Instances of the Number 3 (20 page)

Mrs Painter had warned Frances that births are commonly heralded by unusual displays of cleaning. Frances had looked polite, but inwardly, when this piece of information had been presented to her along with a collection of brightly coloured knitted baby clothes, she had dismissed it as an old wives’ tale.

‘Don’t like pastels,’ said Painter (who rarely used anything else in his palette), ‘so I had her do them in decent colours.’

‘These were your idea, Patrick?’ Frances was turning in her hand a small violet hand-knitted cardigan and matching hat with a scarlet pom-pom.

‘She’ll look better in colour.’

‘Why do you say “she”?’

‘It’s a girl—I can tell by the way she’s lying.’

Two nights later, Frances, unusually wakeful, remembered that she hadn’t rinsed down the draining board before going to bed. Halfway through cleaning the bath, the rubber gloves she was wearing developed a hole, and she had to search in the cupboard beneath the sink
for another pair. Nothing there but a pair of the surgical gloves Zahin used—unfortunately far too small. The lack of gloves forced Frances to abandon her cleaning but by morning it was apparent she had better call the hospital. Lottie too—who had promised to be on hand if needed…

‘Take some ice packs,’ Lottie advised. ‘I’m told the pain is horrendous.’

In the end all Frances brought was herself because there was no time for more before the ambulance arrived.

Patrick and the tea leaves were right: it was a girl child, born in an hour, with tiny fists and a small, red, boxer’s face.

‘She’s adorable,’ said Frances, transfixed.

‘Each to his own,’ said Lottie. ‘I knew I was right not to have any! How are you feeling?’

‘Wonderful!’ said Frances.

‘It sounded hellish. Were you in ghastly pain?’

‘I didn’t feel a thing,’ said Frances, blissfully.

‘You were screeching like a fishwife,’ Lottie said. ‘I’ve never heard such effing and blinding.’

The first response to the birth was from Ed Bittle who sent a glade of white lilies.

‘What are those for—the annunciation?’ asked Painter, who arrived himself that evening with a bunch of sweetpeas from the garden wrapped in a copy of the
Sunday Sport
. ‘He’s got you confused, thinks you’re a virgin.’

‘I think they’re lovely,’ said Frances, loyally.

‘Here you are!’ said Painter, taking a frail, candyfloss bloom from where it nestled in the bosom of a
Sunday Sport
girl and laying it against the baby’s cheek. ‘Pink for a girl—not white for a bleeding angel. You could
always call her Sweetpea, after Popeye’s baby. You have a look of Olive Oyl about you.’

Frances, correctly, took this for a compliment. ‘I’d thought of calling her Petra,’ and once she had said it she knew that this had always been her daughter’s name.

Ms Nathan called by and was crisply congratulatory. ‘Well done! She’s a credit to you, and I hear came nice and quick too. If only my young mothers were as obliging.’

Frances had become used to the train of foreign women who traipsed through the ward vaguely mopping disinfectant under the beds. One day it was Teresa from Portugal; the next, Elsa from Sierra Leone. So when a trim, dark woman began to mop vigorously under the bed Frances thought nothing of it but went on reading the book Painter had brought her about Henry Moore.

‘You ever find that ring, then?’

Frances looked up. ‘Claris!’

‘That’s right. You remembered.’

‘Why are you here? Of course I remember you! No, I never found the ring.’

‘Ah, that’s a shame. It’s one of my cleaning contracts—the school, then the hospital. God returned you something for the loss, though, didn’t he? You never said you was expecting.’

‘I didn’t know myself!’

‘That kind’s best. My Pearl was one of them. I loved that child more than all the others. A gift from God she was too. I never knew her dad.’

Frances said, ‘Petra’s father died. She’ll never know him either.’ It was comforting to feel that Petra and Claris’s daughter had something in common.

‘Is that right? Then that child’s sure going to make up
for that loss too. Her daddie’ll be watching over her right now, that right, sweetheart?’

