Instances of the Number 3. Salley Vickers

by the sight of the tender spear of rosemary twisting in his hand Bridget thawed. ‘Hello?’

      The boy did not smile but bowed his head a little. When he looked up she saw that despite his dark hair and complexion he had eyes of the deepest blue. ‘Excuse me please.’

      ‘Can I help you?’ He had a small gold earring in his right ear.

      ‘I was looking for Mr Hansome.’

      ‘Ah,’ said Bridget, ‘in that case you’d better come inside.’

      He stood in the middle of the kitchen in an attitude of respect so that Bridget felt she had almost to push him down into a chair. ‘Would you like coffee?’ He shook his head. ‘Tea?’ Another shake. ‘What can I offer you to drink then?’ If this young man was unacquainted with Peter’s death he might need to be fortified against the news—or she, at least, needed to be fortified against telling it.

      ‘Please, a glass of milk?’

      Grateful for this temporary relief Bridget took down one of her glasses that she had brought back from Limoges and filled it to the brim; the white milk glowed green behind the thick glass. She poured herself coffee and sat down opposite the boy across the kitchen table. ‘I am Mrs Hansome,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if this is a shock to you but Mr Hansome, my husband, is dead. He was killed in a car crash some weeks ago.’ It would soon be Christmas; almost two months since she herself had received the news from the policewoman with the guarded face.

      An expression of intense surprise flickered across the blue eyes. ‘But he is married…?’ It was as if the other news had passed quite over him.

      ‘Yes,’ said Bridget amused. ‘He is, or was married. I am his wife,’ she repeated, ‘or his widow, I suppose now.’ And indeed this was the first time she had consciously applied the word to herself.

      The boy put his head upon the table and began to cry. The crying made big searing sobs so that Bridget hearing them was filled with something like admiration. To be able to weep like that—it was remarkable!

      She leaned across the table and patted his shoulder. ‘He felt nothing,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry—he was not in pain.’ Against such a torrential display she felt she must provide some consolation.

      The boy lifted his head and looked at her with tragic eyes. ‘I did not know. He was my friend and I did not know.’

      ‘Yes,’ said Bridget, taxed by her ignorance of the identity of this young person, ‘I agree. It is terrible not to know.’

      The boy began to drink the milk. He took big noisy gulps, draining the glass. Then he licked around his upper lip where a soft vestigial moustache was barely showing. ‘I am called Zahin,’ he said.

      ‘And I am Bridget.’

      ‘You are Mrs Hansome?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Bridget. The penny seemed at last to have dropped. ‘I am Mrs Hansome.’

      ‘Then,’ said the boy, ‘you will help me.’

      ‘And he just sat there and asked you, straight out?’ Frances asked.

      ‘Not so much “asked”—more like told.’

      They were eating together in Bridget’s kitchen. On the wall, behind Bridget from where she was sitting, Frances could see the plate she had given Peter for his fifty-sixth birthday. A pale green glazed plate—Chinese; the kitchen wall was not where she would have hung it.

      ‘But who is he?’

      Supper was eggs and tomatoes which Bridget had fried in the virgin olive oil she brought from France in unlabelled bottles, only produced for special guests. Mopping her plate with a corner of baguette, Bridget checked an automatic inward response of: Mind your own business! ‘He seems to have met Peter at a sponsorship do—his firm sponsored kids through school from various parts of the world they were dealing with.’

      From Iran. The boy had told her. ‘My father’s family were good friends with the Shah—when he died my family became outcast—it is dangerous for the men in our family. So, two years ago I come to England.’

      Frances did not say, as another woman might have done, I wonder why Peter never mentioned it? She knew as well as Bridget that Peter was a man whose life ran to compartments. Instead she said, ‘But where has he been living until now?’

      A sensible question, Bridget thought, approving Frances’s practicality. ‘With another Iranian family, but now they are moving to the States. Apparently, Peter knew this and promised, when the time came, to help the boy find a new berth. But the time came for Peter first,’ she concluded, making one of her slightly morbid jokes.

      Frances, whose failure to respond to the joke didn’t mean she didn’t get it, said, ‘Is he a nice boy? Did you like him?’

      ‘I liked him, I think,’ said Bridget. ‘As to whether he’s “nice” I wouldn’t care to say.’

      And it was the case, she thought later, washing up after Frances had left—having declined Frances’s help—she couldn’t say whether the boy was ‘nice’, ‘niceness’ being a quality which did not have much meaning for her. The mechanical business of washing and drying dishes was calming before bed. As to ‘liking’ people, that was a different matter. Did she like the boy? It was too soon to say. But there must have been something or she would not have come out with her bold suggestion.

      Climbing into bed in Peter’s shirt it came to her that the boy had had some effect: he had been enlivening, quickening something which had lain fallow in her since Peter’s unexpected departure.

       6

      Bridget called to deliver Mickey’s Christmas present, a blanket made up from coloured knitted squares. Bridget was aware that this might not find favour: Mickey, who was a traditionalist, would have preferred something on more conventional lines—a set of bath luxuries, a frilly nightdress, port. But Bridget could never bring herself to give to others what she herself would not enjoy.

      ‘I have found a lodger,’ she said, as much as anything to fill in the silence with which Mickey was contemplating the cheerful squares. ‘He will be here when I am away so I have said to him that if there’s any problem he can ask you.’

      ‘My mother had one like this. Where d’you get it? Wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t hers come back to me.’

      Bridget, who had bought the blanket from a colleague in Southend in exchange for a stuffed tapir, said she had bought it in a Chelsea sale.

      ‘There you are—could easy be mother’s, she got rid of all her stuff when she come to live with me.’ With an air of one who knew how to do things properly Mickey presented Bridget with an oblong package wrapped in red and gold ribbon and holly paper. A strong smell of violets confirmed the identity of the gift. ‘Coty bath cubes—same as I always give you.’ No surprises there.

      Mickey, at first pleased to have news that there was to be company next door, was dismayed to find that the lodger Bridget was planning to install was what, among her friends, she still referred to as ‘dusky’.

      ‘He’s a nice enough boy, I’m sure,’ she confided to Jean Clancey, over a pre-Christmas drink at the Top and Whistle, ‘and pretty as a picture, I’ll say that for him. But it’s not the same!’

      What, for Mickey, was ‘not the same’ was left to the sympathetic imaginings of her friend. For Bridget, certainly, it was different having Zahin in the house.

      In her adult life, Bridget had lived for any space of time with no one other than Peter. She had graduated early from shared flats and had gone without the things other people find essential in order to be able to afford a place on her own. The early days with Peter had sometimes ragged Bridget’s nerves.