Lamb in Love (32 page)

She turns from the table and stops, for Manford has moved to the little sitting room and stands in front of the tiny mirror there, his face pressed up close to the glass. He stands so near the surface of the mirror, in fact, that he must not be able to see anything at all, she thinks in surprise—nothing but his nose pressed flat like a pugilist's, the distorted terrain of his own face, and a glimpse of the stranger who lives there behind his own eyes.

“A
ND WHAT WILL
I do today whilst you're off at Niven's?” She tries to speak cheerfully, for she sees that Manford is now suddenly melancholic; left over from the fever, no doubt.

“Well, there's the eggs,” she blathers on. “I'll go round and fetch us some eggs.” She helps Manford into his mackintosh, shoos him out the back door ahead of her. “And, let's see. There's the sheets. We might as well have fresh sheets after both of us being ill. Do you know, Manford, I think that tea Mr. Lamb made me was quite the miracle cure. I feel entirely well this morning. We must ask him about it for the future.”

They descend the steps, Manford moving ahead of her, riding the air, his feet disturbing the morning mist. Vida feels the damp on her face and throat. The sky seems lowered, a tent pitched overhead. At the gates to Southend House, Manford stops, turns, holds out his hand. Vida takes it this morning without argument, though she's been trying to break him of this habit, and tucks it under her arm. They pass out onto the lane, its long concourse braided with mist like a delicate, fraying twine. She pats his hand. “There,” she says. “You see? The mist is lifting.”

Manford smiles as they step into the mist, its gray wreaths circling the tree trunks; she sees some feeling she cannot fathom pass over his face. He blinks, opens his mouth, raises his free hand, and wobbles his fingers in the air. He purses his lips and blows the vaporous steam of his breath into the lightening morning.

When he stops up short, she is startled. “What is it?” she says, turning to look at his face. And then she follows his eyes.

The bench in the lane where they so often rest, where Vida waits for him in the afternoons, where a few days ago she had found the flowers, is now strung from armrest to armrest with an elaborate spider's web, each strand beaded with pearls of dew, like a hammock of silver chains strung across the seat. If she reaches out and plucks a strand, Vida thinks irrationally, it will chime a perfect note.

“Oh,” she breathes. “Isn't that something, Manford? Like what a fairy would do. It's a fairy bench, Manford. Look!”

But he
is
looking; he is staring at the bench as though watching the web for some sudden movement—as though it might fly up and flit off into the mist, or fly toward them, the lightest of chain mail, an invisible encumbrance. When he shudders, drawing
nearer to Vida, she looks at him, puzzled, and then laughs, nudging him in the ribs.

“Oh, it's just a
spider's
web! You're not afraid of it, are you?”

Manford takes a few steps to the side, giving the bench a wide berth, eyeing it like a shy horse.

“Look,” she says again, tugging on his arm, anxious for him to see what a lovely thing it is. “You could do this on one of your cakes,” she says. “Look how pretty it is, Manford.” She drags him with her, approaching the bench with its stirring, glinting web. She puts out her hand as if to touch it, but he grabs at her arm, jerks her backward, hard.

“Manford!” She turns, surprised. “Why, you
are
afraid of it! Oh, that's silly! It's nothing but an old spider's web!”

But Manford lets go her hand then and pulls away from her, throwing up his arms and fluttering his hands around his head as though there were bats flying at his eyes. He ducks and swerves, running circles in the lane, his own hands pursuing him. He moves his mouth in odd ways, but no sound comes from his lips. He brushes his hands wildly about his hair, grimacing, his eyes squinted shut.

“Manford!” Vida cries. “Stop!” She raises her own hands to stay him, but he twitches away from her, his hands frantically slapping his hair, his head ducking.

Looking around in a panic, Vida catches sight of a piece of broken branch. She darts to it, catches it up, and runs toward the bench, waving it wildly. “Look!” she cries. “Look, Manford! I'll be rid of it!”

