Instances of the Number 3 (23 page)

‘The sign of a real novelist—effortlessly taking a new line while retaining the same unmistakable fictional personality.
Instances of the Number 3
is compulsive; like the Sultan listening to Scheherazade.’

JOHN BAYLEY

‘Salley Vickers writes with a luminous and exacting perception that reveals us all as ghosts of ourselves, haunting and haunted by past, present and future loves.’

RUSSELL HOBAN

‘When Peter Hansome dies in a car crash he leaves a wife, Bridget, and a mistress, Frances. Between the two women an unlikely friendship forms. When Zahin, a beautiful Iranian boy, turns up on Bridget’s doorstep claiming to have known her husband, he becomes part of the trio of mourners. How they cope and how their relationships and emotions shift is the theme of this wonderfully readable novel. Vickers is quietly, ironically funny and offers some deft observations. She also has a compassionate, non-judgemental understanding of human nature and a keen intellectual curiosity about faith, and its absence.’

Sunday Times

‘Taken simply as a meticulously drawn portrait of smart London life in the Barbara Pym mould, this is an extremely classy piece of writing. But
Instances of the Number 3
is a far more ambitious novel than that, exploring the different ways in which human beings can find salvation through selfdiscovery. Salley Vickers’ precisely measured prose combines a philosophical detachment with close observation of character to create a world where ideas live as vibrantly as people. Owing much to Virginia Woolf, it is a book that demands to be read slowly, but leaves you with plenty to think about.’

Observer

‘Inevitably I opened
Instances of the Number 3
with some concern that Vickers would not be able to match the brilliance of her first book. I need not have worried. The quality of her second novel confirms that she will have a long and outstanding career in writing.’

MARTYN GOFF
, Book of the Week,
Times

‘Colourfully-drawn minor characters sit comfortably with passages of a more philosophical stamp, in which big questions are asked with the lightest of touches. The ending is particularly exquisite.’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Vickers’ novel is gallopingly readable and its two principal women are compellingly drawn.’

JULIE MYERSON
,
Guardian

‘Salley Vickers is good at pungent lines in the right place, and clever with pace and narrative.’

PENELOPE LIVELY
,
Independent

‘Salley Vickers is a remarkable optimist. She shows that happiness can be found even after it seems to have died.’

DAVID SEXTON
,
Evening Standard

‘Gentleness of perception and sharpness of intellect sustain you long after the last page.’

BEL MOONEY
,
The Times

‘
Instances of the Number 3
has all the elements that made
Miss Garnet’s Angel
such a satisfying novel, but in larger quantities. It has the same intelligence and faultlessly elegant prose style, coupled with a compulsive story populated by interesting characters who engage the reader.’

Oxford Times

‘Vickers’ portrayal of suppressed grief is masterly.
Instances of the Number 3
is touching, thought-provoking and entertaining. I suspect it may also be extremely wise.’

The Tablet

‘Studded with observations and asides that stop you in your tracks. Reading it is like having a fine meal with a good wine; you are left with a feeling of deep satisfaction.’

JULIE WHEELWRIGHT
,
Scotland on Sunday

‘The author of
Miss Garnet’s Angel
again beguiles with her breadth of vision and understanding of human feelings and foibles. Her fiction has a haunting quality. A witty, ironic and thoughtful novel.’

Choice Magazine

‘Witty, ironic and profound, this novel explores the frontiers of life and death, and forgiveness.’

You
Magazine,
Mail on Sunday

‘The author of the acclaimed best seller
Miss Garnet’s Angel
has written an entirely original second novel that explores the links between various combinations of three people and the relationship between life, the experiences that shape it, and death.’

Hello!
Magazine

‘The classic threesome—husband, wife, mistress—proves mathematically unstable in Vickers’ profound comic novel. Her appealing characters bloom as the world opens up to them in surprising but logical ways. Philosophical concerns are woven seamlessly with earthy incident, so that bad cocktail parties resonate and good bubble baths matter. In the tradition of the late Iris Murdoch, this extraordinary book will inspire and delight.’

Publisher’s Weekly

Read on for an extract from Salley Vickers’ latest novel

A failed suicide, Elizabeth Cruikshank, is admitted to the hospital where Dr David McBride is a psychiatrist. She is unusually reticent and it is not until he recalls a painting by Caravaggio that she finally yields up her story. Here you can read the first chapter.

She was a slight woman, pale, with two wings of dark hair which framed her face and gave it the faintly bird-like quality that characterised her person. Even at this distance of time, which has clarified much that was obscure to me, I find her essence hard to capture. She was youthful in appearance but there was also an air of something ambiguous about her which was both intriguing and daunting.

When we met she must have been in her forties, but in a certain light she could have been fourteen or four hundred—though when I say ‘light’ I perhaps mean that subtle light of the mind, which casts as many shadows as it illuminates but in the right conditions can reveal a person’s being more accurately than the most powerful beam.

Once I would have known her age to the day, since it would have been part of the bald list of information on her medical file: name, sex, date of birth. Of the last detail I have a hazy recollection that her birthday was in September. She spoke of it once in connection with the commencement of the school year and a feeling that, in the coincidence of the month of her birth and a new term, she might begin some new life. ‘You see, Doctor,’—when she used my title she did so in a tone that located it at a fine point between irony and intimacy—‘even as a child I must have been looking for a fresh start.’

