‘It’ll only be for weekends,’ she reassured Mickey.
Bridget had decided to give Mickey something from Peter’s alleged will. In fact, everything had been left, in her lifetime, to Bridget, but this did not hinder Bridget from interpreting the will in her own way. Mickey had stood in for Peter’s wife in her absences; it was appropriate Mickey should be rewarded. A thousand pounds seemed the right sort of sum.
Mickey had taken the money with a lack of resistance which made Bridget wonder if the apocryphal legacy should have been rather more; nor had Mickey been reassured by Bridget’s account of the house in Shropshire.
‘If it’s weekends you’re thinking of going there and you away all that time abroad, I shan’t hardly see you, then.’
‘Not every weekend.’ Bridget had tried to be placating. She had, in fact, hired an assistant to serve in the shop at weekends so theoretically she could be away every one if she wished.
‘I’d say it was dangerous, leaving your house with no one there like that. Course I’m next door but I’m only an old woman—no match for any burglar or whoever chooses to call!’ her neighbour had said with unconsoled relish.
Mickey’s words stuck in Bridget’s mind. Perhaps it was foolish to leave a London house regularly unattended? How she wanted to get away, though, and be by herself. It seemed as if she had never been by herself, not since she married Peter. So when the boy turned up it was almost like an answer to a prayer.
The doorbell rang one Saturday morning when, dressed only in one of Peter’s Vyella shirts, she was trying to steel herself to face Peter’s papers and was tempted not to answer. She had found Peter’s dressing gown and had it clutched about her when she got to the door and saw the boy walking back down the path. Thanks to the many occasions she had crept home from trips abroad in the small hours, the hinge of the door had been worked on to open quietly, so he did not hear her and she could have let him go altogether and resumed her vague sortings of the papers into toppling piles. It was the sight of the sharp little protruding shoulder blades, almost like wings, she thought, which made her call out, ‘Did you want something?’
The boy turned at her voice and she saw a young face which was, as she phrased it later to Frances, ‘as beautiful as the day—quite breathtaking!’ Frances, who had so far encountered only the firmer of Bridget’s surfaces, was momentarily surprised and then amused at the hyperbole. (That this was not hyperbole but the straightest report became clear only much later when Frances also met Zahin and described him, in turn, as like a ‘dark Apollo’. By then the ‘Apollo’ was staying in Bridget’s house—but this is to anticipate.)
The boy hesitated, then moved back up the path towards her. Bridget noticed that he had plucked a soft green frond of the rosemary which grew in an aromatic bush by the front door. He was neatly dressed, the boy, in a white shirt, navy sweater and grey trousers. The trousers gave the impression of having been pressed for the occasion.
Moved by the sight of the tender spear of rosemary twisting in his hand Bridget thawed. ‘Hello?’
The boy did not smile but bowed his head a little. When he looked up she saw that despite his dark hair and complexion he had eyes of the deepest blue. ‘Excuse me please.’
‘Can I help you?’ He had a small gold earring in his right ear.
‘I was looking for Mr Hansome.’
‘Ah,’ said Bridget, ‘in that case you’d better come inside.’
He stood in the middle of the kitchen in an attitude of respect so that Bridget felt she had almost to push him down into a chair. ‘Would you like coffee?’ He shook his head. ‘Tea?’ Another shake. ‘What can I offer you to drink then?’ If this young man was unacquainted with Peter’s death he might need to be fortified against the news—or she, at least, needed to be fortified against telling it.
‘Please, a glass of milk?’
Grateful for this temporary relief Bridget took down one of her glasses that she had brought back from Limoges and filled it to the brim; the white milk glowed green behind the thick glass. She poured herself coffee and sat down opposite the boy across the kitchen table. ‘I am Mrs Hansome,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry if this is a shock to you but Mr Hansome, my husband, is dead. He was killed in a car crash some weeks ago.’ It would soon be Christmas; almost two months since she herself had received the news from the policewoman with the guarded face.
An expression of intense surprise flickered across the blue eyes. ‘But he is married…?’ It was as if the other news had passed quite over him.
‘Yes,’ said Bridget amused. ‘He is, or was married. I am his wife,’ she repeated, ‘or his widow, I suppose now.’ And indeed this was the first time she had consciously applied the word to herself.
The boy put his head upon the table and began to cry. The crying made big searing sobs so that Bridget hearing them was filled with something like admiration. To be able to weep like that—it was remarkable!
She leaned across the table and patted his shoulder. ‘He felt nothing,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry—he was not in pain.’ Against such a torrential display she felt she must provide some consolation.
The boy lifted his head and looked at her with tragic eyes. ‘I did not know. He was my friend and I did not know.’
‘Yes,’ said Bridget, taxed by her ignorance of the identity of this young person, ‘I agree. It is terrible not to know.’
The boy began to drink the milk. He took big noisy gulps, draining the glass. Then he licked around his upper lip where a soft vestigial moustache was barely showing. ‘I am called Zahin,’ he said.
‘And I am Bridget.’
‘You are Mrs Hansome?’
‘Yes,’ said Bridget. The penny seemed at last to have dropped. ‘I am Mrs Hansome.’
‘Then,’ said the boy, ‘you will help me.’
‘And he just sat there and asked you, straight out?’ Frances asked.
‘Not so much “asked”—more like told.’
They were eating together in Bridget’s kitchen. On the wall, behind Bridget from where she was sitting, Frances could see the plate she had given Peter for his fifty-sixth birthday. A pale green glazed plate—Chinese; the kitchen wall was not where she would have hung it.
‘But who is he?’
Supper was eggs and tomatoes which Bridget had fried in the virgin olive oil she brought from France in unlabelled bottles, only produced for special guests. Mopping her plate with a corner of baguette, Bridget checked an automatic inward response of: Mind your own business! ‘He seems to have met Peter at a sponsorship do—his firm sponsored kids through school from various parts of the world they were dealing with.’
From Iran. The boy had told her. ‘My father’s family were good friends with the Shah—when he died my family became outcast—it is dangerous for the men in our
