Free Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers Page A

with my husband!’ jeered Bridget. ‘Listen, don’t worry about it—Mickey loves to take umbrage. I’d rather it was you than Zahin she took against—it’s more convenient,’ she added, then, not being quite without kindness, noticed that Frances’s face had that crumpled look as if she might have been crying.
    Frances had, indeed, been crying. Lacking Bridget’s steelier foundations, she was, nonetheless, possessed with more than average self-control. When she wept it was generally in private. And had an impartial observer been present they would have had to report that the crying was, mostly, not of the self-indulgent kind.
    Frances had not cried so thoroughly since she lost Hugh. Or rather, since she told Peter about her younger brother. It was one of the most treasured aspects of her time with Peter that he had encouraged her to cry herheart out—all over him—tears she had not been able to shed when she learned she had lost Hugh.
    Frances and Hugh had shared a language, and a country—like the young Brontës, she had been told since. Only Peter had been trusted with the fictional land she and Hugh had dreamed up together, where children had the power of telepathy and were acknowledged superior to adults.
    If not telepaths in the full sense, Frances and Hugh certainly shared some unspoken communication. On the day that Hugh drove into the gatepost, Frances, a hundred miles away, came down with a migraine so severe that she had to be admitted to hospital. It was in hospital that she was told of her brother’s death, a fact which seemed to cause her so little surprise that the nurse who had come to tell her believed that her patient couldn’t have heard and told her—in identical words—again. ‘We have some very sad news for you, I’m afraid…’
    Frances had found Peter’s arms to encircle her while she cried for Hugh; but there was no one to hold her while she cried for Peter.
    Driving to the Tate, Bridget felt compunction. ‘Let’s have lunch,’ she said, as the London Eye loomed. ‘My treat. I never thanked you properly for your help with Farings.’
    Astonishing how strong a part food plays in our humours. Just as dyspepsia can rapidly translate into bad temper, the offer of a cup of tea, the share of a sandwich or an ice lolly will often provide more of a fillip than the most carefully chosen words. Bridget kept her thoughts to herself but the promise of a meal found its way to Frances.
    ‘I don’t think they do lunch there on a Saturday but I’d love to go somewhere else,’ she said, and felt calmer.
    A short while later, standing with Bridget before a Sickert of two women on a couch (‘I wonder if that’s how Peter saw us?’ Bridget asked herself), Frances turned, and, in the room beyond, caught sight of a large painting.
    A man and woman seated at a café table; even at a distance it was possible to tell that this was a couple engaged in some equivocal escapade. The woman is looking, a little too yearningly, into the face of the man, who has a bunch of flowers at his side, presumably a sop to conscience and not for the woman who is seated by him. Looming over the couple, prepared to take their order, stands the figure of a waiter, manifestly aware of the nuances of the situation his customers find themselves in.
    As she gazed across at the painting, Frances, in peripheral vision, saw another figure also looking—so that after a moment she turned to Bridget to say, ‘Look, over there. For a second I thought it was Peter…’
    Peter, standing before the painting of the Edwardian threesome, felt the eyes of his mistress on him, and turned back round the corner to melt into the crowd.

16
    Bridget had driven up to Farings on the Friday night to be ready for the sweep the following morning.
    The front doorbell rang on the dot of 10 a.m.
    ‘You’re punctual, Mr Godwin.’
    ‘Godwit. Like the bird—everyone makes that mistake. I used to be a psychoanalyst—a job like that you have