Lamb in Love (21 page)

The door moves inward lightly, soundlessly, swinging wide like doors in dreams.

He feels his breath quicken now, for he has never been inside Southend before. At last he is in the presence of so many things she has touched, the fraying cloth hung over the handle of the stove, the slick, pearly oval of white soap in the dish by the sink—it might have slid into the bend of her wrist, up her white arm!—the teacups draining on the board, an apple, partly eaten, browning on a plate with a scalloped edge. Norris wants to put the bitten slice to his own lips, to run his tongue over the clean edge, like a shelf of coral, made by her teeth. He steps close to the sink, to the windowsill, where an assortment of objects lies perfectly arranged as if by a painter: a tangle of hairpins; a small jar of hand lotion, pink gel crusted round its rim; two knobbed horse chestnuts from some previous autumn, their luster dim; the spindly dried flower of a tulip poplar like a medieval crown of thorns; one broken and lifeless monarch butterfly, its scales turning to dust. What did it say about her that she had chosen to collect these things? he wonders. He reaches his hand to touch them, sends the chestnuts wobbling, stirs the pins.

He moves soundlessly through the room, his gaze caressing each surface her hand might have trailed across, might have rested upon.

When he stands at last in the central hall, he feels frightened for the first time. He does not know exactly where Mr. Niven is;
the house is so large. It occurs to him that explaining his presence here to him would be almost worse than explaining it to Vida herself. So when he hears the distant sound of a door opening and a set of approaching footsteps, he turns and runs wildly up the staircase, reaching the landing just as Mr. Niven, putter under his arm, and a bottle of sherry in one hand, passes through the hall, whistling tunelessly under his breath.

On his knees on the landing, Norris touches his forehead gently to the carpet as Mr. Niven's steps recede.

And then he raises his eyes to find that he is in a nightmare, faces with distorted Teutonic features growing like burls out of the lintels over the doors, strange creatures—half wyvern, half stag—emerging from the scrollwork, feathery-tailed dolphins diving from the wall brackets, all of it rococo and queer, the gold paint faded and glowing morosely.

Standing shakily, moving down the hall, he looks into several rooms and then arrives at what must be Vida's. He finds her bed, where the coverlet has been disarranged as though she had lain down briefly before going out, her hair, her cheek, against the pillowcase. He puts his face to it, and a wild feeling comes over him, as though he has lost her, as though she has died.

It is the room of a penitent, the small white bed pushed beneath the window, where the sleeper would have a view of the moon at night.

D
OWNSTAIRS
, M
R
. N
IVEN
returns through the hall with his glass of sherry and his putter. At the foot of the stairs he stops. Putting on her hat earlier that evening at the door, while thanking him profusely, Vida had said nervously that Manford would be asleep, that Mr. Niven needn't go check on him.

“Of course, he does sleepwalk from time to time,” she'd added,
turning round as he began to close the door after her. “But he hasn't done it for some time now, so I wouldn't worry. But if he does, you should just steer him back to bed. Don't, though,” she said earnestly, as Mr. Niven again tried to close the door, “attempt to wake him. That can have—consequences.”

Mr. Niven takes a sip of his sherry, glances up the darkened stair. Perhaps he will just go up and have a look in on him. He'd done that with his own children when he was left to mind them while his wife went off for some evening's entertainment. Of course, Manford isn't a child. But he
is
helpless, Mr. Niven thinks. And he begins to ascend the stairs, but as he does so, he looks up and meets the heavy-lidded eyes of one of the carvings, a great ho-ho bird standing atop the newel post at the landing. Mr. Niven stops uncomfortably at the sight of the coiled creature, its head thrown back over its bristling shoulder. He takes one more step, keeping his eyes fixed on the thing, and then turns round abruptly and heads back toward the kitchen and the small sitting room there. I think I'll just have a look at the telly, he thinks. And, How does she stand this place all by herself?

