Instances of the Number 3. Salley Vickers

fascination—‘it seems discourteous, somehow, to Peter if we don’t meet, though I hardly know how we should conduct ourselves.’

      What Frances thought was: Why does she have to be so different? Aloud, she said, ‘I don’t know that I want so terribly to “talk” either—though there are things I could probably only say to you.’

      ‘That’s true,’ conceded Bridget, and lapsed into morose silence.

      Frances tipped tea around the cup and watched a couple across the way having a row. ‘You’ve always fancied her—don’t bother to deny it!’ she heard the woman say—a woman with badly applied make-up and backcombed hair. At least, Frances thought, we are spared scenes like that. For the first time it crossed her mind that they were a threesome—herself, Peter and Bridget. Were a threesome, she supposed she must think of it now.

      ‘There’s a concert on at the Wigmore Hall—’ Bridget said, suddenly coming to—‘Schubert—which I like—and Mahler—which I don’t, but we could sneak out after the interval—unless you like Mahler, that is?’

      Frances said that she had no particular view on Mahler. As it happened, she had no particular view on Schubert either.

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      ‘The point is,’ Bridget said, sucking noisily at a bone from the remains of her coq au vin, ‘Schubert is never bogus—but Mahler can be.’

      They were eating, after the concert, at a restaurant which each woman had visited with Peter. Neither made even oblique reference to this. Tactfully, they commented on the decor, the stylish young waiters and waitresses, with no suggestion that they might have shared opinions on such matters with the dead man who had brought them together.

      Frances said, ‘I’m ignorant about music—but I suppose like it better when it isn’t too loud.’

      ‘Quite right,’ Bridget agreed. ‘Symphonies are overrated.’ She tapped a cigarette from a blue Gauloises packet. ‘Do you mind?’

      Too late if I do! thought Frances. ‘Not at all.’

      ‘You never know these days.’

      Frances thought: She must have been pretty once with that colouring.

      Bridget thought: I wouldn’t have minded a nose like that, beaky and aristocratic.

      The waiter came and flirted idly with the two women, but more with Bridget because of her French. Bridget asked which part of France he was from and there followed an animated conversation on Arlesian sausage.

      ‘How did you learn?’ Frances asked.

      ‘Practice. I learned most haggling. The French respect you more if you bargain hard—but you need the slang to keep up.’

      ‘I’m not good at languages,’ said Frances. ‘That’s two things you’re better at—languages and music.’

      ‘It’s not a competition!’ Bridget remarked coldly.

      Frances always travelled to work by tube so Bridget drove her home. Passing Turnham Green Bridget said, ‘It’s where they turned’em back, isn’t it?’

      ‘Back?’

      ‘The Civil War,’ Bridget explained. ‘The Roundhead apprentices turned back the Royalists here—hence “Turn’em Green”—it was the site of a battle.’

      ‘Oh, yes.’ Frances was not really listening. Bothered over what she should do about asking Bridget in when they reached the flat, she preferred not to be lectured to about her own neighbourhood. She wanted to dispel the annoyance by saying, ‘That’s three things then you know more about than me: music, languages and local history.’ It was the kind of remark she might have made to Peter and it would have made him laugh. That she could no longer say such things suddenly depressed her. She decided she wouldn’t ask Bridget in after all.

      ‘Would you like to come in for a drink?’ she heard herself saying and was doubly angry when Bridget accepted. I am managing this badly, she thought, ushering Bridget into the flat where she had been used to receiving Bridget’s husband.

      Frances’s flat was like Frances. Drifting round the room Bridget noticed the books were all in alphabetical order. Few ornaments, but three very good paintings on the sunflower-yellow walls.

      ‘That’s a Kavanagh, isn’t it?’ Bridget peered at a picture of a nude in high heels, reading in a striped deckchair. (Peter, in fact, had bought it for Frances’s thirty-seventh birthday. ‘I thought she was like you,’ he had said, removing all her clothes but her shoes.)

      ‘Yes,’ said Frances, shortly, glad she had her back to Bridget and was occupied with pouring whisky and water.

      Bridget, who had her country’s usual measure of telepathic powers, smiled rather nastily at the back. The nude’s resemblance to Frances had not escaped her; Peter liked that sort of statement: he had once given Bridget a small, powerful bronze of a woman naked on a horse.

      She lay back, deliberately sprawling across the clean lines of the sofa, imagining her husband here. He would have drunk whisky and water too. Frances had poured Jameson for her, the whisky Peter had liked. Frances herself, she noticed, was drinking brandy.

      ‘It’s funny,’ Bridget said, conversationally, ‘I can’t believe he’s dead. Do you weep at all, yourself?

      ‘Not at all,’ Frances lied. She didn’t want this. ‘I’ve been too busy,’ she added, unnecessarily. It wasn’t true; time had hung about her like a moody adolescent.

      ‘You see,’ said Bridget, ignoring Frances’s efforts at camouflage, ‘a person—I expect you know this—isn’t only flesh and blood. A person exists inside one, informing one’s state of mind. There were whole weeks when Peter and I were apart—of course, you know that too!—so my system hasn’t got the habit of the difference. I keep expecting to come home and find him there. And when I don’t, when I walk in and everything’s as I left it, my system just thinks: Oh well, he’ll be along later, what’s all the fuss about?’

      Frances, who had noted the parenthetical ‘of course you know that too’, was partially reassured. ‘I haven’t got used to it, either,’ she agreed. ‘But then I saw him in patches anyway.’ She felt better with the matter of her arrangements with Peter broached.

      ‘A thing of something and patches,’ said Bridget, lazily. ‘What’s that…?’

      But Frances didn’t know. She was thinking it mightn’t be so hard for Peter to have been in love with his wife. This thought only faintly troubled her: Peter had needed her too, needed her orderliness. Bridget had the air of something frightening about her: she might be amused by, even entertain, perturbation.

      ‘Hamlet,’ Bridget said suddenly. ‘Of course, it’s Hamlet, I’ll forget my own name next. It’s “king” not “thing”—“a king of shreds and patches”.’ She fell backwards on the pale sofa, triumphant.

      ‘We did Hamlet at school,’ said Frances, determined this time not to be outdone. ‘I played Gertrude; I didn’t like her.’

      ‘Hmm,’ said Bridget, unconvinced. She had some sympathy for the queen who had married her husband’s killer. ‘Hamlet’s a case in point.’ she said darkly. ‘Look what happens when Hamlet’s father dies—he doesn’t go away. Quite the reverse. He comes back and rants like all get out!’

      ‘I do hope Peter won’t come back and rant,’ said Frances, feeling it was safe now to risk humour.

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      It