Instances of the Number 3 (10 page)

In the plan to see
Hamlet
as usual it was Sister Mary Eustasia who came to Bridget’s aid; more properly, the image of her, since Sister Mary Eustasia, in person, was away, taking her annual vacation in Galway. But invoking her name was a powerful amulet against her father and Uncle Father Eamonn, so that when Bridget said, ‘Sister wants me to stay over and help her with a play she’s doing with the third years,’ no one raised any objection—though Joseph Dwyer did mutter, ‘What she want to fill them babbies’ heads with that for? Where’s that going to teach them how to mend the shirts off their men’s backs?’

Truth is often the safest form of deception. Bridget went on to explain that the play was by Shakespeare, who was familiar to Joseph Dwyer from the legend which claimed that the playwright had visited Youghal, Dwyer’s home town, as part of a travelling band of players invited by Sir Walter Raleigh. The Irish, always ready to be allied with genius, swore that the character of Shylock was
based on Youghal’s Jewish mayor of the time. Had it been at all possible, they would have claimed Shakespeare too for one of their countrymen.

‘It’s
The Merchant of Venice
, Da,’ Bridget explained, ‘the one Grand-Da used to tell me about, you know?’—and in this way won her small freedom.

‘You see, Bridget,’ Sister Mary Eustasia had said, by the stove that first November evening, when the centre of gravity in Bridget’s world shifted, ‘Hamlet was a sweet prince, with a noble mind, and that old misery guts of a ghost came and corrupted it with all that talk of the torment he was suffering—how, if you were to hear about the dreadful time he had been having, it would make your hair stand on your head like the quills on the “fretful porpentine”—for Heaven’s sake! And people imagining Shakespeare could possibly have endorsed such terrible self-centred nonsense! But that’s “people” for you! They say the young prince dithered instead of getting down to it—but “people” don’t think! It was a mortal sin he was being asked to commit—and his not the soul for it at all.’

Bridget watching the play that first time recalled her teacher’s words and asked herself: Whose soul is?

Vengeance, then, and its attendant dangers, were already on her mind when she arrived home.

‘Where were you then, you little whore?’ her father asked knocking her down.

To give herself courage, before setting out for the play, Bridget had inexpertly applied make-up. Now she vaguely wiped her hand across her mouth, smearing the blood, which was streaming from her lower lip, into Rimmel’s ‘Honeykisses’.

‘I’ll wipe that whore’s muck off your fucking face, so I will!’

Economy with lying is sometimes as important as economy with the truth.

‘It’s Maeve Whelan as is playing the part of Portia,’ Bridget had thrown off as she was leaving, the copy of Shakespeare already tucked inside her coat, a scarf loosely draped around her face to cast a shadow over the illicit make-up. An unnecessary fiction; but Bridget was human and only sixteen, and had not had time to learn that simplicity in fiction (and lies are only one of fiction’s many forms) is generally best. She had elaborated—dangerously, as it turned out when Mrs Whelan had called by and remarked in passing that her Maeve had gone with Joan MacCormack to visit Joan’s nan up in Sligo. This news in itself would have been safe enough—Moira Dwyer not being one to rock the family boat—had Joseph Dwyer not thought to remind his wife that he would be off for a spot of fishing in the morning and she would need to get his dinner in time for an early start. It was to deliver this edict that he was entering the kitchen when Maeve’s mother blew Bridget’s cover.

‘She’s in a play by Shakespeare, though, your Maeve?’ Joseph was proud of his knowledge of the so-called English ‘bard’.

Mrs Whelan was not an ill-meaning woman; the last thing she would have wanted was young Bridget, who sometimes helped out with looking after her youngest, getting into trouble. But she was not quick enough on the uptake to avert a crisis.

‘What play’s that now, Joseph?’

‘Are you sure now it’s not a case of better the devil you know, Bridget?’

Sister Mary Eustasia’s grey eyes looked tired. Bridget, who had come to return the Shakespeare before leaving, found herself, not for the first time, wondering what in the nun’s own life had led her to take the veil.

‘Mam says she’s scared I’ll kill him.’

‘And you would, would you…?’

‘If he ever hits me like that again I will.’

‘In that case maybe you are better gone.’

By this time Bridget was tall enough to look down on her teacher. Addressing the well-governed face, which had seen her through so many family crises, she said, making a joke out of the subject which had brought them close—for she found that some table between the two of them had turned and now the responsibility of making the atmosphere right had fallen on her—‘I’ll be best off in England. Didn’t Hamlet say they’re all mad there anyway?’

‘Remember now where you came from,’ Sister Mary Eustasia had said, ‘the land of St Patrick, who was crazy enough to survive anything.’

By this time Bridget had thought more about St Patrick’s Purgatory and the ghost in
Hamlet
who was doomed for a certain time to fast in fires. ‘Sure, St Patrick didn’t have childer to take it out on, Sister!’

‘Write to me, mind,’ Sister Mary Eustasia had instructed, as Bridget left, and a month or so later, after she had written with the address of the hostel she was staying in, a packet had arrived which on opening proved to be the red-leather-bound Shakespeare, with a line written in a neat hand in the front:

‘…the readiness is all’
Hamlet
V. ii.

and under it:

Joyce Mary Eustasia, with warm good wishes

In her sitting room, which looked out on the westering sky, Bridget remembered the nun whom she had seen only once since that first leave-taking.

