Instances of the Number 3. Salley Vickers

said suddenly, ‘Well now, I’ll leave you two to sort it out,’ and left the kitchen.

      Zahin gently put the bowl down on the table. The silver-bell-like voice spoke again. ‘You and Mr Hansome, you were sweethearts…?’

       7

      Frances and Peter had been away together only a few times. Twice she had travelled with him to Scotland, where Peter had gone for business reasons. On those two occasions they had stayed in the Edinburgh flat of an old school friend of Peter’s, a bachelor who travelled abroad, and was grateful to have the flat occupied during his frequent absences. Nor was he fussy about the moral conduct of his guests. Another occasion had been when they had gone to Paris.

      The visit to Paris had remained to Frances a kind of touchstone of what people meant by being ‘happy’. They had stayed on the Left Bank, in a cramped, almost drab hotel—so dim was its lighting, so very ancient its threadbare furnishings.

      It was in Paris that Peter had begun to call her ‘France’ the diminutive which he alone was allowed—all other, and previous, attempts, such as ‘Francie’, or ‘Fran’, or, once—quite frightfully—‘Frannie’, having been instantly squashed by one of her looks—the ‘basilisk look’ Peter called it. There had been only one other to whom any abbreviated form of address had been permitted: her brother—not James, the judge, but her younger-by-two-years brother Hugh, who had been killed on his motorbike when she was nineteen.

      Hugh had driven the bike full tilt into the stone gatepost of the country house of a friend, whose family was grand enough to own a drive down which one could drive at 70 mph. Hugh had also called her ‘France’; that there had existed certain resemblances between Hugh and Peter was a secret which was now known only to Frances.

      Perhaps it was that likeness to her younger brother which had prompted a kind of playfulness with Peter. In Paris they had been like children: it was cold, and Frances had taught him how to keep warm by skipping, and hand in hand they had skipped along by the Seine looking, as Peter had said, ‘like geriatric kids!’ But they had had their moments as lovers too.

      It was on a morning after a night of lovemaking that she had wakened to find Peter, in his socks, about to tiptoe from the room. The lovemaking had been of the kind which routs paranoia, so her first thought was not, as it might have been: He is leaving me! Instead she said, still half asleep, ‘Where in the world are you off to at this hour?’ and he, slightly embarrassed, had murmured, ‘Mass. Go back to sleep.’

      Frances had submissively rolled down the dip in the aged mattress. When Peter returned she was propped up against an unyielding bolster reading about Matisse.

      ‘It’s nice when one’s prejudices are confirmed,’ she said, noticing his slight awkwardness. ‘I always suspected Picasso was a bastard. He encouraged his toadies to throw darts at poor Matisse’s paintings.’ Then, seeing he was still fiddling with the change in his pocket, ‘I waited breakfast for you—I must love you a whole lot because, frankly, my dear, after last night I’m ravenous!’

      At that, Matisse was tipped to the floor and it had been some time, after all, before breakfast was ordered.

      She had not enquired about the Mass, sensing that this was a subject which, if it was to be raised at all, must be so by him. And two nights later, over dinner in a restaurant in Montmartre, he did himself bring it up. ‘When I was in Notre-Dame,’ he dropped the name casually, ‘there was a beggar woman some rows in front of me—pretty tatty and quite niffy, I should think. When it came to the Sign of Peace everyone kissed her or shook her hand most courteously.’ They were discussing declining standards of manners in Britain.

      ‘But mightn’t that be true also at an English service?’ She was shy of speaking the word ‘Mass’.

      ‘Maybe. But afterwards she was looking a bit unsteady on her pins and a young man, a very well-dressed young man—good clothes—took her arm and helped her down the aisles outside. He wasn’t a relative, or anything to do with her—I was watching: he went off afterwards in a quite different direction.’

      ‘Do you think it’s their being French or being Catholic that makes the difference?’ she had said, feeling bold enough to broach the topic.

      And he had replied, quite casually, ‘I’m a Catholic, if it comes to that, but I’m not sure I have their manners—really, it does seem to be a different culture here.’

      That Bridget was unaware of her husband’s faith was something which Frances had suspected before Peter’s death. Just as well, as it turned out, for otherwise, she could have put her foot in it. Peter could never have guessed that the two would become such intimates—if that was what they were, for ‘friends’ did not quite capture it—no, ‘friends’ wasn’t it at all, Frances thought, leaving the house that afternoon when the young man had so disarmingly referred to her and Peter as ‘sweethearts’.

      ‘Sweethearts, we are sweethearts,’ Peter had said to her. In the ‘childlike’ spirit he had bought her a bag of coloured sugar hearts. How could that young Iranian have known? Frances, nostalgically remembering the sagging French bed and the hard usage they had put it to, wondered again if it was the lovemaking which had occasioned that early-morning visit Peter had made to Notre-Dame…

      Bridget, as it happens, had found a rosary hidden in one of the small interior drawers of the oak desk but she had thought little about it: Peter was a man who collected talismans—worry beads from Greece, Maori carvings from New Zealand, fragments of lichen-covered marble from abandoned Turkish temples. Rosary beads were merely one among the many superstitious fetishes which had accumulated at the close of Peter’s truncated life.

      To the end of that life Bridget remained ignorant of her husband’s faith and her own role in his observance of it. Without other information to go on Bridget had chosen the cremation service for Peter on the basis of her own preferences. It would suit her to become ashes—‘ashes’ was what she, herself, felt like; to have her husband rendered into an ashy condition seemed perfectly acceptable. She enjoyed shocking the cremation officials by asking scientific questions about what the post-cremation remains were actually composed of. ‘What about the coffin?’ she had asked, when solemnly presented with the casket. ‘Solid oak—I paid through the nose for it. How can I tell which of the cinders is expensive coffin and which dead husband?’

      In fact Peter’s attendance at the Paris Mass had not arisen, except in an indirect sense, from the night’s abandonment with Frances. Mistresses fill many needs, not exclusively sexual, and if truth were told Peter had often found more satisfaction in making love to Bridget than to Frances. This was not due to any deficit in Frances, other than a sensitivity in her which Peter sometimes found daunting. If Bridget’s wordless and robust responses suited him better, it was because they relieved him of the requirement to worry about how she was finding things. Not that he would ever think of revealing this to Frances—he was not without sensitivity himself, and it was alive to him that it was as a desirable lover that she gained part of her self-esteem. Nor was it something he could say that the morning visit to Notre-Dame had nothing to do with their unusually satisfactory time in bed.

      On the whole, Peter restricted his extramarital activities to those times when his wife was away—her absence, he might have argued, legitimising any steps he took to make time pass without her less disturbing. As he had frankly told his mistress, he loved his wife and made his own efforts to behave honourably to her. But honour is not a commodity you can ration: almost by definition there is a place for honour towards one’s mistress as well.

      Honour, however, is not the only engine of erotic escapades; and perhaps this is as well since history suggests actions performed for lofty motives are more likely to be dangerous than those performed for selfish ones. Peter may not have noticed this himself but he took his mistress to France after a period during which his wife had visited that same country three times in as many months. Bridget, busy buying for an international antiques fair, had made more than her usual