Lamb in Love (2 page)

Norris is postmaster for Hursley, a small village a few hours southwest of London in the county of Hampshire. He is also, not surprisingly, a philatelist, a collector and admirer of stamps. As such, he carries in his head a mental reel of images not unlike that of the serious scholar of art history. Both may see the past as one of those shutter books one flips with one's thumb to make a motion picture, time streaking forward, image by image.

So when Norris dwells on Vida, it is often through the world of his stamps. He sees her masquerading in all the stamps he knows and loves so well: in a severe white uniform, holding aloft a beaker of some foaming substance, a look of serious and intelligent consideration on her face—this from the Christmas Island stamp celebrating the phosphate industry. Or in a glowing and bristling headdress of beads and feathers, from a definitive series issued by Papua New Guinea. He sees her face where the Madonna's should be, eyes downcast, in the cracked pigment of the image reproduced in a commemorative stamp for St. Thomas. And sometimes, though it seems a bit absurd, he finds her features arranged under the queen's crown and demure coif, her face etched in purple or blue or forest green.

Yet, released from time to time from his library of stamps, he finds himself surprisingly—uncharacteristically, he would say—inspired. Closing his eyes, he imagines Vida without her blouse, her hair unwound, flying from the prow of a ship—a figurehead. He sees her all in white, ministering to a fallen soldier (himself, of course) safeguarded in a ruined Italian convent serving as hospital; her hands are infinitely gentle on the man's broken limbs. He sees her dreamy and restful, her arms bathed in soapsuds, washing up his dinner plate. He even sees himself, bearing her in his arms onto an endless crescent of shore from a limpid, gaseous ocean; his own bathing trunks are dark blue, and his physique, very manly. This fantasy feels faintly apocalyptic to him. He couldn't say where it comes from.

L
EANING AGAINST HIS
horse chestnut tree, trying to breathe quietly, Norris travels over his image of Vida, so restful and patient now upon her bench. Why is he so sure that some recklessness resides within her, some capacity to surprise him, surprise them all? He is slightly shocked to realize that he can imagine claws retracted inside the soft pad of her foot, her teeth buried within her still and watchful face.

Perhaps it is just the fact of Manford, her poor charge. Nothing should ever happen to Manford. Norris understands that Vida would, at all costs, prevent that.

Although Manford is not young now. Not anymore.

In light of that truth, that Manford is now a man himself, Norris sees as he never did or cared to before what Vida has within her. All along she has been faithful steward to Manford. She has prevented every accident, every misfortune—and certainly if ever there was a person who needed protection, Manford is it. Norris himself is quite overwhelmed by the notion of children, all the
dangers waiting to befall them. Sometimes he finds himself almost intimidated by Vida, as if she has already seen right through him, seen how nervous children make him, how inept he becomes in their presence.

He tries to see Vida now first as he thinks others must see her: As a pleasant woman with quiet manners, attractive, though not in any way you might consider showy. A woman who's done her duty. And she's grown into such a capable person—no one would have pegged her as someone to last with Manford Perry. Not that he isn't sweet; it's just—well, how dreary it must be sometimes. With no one to talk to.

For Manford is not only retarded, but mute, too. Though perhaps it's for the best—think what he might say if he
could
speak. Nothing but gobbledygook, likely. From their own doors and windows on the Romsey Road, the neighbors watch Vida pass down the street, Manford beside her, Vida chattering away happily as if they were actually having a conversation, her hands busy describing shapes in the air. And Manford himself squinting at the sun, shaking his head, running a hand over his hair, distractible as a dog. Almost no one can remember Vida as a girl anymore, when she ran errands for her mum at the shop, up and down the Romsey Road, those long braids flying out behind her, pink in her cheeks. Now the gestures of her youth, once so fluid and excitable, appear careful, economical. Vida is almost old enough now to be considered a spinster. And no one has ever known her to have a young man.

What a pity, people say. She might have had children of her own.

But Norris knows—he believes he alone knows—what is still there to be rescued and revived. He imagines that he sees what others, lacking the wondrous prism of his passion, cannot. She
has been waiting, he thinks. All along, she has been waiting. And now, could she love him? Could she?

Impossible, he thinks, closing his eyes against the surge of disappointment, the embarrassment. But then he reels, steadies himself against his tree, rights himself, his heart: I will love her so well, he thinks, that she will have to love me back. That's the way it works.

O
NCE IN HER
life, a long time ago, there was a spell when Vida was wild to get away from Manford, wild to be with people like her, to have what she used to think of as a “normal” life. It was almost as if she could see her life trailing away like a distant curl of smoke, going on without her. Her desperation lasted a little while—she had fits of weeping, wrote many letters of resignation to Mr. Perry that she tore up into tiny bits. And then somehow, one day, it was gone, and she felt like a person who has had a very high fever for several days and then wakes one morning to find the world calm and dry, a sparrow singing at the windowsill, a kettle blowing a shrill whistle from the kitchen downstairs.

Sometimes, though she cannot say why, she finds herself blinking away tears—it happens occasionally when she sits quietly like this, waiting for Manford. She has a sudden apprehension, so quick and sharp that it feels like pain, of what she thinks of as the world's transparency, the way everything is held together so loosely, so delicately, so impossibly—raise her hand, she thinks, and it will all fly apart; she will lose it forever.

One

S
OMETIMES, WHEN HE
is hiding behind the horse chestnut and spying on Vida, Norris dares to lean slightly to the east and watch for Manford.

