Lamb in Love (25 page)

He stands helplessly behind her, his hands dangling. Manford lifts his head from the table, looks at Vida, alert.

Oh, Lord! She's crying. Another one, crying! He feels wild with despair and confusion. Why did they
always
have to be crying? What was it that he did to them?

“Vida,” he says, his voice low and ashamed. “Miss Stephen. I am so sorry. I didn't mean—I'm only trying to understand. I so want to understand. Please, I know I'm very stupid, that it must seem very stupid, my asking such questions and saying it all so badly. But I do—”

I do what? he thinks.

I do love her so much.

H
E WANTS TO
know everything about her life, everything about how it is with Manford. He feels that he has never experienced anything so difficult in his whole life as this, this wanting to know about them. He had once thought that it was simple, he realizes now, how people come to know one another. He'd thought it was a simple accumulation of evidence. His grandmother would touch his face, hold it in her hands. “Norrie,” she'd say, “you're getting the big nose like your father. Be a good boy, Norrie. Be so very good now, won't you?” And then she'd release him. But he would notice that his mother had begun to cry, ever so quietly. And though she couldn't see a thing, his grandmother knew her daughter-in-law was weeping away in her corner.
“Don't be sniffling now, Rosemary,” she'd say sharply. “It does no harm to tell him that he looks like his father.”

And Norris knew that it would never go away, that his being there was no replacement, really, for his father's absence. And yet no one had to say so for him to understand that! And so he thought that was how it was done, how people came to know one another.
With no words.

People came to understand one another not by words but by what had happened between them. It couldn't be said, in so many words.

And yet it's all he's got now, he feels—nothing but questions, nothing but words.

He's watched her. He's seen her come and go about the village. Everyone seems to know her, or they're used to seeing her, at least. But since spying her that night on the fountain, he believes that he understands her in some essential way. At that moment, standing in the garden at Southend, he had realized that he simply hadn't been
looking;
that it was all a question of looking. If he'd looked before, surely he would have seen it, how lovely she is.

He knows something about her, and now he wants to know everything, for it's as if he's had a glimpse of something hiding behind the curtain, as if a drape has been pulled aside to show just a corner of a beautiful painting. He has something small now—like a postage stamp, he realizes happily—that small image of her upon the fountain, or waiting on the bench in the lane. But now he wants to pull the drape aside, wants to see the whole thing, wants something so large it fills the room, the universe!

He's not satisfied, anymore, with something small.

And he's afraid that he will never be able to tell her how he feels, never be able to show her what a help he could be. Because
he knows that he is good at helping, an expert, you might say. He knows how women are. His mother and grandmother would sit beside him on the bed at night after his father had been killed. “Is there anything you want, Norrie?” they'd say. “Is there anything we can get you?” And they'd argue between themselves. “Leave the boy alone,” one would say to the other. “Just let him sleep,” the other would reply, all the while both of them smoothing the coverlet, tucking in the sheet corner.

But he'd understood that they wanted him to stay awake for them.

“Should I play for you, Norrie, whilst you go to sleep?” his grandmother would ask.

Oh, yes, please. For that was what they wanted. And before he closed his eyes, he would see them, his mother winding her hands at the door frame in the square of light, his grandmother at the organ. He knew how to make a gift, then. He knew how to please.

He'd love to please Manford, too, if he knew how. He knows he likes stamps, and it frustrates him that he can't simply give him stamps in quantity, lovely ones, as many as he'd like. He'd even give Manford one of his own collections, if he would enjoy it, Christmas all over the world—Renaissance religious paintings from the smaller islands of the British Commonwealth, and a jolly lot of colorful stamps from the United States, with happy snowmen and reindeer and so forth, and some charming ones from Ireland, the nativity in gold leaf.

He's bought jam doughnuts, masses of them by now, enough to make a man sick.

He's tried to be attentive.

But he doesn't know what Manford wants; he doesn't understand him.

What does he want? Norris thinks, staring at Manford across
the table. How will I ever know?

