Instances of the Number 3 (9 page)

Although Frances had now met his sister, she had not seen Zahin since the day she called round with the Chinese bowl, when he had referred to her and Peter as sweethearts. The odd pronouncement—Peter’s own word for them—remained for her a conundrum. She had not mentioned it to Bridget for she was well aware that, despite their quirky acquaintance, Bridget retained an understandable hostility to the affair.

Lying in bed one morning, Frances wondered how the boy could have come by his knowledge of her and Peter, and was suddenly overcome by remembrance.

What she was recalling, in particular, was the summer after they had first met at Mickey’s, when she had gone regularly to the open-air baths to swim. The purpose of the exercise had been to trim the body which Peter seemed so to like, but the swims had evolved into a ritual through which, mad as it seemed even to herself, she sought to keep him.

‘If I swim another seven lengths,’ she used to incant, ‘he will ring me tonight.’ The seven would be followed
by another seven—and so on. When, returning home exhausted, her hair damp and smelling of chlorine, she heard his voice on the answerphone, she tasted triumph.

It has been suggested that what we want and pursue with a whole heart we can always have. Who can tell the validity of this proposition—yet there are people whose conviction is strong enough to steer fate. It may be that without Frances’s propitiating swims—or what lay behind them—Peter’s interest in her might have waned. Certainly, at the simplest level, he responded to her need of him—as a man who has been abandoned always will.

The belief that we are worth loving is a blessing granted to very few and with that one blessing all others become redundant. To Peter Hansome, the idea that he might be the object of another’s desire was inherently unbelievable. And yet there had been Veronica…

Peter was too untried at the time to perceive that the uncomplicated merging of body and emotion he had known in Malaya was one of those gifts which, through its very simplicity, gives an illusion of being commonplace. He had taken the whole experience simply, very much in the manner with which he had caught up the gold-skinned girl’s body in his arms and threatened, amid squeals of delight, to ‘crush it to death’. That mix of amorous sadism and erotic masochism was too fine-blent—in those days, too far below the surface of conscious thought—to be recognisable to Peter for what it was: a complete compatibility of disposition and longing, an example of natural partnership—in other words, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

It has been told how, on the discharge of his commission, Peter had contemplated returning to Malaya to
marry Veronica. What has not been told is how letter after letter had arrived—all in the childlike cursive handwriting taught by the Sisters of Mercy—how these had been read more and more sketchily until, finally, they had been put away, unopened, in a far recess of the oak bureau. (That these were not among the relics later found by Bridget was because, long before, during his first marriage, Peter had consigned the collection of manila envelopes, addressed in the round hand, to a purpose-built fire in the back garden, and had gone out afterwards to a nightclub in Soho where the ‘waitresses’ were obliging.)

It would be easy to assume that it was that lack of commitment with which women these days so often charge men, which led to Peter’s seeming brutality. Veronica, back in Malaya, was first worried, then hurt, then, finally, angry when, after a few increasingly terse cards, she heard nothing back from the man who had ‘died’ inside her with the most unguarded expressions of ardent adoration. But guarded men do not always care to recall their unguarded moments; it was the memory of that uncollected wash of feeling which was partly responsible for shoving away to the back of Peter’s mind, as well as his desk, the envelopes written by the slender hand which had so often—and so unexpectedly—brought him such exquisite delight.

But just as memory can recede more swiftly than we expect so the opposite is also true: people do not fade away inside us as easily as we sometimes hope. There came moments when, before he had consciously formulated the reason, Peter’s heart would quicken and lurch, as, in the distance—perhaps walking down the street, or at the far end of a carriage on the tube—his eye was
deceived by the sight of some slender, gold-skinned girl into believing his first, misprized love had returned.

The onset of significant developments in our inner lives is not easy to date: often they drift upon us casually, like snowflakes which do not announce the speed and severity with which they will become a storm. Peter could not have precisely said when it was that, in the act of making love to a woman, there began to come always a moment when she turned into Veronica.

At first he had been disgusted with himself. We know that in his fashion he was faithful, and the idea of super-imposing another on to the body of the woman he was making love to, tarnished his own picture of himself. But no one has ever found a successful counter to the anarchic forces the heart is host to—and, in the end, Peter had to accept that whenever, or however, he made love, and with whatever degree of fervour, there would always be three present: himself, the woman—and Veronica.

