Instances of the Number 3

4

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.

5

Mickey’s words stuck in Bridget’s mind. Perhaps it was foolish to leave a London house regularly unattended? How she wanted to get away, though, and be by herself. It seemed as if she had never been by herself, not since she married Peter. So when the boy turned up it was almost like an answer to a prayer.

The doorbell rang one Saturday morning when, dressed only in one of Peter’s Vyella shirts, she was trying to steel herself to face Peter’s papers and was tempted not to answer. She had found Peter’s dressing gown and had it clutched about her when she got to the door and saw the boy walking back down the path. Thanks to the many occasions she had crept home from trips abroad in the small hours, the hinge of the door had been worked on to open quietly, so he did not hear her and she could have let him go altogether and resumed her vague sortings of the papers into toppling piles. It was the sight of the sharp little protruding shoulder blades, almost like wings, she thought, which made her call out, ‘Did you want something?’

The boy turned at her voice and she saw a young face which was, as she phrased it later to Frances, ‘as beautiful as the day—quite breathtaking!’ Frances, who had so far encountered only the firmer of Bridget’s surfaces, was momentarily surprised and then amused at the hyperbole. (That this was not hyperbole but the straightest report became clear only much later when Frances also met Zahin and described him, in turn, as like a ‘dark Apollo’. By then the ‘Apollo’ was staying in Bridget’s house—but this is to anticipate.)

The boy hesitated, then moved back up the path towards her. Bridget noticed that he had plucked a soft green frond of the rosemary which grew in an aromatic bush by the front door. He was neatly dressed, the boy, in a white shirt, navy sweater and grey trousers. The trousers gave the impression of having been pressed for the occasion.

Moved by the sight of the tender spear of rosemary twisting in his hand Bridget thawed. ‘Hello?’

The boy did not smile but bowed his head a little. When he looked up she saw that despite his dark hair and complexion he had eyes of the deepest blue. ‘Excuse me please.’

‘Can I help you?’ He had a small gold earring in his right ear.

‘I was looking for Mr Hansome.’

‘Ah,’ said Bridget, ‘in that case you’d better come inside.’

He stood in the middle of the kitchen in an attitude of respect so that Bridget felt she had almost to push him down into a chair. ‘Would you like coffee?’ He shook his head. ‘Tea?’ Another shake. ‘What can I offer you to drink then?’ If this young man was unacquainted with Peter’s death he might need to be fortified against the news—or she, at least, needed to be fortified against telling it.

‘Please, a glass of milk?’

Grateful for this temporary relief Bridget took down one of her glasses that she had brought back from Limoges and filled it to the brim; the white milk glowed green behind the thick glass. She poured herself coffee and sat down opposite the boy across the kitchen table. ‘I am Mrs Hansome,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if this is a shock to you but Mr Hansome, my husband, is dead. He was killed in a car crash some weeks ago.’ It would soon be Christmas; almost two months since she herself had received the news from the policewoman with the guarded face.

An expression of intense surprise flickered across the blue eyes. ‘But he is married…?’ It was as if the other news had passed quite over him.

‘Yes,’ said Bridget amused. ‘He is, or was married. I am his wife,’ she repeated, ‘or his widow, I suppose now.’ And indeed this was the first time she had consciously applied the word to herself.

The boy put his head upon the table and began to cry. The crying made big searing sobs so that Bridget hearing them was filled with something like admiration. To be able to weep like that—it was remarkable!

She leaned across the table and patted his shoulder. ‘He felt nothing,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry—he was not in pain.’ Against such a torrential display she felt she must provide some consolation.

The boy lifted his head and looked at her with tragic eyes. ‘I did not know. He was my friend and I did not know.’

‘Yes,’ said Bridget, taxed by her ignorance of the identity of this young person, ‘I agree. It is terrible not to know.’

The boy began to drink the milk. He took big noisy gulps, draining the glass. Then he licked around his upper lip where a soft vestigial moustache was barely showing. ‘I am called Zahin,’ he said.

‘And I am Bridget.’

‘You are Mrs Hansome?’

‘Yes,’ said Bridget. The penny seemed at last to have dropped. ‘I am Mrs Hansome.’

‘Then,’ said the boy, ‘you will help me.’

‘And he just sat there and asked you, straight out?’ Frances asked.

‘Not so much “asked”—more like told.’