She had returned to Limerick the year after marrying Peter, and had gone in search of her former teacher. Sister Mary Eustasia, she learned, had retired from the school and was now part of a closed order, further west in Clare. Bridget had driven down to see if she could find the place and, after some negotiation on the phone, an interview had been granted by the Reverend Mother to the Sister’s old pupil.

As she drove down steamy, fuschia-lined lanes, Bridget had pictured to herself the nun’s eyes, witty as ever. But the eyes of the face which received her were closed fast and Bridget learned, from the nursing Sister, that her former teacher was dying of cancer. The sickness seemed unlikely to detain her long.

During the drive, Bridget had speculated that this was the last time she was likely to see Sister Mary Eustasia, and that she should attempt to voice gratitude for the debt she owed. In her imagination Bridget saw herself fumbling to find the right words, ‘I’ve never really acknowledged…’ and her imagination also supplied the words with which she would be interrupted.

‘“To be acknowledg’d, Madam, is o’er-paid”—Kent!’ Sister Mary Eustasia, who liked the minor characters best,
would say. ‘You had a fine mind, Bridget. It’s not often you find that in a country school in the back of beyond and you could not know how much that did for me—so there’s no thanks needed, if that’s what you were on about!’

The thanks were never given, for Sister Mary Eustasia was beyond speech and lay with a dribble of saliva at the corner of her mouth. Bridget had wiped away the saliva with her handkerchief, and, briefly, the grey eyes had flicked open. But they had glimmered only a second in the dying face; if Sister Mary Eustasia had had any idea of who Bridget was—never mind
King Lear
—it would have been a miracle. So the acknowledgement was never made.

Yet there remained the need for it, Bridget reflected, as the rooks returned to their ink-blot nests in the elms, for it is out of such gossamer threads of chance that we are saved…

Peter was not conscious that there was a connexion between his drifting into the Brompton Oratory and the meeting with a fellow officer from the Malaya days.

‘I say, Pum Hansome!’ The word erupted in his ear in the middle of the Brompton Road, and stopping to look back at the man who had uttered it, he saw Atkins.

‘Pum’, a corruption of ‘Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater’, was Peter’s army nickname. He and Atkins exchanged convivialities. They owned to wives and children, a pair each on both fronts, and agreed they must call each other and fix a chance for a longer chat. That neither followed up this threat was hardly surprising: they had had little in common all those years ago in a far country—no reason to suppose that time and home would have caused them to grow close.

But for Peter at least—we know nothing of Atkins’s thoughts or history—the meeting was sufficiently unsettling that, moments after, passing the Oratory, he turned and entered the church, near to tears. Churches provide a certain hospitality: for all its domed height, there was
a consoling privacy within the quiet blue and gold space where Peter sat and composed himself before going on his way to the lunch he was off to.

It was weeks later when, making his way towards a venue in the same part of town, he again went inside the church and many weeks before he dared to approach a priest. This was long after his marriage to Bridget and the liaison with Frances.

Peter was always grateful that Frances had received the news of his Catholicism with the unassertiveness he found attractive in her. Though you could never call Bridget interfering it was as if you knew that, should she choose, she could stretch out her powerful arm and knock your life into disarray. That she did not choose only added to the slight fear that she induced.

Frances had none of that scary quality. Peter had never enquired into her beliefs but if he had bothered to think about it he might have guessed at a gentle agnosticism.

Frances had toyed with religion after the death of Hugh; that she had not persevered in visiting churches, lighting candles—even, on one or two occasions, going so far as to kneel on hard stone floors—was an aspect of that tentative part of her character Peter found appealing. There was something in Frances which brought out in men either the sadist or the knight-on-white-charger; sometimes—these configurations being merely different sides of the same coin—both. She was without Bridget’s invincible strength; but for this reason she listened more.

Frances wondered if the fact that there was no experience equivalent to the terrible migraine with which she had been visited when Hugh died, maybe indicated that her love for Peter was a lesser love than that for her
brother. And perhaps it was; impossible to measure degrees of human love, though we are always attempting it: Do you love me? How much? Is it more than him or her? being the kind of subliminal questions with which most relationships are freighted. If Frances was unusual it was because she did not ask such questions of other people but only of herself. Therefore, Did I love my brother more than my lover? became a question she was not afraid to pose.

One consequence of her posing it was that she considered carefully how she should mark Peter’s death—not for herself but for him. She had no strong opinion about the afterlife; but even had she been sure ours was the only existence, she would have respected the different view of one who was now existenceless. This is how it happened that Frances travelled to Paris, and made her way along by the Seine, where the swirling autumn mists bore quite a funereal aspect.

As anyone who has visited Paris knows, the slow, green river which divides the majestic city is lined on its left bank by covered stalls, where even today the Parisians buy books—for in Paris, at least, reading is still a requirement of a cultivated mind. Among these old paperbacks are also to be found books on art, books on architecture, books of photography, and the altogether tasteful erotica which the French preserve as part of their reputation for culture.

