Lamb in Love (28 page)

As they near the end of the village, where the oak trees overshadow the road, Vida feels the shift into darkness, something cold and dead upon her arms. She shivers. The chill recalls for her the ominous hours of Manford's sleepwalking. And then she feels strangely angry at the presumption of that dark span of time—how frightened she becomes at night. She does not like having to be afraid. Her mind makes a little leap; that someone could enter her bedroom, for instance, could be always on the periphery of her life, unseen and yet all-seeing—this is equally horrifying, she thinks. A fierce righteousness grows in her. Suddenly she wants to tell someone that there is a secret in her life, a person who comes and goes without being seen. She wants to be rid of the secret of it. What is wrong with this man, whoever he is? she thinks now—Mr. Niven
or Mr. Perry or Mr. Spooner or Jeremy—what is wrong with him that he can't simply come to her, declare his love? There must be something wrong with him.

And now the whole weight of her day and the night before crashes down around her—finding Manford in the greenhouse, Jeremy's injury, worrying about Mr. Lamb. She is tired of this, so tired. She wants to be done with the weight of it. She wants whoever it is to show himself.

“Mr. Lamb,” she says suddenly. “I haven't been hospitable. I haven't been friendly to you. I'm sorry for that.” She stops, sets her mouth.

Why does she feel so angry at
him?
He's only been nice; he's lonely himself. Still, she
is
angry, she finds, especially at him just now, because he knows nothing about her, cannot be complicitous with her, cannot know all that has befallen her. She has had no one to talk to, she thinks. She has to tell someone.

“It's just that I've been—I'm being stalked, you see.” She stops abruptly and turns to face Mr. Lamb. “I'm afraid that sounds melodramatic. But it's quite true.” She looks aggressively at him, as if he has challenged her. “You wouldn't think such a thing could happen here in Hursley,” she goes on in a high tone, and suddenly it really does seem too bad then, too cruel!

She keeps her eyes on Mr. Lamb's face. She wants him to say something, but he looks absolutely stricken, as though he's swallowed poison. She glances down the road impatiently and sighs. Manford is far ahead of them, almost disappearing into the darkness.

“We'll lose him,” she says, and begins walking again, more swiftly.

“Miss Stephen. Vida,” Mr. Lamb says, hurrying up behind her. “I cannot understand—I'm afraid I—”

“Oh, you mustn't bother yourself, Mr. Lamb,” she says then, airily at first, and then her foolish anger abates and she is embarrassed. Oh,
he
isn't to blame. And what did it all matter, anyway? “It's just—” She sighs. “It's only that—you see, someone's been writing me letters. And leaving me things. On my
bed.
” She stops walking as if the ability has suddenly left her.

“On your bed—” his voice echoes faintly.

“Yes! Actually,” she goes on, “it was beautiful, really—a lovely robe and nightgown. I never thought I'd have anything so fine. But I don't feel right taking them, you see. Keeping them or wearing them or even enjoying them.” She stares off vaguely into the dark leaves of the trees around them. “I know it seems impossible to imagine, Mr. Lamb, but apparently I've got an admirer. Only, he's a very strange sort. You see, I haven't any idea who it is. And now I'm afraid that—well, there must be something wrong with him, that he can't declare himself.”

Turning back to Mr. Lamb, she sees that he looks utterly undone. No doubt she has shocked him with such a confession. She sighs again. All the happiness of the mystery has drained away from her. It wasn't going to be wonderful. It wasn't anything at all. And to make it worse, she's been wretched company for Mr. Lamb. “Now, I've told you my secret,” she says, and takes a deep breath, meaning to try to cheer him up. “And I've upset you. I didn't mean to do that. I only wanted to explain why I've been so—why I'm so—distracted.” She pauses. “Actually, I know who it is, anyhow. Or, at least, I think I do. I—”

“You
do?
” He seems startled.

“Yes.” She looks ahead into the darkness for Manford. He has stopped by a tree, has placed his hands on the bark and leans there as if he and the tree had engaged in a struggle but were resting now, forgiven, in each other's arms. She sighs.

“I'm afraid,” she says, taking a deep breath, “that it's Mr.
Niven—
”

“Oh! Oh, I don't
think
so!” Mr. Lamb speaks quickly. “I think that's
completely
the wrong conclusion.”

