Lamb in Love (15 page)

But Vida knows that for Manford, leaving Mr. Niven, who has
never once taken his hand, is not the same thing as being parted from her. She still allows Manford to twine his fingers with hers as they walk down the lane.

At the bench this morning she stops, disengages her hand, and folds her arms. Manford stares straight ahead of him, not moving a muscle.

Now we're going to have a moment, Vida thinks. She looks upward into the trees, at the still tent of leaves. “I want you to do the rest yourself now,” she says firmly after a minute. “Go on. You know the way. It's right down the end of the lane.”

Manford sidles a bit closer to her, reaches with one hand toward her folded arms.

“No,” she says, twitching away. “I will not hold your hand any longer. You must do it yourself.”

Manford licks his lips, reaches up, and with his fingers curled close together pushes his hair slowly under the brim of his cap. Vida has attempted to teach him this, to tidy his appearance. Now she sighs impatiently.

“
Thank
you, Manford. Very well done,” she says. “Your hair looks lovely. Very handsome. Now, go
on
.”

But Manford turns suddenly and starts to move at a lumbering trot, not quite an out-and-out run but still deliberate, back down the lane toward the gates of Southend House.

“Oh, Manford,” Vida cries, and stamps her foot. “Please!
Why
won't you do this?”

She stares reproachfully at him. Perhaps she shouldn't hold his hand at all anymore, if this is what comes of it—such obstinacy. Why, she's spoiled him! But that doesn't feel quite right. His hand in hers is comforting to them both, she feels. In fact, she knows Manford's body almost as well as she knows her own, she thinks, his hands and face and the shape of his toenails and
the curve of his back. Sometimes, if he is agitated, she will lie down on the bed beside him when he goes to sleep at night, the two of them staring at the circling figures of pretty colored fish thrown by the night-light Mr. Perry brought back from Italy for Manford many years ago. Vida admires its cleverness—it's just a box, fitted all around with onionskin. But inside is a cylinder of stiff paper, with the shapes of fish and seaweed and a tilting galleon cut out of it and pasted over with different-colored cellophanes. The cylinder revolves round a tiny lightbulb and throws the colored shapes onto the ceiling, very large, like the shadows you can make with your hands. Sometimes Manford leans over and laces his fingers together over the light. And then Vida thinks it is as if a net has been tossed over the sea, a net that would catch everything, even the stars in the sky. It's clever, the way he figured that out, she thinks. He does a bird with his hands, too, a diving pelican, its knuckled beak snapping, and a vaulting gazelle or a springbok—or perhaps it's a prehistoric horse. Sometimes she thinks he's made up the creatures he does with his shadow hands, as she calls them. And then every now and then she'll come across him looking at one of his picture books, and she'll realize that, no, he hasn't made anything up. It's all right there. It's real.

She herself couldn't have dreamed up the things he seems to know about the world. But between knowing and imagining, she thinks maybe knowing things is better, in the end.

You can count on it.

“W
ELL, HE WOULDN'T
do it,” she says in exasperation a few minutes later, ushering Manford in the door at Niven's with an impatient shooing motion. Manford heads quickly for the pantry, where his stool awaits, sits down immediately, and begins
filling the doughnuts with the pastry cone. Vida and Mrs. Blatchford crane round and stare at him.

“What a busy bee,” Mrs. Blatchford says. “Well, I
am
sorry. Still won't leave go your hand, will he?”

“He turned right around and ran home! I had to fetch him back! I don't know what to do.” Vida hears the uncharacteristic despair in her own voice and is a little ashamed of herself. But since Manford has started at Niven's, she has enjoyed, more than she ever expected, their interest in him, their growing understanding of his ways. They've all taken to him, no question, Mrs. Blatchford fixing the buttons on his cardigan for him, Mr. Niven clapping him on the back. And who wouldn't love him, after all, so gentle and so quiet? And yet full of surprises, in his own way. Vida thinks what intelligence Manford has is sly and wondrous—creatures springing to life on his bedroom walls at night. Now, feeling herself among friends, among
Manford's
friends, she allows herself an instant of confession.