Claris bent and swept up Petra, who had just wakened and was gazing upward with soft unfocused eyes, at a presence neither woman could see. Impossible, Frances thought, to look at those eyes and not be reminded of Hugh. It’s like a great web, she reflected, Hugh and me and Peter and Petra, and then Bridget and Patrick and Zahin, and now Claris and Pearl—we’re all linked somehow—even the dead.

‘There’s not another love like it.’ Claris laid Petra back in her bassinet. ‘You look after yourself, now, darling. Take plenty rest.’

Another surprise was that Painter came to the hospital every day. Because Petra had been born premature and underweight, and Frances had no one at home to look after her, Ms Nathan decreed they should stay in longer than forty-eight hours. In the end they stayed a week; Painter came in a taxi to collect them.

‘Mind the baby, mind, mind!’ he shouted as they made their way through the hospital with Petra a tight bundle in Frances’s arms.

‘Patrick, everyone’s got babies here.’

‘None like ours! The others look half-baked.’

Halfway home Frances said, ‘I forgot to say goodbye to Claris.’

‘Good God, woman, who’s Claris? Turn round, turn round! We have to go back!’ Painter roared at the taxi driver, but when the cab began to swing across the road Frances said, ‘No, no, it’s all right. I just want to get home.’ Claris could be found another time.

Painter ensconced Frances and Petra in the flat and
went off, returning with carrier bags stuffed with food.

‘Patrick, there’s only me—Petra doesn’t eat. What’s in those bags will feed an army.’

‘You need feeding up!’

But with Painter gone, the flat, once such a haven, felt alien. Perhaps it was the presence of Petra but some sea change—Frances could not put her finger on what it was—seemed to have occurred.

‘Maybe you need a garden,’ Lottie suggested. ‘I don’t know anything about it but I’m told kids like to look at leaves.’

It was more than a week before Bridget came, and then it was with Zahin. ‘Sorry we haven’t been before—I’ve been up to my eyes…’

‘O Miss Slater, she is adorable!’

‘Thank you, Zahin, I think so too.’

‘My sister Zelda would love her—she loves babies.’

Frances, carried away by the novel charms of motherhood, invited Zelda to see the miraculous child. ‘Anyway,’ she said to Bridget after Zahin had gone off to make tea, ‘I’d like to get a closer look at Zelda—I’m curious, aren’t you?’

‘Not particularly.’ Bridget was fighting a desperate, savage, serpentine jealousy. She had never wanted children, and yet the sight of this small representative of Peter’s genes activated something vicious she had thought defeated.

Frances, guessing something of this said, bravely, ‘You can hold her, if you like,’ which was the last thing she wanted to have happen.

Bridget took the tiny bundle in her arms. Peter’s daughter.
She tried to see some resemblance to her husband in the small, bunched features.

‘She’s more like my brother—Hugh,’ Frances said, reading Bridget’s thoughts.

‘I didn’t know you had another brother.’

‘He died.’

‘You don’t seem to have much luck with your men,’ said Bridget, returning Petra abruptly to her basket.

It was as well that Zahin returned with a teatray. ‘I remembered where everything was, Miss Slater—’

‘Frances,’ said Frances, automatically.

‘—and that you like it weak, see, I have brought hot water and the full-cream milk for Mrs Hansome.’

‘Zahin,’ said Frances, seeing a chance to get rid of some of Painter’s supplies, ‘there’s ginger biscuits—masses of them—in the kitchen, Mrs Hansome might like one with her tea. And by the way, there’s a pair of your rubber gloves in the cupboard under the sink. Don’t forget to take them with you when you go.’

Ed Bittle began to be a problem. He rang constantly to ask after Frances’s health—happy to hear it was good because then he could come and draw her! In the end his calls became such a nuisance that Frances accepted an invitation from Mrs Painter to stay in Isleworth.

‘Patrick’ll feel happier with Petra on the premises,’ remarked Painter’s mother, prodding the Moses basket with her embroidered-slippered foot.

It looked for a while as if there might also be a problem with Roy. Roy had murmured something about replacing Frances, now she was ‘occupied’. This notion was put paid to when Painter, in a call, mentioned a rival gallery who had been courting him for years. ‘Of course, I would
never leave Gambit, because of Frances’ was all that need be said, for a bunch of perfumeless red roses to arrive with a note:
Dearest Girl—take such care of yourself, and our little Petronella, of course. R.

