Lamb in Love (34 page)

In the lane, doves called back and forth to one another in the soft summer-night air over his head. Norris saw the lights of the village ahead. He felt fiercely, as he passed the bench, how desirable another person's separateness could be, how hospitable, a sea in which to wade, another world unto itself.

Seeing Vida alone that night on the fountain's rim, he had recognized something, the wondrous, private theatrics of the unobserved self. Together, he'd imagined, he and Vida could step out onto the stage of their unknowing and enact the perfect event of creation, of creating themselves together. He believed he saw her, really saw her, and saw Manford, too. He believed he knew them, because he himself knew what it was to be lost.

Hadn't he been right to go slowly, to be a gentleman?

But now she thinks she's being stalked. That was the word she had used—
stalked.

Dear
God,
he thought, turning on the light in his kitchen at last, blinking at the glare. It is not what I meant.

H
E SAT IN
his chair for an hour, but he had been unbearably restless, trying to sort out his feelings; he felt wretchedly guilty after steaming open and reading Laurence's letter to Vida. A hot shame—the same as a thousand needles, he told himself sorrowfully—prickled him all over his body whenever he thought about it. He had arrived at a wall through which there seemed to be no door in his campaign to win Vida's heart. She thought her admirer was—peculiar.

Peculiar!

Finally, though it was getting on toward midnight, he took up his stick and left the house again.

He walked in the darkness, up toward the farm where his grandmother's cottage, now falling into disrepair, still stood. After her son, Norris's father, had died and she had moved in
with her daughter-in-law and young grandson, the three had gone back to the house occasionally—the summer cottage, they called it, as if giving it that romantic name changed its purpose in their lives, made it seem a luxurious second property, not the scene of his grandmother's eyesight's gradual failure, the shared grief over Norris's father's death, the beginning of his grandmother's end.

It was a lovely place, though, on a bend of the Tyre. They had brought picnics there from time to time. Norris's grandmother had liked to go back and poke around the place with her stick, rooting around in the jack-in-the-pulpits and the violets that grew down by the water, exclaiming over all its small delights, the things she could still see if they were brought up close before her eyes.

“You might like this for yourself one day, Norrie,” she'd said. “It'd be a little retreat for you. A gentleman's retreat.”

But instead of the usual comforting nothingness that swept over him when he walked, that he'd been so glad of, walking home from Southend just an hour before, his head was bristling. It was the guilt, he thought again. He'd broken a cardinal rule. He had read another person's mail. He had steamed open an envelope like a common criminal. He knew things he should not know.

He came upon the house in its little glade.

He unlatched the gate and walked down the path. Round the side of the cottage, by the water, was a small terrace where his grandparents had placed a round table and a bench. He sat at the bench, watched the moonlight fall in delicate sheets over the grass and the water. The darkness was comforting on his face and hands. He saw that the house needed a whitewash and the thatch needed mending. But the garden had gone to weeds that flower
at night, white and fragrant. It was all lovely, he felt. And then he had a vision, a vision of Vida there on the terrace, her face lifted to the moon.

He leapt up, almost frightened by the clarity of this picture, how real and near she seemed.

He began poking around the house, and after a while he came to see that, really, there wasn't so much work to be done after all. He let himself in through the kitchen and stood in the empty first room. Vines came in through the casement, fingering the stone. But there was the good, deep sink and the old Aga.

And he allowed himself to think then that they could have a little holiday themselves, right there. It wasn't Corfu; of course it wasn't, he told himself. But it was away from the world in its own fashion. Perhaps they could come only at night, he thought, and he'd wash Vida's hair in the deep sink and dry it in his fingers on the terrace in the moonlight. He'd bring his phonograph. They'd have music, and they could dance on the deep moss.

He could have the whole place mended, restored.

He would come to her with roses. He would blindfold her. He would lead her by the hand to the cottage, unwrap her eyes, and all the darkness would fall away.

“A
H, HERE IT
is, just in time,” the Billy said early the following morning in the post office, shaking out a small catalog and holding it up for Norris's inspection. “Morris's puzzlers. He's just yesterday finished the last of the previous month's.”