N
ORRIS UNPACKS THE
nightdress, lays it across the bed, and pulls and pinches its folds until it looks just right to him. Then he fetches the letter Nesser had forwarded and places it carefully atop the gown. At last he steps back and looks around. The nightdress makes the room seem even shabbier, in a way, like the queen visiting a prisoner in his cell. He picks up a piece of the tissue that has fallen to the floor and is about to put it back in the haversack when he hears Vida's voice from the stairs.

“Good night!” she calls. “Thanks ever so much!”

Norris, frozen with terror, hears Mr. Niven's muffled, unintelligible reply. He looks around wildly and then steps quickly into
the closet and closes the door after him, sinking to his knees inside as if his limbs have turned to water. He cannot see or hear anything. He feels the floor with his hands, places his palms flat against it, and tries to breathe deeply. But as he moves, as quietly as he can on his trembling hands and knees, toward what he supposes is the back of the closet, where he might hope to remain undetected if Vida has to open the door, he is surprised to fail to encounter a rear wall. In fact, the closet seems unnaturally deep. He ducks his head beneath the slips of hanging dresses, their intimate odor, and crawls slowly until the cloth brushing his forehead no longer has the light, hesitant brush of a woman's hemline but has become heavier, like a hand pressed to his shoulder. He reaches up in the darkness and feels velvety nap and rough wools, realizes that they are overcoats, that it must be a shared closet, that he has crawled from Vida's chamber into the closet used by Mr. Perry for his winter storage. And suddenly the thought of their garments intermingling in that single space, that tunnel—the thought of the insignificant weight of her dresses beneath the masculine heft of Mr. Perry's topcoats—makes Norris practically ill. He closes his eyes.

He falls asleep in the closet eventually, drowning in shame. Or perhaps he faints; he is not sure which. Sometime late in the night, he wakes and crawls out quietly into an unused bedroom. He feels as though he has been ill for a long time. The house is so dark and still that as he passes down the stairs in his socks he wonders what spell has overtaken them all, Vida and Manford and Mr. Niven and perhaps even the whole village fallen asleep, shafts of moonlight laid over their faces like veils. He is cold and exhausted.

By the back door he finds his shoes, full of water, and walks home. But as he walks, he looks up and sees that the moon has
come out and bobs along behind him cheerfully like a toy on a string. As he turns the corner from the lane onto the Romsey Road, the moon swings round his shoulder as if to light the way, and when Norris reaches the street, he has to gasp, for there she has laid down a trail of silver for him to follow, a carpet rolled out for a king.

And now he can hold his head up again as he steps onto this river of light, the windows behind which his neighbors sleep filled with the blinding reflection of wonder, the moondust sparkling and twinkling around his forehead in a crown of a thousand brilliant stars.

Ten

V
IDA USUALLY FINDS
the services at St. Alphage restful, and so when she comes to her knees at the pew Sunday morning, Manford kneeling heavily beside her, his hands folded in a pious fashion, she closes her eyes, hoping for relief.

Coming home last night from the book circle to find the robe laid out on her bed had been one of the most unsettling experiences of her life. That, and the accompanying letter, postmarked this time from Cairo:

I am the man with the world at his fingertips. I am the gateway to adventure. I am your personal ticket to paradise. I fall at your knees in worship.

As beautiful as the robe was—and it
was
beautiful—and as mysterious as the letter was, the charm of both had almost been destroyed for her by something very unexpected and unpleasant indeed—fear. Someone had been in her bedroom. Someone she did not know, or the emissary of someone she did not know, had put his hands where she lay down to sleep. Perhaps he had watched her enter the house, wave good night to Mr. and Mrs. Niven, had seen her light come on in her window. This was too much, she felt. It was too—near.

She had been looking forward to her hour in church this morning. She had hoped that it would calm her, the tedium and the music both immersing the congregation in a soothing bath of piety and fellowship. She had hoped it would remind her of the ordinariness of everything. But now she finds that she will
not be soothed by the morning's service in the least. The new organ is very loud, and there is a ferociousness to Mr. Lamb's playing.