And she sweeps the stick through the web, its sticky warp collapsing, tangling. She bears the stick down upon the seat, crashing it against the rungs, the filaments of web flying upward, dissolving into nothing. She swings as hard as she can, Manford
reeling behind her, his face tormented. The stick shatters in her hand, wormy wood, cottony and soft. She feels she is beating nothing, the air itself. At last she drops the stick to the ground, turns to Manford.

He is standing at the far side of the lane in the rut, crouched low, shaking.

“There,” she says, and realizes she is trembling. “I've got rid of it. It's all right now. Come on to me, Manford. It's all gone. I've killed it, do you see?”

“W
ELL!
U
P AND
about again, I see,” Mrs. Blatchford says as Vida and Manford come in the door of Niven's. “Right as—” She stops abruptly as she takes in Vida's white face, Manford's disarray.

Vida puts her finger to her lips.

“Here you are, then,” Vida says in a tone of forced cheerfulness, helping Manford off with his coat. “Now, right to work with you,” she orders. Manford trots obediently into the dairy, sits down hard on his stool, and immediately begins filling the paper cone with jam and squirting it into the tray of doughnuts waiting for him.

Mrs. Blatchford glances at Vida, a question on her face, and then goes to fetch Manford's apron. Tying it round his waist, she speaks kindly to him. “One day away and you've forgotten already,” she says. “You'll have jam all over without your apron.”

Mrs. Blatchford raises her eyebrows at Vida when she comes back into the room.

“He had a terrible fright this morning,” Vida whispers, leaning toward her, her voice low. “It was all over a
spider's
web! He went berserk!”

“A
spider's
web!” Mrs. Blatchford rears back. “Frightened by a spider?”

“No!” Vida whispers. “It wasn't anything like that. We didn't even
see
a spider! It was just the web, over the bench in the lane. It was very large—I've never seen one like it. But he was—he was terribly afraid of it. It was the strangest thing. I've never seen him like that before.”

“No spider at all?”

“No.” Vida glances at Manford. He still looks worried. In his haste he has crumpled the paper cone. Jam has spilled onto his hand and the table. “Perhaps I shouldn't have made him come on,” she says. “Do you think he'll be all right?”

Mrs. Blatchford looks at Manford doubtfully. “He went
berserk,
you say?”

Vida stops. She hears something in Mrs. Blatchford's tone that suddenly raises all her alarms. As much as they might seem to love him, she knows, he is essentially beyond knowing for them; they could cast him out, would cast him out, at the first sign of—of anything they couldn't understand. But she would not have him turned out now! She would not! No one, no grown man, ought to spend all his days with a nanny, shut up in a big, empty house. He needs friends. He needs to be in the world.

She has to be very careful. Words like
berserk
—well, when used in conjunction with Manford—people might make the wrong assumption. She considers what she might say. “He was
frightened
by it,” she offers at last, stressing the word.

“What did he
do
?” Mrs. Blatchford inquires, her eyes wide.

“Well, he just—” Vida pauses, for it
had
been alarming. He had behaved as if a net had been thrown over him, trapping him like a fish. She'd never seen him so wild. “He didn't want it touching him,” she says finally.

“But it wasn't—touching him,” Mrs. Blatchford repeats, watching her.

“No.” Vida collects up her purse straps then, throws Manford another glance. He is sloppily filling the doughnuts, setting them unevenly on the tray. “I'm just going round to pick up eggs,” she says. “I'll stop back on my way home and check on him. I'm quite sure he'll be all right.” She gathers in a breath. “You mustn't worry,” she says to Mrs. Blatchford, and her tone suggests she will have nothing more to say, that such things happen from time to time and signify nothing. “Just carry on as you usually do. I'm sure he'll calm down presently. Perhaps a cup of tea would soothe him.”

“I haven't anyone with me today,” Mrs. Blatchford calls after Vida as she leaves. “I'm all alone! Mr. Niven's taken Mary into Winchester—they're seeing about a new sofa!”

But Vida doesn't wait to answer her.

S
HE IS HALFWAY
down the dairy road, its close shoulder thick with the briery hawthorn, before she remembers Jeremy, the house with the drawn curtains and ringing silence. Thinking of Jeremy makes her think of her mystery lover—for hadn't she imagined it might be Jeremy himself writing to her?—and she grows suddenly awkward and watchful, wondering if whoever this suitor is could be observing her right at this moment. She realizes that she is looking about under hedges and up in the trees as if this man weren't actually real but were composed instead of magical elements—a talking frog, for instance, or hedgehog.