The smile on the R was unusually gracious.

Frances was grateful for Painter’s interventions. And it was pleasant, too—Lottie was right—to lie in the garden, with the perfect Petra beside her in her Moses basket, and read, and watch the peacock butterflies and red admirals scattering delicate painterly wings over Mrs Painter’s buddleia.

She wished Peter could see his daughter as she lay, curled, sleeping in her rush basket in the shade of Mrs Painter’s lilacs. Would Peter have liked Petra? Would he have even wanted her to have the child?

We cannot know the worst that befalls those who have parted with this life, but numbered chief among them might be the pang that Peter felt as he watched over Petra.

The dead cannot cry; thus, it was dry-eyed that Peter silently observed his newborn daughter.

Zahin was not openly impatient when he learned that Bridget would be staying in London for the third weekend in a row, but he came as close as he ever had to expressing displeasure.

‘But the weather at your country house, would that not be pleasant, Mrs Hansome…?’

‘Zahin, I believe you want to get rid of me…’

‘Oh no, Mrs Hansome.’

He does though, Bridget thought grimly. Even in her own home she was superfluous; not even when Peter died had she felt so low. Mickey called by and looked almost embarrassed to find Bridget in her own kitchen. Mickey spoke mysteriously of tuna fish and mayonnaise.

‘Zahin, is Mickey organising a tea, or something? She seems preoccupied with sandwiches.’

Zahin decided it was the moment to come clean. ‘It is my new business I am starting. Mrs Michael and I are going into partnership.’ He explained about ‘Zandwiches Zpecial’ and the logo that he’d had specially designed:
an open sandwich with a smiley face constructed of portions of tomato and hard-boiled egg.

‘And the headquarters of operations is my kitchen, I suppose.’ Bridget was almost hurt. ‘What about your sister? Is she part of the plan to take over my house?’

But Zahin didn’t want Zelda associated with his sandwich project. In fact, he didn’t like her being mentioned at all. Almost sullenly he said, ‘I don’t know where my sister is right now.’

‘Didn’t you promise she would go and visit Frances and Petra? I gather they’ve gone to stay with that disagreeable artist in Isleworth…’

Later that day a distinctive-looking young woman made her way down the Charing Cross Road and stopped at one of many phone booths. If she was perturbed by the scrawled invitations that could be read within she gave no outward sign, unless an unnecessary repair to her eye make-up indicated some unusual need for selfprotection. That same afternoon, while Mrs Painter was taking her rest (studying the card for the Sweepstake Hurdle in the
Express
) and Painter was preoccupied, repainting, for the third time, a tiny square of lavender, the girl stepped, almost shyly, through the side door into the Painters’ garden. She stopped and looked warily around, like a nervous cat, before sighting the Moses basket on the lawn.

Frances, returning from the house, where she had gone to fetch lemonade, was alarmed to see Petra in the arms of a young woman in tight white jeans and a skimpy red top.

‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Put that baby down AT ONCE!’

The girl turned a blank face in Frances’s direction.
Then she bent to replace Petra—now screaming—back in the basket, before running from the garden.

‘That’s the last time!’ Zelda said to herself. ‘The very last.’

Her hair was a mess, she had a stitch in her side and her jeans had almost split in the effort to get away from that horrible woman. From the top of the bus she had clambered on to, Zelda looked down to see Painter, who, alerted by Frances’s shouts, had run with furious speed after the interloper, down three streets to the spot where the bus had swallowed up her fleet form.

Petra was still crying when he got back.

‘Bitch got away!’ Painter fumed. ‘We’ll get the police along—I’d know her again.’

Frances had calmed down. ‘Need we? I think I’ve an idea who it was.’ As soon as the girl had left the garden, and she had made sure no harm had come to Petra, Frances had known. ‘It was Zahin’s sister, I’m almost sure. I did invite her to come and visit Petra.’

Bridget, when Frances rang, said Zahin was not at home at present but she would ask the moment he came in if his sister had been to call on Frances. ‘The description certainly fits the girl I saw at your flat—white jeans, dark hair.’

