Instances of the Number 3

It takes a rare man to know he is afraid—and why. Peter was not aware that he was fearful of other people’s power to remove themselves, nor that he had chosen Bridget because although she exuded a power which did not always make him feel comfortable, it did not, at least, feel as if it might desert him. And in this he was correct. That he was capable of being harmed, perhaps mortally, through loss of another’s love, was a secret, even from himself. Dormant and lethal, it lay hidden at the centre of Peter’s universe, until the October day when the truck driver adjusted his cassette and exploded Peter’s former reality.

It is part of nature’s way to meet threat with superfluity: toads puff up their skin, snakes rear, peacocks rattle and spread their tails; the habit of hyperbole is but another version of this florid system of defence. Lying in her bath, inhaling the scent of meadow flowers, Bridget remembered Peter, late one Christmas Eve, returning, as she now understood, from seeing Frances. She heard again the familiar accent of anxiety, concerned to account for time which could not be accounted for except by honesty or omission—‘I would have been home earlier but there was an accident on the M4—terrible catastrophe—I shouldn’t be surprised if someone got killed!’—and wept for the way life had apparently taken him at his word.

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The Soho gallery which Frances managed, dealt, among other contemporary artists, in the works of Patrick Painter. Although Frances did not own the gallery she was indispensable to its running: it was understood that without her skills Gambit Galleries would never have hung on to its most prestigious name.

There were rules for dealing with Patrick Painter: you did not call him before noon; you never enquired about his health, or his financial affairs, and no one was permitted to comment on his name. A journalist from a respected broadsheet had lost a promised interview because he had been unable to refrain from audibly murmuring, ‘Painter by name…’ Frances, who arrived too late to prevent this outrage, explained, ‘It is not his own name, you see. It was his stepfather’s—they didn’t get on.’ ‘Why for Christ’s sake didn’t he change it then, if it offends him so much?’ the aggrieved young journalist had asked, conscious of the hole in the copy this upset would make, and doubly conscious of his editor’s displeasure.

Painter lived in Isleworth with his mother and his tortoises. Frances had sometimes speculated that the mother and the tortoises occupied interchangeable places in the artist’s mind. It was to visit Painter that Monday morning that Frances had returned the previous evening from Shropshire.

When Painter asked to see Frances, it was generally to seek her view on some painting on which he was stuck. As with everything to do with him these meetings involved a certain amount of ritual before a hint of anything to do with work-in-hand could be broached.

‘So you’ve deigned to come and see me, have you?’ Painter said, meeting her at the front door and indicating she should go ahead into the front room. ‘About bloody time, too!’ He swept a chair free of a pile of unsorted magazines and papers.

Paradoxically, the house, although apparently a tremendous muddle, always had an ordering effect on Frances, a product, she supposed, of the fact that the house itself made up much of the subject matter of the artist’s orderly paintings. There was some to-do about the biscuits—the tin could not be found. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the ginger nuts. What has the bloody bitch done with them?’

Frances was used to this. ‘If by that you mean Mrs Hicks, I think it most unlikely she has done anything. I expect you’ve eaten them.’ She looked about the Formica-covered kitchen until she found a tin with a picture of the Queen with her corgis on it. ‘These shortbread, will they do?’

‘At a pinch—but you would prefer ginger nuts…?’

Frances said she’d prefer not to have a biscuit at all lest she grew fat.

‘Rubbish, you have no arse to speak of.’

‘Well, I hope to keep things that way.’

‘Nonsense, a woman should have a decent arse.’

Other than the nude models he must have drawn from in his pre-abstract days, Frances doubted Painter had ever had anything to do with a woman’s bottom. Nevertheless, because he seemed to like it, she kept up the myth of his erotic interests.

‘Where are the tortoises? Are they out of hibernation?’

‘Fred is—Ginger is still comatose, lazy cow.’

‘Can one call a tortoise “cow”?’

Frances was not deceived by Painter’s habits of speech: she knew him to be a man of warm, if secret, sensibility. After Peter was killed she had found herself ringing the artist in need of the kindness which lay beneath the superficial savageness. Also, he was from Cork and she liked an Irish accent. Maybe that was why she got on with Bridget…?

Painter had got round to his current fix. ‘It’s this effing catastrophe,’ he complained, indicating a canvas composed of tiny delicately painted squares of lilac—recognisably a mutation of the hall wallpaper. ‘Look at it, will you just—I’ll have to destroy the whole bollocking thing.’

‘Maybe it just needs some balance,’ said Frances carefully. She had decided long ago that it didn’t much matter what one said to Painter about his pictures—all that was required was to sound as if what was said made sense. What was important was that Painter felt safe in showing her uncompleted work. It was like being the stooge to a highly strung comic—he relied on her to feed him the right lines.

‘No, no, no, no,’ said Painter, falling into the familiar patter, ‘it’s vile, vile—I’ll have to ditch it.’

‘Hmm,’ said Frances, ‘I see what you mean—but it would be a pity.’

