Read Online Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers - Free Book Online Page B

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.

14
    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. Onlyoccasionally, 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.
    Bridget’s chests of drawers were full of the antique lace and cotton which she creamed off from her commercial purchases. She enjoyed the knowledge that beneath her rather serviceable clothes lay unseen knickers and bodices and petticoats, ribboned and tucked and sewn with the fine seams of French seamstresses. Peter had enjoyed them too—in particular a pair of knickers with a convenient flap, one an adroit hand could undo and make use of (without recourse to further removals), cunningly fashioned, no doubt, for some busy Frenchman’s mistress.
    Peter himself had sometimes taken advantage of this prudent piece of design economy while visiting his wife at her shop. Both parties had enjoyed the wordless exchange. Since her husband died, Bridget had not thought about this much enjoyed arrangement but seeing the knickers carefully folded, alongside her other underwear, it seemed right they should be put away in tissue paper—it was