Since he has been pondering Vida and the circumstances of her life, Norris cannot decide for himself whether Manford is blessed or cursed. Certainly Manford has been lucky to have Vida, he thinks, though of course it is an unwelcome blessing to need a nanny all your days, no matter how charming and dependable she may be. And blessed, too, after a fashion, by his state of permanent innocence. But surely in all other ways it is a curse to be as dim-witted as Manford, unequipped to consider the marvelous complexities of the world, to tarry awhile in the amusing company of one's own thoughts and the genius of society's inventions. Does Manford, grown to manhood now, a strapping twenty-year-old fellow recently employed at Niven's Bakery to stuff the doughnuts with jam, have even a single thought? Something that might be described as having a beginning and a middle and an end, with a little flash of revelation glowing in the center of it? What does he think as he fills those doughnuts? Norris can't say for certain that Manford thinks anything at all, and the notion perplexes him.

Whenever he's there in the lane, hoping to catch sight of Vida, Norris prepares himself for the sound of her voice, for the frisson of delight that runs over his body. He hears
her,
of course, for Manford does not speak, has never been known to speak. Every time, Norris listens for the receding murmur of Vida's voice as
she receives Manford's staggering embrace and inquires after his day (but isn't it pointless to ask if you can't be
answered?
) and leads him back down the lane to Southend House.

At that moment, after they've gone, Norris always thinks: It is so pretty in the lane. And he raises a hand delicately as if toward a work of art.

A
LONG WITH SERVING
as Hursley's postmaster, Norris is also amateur organist for St. Alphage, an entirely voluntary situation inherited from his grandmother, who, until she lost her sight, was pleased to be the only woman in Hampshire, she imagined, to hold the position of organist. As a consequence of her gender, she had begun offering her abilities free of charge, some vague understanding between her and the church committee that hers was a temporary service until the original organist was returned—safely, they all prayed—from the war. He was not, however. And by the time Norris was sufficiently proficient, the job was thought to be a sort of family office. He's never had a shilling for all his Sundays, though his repertoire is, he acknowledges, somewhat limited.

A philatelist and bachelor and collector of obscure reveries, Norris has never in his whole life had what might be described as a love affair. But he still remembers the name—Mary—of the sweet-faced girl who sat in front of him in the third form and whom he tried to kiss one day after school, darting out from behind a monkey puzzle tree and grabbing her to him. He remembers the feel of her upper arms within the circle of his hands, the slight yield of her flesh. But the girl had pulled away from him in horror, wiped her hand across her mouth, and burst inexplicably into tears, a response that mortified Norris so powerfully that the memory of it haunted him forever after, the scene replaying itself
over and over again in excruciating detail, just when it seemed he might be free of it.

There was that one other time, the sad and mysterious incident with the weeping woman. Why
do
they all always seem to cry?

This
woman's father, a postmaster in Winchester and an acquaintance of Norris's through the stamp league, had asked whether Norris wouldn't play escort to his daughter at a dance held at the St. Jude Hospital, where she was a nurse; her boyfriend, the father intimated, was a doctor who'd recently given her the brush-off. Norris, though nearly sick with anxiety, had dutifully presented himself to the girl at her flat. They had a cup of Pimm's at the dance, meanwhile watching other couples go round and round the large, empty room with its green walls and white plumbing. A steady rain beat dark against the window-panes. Norris, his heart racing, had asked the young woman to dance—she was quite pretty, after all. But once in his arms, she had wept so profusely and with such ferocity that she had soaked the shoulder of his suit coat. Eventually, with dismay, he had managed to steer her outside, still pressed to his shirtfront. He had driven her home and there he had left her off, still crying so hard that he could understand nothing of what she said other than, “Do forgive me.”

Afterward the woman's father had been oddly nervous around Norris, as though they shared some terrible complicity. So, women—well, until Vida, it all seemed simply too complicated, too important, for words. He has made do without, pushing the idea of the fairer sex, as he refers to them, far, far to the back of his thoughts. He knows other men who seem always to be on their own—Sir Winstead-Harris, for instance.
He's
done all right, Norris thinks. Pots of money, anyway.

So. He is just a fifty-five-year-old stick whom his neighbors
consider a confirmed bachelor. Terrified of women, perhaps? Or maybe a queer? (So careful with his appearance, etc.) He strikes some, in fact, as having the vulnerability of certain animals, the dolphin, perhaps, with its high, blunt brow and the dignity of a captive. With his mournful eyes and sometimes distracted manner, he is a fellow to be pitied, in a way, though he seems satisfied enough, always busy at the post office, full of helpful advice about the mails and so forth. Still, one does feel sorry for him; he's exactly the sort you expect to be taken by surprise by a sudden myocardial infarction. Or to be bitten by a rabid dog. One senses—vaguely—some harm speeding toward him, its target certain, its course unswerving.

But he is more than that now, Norris thinks, walking through Hursley, opening up the post office, mounting the steps to the organ on Sundays, doing his wash or his gardening or his sweeping. He is more than any of that. No one has the slightest idea who he
really
is, what he's capable of.

He can often be heard singing as he goes about his work these days.

He's happy.

For the first time in his life, he thinks, he isn't harm's foolish target, the idiot about to be turned tail over teacup, the one with egg on his face. He's standing directly in harm's way now, isn't he? He's brave as a soldier, fully prepared. He has everything to risk, and everything to gain.

He is Norris Lamb in love. Lamb in love.

B
UT HOW REALLY
does Norris understand Vida? For that matter, Manford Perry?

Nowadays it's no longer proper to call them idiots or fools, these souls with the strange air of the savant behind their otherwise
childlike expressions. Handicapped is how Norris has overheard Vida describe Manford.