Lamb in Love (11 page)

And yet he has been restless, given to fantasies that seem to have no toehold in reality, faceless women or the women of his stamps stepping forth and disrobing for him, a sultan weighing his wives for an evening's diversion. His fantasies have been peopled by the women of history—Joan of Arc, Carry Nation, Eleanor Roosevelt—unlikely figures all, but women, nonetheless, who are familiar to him, their faces in his stamps like dear friends, tolerant and loyal.

His restlessness, for never being assuaged by gratification, has been inclined to manifest itself as a state of unnatural torpor. He might spend an hour in his chair in his darkened sitting room, watching the last light of the day squeeze into a single purple column between his drapes, a book unopened at his fingertips. He appears nearly asleep, but his mind at those moments is in a state of anticipation so acute that he could swear, were you to rouse him suddenly by shaking his arm with your hand, that something was just about to happen, had just been about to happen. What? He could not say. Something.

Also, he is a walker, a perambulator, banging out his back door through the damp pantry at odd hours of the evening, setting out over the fields with his stick. He walks in haste with his head forward, his eyes to the ground. Many in the village are familiar with his distant form, his coat flapping behind him, eclipsing a hillside or disappearing down a lane.

He is a haunter of ruined places. He investigates ruined cottages, the sky visible in shards through disintegrating thatch, a bit
of cutlery or pottery unearthed by Norris's blackthorn stick, rubbed free of soil with his fingers, and pocketed. He has stood inside such places, erect and alert, listening, the sound of raining seed drifting from the roof, his tread soundless on the damp earth, the infinitesimal progress of earwigs resuming their interrupted path at his feet.

He has lain down in the wood, his eyes open. And when he leaves, there is a declivity in the tall weeds, as though an animal had curled there, matting the grass into the shape of its body.

He has found the bomb shelter deep in the wood beyond Southend House, in a clearing devoid of trees, a place so strange and frightening that village children (who also know of its whereabouts) avoid it. Or else terrify themselves by threatening to tie one unfortunate member of their unruly band to a nearby stump and leave him there. Norris has stood atop the shelter's heavy earthen roof and imagined a gunner crouched below, a man who does not know the war is over, the world changed, less reckless now. A soldier, he thinks, who has been living off the stores of tins, oiling his rifle, muttering in the dark, growing pale, the color of moonlight or mushrooms.

Norris stamps his foot on the sod, listens.

He has come across the occasional misdeed—a poacher on the prowl, who, waiting for censure and receiving none, shares a cigarette with him as they sit down on a stile, a rabbit limp and warm within the bag. Norris does not inquire about the man's business, does not appear surprised to encounter another solitary traveler.

“Lovely evening,” he says.

He has, standing in the lane with its high blackthorn walls, been surprised by someone's husband, tying up his trousers, sprinting from the back door of someone's wife's kitchen. Or a
woman in her blouse, rinsing her face in the trough at the door, soaping under her arms before she retires for the night, weeping all the while.

He takes in all such sights without judgment, as if his own mind were too occupied with another, more pressing problem to consider the implications of what he sees. Nothing may shake loose the formula in his head, the arranging and rearranging patterns of it.

So what can it be that awakens him so suddenly in his fifty-fifth year, that accosts him so roughly and yet with such unbearable sweetness, that travels a finger up his bony leg and touches the cleft and root of his manhood, awakening it at last?

Vida.

It is Vida.

He doesn't know how even to begin.

Six

S
O THEY KNEW
after the trip to London that Manford would never be right. Arrested in his development, Mr. Perry said. Perhaps he would grow to have the mind of a five-year-old, but not likely more. Nor would he likely ever speak. He'd always be clumsy, childlike. Occasionally, they were told, he might exhibit some more mature talent, but it would be without significance—not indicative of anything. More like a stray bit of intelligence, random and unconnected, cropping up out of the fog of his mind. There would be nothing to attach itself to, though; no order.

“Like a lily in a patch of weeds, Vida,” Dr. Faber said, trying to explain it to her. “A daylily. Lasts just a day, no more, and then it's gone.”

In the beginning she didn't quite believe it. She thought they were wrong, for she could see that in some ways he was intelligent, lively in his mind, crawling round patiently after an ant on the terrace, letting it walk up on his finger. He was learning something there, down at eye level with the ground. She knew he was. And he was always so gentle with things, even when he was a baby. She imagined he would, slowly, over time, defy all their predictions, grow up into a man—maybe even a doctor himself, she thought wildly, like Dr. Faber.

And he
has
grown up, in his way, she acknowledges, though not ever as she'd hoped, of course. She has to say that now.

She used to read to him, page after page, Shakespeare and the Bible and Henry James and Chekhov, books she found in Mr. Perry's library. And from the back, as he stands on the terrace
looking out over the ruined gardens at Southend House, Manford looks grown enough, fully developed, broad shoulders and straight back. But when he turns, you see the belly slack like an old man's, the wandering face, the untidy hair. And it gives you a start, Vida knows.

Still, there are things that do excite him. Flowers, for example, the scented variety in particular. Any sweet scent, for that matter. She remembers buttoning his shirt collar one day when he was a boy. He caught at her hand, raised it to his face, breathed in deeply. She was wearing on her wrists the scent Mr. Perry had given her for Christmas—Joy. She wears it every day now, has for years. She likes the way it makes her feel, a bit sophisticated. She knows it costs a lot of money.

Manford held her wrist the way a small child holds a bear to himself, hugging it. He dipped his nose to her hand, turned it over between his own, round and round as if he couldn't fully catch the scent. She thought to put a dab of it on his own wrists and ran up to her room to fetch the bottle. But later she regretted it, as he kept his hands crossed up against his face all day, his eyes closed, breathing it in. Now she just wears it herself, lets him hold her arm if he likes. They sit like that sometimes, Manford holding her arm, looking at the gardens, just sitting and looking.