‘Looked like a tart to me!’ Painter said. They were eating, Petra on Painter’s lap, in the garden. ‘Get some of this down you—’ offering Frances Guinness—‘good for breastfeeding.’

‘No thank you, Patrick, I loathe stout—the name alone is enough to threaten my waistline.’

‘Really, Patrick,’ said his mother, indulgently, ‘such language!’

‘I hope she hasn’t infected Petra with anything,’ said Frances, who was new to the neuroses of parenthood.

Bridget was puzzled, when Zahin returned, to learn that he wanted to make a bonfire. ‘It’s roasting hot, Zahin. Can’t it wait till the weather’s cooler?’

As a rule, there was no one more gracefully persuasive than Zahin, but on this occasion he became simply stubborn. ‘It is important’ was all he would say.

‘OK, but you must inform the neighbours. Mickey, of course, will let you do whatever you want…’

Fortunately, the neighbours on the other side were away on holiday. In fact, half the street was, so only Bridget was inconvenienced by the acrid smoke billowing from Zahin’s fire. Bridget, who could be tactful and in scrutinising Zahin’s face had noticed that it looked as if it might have been streaked with tears, did not ask what it was he was burning; it looked like bundles of clothes—though you’d have thought these could more easily have been disposed of at the charity shop on the corner—for donkeys, she seemed to think it was.

Father Gerard, whose dogma was formed in South America, did not fudge the question of hell.

‘Nowadays we don’t imagine an eternal fire, or devils with pitchforks, oh dear me no! There are those who have claimed it is a place of eternal silence, coldness, filled with ash—but most of us prefer simply to see it as a place of everlasting separation from God’s grace. Like a child shut away from a parent’s care—the worst of punishments, wouldn’t you say, Peter?’

This, though effective, was not the most fruitful of Father Gerard’s comparisons. Peter had spent too much
of his youth barred from his mother’s attentions by his stepfather to do other than switch off from the prospect a similar, but more long-term, deprivation.

Maybe it was this which led to his preferring the idea he had heard in a poem Bridget had quoted to him once:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire,

I hold with those who favour fire…

Even so, Peter made no connexion between his desire for Zelda and eternal damnation. The human mind is endlessly plastic, and the intensity of Peter’s desire felt to him like something elevated, purifying even. And yet, without question, what he was engaged in was, in the eyes of his Church—certainly Father Gerard would have said so!—a mortal sin. And mortal sin, he was warned, if unrepented, led straight to that unimaginable place, well-represented by artists, until the twenty-first century, with pictures of horned devils almost cheerily tossing condemned souls into blazing pyres or icy wastes.

‘What happens if a man dies without being able to confess his sins?’ Peter had once asked, and Father Gerard had explained that in that event allowance was made for an act of perfect contrition. ‘If a man truly hates his sin at the moment of death, Peter, then that is sufficient to ensure God’s infinite mercy comes into play, in which case all other bets are off!’

Mercy—infinite or otherwise—is probably better comprehended through experience than description. One of its less subjective, more universal, manifestations might
be the tendency of danger to promote in human beings some saving answering power. At the moment of his death Peter saw in his mind’s eye three persons—and saw them, for the first time, as they really were.

Another aspect of objective mercy might be associated with clearness of sight. To see ‘truly’ is perhaps what is meant by seeing under the gaze of eternity, which is another way of saying ‘with the eye of God’. At the moment of death Peter saw truly and understood—and, understanding, forgave what he saw.

Bridget knew that Peter was not a presence in the bedroom that night. There was only the darkness which reflected back the unmediated darkness within herself. Unable to sleep, she put on Peter’s dressing gown and went outside.

Bridget made her way barefoot down the path to the bottom of the garden. The sky was lightening in the summer dawn and the glints of red above echoed the still smouldering remnants of Zahin’s fire.

Picking up an unburned stick Bridget poked into the glowing embers a remnant of clothing—something white. Now why was Zahin burning what looked like a perfectly good pair of jeans? What a strange boy he was. She wished she knew what Peter had thought of him.