Lamb in Love (10 page)

N
ORRIS IS A
postmaster, but he does not read other people's letters.

He reads picture postcards from time to time but feels he can say with confidence that so does every other postmaster. The regrettable truth, he's had to admit to himself, is that most picture postcards are very dull. But in any case, usually he doesn't have time to read everybody else's dreary mail, anyway, and in addition, people's handwriting is as a rule so poor that it would be impossible to make out much of them.

It's sort of a joke within the profession.

Moreover it is one thing, it seems to him, to glance casually over a postcard as one sorts the letters of the day, and another to hold an envelope to the light or secretly steam it apart in a back room. The one could be characterized as entirely innocent, the desultory—even unavoidable—perusal of life's traffic as it passes your doorstep. The other, it seems to him, reflects a certain deviance of character.

He reads postcards, when he does, less out of curiosity than habit, you might say.

He does take note of correspondence, though it's not something he does deliberately. He can't seem to help it. His mind has a propensity for keeping tallies. He knows exactly how many times Mrs. Billy has written her daughter gone to Australia. He knows how many times the daughter has written back. They are not equal, he can assure you.

He counts things, it seems, by instinct. Standing alone in the
post office, watching the rain streak the window, thinking of Vida, he counts his heartbeats. The bricks beneath his feet as he walks between the post office and St. Alphage number 1,472. The number of panes in the windows in Dr. Faber's surgery—forty-eight. The number of dewdrops on the chandelier in the dining room at the vicarage—eighty-eight crystal tears exactly. He counts washing on the line, eggs in the fridge, horse chestnuts on the ground. Sometimes he finds it a distracting habit, almost an affliction. He has been asked a question and for a moment found himself literally unable to answer—as if his jaw were wired shut—while he helplessly counts away inside his head.

So he does not read other people's letters.

He has not been tempted, and he likes to think he would certainly resist such temptation, were it ever to come before him.

N
ORRIS HAS NOTICED
that Vida very rarely receives what might be considered a personal letter, unless you count things from her uncle Laurence. Occasionally she'll have an aerogramme from her old friend Charlotte Patrick, now living in Switzerland. Vida always writes back very promptly. There was quite a lot of to-and-fro around the time of her father's death, and then later her mother's, from solicitors and so forth. Otherwise, nothing.

But along with his fervent belief in the privacy of the mails, Norris also believes that postmasters should refrain from inquiring
about
a person's letters. It would be impudent, he thinks, upon weighing a parcel or affixing a stamp, to stop up short and make some comment or another: “Writing about a Vietnamese bride this time, I see, Mr. MacKenzie? No luck with the Indonesians?” Or “Pursuing a new remedy for the hemorrhoids, Mrs. Larkin? Sea kelp from that Irish outfit stopped you up, did it? I've
heard it can do that.” These are things Norris knows he
could
say—any idiot can read addresses, after all, and come to his own sensible conclusions about another person's business.

So he knows he could say them. But he wouldn't.

It would amount, he believes, to a terrible invasion of privacy, a violation of trust. He simply takes his customers' parcels and letters—he
receives
them, as it were—and allows no expression to cross his face. Whatsoever. This is as it should be. People have great faith in the mail service, sending off their most intimate inquiries, their most passionate requests, via the hands of perfect strangers. After all, when you think how far the mail service has progressed—from dak runners, letters held high in a forked stick, a second rider bearing a burning log to ward off wild animals; or brave young men, strong and hairless, slipping into shark-infested waters to bear a letter to the shores of Cephalonia; or the dim islanders who sealed their mail in inflated sheep's bladders and floated them off hopefully on a boat of driftwood—when you think of all that, the mail service is really the most wonderful example of cooperation among peoples. Norris likes to imagine all the postmasters engaged in moving letters from one waiting hand to the next as not unlike a team of skilled surgeons—brave, astute, tender. Men of heart. The mails represent a marvelous system of common trust, he feels, a belief in government at its best. And it is so hard these days, he thinks with sorrow, to find something worth believing in.