She turns to him, surprised.

“No, no indeed,” he goes on, rather wildly. “Niven's not—not imaginative enough.”

“Well, that's what I thought, at first,” Vida says, surprised again. She feels a little better now, just talking about it. And Mr. Lamb is taking it so very seriously, not laughing at her at all. Some of the deliciousness of it, the sweetness of it, creeps back. “I thought so, too,” she goes on, “but there couldn't be any other explanation for it. You see, the robe came just last night, while I was at the book circle. And he was there minding Manford for me. There wasn't anyone else there.”

Mr. Lamb seems to be searching rapidly over his thoughts. She feels pleased, grateful for his interest. “But couldn't—” he says, “couldn't someone have
eluded
him? I mean, come into the house without his knowing? Someone very—clever?” He stops her, his hand on her arm. “And it must be someone—you say he's writing letters?”

“Yes.” Vida looks up at him. “They're quite—they're wonderful, really. Poetic.”

“But then—he couldn't mean any harm? If he writes letters?
Poetry,
” he adds significantly.

She sees that he is trying to comfort her. And she does want to be comforted.

“No one who writes letters is—well, there couldn't be anything
so
wrong with him. He must just be shy. And very sincere, I should think. To write letters.” Mr. Lamb stops. “Are they—all right? He hasn't done anything”—he lowers his voice—“
crude?
”

“Oh, no!” she says quickly, embarrassed. “It's all been—no, I—oh, Mr. Lamb, do you think someone could really be in
love?
With me?” She is almost whispering. “Do you believe that, Mr. Lamb?”

“Oh, yes. Yes,” he says. “I do believe that, Miss Stephen. I do absolutely. He must be—terribly in love. Not to want to show himself. He thinks he isn't worthy. Worthy of you. I think he just wants to make you
happy.
”

Vida glances at him, shy. “I see you understand him, man to man,” she says thoughtfully. Perhaps, being a man himself, Mr. Lamb understands this better than she herself could hope to. There's no need for her to feel so—violated. She just has to be patient, perhaps, and then—“It's just that women,” she bursts out, “—we always have to wait for something to happen to us.”

Mr. Lamb looks up into the dark canopy of leaves overhead. His high forehead makes him seem so innocent, she thinks, and so vulnerable. He looks down after a minute, studying his shoes. “I think you are perfectly free, Miss Stephen,” he says urgently. “You must feel that you can do anything you like. You will be perfectly safe.”

“Yes,” she says faintly, though not exactly taking his meaning. “I will.”

She looks down the road behind them, the way they have come. The moon has vanished entirely, buried behind cloud, a marble rolled into the cup of a hand and concealed.

When they reach Manford, he is waiting impatiently for them, shaggy-headed, rocking from side to side.

“He wants to get on,” she says to Mr. Lamb. “He hates to wait.” She turns around. “We should be starting back anyway.”

So she takes a step to go back, a neat step over the curb, and then she hears Mr. Lamb stumble behind her—rather, she just
feels him brushing past her shoulder, then hears the sound of his voice, and when she spins around, he is on his knees in a puddle.

“Oh, God,” she hears him say. “My God, how bloody
stupid
.”

Vida claps her hand over her mouth but cannot contain the explosion of laughter that leaves her then. She tries to compose herself; she is horrified to find herself so inappropriately doubled over at the sight of Mr. Lamb in the puddle. She reaches down to help him up. “I'm so sorry!” she says through her laughter. “What
happened?
Are you all right?”

Mr. Lamb has his hands over his face. “Only my bloody nose,” he says. She is relieved to hear that he is not crying. He is only sitting up now in the puddle, laughing. “Just my bloody nose,” he repeats. “My stupid, ugly nose.”

“Oh, do
get up,
” Vida manages at last through tears of laughter, reaching for him again.

But Mr. Lamb laughs even harder. “I'm all
wet!
” he says, as if it were the greatest joke in the world. “I'm
completely
sopped!”

