Lamb in Love (29 page)

Where are all those other girls? she wonders. What has happened to them? Would their lives, held side by side, resemble her own in any way?

Once, she believed that she was only waiting for something to happen to her. And yet now it seems that something
has
begun around her. The thing she has been waiting for—though she cannot say what it is—has started making itself felt in the very air around her. She does not know how to behave, she realizes, nor what to expect.

She does not even know anymore what to hope for.

Thirteen

W
HEN
N
ORRIS OPENS
the door of the post office Monday morning, the room seems unfamiliar to him—smaller, somehow—as if he has been away on a long journey. Beneath his feet the linoleum, dark green and patterned with darker, ambiguous shapes suggesting the blurred hoofprints of animals, is worn and faded, buckling up along a filthy seam. When he raises the black shades at the window—just halfway, not enough to suggest he is open for business—a shaft of dull, pale light falls first across the high oak counter installed against the front wall beneath the window. There, his patrons address letters and packages, pause to gossip and chat. Pens attached to long beaded chains are riveted to the top of the counter, which is scarred and stained under its polished surface from many years of being borne down upon with damp palms and leaky pens. Small pink sponges swim in tiny bowls of filmy water.

Along another wall of the post office, Norris maintains a dual confectionery and stationers, selling tablets of onionskin and heavy, cream-colored stock, envelopes of all sizes, postal cards and gummed labels, all stacked on shelves alongside boxes of chocolates and sweets in tiny sachets, as well as sacks of tobacco and a few brands of cigarettes. Norris also keeps a contract with a company that manufactures greeting cards featuring pencil and watercolor drawings of baby animals, their faces and attitudes either fetching or pathetic, depending on the occasion.
CHEER UP
! reads the inside of one card featuring a small kitten with the large eyes of a malnourished creature. These cards are typically purchased
by the older women of the village. Norris has kept this particular line in stock for so long that many ladies have received at least one and usually more from a neighbor over the years. Norris has been in enough of his neighbors' houses to see the cards, some of them quite faded, lined up on the mantels, and the sight pleases him, as though he has contributed something important to his neighbors' lives.

From time to time he has been approached by salesmen from other companies, who open their cases briskly on his counter and spread out their wares. But Norris hasn't cared for the rude cartoons they assured him were popular.

“These are simple people, people who are fond of animals,” he protests. “I don't believe they would care for these at all.”

Once, though, he agreed reluctantly to take a set of free samples from a pushy young woman selling cards of tarted-up old men and women apparently enjoying rather debauched birthday celebrations. “You're not as old as you look!” the cards read inside. It was insulting! Norris watched surreptitiously as a few people took them off the display rack that first week and looked at them without expression, returning them after a moment. Some days later, when the young woman came back to see about how her cards had done, Norris was able to return the entire lot triumphantly to her.

“I'm afraid,” he said somewhat disingenuously, “I wasn't able to sell a single one. They don't know,” he added, “your company, what people really like. They like animals,” he repeated. “Small animals. Something dear.”

On the empty wall across from the shelves of stationery supplies, Norris has hung several framed stamp displays, including one of his own favorites—stamp errors—which he assembled and mounted while still a young man. It includes stamps with simple
printing mistakes—one issued by the Bahamas, for instance, featuring the face of Queen Elizabeth in the foreground gazing over an oddly empty silhouette of Government House, a ghostly outline where the printer's ink had run out. Another is a 1930 stamp from Germany, showing a portrait of the composer Robert Schumann against a background of sheet music—composed by Franz Schubert. And Norris is particularly proud of a 1903 stamp from St. Kitts-Nevis, depicting Christopher Columbus using a telescope—one hundred years before such an implement was invented. This stamp is especially rare and valuable now; Norris is proud of owning it and imagines that all of Hursley benefits from its presence among them.

Norris also framed, after his mother's death, part of her collection of stamps featuring famous women, including an oversize portrait of pioneer pilot Harriet Quimby, her aviatrix's goggles staring out darkly above a smile of brilliant white teeth. There is also a humble stamp depicting Clara Barton, and several of the Virgin Mary, of course. (His own private collection of breastfeeding stamps he keeps concealed at home in a box marked
TROPHIES.
It has occurred to him that someone might find these stamps pornographic at one level, but in fact he has an oddly reverent, almost paternal feeling for the scenes of domestic comfort they suggest; he keeps them shut away out of protectiveness rather than shame.)

This morning, staring around the post office, he walks irresolutely into the center of the room and pauses. He inspects the stamps on the wall; their effect, he senses suddenly, is to make him feel peculiarly tiny, as though he has shrunk uncomfortably to the size of a pencil and is passing through a gallery of paintings now scaled perfectly to his new stature. He frowns, shakes his head slightly against the sensation of diminishment, the dismaying
sense that everything around him has grown either small or shabby or both.

At the back of the room runs Norris's postal counter; he has always wished for a grille for it, something that suggests that when you pass your letters over, they will acquire, in that moment, some worldly and important mission of their own—like a child sent off for the first time to perform an errand by himself—passing into the wondrous stream of mail traveling to distant corners of the globe. He has never found exactly what he wants, though, and so makes do instead with a large leather-trimmed blotter flanked by tall, unsteady cardboard stamp displays. And he tries to make his manner, when he takes a letter or parcel in his hands, both serious and mysterious at once, perhaps as compensation for the modest environment. He tries to maintain a cachet about the transactions.