Some say this is what is meant by the law of karma, a stepping aside from a moment of possibility only to be for ever haunted by its unrealised spectre. If this is the case it seems hardly fair on those who have had no part in, yet suffer, the consequences of such derelictions. But here too there may be some pattern, and perhaps it is as well that whatever runs the system which is life has not found time to read the Declaration of Human Rights. By the time Peter met Bridget and Frances, both women to whom he longed to give his ardour unconfined, he found, when making love, he was impossibly and inescapably merged with the ephemeral body of a young Malayan girl, who by now if not, conceivably, dead was certainly middle-aged.

Frances was entrusted with the knowledge of her lover’s faith but he never divulged to her his love for Veronica. Nor could she have borne that knowledge. Lying in bed months after her lover’s death, she resolved the mystery of the young Iranian’s clairvoyant insight with the consoling thought that the passion she and Peter had shared was so tremendous it had manifested itself to others, even after death.

Bridget, shopping in the village, bumped into Stanley Godwit in the company of a man with a ginger moustache and a cross-looking young woman.

‘My daughter, Corrie.’ Stanley made the introductions. ‘And this is my son-in-law, Roland. Mrs Hansome.’

‘Bridget,’ said Bridget, staring at the moustache. The owner of it had a roly-poly look. Well named, she thought, Was he really a psychoanalyst? The humorous sweep could have been having her on.

‘I took Mrs…er…Bridget birdwatching a fortnight back.’

‘What did you see?’

Bridget, who had brought pebbles back from the beach, fingered them smooth and hard in her pocket. The eyes of the sweep’s daughter were somewhat pebbly.

‘Your father showed me some waders. Turnstones and golden plovers.’ She remembered the names but did not mention that they had also seen a whimbrel—a slender, solitary, grey-plumaged bird, smaller than a curlew, with long elegant legs and an aristocratically curved beak.
There in the high street the bird suddenly reminded Bridget of Frances.

‘There were said to be choughs but—’

‘—we didn’t manage to see any,’ Bridget interrupted. She had been disappointed not to see the fabled rook-like bird with the scarlet beak and matching legs. She didn’t mention that she had worn Cordelia’s boots. Stanley Godwit seemed uncomfortable and, wanting to ease things for him, Bridget invited them all round for a drink. ‘Your wife too, Mr Godwit, of course.’

‘My wife, bless her, is in a wheelchair. She doesn’t go out much.’

Hell, why hadn’t he mentioned this during their trip? To her alarm Bridget found she was blushing.

The daughter furrowed her brow and said, ‘We should be getting back, Dad,’ and grabbed his arm, which made Bridget remember the conversation about father complexes.

‘Are you really a psychoanalyst?’ Bridget asked.

As if to keep her company the roly-poly flushed too. He had the kind of complexion which at best tends towards pink.

‘I work at the Paddington Clinic and Day Hospital in London.’

‘Heavens,’ said Bridget, noticing that he was wearing bicycle clips, ‘that sounds pretty terrifying!’ The bicycle clips gave a rather endearing look.

‘Better watch it or he’ll lock you up!’ said Stanley Godwit, laughing loudly. Bridget, recognising this as the mirth of social embarrassment, let the Godwit party go. She had come to the village more to explore than to make any radical purchases.
It was easy to bring stuff with her from Fulham. Nevertheless, it was useful that beside a tea shop with the legend ‘Daisy’s Teas’ in green and white, there was a chemist, a dull-looking greengrocer’s and what looked like a proper butcher’s. There were pigs’ trotters in the window; also tripe. Bridget did not much care for either but she liked to see that they were still in supply. Peering into the shop’s interior she could see a whole pig’s head, waxy-yellow with wide, red, splayed nostrils. A pork butcher’s then? She decided to show goodwill by buying sausages.

But the experience was disappointing. The woman serving smiled—to disguise ill temper—and the diplomatically intended purchase did not go well. All the sausages of Shropshire, it appeared, had already been snapped up.