They stood side by side and stared at the canvas. Frances had noticed before that Patrick was nice to be near: he gave one space; there was no crowding in—or pulling away.

A tortoise, presumably Fred, ambled through the door and rested where a patch of sun lit up the pattern of the carpet.

‘“Gaming in a gap of sunlight”,’ said Painter resting his foot on the tortoise’s back. ‘I’ll scrap it then, shall I?’

This was the crucial moment. Frances gambled, ‘Maybe you’re right…’

‘Or maybe I could do something with it,’ said Painter, quickly. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you generally know.’

‘That’s all right then,’ said Painter relieved. ‘Glad we sorted that out. Damn that tart—I could do with a ginger nut.’

Frances walked down to the corner shop with Painter where he bought Typhoo tea, ‘Extra strength’, and two packets of biscuits. The woman in the shop said, ‘You still want the Sunday Sport, Mr Pinter?’

‘Pinter?’ asked Frances outside. ‘What’s this?’

A sly smile spread over Painter’s face. ‘Their mistake, not my doing. She thinks I’m Harold Pinter. Writes plays,’ he added helpfully.

‘I know he’s a playwright—a highly civilised one. What’s going on?’

‘It’s an identity swap,’ said Painter, slightly sheepish. ‘When the silly cow took over from the Patels they told her I was famous—and she read the name as Pinter. She’s got a daughter doing Media Arts at Luton. I can’t help it if the woman’s a star-fucker.’

‘Is that why you’re ordering the Sunday Sport?’ asked Frances, light dawning. ‘Honestly, Patrick, how infantile!’

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If an impression has been given that Peter Hansome was not a particularly brave man it would be misleading. At boarding school he passed through the ordeal of separation from home and familiars without even the sharpest-eyed, and most malicious, of his peers noticing that the experience left him feeling he was bleeding alive. More heroic still, he resisted the urge to find relief from his own despair by joining in with tormenting those less successful at concealment. He became popular, up to a point, never reaching that pinnacle of popularity which, from the start, attends the lucky—if luck is what it is. And ‘luck’ made up no conspicuous part of Peter Hansome’s history.

Once we are in the way of losing things, life seems to determine that other goods shall go: having lost his father Peter went on to lose his mother, to a Member of Parliament who chose Peter’s siblings, Marcus and Clare, as the foci of his step-parental care.

There is a kind of person who, if aware that an affection is not directed towards them, will set out to destroy it. With the acuity of the sadistic, Evelyn Hansome’s second husband recognised the deep link between his wife and her second son. Such bonds between mothers and sons are not uncommon—nineteenth-century fiction depends upon them; but they should not, for that reason, be dismissed as unreal. Peter watched his mother falter in her expressions of love towards him and knew that she did so, not through any dereliction but through the desire to protect him. But understanding does not necessarily dispel reaction: as the mother became guarded, so did the son. When his stepfather died it was difficult for Peter to find a way back to any spontaneous expression of feeling.

By the time he reached Cambridge Peter presented to the world the character of a conventional public schoolboy. He was rangy and, on the surface at least, good-humoured. Differences from others he expressed in minor, socially acceptable ways, by changing subjects from history to anthropology, for example. About this time he made friends with his father who, when Peter left university, celebrated the event by taking his son to a Soho strip joint. Peter responded to the prominent breasts and buttocks with an excited fascination he later defined to himself as loathing—though whether it was the naked gleaming girls or the profusely sweating figure of his father beside him which produced this reaction he could not have said. These uneasy emotions he ascribed to feelings of loyalty to his mother. It was the last year of conscription and he was about to leave for military service.

He went to serve in Malaya, where he learned to command men and issue orders. And it was in Malaya that Peter Hansome first fell in love.

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Zahin explained that he attended a college near the King’s Road. ‘I am doing physics, also maths and chemistry.’ He sighed.

‘But why do them if that is not what you want?’ Bridget asked, and Zahin had explained that this is what his family wished for him.

‘I am to be a chemical engineer. In America there are big salaries for this work.’

Long ago Bridget had recognised that not having children put her at a disadvantage in understanding parental motive. Unimaginable to her the idea of setting another human being to do anything for which they had no inherent desire. Yet a rebellion against a parent was the basis of her own escape; maybe it was necessary that the young were made to comply with uncongenial demands—to ensure a kind of survival of the fittest…?

Zahin, despite his expressed reservations, appeared to take his academic obligations seriously. Each morning, already showered and neatly dressed in his sober navy or grey pullover, he woke Bridget with a tray of tea. Only occasionally, on half-days and holidays, did he break out and dress in the colourful shirts, such as the blue silk he had been wearing the evening she returned from Farings. These he ironed with a professional skill. What he seemed to like best, however, was cleaning.

It had not escaped Bridget’s notice that Zahin’s programme of cleaning included her bedroom. Not usually at a loss, she was unsure whether or not to take this up with the boy. On the face of it, it was an atrocious invasion—it was clear to her that he had not only tidied her dressing table, but that his domestic efforts had extended to more private areas.