H
E WATCHES
V
IDA
carefully put aside the towels with which she lifted the roasting pan. Her shoulders have quieted. She runs her hands down the front of her apron, touches her palms to her cheeks. But when she turns around, her face is gentle, kind; she smiles at him. Why, she wasn't crying! Not a bit of it! She's been—
laughing!

But before she can speak, the kitchen door opens. The young man from the garden, black hair tousled over his forehead, his cheeks pale as milk, appears in the doorway, grasping one wrist with his hand. Blood spills on the floor.

“Hallo,” he says weakly. “Could I get a bandage?”

Norris backs away as Vida sweeps past him. “Oh, what have you done?” she cries.

The young man smiles. “Sorry to interrupt the
party,
” he says. He looks around the room.

Norris thinks he smirks at them, but perhaps he is only grimacing.

The young man indicates a chair with his elbow, smiles as if both Vida and Norris were idiots not to have offered it to him already, a man dripping blood on the floor. “Mind if I have a seat?” he asks, and his lip curls.

“No, no, of course!” Vida pulls out the chair for him; Norris sees that the young man has embarrassed her, made her feel guilty. Norris frowns.

She leans over the gardener's hands, her back to Norris. “What
happened,
Jeremy?”

“Putting in another window in the greenhouse,” he says. “One of the sloping ones for the roof.” He lifts his hand slightly, experimentally, releasing the pressure on his wrist. Blood fountains up.
“Should have waited for
you,
” he adds, and glances up at Vida, winking heavily. “Came right down on my wrist, just like a guillotine.” He makes a noise with his mouth, like something bitten off neatly.

Norris shivers.

Jeremy closes his eyes.

“I think you need stitching up!” Vida says. “Let me see it.”

The young man draws his hand away again. Blood bubbles up as his fingers release.

Vida gasps. “You must see Dr. Faber straightaway.” She reaches down and begins to lift him at the elbow. “I'll take you in the car. Oh—let me get a towel first.” She turns as if to find one on the cluttered countertop beside the sinking roast and the scattered plates. Then she spins back to face Norris, as if she has just remembered something.

“Manford—” she begins. A high hot color has risen into her cheeks. “Mr. Lamb—do you, would you—could you mind him while I take Jeremy to Dr. Faber's?” She says this, Norris thinks, as though he has not been here the whole while, listening to matters develop. “I'd rather not take him to Dr. Faber's with me,” she goes on, lowering her voice. “He's so squeamish about blood. Do you think you could stay here with him? He'll be no trouble. I'd
so
appreciate it, Mr. Lamb.”

Her face is pleading; he glances down at her skirt, sees she has got some of Jeremy's blood on her apron. Or perhaps it is from the roast?

“Here,” she says, turning quickly again and opening a drawer, withdrawing a stack of cellophane stamp envelopes. “There's these you could do together, in his album? We haven't got to them.” She holds them out to Norris. “They're your recent ones. We haven't had the time,” she adds apologetically.

Norris takes them from her hands. “No, of course,” he says faintly. He feels as if it were he who had lost a lot of blood, not this young gardener with the black hair and milk white cheeks.

“Oh.” Vida stops again as she lifts her coat from the stand in the corner. “Jeremy Martin,” she says, “Mr. Norris Lamb. I'm so sorry.”

She seems very young to Norris at this moment. The excitement has brought a high color into her lips as well as her cheeks, as if she has been pinched. He steps toward her, for it has come into his mind that he might kiss her now as if they were an old married pair, as if he were simply sending her on her way, on an errand of kindness.

But she is bending protectively over Jeremy. “Are you all right to stand?” Norris hears her say.

The gardener rises slowly to his feet. “Nice meeting you,” he says to Norris, and Norris feels ashamed of himself then, for Jeremy looks very young as well at this moment, and quite pale and sickly. There's not a trace of the—what was it?—superiority he'd shown a few minutes ago.

Vida holds the towel toward Jeremy but then appears to realize that he can't wrap it himself. Her eyebrows lift inquiringly. “Should I?”

“That would help,” he says.

She inclines toward him then, leaning necessarily close to him, wrapping the towel gingerly around his arm.

Is that her breast, brushing his shoulder?

