Read Instances of the Number 3 for Free Online Page B

bought her a bunch, adding casually, ‘when I die, you can send me some of these.’
    In the split second before he died Peter remembered these words, and remembered that, unlike Bridget, Frances had not disputed the likelihood of his death.

8
    ‘Does Zahin know about me and Peter?’ Frances asked.
    They had been shifting furniture for hours. The coolness over the Christmas bowl had been patched up—or, more accurately, had been passed over, since neither woman wished to be thought undignified. It was Bridget, though, who had made the peacemaking gesture, asking Frances if she was free for a weekend at Farings, the Shropshire house.
    The cynical part of Frances had suggested, when she arrived at the slightly austere brick house, that she had maybe been invited as a useful pair of hands. Bridget had piled a whole lot of furniture into the downstairs rooms with no apparent plan as to where it was to end up. Frances had hauled and dragged, pushed and shifted until her back and ribs protested. Finally she sat down on a roll of carpet. ‘Where am I sleeping, as a matter of interest?’
    ‘Hell!’ said Bridget. ‘I forgot. No bed.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘There’s only one bed—I was planning to bring one of the ones from the shop—it’s a sweetheart bed, with intertwined hearts on the head and foot. But I never picked it up.’
    ‘Uh-huh,’ said Frances. ‘Sweetheart’ made her think of the boy’s odd, telepathic comment. Which was when she asked, ‘Does Zahin know about me and Peter?’
    But Bridget was preoccupied with the sleeping arrangements. ‘There’s the sofa but I don’t even think I’ve brought enough bedding—damn.’
    ‘Don’t bother,’ said Frances, coolly, ‘I can stay at the hotel.’ She suspected the forgotten bed and bedding were a ploy and that Bridget preferred her not to sleep in the house after all.
    Bridget, sensing this, said, ‘The hotel’s closed down—I noticed as we were passing—the nearest other one’s miles away. But if you didn’t mind we could always share—I mean, it’s a big bed, it was Peter’s and mine!’
    Looking at Frances she started to laugh, and Frances, seated on the dust-filled Indian carpet, caught the mood and began to laugh too. Helplessly, the two women wheezed and Bridget all but rolled about the room.
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Frances, wiping tears from her eyes—brought on as much by the dusty carpet as the laughter. ‘We’ll be able to tell no one—people will think—I don’t know what they’d think!’
    ‘Who cares?’ Bridget was soberer now.
    ‘What would Peter think?’ Frances asked as a while later together they made the bed upstairs.
    Bridget reflected a moment. Outside, through the west-facing window, the far hills were turning indigo—‘blue remembered’, she thought, like Housman’s.
    ‘He’d have been sorry not to be joining us,’ she finally announced.
    It was not that Bridget had failed to hear Frances’s question about Zahin but that she had decided to ignore it. She hadn’t yet assembled her impressions of the boy. Christmas had been…she needed time to ponder…
    Except in the first years of their marriage, Christmas with Peter had never been a tranquil event. Bridget’s consciousness of a regular Christmas Eve assignation, long before she met the object of it, caused her bridled indignation. To say she was without ill feelings towards Peter’s other ‘associations’—as it was her habit to call them—would have been stretching a point. Possibly there are people large-hearted enough to offer perfect charity towards those with whom they are asked to share the person of their beloved; but purity must be its own reward: while commendable it is hardly interesting, and anyhow Bridget was not among this angelic band. On the other hand, she had learned the dangers of bearing grudges.
    Bridget had been born and bred in Limerick, in the south-west of Ireland. Her father had been tricked by a phantom pregnancy into an