Vida makes a final effort to quiet herself, taking deep breaths. “Oh, you're a fright,” she says as she helps him to stand and hands him a tissue from her coat pocket. “I
am
sorry—for laughing, Mr. Lamb. Completely uncalled for, I know—”

“No, no, it's all right. I—” He takes the tissue she hands him, applies it to his nose, which is bleeding slightly. He is covered with mud. He stands before her, brushing at himself hopelessly. She feels her heart expand with pity, expand to such a degree that for a moment she thinks she will lift from the earth itself. He looks into her eyes. She smiles back at him.

“I—” He puts out a hand toward her. “I'm a fool,” he whispers.

But Vida catches him hard by both arms, shakes him a little, and then, embarrassed at having taken such a liberty, lets him go. But she is still smiling. “Mr. Lamb,” she says. “I haven't laughed that hard in years.”

V
IDA AND
M
ANFORD
see him to his house. At the door he turns and gives her a little wave, holding his coat open in the unfortunate posture of a man exposing himself, Vida notices, but she understands that his gesture is meant to remind her of how wet he is, of how funny it all was, of how she laughed. “Good night!” she calls.

She takes Manford by the arm. “Let's hurry,” she says, for now it seems she must be away from him, cannot bear to look at him so cheerful and filthy and hopeful. “Let's run home.”

They run together all the way to Fergus's before Vida has to stop and catch her breath. Manford won't stop, though. “Up the lane, Manford,” she calls to him as he pushes past her. “Time to go home.” She sees him disappear round the corner to the lane.

And who had seen them, after all, she thinks. Who had seen Vida Stephen and Manford Perry, running hand in hand down the streets of Hursley in the night? No one. No one had seen Mr. Lamb trip and fall in the street. No one had seen the look on his face. No one had seen anything at all.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT,
Vida stands at the door to Manford's room, listening to the steady sound of his breathing. Then, from down the hall, she fetches a chair and wedges it under the knob. It wouldn't exactly prevent him from getting out if he started to sleepwalk again, but it might dissuade him. Perhaps he would, rattling the knob and finding the door stuck, just turn round and get back into bed. Vida closes her eyes and tries to imagine Manford getting back into bed, getting safely back into bed. At least, she thinks, she'll hear the chair fall and can stop him before he gets to the stairs. She worries so about the stairs.

She finishes clearing up in the kitchen and then goes to the library to fetch her book. The moon bobs at the window, full and bright, and she is drawn to the French doors to look out upon the
sight. It still seems unfathomable to her that American astronauts have now set their feet on the moon, though she is struck by how quickly something that was once considered impossible can pass over into the realm of the accomplished.

She steps out onto the terrace to walk behind the row of Mercuries, a shadow behind the solid figures. Staring out over the dark velvet of the lawns, she remembers dancing on those same lawns as a girl in Miss Ferry's pageants, Miss Ferry with her wobbling jowls and deeply hooded eyes and velvet waistcoat, the silver serpent with the ruby eye coiled around her upper arm. She remembers as if it were yesterday Miss Ferry clapping loudly in measure, tra-
la
tra-
la
tra-
la
, neatly smacking the girls' backsides as they flowed past her in their circling skirts out from between the wings of boxwood. Leaping and curtsying over the grass, bangles on her ankles, a scarf in her hair, Vida had felt then that she might have been anybody, anybody else, a wild girl with Gypsy blood, capable of a kind of ecstasy ordinary life seemed to dampen like a blanket thrown over a fire.

A small breeze flutters the leaves of the trees below her, moving like the surface of a lake. Vida wraps her arms around herself and shivers slightly. The Prince's Mead dance performances had always been preceded, for her, by such excitement that she was nearly sick from it, as though another body, another person, were struggling up from within her,
that
girl's exotic spirit rising up within her like a body from a grave, subduing her own nature by means of flashing looks and snapping castanets. She had loved those ritualized performances, yet afterward she had felt such grief, such disappointment that it was over, that she would not feel so inhabited again for another year.

Finished with their dancing, the girls would come back out on the lawn at Southend, receive their parents' embraces, take a glass
of orangeade, and stand demurely and quietly amid the adults' chatter, smiling politely. And yet Vida would feel exhausted, ashamed, that other self within her scornful and proud, gradually parting from her as if in disgust, as if Vida herself had failed to seize some opportunity, had shown herself a traitor. She stands now motionless between two Mercuries, the dark garden before her full of the fading echoes of her past.