Instances of the Number 3. Salley Vickers

furniture was making a comeback. She set off on these trips, often in the small hours of the morning, leaving Peter to the ostensible care of Mickey. So, Peter might have argued to himself, if he chose to take Frances, who was looking peaky after a bout of flu, to Paris, it could be said that his wife had left the door fairly open to that possibility.

      Yet, waking in the musty erotic aftermath in the Paris hotel, beside Frances’s warm body, Peter had felt the painful lance of remorse; it was this which had taken him out into the pearl-quiet morning and along by the placidly flowing Seine to the service in the cathedral where the light, filtering the amethyst and blue of the great north rose window, hinted, he reflected as he bent his knees, at some oblique promise of a life to come.

      Perhaps it was the effect of that sincere blue light which had prompted him to tell Frances, over the intimate Montmartre dinner, the tale of the young man’s courtesy to the beggar woman, the story which had harbingered the admission of his faith. The next day they had passed a flower seller, where Frances had pointed to some brilliantly coloured flowers—pink, red and the lambent blue and purple of the stained glass in Notre-Dame. ‘Look, lilies of the field! Did you know they were anemones?’ Happy that, for the moment, his faith had lain down like a lamb with his worldlier self, he listened as his lover explained that this was the flower in the parable which, arrayed like ‘Solomon in all his glory’, had no need to toil or spin.

      On that misty October morning when the journalist friend telephoned with news of the fatal accident, the biblical flowers came into Frances’s mind. Peter had said, ‘They’re awfully merry,’ and he had bought her a bunch, adding casually, ‘when I die, you can send me some of these.’

      In the split second before he died Peter remembered these words, and remembered that, unlike Bridget, Frances had not disputed the likelihood of his death.

       8

      ‘Does Zahin know about me and Peter?’ Frances asked.

      They had been shifting furniture for hours. The coolness over the Christmas bowl had been patched up—or, more accurately, had been passed over, since neither woman wished to be thought undignified. It was Bridget, though, who had made the peacemaking gesture, asking Frances if she was free for a weekend at Farings, the Shropshire house.

      The cynical part of Frances had suggested, when she arrived at the slightly austere brick house, that she had maybe been invited as a useful pair of hands. Bridget had piled a whole lot of furniture into the downstairs rooms with no apparent plan as to where it was to end up. Frances had hauled and dragged, pushed and shifted until her back and ribs protested. Finally she sat down on a roll of carpet. ‘Where am I sleeping, as a matter of interest?’

      ‘Hell!’ said Bridget. ‘I forgot. No bed.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘There’s only one bed—I was planning to bring one of the ones from the shop—it’s a sweetheart bed, with intertwined hearts on the head and foot. But I never picked it up.’

      ‘Uh-huh,’ said Frances. ‘Sweetheart’ made her think of the boy’s odd, telepathic comment. Which was when she asked, ‘Does Zahin know about me and Peter?’

      But Bridget was preoccupied with the sleeping arrangements. ‘There’s the sofa but I don’t even think I’ve brought enough bedding—damn.’

      ‘Don’t bother,’ said Frances, coolly, ‘I can stay at the hotel.’ She suspected the forgotten bed and bedding were a ploy and that Bridget preferred her not to sleep in the house after all.

      Bridget, sensing this, said, ‘The hotel’s closed down—I noticed as we were passing—the nearest other one’s miles away. But if you didn’t mind we could always share—I mean, it’s a big bed, it was Peter’s and mine!’

      Looking at Frances she started to laugh, and Frances, seated on the dust-filled Indian carpet, caught the mood and began to laugh too. Helplessly, the two women wheezed and Bridget all but rolled about the room.

      ‘Oh dear,’ said Frances, wiping tears from her eyes—brought on as much by the dusty carpet as the laughter. ‘We’ll be able to tell no one—people will think—I don’t know what they’d think!’

      ‘Who cares?’ Bridget was soberer now.

      ‘What would Peter think?’ Frances asked as a while later together they made the bed upstairs.

      Bridget reflected a moment. Outside, through the west-facing window, the far hills were turning indigo—‘blue remembered’, she thought, like Housman’s.

      ‘He’d have been sorry not to be joining us,’ she finally announced.

      It was not that Bridget had failed to hear Frances’s question about Zahin but that she had decided to ignore it. She hadn’t yet assembled her impressions of the boy. Christmas had been…she needed time to ponder…

      Except in the first years of their marriage, Christmas with Peter had never been a tranquil event. Bridget’s consciousness of a regular Christmas Eve assignation, long before she met the object of it, caused her bridled indignation. To say she was without ill feelings towards Peter’s other ‘associations’—as it was her habit to call them—would have been stretching a point. Possibly there are people large-hearted enough to offer perfect charity towards those with whom they are asked to share the person of their beloved; but purity must be its own reward: while commendable it is hardly interesting, and anyhow Bridget was not among this angelic band. On the other hand, she had learned the dangers of bearing grudges.

      Bridget had been born and bred in Limerick, in the south-west of Ireland. Her father had been tricked by a phantom pregnancy into an ill-matched wedding. When, in time, a child was eventually born, she received the brunt of a resentment which had had five years in which to accrue. Among families, resentment is often expressed indirectly. To Joseph Dwyer’s fear of his wife was added an even greater fear of her brother, Father Eamonn, priest to the neighbouring parish and spoken of as ‘episcopal’—even ‘cardinal’—material. Unhappily for Bridget, her father kept his interior rage for the family who had curtailed his snappy-bachelor freedom, while he vented it more openly upon his daughter.

      Bridget was born curious. She questioned her mother, her grandparents—who lived a village away—her uncle the priest, her teachers—most of all she questioned her father, to the point where her mother finally abetted her daughter’s flight from home, lest, as Moira Dwyer confessed to her brother, ‘there be a murder in the house’.

      That there was not a murder was due to Bridget’s early discovery that life tends to be unyielding to our desires. She was unusual in perceiving so soon the gap between what we want and what is possible; more remarkable still, in time she came to recognise the distinction between what she felt was her due and what was actually on offer—a distinction which stood her in good stead when, years later, on Christmas mornings, having returned late from Turnham Green, her husband would say, in varying accents of agitation, ‘I’m sure I did buy you something—no, hang on, I know I did—let me think a moment while I remember where I put it…’ or ‘Good God, have I left it behind in the shop…?’

      All this might have been easier to accommodate had not Bridget, not meaning to pry, once come across a small box, which curiosity had made her open and which had shockingly revealed a costly looking square-cut sapphire ring, a particularly brilliant blue. It was, in fact, the sight of this ring on Frances’s finger, which had sparked the moment of tension over the Christmas bowl. Seeing it, Bridget had felt a return of the nauseous rush of jealousy which had accompanied the original discovery of the ring in its expensive leather hiding place.

      Christmas with Zahin could hardly have been more different. He had arrived, with his things from St John’s Wood, late in the day on Christmas Eve. How in that short space of time he had managed so to infer her tastes and buy accordingly, Bridget could never fathom. She had popped out and bought him a rather dull shirt, feeling that to