Lamb in Love

A NOVEL BY

Carrie Brown

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

F
OR
J
OHN

AND FOR

H
ELEN AND
S
ANDY
M
C
C
ULLY

FOR TAKING ME THERE

If love be good, from whennes cometh my woe?

Geoffrey Chaucer,
Troilus and Criseyde

Prelude

One
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Two
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Three
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Four
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Five
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Six
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Seven
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Eight
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Nine
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Ten
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Eleven
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Twelve
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Thirteen
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Fourteen
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Fifteen
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Sixteen
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Seventeen
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Eighteen

Postlude

Also by Carrie Brown

H
ERE'S
V
IDA NOW,
passing through the faint bars of afternoon sunlight striping the lane, come to meet Manford. High above her head, in a perfect proscenium arch, the boughs of the oak trees rise and fall on the wind. Pairs of clouds slide by, soundless against the blue sky. Vida's long shadow trails behind her over the grass.

To Norris Lamb, the postmaster who has hidden himself behind a nearby horse chestnut tree, Vida's passage takes a church-like eternity, and his ears fill with the deafening sound of his own racing pulse.

But at last she arrives. Not twenty-five feet from Norris's position behind the tree, Vida Stephen takes her place quietly on the bench fitted into the alcove of boxwoods, folds her hands, and turns her chin slightly to face the vanishing point on the curve of the lane.

Manford, Vida's poor charge, will be along now any moment.

I
T IS A
warm afternoon, the last day of July. It has rained each morning over the last week, but in the afternoons the weather has cleared. By five—customarily the hour when Vida leaves Southend House to walk down the lane to meet Manford—the light is low and devotional, finely particled as though you could sift it through your hands.

Vida and Norris wait there now, one upon her bench, her hands motionless in her lap, the other hidden behind his tree.
Minutes tick past. Norris feels his diaphragm expand and fall with each breath, his heart steadying now after the first excitement of seeing Vida again. Then, as if at a signal from an unseen hand, the silent air around them ignites with the rise and fall of buzzing sound. Swarms of dragonflies—devil's darning needles, Norris calls them—lift from the tall grass and veer down the lane. Vida raises her head at the purring their wings make.

Despite her gravity at this moment, her patient attitude, her careful clothes, Norris sees Vida as something wild, something barely contained—something greater, perhaps, than she is. After all, she might protest, what
is
she but a middle-aged woman (forty-two in December), not very striking in any way? Though with lovely chestnut hair—everyone in the village agrees about that.

What else can be said of her that they might all agree upon?

That she has been loyally employed for nearly twenty years now as nanny to the retarded son of an expatriate American architect. That she was an undistinguished girl, whose constancy with Manford has shown her to better advantage than her neighbors might have predicted. That she wears a hat to good effect. That she—well, they cannot think of anything else. And then perhaps they are surprised to realize they don't know anything at all about her, really.

But now it is Norris's privilege and pleasure to see her as no one else does, for he has been struck by love for Vida. And in his eyes, under the transforming inspection of his gaze—well, who can tell? Vida
may
become something other, something
more
than she appears at this very moment, waiting quietly on her bench, the world breathing delicately around her.

A
FEW DAYS
ago—on July 20, 1969, Norris's fifty-fifth birthday, in fact—American astronauts landed on the dusty ridge
of Mare Tranquillitatis and planted a flag atop an atoll on the moon's marvelous ashen desert.

Late that same night, after sitting for nearly two hours in front of the BBC, watching the snowy footage of Neil Armstrong advancing slowly as a mime across the moon's surface, Norris went out for a nocturnal stroll, awed to find himself alive—indeed, celebrating a birthday—at a time when such a thing as a man's landing on the moon might be possible. He'd gone out just to have a look at the
real
moon, as he thought of it, and had stood for a while in the middle of the Romsey Road, his head craned back. Then he'd walked out across the fields under the stars and paused by a silvery, moss-covered stile to stare up into the sky. And at last he found himself led as if by habit onto the lawn at Southend House; he had walked there often in the past, to admire the architecture of the gardens. The moon hung high in the sky above him, and Norris had stared up at it, distracted and amazed, thinking there could be no greater miracle.

And then he had seen Vida.

Not for the first time, of course; they'd known each other for forever.

But he'd never seen her like that before. He'd never seen
anything
like that before.

And you don't see a nearly naked woman dancing in the moonlight in a ruined garden and then just go on about your business as though nothing has happened, do you?

V
IDA, OF COURSE,
had watched the moon landing, too. That's how it happened.

After hours of the proceedings on the telly, when she was sure it wouldn't be a moment longer before they actually set foot on the moon itself, she ran upstairs and woke Manford. She helped
him into his dressing gown, hurried him back down the stairs and through Southend House's interminable passageways, back to the sitting room off the kitchen.

But no matter how hard she tried, she could not keep Manford awake. She told him it was an important moment, a historic moment. But he wanted to lie down on the floor or to put his head in her lap. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes and rocked back and forth and yawned like a hippopotamus, and at last she gave up on him, let him have the sofa, and sat cross-legged tailor fashion by herself on the floor in front of the set. Once she reached out and touched the picture before her; a shower of tiny electrical sparks met her fingertips.

She was disappointed not to have company for the event; even Manford's company would have been better than nothing.

When the program reverted to the commentary again, she realized how late it was, and yet how strangely alert, how alive, she felt. Manford still lay curled on the sofa, his face turned away from her, his hair standing up in the back.

She stood and crossed the room to look out the window.

The casement was ajar. It was a warm night, and from below, the bright, souring scent of grass and boxwood drifted up to her nose. She looked up at the moon. And it wasn't enough then, being there inside the house. She wanted to be outside, nothing between her and the moon. She wanted to be standing there on the lawn in the moonlight. That one night, she wanted nothing between her skin and the world, nothing, at last, to come between what she wanted and what, in the end, she would discover she had.

T
HIS LOVE FOR
Vida has swept over Norris, overtaken him after a lifetime of crisscrossing the same streets as she, going
in and out the same doors, conducting their business over the same counters.

Oh, Norris knows how silly it looks, how they'd laugh, all his neighbors, if they knew. He knows he is a victim of a delicious assault, a caress from a lion's paw.

In his better moments, his braver moments, his love for Vida inspires joy in him—now, at last, at such an age, he has fallen in love. But it fills him with terror, too. How unlikely his prospects are. He could stay up half the night worrying about how it will all come to nothing, or worse—to ruin. To humiliation. But sometimes he grows nearly hysterical with the pleasure of his fantasies.