‘You need to order in advance for the weekend. We’ve sold right out, I’m afraid.’ The woman’s voice reflected satisfaction at being unable to meet this new customer’s demands.

‘How fortunate for you that your business is thriving,’ said Bridget and bought chump chops instead. ‘Is this local lamb?’ she enquired, but the woman sucked her teeth as if being required to solve a deep, theological question.

‘I couldn’t say. Welsh, I would think.’

So much for welcoming locals, Bridget thought. The scowling Cordelia and the pork butcher’s assistant were not great adverts for the community.

She drove home, passing, on the way, the psychoanalyst, pinker than ever and pedalling hard on a state-of-the-art-looking bike. A wish not to be influenced by her
unaccountable embarrassment made Bridget wind down the window and yell, ‘I meant what I said—do come round and have a drink some time, any of you who feel like it…’ and he gestured and waved back in quite a friendly way. Probably frightened of his wife, Bridget thought.

This sparked other thoughts: back at Farings one of the sudden swinging moods of listlessness, which had visited since Peter’s death, swept over her—everything seemed too much trouble and pointless—there was no one who cared whether she was alive or dead, she had no child, or god, nothing to lend purpose to existence. Not even the book she was reading seemed worth the trouble—a modern book, one of those published to extravagant acclaim, none of it borne out by the experience of reading it.

Bridget had been a reader since the age of four, when she had found that, by concentrated staring, she could make sense of the magazine called
Housewife
which her mother was sent each month by a cousin who had married into the north. It was in
Housewife
, a few years on, when the habit of reading had become compulsive, that Bridget had read
The Greengage Summer
, and it was from this that she had learned about forbidden passions.

It was the kind of story which her mother’s brother, Uncle Father Eamonn, would have censored had he been aware of its content. But Bridget learned self-preservation from her mother, and the clandestine affair between the older man and the young girl, which Moira Dwyer and her daughter devoured, was described to Father Eamonn by his sister as ‘a great story about a fruit farmer’.

From
Housewife
Bridget had graduated to
The Famous
Five
,
White Boots
,
Treasure Island
,
Jane Eyre
(with whom she formed a certain fellow feeling) and finally, and permanently, Shakespeare. After that there was to be no equivalent love, as a disgruntled boyfriend later commented.

Bridget was introduced to Shakespeare by Sister Mary Eustasia who taught her in the first year of secondary school. Sister Mary Eustasia had a shrewd expression and the kind of voice which does not need to be raised. ‘Now I want no nonsense, mind,’ she would say. ‘Any girl giving me any nonsense and it’s extra homework and staying behind after school, make no mistake.’

Where there is true authority there is no need for punishment; there were few enough occasions when girls were made to stay behind. If Bridget was an exception it was because she preferred to remain in the company of the strict Sister Mary Eustasia than face the erratic justice of home. If her father was in when she got back, the chances were she would end up eating her supper in the yard, with Cindy the dog.

On the whole, Bridget liked animals, but Cindy, her father’s pet, an ill-disciplined, bad-tempered bitch, had picked up her master’s habits and would snap and snarl at Bridget, as if currying favour with the father when the daughter was in disgrace. Not only Bridget’s fingers and toes but also her knees developed chilblains during the colder months, a fact which was not missed by the sharp-eyed Sister. When Bridget had attracted attention to herself yet again, by talking during a silent period for the third time in as many weeks, Sister Mary Eustasia called her over to her desk and said, with, for her, unusual mildness, ‘I’ll see you after school and have
your English book ready to show me as well, will you?’

When the time came it was not the English book which Sister Mary Eustasia seemed concerned with. Instead she pulled from the pocket of her habit a book bound in dark red leather with a gold script.

The Works of William Shakespeare
, Bridget read.

‘Have you read much of him yourself?’ Sister Mary Eustasia asked, and it was only many years later that Bridget realised that this severe, exact woman had dropped her usual tone and spoken to her almost as a colleague. When Bridget said she hadn’t her teacher went on, ‘Well now, he’s the very best. People say you should start with the comedies but for myself I got to like them only later. Life isn’t comic when you’re young, would you agree? Start with
Hamlet
, I think is best; you won’t go wrong there.’

