Lamb in Love (13 page)

She starts from her reverie to see Mr. Lamb before her still. She feels, as she stands there, that he is witnessing that moment again with her. That she can travel back into her own life and he will be there, too, standing to the side, watching. They had missed each other then though, hadn't they, the fragile young man on the bench, wounded in some insignificant way, and she in the speechless torment of those adolescent years, her hair wild and coming unloosed, her expression pained. She looks up at him.

“I seem to remember—so many things,” she says, feeling faintly stunned, as though she'd been hit over the head and were just coming round.

“Yes. Yes, I do as well,” he says urgently. “So many—moments.”

“Of course, we're still here. So we would. I mean, there are so many reminders.” Vida glances around vaguely.

“Yes.” Mr. Lamb looks down at his blotter. “I remember—how very pretty you were.” He speaks so quietly that Vida feels the words brush against her ear. She looks up at him. She feels her grasp tighten round her purse.

“You had this—hair. It's such a lovely color.” He gestures round his head in circles, as though wrapping a turban. “And you were so—” He glances away. “You always seemed so
inspired
.”

The room has gone suddenly very bright. Vida feels she might need to close her eyes but manages to keep them open.

“I think your hair now—the way you've done it—” He points a trembling finger in her direction. “It's very—attractive.”

She meets his eyes, reaches up her hand, touches her hair gently.

“You're happy—here in the village?” His voice is low, as if inviting a confidence.

“It's what I know,” she says at last, dazed as a bird that has collided with a windowpane, its own reflection.

“That is how I feel,” he says, letting out a long breath. “All of it.”

They both jump as the bell above the door clatters. Fergus comes in on a draft of animal odor. Horse fear, Vida senses, recoiling.

“Yes?” Mr. Lamb straightens up, glares at Fergus impatiently.

“Box of matches,” Fergus says shortly.

And Vida takes the opportunity then, with relief, to back away from the counter.

“Thank you,” she calls. “For the stamps.”

Mr. Lamb tosses a box of matches at Fergus. “I'll write them again!” he calls after her. “I'll tell them they must send some other stamps! A commemorative issue! The liberation perhaps?”

She waves, nods, passing quickly away down the pavement.

H
E WAITS A
moment, placing both his hands flat on the counter's varnished surface, and closes his eyes. When he opens them, Fergus is emptying his pipe into his cupped palm, looking shrewdly at Norris.

“Well? Don't be making a nasty mess on my floor,” Norris says.

“Ah, no.” Fergus laughs. Then he jerks his head after Vida. “Done herself up lately,” he says.

Norris stares him down. “Will there be anything else?” he inquires coldly.

“Not at all. Not a thing,” Fergus says blithely. “Must be getting back. To
work
.” He opens the door to leave. “Haven't got a cushy spot like you, Lamb. I've no time for chatting up the ladies. Good morning.”

W
ELL, HE'S DONE
it. He's spoken to her. He'd thought he'd open with something better, but in the end, perhaps this was just right.

He is so excited. Almost too excited, he thinks. It can't be good for him, such excitement. But, oh, she remembers him! From their childhood! This must be significant.

He wants to do
something
now, anything, but he can't even think straight. He hops around the post office like a child unable to contain himself.

And then he catches sight of Mrs. Billy passing down the pavement outside. She has stopped and is staring in the post office window at him, bobbing up and down on the tiled floor of the post office. Well of
course
she thinks he's gone bonkers! He stops jumping and stands perfectly still, frozen in position; perhaps she'll think she imagined it.

Still, he doesn't really mind. And at the end of the day, when he goes home, Norris jogs round and round in the rooms of his
house. Finally, just as evening begins to fall, he runs out his door, down the lane, past the pub, and along the Romsey Road to St. Alphage.

He passes the vicar, sitting on a moss-covered bench in the graveyard reading a letter, and gives him a wave.

Once inside, he takes his place at the organ and plays the “Triumphal March” from
Aida,
over and over again. It's one of the first pieces he committed to memory.

The vicar will wonder, he knows, what he is doing there, bent over the organ as if weeping on a Wednesday evening. But perhaps he will just be grateful, Norris thinks fiercely. Grateful for love. Grateful for everything. Grateful for anything at all.

Seven

N
ORRIS HAS SEEN
nude women. He saw his mother in her white drawers and his grandmother in her narrow gray woolens. Before they had indoor plumbing, it was his job to fill the bath Saturday evenings, to carry the kettle back and forth. “Mind the heater, Norris,” his mother would say from the tub, where she crouched, folded in upon herself like an old white mattress. “Don't slip now with the kettle.”

He has seen, despite himself, the disturbing photographs in the magazine to which Mr. Blevins subscribes.

“Have a look, Lamb,” Blevins said one day with a leer, leaning over Norris's clean counter and spreading the pages wide. “Look at those titties!”

“My!” Norris said. And they certainly were large.

“And look at this,” Blevins said, showing Norris another picture, most distressing, of a young woman bound by the hands and feet to a tree.

“What will they think of next, Mr. Blevins,” Norris said. “My, my.”

People frequently show him things from their periodicals, Mrs. Billy with her
Afghan Bee,
Nigel Spooner with his motorbike journal. They flip through the pages as they stand there, commenting on this or that. He affects an interest, to be polite.

So he is not entirely naive about women, despite his lack of practical experience. But until that night in the garden at South-end House, he had never seen anything quite so beautiful as
Vida. It's not often that one sees something like that, something that must, in the end, be interpreted as a sign.

But who had turned on the fountain again?

