Salley Vickers - Instances of the Number 3

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?’

‘Help yourself.’

In his white shirt, pouring milk, he looked, Frances thought, like some cool-toned modern painting—maybe Hockney?

‘Frances knew Mr Hansome, Zahin.’

Intrigued that Peter seemed to have become ‘Mister’, Frances asked, ‘How did you know—er, Mr Hansome, Zahin?’

‘It was through his work,’ said Bridget, smoothly. ‘Remember, I told you—Zahin was one of the families the firm sponsored.’

Peter had confessed to Frances that being confined to England made him restless. Frances, conscious of—indeed, benefiting from—Bridget’s own trips abroad, had sometimes wondered why Peter’s wife had not noticed that he, too, might have done with a more regular change of scene. Now she said, ‘Where is the Caspian Sea? My geography’s hopeless.’

The boy was swilling his milk in the glass, watching the viscous surface slew round the side. His blue eyes stared at Frances for a second. Then he said, placidly, ‘The part my mother came from is now Iran. My mother is from the old Median people.’ It was as if he were speaking of someone known to him long ago.

‘The Medians are very ancient,’ Bridget said. As usual, Frances thought, she seemed to know all about it.

Noticing that Bridget had plonked the bowl down on the dresser and was carelessly brushing crumbs from the surface around it, Frances suddenly burst out with, ‘You needn’t keep the bowl if you don’t want it, Bridget. It was silly of me to think of giving it to you. Mistake.’

There was a silence during which the three people in the room all looked at the bowl.

Bridget had been correct in her hunch that Frances had planned to give the Chinese bowl to Peter. Taking it down from the wardrobe shelf, where she amassed her Christmas gifts, she had debated what to do with it: to keep it seemed ghoulish; also, it would be a gesture to give something to Bridget: the thought had given substance to Frances’s wish to be generous to Peter’s widow.

‘It is beautiful.’ The boy’s words spoken into the charged atmosphere had the quality of some bell—whose authority was no less for its comparative softness—rung as part of some obscure but picturesque ritual. ‘I would like to have it in my room. May I, please?’

Bridget was rummaging in a drawer. She said without looking at Frances, ‘If Miss Slater doesn’t mind…’

‘Frances,’ said Frances firmly—she had had enough of this ‘Miss’, ‘Mrs’ business. ‘Please, Zahin, do call me Frances. Of course I don’t “mind”—it was intended as a present. I just thought maybe Bridget had enough dishes…’

Bridget had found Mickey’s bath cubes. ‘Here you are, present for you.’

Zahin had finished his milk. He walked round the table to the bowl and picked it up, turning it over with delicate fingers. ‘The colour is blue—like heaven.’

He looked at Frances and she saw how his eyes had the same blue opacity.

Bridget said suddenly, ‘Well now, I’ll leave you two to sort it out,’ and left the kitchen.

Zahin gently put the bowl down on the table. The silver-bell-like voice spoke again. ‘You and Mr Hansome, you were sweethearts…?’

Frances and Peter had been away together only a few times. Twice she had travelled with him to Scotland, where Peter had gone for business reasons. On those two occasions they had stayed in the Edinburgh flat of an old school friend of Peter’s, a bachelor who travelled abroad, and was grateful to have the flat occupied during his frequent absences. Nor was he fussy about the moral conduct of his guests. Another occasion had been when they had gone to Paris.

The visit to Paris had remained to Frances a kind of touchstone of what people meant by being ‘happy’. They had stayed on the Left Bank, in a cramped, almost drab hotel—so dim was its lighting, so very ancient its threadbare furnishings.

It was in Paris that Peter had begun to call her ‘France’ the diminutive which he alone was allowed—all other, and previous, attempts, such as ‘Francie’, or ‘Fran’, or, once—quite frightfully—‘Frannie’, having been instantly squashed by one of her looks—the ‘basilisk look’ Peter called it. There had been only one other to whom any abbreviated form of address had been permitted: her brother—not James, the judge, but her younger-by-two-years brother Hugh, who had been killed on his motorbike when she was nineteen.

Hugh had driven the bike full tilt into the stone gatepost of the country house of a friend, whose family was grand enough to own a drive down which one could drive at 70 mph. Hugh had also called her ‘France’; that there had existed certain resemblances between Hugh and Peter was a secret which was now known only to Frances.

Perhaps it was that likeness to her younger brother which had prompted a kind of playfulness with Peter. In Paris they had been like children: it was cold, and Frances had taught him how to keep warm by skipping, and hand in hand they had skipped along by the Seine looking, as Peter had said, ‘like geriatric kids!’ But they had had their moments as lovers too.

It was on a morning after a night of lovemaking that she had wakened to find Peter, in his socks, about to tiptoe from the room. The lovemaking had been of the kind which routs paranoia, so her first thought was not, as it might have been: He is leaving me! Instead she said, still half asleep, ‘Where in the world are you off to at this hour?’ and he, slightly embarrassed, had murmured, ‘Mass. Go back to sleep.’

Frances had submissively rolled down the dip in the aged mattress. When Peter returned she was propped up against an unyielding bolster reading about Matisse.

‘It’s nice when one’s prejudices are confirmed,’ she said, noticing his slight awkwardness. ‘I always suspected Picasso was a bastard. He encouraged his toadies to throw darts at poor Matisse’s paintings.’ Then, seeing he was still fiddling with the change in his pocket, ‘I waited breakfast for you—I must love you a whole lot because, frankly, my dear, after last night I’m ravenous!’

At that, Matisse was tipped to the floor and it had been some time, after all, before breakfast was ordered.

She had not enquired about the Mass, sensing that this was a subject which, if it was to be raised at all, must be so by him. And two nights later, over dinner in a restaurant in Montmartre, he did himself bring it up. ‘When I was in Notre-Dame,’ he dropped the name casually, ‘there was a beggar woman some rows in front of me—pretty tatty and quite niffy, I should think. When it came to the Sign of Peace everyone kissed her or shook her hand most courteously.’ They were discussing declining standards of manners in Britain.