mercy…

If Peter Hansome had not named things quite as he found them it was because he had problems discerning them clearly in the first place. Reality may be singular but the sense of it is not, and ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’ refers to more than simple taste. ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees’ perhaps puts it better. Many conflicts of opinion can be explained by the fact that perceptual systems depend on the personalities of the perceivers.

In Peter’s case, behind all his responses lurked a chronic panic, which coloured—or obscured—his apprehension of reality. Although he would never have owned to it he could not forget that day when half his known world walked away and left him. From this moment, he had constructed a personality upon which such a loss had made no obvious dent; but this did not mean that the dent had not been planted. As a child the knock had made for a wary caution. In time, and with training, the wariness had become overlaid with an acceptable veneer, one in which a kind of genial sociability acted as a polished surface which deflected intimacy; but the most significant feature of his character was that at bottom he was frightened of people.

It takes a rare man to know he is afraid—and why. Peter was not aware that he was fearful of other people’s power to remove themselves, nor that he had chosen Bridget because although she exuded a power which did not always make him feel comfortable, it did not, at least, feel as if it might desert him. And in this he was correct. That he was capable of being harmed, perhaps mortally, through loss of another’s love, was a secret, even from himself. Dormant and lethal, it lay hidden at the centre of Peter’s universe, until the October day when the truck driver adjusted his cassette and exploded Peter’s former reality.

It is part of nature’s way to meet threat with superfluity: toads puff up their skin, snakes rear, peacocks rattle and spread their tails; the habit of hyperbole is but another version of this florid system of defence. Lying in her bath, inhaling the scent of meadow flowers, Bridget remembered Peter, late one Christmas Eve, returning, as she now understood, from seeing Frances. She heard again the familiar accent of anxiety, concerned to account for time which could not be accounted for except by honesty or omission—‘I would have been home earlier but there was an accident on the M4—terrible catastrophe—I shouldn’t be surprised if someone got killed!’—and wept for the way life had apparently taken him at his word.

12

The Soho gallery which Frances managed, dealt, among other contemporary artists, in the works of Patrick Painter. Although Frances did not own the gallery she was indispensable to its running: it was understood that without her skills Gambit Galleries would never have hung on to its most prestigious name.

There were rules for dealing with Patrick Painter: you did not call him before noon; you never enquired about his health, or his financial affairs, and no one was permitted to comment on his name. A journalist from a respected broadsheet had lost a promised interview because he had been unable to refrain from audibly murmuring, ‘Painter by name…’ Frances, who arrived too late to prevent this outrage, explained, ‘It is not his own name, you see. It was his stepfather’s—they didn’t get on.’ ‘Why for Christ’s sake didn’t he change it then, if it offends him so much?’ the aggrieved young journalist had asked, conscious of the hole in the copy this upset would make, and doubly conscious of his editor’s displeasure.

Painter lived in Isleworth with his mother and his tortoises. Frances had sometimes speculated that the mother and the tortoises occupied interchangeable places in the artist’s mind. It was to visit Painter that Monday morning that Frances had returned the previous evening from Shropshire.

When Painter asked to see Frances, it was generally to seek her view on some painting on which he was stuck. As with everything to do with him these meetings involved a certain amount of ritual before a hint of anything to do with work-in-hand could be broached.

‘So you’ve deigned to come and see me, have you?’ Painter said, meeting her at the front door and indicating she should go ahead into the front room. ‘About bloody time, too!’ He swept a chair free of a pile of unsorted magazines and papers.

Paradoxically, the house, although apparently a tremendous muddle, always had an ordering effect on Frances, a product, she supposed, of the fact that the house itself made up much of the subject matter of the artist’s orderly paintings. There was some to-do about the biscuits—the tin could not be found. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the ginger nuts. What has the bloody bitch done with them?’

Frances was used to this. ‘If by that you mean Mrs Hicks, I think it most unlikely she has done anything. I expect you’ve eaten them.’ She looked about the Formica-covered kitchen until she found a tin with a picture of the Queen with her corgis on it. ‘These shortbread, will they do?’

‘At a pinch—but you would prefer ginger nuts…?’

Frances said she’d prefer not to have a biscuit at all lest she grew fat.

‘Rubbish, you have no arse to speak of.’

‘Well, I hope to keep things that way.’

‘Nonsense, a woman should have a decent arse.’

