Instances of the Number 3. Salley Vickers

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…

      Neither woman knew this but Peter’s hatred of Christmas began when his father had deserted his family on Christmas Eve. His mother had made the best of things—but ‘the best of things’, even when executed with genuine selflessness, often turns out to be worse than selfish protest.

      From an early age Peter had monitored his mother’s face. That Christmas, undeceived by a not-too-convincing story about ‘Daddy’s business’ calling him away, Peter had watched his mother’s expressions more closely than usual. There had been a horrible moment between the turkey and the Christmas cake—decorated that year with a superfluity of snowmen and hard little silver balls, which Peter afterwards always hated—when he had sleuthed his mother to her bedroom and, through the keyhole, had spied her lying on the bed, her face pressed into a pillow to stifle any sound.

      Six-year-old Peter had been tactful enough to remove his presence from this private grief, and to hurl himself, with unusual energy, into a distractingly boisterous game with his elder brother, Marcus. He had also been unusually conciliatory with his little sister, Clare, and had played doll’s-house tea with unwonted sweetness which had raised—unfairly in the circumstances—maternal questions later about his state of health.

      There had been other, happier, Christmases when his mother’s smiles had been less forced, and, later still, his mother’s smiles had become genuine, for a time, when his stepfather, the MP, had first appeared on the scene. But the early loss had fractured for good the young Peter’s capacities for enjoying the ‘season of goodwill’. The pillow which had stifled the mother’s anguish acted as a more permanent block upon the son’s capacity to rejoice. From that time on Peter grew to think of Christmas, and its attendant duties, as dangerous, an ordeal rather than a blessing—one of many—to be ‘got through’.

      Bridget woke in the bed she had once shared with Peter, left Frances sleeping and went barefoot downstairs to make herself a cup of tea. Outside the kitchen window a flock of goldfinches made a vivid zigzag across the pale wintry field. Bridget stretched and yawned noisily. There were advantages to living alone—Peter, who could be prim, would have grimaced at the sound. What was the collective noun for goldfinches?

      She had dreamed of Peter—the first time since he had died. She couldn’t bring the dream back but she knew from the feeling in her limbs it was Peter all right.

      Bridget filled a kettle and looked appraisingly round the kitchen where Frances had hung on nails bags of Italian pasta and some of the large copper French pans. The paint work wasn’t right—too shiny—but with the old brocade curtains she’d been waiting to find a use for, and a lick of distemper, the place would do up fine.

      She made tea in a big mug, stirring the tea bag to give the brew strength, and stuck her bare feet into boots. Outside, she surveyed the field where the striking looking finches with their gold-flashed wings and crimson foreheads had flown. The bare soil, fringed by bleached grasses, stretched in gleaming furrows where the light struck the early-morning moisture.

      Frances appeared and began opening cupboard doors. ‘There’s some coffee in that cardboard box.’ From the doorway Bridget pointed. ‘Otherwise there’s tea and some rather mouldy bread in that bag. It must be damp here.’

      Maybe