Lamb in Love (33 page)

When they turn onto the Romsey Road, the silence between them feels as though it has acquired something noticeable, that by walking along side by side without speaking, they are calling attention to themselves. But Jeremy does not look at her; he seems in a black humor, his gloved hand hanging limply by his side, his face averted and closed as a stone. She hurries to keep pace with him, holding the eggs tightly.

When they pass the post office, Vida turns her head involuntarily and glances through the window. She sees Mr. Lamb, engaged in some transaction with a customer at the counter, look up and meet her eyes before she passes from view. She raises one hand to him, but he freezes as he catches sight of her, and suddenly she feels that she is engaged in something improper, even hurtful. She wants to speak to Mr. Lamb—she wants to thank him for the night before, the nettle tea. Where had he gone when she'd fallen asleep? When she'd woken, still in her chair, the house had been silent, still. How long had he stayed by her side?

But there seems no way to address these complicated questions. Jeremy is hurrying on.

At the courtyard to Niven's, it occurs to her that she wants to stop and check on Manford as she had said she would, but now she cannot imagine breaking the silence between them to explain
her errand. And then they are turning onto the lane to Southend House, the sound of the Romsey Road receding behind them as they enter the long tunnel of green. They walk along, their tread soundless. As they draw near the bench, Vida glances surreptitiously to the side, sees that no trace of the web remains. The growing heat of the morning has evaporated it like the memory of a dream that gradually disintegrates as the day wears on. Remembering the bouquet of flowers, she tries to see whether Jeremy looks, too, whether the place holds any significance for him, but he stares straight ahead.

In the kitchen she puts the sack of eggs on the table and takes off her coat. Jeremy looks around the room, then steps to the door of the small sitting room and pokes his head in. “You eat in the kitchen?” he asks abruptly.

“Usually,” Vida says, a bit surprised at the question. “Or sometimes in there.” She indicates the sitting room. “In front of the telly, if there's something on.”

Jeremy laughs. “He never has you eat in the dining room with him?”

“If there's houseguests.” She feels confused by this line of questioning. “They eat in the dining room then.”

“Ah, yes. Houseguests.”

He moves to the pantry, stops, runs a finger over the labels on the shelves. She watches him a moment and then returns to the center of the room by the table, waiting and winding her hands together. After a pause she puts the eggs away and turns to fill the kettle. “Will you have a cup of tea?” she calls.

He does not answer. When he comes back into the room, he is carrying an enormous soup tureen, its fluted sides painted with minute pastorals, a formal Italian parterre seen in columns as though divided by a trick of light. “Every
day
china?” he says, holding it aloft oddly.

Vida draws in her breath sharply. “It's very old,” she says quickly. “I've never used it.”

“An antique,” he says. She holds her breath. “He has nice things,” he says calmly after a moment and returns with the tureen to the pantry.

The kettle shrieks and Vida jumps. In relief she fills the pot with the dry tea, pours in the water, and replaces the lid carefully, resting her hand over the faint halo of steam that escapes around the lid.

“Right, then. Let's have a look at the library,” he says, returning to the room.

She is glad to see that he is empty handed this time. “I'll bring my tea, then,” she says. She fills a cup. “Will you have one?”

“No. I drink too much tea,” he says.

She leads the way down the passage, through the great hall with its dim balcony. In the center of the room, Jeremy stops and whistles, craning his head back. “How many bedrooms?”

“There's fourteen.”

“Musical bedrooms,” he says, and laughs again. “For the houseguests,” he adds, and winks at her.

She walks on, but he wants to stop again and again, standing in the doorways, staring at the rooms. “You could put up the whole bloody village in here,” he says quietly at one point, walking into one of the unused rooms, the few furnishings covered with dusty cloths. He stares around him. “He doesn't use much of it, does he?”

“During the war,” Vida says slowly, “I believe many people stayed here.”

“Refugees from London,” Jeremy says, running a hand over the curved back of a settee. “Running from the bomb.”

Vida thinks of that for a moment—the sitting room crowded with various people, the remnants of families, perhaps single
ladies like her or early war widows, invited to stay at Southend for the long months of the bombing, when whole sections of London were falling under the rain of shelling, ruins toppling into ruins, heaps of ancient stone. She doesn't remember much from then, though she seems to recall that some people from London had come out to stay at Southend. It seems odd to imagine the house full, servants catering to the odd collection of people who must have taken shelter here. Since then, of course, the house has been mostly empty, unused, she and Manford and, less often, Mr. Perry, moving through its grand and deserted spaces like refugees themselves, alert, easily alarmed, nervous. As if someone were missing. Or in danger. As if they all were.

She jumps at the sound of the double doors across the hall being swung open, Jeremy wrenching the stiff hinges against disuse. The rich parquet floor of the ballroom spreads out before them, gleaming chestnut dulled under the glaze of dust, the cool morning light like frost, the mirrors full of silver. Vida sneezes, but Jeremy laughs and strides into the room, shattering the cool silence. “Aha!” he cries. “It's a party!” He takes a silent turn around the floor, upright and military, his black-gloved hand stiff as a raven tied to his wrist.

“Come on,” he says, stopping before her, gesturing in a way that seems to her, for an instant, faintly crude.

“Oh, no,” she says, cringing. But he comes at her, puts his good hand round her waist, a hard grip, and raises her other hand lightly in the fork of his black glove. With a wrenching movement he turns with her, executes another turn round the room. She feels the stiff hand holding hers, imagines she can feel the raised line of black stitches along his hand and wrist, the seam holding him together.

“Oh, be careful!” she cries out.