His dark eyelashes come to rest slowly against his cheeks. His head, lolling, is inches from her.

Norris looks away, hard, at the floor, at the tiles there set in even rows, stretching away across the floor one after the other.

A
ND THEN THEY
are gone.

Norris hears the car start somewhere far below, far away, hears its motor recede. He stares at the door through which Vida and Jeremy exited, as if they might reappear at any moment. He sniffs the air, the damp smell of the meat's pooling pan juices. It is, he realizes suddenly, very quiet. When he turns around with a start, he sees that Manford has disappeared.

Norris looks round wildly. “Hallo?” he calls to the empty kitchen.

He steps to the door of the small sitting room: empty. And then, furtively, as if he might be ambushed at any moment, feeling vaguely as though Manford might pop out at him, he sets off down the hall toward the interior of the house, calling loudly, “Hallo! Hallo?” He raps repeatedly on the wall with his knuckles as he passes, as if the sound, with its steady reverberations, might reach Manford more easily than a voice and with clearer purpose.

He senses that the afternoon has closed in as he steps into the front hall. Now day has passed the noon mark, with its spreading lap of possibility, that hour that seems to last from morning to night in an endless lull of time. He stands in the mingling shadows of the hall with its empty hearth, its walls of tapestries. The balcony runs high above, balanced, it seems, now that he sees it in daylight, upon the arched backs of what appear to be winged lions. He tries to calculate how late it is. There'd been the walk home from St. Alphage, all his pointless chatter, the bloody gardener—is it three? Or even four now? In the dim and silent hall, its stone walls ringing his footsteps back to him, he can't be sure.

He hurries onward then, struggling to contain the feeling that Manford, too, is moving, can move so much quicker than he. He could be miles away by now, roving away down some distant lane, stroking the air in that odd way he has, as if feeling it billow past him like green waves around the trunk of a giant, a giant
striding through the teeming leagues of an ocean, birds wheeling above his bowed head.

Norris scurries from room to room. The house is extravagant, baffling, hallways turning at invisible corners, double doors bracketed by carved wood panels opening here and there in the walls, the odd piece of furniture—an enormous chest, its brass fittings gleaming in the gloom, a chair forked with antlers—placed as if to trip him up. As he hurries from door to door, he sees that many rooms are almost entirely unfurnished, sheets webbing the chandeliers. In one—he judges it to be a ballroom, perhaps, the silvered pier mirrors streaked with gray—the tent of sheeting has come loose and dangles from the arms of the fixture high above, a sculpture of flowing marble, suspended stone.

Manford is nowhere to be found.

At last Norris enters a room that is, he senses, in use. The long gallery is hung floor to ceiling with dark paintings. An arrangement of settees and end tables are gathered in the center, newspapers and books lie scattered on the floor, and pillows and footstools are tucked among the larger furnishings for apparent comfort. A carved plaster ceiling caps the tall walls, cupping the light from several French doors that give out onto the garden.

Norris hurries across the room, soundlessly crossing a carpet of spring flowers and grasses, endless repetitions of nodding bells in faded greens and silvers and blues and rose. It strikes him that he has seen a stamp of this pattern once, a brocade—from Austria? The Alps?

One of the French doors is ajar. Norris steps outside. Set at intervals on the broad terrace, poised as if to leap to the garden below, are several marble statues—of Mercury, Norris realizes now, though he has seen them before from afar.

He moves quietly among them now in the dove gray light of
late afternoon, raising his hand to touch the pitted feet, the wings sprouting from heels, the arms raised in a delicate attitude of balance, the platonic ascent. The statues' hooded eyes stare past him; the genitals float, soft and obscure.

Norris has seen the figures from the garden below while wandering on his evening walks through the wilderness areas of orchard and stanchion oaks and passing through the bowed hedges of boxwood that circle the fountain and its surrounding Venetian grotto. But he has never been up to this side of the house, never been so close to the statues before, never felt, as he does now, the inevitability of their flight nor the heroism of their sacrificial pose. He rests his hand on the outflung calf of the nearest statue, follows the figure's ecstatic gaze.