it? She knew as well as Bridget that Peter was a man whose life ran to compartments. Instead she said, ‘But where has he been living until now?’
A sensible question, Bridget thought, approving Frances’s practicality. ‘With another Iranian family, but now they are moving to the States. Apparently, Peter knew this and promised, when the time came, to help the boy find a new berth. But the time came for Peter first,’ she concluded, making one of her slightly morbid jokes.
Frances, whose failure to respond to the joke didn’t mean she didn’t get it, said, ‘Is he a nice boy? Did you like him?’
‘I liked him, I think,’ said Bridget. ‘As to whether he’s “nice” I wouldn’t care to say.’
And it was the case, she thought later, washing up after Frances had left—having declined Frances’s help—she couldn’t say whether the boy was ‘nice’, ‘niceness’ being a quality which did not have much meaning for her. The mechanical business of washing and drying dishes was calming before bed. As to ‘liking’ people, that was a different matter. Did she like the boy? It was too soon to say. But there must have been something or she would not have come out with her bold suggestion.
Climbing into bed in Peter’s shirt it came to her that the boy had had some effect: he had been enlivening, quickening something which had lain fallow in her since Peter’s unexpected departure.
Bridget called to deliver Mickey’s Christmas present, a blanket made up from coloured knitted squares. Bridget was aware that this might not find favour: Mickey, who was a traditionalist, would have preferred something on more conventional lines—a set of bath luxuries, a frilly nightdress, port. But Bridget could never bring herself to give to others what she herself would not enjoy.
‘I have found a lodger,’ she said, as much as anything to fill in the silence with which Mickey was contemplating the cheerful squares. ‘He will be here when I am away so I have said to him that if there’s any problem he can ask you.’
‘My mother had one like this. Where d’you get it? Wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t hers come back to me.’
Bridget, who had bought the blanket from a colleague in Southend in exchange for a stuffed tapir, said she had bought it in a Chelsea sale.
‘There you are—could easy be mother’s, she got rid of all her stuff when she come to live with me.’ With an air of one who knew how to do things properly Mickey presented Bridget with an oblong package wrapped in red and gold ribbon and holly paper. A strong smell of violets confirmed the identity of the gift. ‘Coty bath cubes—same as I always give you.’ No surprises there.
Mickey, at first pleased to have news that there was to be company next door, was dismayed to find that the lodger Bridget was planning to install was what, among her friends, she still referred to as ‘dusky’.
‘He’s a nice enough boy, I’m sure,’ she confided to Jean Clancey, over a pre-Christmas drink at the Top and Whistle, ‘and pretty as a picture, I’ll say that for him. But it’s not the same!’
What, for Mickey, was ‘not the same’ was left to the sympathetic imaginings of her friend. For Bridget, certainly, it was different having Zahin in the house.
In her adult life, Bridget had lived for any space of time with no one other than Peter. She had graduated early from shared flats and had gone without the things other people find essential in order to be able to afford a place on her own. The early days with Peter had sometimes ragged Bridget’s nerves. She had found it tiresome when Peter would ask questions when she was engrossed in her book, or demand immediate help in searching out missing socks or journals; or, on one occasion, an old copy of Wisden in which he wanted to look up some ancient cricket score. This last had tried Bridget’s patience too far and she had remarked, rather acidly, that she hoped he was not going to make use of their relationship to become ‘infantile’. Peter had sulked for several days until by a mixture, on her part, of unvarying good temper and ignoring his ill one, harmony had been restored.
It was eight weeks to the day from Peter’s death that Zahin had appeared. In those eight weeks Bridget had found that on the occasions when she was not either missing Peter, or, as she had intimated to Frances, had been unable to believe that his absence was to be permanent, she had failed to recover her old pleasure in her own company. It was true that it was theoretically pleasant to be able to do as you liked; but what she liked was compromised by an awful, lowering sense of futility which had insinuated itself into everything. Without quite recognising that she was doing so, she had turned the beam of her attention towards her husband, whose regular little demands had first irritated, then amused and finally made up much of the regular substance of her life. Now, without spectacles and missing papers to find, calls to make, tickets to order, diets to cook for—Peter had been prone to hypochondria, which had expressed itself in various and often conflicting culinary regimes—she felt dry as dust. The tears the boy had wept so bitterly in her kitchen had somehow fallen upon that ‘dried-up’ feeling, so that when he spoke of his being at a loss where to live it was not merely sympathy for his plight which had led her to say, ‘You can come and stay with me, if you like,’—though caution made her add, ‘until you find something more settled.’
Zahin had given an impression which had reminded her of the occasion when she had bestowed Peter’s ‘bequest’ on Mickey: he accepted her suggestion without protest, as if it were his due. Mr Hansome, he told her, had also said that if necessary he could stay at his house with him. The news of this offer, and the fact that Peter had evidently neglected to mention that there was also a Mrs Hansome who might need to be consulted on such a matter, had neither surprised nor angered Bridget. She was used to Peter’s quixotic moods: had the boy actually turned up while Peter was alive, he might easily have denied the fact that any such suggestion had been made by him. ‘Nonsense, the lad’s making it up,’ he quite likely would have exclaimed—and Bridget would have had to suggest that in the circumstances it would not inconvenience them greatly if the boy stayed a night or two.
In a sense, then, she was doing no more than she might have done anyway, in proposing that Zahin bring his things over from the flat where he had been living in St John’s Wood in time for Christmas Day. I might as well have someone to cook Christmas dinner for, she thought, conscious that this was solving a problem for her which she had not looked forward to having to face.
Frances, who was accustomed to making her Christmas arrangements in time to avoid the sense of aloneness which Bridget was experiencing for the first time, spent the festival with her brother’s family. Her brother was a judge on one of the northern circuits and lived in a large house in Northumberland. James’s family was large too—also his wife. She and the five girls were good-hearted and energetic—‘excellent people’ a friend had once called them.
It is a sad fact that ‘excellent people’ are often dull. Frances, who began her visits to her brother’s home with a pang of envy, usually left the substantial household with a stab of relief: the peace and quiet, if loneliness, of Turnham Green was at least air she could breathe freely.
What with the Northumberland visit and the recovery from it, it was some days into the new year before Frances finally called by with a present for Bridget.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said frankly, ‘I was too busy to call by sooner. It’ll have to be a New Year’s gift.’ There was a particular reason why she had felt reluctant to see Bridget before Christmas: for the last five years Peter had found time to visit Frances
