Lamb in Love (20 page)

She stares back at him. “A
woodcock?
”

“Yes!” He has caught up her hands, is wringing them. “It's the most amazing thing. I've seen them, up near Winstead-Harris's house, in a spinney there. They start low to the ground”—Norris crouches slightly, and Vida must crouch along with him, for he has hold of her hands—“and then the female bird, she spins straight up in the air! Like a corkscrew! Really! It's fantastic!”

“Whatever for?” But she is laughing.

“Why, it's all part of the ritual, I suppose. It's how they do it.” But he hears his own words then, and drops her hands in embarrassment. A
woodcock.
Good lord.

“It's a dance, you see,” he says helplessly. “It's an art. A talent.”

She smiles, and then he can see recollection pass over her features. “Did you ever go to Miss Ferry's pageants?” she asks him. “Do you remember them? The ones at Southend? I don't know whether they do them anymore. They've never asked Mr. Perry about using the house. But we had to wear Gypsy skirts and bangles. We liked the way we looked, all made up, with mascara and eyeliner and lipstick. We thought we looked quite exotic. We used to kiss one another before we went out, for luck.”

Norris feels so happy. “Yes, yes, I remember,” he says. “Of
course you would like that, wouldn't you? Anyone would—like being somebody else. Someone with a more interesting life. More exotic, as you say.” He appraises her shyly, appreciatively. “I should think you'd be a wonderful Gypsy. I like costumes, myself. I—admire the change they can effect. I think I—long for it, really, in a way.”

“Being somebody else.” Vida repeats his words. “You long for that?”

Norris feels disconcerted. He can't exactly judge her tone. Does she disapprove? “I used to think that I might have done so well, if only I'd had the chance,” he says, trying to explain, and the words and the time are getting all mixed up for him. “If things had been different, I might have been—”

“Somebody else? You might have been different, too?” She is eager now, almost straining inside her robe. Her wet hair is slicked back from her face. Norris can see the slight protrusion of her brow above her temples, the fine bone there curved like a shell. He wants to put his finger to it, touch her pulse, the steady, astonishing measure of her existence.

“I thought, in a way,” he begins awkwardly, touching his fist to his heart, the words coming slowly, carefully, for he has never said such things before, never to anyone; he is surprising himself, what he knows. “I thought once I might be capable of anything, really. Just that I walked and breathed—that seemed miraculous in and of itself! That I was one of the—the marvelous contrivances of the world, all so cleverly put together—” He wiggles his fingers like a man counting money. “The tympanic membrane of the ear, the great wings of the skull, and tissue and blood and ligament and bone. It all seems so fantastic, in a way, that it works!”

Vida looks baffled, almost agonized.

Norris tries to think. What is it he wants to say? He runs on desperately, despite himself. “But then, I don't know—one day I realized that I wasn't really so miraculous after all.” He thrusts out his hand. “I've got a wart on my finger. You see? And I've got terrible eyesight. And a bad back. Kept me out of the war!” He says this last as if accusing himself, accusing his own back of having prevented him from being heroic. “But still, I've got to hope, don't I? Don't I? Don't we all?”

“Yes, of course,” Vida says, but the baffled look hasn't left her face. Norris feels as though he will burst. He is so stupid! Why can't he just tell her?

A sudden, dull crash causes them to turn away. Manford flounders in a pile of hymnals down near the last pew. The tower he's built of them lies scattered.

Vida hurries down the aisle. She helps Manford to his feet, picks up the books, and arranges them neatly. She returns to Norris, holding Manford tightly by the hand. Manford's skin looks gray in the poor light.

She takes off her robe, hands it gravely to Norris without exactly looking at him. He reaches for it, holding it tightly, as if holding the robe will cause her to stay.

“It's let up a bit,” she says. She helps Manford out of his robe, hands it to Norris, too.

She will leave now. Norris feels as though he were being buried in sand, that soon even his mouth and eyes will be buried.

She turns after ushering Manford outside.

“It was lovely seeing you,” she says suddenly, warmly.

“Yes. Thank you,” he replies.

W
HEN HE STEPS
outside, he finds Mr. Niven and his wife sitting under the dormer, a rug over their laps, and a thermos be
tween them.

