Instances of the Number 3 by Salley Vickers Page B

having trouble in the strong current, he stripped off his clothes and dived, manfully, in.
    Veronica—an orphan, brought up by Catholic nuns and named for the saint who wiped Christ’s face—was, in reality, a strong swimmer and was merely fooling around in the water, pretending to drown to amuse her friends. She allowed herself, however, to be assisted to the bank by the tall English officer and thanked himcharmingly for his intervention. (The true nature of this event was revealed much later amid much teasing and giggling.)
    At the right moment, after the appropriate number of other meetings, Veronica translated her thanks into something yet more gracious. The remaining time spent in Malaya was, as a consequence, like the homecoming he never had—a miracle of happiness for Peter.
    When the time came to leave Peter thought seriously of throwing over his commission and staying on; just as, a year later, the stint in the army behind him, he thought about returning to find the girl who had finally cracked the straitjacketing shyness. But upbringing sticks; he had lost the one resource—the regular contented congress with Veronica herself—which might have made such a departure from custom possible.
    Thus Peter put away that small peculiar taste of paradise, believing, with the genetic optimism of youth that one day, another—more suitable—paradise would supplant it.

18
    The night light Bridget had bought at John Lewis had been installed beside her bed. The purchase may have been initiated by a wish for distraction before the meeting with Frances. However, in the months which followed, Bridget had grown attached to the translucent column, with its tiny voluptuous mermaid and the bobbing coloured seahorses.
    She was finding that she missed Peter at night. From the time she left home and could afford not to sleep with a knife under her pillow, she had been, with one or two ups and downs, a sound sleeper. But since Peter’s death she found that sleep had become a kind of circle of hell—one in which, nightly, she was judged guilty of crimes, from which she woke into yet more terrible daylight misery. She missed not only Peter’s demanding ways but—even more strongly—his sleeping form beside her.
    ‘You are like a pig!’ she had once remarked when he apologised for his snoring. ‘I like it—it’s reassuring.’
    Without Peter’s familiar porcine presence the nights had grown hostile. Incidents from her past arrived in ravening packs: the man she had slept with who turned out to have a wife who had tried to kill herself; the flat from which she had done a flit where the landlord had trusted her; letters she had pretended had never arrived she had let go unanswered; the bangle she stole from a school friend—she had had no idea that she possessed a conscience, yet here it was, a baleful, many-headed Cerberus.
    During one such sleepless night Bridget, whose early exposure to Catholicism had formed in her the mental equipment, if not the spirit, to engage with such matters, read of an anthropologist who had hung the religious totem of some primitive tribe on his wall. As a form of self-experiment the anthropologist had begun to worship the totem himself. To his astonishment he had found a belief in the totem’s numinous power had grown in him, as if the act of worship carried within it some invisible seed which could take root even in the most inhospitable crannies.
    The article was in one of the anthropological magazines to which Peter had subscribed, and which, after his death, Bridget had somehow not got round to cancelling. Maybe, then, it influenced her when she found herself counting seahorses.
    The light was constructed so that the seahorses rose and fell according to the expansion of the water, which in turn was governed by the heat emitting from the light bulb. ‘When I have counted twenty-one rise-and-falls,’ Bridget decided to herself one night, ‘I shall fall asleep.’
    Although Bridget had