Instances of the Number 3 (8 page)

Frances had had to turn down a second invitation to Farings. There was a show on at the gallery and she had to be on hand to organise the moving in of the works of the young sculptor who was showing there. Roy, whose taste had made the gallery, was a puzzle to Frances. ‘How can someone with such an aesthetic gift be so personally unpleasant?’ she had once asked Peter. To Peter this was no contradiction. ‘Some of the nicest people I know have the most terrible taste,’ he objected, ‘and vice versa. You seem to expect people to be the same all through!’ ‘You mean like that toothpaste—’ Frances had asked—‘with mouthwash in the stripe, or jam in a Swiss roll?’ ‘Talking of rolls…’ he had said (they were in bed at the time).

The sculptor arrived and fretted as the van containing his work was unloaded. Frances understood this: she knew about artists’ anxiety from Painter. ‘You’ve only yourself that really knows,’ he had declared, when she had tried to reassure him after a critic had damned with faint praise his latest show. ‘The arsehole thinks that just because it looks easy it isn’t deep.’

Frances herself was not sure if she would recognise ‘deep’ but she knew the sculptor was not being grandiose when he fussed about the transport of his pieces; or how they were placed around the gallery, whether or not in the right light. ‘It isn’t egotism,’ she had said to Peter once, of Patrick in fact. ‘It’s a kind of self-respect.’

Patrick, unusually, had agreed to attend the opening. It was part of Frances’s value to the gallery that she had a gift for getting people along to functions; but even with her influence over Patrick it was unusual for him to put himself out for a fellow artist.

‘I’ll come,’ he had said, ‘provided I don’t have to talk to anyone but you,’ which wasn’t so easy, Frances reflected as she steered him through to the drinks table.

Painter was wearing a bubblegum-pink waistcoat and matching socks. With his black beetling eyebrows, springy, untameable hair and the hum of fantastic energy which almost audibly came off him, it was impossible to miss the fact that here was someone who ‘counted’.

The concept of those who ‘count’ was one which Frances had learned from her brother Hugh who had counted so much that the loss of him shattered for ever the weak ties which held the Slater family together. Neither his father nor his mother, it was understood, had ever recovered from the death of their dashing youngest child—who claimed men and women alike. And James, poor James, had had to grow insufferable as a result—his only means of combating the dead charm. She herself, she knew from the way in which her presence made so little difference to her parents’ grief, had never counted. In fact, she was aware her mother often wished
it was her only daughter who had been killed instead of Hugh.

Patrick, a glass of Roy’s cheaper wine (a special offer at Majestic) held grimly in his fist, had, against all precedent agreed to speak to the young sculptor, who stood guarding his prize exhibit, a massive boulder within which were carved intricate and delicate fronds of fern.

‘Bloody piss, this,’ Painter remarked.

The young sculptor jerked round and for a moment Frances thought he was going to hit the older man. ‘He means the wine,’ she explained.

Painter gave a farmyard bellow. ‘Don’t read a word the arseholes write about you, will you!’ He brought a fist down on the shoulder of the younger man—who reeled backwards as much at the unexpected compliment as at the force.

Frances, seeing Patrick into a taxi, said, ‘That was kind of you—he went the colour of your socks!’ at which Painter went quite pink himself.

‘How’s the widow?’

Frances had told Painter, when she last visisted, that she had been staying with the widow of ‘an old friend’. Now she explained that she had been invited to the country with Bridget again but hadn’t gone on account of the show.

‘I’m an “old friend” too, aren’t I? Come and visit me instead. Fred and Ginger would like to see you…’ he yelled through the open window as the taxi pulled away.

Back home, Frances ran a bath under Peter’s watchful eye. He waited, like a fussy nurse, to see that she had rubbed and patted dry all the crevices of her naked body, before he slipped back, through the hole in reality, into the windy dark.

It is easier to refuse an invitation if you have a guest staying. Part of Bridget’s reason for asking Frances up to Farings again was a hesitation over Mr Godwit’s promise to take her birdwatching. So when the offer showed no sign of being renewed she was at first relieved—then, perversely, a little annoyed. It was one thing to turn down an invitation; another to have the prospect withdrawn.

Bridget took herself into the garden and did some heavy digging; the ground was clay and she had to work hard to clear the patch of ground where she had decided to grow beans.

‘“Nine bean rows will I have there,”’ she intoned to herself, ‘“…And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”’ What did the young Yeats want with
nine
bean rows? Nine bean rows would feed an army.