At one such little booth Peter and Frances, wrapped in that exciting, invisible tissue which is an element of the erotic, enjoyed—at first sneakily, then, seeing that the other wasn’t shocked, more heartily—the representations of the various configurations which the human mind has invented to extend the pleasures of sexual congress. In one thick-yellow-papered volume there was a drawing of a young woman whose breasts Peter insisted, were the ‘dead spit’ of Frances’s. Closer inspection revealed that the ‘young woman’ was a hermaphrodite, replete with a vigorous-looking member. ‘I suppose it’s getting the best
of both worlds,’ Peter had said; and Frances riposted, out of character—as unlike Bridget she wasn’t given to frank curiosity—‘Then would you like me to have had a penis too?’

After that they had crossed the Seine to the Louvre, where she showed him the Leonardo of St Anne, the Virgin’s mother, with her daughter in her lap and her young grandchild, on his mother’s knee, playing—in a small patch of freedom—with a lamb.

St Anne’s feet, with their long toes, were planted firmly on the pebbled ground, while the foot of her daughter was entwined with the lamb’s hoof. But the boy’s fat foot…Frances wanted to reach out and pinch it. ‘Look at his grandmother’s expression,’ she said, repressing another thought. ‘You wonder if she knows what’s going to happen.’

On the day that Peter’s mortal remains were shunted into the powerful modern incinerator to be reduced to a cupful of ashes, Frances returned to the old gallery to find the painting of the holy family by the acknowledged master of the enigmatic. St Anne, her hand on her left hip, the mysterious azure mountains behind her, gazed down as before at her daughter. The lidded face, with the strange, calm smile in which compassion blends with anguish, had not altered, but its meaning for Frances had. Looking now, she could see that the Virgin’s mother knows what her daughter cannot yet afford to know, as all her maternal being is directed at the small boy, who, pulling at the ears of the struggling lamb, stares back at his mother in ordinary childish defiance. Yes, Leonardo’s St Anne is aware of what her family is going to have to bear: that small, mean, brutal tragedy, which was
ordained to ensure a larger cosmic end—the ultimate salvation of the human race. She must have wondered, St Anne, Frances thought, passing quickly out of the room to avoid the diluting sight of other paintings, if it was worth it. How could you set the loss of your heart’s dearest against any objective, however universal? It was too theoretical—a woman would have known that. Sensible Leonardo had ensured that in this trinity at least it was the women who counted.

Outside Frances walked through the florid, selfconsciously ornate courtyards back to the river and across the bridge where she and Peter had walked as lovers nearly five years before. Paris had hardly changed—only become a little grubbier; as with everywhere there were more cars, more complacent signs of multinational interests, but better than most races the French knew how to hang on to their own.

By the bridge which leads on to the Îla de la Cité, the most ancient quarter of Paris, Frances halted with the air of looking for something over whose existence she might have been in doubt. Then, tucked into a corner of the bridge, she saw it—the flower seller. That, too, hadn’t changed: the Parisians still bought flowers before politely visiting their God.

Notre-Dame, with its twin tall towers, stands within a courtyard space of its own, and there Frances stood a while too, looking at the honey-coloured, intricately carved portal before venturing through one of its doors. Inside she wandered purposelessly in the lighted dimness—it was many years since she had been inside a cathedral—but light from a vast rose window made her stop again and look upwards. The sapphire and amethyst window
Peter had talked of. She sat down opposite it and rested her head on the chair before her.

Peter was gone; there was nothing to be done about it—nothing that could be done. Having no prayers to say she didn’t pray—there was nothing she could ask, nothing that could be granted. He was gone and she was here and all she had to be glad about was that, unlike St Anne, she had been spared the foreknowledge. That and the sapphire ring Peter had left her.

Lifting her forehead from the hard wooden rail of the chair, Frances looked at the ring again, tilting the plane of her hand until the superior light of noon, playing through the window behind her, caught the jewel, making a tiny echo of that high, other extraordinary blue within its square heart. Those anonymous men who had fashioned the stained glass and set it for the glory of their God, they were dead and gone too. But the glass remained. Then did death matter? She didn’t know. All she knew now was that this was where Peter had come after they had made love and it was the closest she would ever again be to him.

The bunch of anemones lay beside her on the seat, like some humble paid companion, too polite to interrupt, yet anxious to be about her own particular duty. Figures were moving about the cathedral, coming and going in its indistinct roominess—tourists, local worshippers come to light a candle or say a rosary, parties of pilgrims—nobody seemed to be bothering about anyone else’s business: there was a kind of splendid anonymity there still.

Frances rose and walked deliberately towards the high altar. Ducking under the corded rope she placed the anemones
by the statue of God’s mother, then turned and walked quickly down the aisle and back outside.

Afterwards, she wondered if she should have thrown the ring into the Seine; but on balance decided that this would have been excessive.

It was this act of Frances’s which first summoned Peter from the place of windy dark. He travelled back to Waterloo on the Eurostar with Frances, and, recalling the earlier journey, regretted the whisky, and the brandy and dry ginger, he was no longer at liberty to purchase.