Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers Page A

why, anyway, did one bother about what a dead person might or might not ‘mind’? ‘You know,’ she remarked to Frances, ‘I still can’t register that Peter doesn’t exist. It’s not that I can’t cope with it, it’s that it doesn’t go in.’
    ‘No,’ said Frances. The nights of weeping had been exchanged for a series of erotic dreams. Most of thesewere more satisfying than any real-life encounter with Peter had been.
    Frances had never given Peter reason to suspect that there was anything wanting in his lovemaking because it had never entered her head that there might have been; her interest in him had not been primarily physical anyway. To suggest that she pretended with him would be to overstate: she did not exactly pretend, but played, as it were, to his idea of himself. That this idea included some notion of a more than ordinary virility was something she grasped implicitly; it was tacit between them that theirs was a violent passion.
    It may be the case that wherever large and romantic notions crop up in human associations they cover some corresponding lack. And it may also be true that where, in a couple, one party is straining a little, the strain will be matched somewhere in the other too. Perhaps what we like to call ‘love’ is, in part, the willingness to keep such strains from the other’s knowledge, and mutual ‘love’ a reflection of the desire to protect? Just as Peter was less contrived in bed with his wife than he was with Frances, Frances, when lovemaking with Peter was successfully concluded, was often somewhat relieved—although this was something she never told Peter, nor ever made quite conscious at the time.

17
    Peter had no thought of falling in love when he first saw the girl in Malaya. He had had girlfriends up at Cambridge: a trainee teacher from nearby Homerton, a nurse from Addenbrooke’s, nearer still, and he had dutifully put his hand inside the brassieres of each of these girls (a disconcertingly grubby pale blue in the case of Homerton, a more stimulating black in the case of the nurse) and, as dutifully, been slapped down—for such was the custom of the times. He had not, as had the more persistent of his peers, pressed forward, ignoring these quite standard, and insincere, put-downs in pursuit of something more rewarding.
    This did not mean that Peter was not endowed with a normal sexual appetite. He had been through the usual stages, being first the object, and then the instigator, of homosexual crushes at school, graduating to girls when that possibility became more available. He liked girls but he was shy—and it was the kind of shyness which lay concealed beneath a veneer.
    As a result, at Cambridge he got a reputation for beinga heart-breaker, merely because when a girl responded he tended to pull back. The myriad influences of sexuality are subtle and hard to account for: it takes a very advanced person to comprehend his own sexual make-up, and if Peter himself did not quite know why he hung fire, most who have been in that boat will sympathise.
    It is a stereotype that men are sexual aggressors: knights in armour, full of buck and swagger—potential rapists, no less. But in truth men—indeed most of humankind—are far more fragile than is commonly supposed. Peter was no exception. His love for his mother had left him vulnerable; the loss of her had left him fearful. And, to date, none of the girls he had met had aroused the protective tenderness that is often needed to overcome a disabling fear.
    Peter met Veronica by the river where, on a free day, he had gone to swim. Tired of the company of his men, he had made an excuse and gone off on his own, feeling that slight sting of guilt which can plague the sensitive when they follow their own whim.
    He had dried himself and was dressed when he observed a girl swimming with her friends and was struck by her natural grace and the sweetness of her smile. So that when he saw—or supposed he did—that she was