Mrs. Niven looks up in surprise. “
Another
refugee?” she says. “But it doesn't look as though you made it quite in time, Mr. Lamb.”

“No,” Norris says, feeling vaguely guilty, as though he's been caught at something. Had they seen Vida and Manford as well?

“Did you see Miss Stephen inside?” Mrs. Niven asks.

“Ah—yes. I did.” He pauses. “She was wet as well,” he adds.

Mr. Niven glances up at him. “Tea?” He extends a mug.

“Yes, thank you,” Norris says, for he feels unnatural and lightheaded, as though he has run a hard race.

“We've our book circle tonight, Mr. Lamb,” Mrs. Niven says, leaning round her husband. “And, do you know, Charles has said he'll mind Manford for Miss Stephen while she joins us. Don't you think that will be lovely for her?”

“I'm going to practice with my putter is all,” Mr. Niven says gruffly. “She said he'd be asleep.”

But Norris is hardly hearing them, for suddenly an idea has come into his head. “So,” he says, bringing the steaming tea to his lips. “Your book circle is tonight, is it? An hour of intellectual adventure on the high seas of literature?”

“Oh, not just an hour, Mr. Lamb. We shall be going on late into the evening,” Mrs. Niven says. “We're having wine, as well,” she adds. “A rosé. I expect I'll have to wake Charles, we'll go on so long. We're all terribly excited.”

“I'm sure you are. It sounds fascinating,” Norris says. Now he feels much better. All his botched efforts this afternoon, babbling on at Vida like an idiot—showing her his warts, for God's sake! But he can redeem himself now. Could he, really, get past Niven? Get the robe to her bedroom? He feels infinitely revived.

He takes a mouthful of tea. “Pity about the race, isn't it?” he
says casually.

“Oh, they're
so
disappointed,” Mrs. Niven says.

Norris hands his cup back to her. “That was just the thing, Mrs. Niven,” he says. “Now I'll just run home and change into some dry clothes.”

Mr. Niven looks up at him. “Are you opening up later?”

Norris is perplexed. “Sorry?”

“The
post office?
” Mr. Niven says, as if reminding him. “You weren't there this morning. I've something to post.”

“Oh! Yes. Of course. Sorry for the inconvenience.” He gives them a brilliant smile, touches two fingers to his forehead in a salute, and moves off. But he has no intention of spending his afternoon at the post office. He has far too much thinking to do.

T
HAT EVENING
, N
ORRIS
folds the nightgown and robe carefully in tissue and then in a length of torn sheet taken from the linen chest. When he opens the cupboard, a bundle of curled, dry roots tied with string falls out on the floor. Norris picks it up and puts it to his nose—vetiver, the smell of his bedsheets. He replaces it on the shelf and then puts the wrapped nightdress in a haversack. He senses that he might need both hands free for this mission, though if he had stopped to examine that thought he might have been embarrassed. What, did he expect to scale the brick and stone of Southend's facade, a patch over one eye and ivy tickling his chin, and enter through a window?

But he will not allow reason to interfere with the anticipation of adventure, even danger, that accompanies the matter of delivering his gift. He has in mind to lay it across her bed so that she might, stepping into her room later that night—possibly
naked
—from the bath, find it there waiting, as if someone watching had followed her. He has in mind something magical, impossible. He has in
mind to surprise her. Everybody loves to be surprised, he thinks.

When he steps from his back door into the darkness, the pair of doves that nestle in the wisteria are disturbed and blow a long, warbling cry into the night, like the imitative whistle of a young boy meeting a cohort for a secret assignation. Then all is quiet.

He lets himself in at the post office as quietly as he can. He doesn't want to turn on a light and excite the suspicion of the drunken patrons at the Dolphin, lounging about on the corner at the two oak tables there, and so instead takes a torch from his haversack and trains it on the supply of letters and parcels that had come Friday afternoon. He had expected to sort the post Saturday morning, and then the notion of traveling to Winchester had seized him instead. But he hopes now that his second letter to Vida will have arrived, courtesy of old Nesser. He wants to deliver it along with the robe.