Other than the nude models he must have drawn from in his pre-abstract days, Frances doubted Painter had ever had anything to do with a woman’s bottom. Nevertheless, because he seemed to like it, she kept up the myth of his erotic interests.

‘Where are the tortoises? Are they out of hibernation?’

‘Fred is—Ginger is still comatose, lazy cow.’

‘Can one call a tortoise “cow”?’

Frances was not deceived by Painter’s habits of speech: she knew him to be a man of warm, if secret, sensibility. After Peter was killed she had found herself ringing the artist in need of the kindness which lay beneath the superficial savageness. Also, he was from Cork and she liked an Irish accent. Maybe that was why she got on with Bridget…?

Painter had got round to his current fix. ‘It’s this effing catastrophe,’ he complained, indicating a canvas composed of tiny delicately painted squares of lilac—recognisably a mutation of the hall wallpaper. ‘Look at it, will you just—I’ll have to destroy the whole bollocking thing.’

‘Maybe it just needs some balance,’ said Frances carefully. She had decided long ago that it didn’t much matter what one said to Painter about his pictures—all that was required was to sound as if what was said made sense. What was important was that Painter felt safe in showing her uncompleted work. It was like being the stooge to a highly strung comic—he relied on her to feed him the right lines.

‘No, no, no, no,’ said Painter, falling into the familiar patter, ‘it’s vile, vile—I’ll have to ditch it.’

‘Hmm,’ said Frances, ‘I see what you mean—but it would be a pity.’

They stood side by side and stared at the canvas. Frances had noticed before that Patrick was nice to be near: he gave one space; there was no crowding in—or pulling away.

A tortoise, presumably Fred, ambled through the door and rested where a patch of sun lit up the pattern of the carpet.

‘“Gaming in a gap of sunlight”,’ said Painter resting his foot on the tortoise’s back. ‘I’ll scrap it then, shall I?’

This was the crucial moment. Frances gambled, ‘Maybe you’re right…’

‘Or maybe I could do something with it,’ said Painter, quickly. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you generally know.’

‘That’s all right then,’ said Painter relieved. ‘Glad we sorted that out. Damn that tart—I could do with a ginger nut.’

Frances walked down to the corner shop with Painter where he bought Typhoo tea, ‘Extra strength’, and two packets of biscuits. The woman in the shop said, ‘You still want the Sunday Sport, Mr Pinter?’

‘Pinter?’ asked Frances outside. ‘What’s this?’

A sly smile spread over Painter’s face. ‘Their mistake, not my doing. She thinks I’m Harold Pinter. Writes plays,’ he added helpfully.

‘I know he’s a playwright—a highly civilised one. What’s going on?’

‘It’s an identity swap,’ said Painter, slightly sheepish. ‘When the silly cow took over from the Patels they told her I was famous—and she read the name as Pinter. She’s got a daughter doing Media Arts at Luton. I can’t help it if the woman’s a star-fucker.’

‘Is that why you’re ordering the Sunday Sport?’ asked Frances, light dawning. ‘Honestly, Patrick, how infantile!’

13

If an impression has been given that Peter Hansome was not a particularly brave man it would be misleading. At boarding school he passed through the ordeal of separation from home and familiars without even the sharpest-eyed, and most malicious, of his peers noticing that the experience left him feeling he was bleeding alive. More heroic still, he resisted the urge to find relief from his own despair by joining in with tormenting those less successful at concealment. He became popular, up to a point, never reaching that pinnacle of popularity which, from the start, attends the lucky—if luck is what it is. And ‘luck’ made up no conspicuous part of Peter Hansome’s history.

Once we are in the way of losing things, life seems to determine that other goods shall go: having lost his father Peter went on to lose his mother, to a Member of Parliament who chose Peter’s siblings, Marcus and Clare, as the foci of his step-parental care.

There is a kind of person who, if aware that an affection is not directed towards them, will set out to destroy it. With the acuity of the sadistic, Evelyn Hansome’s second husband recognised the deep link between his wife and her second son. Such bonds between mothers and sons are not uncommon—nineteenth-century fiction depends upon them; but they should not, for that reason, be dismissed as unreal. Peter watched his mother falter in her expressions of love towards him and knew that she did so, not through any dereliction but through the desire to protect him. But understanding does not necessarily dispel reaction: as the mother became guarded, so did the son. When his stepfather died it was difficult for Peter to find a way back to any spontaneous expression of feeling.