Instances of the Number 3. Salley Vickers

was looking for a house in the area and Mickey, who liked to be of help (it was also to soak up some of that liking to help—where she was conscious of giving disappointment—that Bridget had made the suggestion about Peter), had asked Frances back for a drink to ‘give her an idea of what these are like’, since Frances had indicated it was such a house that she was hoping to buy.

      In the end Frances bought a flat in Turnham Green, the prices of the Fulham houses having risen beyond her pocket, where, after a suitable lapse of time, Peter visited her during one of Bridget’s summer trips to the Vichy area.

      ‘I love my wife,’ he had declared, this being the gesture of fidelity to Bridget he was in the habit of making on such occasions. ‘If we are going to do this you must understand I will never leave her.’

      And in saying he ‘loved’ Bridget Peter was not, as it happens, speaking to deceive. His liking for chat was not, as is sometimes supposed, a sign of superficiality, any more than a tendency to silence necessarily indicates depth. ‘Chatting’ was one of Peter’s means of helping himself to stay alive.

      Frances, who had closed down an affair when the man was foolish enough to suggest that he was ‘misunderstood’, was not displeased to hear a man speak unashamedly of love for his wife. Although Frances was not prone to introspection, unconsciously she was aware that as a man speaks so he is: a declaration of conjugal love was a sign of an affectionate nature—and a loyal one, of a kind. At least Peter was not going to ‘explain’ any entanglement with her as a product of ill treatment meted out to him elsewhere. Frances did not care to be seen as some sort of therapist—sexual or otherwise. She liked—as most of us do—to be liked for her own inherent qualities, good and bad, and not as a reaction to qualities in another person.

      Frances was thirty-six when she first met Peter—an age when women often suffer degrees of anxiety about ‘settling down’. Whether her liking for Peter was as innocent of a reactive component as his was for her is another question entirely.

       2

      Peter was sixty-two when he died. A truck driver, in an October fog, leaning to adjust the volume on his tape of Elton John’s Greatest Hits, took his eye from the road, failed to see a car coming up on the run into the Hogarth roundabout, swerved to avoid the car and, instead, hit Peter’s BMW, broadside. This, not fatal in itself, had the result that the BMW was swung around in the path of a speeding Mercedes. The driver of the truck was shaken, the driver of the Mercedes damaged his arm, but Peter’s neck was broken in the ensuing crash.

      The Hogarth roundabout happened to be the spot where if he had been going to visit Frances Peter would have swung off to the left. The roundabout was also the final stage of the normal route home to Fulham. What no one could know was that Peter was intending to make his way to neither of these destinations, but instead to a discreetly-fronted house in Shepherd’s Bush where unusual tastes of all kinds were catered for. Although neither woman had any knowledge of this other destination, it is true to say that of the two Bridget would have best tolerated the knowledge.

      For weeks after Peter’s death Bridget was unable to do anything about his things. Reluctant to move so much as a paper clip from his desk, she walked about the house playing old records, opening and putting down books, eating cold baked beans, keeping unusual hours. Sometimes she moved in a slow, stately dance to the voices of Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Eartha Kitt—tunes she and Peter had known when they were younger: ‘walking out’, as she herself had called it; in particular she became addicted to a song entitled ‘Love for Sale’.

      Because Bridget was older than Peter she had always imagined to herself that she would be the one to die first. This had mildly bothered her: past form suggested that she would better be able than her husband to cope with a permanent absence. From time to time she had allowed herself the luxury of making vivid how, in the event of her own death, she would be missed by Peter. She had not quite defined in her mind the form this ‘missing’ would take, but it might have included a new-found impatience on her husband’s part with an alternative source of feminine comfort.

      What Bridget found she disliked most, in the weeks after Peter’s death, was having to talk about him. There were numerous phone calls; the letters were not such a pressure—these she could reply to in the familiar-smelling comfort of their double bed, where she wore Peter’s shirts and sometimes, because her feet had grown unaccountably cold, his woolly socks. But the talking…how she loathed it! And yet, how kind people wanted to appear—really, it made one take against ‘kindness’. Yet for all Bridget’s indifference to appearances it seemed wrong to her to leave the answerphone on. She must not be stingy with her loss—she felt it should be shared, available to all, like the torrential rains they were having this autumn.

      And it was the case that the skies seemed to have some secret sympathy for her dead husband: they wept and howled impressively, highlighting her own lack of tears.

      Bridget found she could not cry for Peter. Indeed, when she was obliged to participate in the conversations she so detested, she was conscious of a note in her voice which she knew must sound at odds with her situation. She was aware that this was disconcerting to those who had called to condole.

      To call this note ‘gleeful’ would be inaccurate. It was not glee in Bridget’s voice, but it might have been mistaken for it; so that Frances, when she plucked up the courage to call the Fulham number, thought for a moment, as Bridget peremptorily answered the phone: Oh, she doesn’t mind!

      ‘It’s Frances Slater,’ she said. And waited.

      Bridget knew, of course, who Frances was. Peter, with unusual foresight, had once said, ‘If anything happens to me there’s someone who might get in touch,’ and Bridget, with perfect understanding—though not, as it turned out, perfect prescience—had replied, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you—don’t be melodramatic.’ But had added, less briskly, ‘Of course I would speak to anyone who mattered.’

      However, when she took Frances’s call, she simply said, ‘Ah yes!’ which Frances found discouraging.

      ‘I knew Peter,’ Frances had continued, and just in time prevented herself adding ‘a little’. She did not want, by implying the connexion with Peter was less than it had been, to slide into appeasing Peter’s wife.

      Bridget had never been one for appeasement. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I expect you’re feeling odd, aren’t you?’ which was a surprise to Frances after the discouragement.

      The two women met first in the café at John Lewis. This was Bridget’s idea—she was keen to avoid anything which hinted at the scent of camellias. And it was convenient for Frances, who worked in Soho nearby.

      ‘I’ve bought a night light,’ Bridget announced after Frances had found her (‘You’ll know me, I expect, I’m big and blonde and I’ll be wearing green’). A conical transparent light with coloured seahorses bobbing around in it sat, slightly absurdly, on the pale teak-effect table between the two women. ‘The seahorses rise and fall when the light is on.’

      ‘Are you sleeping OK?’ Frances asked. It had sounded like a cue.

      ‘Moderately,’ said Bridget. ‘And when you switch it off there’s a mermaid at the bottom, combing her hair and admiring herself in a looking glass. See!’ She pointed out a small but perfectly formed maiden with a curvaceous green plastic fishtail.

      Frances, who was quick, got the drift: there was to be no demonstration of emotion. ‘I had something like that once,’ she offered. ‘It was in one of those globe things children get given—you shook it and bits flew around.’ The remark felt like a shot in the dark.

      Happily it hit home. ‘Usually snow,’ Bridget agreed. ‘Do you want tea? If so we’ll have to get another pot—I’ve drunk nearly all this already.’

      Outside the weather rained down tears. Bridget thought: She’s not too bad, and felt it was not impossible that