Lamb in Love (14 page)

H
E THOUGHT
V
IDA
was a nymph at first, some trick of memory occasioned by the sudden blossoming of the fountain. And then he realized, no, not a nymph, not a figment nor a phantasm, but a real live woman, dancing there on the edge of the
fountain in her dressing gown, the marvelous moon high overhead, the arcs of water raining onto the grass from a pyramid of arcing swans, their necks twisting with joy.

Norris's own heart twisted then. He came to his knees on the grass. On the terrace above him, at the thick stone lip of the fountain's edge, with the moon above her head inside a gauzy penumbra, Vida stood balanced on her toes, the silhouette of her body revealed inside her loosened dressing gown, facing the spray of the fountain. Norris withdrew on his knees into the lap of shadow thrown by a yew, his stick dropping soundlessly beside him.

At first she walked the way a child walks along a wall, balancing with her arms outspread. But she gained speed as she went, and at last she was running, around and around on the edge of the fountain, joyous and quick. Norris saw the high arch of her foot and her agile toes, her rounded calves and tiny waist, her throbbing neck and outflung hair and private, private pleasure.

He felt his limbs grow cold and then hot, as if brushed by cotton dipped in alcohol and drawn slowly across the skin. A tentative breeze touched his face. He watched her, his breath held high and light in his chest.

Then suddenly she froze, crumpled from her prancing pose, and fell to a crouch, glancing over her shoulder. After a moment, she climbed quickly to the ground, pulled her robe close around her, and ran from the grotto up toward Southend House, the white soles of her feet flickering. The house, its balanced wings of smooth stone, its terrace lined with statuary, swallowed her.

It was her leaving, the heartbreak of seeing her shame, her dancing interrupted, that struck Norris so hard. That, and the wild desire he experienced after she had gone. Not just desire for her, though there was that, but on her behalf. As if he should,
from that moment on, stand sentinel at the garden of Southend House, see that it suffered no infiltrators, no sudden sounds or alarming rustles, nothing that might arrest Vida in her pursuit of such complete and glorious and utter abandon. He raised his blackthorn stick, spun round to strike whomever, whatever, had been responsible for Vida's fright. But there was no one there.

Who had turned on the fountains again? What was happening at Southend House?

He glanced up at the house, one light burning high in a bedroom, another far away in the deep interior of a sitting room. All was still. He turned to survey the garden, its checkerboard of shadows, his breath held. There was not a sound, but his mind raced like something darting through the darkness, checking everywhere for danger. Was there someone there? Someone who could spoil it all? Not an innocent voyeur like him, but someone who might dare to step forth into that scene, arrest the figures there, change the tableau, the unfolding, the ending?

A terrible fierceness gripped him. One should never be denied one's heart's desire. Dear God, he thought, putting his face in his hands.

B
UT WEEKS AFTER
this miraculous event, Norris still cannot settle on a plan of action.

Vida comes and goes, in and out of the post office. Sometimes he can speak to her, but more often he has a long queue of chatty customers and can do nothing except gaze significantly and mournfully at her as he hands over her mail.

And then one day, late in August, he receives an official inquiry from the Hellenic Post Office in Athens, noting the issue of a new set of commemoratives sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund. The stamps depict native animal species on the Ionian archipelago:
the dolphin; the jackal,
Canis aureus;
seals colonizing beneath the Erimitis cliffs.

And the same day there is an envelope from his old friend Mr. Calfo on Corfu, enclosing a complimentary set of the new issue and accompanied by a brief note asking after his general health and spirits.

Norris stares at these two letters for some time.

And then he sits down, his pen in hand, and writes several letters, two to Vida—these come to him more easily than he might have imagined, flights of poetic fancy—one to his dear friend Petros Calfo, and another to old Nesser.

T
O
M
R
. C
ALFO,
at the Corfu post office on Alexandras Avenue, he writes, “Dear Petros. I have received your kind gift of the new stamps from your islands. They are very handsome. Thank you. I have a customer who will appreciate them particularly.

“I have a rather odd request to make of you. Would you please attach a stamp to the enclosed letter and mail it off for me? I have in mind a stamp with love as its subject, should you have one lying about. (Not mother and child, however; I should prefer something
romantic
.) I enclose some stamps of the equivalent value for your trouble, a very nice set of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, from America.

“I know you are wondering what funny business I am up to! I assure you it is nothing that should disturb your conscience. It is just that I am engaged in a bit of a romp, you might say, and the foreign postmark is part of the plan, you see. I hope it gives you, as a member of the world's most romantic citizenry, some pleasure to have had a hand in my own little English love story! I do thank you.

“Cordially, Norris Lamb.”

This he fits inside an envelope, along with his first letter to Vida.

Then he takes out another sheet of paper. This letter he addresses to Mr. Nesser at the Philatelic Office, Postal Organization, Cairo, United Arab Republic.

“My dear Nesser,” he writes.

“Greetings! Do forgive the unorthodox nature of this request, old chap, but would you be so kind as to affix a stamp—theme of love, if you will—to the enclosed envelope and mail it off for me? There is nothing untoward here, I assure you. Only a little manner of
amour
I am engaged in. You can imagine how exciting this is.

“I inquire about your gout. Is it any better?

“Gratefully, Norris Lamb.”

He seals this up, after enclosing his second letter to Vida.

Now he feels inordinately pleased with himself. This business of writing—it's really so easy, once you get the hang of it.

Eight

V
IDA STANDS AT
the deep sink in the kitchen of Southend House, washing up the morning's dishes. From time to time she looks out the window at the figure of the new gardener, spade in hand, digging in the beds that curl in interlocking shapes around the fountain. A scrim of fine mist floats in the air; a flock of ravens briefly divides the sky.

