Instances of the Number 3 (15 page)

Frances had not confided her suspicions to Bridget that Zahin’s sister might have taken the sapphire ring. The ring was hardly a subject she could safely broach—and since Zahin’s return Frances thought she detected in Bridget a renewed prejudice in Zahin’s favour. Very likely that would extend to the sister. Anyway, Frances was not the sort to make easy accusations. She had been intending to wear the ring to the reunion—better explore that avenue first.

The botched encounter with Ed Bittle had left her jangled. A brisk walk would do no harm—and really she must get back in shape, so she might as well kill two birds…She set out in her track suit for her old school.

Not expecting anyone to be there on a Sunday, Frances was rewarded by the sight of the imposing front doors standing open. Going up the steps she saw a woman mopping the marble floor—and for the first time realised that this floor was often in her dreams.

‘Hi,’ said Frances. ‘I’m sorry to barge in.’

The woman stopped mopping to inspect the source of interruption.

‘That’s all right, darling,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be here myself but my daughter’s sick and I couldn’t come in last night. There was a party they had here.’

‘I know,’ said Frances. ‘I was at it. That’s why I called by—I may have lost something here.’

‘What’s that you lost then?’

‘My ring.’ Frances tapped the ring finger of her left hand. ‘A square-cut sapphire—you haven’t found it?’

‘I haven’t, darling, but I only got here myself ten minutes. That your engagement ring you lost?’

Frances looked at the woman’s hand which grasped the handle of the mop. A multitude of hooped brilliants glittered and sparkled on the fingers. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘My fiance?gave it to me before he died.’ It seemed a shame to waste the tragedy.

‘That’s too bad. Listen, if Claris finds it for you she keep it safe. What’s your name, then, darling?’

‘Frances—Frances Slater.’

‘You go look round where you like, then, Frances. Claris’ll look out for it too.’

Frances made her way back down the stairs her eyes peeled for a fragment of bright blue, but with no success. The room where Susannah had enquired about her skin proved equally barren. Nothing in the dining room either, though you could hardly look everywhere. She made her way to the cloakroom where she had gone to wash her hands. The same site as the old loos but now transformed into washrooms resembling some smartish hotel. She was conscious of a disapproving thought: Can all this luxury be good for young girls? How mean she was getting! She
herself had used these very washrooms, in their unfurbished state, to put on, with a trembling hand, eyeliner to meet Paul Madden, from the boys’ school. Paul Madden had gone on to manage a successful rock band—she’d have been grateful for one of these mirrors then!

No ring in the washrooms either.

Claris had finished mopping the black-and-white marble when Frances reappeared. She agreed to keep ‘an eye out’ and accepted Frances’s telephone number ‘in case’.

Not finding something you value is worse than losing it in the first place. Frances tried to jog away her despondence on the way home, but, getting tired, stopped at a café and ordered a caffé latte. An acute longing for Peter came over her. He would have minded about the ring and anxiously joined in the search. It seemed some ill omen that she should lose her most treasured memento of him—maybe it was a punishment for the moment of weakness with Ed…?

‘You see, Peter, we have become feeble as a species—the idea of punishment makes us feel queasy, wouldn’t you say? And yet let us look at the question: what is “punishment”, when we think about it?’

Despite Father Gerard’s words, Peter, as it happened, was no stranger to punishment. His stepfather was an advocate of it—a subtle one, but subtlety is no great deterrent when it comes to inflicting misery, often the reverse. When it was noted how Peter and his mother shared certain jokes, the language of understanding, a treat for the other children would be proposed, at a time when Peter could not reasonably join the party. Several
pantomimes, circuses and boating trips mysteriously materialised when Peter was staying with a friend, or playing in a school rugger match. Marcus—who later became a prison governor, and used this regular lesson in injustice to good effect—was too short-sighted to be good at sport; Clare, the baby, was always available for off-the-cuff outings.

The effects of this partiality were apparent later in life—though both Marcus and Clare sent flowers and condolences neither attended Peter’s funeral—but at the time Peter took it all with no outward fuss. He became reconciled to others’ pleasure as a source of pain for himself. It was not, anyway, the fact of missing the clowns, or the dame in drag, or the picnic at the regatta—it was the fact of being deliberately excluded which hurt, and the frightening sense of power that this gave to the excluder.

‘But purgatory is not exclusive, Peter,’ suggested Father Gerard, his slightly droning voice as usual at odds with the levels of his enthusiasm. ‘Not at all. Except for a few blessed souls whose state of sanctity renders them immediately ready for heaven, most of us—and I count myself very much among this bunch—will need time to find forgiveness for our venial sins—and that is what venial means, you see—it comes from the Latin
venia
and means forgiveness.’