But he is laughing, galloping her around the room until she is dizzy. She catches her own reflection in the mirror, her white face, her dress hiked up in the back. He smells like stale tea. “Watch out!” he cries. “We'll take them all down!”

She feels the force of his thighs parting hers, the neat scissoring of their paired steps; and she remembers this about dancing, remembers her instinct for it. There'd been that boy, James, her partner at the dancing school held on Sunday evenings in the chilled dining hall at Prince's Mead, the boys and girls of the village scrubbed clean, the parents conscripted by the definite and regal Miss Ferry to bring their unruly youngsters, awkward and uncomfortable, for formal lessons. Being a gentleman. Being a lady. And James, at thirteen already the tallest boy in the village, a sapling, down on his upper lip, had agreeably taken her round the waist and whispered to her, “Let's get it right then.” So they had learned it, James speaking to the air above her head, “That's it, that's the way. My mum and dad can dance, you know. They're grand together.”

And she'd loved it, loved him. She'd loved that they seemed to dance so well together, just like his parents, whom Vida imagined in their own closed bedroom, twirling in front of the dark glass on an uneven floor, James's father loosening his wife's hair, the combs flying loose, his red neck bent over, obscuring her white face. Vida had imagined herself married to this James, this black-haired boy; she'd thought of herself as his partner in this familiar place, the various smells of the room—old bread and soup, wet wood—peeling away before the honorable smell of this boy, his clean sweat, his easy dancing, his parents in love. But she'd been only ten or eleven, too young even for possibility; they'd been paired randomly, Miss Ferry nudging couples together with her stick.

“I love you,” she had whispered once into his chest, feeling as though she would have given up her life for him at that moment, there in the cleared dining hall with the black windows, the faraway smells, the evanescent music.

“What?” he'd said with his sweet breath, bending down his head. And, stepping on her foot, he'd said, “Oh, sorry.”

“I'
M SORRY
,”
SHE
says breathlessly now and pulls away from Jeremy, overcome by the memory the dancing has roused in her, by what she had felt back then.

“Tired you out?” Jeremy laughs. “Don't tell me you're getting too old for this.”

But it isn't a question. Vida sees that. Perhaps he does consider her old, she thinks, feeling foolish; not the sun and the moon and stars.

Oh, what had ever happened to James?

“My teacup,” she says faintly.

He looks at her, looks around as if annoyed that she would be worrying about her cup. “You could be a good dancer,” he says then, and spying her cup, he picks it up and hands it to her. “You must have been good at it once.”

“Yes. Once, perhaps,” she says. She looks away.

“You should enjoy yourself more, Vida.” He holds out his hands, the black glove. He glances around the empty room, the windows full of dust and light, no one there. “We could enjoy ourselves.” He takes a step toward her. “It's all just going to waste, you know. You're wasting away here, Vida.”

She feels him darken the light from the window.

Fifteen

Y
ES, IT MOST
certainly was Vida, going down the road with the gardener, and as soon as he can free himself from his customers, Norris hurries down the pavement toward Niven's in pursuit of her. He does not actually intend to speak to her, and he certainly does not want her to think he's following her. He tells himself that he just wants to see that she's all right.

Something must be amiss. Of course, it's fine that she's up and about. But to be walking about in this damp, with the gardener—what can she be thinking? Only last night, she was too weak even to finish her nettle tea, falling asleep with it only half gone!

Norris frowns into the thick, damp air before him as he passes the blacksmith's and turns the corner near Niven's; he does hope this fogginess will burn off. He feels positively suffocated.

There's something about the gardener he does not like, he thinks as he walks quickly down the pavement, trying to catch sight of Vida. He can't quite put his finger on it, but he would venture to guess that that young gardener is not a wholly reliable sort of person. It was very careless, Norris considers now, his dropping that glass pane on himself on Sunday. And what a bother, his appearing all bloodied up and Vida's having to take him off to Dr. Faber's! She was awfully kind, wasn't she? And now he's got her off on another errand, and she just over the flu!

How inconsiderate.

How thoughtless.

And how bold he is, dragging her through the village like that.

L
AST NIGHT, STEPPING
into the black river of the lane on his way home from Southend House, he had felt himself disperse into the night air as effortlessly as the air itself. A sudden trill of alarm from a thrush disturbed upon its nest had risen in the wood near him, a wild, sharp cry from an unseen throat, and then nothing. Norris had raised his head at the sound and taken in the stars lining the road of the sky overhead, the narrow strip of black paving a path between the tops of the trees.

He had been grateful for the sensation of a steady walk. Out on his perambulations, he often lost all sense of purpose. He had no destination, no sense of time, only some compass within his body accustomed to steering him like a gentle hand at his back. At the end, near dawn, there would be the surprise of his own door, his bed, and sleep.

Norris knew that he seemed, probably to most of Hursley, a happy-enough man. He knew his duties; he talked to himself and others in a kindly and busy way, dispensing postage, admiring the stamps, asking after his neighbors. He was not insensitive, and he knew he could be charming if he chose to be. Week after week he would climb the steps to the organ; he understood its complexities, and he could play well enough to satisfy the congregation and the vicar. But it had now become too late for anything else, he feared. No one would ever really know him. He did not, perhaps, even know himself. The more time went by, the more he sensed that a gulf between him and the rest of the world was growing larger, a more dangerous crossing.

Yet walking through the darkness last night toward his own house, he had felt urgently that he needed to be successful now. He had been drawn to Vida—and to Manford, too, for Manford had become part of this cure Norris imagined for himself, this bringing together of the lost and the found, this one final effort he must make.