“It is so worrying!” she exclaims. “Mrs. Blatchford—think of it! What if something should, should”—she lowers her voice, as if to prevent him from hearing—“should
happen
to me?
Then
where would he be? Oh, I felt
sure
he could learn this.”

Mrs. Blatchford gives her a correcting glance. “Now, Vida,” she says, as if speaking to a small child. “Nothing whatsoever is going to happen to you. Let's not have any such nonsense.” She hands Vida a doughnut, which Vida takes but only holds, as if she's forgotten that they are things to be eaten.

“Not that I think it would be a bad thing,” Mrs. Blatchford goes on, “his being able to do it on his own. He's come so far really, hasn't he? But I can understand your wanting him to be as independent as possible. After all, what if”—she appears to search for a reason—“what if you should want to, oh, go on holiday, for
instance? Had you ever thought of that, Vida? Having a holiday?” She stops wiping the glass counter and looks straight at Vida. “Have you ever
had
a holiday?”

Vida stares at her. “A holiday,” she repeats. “No, I—not as you would call it, I suppose. No. I've—” But she can't finish. For suddenly it strikes her as so odd, that she hasn't ever had a holiday, that the idea has never even occurred to her. Or maybe it had once, a long time ago. But, of course, what she does—it no longer feels like work to her. It feels like her life. It
is
her life. And then she thinks of her uncle Laurence, what he'd written about going to Corfu in one of his earliest letters: “Where else but on an island,” he'd asked, with undisguised enthusiasm, “can one reinvent oneself so entirely? The only thing to fear is that one day one's old identity will wash up on shore like a shipwreck.”

“Well, I do see what he means, but would that be such a dreadful thing?” Vida's mother had asked at the time, looking up at Vida from Laurence's aerogramme. Her eyes had held a wounded look. “His old self?”

“
Well,
” Mrs. Blatchford says smartly now, “I think a holiday is most certainly in order. Perhaps his father will look after him for you when you go,” she adds irrationally, as if it were a fait accompli.

“But where would I go?” Vida asks, baffled. “And besides, Mr. Perry's rarely there! He's hardly ever at home.”

Though he had been home more of late, she thinks now. He'd hired the gardener, for instance. Mr. Perry had told her the fellow would be taking his meals at the house, but he'd never yet come inside, at least not when she'd been around. She hoped Mr. Perry didn't want an accounting from her of how the man spent his time. Oh well. It wasn't any of her business what the gardener, whoever he was, did with himself. Perhaps he was eating in the
village. Or perhaps he had a home somewhere nearby. She'd set a place for him at the table one afternoon when she'd glimpsed him puttering around the greenhouses, but he'd never come up to the house. She and Manford had eaten their supper with the third place empty, as if for a ghost. It hadn't been a special supper anyway, just beans on toast.

She hadn't really been surprised much by the gardener's mercurial comings and goings, though. They confirmed a rather vague idea she had of the rest of the world's being always engaged in urgent business; she frequently worried that she was interrupting people. She remembered calling Dr. Faber late one night, when Manford was still a young child. It had seemed to Vida at the time, passing her hand over his forehead, that he was running an unnaturally high fever. Mr. Perry had been abroad, as usual. She'd been terrified, alone in the enormous house with the silent, feverish boy. She'd rung her mother at home and woken her. Her mother, sleepy but understanding, had said she'd try to reach Dr. Faber for her. But hours had gone by, and still there was no sign of him.

At last, about two o'clock in the morning, Dr. Faber had rung the bell. Vida, who'd been nearly hysterical with anxiety at that point, had hurried him upstairs to Manford's bedroom.

“Well, we might open the windows for starters,” he'd said, preceding her into the room and blowing out a noise of annoyance. “It's hot as blazes in here, Vida!”

Advancing to the window, he had pushed the drapes aside and struggled with the latch on the casement, grunting with effort. “Damn,” he'd muttered under his breath. And then it had given way at last, an envelope of cool, wet air sliding into the room, the moon floating full and white.

Dr. Faber had peered into Manford's eyes with a little light, listened carefully to his chest.

“He'll be all right,” he'd said at last, straightening up. “Nothing but a cold. You can bring him by in the morning if you like, though. I'll have another look at him then.” He glanced down at the boy, whose eyes followed the physician's face. “I think you'll live to see morning, Manford. All right?”