Beneath the counter are shallow drawers containing stamps, aerogrammes, stamped postcards, and registered mail envelopes. Against the back wall are his scales, his cancellation machine (recently and reluctantly purchased to replace the failing hand-operated duplex cancel he had continued to use, despite vastly improved mechanical equipment), and the pigeonholed cabinet into which he sorts received mail. A black rubber mat that holds the indentations of his feet lies across the floor.

Norris slowly crosses the room and steps behind his counter. A small door, between the scales and the pigeonholed cabinet, opens to a narrow hallway with a buckled brown tile floor that slopes noticeably downhill. To one side is the lavatory; to the other is the tiny room Norris maintains as an office for himself, with a desk and a narrow chair, an electric kettle for tea on an unsteady rattan table, and on the wall a framed engraving of a
chasqui,
the helmeted runner employed in ancient Peru to deliver messages from
Sapa Inca,
the emperor.

Norris sits down at his desk, his head in his hands. Since parting from Vida last night he has hardly slept, lying awake on and off all night, aware of the sense of urgency their conversation has created in him. That he might have actually frightened her by leaving the robe on her bed—the thought is dreadful! He closes his eyes, shakes his head back and forth within the brace of his hands. He had managed to reassure her a little, it's true, but he also suspects that it will prove to be only a temporary comfort. Now, he fears, it is time to show himself to her, to declare himself. And yet he feels utterly unprepared for this. He had planned—what?
Weeks
of courtship, flowers left here and there in surprising places, gifts of dresses and jewels, more letters, each more enticing, more deliciously romantic than the last. By the end, he had supposed, there would be no question: He would have won her entirely. She would be in love already just with the idea of him.

But if he is done with that now, what is left? Nothing but himself, the poor excuse of himself. This is a terrible notion; and he finds that he has risen unconsciously to his feet behind his desk, as if to defend himself before a jury. He is not ready! He will never be ready!

And now, running his hands through his hair again, turning around and around in the oppressively close confines of this little, windowless room, he realizes as well that there is Manford to be considered. He had not counted on that, not counted on having to consider him at all, in fact. Oh, foolish man—what had he thought? That he would marry Vida Stephen, take her away, and someone else would step in to replace her at Southend House? The idea is preposterous! What would Manford do without Vida? They can no more be separated than—well, he can't exactly find a comparison. But there can be no question about it, he realizes
now. And there is something special about the boy, Norris thinks, something that makes him want to take care what he does, take very great care.

He is startled at this moment by the distant sound of a fist pounding on the door outside. He hurries into the front room to open the door, where he nearly falls over the mail sacks slumped against the jamb.

“You're late opening up. Got anything to go out?” A young man Norris has never seen before, an annoyed look on his face, is climbing into the postal truck idling at the curb. He leans out when Norris does not answer immediately.

“The other fellow brings them inside,” Norris says stiffly, ignoring the young man's obvious impatience and bending to lift the sacks himself to carry them.

“I'm going to be late! And your blinds weren't up!” the man retorts, blowing a gust of cigarette smoke out of his mouth. “Come on,” he repeats after a moment, racing the engine. “I haven't got all day. Be a good chap and bring out what you've got, won't you?”

“I haven't anything,” Norris says primly. “It all went Friday with Mr. Howard. Where
is
Mr. Howard, anyway?”

“Had an accident. Banged up a vehicle. I'm doing Hursley and Stoke Charity.” The man grinds the gears of the truck. “See you at five, then,” he calls as he drives off.

Norris surveys the still-empty street a moment and then hefts the canvas sacks himself and pulls them inside. Mr. Howard always carries them in himself and hands them to Norris over the counter; they exchange a word or two. It is a moment Norris enjoys, the two men remarking about the volume of mail that day, Mr. Howard offering some bit of news from the central post office in Winchester. He hopes now that Mr. Howard wasn't seriously
injured in the accident. How like that young man not to have said; probably couldn't care less about Mr. Howard! Tugging the bags across the floor, Norris feels his distaste for the task; it's like trolling a dead body.

Behind the counter he begins the business of sorting the letters and magazines, church bulletins and advertisements. He has developed over the years the trick of catching a fistful of envelopes and splaying them quickly in his hand, like a card trick. Many he recognizes simply by color and shape, and he can fit them into their accustomed boxes almost without thinking. Each day he likes to time himself, glancing at the clock and promising himself a certain number of minutes to finish the task. He hardly ever stops to look at a letter for more than a fraction of a second, just long enough to see who it's for. Unless, of course, there is an interesting stamp on it.

He pauses now, in fact, distracted by the stamp on a long, slender, almost weightless envelope. It's a truly striking stamp, a careful engraving of an ancient building, its front studded with pillars, set against a midnight blue sky. Below the templelike building, a landscape of curling russet lines and the shadowy folds of chalky cliffs tumble toward a distant skyline rendered in inky black silhouette, the jumbled rooftops and spires of a foreign city. It's a copper photogravure, Norris thinks in surprise; one doesn't see many such stamps nowadays. Though offset printing produces stamps with sharper images, Norris thinks recess-printed stamps have a special quality. Like snowflakes, no two are alike.

And then his eyes drift, almost accidentally, from the stamp itself to the name on the envelope:
MISS VIDA STEPHEN.

The shock of seeing her name gives him a jolt, an uncomfortable one.

Who has sent her this letter?

He finds himself staring vacantly across the post office now, the letter still held in his hand, as if someone might at that moment step forward in accusation: Oh, you're a bungler, Norris Lamb. Nothing but a bungler. Go on, step aside. Give it up. She won't look twice at you!