And there it is, an envelope of pale blue paper, a stamp on its face so lovely he feels instantly grateful to Nesser for his good judgment and excellent taste. It must have been from his own collection, Norris thinks, from a series he remembered that represented the civil virtues, issued by the independent Republic of San Marino some years back. Each stamp is a sketch, loosely drawn like a Matisse, showing a woman's body in various attitudes, heroic or modest. This stamp, depicting love, is of a beautiful woman seen in profile, her neck inclined backward in a faintly ecstatic pose, her gaze half-lidded and erotic. The faintest suggestion of her naked breasts can be seen, rising mounds beneath her collarbones. Norris is reminded of his own secret collection of breast-feeding stamps. He has several Madonnas, of course, and one stamp from Laos showing a pert young mother in an opened blouse with a high Oriental collar, her infant at her nipple. Another, from Tanzania, in celebration of the Year of the
Child, features a dark-skinned woman, her enormous teat stretched by her hungry child. A Bostwanian stamp shows a woman tilting her large nipple playfully toward a cartoonish crocodile, its jaws stretched into a smile. Norris's favorite, though, is from Transkei, one of the South African homelands with its own postal service. In this stamp an older woman, a wet nurse, perhaps, naked from the waist up except for a massive necklace of rough white shells, offers her breast to a tiny starveling. Norris likes this stamp for the woman's patient service, her grave and heavy features, and the supposed life-giving magic of her milk.

Oh, Nesser is a marvel, he thinks now. How perfect this is.

He puts the envelope in the haversack, flicks off his torch beam, and steals quietly back outside.

H
E DOES NOT
expect to find the doors at Southend locked. No one in Hursley ever locks a door. He walks soundlessly through the high-pruned white oaks; a wide, leafless blackness, serene as a museum chamber, lies beneath the massive branches. Through a ragged passage in a towering boxwood already strung with the moist netting of spiders' webs, he steps into the garden and looks up at the house. A broad flight of steps, the capitals of the columns at its base carved with stone fruit borne lightly on a frozen froth of waves, leads to the terrace. And he imagines then that he can rise to her room like a hero, his heels sprouting wings.

But naturally he must walk like any ordinary mortal, and so he ascends the steps to the house, advances quietly along the terrace until he reaches the lighted frame of a set of French doors. He peeps round the frame.

Mr. Niven is there with his back to Norris, his putter gripped between two hands, his shoulders rounded, his gaze fixed on the
golf ball and, fifteen feet away across the infinitely varied terrain of an Oriental rug, an overturned sherry glass that serves as the hole. The chandelier above him spreads light into the vast room with its coved ceiling; the dangling prisms issue a confetti of blue-white snowflakes the color of evening moths. Mr. Niven rocks slightly on his feet. He strikes the ball. Norris, crouched by a parapet, watches it roll soundlessly across the carpet and glance off the edge of the faceted glass with a single, perfect chime.

Oh, too bad, he thinks.

Mr. Niven walks across the room, fetches his ball, and returns again to his original position. Through the window, Norris follows the second shot, sees it roll clear of the glass altogether.

Tucking the club under his arm like a shotgun, Mr. Niven advances on the glass and touches it gingerly with his foot, adjusting its angle slightly, and then aligns himself over the ball again, somewhat nearer this time. Norris sees the ball describe a gentle arc and sink, with the sound of ice hitting the bottom of a tumbler, into the glass.

But he cannot stay and watch, though something in Mr. Niven's patient endeavor, something in his complete ignorance of Norris's presence outside the French doors, makes Norris feel somnolent and contented, like a sleepy child watching his mother's hands form dumplings or knit and purl an afghan. The danger of his errand, its preposterousness, licks at the back of his mind the way a forgotten caution rises into the conscience of a child—there is something he is supposed to remember, though he only wants to watch Mr. Niven and his ball traverse the carpet, back and forth, all night, the little white ball rolling.

But when Mr. Niven turns his back and bends over his putter again, Norris rouses himself and walks softly the length of the terrace to the short flight of steps that leads down to the kitchen garden
by the back door. The beds there are a tangle of overgrown herbs, the long, spiny stalks of lavender waving like sea grass, the rue perfuming the air with its sour, volatile fragrance. At the kitchen door he stops and unlaces his shoes, tucking them beneath the dank boxwood, releasing a tiny shower of drops from the leaves cupped like tiny bowls.