They were eating together in Bridget’s kitchen. On the wall, behind Bridget from where she was sitting, Frances could see the plate she had given Peter for his fifty-sixth birthday. A pale green glazed plate—Chinese; the kitchen wall was not where she would have hung it.

‘But who is he?’

Supper was eggs and tomatoes which Bridget had fried in the virgin olive oil she brought from France in unlabelled bottles, only produced for special guests. Mopping her plate with a corner of baguette, Bridget checked an automatic inward response of: Mind your own business! ‘He seems to have met Peter at a sponsorship do—his firm sponsored kids through school from various parts of the world they were dealing with.’

From Iran. The boy had told her. ‘My father’s family were good friends with the Shah—when he died my family became outcast—it is dangerous for the men in our family. So, two years ago I come to England.’

Frances did not say, as another woman might have done, I wonder why Peter never mentioned it? She knew as well as Bridget that Peter was a man whose life ran to compartments. Instead she said, ‘But where has he been living until now?’

A sensible question, Bridget thought, approving Frances’s practicality. ‘With another Iranian family, but now they are moving to the States. Apparently, Peter knew this and promised, when the time came, to help the boy find a new berth. But the time came for Peter first,’ she concluded, making one of her slightly morbid jokes.

Frances, whose failure to respond to the joke didn’t mean she didn’t get it, said, ‘Is he a nice boy? Did you like him?’

‘I liked him, I think,’ said Bridget. ‘As to whether he’s “nice” I wouldn’t care to say.’

And it was the case, she thought later, washing up after Frances had left—having declined Frances’s help—she couldn’t say whether the boy was ‘nice’, ‘niceness’ being a quality which did not have much meaning for her. The mechanical business of washing and drying dishes was calming before bed. As to ‘liking’ people, that was a different matter. Did she like the boy? It was too soon to say. But there must have been something or she would not have come out with her bold suggestion.

Climbing into bed in Peter’s shirt it came to her that the boy had had some effect: he had been enlivening, quickening something which had lain fallow in her since Peter’s unexpected departure.

6

Bridget called to deliver Mickey’s Christmas present, a blanket made up from coloured knitted squares. Bridget was aware that this might not find favour: Mickey, who was a traditionalist, would have preferred something on more conventional lines—a set of bath luxuries, a frilly nightdress, port. But Bridget could never bring herself to give to others what she herself would not enjoy.

‘I have found a lodger,’ she said, as much as anything to fill in the silence with which Mickey was contemplating the cheerful squares. ‘He will be here when I am away so I have said to him that if there’s any problem he can ask you.’

‘My mother had one like this. Where d’you get it? Wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t hers come back to me.’

Bridget, who had bought the blanket from a colleague in Southend in exchange for a stuffed tapir, said she had bought it in a Chelsea sale.

‘There you are—could easy be mother’s, she got rid of all her stuff when she come to live with me.’ With an air of one who knew how to do things properly Mickey presented Bridget with an oblong package wrapped in red and gold ribbon and holly paper. A strong smell of violets confirmed the identity of the gift. ‘Coty bath cubes—same as I always give you.’ No surprises there.

Mickey, at first pleased to have news that there was to be company next door, was dismayed to find that the lodger Bridget was planning to install was what, among her friends, she still referred to as ‘dusky’.

‘He’s a nice enough boy, I’m sure,’ she confided to Jean Clancey, over a pre-Christmas drink at the Top and Whistle, ‘and pretty as a picture, I’ll say that for him. But it’s not the same!’

What, for Mickey, was ‘not the same’ was left to the sympathetic imaginings of her friend. For Bridget, certainly, it was different having Zahin in the house.

In her adult life, Bridget had lived for any space of time with no one other than Peter. She had graduated early from shared flats and had gone without the things other people find essential in order to be able to afford a place on her own. The early days with Peter had sometimes ragged Bridget’s nerves. She had found it tiresome when Peter would ask questions when she was engrossed in her book, or demand immediate help in searching out missing socks or journals; or, on one occasion, an old copy of Wisden in which he wanted to look up some ancient cricket score. This last had tried Bridget’s patience too far and she had remarked, rather acidly, that she hoped he was not going to make use of their relationship to become ‘infantile’. Peter had sulked for several days until by a mixture, on her part, of unvarying good temper and ignoring his ill one, harmony had been restored.

