Lamb in Love (41 page)

He passes slowly before the houses, thinking of Vida—“Come on, Mr. Lamb. Come along with us. Perhaps you'll be invisible, too.” No one sees him now; only the eyes of an owl follow him, or a sly cat wending its way into an alley. He looks in a window, sees Mrs. Thompson-Harris asleep over her knitting, sees the Bates boys building something, a model airplane, at the kitchen table; sees Horace the milkman cleaning his shoes at his back
step; sees Mr. Blevins stepping across his sitting room in his undershirt, a stack of newspapers in his arms.

A
ND ANY ONE
of them, looking up, might have wondered about Mr. Lamb's walking through the village at this hour. Some of them, in fact, attempting to collect their mail or post a letter or buy a box of stationery, had stood perplexed at the closed door and drawn shades of the post office earlier that afternoon, had wondered what had become of the postmaster, usually so dependable.

Fergus, foul-tempered without his tobacco, had kept his eye out from the forge, begged a pipeful from the odd man lingering there, peering in the window, cupping his hand to the glass.

“Gone out walking with Perry's idiot,” Fergus had said, hurrying up whenever he had the opportunity, holding out his pouch for a pinch, as if this news were obligatory trade for tobacco.

“What? Manford Perry? What's happened to Vida?” they'd asked, surprised, and Fergus had shrugged, uninterested now that he had his pipeful. That was all he had to offer.

Even Dr. Faber, stopping round at the end of the day for a box of chocolates for his grandson who was coming to spend the weekend, had paused at the dark post office and wondered about Norris. A little hinge of unease had opened in his thoughts, something unpleasant and unfamiliar, when he remembered seeing Norris and Manford together earlier that day. He liked Manford, as much as you could genuinely like someone so deficient, he'd thought. There was a sweetness to him, an unguarded nature that Dr. Faber, as a physician, found simple and relaxing to confront—no invented symptoms, no distracting terrors about mortality. He'd sworn under his breath, pacing in front of the dark window.

Someone should have given Vida more help, Dr. Faber thought fiercely, and felt suddenly and uncomfortably guilty. Really, she'd been surprisingly intelligent about Manford all these years, if a bit of a worrier. He wouldn't have expected it from a girl in the village, such patience. Even, from time to time, inspiration. Like getting him that job at Niven's. Now, who'd told her that would be such a good idea? He had learned a few things from her, he thought. On her visits to his office with Manford, and the few times he'd been round to Southend to answer some urgent call from her, he'd been impressed by her, by her thoughtfulness. She's had a hard go of it, he decided, and a surprising anger gripped him for a moment. He thought of Manford, unable to lace his own shoes, Vida kneeling at his feet.

Good Lord, you don't hand it round very evenly, do you? he thought.

He'd stared a moment longer through the dark window of the post office, vaguely reviewing the sight of Mr. Lamb and Manford from earlier in the day. They were a likely pair, in a way, he'd thought, surprised.

But he felt tired that evening, uncharacteristically weary. And so he'd set his hat then and turned for home.

There's only so much, he'd thought, any one of us can do.

A
ND IN FACT
no one does look up from his or her business that evening. Norris passes down the pavement, his head wagging from side to side as he looks in every window, curious, as if he has found himself in a foreign country. Aren't the gardens pretty, he thinks, noting the pale strawberry of the foxgloves, the lantern yellow of the butterfly orchid. He counts the ghostly pickets until he reaches the corner and turns onto the Romsey Road.

A few patrons are standing outside the Dolphin, their caps pulled down low on their heads; they turn at the sight of him rounding the corner, watch him until he disappears into the darkness along the street. They down their glasses, think instinctively of their wives and children, resolve to have just one more and head for home. Perhaps their children will be asleep by then, the pubescent girls so startlingly mature suddenly, their breasts budding beneath their nightgowns, their profiles so exotic in the shadows, so like their mothers', traces of forbidden lipstick, perhaps, still on their mouths, blue eye shadow still in a faint smear on their eyelids. How these men love to come upon their daughters like that at night, to touch them tenderly on the head, sweep the hair from their faces, gaze at them. And the little boys, their rooms strewn with toys, one baby arm—scarred at the elbow from scrapping in the street—flung free from the sheets, a soiled plaster dangling by a corner. How sweet they all are.