Bridget had never quite trusted the poetic grasp of the natural world since she had detected a confusion between ‘alder’ and ‘elder’ in the work of a contemporary poet. She had written to the poet to point out the error but, unsurprisingly, had received no reply. It was not a mistake
you would find Shakespeare making even though he was sometimes shaky on his geography. Maybe it was just a matter of what one felt was important—for her, and for Shakespeare, the difference between elders and alders mattered—for other people it might be the nonexistent coastline of Bohemia.

Bridget was lighting a fire when someone rapped on the window. Looking out she saw the sweep.

‘Meant to call earlier—you’ve been gardening.’

Bridget explained about the bean rows.

‘Going to put any broad beans in? They’re my favourite—the first broad beans with potato and mayonnaise—a meal for a king!’

There was tea brewing in the brown pot.

‘That’s apple you’re burning.’ The man sniffed like a connoisseur. ‘How are the rooks doing?’

‘“The rook-delighting heaven”,’ said Bridget automatically. As she spoke a cloud passed across the face of the sun, darkening the room, and she shivered. A goose walking over her grave. She hoped whatever it was that had looked like Peter wasn’t cast out naked.

‘Ah yes, Yeats—the “injustice of the skies”. I like that one. One I don’t like is “Innisfree” with the “evening full of the linnet’s wing”. The linnet’s wing is brown—it’s the head that’s pink, if he wanted to talk sunsets. Still, you can’t have everything.’

‘How funny,’ said Bridget, ‘I was just thinking about that, too. I was thinking that nine bean rows was far too many for a single man.’

‘Unless he meant bean
poles
,’ said Mr Godwit. ‘Nine bean poles in a wigwam. He’s a great poet—I suppose we should give him the benefit of the doubt.’

‘Then he should have said so!’ A poet should be accurate.

There was a pause.

‘It could be he didn’t mean to refer to the colour pink at all,’ Bridget said, relenting. ‘It might just be the wings—that peculiar whirring sound of birds’ flight you get just before dusk—that he felt the evening was full of, and the pink heads get confused with sunsets…’

Shyness mingled in the air with the apple smoke. Mr Godwit drank his tea and they both stared at the fire as if it held some arcane secret.

‘Well, I must be going.’

‘Thank you for coming then,’ Bridget said politely.

‘Goodbye then,’ said the sweep. He went out of the door and down the path.

Bridget thought: I didn’t want to go anyway. I wouldn’t have known what to talk to him about.

‘Just thinking,’ said Mr Godwit, putting his head back round the door. ‘If you’d like to come to the coast with me tomorrow…? There’s been talk of sightings of choughs.’

The air was sharp with the scent of incipient spring and the sun on the field was laying the lightest benediction on the pale ranks of spring wheat when at 8 a.m. the sound of a diesel engine could be heard coming up the lane.

‘Hope you don’t mind leaving at this hour,’ Mr Godwit enquired, declutching to negotiate the steep mud ruts. ‘Only, by this time of year the traffic gets going early at the weekends.’

In near silence they drove through the greening Shropshire
countryside. Occasionally Mr Godwit pointed out objects of local interest: the old cottage hospital, now being turned into tasteful apartments; the house where a local bigamist had lived, supposedly with a third wife under the floorboards; an oxbow bend in the river—good for frogspawn. Bridget’s mind roamed back to Peter—or whatever it was that had looked like Peter in her bedroom. Speculating about the place into which she had watched her husband vanish, she hoped it might be soft and warm—like down feathers plucked from the breast of some vast night-plumaged goose. Peter—wherever he was—would need comfort. Had she given him comfort? Probably not enough; but then, maybe nothing one gave another person was ever quite enough…?

Bridget might have been pleasantly surprised to learn that Peter himself had no complaints on this score. Had he been asked—as he might have been, for who knows the form of that measureless infinity which Bridget had been contemplating—he would have answered that his life with Bridget had been better than he could ever have expected—much more than he deserved, for deep down he was a modest man.

As we know from his early declaration to Frances, Peter loved his wife and admired her well-delineated character. If his own character was more susceptible to influence, and, as a consequence, more shifting, he accepted that as a fault on his part and a virtue on hers. Her uncompromising nature made him feel that, even if he had not found them for himself, there were certainties in the world.

