Instances of the Number 3 (2 page)

Peter was sixty-two when he died. A truck driver, in an October fog, leaning to adjust the volume on his tape of
Elton John’s Greatest Hits
, took his eye from the road, failed to see a car coming up on the run into the Hogarth roundabout, swerved to avoid the car and, instead, hit Peter’s BMW, broadside. This, not fatal in itself, had the result that the BMW was swung around in the path of a speeding Mercedes. The driver of the truck was shaken, the driver of the Mercedes damaged his arm, but Peter’s neck was broken in the ensuing crash.

The Hogarth roundabout happened to be the spot where if he had been going to visit Frances Peter would have swung off to the left. The roundabout was also the final stage of the normal route home to Fulham. What no one could know was that Peter was intending to make his way to neither of these destinations, but instead to a discreetly-fronted house in Shepherd’s Bush where unusual tastes of all kinds were catered for. Although neither woman had any knowledge of this other destination,
it is true to say that of the two Bridget would have best tolerated the knowledge.

For weeks after Peter’s death Bridget was unable to do anything about his things. Reluctant to move so much as a paper clip from his desk, she walked about the house playing old records, opening and putting down books, eating cold baked beans, keeping unusual hours. Sometimes she moved in a slow, stately dance to the voices of Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Eartha Kitt—tunes she and Peter had known when they were younger: ‘walking out’, as she herself had called it; in particular she became addicted to a song entitled ‘Love for Sale’.

Because Bridget was older than Peter she had always imagined to herself that she would be the one to die first. This had mildly bothered her: past form suggested that she would better be able than her husband to cope with a permanent absence. From time to time she had allowed herself the luxury of making vivid how, in the event of her own death, she would be missed by Peter. She had not quite defined in her mind the form this ‘missing’ would take, but it might have included a new-found impatience on her husband’s part with an alternative source of feminine comfort.

What Bridget found she disliked most, in the weeks after Peter’s death, was having to talk about him. There were numerous phone calls; the letters were not such a pressure—these she could reply to in the familiar-smelling comfort of their double bed, where she wore Peter’s shirts and sometimes, because her feet had grown unaccountably cold, his woolly socks. But the
talking…
how she loathed it! And yet, how kind people wanted to appear—really, it made one take against ‘kindness’. Yet
for all Bridget’s indifference to appearances it seemed wrong to her to leave the answerphone on. She must not be stingy with her loss—she felt it should be shared, available to all, like the torrential rains they were having this autumn.

And it was the case that the skies seemed to have some secret sympathy for her dead husband: they wept and howled impressively, highlighting her own lack of tears.

Bridget found she could not cry for Peter. Indeed, when she was obliged to participate in the conversations she so detested, she was conscious of a note in her voice which she knew must sound at odds with her situation. She was aware that this was disconcerting to those who had called to condole.

To call this note ‘gleeful’ would be inaccurate. It was not glee in Bridget’s voice, but it might have been mistaken for it; so that Frances, when she plucked up the courage to call the Fulham number, thought for a moment, as Bridget peremptorily answered the phone: Oh, she doesn’t mind!

‘It’s Frances Slater,’ she said. And waited.

Bridget knew, of course, who Frances was. Peter, with unusual foresight, had once said, ‘If anything happens to me there’s someone who might get in touch,’ and Bridget, with perfect understanding—though not, as it turned out, perfect prescience—had replied, ‘Nothing’s going to happen to you—don’t be melodramatic.’ But had added, less briskly, ‘Of course I would speak to anyone who mattered.’

However, when she took Frances’s call, she simply said, ‘Ah yes!’ which Frances found discouraging.

‘I knew Peter,’ Frances had continued, and just in time prevented herself adding ‘a little’. She did not want, by implying the connexion with Peter was less than it had been, to slide into appeasing Peter’s wife.

Bridget had never been one for appeasement. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I expect you’re feeling odd, aren’t you?’ which was a surprise to Frances after the discouragement.

The two women met first in the café at John Lewis. This was Bridget’s idea—she was keen to avoid anything which hinted at the scent of camellias. And it was convenient for Frances, who worked in Soho nearby.

‘I’ve bought a night light,’ Bridget announced after Frances had found her (‘You’ll know me, I expect, I’m big and blonde and I’ll be wearing green’). A conical transparent light with coloured seahorses bobbing around in it sat, slightly absurdly, on the pale teak-effect table between the two women. ‘The seahorses rise and fall when the light is on.’

‘Are you sleeping OK?’ Frances asked. It had sounded like a cue.

‘Moderately,’ said Bridget. ‘And when you switch it off there’s a mermaid at the bottom, combing her hair and admiring herself in a looking glass. See!’ She pointed out a small but perfectly formed maiden with a curvaceous green plastic fishtail.

Frances, who was quick, got the drift: there was to be no demonstration of emotion. ‘I had something like that once,’ she offered. ‘It was in one of those globe things children get given—you shook it and bits flew around.’ The remark felt like a shot in the dark.

Happily it hit home. ‘Usually snow,’ Bridget agreed.
‘Do you want tea? If so we’ll have to get another pot—I’ve drunk nearly all this already.’

Outside the weather rained down tears. Bridget thought: She’s not too bad, and felt it was not impossible that she might, one day, drop tears too.

‘You don’t look like the kind of woman who “needs to talk”,’ Bridget said. ‘I’d better say, frankly, from the outset, that “talking” is not part of my plan. However—’ she went on, as if there had been an attempt to interrupt, which was not the case, for Frances was listening in silent 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.

‘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
Gauloise
s 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.

It seemed obvious that Frances should be the first to be told.

‘I’m buying a house in Shropshire,’ Bridget had said.