Forgiveness was not a concept which, until now, had had much reality for Peter. He might be said to have ‘forgiven’ his mother for seeming to turn her face from him, but he himself would not have called that ‘forgiveness’. In the quite straightforward way which modern psychologists will always wrongly question, he loved his mother, and knew that she—for her own reasons—in
turn loved his stepfather. He perfectly understood her difficulty. As to being himself ‘forgiven’, he had not the least sense of what that might feel like. And if you have no experience of being forgiven, you can hardly forgive yourself.

If Peter remained reticent about his reasons for approaching the Roman Catholics it was because he himself did not really understand it. He never made an explicit connexion between what he had embarked on, his meeting with Atkins in the Brompton Road, his misty sense of his own betrayal and the place of the nuns in Veronica’s life—which according to her they had saved. (Veronica had been found in a basket, ‘like Moses’, she had later been told—but not in anything like so salubrious an environment as bulrushes.) But a sense of shame had surrounded the memory of Veronica—obscurely he knew, or sensed, he had acted shabbily.

‘Look, it’s a caring concept,’ Father Gerard had said, his eyes alight with the zeal of hope, ‘an opportunity for ordinary, fallible people to be cleansed—and that’s what Purgatory means, Peter—a place of purging. It’s a refining process really—a kind of spiritual health farm on a vast scale, if you like. Free as well. No credit cards in the afterlife!’

If Peter found anything to object to in Father Gerard’s lively contemporary comparisons, he never said so. He was too busy finding relief in the thought that what you had done could, after a fashion, be undone again. And he was reassured by his instructor’s pronouncement that purgatory, whatever it was, was not likely to be the sort of place where you knew other people were off enjoying themselves at circuses. It seemed quite democratic, a point that Father Gerard was keen to emphasise.

‘They made a mistake, the so-called reformers, abandoning the notion simply because there’s no mention of it in the scriptures. The Church existed long before the scriptures were written. People forget that! Look at it this way, we’re all, every man jack of us guilty of some misbehaviour we haven’t come to terms with. Tell me, Peter, how could we ever rest in eternal bliss with no chance to set the record straight! Answer me, Peter, that!’

Sometimes when we give way to depression and let ourselves sink down, other, lighter, moods may bubble up. Frances, drinking her coffee, was cheered by a passing elderly man, wearing a top hat and a red rose in his buttonhole—off to some wedding, perhaps?—who, sighting her seated at the table, raised the tall hat and gave a distinctive bow. And Peter, who had disliked caffé latte and never would drink it, was grateful for this act of old-fashioned courtesy towards his mistress.

Bridget might not ordinarily have remembered the hastily flung-off suggestion that the people of Merrow come round for a drink. But maybe she had motives for reviving it. One bank holiday had passed; with another looming it seemed the moment to reintroduce the idea. Perhaps she didn’t quite like the prospect of hosting a social event alone, or perhaps she wanted company? Anyway, she rang Frances.

‘Do you fancy a trip to the country this weekend at all?’

‘Not if Zahin’s coming too!’

The association with Bridget was teaching Frances to speak her mind. Neither she nor Peter had been very good at that. That morning, lying in bed, she had thought how little, really, Peter had asked for himself.

Bridget gave one of her barking laughs. ‘Don’t worry! He’ll be here: he’s on a campaign to twist Mickey round his little finger.’

Frances couldn’t understand this attitude of Bridget’s towards what looked like naked manipulation. She gave
an impression she almost enjoyed it—certainly she seemed to indulge it.

What Frances didn’t understand was that for Bridget watching Zahin’s posturings was almost as good as being at a play.

‘Will you notice, Bridget,’ Sister Mary Eustasia had said, ‘the difference between the Players, whom Hamlet welcomes with open arms, and his so-called friends who try to manipulate him.’

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops
…Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are only playing the parts of friends, in reality colluding with the murdering king. And Hamlet was right to mind, the young Bridget had thought.
It is as easy as lying
, he says, seeming to challenge the puzzled pair to play on the recorders, but really meaning to show them that he has seen through their act and that he’s on to how they are attempting to ‘play’ him. But they’re no match for their fleet fellow student, poor, slow-witted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They go to their deaths in the end because they don’t understand the difference between honestly acting a part and impersonating a truth. And yet it is a fine line…

She was reflecting on this as she watched Frances busily looking in the cupboards at Farings for bowls to put crisps and nuts in. ‘Really, Bridget, you haven’t brought very much for them to eat!’

‘It’ll make sure they don’t stay long!’

Bridget, like many people when facing the realities of their social planning, was regretting the party. It had seemed fine enough when she had tossed it into the
awkwardness of the meeting with the Godwit family. But there had been the awkwardness since of the trip to Ludlow. She had called the sweep and learned that Corrie and her husband would be up for the late May bank holiday weekend. She had also called the Rector, Bill Dark, her neighbour, Mrs Nettles, and the local doctor and his wife, whom she considered it prudent to be on friendly terms with.