Sometimes, though, she would try to rouse Manford. She was just bored or impatient. She was young when she started with him, of course, and she can remember wanting to run, wanting to set up a clatter in the halls. On weekend nights, when she'd go to the pub with a friend, she'd be amazed at the commotion of it all, after the quiet of Southend House—the punching laughter in the warm room, the bristled darts flying toward the target hung on the wall, someone's arm around her waist, teasing, tugging.

But she hated the way people spoke of Mr. Perry and Manford sometimes, the way they poked fun at him.

“Feed me, Nanny Stephen,” said a big, ugly lad named Simon one night, leaning heavily on her arm, showing her his open mouth, flooding her with his beery breath. “Feed me, Vida, like you do your idiot.”

She stepped back, revolted. And before she knew what she was doing, she slapped him hard across the face.

For a second he looked shocked, put his hand to his mouth. “Temper, temper,” he said then, softly, meanly, and turned away.

“He didn't mean anything by it, Vida,” her friend Charlotte said, turning around on her stool as Vida gathered her things to leave. “Come on. Don't be in a huff.”

But she couldn't stay there in the pub then, not after that. Walking home alone to her parents' house, she thought of Manford asleep in his bed, the moonlight falling into his room, his heavy head, his curled hands.

S
HE'D HOPED HE
could learn to catch a ball, and she played with him outside by the fountain. She'd work her arms around—“Watch my fantastic windup, Manford!” she'd call, in an American accent—and toss the ball at him. But unless it sailed right up into his face, he wouldn't catch it. He couldn't seem to follow it unless it was right in front of him. She would climb up on the fountain's edge, play that she was going to fall in. “Help! Help!” she'd cry, to make him laugh.

And Manford would stand there and laugh, that choked and silent laugh, bent over with his hands planted on his thighs like an old man. The joke never seemed to get old for him, the funny idea of her falling in and getting all wet.

To help improve his balance, his coordination, she would play
the phonograph for him—“Try a mazurka, or a rondo,” Dr. Faber suggested thoughtfully, when she explained her idea to him. “Anything with a strong rhythm. And let me know how you progress. I'd be interested.”

She started by trying to teach him to clap his hands, kneeling before him, bringing his palms together.

“Come on, Manford,” she'd say, staring at his face, trying to communicate what she meant with her enthusiasm, her smile, her eyebrows lifted high. But he couldn't seem to catch the rhythm, couldn't seem to catch on, watching her with a worried look, as she brought his hands together over and over again.

The night she tried to teach him to dance, he was nearly grown, eighteen or nineteen, with a heaviness to his limbs that came of overeating. She felt guilty about his size; but she hated to deny him anything, and he'd point to the cake tin so pathetically. She'd give him a despairing look. “Oh, only a little piece,” she'd say, laughing when he tried to hug her. “Think of your belly!”

She tried only once to teach him to dance; even today she doesn't like to recall the occasion.

That night, Mr. Perry had been out to dinner in London; he'd said not to expect him until late. The house had felt especially big and quiet to Vida, one whole wing of it unused, unfurnished, the chandeliers hooded with sheets. Vida had laid a fire in the library, where Mr. Perry kept his phonograph. Though she and Manford usually occupied the sitting room off the kitchen, she felt it was a shame to have the whole lovely house going to waste, and Manford liked to watch the reflection of his face in the globes of the brass andirons in the library's fireplace, his features there stretching like elastic as he veered in and out before them.

That night she drew aside the drapes for the view out onto the
terrace, the row of moonlit statues there, their faces the color of quicksilver.

Manford sat with his stamp books while she cleaned up their supper things. But when she joined him by the fire, she found she couldn't keep still. It seemed to her that something was happening out there in the world—something. Dawn was breaking over Corfu, where her uncle Laurence lay asleep in his white house at the edge of the surf. Fishermen were wading out into the sea, breaking the surface of the water, stars fading overhead.

They were missing it, she thought suddenly, desperate. She and Manford. They were missing it all.

She tried to read but kept looking up from the page, unnerved, as if something were about to happen—as if the door might blow open or a handful of stones clatter against the window.

At last she stood up and put a record on the phonograph, some of Mr. Perry's American jazz—Benny Goodman. A friend had sent Mr. Perry the record. “Strut, Miss Lizzie.” That was the song she liked.

She swayed back and forth on the carpet before the windows, looking out into the dark garden.

When she turned around, she saw that Manford was watching her.

She smiled at him, lifted her arms, took a turn with an imaginary partner around the furniture, around the chair he was sitting in, so that he had to swivel his head to keep her in view.

“I'm dancing, Manford,” she called to him as she sailed away to the far side of the room. “This is how it's done.”

And then she came back and stood before him, hopping up and down, smiling. “Come on,” she said, breathing hard now, holding out her hands, happy. “Come on up and have a dance with us.”

But he shook his head, put his face down on his forearm.

She leaned down, caught his hands in her own, pulled him up.

He stood woodenly before her, his face serious, and allowed her to hold his hands. She tried to swing them back and forth, smiling and nodding at him. “That's it,” she said, as his arms began to loosen up, as she felt him begin to take up the rhythm.

She began to feel excited; perhaps this
was
what he'd needed, she thought—to learn to dance! And then he mightn't be so clumsy; he wouldn't fall so much. It was always shocking to see him fall, a grown man falling down like a child, like a little boy. She hated it, hated watching him pick himself up.