Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers

bank on it. No good phoning Marianne either. If one tried to explain things to her there would certainly be a muddle. And she couldn’t be sure of Mickey’s feelings towards Zahin; it wasn’t safe to ring there.
    In the end she rang Frances. ‘Look, this is a cheek but…’ and she explained about the hour.
    ‘I’ll go round,’ Frances said. ‘It’s no bother, really. I’ll call at a respectable hour and tell him about the clocks.’
    ‘You don’t mind?’
    ‘If I did I wouldn’t say!’
    Frances had been feeling better since her visit to the Tate. Perhaps it was that man in the crowd who had reminded her of Peter? The week which followed held fewer nights of anguish. In some way, she wasn’t sure how, the lunch with Bridget had helped.
    And she didn’t—or she would not have joked about it—at all mind putting on her tracksuit the following morning and driving past the Fulham house on a roundabout route to Richmond Park. She was, she had decided, getting fat and needed exercise.
    The upstairs curtains were drawn when she rang the bell at 11.15 a.m. Perhaps a note would do? She was rummaging in her bag when the girl answered the door.
    ‘Oh, is Zahin there?’ The girl shook her head. ‘Mrs Hansome asked me to call. Will he be back?’
    A nod. A pretty girl, with two scarlet velour flower grips in her hair.
    ‘Could you give him this then?’
    Frances wrote: Zahin—Mrs Hansome rang me to let you know that the clock has gone on one hour. Please be in for Marianne at 4 o’clock (what was 3 o’clock!)
    Would that do? Or would it, as was so often the case with explanations, only cause more confusion? Well, she had done her best.
    Running round Penn Pond, Frances thought: I wonder who she is…?
    Bridget rang Zahin. ‘Zahin, did they arrive?’
    ‘Oh, of course, Mrs Hansome, and I was there on time to receive the lovely chests.’
    ‘And Frances told you about the hour?’
    ‘I had already moved the clocks.’
    Frances had decided there was no need to worry Bridget about the girl. But Marianne had the effect of making people fuss out of character, so Bridget rang Frances to check the chests really had arrived, and then it seemed pointless to conceal the encounter.
    ‘What was she like?’ Bridget asked, more intrigued than offended.
    ‘Very pretty. I wondered if she was his sister…’
    When Bridget returned home the following evening she found an opportunity to say, ‘Zahin, do you have any family here?’ and with the perfect concordance with her thoughts which, almost eerily, he often betrayed, the boy replied, ‘There is my sister, Zelda—she is staying here in England presently.’
    ‘I see.’ Pause. ‘Did she visit you here, in the house this weekend? By the way, “presently” means “in a while”—not, as you used it just now, “at the moment”.’
    ‘O Mrs Hansome I was going to tell you presently, I promise…’
    ‘Zahin, get up from the floor, please, there is no need for this exaggerated display…’
    ‘Where does she live?’ Frances asked. She was amused to have been the instrument of the uncovering of Zelda.
    ‘With some sort of relations in St John’s Wood.’
    ‘They must be rich, this family,’ Frances said. ‘Zahin seems to have plenty of money. I hope you’re charging him a proper rent?’
    Bridget, who did not care about money—Zahin’s or anyone’s—had concluded that Zahin was fearful that the news he had relations in London might precipitate his departure from her house. That he was keen to stay with her—almost fantastically keen—was touchingly apparent. The discovery of Zelda’s existence brought on a bout of intensive cleaning.
    Bridget had considered making some demur when she saw the latest cleaning programme had reached Peter’s study—she had not been able to touch it herself. But then, as with the knickers and petticoats, she thought: Why not? It was Peter who had first befriended Zahin—she must assume he would not have minded.
    And