She folded the catalog around her other mail, adjusted the lot beneath her arm, and painstakingly shook out her rain hat. “Looks like rain again, wouldn't you say, Mr. Lamb? The garden's very glad of it, I must say, but it's brought out the beetles something
terrible. Why, they're all over the cabbages, and me out with my beetle jar in the mornings, picking them off.” She sighed.

Norris rolled his eyes, and that was when he caught sight of Vida.

He struggled vainly to see around Mrs. Billy's billowing rain hat, its blue cellophane sheen obscuring his view through the window.

And it certainly
was
Vida, being towed along by the gardener.

“Matter with your neck, Mr. Lamb?” Mrs. Billy inquired. She nodded sympathetically. “It's the damp what does it. A terrible stiffness in the joints, this weather causes. I should have thought it might be fine this month,
last
month being so wet. But, that's it then. Can't do a thing about it. Think of them over in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Lamb. Now, aren't you glad you don't live there? Parching away in the desert like a lot of dried-up crisps?”

Norris glanced at her in annoyance and then back to the window.

“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Billy bent over suddenly, her mail slipping from beneath her arm, her hand to her face. “Oh! Something's in my eye, Mr. Lamb!” She dabbed at her eye, which was squeezed shut. “Oh! Something sharp!”

Norris gave a last, frantic look out the window. The Billy's envelopes had scattered at her feet. She held both hands to her face.

“Oh! Most annoying,” she cried in agitation. “Whatever can it be?”

“Let me help you,” Norris said, sighing, and he came round his counter. He put his hands out. “Let me have a look.”

Mrs. Billy turned her face toward him, her features bunched up in discomfort, her eyes tearing from beneath short, clenched lashes.

Norris poked at her face. “You need to open your eye,” he told her. “I can't see whether there's anything in it like that.”

Mrs. Billy contorted her face, one eye gaping open hotly at him, pooling water. Norris peered at her. “Now, let me—” He reached with a finger, gently pulled down the skin beneath the eye. The eyeball rolled, a pickled egg. “Ooooh,” Mrs. Billy moaned. “Quick, quick, it's there.”

“Well, I can't
see
anything,” Norris said in irritation. “Honestly, there's nothing there. It might just be a sty.” He dropped his hands. “Or perhaps you've cried it out.”

Mrs. Billy blinked madly, her hands fluttering before her. “Why, yes,” she said at last. “I believe I have.”

She smiled gratefully at him. “It's gone! Have you a hankie?”

Norris reached in his pocket, withdrew a handkerchief, and handed it to her. She patted her eye tenderly. “Now then—”

Norris stooped to the floor, collected her envelopes, and handed them to her.

“Thank you
ever
so much, Mr. Lamb,” she said as Norris took her by the elbow and steered her toward the door.

“Not at all,” he said hurriedly. “Not at all.”

But as Mrs. Billy headed away down the street, waving her hand at him, Norris realized he was too late. Vida must have turned the corner by the blacksmith's already, was heading—where? Home, perhaps?

Another customer came in, Mr. Titus's grown and married daughter, wanting chocolates and cigarettes for herself. Norris tried to hurry her along. The ugly shape of jealousy was arranging itself in his heart.

N
OW, NEARLY OUT
of breath from hurrying down the pavement in pursuit of Vida along the Romsey Road, he turns in the door of the bakery.

Mrs. Blatchford looks up at him from behind the counter and
frowns. “I hope you're in a better humor than you were yesterday,” she says tartly.

Norris tries to appear contrite but decides to forgo any apologies. It seems too complicated to explain his anxiety of yesterday. And now—now he feels such a mixture of things, both cheered, even emboldened, by his vague plan with his grandmother's cottage, his restoration of it, the gift of it to Vida, and perplexed and worried by Vida's appearance outside his window with the gardener. He will just check on Manford, he thinks. And then? He doesn't know exactly.

“All alone again today, are you?” he says sympathetically to Mrs. Blatchford instead. He leans round and sees Manford at his worktable, a two-tiered cake with dark icing before him. Manford holds a pastry cone in his hand, is bent over his work. “Except you have your helper back today,” he adds. “Hallo, Manford!” he calls brightly.