Norris keeps his postal scales highly polished, and he employs a new rubber thumb frequently so as to avoid smudges. He believes people are entitled to cleanliness in their post office, a sense of perfect order, nothing that might suggest carelessness, or the possibility that someone's words might be mislaid in a slovenly environment, or that one letter might be more important than
another. They are all important. And as a special courtesy, he uses his familiarity with the postal services of the world to acquire stamps for those who are interested. Manford has been a particularly devoted collector, though it is only recently, of course, that Norris has tried especially hard to please.

He has a long-running correspondence with gentlemen in post offices throughout the world, gentlemen who regularly send specimen stamps his way. They write to one another about the weather and natural disasters, occasionally about politics—so much more interesting elsewhere than in England. Sometimes he thinks of those men—bearded men in white turbans working in high, tiled rooms, ceiling fans rotating slowly above their heads, or Russians in thick coats, dragging mail sacks over mosaic floors. He has never seen such places, but he can imagine them. Mr. Nesser in Cairo has been one especially loyal correspondent over the years. Egypt produces the most marvelous stamps, often oversize, with the images appearing burned to the paper. Mr. Nesser is kind enough to send, free of charge, many of Egypt's commemorative stamps and always a sheet of the new permanent issue. Egypt puts out a new permanent issue practically every year. Living in Great Britain, where the authorities satisfy themselves with a new stamp only every other decade or so, Norris appreciates this. It is his country's stodgy habit of clinging to the past, awash in old concerns or still heroically marking the same old jubilees, that prevents it from enjoying a more varied family of stamps, a more heterogeneous community. Arnold Machin's sculpture of the queen in profile has been staring past citizens for aeons, it seems, and will, Norris supposes, until she dies. Oh, there have been some very nice butterflies and so forth. But stamps from the Channel Islands have been, in general, much more imaginative, no doubt thanks to the colorful influence of
local habit and custom. Norris has a favorite, a lovely one from Jersey, of Mont Orgueil Castle in Gorey, in which the castle itself, its reflection streaming in the water below, appears lit from within by a phosphorescent vapor. And the French, of course, with their superior sense of style, have recently introduced those stunning stamps depicting French art, miniature Mirós or Matisses. England has no such artists, he fears. Just people in the habit of draping old buildings in London with cellophane or burlap, or constructing giant boxes with an icon of the queen buried up to her neck in Styrofoam. Why they do this, he cannot imagine. Such things do not translate to a stamp face. Perhaps they do not translate at all.

Egypt, though. Now there's a country so comfortable with—indeed, so rightfully proud of, Norris considers admiringly—the long and rich taproot of its history that it has mastered magnificently the habit of aging, adding to its lifeline a million leaves on the branches of the family tree. Old Egypt glories in itself, he thinks, not England, with its upsetting history of colonialism. It never did seem quite right to Norris, the British being so utterly British no matter where they were. One ought to adapt, he believes. One ought to accommodate. Change, after all, is the great elixir of life. He himself has often thought that he should like to adopt, for instance, some new manner of dress—Mr. Nesser's white pantaloons, perhaps, and flowing top garment.

“Lamb! Greetings!” Mr. Nesser's notes begin, and then affixed to them will be sheets of stamps of the most remarkable pigment, as though colored with that country's burning sun, or the slow-moving, silted waters of the Nile, or juice from the betel nut, the color of a live heart, colors as ancient as if they had been discovered dried to a powder in a king's tomb and then revived with a
drop of twentieth-century spittle. Mr. Nesser's English is marvelously ornate. Colonial English, Norris supposes. He tends to refer to himself as “we.”

“We send you warmest personal felicitations on your anniversary,” he wrote at the start of Norris's thirtieth year in the post office. “May we continue to bind the world together, letter by letter by letter!”

And Norris liked that, the notion of each holding the globe together by the variously swift or plodding habits of the letter carrier. He thinks of letters in the bellies of airplanes, in baskets on the backs of donkeys, in satchels tied to bicycles, in one man's proffered hand. How eternally hopeful they seem to him, the letter carriers of the world.