‘But you’re not leaving Fulham altogether, are you?’ Frances had asked, with an odd sense of being abandoned.

By now Frances and Bridget had met several times. More regularly, Frances suggested, trying somewhat to mollify Bridget, than she had met with Peter. Bridget, however, had not been mollified. She was quite able to like Frances without liking what Frances had meant to Peter.

Most women in Bridget’s shoes as a matter of course would have detested Frances. But this is not an account of feminine jealousy, or even revenge, and not all human beings (not even women) conform to the attitudes generally expected of them. Bridget was interested in Frances because Peter had been. She did not enjoy the fact that Frances had been her husband’s mistress, but she was aware that her thoughts or feelings could now have little
impact—if they ever had—on the hard facts of Peter’s liking for another woman.

Frances, equally, might have disliked Bridget, except that in Frances’s case, with Peter gone, it was almost as if Bridget was a point of contact with him.

It was also interesting to Bridget that she and Frances talked on the phone, because Bridget was not, as she liked to say, a ‘phone person’. ‘I prefer letters,’ she had explained to Peter when, still married to someone else, he had reproved her for being brusque with him when he rang unexpectedly from a coin box. ‘With letters you can be sure you are not interrupting someone.’ ‘I’m sorry if I was interrupting,’ he had declared, slightly huffily.

Bridget had found the house when she had gone away for a weekend to a country hotel. The hotel was a reward for having finally steeled herself to go through Peter’s bureau drawers—an exercise to which she had not been looking forward. She had never been what Peter had referred to as a ‘rummager’. Whatever Peter kept in his drawers was his own affair: Bridget had never had the faintest temptation to pry.

This lack of temptation proved unhelpful when it survived her husband’s death. Certain forms of intimacy seemed out of place to Bridget within the cool depths of her union with Peter. She did not warm to the kind of relationship which shares bathrooms, just as she felt there were other matters which should be kept private. On several occasions she had opened the desk, taken out a few papers and felt a strong inclination to make a bonfire of them. As it happened, she had just braved the first pile of bank statements when Frances made her introductory phone call and it was relief at this distraction which had
prompted Bridget’s suggestion that they meet. Maybe it was the stimulus of meeting Frances, but after that long, peculiar day—the tea at John Lewis’s followed by the Wigmore Hall and ending with the whisky at Frances’s flat—Bridget set to work, ‘like a Trojan!’, and polished off the contents of the oak bureau with surprising speed. It was after this that she had gone to stay in Shropshire.

The hotel had been shabby, with chestnut-wood fires and wild duck on the lake—also on the menu. It was in the hollow of time before Christmas and the hotel was empty except for herself and a couple conducting an illicit affair.

Bridget scrutinised the couple with more-than-usual intensity. They seemed much too merry for her, with none of the easy familiarity which she had known with Peter. Possibly Peter had been ‘merry’ with Frances? One day, she speculated, she might ask.

On the Saturday morning Bridget had set out to follow a footpath across a ploughed field, bare but for a grounded flock of strutting lapwing. ‘
O green-crested lapwing, thy-eye screaming forebear-air
,’ sang Bridget at the top of her voice. ‘
I-eye charge thee disturb not my-eye slumbering fair
,’ passing, at the first stile, the young woman from the hotel alone, and in visible tears. Well, if that was going to be the penalty of merriment! Not wanting to be dogged by this picture of woe, Bridget had turned off the footpath and followed along a hawthorn hedge to a lane.

The lane resolved into a red-brick house with four chimneys and a ‘For Sale’ sign stuck on a post in the garden. Hearing footsteps, and fearing pursuit from the tear-stained young woman, Bridget veered into the porch.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ she apologised to the man who answered the door. ‘But I saw the sign.’

The oak bureau had lately yielded up the news that Bridget would be £250,000 better off from a life-insurance policy. It seemed fitting that this should turn out to be the figure quoted for the Shropshire house, which Bridget bought at the asking price without even benefit of survey.

‘There was no need for one,’ she explained to Frances when she telephoned her. ‘It smelled dry, there are fireplaces and there’s a view.’ Of hills—remote, misty. There was also a rookery in the elm tree at the bottom of the garden but that she kept to herself.

What Bridget found she wanted, once she had begun to assimilate the fact that Peter would never return, was a place where there were no associations. It was not so much Peter himself that she needed the rest from, but the effect of his dying. The dying had eaten into her reserves: the people, the pitiless paperwork, the exhausting failure to weep. The house where they had spent their married life seemed filled with bewildering and demanding turmoil. She resented the expense of trying to meet all this—that was why she wanted to get away—among the rooks.

‘It’ll only be for weekends,’ she reassured Mickey.

Bridget had decided to give Mickey something from Peter’s alleged will. In fact, everything had been left, in her lifetime, to Bridget, but this did not hinder Bridget from interpreting the will in her own way. Mickey had stood in for Peter’s wife in her absences; it was appropriate Mickey should be rewarded. A thousand pounds seemed the right sort of sum.

Mickey had taken the money with a lack of resistance which made Bridget wonder if the apocryphal legacy should have been rather more; nor had Mickey been reassured by Bridget’s account of the house in Shropshire.

‘If it’s weekends you’re thinking of going there and you away all that time abroad, I shan’t hardly see you, then.’

‘Not every weekend.’ Bridget had tried to be placating. She had, in fact, hired an assistant to serve in the shop at weekends so theoretically she could be away every one if she wished.

‘I’d say it was dangerous, leaving your house with no one there like that. Course I’m next door but I’m only an old woman—no match for any burglar or whoever chooses to call!’ her neighbour had said with unconsoled relish.