How quickly the time has passed.

A
T THE BENCH
in the lane, Norris nearly loses his courage. He could simply leave the letter there; he could go home then and fall into bed, into dreamless sleep. She could find it in the morning, and by then he'd be gone, he thinks wildly, on a packet bound for foreign shores from Southampton—it's not so far to Southampton. He imagines, briefly, that he can escape everything he has set in motion.

She doesn't love him. She never has. She never will. She won't even have the opportunity.

And somehow, oddly, the coldness of this thought steadies him. He sits quietly on the bench, breathing deeply, thinking of
all the times he has stood behind the horse chestnut tree here and spied on Vida. Happy memories, they seem to him now.

After a few minutes, he puts his hand to the arm of the bench, pushes himself painfully to his feet. He touches the letter in his pocket. He stands there a moment, waiting. Despite himself, he feels in his heart the old excitement of this errand, of creeping to the low lawns beneath Southend, gazing up at the house, searching for her form against a window. Did she have to be so beautiful? he thinks, a groan gathering within him. There was so much more I could have done. I never even told her how I feel. Such a simple thing.

A breath of wind eddies down the lane, setting up a dark music, castanets in the leaves. A twig cracks sharply, somewhere in the bracken. Then all is silent.

Norris leaves the bench, walks toward the house. One last time, he thinks. I'll go the way I've always gone. Invisible.

V
IDA RUBS HER
bare foot against the cool, smooth slate of the terrace steps. She glances up at Manford's darkened window behind her and her own beside it, one lamp left on at her dresser, another burning still in the kitchen, at the far end of the house. The randomness of the lights makes the house itself appear like a rocky island, two distant occupants alone, each on their promontory. For a moment, a chill of fear leaping up inside her, she thinks she sees smoke, swirling forms that step forth and gesture to one another, mute and meaningful, full of intention.

But she shakes her head. There they are, her silly old fears.

Everything's all right, she tells herself.

There's no fire in the house. Manford is safe.

She stands up, drawing her robe close around her throat. She looks down into the chiaroscuro of the garden below, the fountain,
the gray ribbon of walls, the towering velvet yews and boxwoods, each black blade of grass, the white gravel of the paths, the ghostly entabulature of the grotto.

She sets a foot down upon the first step and then the next, her hand resting on the stone balustrade as though gently grazing the arm of a lover. She holds her head high, looking out over the garden. She sees the light in the stable wink once, twice, as though a form has passed before it; and then there is nothing, just a steady yellow glow as though the room has suddenly emptied, its occupant having quit the closely lit space for someplace darker, for the darkness of the garden.

H
OW MANY PEOPLE
move in the garden this night? It is hard to tell in the darkness, for the shadows don't hold still for inspection, not so you can be certain, the angle of the moonlight and the presence of even a small wind altering the tableau as if it were the surface of a pool. And of course there are animals, too, a whiskered badger venturing out on purposeful claws, a pair of deer turning in alarm, the thousand silent burrowings of earthworms and snails in the soil, the freakish shape of an owl falling on its cloak into the dark wood. Across the lawn runs a tiny mouse—two; three; no, more. Or are those errant leaves turning and turning?

Jeremy's work, the cleaned flower beds etched neatly and sharply at the edges with a spade. The work of a strong young man only temporarily inhibited by his injury, the hand nursed now tenderly in the other, more tenderly than is necessary perhaps, as he steps from the stable below the garden into the shadow of a sycamore, relieves himself there against the backdrop of the fountain's white noise. A late woolly catkin, having clung on stubbornly past its time, flutters down now from the birch,
turning in a gyre, pale yellow. And then a little phantom cloud of white night moths stirs from the wood near Jeremy. He watches them break free, disperse. He steps forward.

There is another footfall at the same moment, so the two cancel each other out, two sounds scored in the same instant. The blackthorn stick descends silently, a third leg making its inaudible step, the interval in the gait.