He had turned to Vida, who was standing at the foot of the bed and winding her hands anxiously. She saw a quick sympathy rise into his eyes. “I'm sorry it took me so long to come, Vida,” he said. “I had another case to attend to.”

She waved her hands. “I quite understand,” she started to say, but suddenly found herself very near tears.

Dr. Faber took off his glasses, folded them, and put them into his pocket. He picked up his bag and came around the bed to her, where he stopped and put a hand on her shoulder. “You've done a fine job here, Vida,” he said then kindly. He looked down at Manford again and then back to Vida. “Not many have the patience for it, you know,” he said after a minute. “They make a lot of mistakes along the way. Some can be quite cruel. But you seem—” He paused. “Well, I admire you, is all. . .. You've stuck with it. Manford's a lucky chap.” He unwound the stethoscope from around his neck, held it in his fist. “Of course, he could be a great deal more difficult,” he added. “It's a blessing he's not. Some of them aren't, you know, and then we can all be grateful, but many of them can be quite trying in their own ways.” He glanced back at Manford curled in the bed, his bright eyes watching them. “Still doesn't speak?”

Vida shook her head. It was true that Manford had never uttered a word, not even a sound that might approximate a word, an infant's blundering attempt at precise speech. Still, she felt she understood him. Sometimes, it seemed to her, Manford could speak if he wished. His expression was often so—complicit. As if
he agreed with everything you said, a sort of silent witness to your own conscience.

Dr. Faber shook his head. “Strange,” he said. “I might have thought—” But he said nothing else.

Vida had closed the door after him, had stood in the front hall with its cavernous, empty fireplace, the two small, velvet-covered chairs with their twisted legs standing by either side of it, their faded and unraveling tassels stirring slightly in the draft from the closing door. She thought of the strange, mute child above her, his twisted bedsheets and dull expression. She had wanted, at that moment, to run from the house and had hated herself for that feeling. At last, her hand on the banister, she had climbed the stairs slowly and had taken her place at Manford's bedside, where she passed the night sleeping fitfully in a chair, her hand upon the coverlet, Manford curled beside her palm.

Now, with Mrs. Blatchford gazing at her sympathetically, it seems to her that the idea of a holiday is the silliest thing she's ever heard of.

She couldn't ever leave Manford. He would never love anyone as much as he loved her.

And yet—she looks down at her hands now, perturbed; for how strange it is, she thinks. Because what she is feeling, really, is not how much
he
loves
her,
but how much
she
loves
him,
how much she depends on it. And for a moment she sees herself in the lane, waiting and waiting, a dark, wet wind whistling away over the fields, Manford never coming, never again coming home from Niven's, the moon rising slowly overhead, herself turning to stone.

“I expect his father wouldn't know how to look after him properly anyway,” Mrs. Blatchford says then.

Vida looks up, startled. “Oh,” she says, and the sun comes up
again; the world floods with the plain, unremarkable light of morning. “Yes,” she says, blinking. “Well, he hasn't ever had to.”

“No, I suppose not.
Men,
” Mrs. Blatchford says then, and gives a low snort.

Vida leans over the counter for a last look at Manford. He seems to be avoiding her eye. She sighs, touches the collar of her coat. “Well, I'm off,” she says then. “Going round to pick up the post.”

There seems nothing else to say.

Outside, she stops to adjust her hat and have a final look at Manford through the window.

“What does she do with herself all day?” she hears Mrs. Blatchford say to Mr. Niven, who's just come through the door with a tray of bread in his arms.

He shrugs. “Can't imagine.”

“Isn't it a shame about her holiday, though,” she hears Mrs. Blatchford say to him.

“What holiday?” he says. “Is our Vida going somewhere?”

And then Vida can't hear them anymore, because they've turned away.

After a minute she walks down the side of the building and peeps carefully in the window at Manford, his shaggy head bent over his work. His cap has fallen to the floor, where it is pinned under one of the legs of the stool, acquiring a snowfall of dusty sugar. One foot is planted on the brim, crumpling it. But he looks exactly, she thinks, like a statue. A Greek statue.