But Manford makes no reply.

Mrs. Blatchford sighs. “Vida says he hears quite well,” she says in a confiding tone to Norris, “but I've noticed that sometimes he doesn't seem to hear you at all. It's quite selective, I have noticed.”

Norris regards Manford. “Mind if I have a word with him?” he asks. “I won't keep him. Just see how he's getting on?”

Mrs. Blatchford shrugs. “Oh, he's everybody's favorite now,” she says. “You'd think it was he did all the work round here. No one minds old Mrs. Blatchford anymore. I'm just a fixture.”

“Oh, you're necessary as the sun and the moon, Mrs. Blatchford,” Norris says soothingly. “We all know that. And I've just got stamps for him,” he adds, patting his empty pocket. “Won't be a minute.”

W
HEN HE STEPS
into the hyphen, Norris pauses a moment. Manford is bent low over the cake, the arc of his back that
of a defender or protector, his work concealed. One shoelace dangles limply; his ankles are crossed over the rung of the stool like a schoolboy's.

“Feeling better, Manford?” Norris inquires, and steps forward. But he stops, for though Manford has made no sound, nor even any apparent gesture, Norris sees the muscles across his back tighten, his posture over the cake grow rigid.

“Working on a cake today?” Norris says, and then the stupidity of the remark floods his face with embarrassment.

But as he takes a step forward, intending to pat Manford's shoulder in a jovial way, Manford's hand freezes and he turns his face slightly, not to look directly at Norris, but as if in allowance of Norris's presence, in acknowledgment of some helplessness to prevent what will happen.

For Norris stops then, astonished once again by Manford, by his hand, by whatever mechanism in his mind snaps and closes like a shutter, releasing the world in little pictures—shadow play, a replication of some tiny corner of the universe. The cake is iced with an elaborate spider's web, its white filaments fine as hairs, bowed in the center as if a drifting wind has caught it.

Norris steps away slowly and returns to Mrs. Blatchford.

“Well, it's rather odd, I must say.” He searches for his handkerchief and then realizes in dismay that he lent it to the Billy.

“What?”

“Well, it's quite inventive. It's—” He pauses, glances at Manford, who has retrieved his pastry cone and is bent again over the cake. “Do you let him have free rein like that?” he whispers. “I mean, it's a bit gothic.”

“What's he done?” Mrs. Blatchford looks at him suspiciously.

“Well, it's a—it's a—well, it's a spider's web, I'm afraid.” Norris looks at her helplessly.

“A spider's web!”

“I shouldn't think many would find it
appetizing,
” he says, confession in his voice.

“Well, no!” Mrs. Blatchford looks undone. “It's nasty!”

“Perhaps, after being ill—perhaps his mind has taken a dark turn,” Norris says. “Perhaps he's not quite well yet.”

Mrs. Blatchford glances sidelong at Manford, appears to be thinking it over. “Mr. Lamb,” she says sweetly, cajolingly, after a moment. “Do you think—would you mind just running him home? I don't want to hurt his feelings”—she lowers her voice—“but I can't have him doing spiders' webs and such on the cakes. There's three more to do, and if he's in that frame of mind, I'm afraid they'll all be ruined. Perhaps he'd be best off at home today, resting. Would you mind?”

“No bother at all, Mrs. Blatchford,” he says, calculating the advantage of this proposal; now he'll have an excuse to pop in on Vida.

But he stops in the hyphen, struck by Manford's concentration on his labor. He knows what Mrs. Blatchford means about not wanting to hurt Manford's feelings. He seems so devoted to his work. Every time Norris has stopped in at Niven's and seen Manford there, he has been surprised at Manford's air of delighted occupation—just like Rumpelstiltskin, Norris thinks now, thrilled to have another pile of straw to weave into gold. He never seems to see it as straw, though, all those jam doughnuts. And how is he to know, anyway, that one doesn't put a sugar spider's web on a cake? That some might be put off by that? Suddenly Norris feels horrible, as if extracting Manford from the bakery is tantamount to kicking a dog, a good dog who only wants to be friendly.