At one point she sees the gardener look up. Leaning on his spade handle, he draws a cloth from his pocket and wipes it across his face. He gazes up toward the house, resting.

Vida turns back abruptly to the washing, plunging her arms deep in water.

Behind her, at the long table set on the uneven flagstones of the floor, Manford sits with his book of stamps open before him, his finger touching each tiny image: a series of the dun-colored, sun-backed humps of the Ascension volcanoes; a collection of the spiny pink protea from South Africa; a collection of birds and their eggs from the Grenadines of St. Vincent—the purple gallinule with its mauve-spotted egg, the gray kingbird beside its ink-splattered egg.

Norris Lamb, passing these over the counter to Manford and Vida the week before, had explained in excited tones the history of South Africa's early postal system, how letters home to Holland or England from the colonists would be left under large stones at the coast and picked up by sea captains visiting Cape Town.

“Quite romantic, don't you think?” Mr. Lamb had said, wiping
his mouth with a white handkerchief, his eyes watery, looking at Vida.

They'd been interrupted by the vicar, who'd come in with a great many mysterious parcels in very many extraordinary shapes and sizes, bound up with long lengths of a hairy-looking twine—the vicar did not offer to explain what the parcels were, and Vida noticed that Mr. Lamb didn't ask. She thought
she
would have asked, if she'd been in his place. The vicar also wanted to know how long Mr. Lamb thought it would be before there was a moon-landing stamp. He had a nephew in South Africa “excessively interested in all things having to do with the galaxy.”

Vida had startled at the mention of the moon landing and blushed—it had been a moment of uncharacteristic abandon on her part, that business of dancing around the fountain. But she had been even more startled at Mr. Lamb's reaction to the vicar's comment. He had turned a violent shade of purple, as though filling up with India ink, and had failed to answer at all.

“The
Apollo
moon landing,” the vicar had said helpfully after a moment, as if there might be another moon landing to confuse it with, and at last Mr. Lamb had appeared to recover slightly and said quickly that he was sure someone would do a stamp very soon. He'd been suddenly shy after that, and Vida and Manford had gone away soon afterward.

Manford lies on the rug now, his mouth making shapes as his finger travels over the pictures, his expression liquid and flowing. He turns the pages carefully, licking his thumb. He places his index finger squarely upon the faces staring out from the stamps, the explorers from the British Antarctic Territory—Lincoln Ellsworth smiling bravely out from within his white fur ruff, or Jean-Baptiste Charcot with his yellowed goatee and heavily shadowed eyes. Manford presses the soft ball of his finger flat upon the images
as if taking the imprint of the men's features, lifting their expressions from the page. His feet are hooked over the rung of the chair, his back bent low over the tabletop.

Drying her hands on a towel, Vida leaves the room and returns a moment later with her coat and Manford's cap. Her coat folded over her arm, she tugs the cap down over Manford's head, bending over to look into his face and push his hair up close beneath the brim, tugging down one lock in a gallant fashion and pinching it into place. She licks her finger and rubs it across a smudge on his forehead. He takes no apparent notice of her fussing. She puts on her raincoat and buttons it.

Manford glances up at her and smiles when she says his name, but returns almost immediately to his page, his mouth working.

“Time to go now,” Vida says, and reaches down to touch his elbow. He rises at her touch, although with apparent reluctance, and stands before her. She notices his soft belly, how it blossoms over his trousers. She gives it a poke. “Look at you,” she says. “Oh, dear. You're getting quite
fat,
Manford.”

He doubles over, then stands back upright and attempts to poke Vida at the waist.

“No, no,” she says, twisting out of reach. “Not me. I mind my figure. Not like some I know,” she says meaningfully. “Too many jam doughnuts is your trouble. Come on. They'll be waiting on you at Niven's.”

Manford follows her out of the kitchen, down the long, tiled passageway whose whitewashed walls are punctuated by doors that open onto small pantries, the shelves there neatly stocked with cups and glassware and plates, fading labels in Vida's handwriting pasted to the woodwork:
WHITE WINE, RED WINE, CHAMPAGNE, SPIRITS, APERITIF, DIGESTIVE, TEACUPS, DEMITASSE, DINNER, DESSERT, EVERYDAY, CONSOMMÉ, SOUP.

As they step outside into the small courtyard containing the coal and the wood sheds, the overgrown espaliers there woven through and choked with dead wood, Vida glances behind her through the passageway to the rear lawns. She sees the gardener crouched on the grass, his hands busy in the earth. He's been around for several weeks now, but she's never sure when he's working and when he's not. He hasn't come by the house at all. Mr. Perry has been away, though. Perhaps that's why.

Behind her, Manford stretches out his hands and bounces his palms gently on an invisible current.

Descending the steps to the gravel drive, shaking her coat hem free of coal dust, Vida hurries along briskly. This morning, she has decided, she will walk Manford only as far as the bench on the lane. Not a wink farther.

Mr. Niven has assured her that he thinks Manford has become very canny about the traffic on the Romsey Road, and so between them they have agreed to allow Manford to try crossing on his own. Mr. Niven has taught him to look in both directions for oncoming cars before stepping down from the curb. As an added inspiration, Mr. Niven has also instructed him to raise his hand like a bobby stopping traffic. In this way, Manford now walks home across the street by himself in the afternoons, his hands solemnly held high, palms outward to the invisible traffic. Mr. Niven has told Vida he watches from the entryway to the courtyard in front of the bakery, just to be safe.

“Well done, Manford,” he calls when Manford is safely across and headed for home.

“Poor
chap,
” he confessed to Vida one afternoon, uncharacteristically emotional. “Nearly breaks my heart sometimes, watching him.”