For Peter the prospect of certainty was a kind of grail. His first wife—whom he married because she flattered
his vanity—had delivered all certainty an almost fatal blow when she dismissed her own prenuptial declarations as, ‘the sort of things people say—of course I didn’t mean them!’ Odd as it may sound, the idea that people might say things they didn’t mean was a difficult one for Peter, though he himself could hardly be said to be always quite square with the truth. But the gap between what we are ourselves and what we want others to be is rarely measured, and a certain simplicity—naivety, almost—was part of Peter’s character. In fact this was one of the traits in him which Bridget later found attractive.

Bridget and Peter met at a café in Notting Hill in the days when Bridget was still running her stall in the Portobello Road. She was sitting at a table reading when Peter entered the café in search of some refuge against the sudden sweep of nauseous dizziness with which he was occasionally afflicted. Peter noticed at once the aura of calm which surrounded Bridget and which was to make up a strand in her attraction for him. He sat down, near her table, and tried to make out what it was she was reading.

In a moment of hilarity afterwards, Bridget suggested that it was usually women who resorted to such tricks; having failed to see what it was that so absorbed the handsome blonde that she had no mind to notice him, Peter made as if to get himself another cup of coffee at the counter, staggered, grabbed at the table where Bridget was sitting, and thus, finally, succeeded in drawing her attention.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he had said, dramatically impersonating the giddiness he actually felt, ‘let me get you another,’ for in the cafuffle he had engineered, her cup of tea had spilled.

The tea had penetrated the leaves of
The Inferno
and
the discovery of the name of the engrossing book had given Peter pause: he was not sure he was up to a woman who read Dante.

‘But it’s not a bit “intellectual”, really,’ Bridget had said, on the mirthful occasion on which the subterfuge had been acknowledged. ‘It’s full of sense. Just what hell would be like—if there was a hell. But then I was brought up a Catholic so I’m conditioned to notions like hell and purgatory.’

At this time Peter was not a Catholic himself. When later he became one we know he never let on to his wife. The cautious part of him feared a jocular response from Bridget—and caution is often a sound guide. It is likely that though Bridget would not have openly mocked him for adopting the religion she had fought to escape, her humour might have been too rough to bear without resentment—and instinctively Peter knew that resentment is an enemy to marriage.

Bridget nearly cried out when the sweep’s van came in sight of the long, low line of shining, shivering grey. She loved the sea: an ancestor had been a pirate and privately she liked to imagine that piratical blood flowed in her own veins. Perhaps, she had speculated as a child, the man had been hanged? Why, when the thought of hanging made her feel sick, was the idea of it in connexion with a relative so intoxicating?

She got out of the car rubbing her back which had seized up during the journey.

‘That’s the way down, there,’ Stanley Godwit pointed. ‘It’s pretty steep, mind.’

‘Damn!’ Bridget said, ‘I forgot to bring boots.’

But this proved no deterrent. ‘What size are you? Six, I’d say. You can use Corrie’s boots. She keeps them in the van—you and she’ll be about the same size.’

Cordelia—King Lear’s daughter—‘Choughs are those birds with red bills, aren’t they?’—there were choughs in
King Lear
.

‘Part of the rook family. Used to nest here common as gulls a couple of hundred years ago.’

When blind Gloucester, seeking to end his life, stands on the edge of the cliff which, even in the play’s terms, isn’t really there, his son, Edgar, to support the delusion, describes the dizzy heights his father imagines he stands on the verge of:
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air/ Show scarce so gross as beetles…
But could Shakespeare, living only in London and Warwickshire, ever have seen the sea? Bridget wondered, her ankles bending against the steepness of the descent. Her grandfather, who swore the playwright had been to Ireland and back, would have said so. And when you heard how Shakespeare wrote about the sea, it seemed incredible if he had never seen it. Was it possible that, like the cliff where the supposed choughs are sighted, Shakespeare’s ‘sea’ was merely spun from his imagination? But then so was everything else he wrote ‘spun’: Hamlet, Lear, Gertrude, Cordelia—like the choughs, you could hardly say they didn’t exist, they were realer than most people. What kind of existence did a character in a play have? Did Shakespeare’s characters ‘exist’ in another world, in your mind, the way that a memory did—or a dead person, as Peter now seemed to…? But where, or what, was Peter’s world now? Was what she had seen real, or was it just in her mind…?

But then she herself, she had often speculated, was no more than a dramatic construction, made up of fleeting feelings, idle introspections, vain wonderings—glimpses in the ‘glass of fashion’, she thought, taking hold of the sweep’s hard hand as he helped her down the drop to the uneven, many-pebbled shore.