M
R
. P
ERRY HAD
turned on the fountain—or, more correctly, he'd seen to it that the fountain was turned on. He had returned to Southend House in June after a long absence. His first morning home, he'd gone round to have a chat with Dr. Faber, who had prescribed sleeping tablets for him some months before. Perry's spirits were better than usual, Dr. Faber thought—he spoke of doing some entertaining, issuing an invitation, perhaps, to a young Italian woman with whom, he intimated, he'd had a pleasant dalliance in Rome. Perhaps he'd even reunite some of his oldest friends from the States for a holiday, he said—a hunting holiday.

“I'd like to see the house and grounds as they were in the beginning,” Mr. Perry told Dr. Faber, suddenly serious. And something about his face at that moment made Dr. Faber recall his first glimpse of Thomas Perry, some twenty years before. He'd thought then that no one so young should have cause to look so eaten away by grief already. “I'd like to see it all as it used to be,” Mr. Perry went on, “when the place looked like paradise.” He smiled, rather sadly, Dr. Faber thought. “When I thought it would soothe me to be somewhere so beautiful.”

A week or so later, Mr. Perry hired a gardener, a young man named Jeremy Martin. He offered him an exorbitant wage and told him simply, “Clean it up. Clean it all up. There's an apartment above the stables. I think it's all right. Let me know if you need anything. Vida will cook for you.”

J
EREMY
M
ARTIN UNDERSTOOD
that Mr. Perry did not want to be consulted much, after a first look-round. He did not want to be bothered.

They toured the property together one Saturday in late June, before business called Mr. Perry abroad again. Jeremy explained that he would need a fortnight to let go his previous commitment, asked various questions about original drawings for the garden, water pipes and conduits, glass for the greenhouse, sprays for the orchards, and so forth. He appeared knowledgeable. He asked, too, about an account with Lauder and Lauder, a nearby nursery.

Mr. Perry waved his hand. “Whatever,” he said shortly. “Whatever it takes.”

Jeremy pursed his lips but felt he would not react to this largesse. “Priorities, sir?” he asked.

Frowning at the tennis courts, which were choked with weeds, Mr. Perry seemed to be considering. Then he looked up toward the big house, the heavy, silent shape of the fountains. “I'd like the fountains turned on again,” he said impulsively. “I don't know what's the matter with them. Something with the plumbing, I guess. Rust? Do that first.”

“Might be moles in the pipes,” Jeremy said, his feet planted. “Or tree roots. Terra-cotta, I imagine they are. Could be prohibitive, sir.”

“Whatever it takes,” Mr. Perry repeated stubbornly.

That evening he mentioned briefly to Vida that he had hired someone to do something about the gardens.

“What?” But she didn't mean to sound so surprised.

“To fix them up,” he said, a little defensive, and looked away from her. “I've been meaning . . .” He put his hand over his eyes, that gesture Vida recognized so well. “You won't mind feeding him, will you?” he asked.

Vida, turning to stare out the window at the littered lawns, the overgrown and crumbling balustrades, the blackened roses, said, “Of course not. How lovely.”

F
OR YEARS, LONG
before discovering himself in love with Vida, Norris had walked through the grounds of Southend House from time to time for his nightly walk, drawn to the overgrown gardens there and the circus antics of bats that swerved sharply like tiny, dark kites against the fading sky. He'd been dismayed to see the property deteriorate over the years, understanding that he knew nothing of the reasons, but that there could be a hundred explanations for allowing something so beautiful to fall apart. He'd stolen a plant or two, taken it home in a leather sack, and planted it in his own garden. He did not consider this theft, exactly, but more a form of mercy.

And then, the night of his fifty-fifth birthday, that evening of the moon landing, Norris set out again. The air was soft, ambient; he sniffed—something fragrant was in bloom. The moon hung overhead, buoyant as a breath. He'd looked up, trying to imagine what it must be like to be up there so high, looking down at the earth. The sky had deepened from blue to rose to the silver gray of twilight to the lush velvet black of midnight. Norris felt peaceful, benevolent, charmed by the knowledge of the astronauts treading the moon so far above his head. It felt companionable, in a way, knowing they were out there, too.

He walked through the village, down the Romsey Road, and into the fields, crossing onto the estate of Southend from the low pasture. He hadn't been by there in a few weeks, having discovered some swans on the Tyre and, being fond of swans, deciding to walk down to the river every night instead. But the swans had flown off the previous evening, and so this night—still full of the
miracle taking place so high above his head—he passed into the woods around Southend and through the pavilions of oaks. He passed the tennis courts, thick with Queen Anne's lace and nettles, the rose garden with its crumbling walls. He registered methodically the estate's familiar disrepair, statuary tumbled from their pedestals, gardens overgrown with weeds.

But parting the yews that surrounded the highest lawn at Southend, he stepped onto the still-warm grass surrounding the grotto and the fountain and stopped up short, for it appeared an army had been at work. Even in the darkness he could see that the beds had been hacked clean. The black earth overturned within them was rich as chocolate. Bowers of vine and branch had been pruned back sharply and bore a new froth of delicate white-and-yellow blossoms. Tools and implements lay scattered on the grass.

Norris gazed about him in surprise. Finally his eyes came to rest at the fountain, its tall plume of water breathing a fine mist into the evening air. It had been so long since he'd seen water in the fountain that for a moment he was transported back in time to the summer performances of the girls from Prince's Mead. Their annual pageants had been held on the lawns at Southend House, the fountain playing a joyous accompaniment to the assemblies of young ladies in pretty costume dancing figure eights across the grass. He remembered the music teacher, Miss Ferry, with her deep bodice and the silver serpent with ruby eyes that coiled round the loose flesh of her upper arm.