And of course there was Frances. For half a second, she caught herself wondering what Stanley Godwit would make of Frances. He might like her nose which resembled a bird’s beak.

It was clear to Frances that if the party were to work she was going to have to run it. Bridget, whose scheme it was, after all, was plainly going to do nothing. She had suddenly gone off to fetch a book and was now lying on the sofa, with her shoes off, reading.

‘Shall I cut some cheese into cubes?’ Frances asked, more as a way to recall Bridget’s attention.

‘Eugh! How bourgeois! They can cut their own cheese if they want any.’

‘Very well,’ said Frances offended. ‘I’m going up to have a bath.’

But Bridget didn’t hear her because she was rereading the play scene.

‘Of course,’ she said aloud, but only to herself. ‘I see now, it was a choice. It was up to Hamlet. He could choose what kind of ghost it would turn out to be…’

Frances said afterwards that the party was one of Bridget’s worst ideas. The Godwit father and daughter and a more than usually pink husband arrived in a disconnected
group in which they more or less hung together all evening. Frances made efforts to engage Corrie, but it was uphill work of the question-and-answer kind which tends to defeat sympathy. It is true that Corrie’s husband tried to talk to the Rector, but the latter so hugged the drink that any filling of glasses had to be done in negotiation with him, which meant constant interruptions. Bridget, who was resistant to Frances’s expectation that all human encounters should be made easy, made no attempt to be sociable. The doctor’s wife rang to say that her husband was ‘coming down with flu’, which Bridget opined to no one in particular was ‘not, in a doctor, very promising’. Stanley Godwit looked awkward and out of place while Mrs Nettles, in spite of her name, proved to be a mild-natured old woman with no conversation.

By the end of the evening Frances, who had worked the room twice, was exhausted, so that when, having said goodbye to the guests, Bridget remarked that she believed Mrs Nettles was suffering from unrequited love for Bill Dark, Frances retorted that she believed this was just a fantasy of Bridget’s of the kind which Bridget clearly took malicious pleasure in concocting. Bridget, boosted by this response, had replied that it was as well one of them had some imagination or poor Peter would have been bored out of his wits.

This was the last straw—as perhaps Bridget intended it should be. Frances retired to the recently installed sweetheart bed, where she spent the night in wakeful fury.

Bridget was also awake but more calmly. She had spent the evening longing to resume her reading of
Hamlet
. Living with Peter had eroded her habit of night-time reading. And it was still a thing she had some resistance to
back in the Fulham house. But here, where there was no difficulty in sleeping, quite often she read till the green light had made its way through the thin curtains. She read now with a lover’s excitement…

In the Offertory of the old Requiem Mass there is a petition that the soul of the departed might be freed from the pains of perpetual punishment. ‘Sweet’, suggests one eminent authority, ‘is the consolation of the dying man, who, conscious of imperfection, believes that there are others to make intercession for him, when his own time for merit has expired; soothing to the afflicted survivors the thought that they possess powerful means of relieving their friend.’

‘This is a moot point,’ Father Gerard had said, his forehead furrowed, ‘and is very much a matter of current debate, you understand, Peter—but since the early Fathers it has been the teaching of the Church that the attitude of the living can swing the afterlife of those who have gone before us.’

‘Like the way parents can affect their kids’ futures?’ Impossible not to be affected by Father Gerard’s habits of speech.

‘Exactly!’ Father Gerard’s expansive potato face radiated approval. ‘A loving mum or dad smooths a child’s path through the troubles of this world. In our supplications for the dead we alleviate them from the burden of their sins and steer them towards the everlasting light—a trouble shared is a trouble halved—lighten the load, Peter, that’s what we are enjoined to do. Lighten the load!’

‘A trouble shared is a trouble doubled,’ Bridget had sometimes said when Peter had occasionally dared to ask what she was thinking. The fact is that such moments of thoughtfulness were often the result of her minding Peter’s ‘house calls’. This was one of the things about her life with Peter she now regretted. She wanted very much to see him to tell him what was on her mind. If she had any recollection of the Catholic teaching about the afterlife it was hazy—but what she did remember were Sister Mary Eustasia’s words about the ghost.

‘Whatever kind of creature comes back from the grave with tales of his own torment? Is that a loving father, now, weighing down his son with frightful news like that? Hamlet should have listened to the Player King instead. There’s the real tragedy, Bridget!’

Bridget had gone to see her second production of
Hamlet
when she was working at a hotel in Bath. This time there was no need to put on concealing make-up. She could have gone with Terence, the second sauce chef in the kitchens. Terence was sweet on Bridget and had presented her, when he had heard the blonde Irish girl with the laugh was keen on poetry, with a mauve-bound copy of Tennyson’s poems which had belonged to his Grandad.