And, slightly bewildered, Bridget had seen that the red book, with its gold italic lettering and grand binding, was meant for herself to borrow.

From there began a routine whereby Bridget stayed behind after school while Sister Mary Eustasia marked books, wrote reports, or tidied out her desk. Later, driving through the gloam-lit evening lanes, Sister Mary Eustasia’s occasional post-school garrulity would lapse, and there would be moments of tranquil silence. Neither Bridget’s parents, nor the girls at school, ever commented on this unusual arrangement and this was how Bridget learned that if you behaved as if your differences from other people were to be expected, they would be allowed to you.

Lying on the sofa at Farings, watching through the window a wren weave its way through the lords and
ladies which grew at the foot of the hedge, Bridget recalled that first evening by the stove in the corner of the classroom, reading, with Sister Mary Eustasia passing the occasional comment.

‘They say that Shakespeare was a Catholic, of course, but if so it’s a damn queer ghost, coming out of Purgatory, as it tells us it does, and trying to entice young Hamlet to commit a murder! But then if it’s a Protestant ghost there wouldn’t be mention of Purgatory at all—the Prods don’t believe in it—so it’s a puzzlement, wouldn’t you say?’

Bridget had heard of purgatory—of course she had; you did not grow up in Uncle Father Eamonn’s ambit ignorant of the ‘fires which cleanse and purge’. ‘The smallest pain in Purgatory is greater than the greatest on earth,’ he liked to tell his captive congregation.

For Bridget this meant the place where she might be rid of pardonable sin resembled something along the lines of a particularly horrible supper with her father. Possibly breakfast, lunch and supper lumped together—rather like the school holidays but with no time off for reading in between. Her mother—who, much later Bridget saw, used religion as a trade unionist might use statutory sick leave: as a means of taking legitimate absence from the regular bind—had taken Bridget during one such holiday to St Patrick’s Purgatory. This was to be found on Station Island in Donegal, a location where Christ was popularly alleged to have revealed to St Patrick an entrance to purgatory and—presumably from there—a successful route to paradise.

The trip was not a success. The Irish summer, always unpredictable, was more than ordinarily inclement and
they had had to queue up for the holy site in driving rain. A priest, in the crush to see the sacred spot, had taken the opportunity to crush himself against Bridget’s thigh and in retaliation she had bitten his hand. Uncle Father Eamonn had smacked her hard on the same thigh—which Bridget had loudly asserted she greatly preferred to having ‘that old priest press his old thingy there’—for which she got smacked again rather harder, this time round the head.

Thereafter, in Bridget’s mind, purgatory became a kind of amalgam of that visit: an unholy mix of freezing wetness, lecherous priests, discarded cigarette packets, sweet papers and crisp bags—left by the pious pilgrims—and the sickening buzz in her ears while Uncle Father Eamonn dealt out righteous punishment upon them.

The idea, therefore, that purgatory might be a concept appropriate to a great play was intriguing. On that evening when she had first remained behind in the classroom with Sister Mary Eustasia, Bridget read the story of Prince Hamlet and his father, the old king, who had been murdered, poisoned through his ear by his ambitious brother while sleeping in an apple orchard. (‘A reference to the Garden of Eden, wouldn’t you say, Bridget?’ Sister Mary Eustasia, in her collegiate way, had remarked.)

There was one line in particular which attracted Bridget. The murdered man had been
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin/Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled
.

Bridget liked the sound of ‘unhouseled’. Sister Mary Eustasia explained to her that it meant that Hamlet’s father had died without benefit of the ‘housel’ or Eucharist. ‘What we call the Blessed Sacrament, Bridget. “Disappointed” is a fine, rich word, too, look. It means the
old king died without having made the proper “appointments” with death—the chance to make confession and receive absolution.’

What Bridget concluded from this was that she herself must have failed to make some similar appointment. She had learned disappointment early and one consequence of an education in disappointment is that you learn not to take your own desires too seriously. Or you learn to defend them, if at all, by stealth.

So when the travelling theatre came to the city with a production of
Hamlet
, Bridget didn’t even consider seeking permission to go; she embarked at once on a scheme to see the drama which had so momentously altered her mental life.