Does Norris Lamb need this stick for walking? No, but for resting against, for poking and prodding at the earth, a comforting metronome at his heel, a second party accompanying him everywhere. He has raised the stick in anger before, though. He knows it can do the necessary damage if applied properly. There's nothing as stout as blackthorn, otherwise known as sloe, whose black, plumlike fruit flavors gin, the drink you take when you have lost your love, a child, a war.

But Norris is not a man who drinks.

He stands in the high arch between the yews, the poisonous berries glowing a deep red, almost black, among the spiny green. He is scored all over with the fine shadows of the leaves. Even if he moves now you will not trust your eyes. You cannot be certain what you have seen.

And who is the third? The last? The form so unmistakably, even unfashionably feminine, with its full hips and round calf, moving slowly, sedately down the gray steps in the moonlight, the breeze picking up the hem of her robe, fluttering it like white surf at her ankle. She thinks to try it, walking like Manford, her arms reaching as if above the cold spray of the waves, Manford's invisible companions pacing beside her, her eyes closed and head flung back, trusting the current.

And Norris can imagine her maiden voyage begun, her trip already under way, Corfu beckoning. She steps away from earth
on the milk white sea of moonlight, the pebbled beach of the garden.

And Norris sees that it is her great sympathy that has made him love her so. Her list-making and storing of provisions, her vigilance through so many nights over the boy's common colds and more, over his whole lifetime of brave, failed endeavor, her exorcism of bats and spiders and other children's cruelties, the thousand times she's thrown a ball or held his hand or soaped his back or trimmed his hair, the way she adjusts the spoon in his hand, the flower in his lapel, his hat against the sun. The way she fits herself up against him at night and holds him, loves him.

Loves him. That's it. That's her reward, her privilege. She loves Manford.

And
she
understands that Manford has been a gift to her, the world rocking in one terrible instant, parting open along a crevasse and swallowing one human being, leaving a baby motherless, only to fill that woman's place with another, a soul so unprepared that it has taken her twenty years to learn what she is made of. And that modesty has made her what she was always destined to become, the heroine of her own tale—the woman who will be at last, before it is too late, the great love of one man's life and the salvation of her own.

N
ORRIS SEES HER
pausing there against the flight of steps, her arms at rest upon the air, her face a tiny white moon.

He sees her. They both do, the two men lurking there at the perimeter of the garden.

But Norris sees Jeremy first.

This is his advantage, that by remaining hidden longer, by waiting, he can recover whatever distance he might have lost in pausing. He turns and runs awkwardly, skirting the edge of the
yews, making for the steps of the grotto, where Jeremy now appears, his shoulders rising as he ascends the stair. Norris comes from the dark, something fantastic speeding along the running shadows of the ancient shrubs, a form aggrandized, towering, rising up out of its own darkness. He raises the stick. His eyes show a holy fury, but something else, too. Sadness.

“Down there,” Norris hisses, gesturing with the stick back toward the curving stair that leads away from the grotto. “Or I'll give it to you.”

“Jesus!” Jeremy backs away, terrified.

Norris hushes him fiercely, prods with the stick.

Jeremy raises his hands in protest a moment and then glances at Vida, motionless and distant at the far end of the garden on the stairs. He had meant nothing. He hadn't even seen her until the last moment!

Norris drives the stick toward him, breathing hard.

“You're crazy!” Jeremy expulses it under his breath like a curse, an evil wind. But he backs away from Norris's stick, down the steps. At the bottom he turns once. Norris stands at the parapet, leaning on it, trying to quiet his jagged breaths.

“This is a crazy house,” Jeremy says low. And then he laughs, as something occurs to him. “You won't get any out of
her,
you old bugger.” And then he is gone.

V
IDA HAS OPENED
her eyes to see something move by the grotto, some bent form backing into the shadows. But there is nothing there now. She blinks, takes a breath.

She moves forward toward the grotto and the fountain, gliding down the path, her robe billowing.

For Manford, and for Norris, she is irreplaceable.