Doctors are like parents: there should be no favourites. But doctors and parents are human beings first and it is impossible to escape altogether the very human fact that certain people count. Of course everyone must, or should, count. We oughtn’t do what we do if that isn’t a fundamental of our instincts as well as of our professional dealings. But the peculiar spark that directs us towards our profession will have its own particular shape. I have had colleagues who come alive at a certain kind of raving, who perceive in the voices of the incurable schizophrenic a cryptic language, a Linear B, awaiting their special aptitude for decoding. One of my formidably brilliant colleagues has spent her life attempting to unravel the twisted minds of the criminally insane. It’s my opinion no one could ever disentangle that knot of evil and sickness, but for her it is the grail that infuses her work with the ardour of a mythic quest. My colleague, Dan Buirski, had a bee in his bonnet about eating disorders. I used to kid him, a long cadaver of a man himself, that he liked nothing more than a starving young woman to get his teeth into. I said once, ‘You’re no example, you’re a mere
cheese paring yourself,’ and he laughed and said, ‘That’s why I understand them.’ He’s lucky with his metabolism, but his grandmother and his two uncles died in Treblinka. Starvation is in his blood and he’s converted that inheritance into a consuming interest in humankind’s relationship with food. It’s a strange business, ours.

And what was my peculiar bent, the glimmer in my eye which has in it the capacity to lead me into dangerous swamps and mires? For me it was the denizens of that hinterland where life and death are sister and brother, the suicidally disposed, who beckoned. Like is drawn to like. Alter the biographical circumstances a fraction and my colleague who worked with psychopaths would make an expert serial killer: she had just the right streak of fanatical perfectionism and the necessary pane of ice in the heart. And for all his badinage, Dan had a hard time keeping a scrap of flesh on him. I saw him once, after he’d had a bad bout of flu, and I nearly crossed myself he looked so like a vampire’s victim. But despite the concentration camps, death wasn’t his particular lure. That was my province.

It was a landscape I knew with that innate sense which people call ‘sixth’, with the invisible antennae that register the impalpable as no less real than a kick in the solar plexus from a startled horse. To some of us it can be more real. It is said that the dead tell no tales, but I wonder. When I was five, my brother, Jonathan, was killed by an articulated lorry. It was my third day of school and our mother was unwell; and because our school was close by, and my brother was advanced for his six and a half years, and was used to going to and from school alone, she allowed him to take me there
unescorted. The one road we had to cross was a minor one but the lorry driver had mistaken his way and was backing round the corner as a preliminary to turning round. Jonny had stepped off the pavement and had his back to the lorry to beckon me across. Although he was mature for his age he was small, too small to figure in the mirror’s sight lines. I was on the pavement and I watched him vanish under the reversing lorry and I seem to remember—though this could be the construction of hindsight—that it was not until the vehicle started forward that I heard a thin, high scream, the sound I imagine a rabbit might make as a trap springs fatally on fragile bones.

I doubt there was a bone left unbroken in my brother’s body when the lorry drove off, leaving the mess of shattered limbs and blood and skin which had been Jonny. I believe I saw what was left of him, before I was whirled away in the big, freckled arms of Mrs Whelan, who lived across the street and had heard the scream and rushed me into her house, which Jonny and I had never liked because it smelled of dismally cooked food, and terrified me by falling on her knees and dragging me down with a confused screech, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the blessed lamb, may he rest in peace.’

Afterwards, I didn’t know where my brother was but I was pretty sure it wasn’t with Jesus, Mary or Joseph. The belief I clung to was that Jonny was still in the pine tree he had assured me was ‘magic’, on whose stately curving boughs we used to swing together in Chiswick Park. I heard him more than once, when I was allowed back to play there. He was singing ‘He’ll be coming round the mountain when he comes’, which was the song our
mother sang when we were fretful, the two of us, on long car journeys. Later, when Mother had my twin sisters, born one behind the other within the hour, she sang other songs to them.

From that time onwards, it was always ‘the girls’ and ‘Davey’. I, Davey, was the wrong side of the unbridgeable fissure that had opened up in our family, and although I’m sure my parents loved me I was a reminder of that small bloody mess they’d left behind. The lorry driver never recovered and had to be pensioned off, unfit for work. But my mother was made of sterner stuff. She had in her a fund of life that was not to be defeated even by life’s only real enemy. She was not a woman who lived on easy terms with her emotions. She was the daughter of a judge and her upbringing, though liberal, had not bred in her a place for the easy expression of the finer shades of feeling. And I knew, too, though nothing in her outward demeanour ever gave this away, that if she could have chosen which son she had to lose it would not have been Jonny.

I didn’t blame her. And after that, I was never going to be right for her again. I was the living witness to a calamity, the deeper reaches of which she could not afford to acknowledge if she was to continue to hold her self, and our family, together. Very likely she blamed me for the catastrophe. Why wouldn’t she? I blamed myself for it.

My mother, for my father’s sake, for them to go on together, and for the family to survive, had to set her shoulders and turn her back on the disaster. She faced a choice, and she made it by abandoning me and jumping the ravine which had opened with Jonny’s death to the
other side. It was a leap to the side of life and the proof of this came in the form of my twin sisters, apples of my father’s eye and each other’s best companion.

For a long time I was expecting my lost brother to come round that mountain, with all the confidence with which he had stepped off the kerb of the pavement and into the lorry’s fatal path. He was my closest companion, my hero, my single most important attachment to life. And when he didn’t come, and I heard only the echo of his voice in my ear, as I swung alone on the low pine branch, pretending, for my mother’s sake, that I was enjoying myself, a part of me wanted to go after him, for company.

Harper Perennial
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2007

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2001

Copyright © Salley Vickers 2001

‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’ words and music by Ewan MacColl © Harmony Music Limited, 11 Uxbridge Street, London w8 7
TQ
. Used by permission.

Salley Vickers asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2009 ISBN: 978-0-007-35808-3