When she rounds the corner and sees the string of dreary bungalows, the stained white walls of the dairy on the far side of the road, she tries to keep her eyes away from the house. She ducks her head and averts her face and begins instead to peer interestedly at the hawthorn, its white flowers stirred by agitated bees storming the blossoms. The sky feels so heavy that it seems to rest
directly upon her sleeve, the crown of her head. In the humid air, the astringent lime from the dairy pinches her nostrils. She wrinkles her face.

When she reaches the gate at the corner of the dairy yard, she pauses to find a path through the mud. She does not like stopping here; she is too aware of the house behind her, of Jeremy's possible presence there. Suddenly she is mortified at the thought of seeing him, though whether it is her own shame at having thought him responsible for her love letters or her memory of the odd admiration she'd felt, seeing him without his shirt in Dr. Faber's office, she does not want to consider.

But she is stepping to the side of the gate, preparing to execute a small leap over the worst of the mud, when he calls to her.

He is standing at the door of the bungalow in a gray jersey. Even from her distance across the road, she can see how pale he is.

He raises his arm. “I thought it was you,” he calls. His voice sounds very far away, as though there were something wrong with her ears.

“Yes,” she calls back, and hears her own echo. She waits a moment. “I've come for eggs.”

He does not reply; he seems to be waiting for something else.

“Generally I have them delivered, you know, along with the milk,” she calls desperately, her voice overly loud in the still air. “I've run out early, though, so I thought I'd come myself.”

He seems to be thinking. Presently he says, “Half a sec,” and disappears inside. A moment later he reappears, closing the door behind him, and walks across the road to her. When he reaches her, he holds up his hand, sheathed in a black glove. “Look like a murderer, don't I?” he says. “The strangler.” He surveys the mud around the gate. “Stinking mess. Look,” he says, gesturing with his good arm. “You can go on round the back.”

She follows him to a green-tiled passageway, low and dim and shrouded thick with dusty cobwebs. He stops at the entryway, takes out a cigarette, and lights it. “You going back home after?”

She nods.

“I'll walk with you then,” he says. And then he adds, as though needing to explain himself, “I want to have a look at some of the drawings for the garden. He said they were in the library. Can't do much else anyway like this.” He raises his black hand, regards it with a frown. She stares at it. He returns his attention to her after a moment, dragging his eyes away from his hand. “You can take the eggs right from the fridge,” he says.

In the small, cool room, Vida takes six brown eggs from the cardboard trays lined up on shelves in the refrigerator. A bit of straw clings to one; she pries it loose with her fingernail. She puts the cool egg to her cheek briefly, rolls it between her palm and the concave shell of her cheek; she thinks of Jeremy with his black glove, waiting. She leaves her coins on the enamel tray on the table under the window.

Outside, when she rejoins him, he stubs out his cigarette and sets off down the lane. Vida does not know what to say; she walks along carrying the eggs carefully, cradled in a paper sack close to her chest. At last she glances over at him. “How's your hand?”

“Actually, it's bloody painful,” he says.

And then he does not say anything else. Vida, remembering his kiss, is a little offended by his silence. She thinks he might thank her again for taking him to Dr. Faber's, but he doesn't seem to have anything to say to her. They leave the lane for St. Andrew's Place, pass the few houses there off the Romsey Road. Tony Spooner, Nigel's son, mounts a bicycle leaning against a fence before one of the houses and pedals off down the road ahead of them, his tires issuing a spray of water as he sweeps
through the puddles. These are among the smallest houses in the village; the grander residences front the Romsey Road. Vida's parents' old house is here, now occupied by a retired teacher from Prince's Mead, a swaybacked spinster who cultivates a large perennial border, working all the spring and summer folded like a praying mantis over her flowers and wearing a cotton hat. Vida tries to admire the roses sprayed over the walk to the front door, a bower of white and pink, but realizes she is having to work to be cheerful.