It was eight weeks to the day from Peter’s death that Zahin had appeared. In those eight weeks Bridget had found that on the occasions when she was not either missing Peter, or, as she had intimated to Frances, had been unable to believe that his absence was to be permanent, she had failed to recover her old pleasure in her own company. It was true that it was theoretically pleasant to be able to do as you liked; but what she liked was compromised by an awful, lowering sense of futility which had insinuated itself into everything. Without quite recognising that she was doing so, she had turned the beam of her attention towards her husband, whose regular little demands had first irritated, then amused and finally made up much of the regular substance of her life. Now, without spectacles and missing papers to find, calls to make, tickets to order, diets to cook for—Peter had been prone to hypochondria, which had expressed itself in various and often conflicting culinary regimes—she felt dry as dust. The tears the boy had wept so bitterly in her kitchen had somehow fallen upon that ‘dried-up’ feeling, so that when he spoke of his being at a loss where to live it was not merely sympathy for his plight which had led her to say, ‘You can come and stay with me, if you like,’—though caution made her add, ‘until you find something more settled.’

Zahin had given an impression which had reminded her of the occasion when she had bestowed Peter’s ‘bequest’ on Mickey: he accepted her suggestion without protest, as if it were his due. Mr Hansome, he told her, had also said that if necessary he could stay at his house with him. The news of this offer, and the fact that Peter had evidently neglected to mention that there was also a Mrs Hansome who might need to be consulted on such a matter, had neither surprised nor angered Bridget. She was used to Peter’s quixotic moods: had the boy actually turned up while Peter was alive, he might easily have denied the fact that any such suggestion had been made by him. ‘Nonsense, the lad’s making it up,’ he quite likely would have exclaimed—and Bridget would have had to suggest that in the circumstances it would not inconvenience them greatly if the boy stayed a night or two.

In a sense, then, she was doing no more than she might have done anyway, in proposing that Zahin bring his things over from the flat where he had been living in St John’s Wood in time for Christmas Day. I might as well have someone to cook Christmas dinner for, she thought, conscious that this was solving a problem for her which she had not looked forward to having to face.

Frances, who was accustomed to making her Christmas arrangements in time to avoid the sense of aloneness which Bridget was experiencing for the first time, spent the festival with her brother’s family. Her brother was a judge on one of the northern circuits and lived in a large house in Northumberland. James’s family was large too—also his wife. She and the five girls were good-hearted and energetic—‘excellent people’ a friend had once called them.

It is a sad fact that ‘excellent people’ are often dull. Frances, who began her visits to her brother’s home with a pang of envy, usually left the substantial household with a stab of relief: the peace and quiet, if loneliness, of Turnham Green was at least air she could breathe freely.

What with the Northumberland visit and the recovery from it, it was some days into the new year before Frances finally called by with a present for Bridget.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said frankly, ‘I was too busy to call by sooner. It’ll have to be a New Year’s gift.’ There was a particular reason why she had felt reluctant to see Bridget before Christmas: for the last five years Peter had found time to visit Frances on Christmas Eve.

Bridget, who had already worked out that it must have been Frances over whom Peter had made up the Christmas Eve excuses, had bought her nothing for Christmas. Unwrapping the gift, a glazed dish, which she recognised as bearing a likeness to a dish which Peter had been ‘given by a customer at work’ one previous Christmas, Bridget surmised that what was being presented to her had been originally bought for Peter. Frances looked the type to plan ahead for Christmas.

‘How nice,’ she said, without enthusiasm, ‘a bowl.’ Then, catching sight of Frances’s hand clenching the back of a chair, ‘Peter would have liked this—it’s the sort of thing he often brought home.’

Frances flushed: the frosty jibe didn’t escape her. She said, rather strained, ‘Did your Christmas go well? How was it with the boy?’

‘You can meet him.’ Bridget called out, ‘Zahin! Come and meet a friend of Mr Hansome’s.’ Her voice was surprisingly guttural; Frances wondered if Peter had found it sexy.

When the boy came through the door she almost gasped aloud at his beauty. ‘Heavens,’ she couldn’t help exclaiming, ‘where ever did you get those eyes, child?’

Zahin, to whom nothing, Bridget had observed, was a compliment said only, ‘My mother’s people come from near the Caspian Sea. They have blue eyes. Mrs Hansome, may I have some milk?’