He likes to imagine the thin, dapper men murmuring behind the fabulous and ornate grilles of post offices in Venice or Rome, their heels soundless upon crimson carpets, letters weightless in their fingertips, fading frescoes overhead. Now
that's
a fitting environment for the glorious career of postmaster, he thinks.

He likes all that. What he hates is to be the bearer of bad news.

Norris himself was surprised, when he first began at the post office, at how many people actually read their mail
in the post office itself.
They rip open envelopes or aerogrammes right in front of him, their eyes rushing back and forth across the lines, searching and searching. And then they smile or sigh or laugh out loud. And sometimes they look up at him and
actually read him a bit of their letter!
And then they make a comment about it, saying, “Well, I never. He says he's to have a new hip.” Or “Oh, Sylvia's left Roger again. Could've predicted it. Oh,
splendid.
Now he'll be coming to stay.” As if you had any idea what they were talking about, Norris thinks; as if you
knew.
It's as if, he realizes, he is somehow included in this correspondence, like a loyal friend
standing by—eternally generous, eternally kind, eternally hopeful on his patrons' behalf.

He can always tell if it's bad news. People look up from their letters and stare at him a moment, as if they can't recollect quite who he is. And in their eyes is the dull bruise of disappointment or grief, the burden of unbearable news. Norris's own mother spent the whole of the war weeping, her own grief over her husband's fatal accident compounded by the death notices she had to deliver, the women's fainting to the floor, the men's falling onto her ample breast, the stricken children's grasping the banister. Telegram service was very spotty in Hursley during the war. They couldn't spare individual carriers, and they trusted Rosemary Lamb. Norris remembers her peddling off on her bicycle all hours of the day or night, the telegram pinned to her postal service blouse, tears streaming down her face.

And the recipients of sad letters? Well, people will have nothing, after that, Norris knows, except the one last letter, which they will slip into a drawer and withdraw from time to time. Sometimes, in their first moments of shock, as they reel with the insupportable consequences of it all, their eyes leave the page and find his face, lingering there as if he might correct them or reassure them. And then at last they glance down again at the paper, and after a minute they fold up the sheets again very quietly, very carefully. “Well,” they say, very softly. Or “I see now.” And then, worst of all to Norris, they look up at him again, and do you know what most of them say?

They say, “Thank you, Mr. Lamb.” As if to offer him comfort! As if to show that they do not blame him! As if to reassure him that they will be all right.

He hates that.

I
S HE OBSESSED
? He is obsessive by temperament, perhaps, and therefore inclined, late in life, to one grand obsession, one in which all his ardor, all his vague and disturbing impatience, all his abbreviated thoughts, might be caught up in a single explosive shell, an athlete's last perfect reflex. A bomb.

How did it happen, this falling in love with Vida Stephen? Norris Anthony Lamb is not a man inclined to abrupt deviations, sudden and persuasive desires, clearly defined lusts. And yet now he feels himself transformed by love, forged in steel by this wondrous passion.

Norris has not been exactly content over the years. His life has been almost continually interrupted by the exhausting and time-consuming business of dying and all its observances—first his grandfather, then his father during the war, then his aged grandmother, and at last his own mother. The years between these passings have been spent anticipating the next one, as though the business of living were only a sort of insignificant prelude to death, a series of years spent in sparsely furnished and harshly lit waiting rooms where one passes the time as if it were completely without consequence. The women in his life were in the habit of making resigned and repeated reference to what little time remained left to them. “When I'm gone,” they would say, and Norris heard the disguised petulance, even anger, in their voices. “Why, then you'll be able to get on with things, Norrie. Won't be long now.”

He feels, in some way, that they were making excuses for him, excuses that neatly served their own purposes. How could he find a wife, produce progeny, how could he carry on, when those closest to him were marking their own time in such minute and interminable quantities? He excused his grandmother's morbidity as the lingering sorrow over her husband's and then her son's
death. His mother's grief he saw as a result of the peculiarity of her wartime duties, a few years condensed into a lifetime of delivering death notices. As a consequence he too came to believe that furnishing his own life with the normal attributes of hope—such as a family—was, in some ways, entirely pointless.