Bridget didn’t much care for Tennyson but she did have a soft spot for Terence who reminded her of a giraffe, so tall and thin he was, with that nervous blotchy skin and Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his spindly neck like a ping-pong ball. For all that she was fond of Terence, she was deliberately obtuse over his hints about the two of them maybe going along together—her having let slip that she was taking her night off at the Theatre Royal—
and sharing a Chinese afterwards…? She wanted to have a chance to concentrate on the play unencumbered by fear, or the social obligation of worrying how anyone else was enjoying it.

The six months before taking the job in Bath had been spent by Bridget in Rouen, where she had learned to like things French. Among the things she learned to like was the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, which she picked up from another Jean-Paul who worked in a bar, where Bridget also picked up less abstract matters.

Jean-Paul had introduced her to the philosopher’s notion of the human tendency to play a part. ‘The waiter, you see, plays
’imself
, Brigitte. In this way’e is and—this is the brilliance of Sartre!—is
not
merely a waiter…’

Bridget, who was herself ‘merely’ a waitress at this time, was taken by this concept. For all their other differences the Jean-Pauls’ and Sister Mary Eustasia’s philosophies had something in common. She remembered this as she sat in the Theatre Royal, watching, for only the second time, the play within her favourite play.

‘The Mouse Trap’ Hamlet calls it. Poor Terence had blushed horribly when it emerged—much later, when she had repented and was chatting to him about her evening’s entertainment—that this wasn’t the play by Agatha Christie which had been running in London, even all that time ago, seemingly for ever…

And then it started like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons…
Bridget jerked awake. The cock in the farm by Mrs Nettles was crowing—early again, for, strictly speaking, it was still night. The play had run on in her mind as she slept—or wandered, as it seemed to her,
between worlds: between the world of Mrs Nettles’s cock and the cock which dispatches the ghost from Denmark’s battlements. Was that where Peter also wandered, in the space between this world and the next—or one of the next anyway? In her half-awake state she seemed to see many worlds, receding mistily into the dark. Suddenly, it came to her that there were two ghosts—or rather two illusions of the man who had been Old Hamlet: the armoured apparition, who appears on the battlements of Elsinore commanding his son to seek revenge, and the Player King, who acts the part of Hamlet’s father. And for the first time it struck her that these might both be shades of the man Hamlet’s father had been, offering very different ways of approaching his death—ways so different that you might almost say there were two kinds of ghost in
Hamlet
.

Bridget sat up in bed pulling her husband’s check shirt round her. The battered red book had fallen to the floor and her fingers, cold at first, couldn’t find the right place in the rice-paper-thin pages. Here they were, the lines Sister Mary Eustasia had liked to quote:
Most necessary’tis that we forget/To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt
the Player King says, when his wife, the queen, insists she will remain faithful to him for eternity. And yet what does the ghost on the battlement want but a repayment of what he believes he is owed? A life for a life—which shows you should be careful what you ask—for in the end his creator lets him have it sixfold—eightfold, if you count those inseparables, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!

Bridget stared into the shadowy corners of the room where she and Frances had slept together the night she
moved into Farings. No Peter—nor the ghostly shape of him. She thought that for the first time she began to see behind the play’s many-layered arrases, which played different versions of reality. What was the difference between the illusory ghost and the illusory Player King on the stage? Or between impersonation and acting? Or lying and the truth? What, if it came to that, was the difference between the quick and the dead? Did the living merely ‘act’ reality? But in life there was no clear, tangible ‘reality’, only choices, and as you chose you closed your own version of reality round you, like a garment, until it fitted and became your particular fate: vengeful father, faithless wife, betrayed daughter, justifying son…And then that also became the fate of those near you. If Hamlet had chosen the Player King as spokesman on his father’s behalf, and cancelled the ‘debt’ his father was owed, Ophelia and her father—who was a pest it was true, but a harmless enough old busybody—Laertes, Gertrude, Claudius, even the slightly absurd Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, not to mention Hamlet himself, might all have lived—prospered even. All flawed people to be sure—but then Hamlet himself remarks that if we were all treated as we deserved which of us would escape whipping?

And the ghost, might he then have made his way through purgatory—wherever that was—to whatever it is that lies beyond? And whose ghost was he, anyway? Was he Old Hamlet’s or was he also his son’s? It seemed to her that maybe he was neither but the possibilities that lay between the two. Because, she was beginning to see, there was between people an infinitude of possibilities which might be realised. Where did one’s responsibility
to the dead lie? According to Shakespeare it looked as if it was in the hands of the living—the ‘quick’—to decide…