She rises from her knees, putting a hand on Manford's arm, and stares dully at Mr. Lamb's back as he sits at the organ, his head shaking wildly on his neck like a flower on a long stem, his hands darting over the keys, his knees pumping as though he were running a race. He seems to have gone mad, playing with a fervor that strikes her as profane, a profane gaiety. But it is not as if she can sit still herself. She wriggles and shifts on the pew; her shoulders feel tight and uncomfortable.

In the absence of any other evidence, it now seems likely to her that
Mr. Niven
might be her mysterious admirer, the deliverer of the robe, the writer of the letters. After all, he was the only one at the house last night. And now she can't rid herself of the feeling that he must be sitting somewhere behind her, a notion that fills her with dismay. It isn't at all pleasant to have to think of him in this new way. And, worse yet, something about it doesn't seem exactly right. Still, she knows so little of the world, really, so little of human character; and though she doesn't really like to be reminded of it, if she can dance about on the fountain like a fairy, then perhaps Mr. Niven, too, is capable of surprises.

Manford, as if sensing her discomfort, is as restless as she is. He tries repeatedly to stand up from the pew. She frequently has to prevent him from standing during church services, as if the music reaches him at some instinctive level, prompting from him a soldier's salute. This morning he seems to require particular restraint, however. She turns and glares deliberately at him, her most reproving face, after several instances in which she has to clamp a hand on his knee. “Do be still, Manford,” she hisses at him.

But Manford, beaming and ignoring her reprimand, turns
around in his seat and—to Vida's horror, as she follows his gaze—catches sight of Mr. and Mrs. Niven a few pews behind them. Manford grins broadly and gives them a wave. Mr. Niven raises his hand and flutters his fingers in reply, meanwhile putting a finger to his lips. Mrs. Niven smiles indulgently. Vida freezes, an ugly flush creeping up the back of her neck. She snatches at Manford's hand and squeezes it, harder than she intends. Manford, going limp next to her, looks down at his lap, takes back his injured hand, and nurses it carefully in the other, testing his fingers and giving her baleful looks.

Vida hates herself immediately. And an image of Manford from the night before, disheveled and forlorn in his nightshirt, arrives in front of her eyes. She shudders, puts her own hand apologetically on Manford's fingers to still them, and wishes fiercely that he had not started sleepwalking again.

T
HE WHOLE NIGHT
had been wrong, had gotten off to the wrong start, she thinks, beginning with the robe.

She hadn't even noticed it right away. She'd seen the Nivens out and had gone straight up to bed, tired by the interminable chat of the book circle. She'd gone to wash up and had come back into the room, her hair in a towel—and then she had literally jumped. It was lying there on her bed like a royal visitor.

She had come forward, one hand holding the towel to her head, and had leaned down to touch the robe in disbelief, as if it might not be real. But it was real, cool and silky, and she had run her hands over the waterfalls and birds like peacocks, with long, trailing plumage, the butterflies like sapphires, the golden tassels. It had smelled extraordinarily sweet as well, like vetiver, she realized. She hadn't smelled vetiver in years; her mother had always kept a bit tied up with the sheets. As she lifted the sleeve of the
robe to her nose, though, it struck her that she'd smelled vetiver somewhere else, more recently. Where had it been?

And then she'd noticed the letter. She sat down on her bed to open it—and that's when all the lovely wonder turned to fear.
I am the man with the world at his fingertips.

She didn't like the sound of it. It implied a kind of dark magic, she thought, a promise that couldn't be kept and was therefore no sort of promise at all but only a taunt. She wound her hands together and tried to breathe deeply, her yoga breathing—she'd learned some yoga from a show on the telly once—but it didn't really help. It occurred to her that she would be unable to scream, for her heart had rolled into a high, tight place, lodged against her windpipe like a stone before a cave.