Lamb in Love (5 page)

“I think literature has nothing to do with it. I think—”

“Do you know?” She interrupted him. “I wanted to give her a rinse, as well. She's more than a bit of gray. You take a close look next time you spy her. Tell me what you think. I've just the shade.
Venus, it's called. One of the new natural products. Lovely red highlights. You might say something to her in its favor.”

“
Venus?
”

“It'd take years off her, too,” Mrs. Billy said confidently. And then, putting the chocolates in her string bag, she gave Norris a coy look. “But aren't you one to notice now, Mr. Lamb?”

Norris attempted to recover himself, drew himself upright. “Women are the flowers of the universe, Mrs. Billy.” He stopped. He liked the way it sounded. “It would be a crime not to stop and smell the roses now and again, wouldn't it?”

Mrs. Billy opened her eyes wide then, as though all of a sudden, after years of doing business with Norris Lamb, passing him air letters for the daughter gone to Australia, watching him parcel up a package for the grandchild she's never seen, she'd never noticed this romantic streak in him.

“
Well
then. I suppose we are,” she said, smiling. She gave him a little wave and a wink. “Flowers of the universe—I fancy myself a rose. What do you think?” She tittered. “And you, Norris Lamb. You're nothing but an old bee now, aren't you?” And then she left, twittering, the bell jangling behind her.

A bee? Perhaps, he thought. Something that alights for just an instant, gathers a lick of sweetness upon its tongue, moves on to the next flower. Though he shall never move on. Not now. Not now that it's come to him, in this surprising and wonderful way, a veil drawn away from his eyes. Not now, he thinks, that he's seen the light.

Two

M
ANFORD IS HABITUALLY
a late sleeper. This morning, opening his door a crack and peering in at him before going downstairs, Vida observes that he sleeps the way a giant would, laid down as if felled over a patchwork of fields, his body cradled by a valley, fir trees bent like rushes beneath his cheek. Manford's dark, heavy head rests on a thick forearm. One calloused foot protrudes from the end of the bedclothes. Vida leans in and picks up his trousers and shirt from the floor, folds them over her arm. She retreats and goes quietly downstairs. Dim morning light, wavering with rain, lies across the floor in fluid stripes.

Since Manford started at Niven's, Vida has had more time than she knows what to do with. Still, she's uncomfortable with nothing to do—it makes her nervous—and so this morning she fixes herself a cup of tea and then sits down at her little desk in the sitting room off the kitchen to write a letter. Behind her, light rain falls against the window glass with the soft sound of fingertips striking a tabletop.

“Dear Uncle Laurence,” she begins.

“I'm ashamed it has taken me so long to write and thank you for the card and the lovely little painting you sent for my birthday. (Forty-one years old! Can you believe it?) You'd think that with only Manford to look after I'd have heaps of time, but somehow—actually, I don't really know how to account for it—the time seems to go by so quickly. In fact, I've more time than ever these days because—you'll never guess—I have got Manford a job! Yes! Mr. Perry doesn't know yet; he's off in Amsterdam, I
think it is, this week. Or perhaps that's next. In any case, Manford's working at Niven's now. You remember Mr. Niven? And Mrs. Blatchford? They've been so kind, really, and I think it will do Manford a world of good, being a useful member of society. And now that he's working and gone most of the day, I have all this time to myself. So much time! Perhaps too much, really. I don't exactly know what I shall do with myself.

“But I do want to catch up on all my correspondence, and you are first on my list. It is a
lovely
painting, really. I do thank you. I think one of your earlier letters (I have them
all,
you know, saved in a box!) mentioned the pensione where you first stayed when you went to Corfu. Do you remember? Is this painting the view from the terrace there? I thought it might be. Something about it—perhaps that funny group of big rocks out in the water—made me think of that letter. Oh! And the
Palinurus elephas
you ate for dinner each evening; that was in the letter, too, and now I see them here on the table—a still life, isn't it?—right in your painting! (You see, I've nearly memorized your letters!) Spiny lobster just brought up from the sea! I like the sound of
that!
It's quite a grand thing, you know, having a relative in such an exotic place as Corfu. I think it makes me quite the celebrity here, though Mrs. Billy's got a daughter in Australia now.

“And what news have I to tell you? Well, very little has changed here in Hursley (ha ha. What would you expect?) except that St. Alphage has a new organ since this spring. Some people say Mr. Lamb has been inspired ever since. Do you remember Mr. Lamb? He hasn't changed at all since you've gone away. It's funny, actually, now that I think about it—in fact, he looks probably very much the same as when you left! Still very tall and thin. So, he's the same, except that he seems a bit more, oh, impulsive, I find him lately. In conversation, that is. In any case, I do think I detect
a change in his playing since the new organ arrived—it seems a trifle ferocious, if you ask me. But perhaps it is just the instrument. It is very grand. Mr. Perry helped pay for it, of course.

“I've planted a pot of lavender at Mum's stone in the cemetery at St. Alphage. It looks very nice. The vicar says it's the lime in the stone that makes the lavender flourish so.

“Well, I'll sign off now. Thank you so much again for remembering my birthday. Forty-one years old! Think of it! My life's half over, isn't it?

“Your loving niece, Vida Stephen.”

When she finishes writing, Vida looks up at the clock on the mantel and sees that it's nearly half past eight, time to wake Manford if he's to be at Niven's on time. He likes an egg for his breakfast, too, and she likes to have him well fortified for the day, especially now that he's a working man, as she tells him. Perhaps he'd like a bit of ham to go with his egg, she thinks. He so loves salty things.

For a moment she wonders what her uncle Laurence, her romantic uncle Laurence, gone to Corfu now nearly twenty years ago, would be having for
his
breakfast. She turns her head slightly, as if to encompass a different view, and the pictures fly up easily, habitually, before her eyes, the way one encounters photographs in a long-familiar scrapbook: She imagines banquets laid upon tables at a cliff side, imagines herds of bright white goats sending stones scuttling down the mountain face, imagines silver fish twisting free of the sea, imagines a bell ringing. She has thought of Corfu so often over the years, bringing it up to comfort herself if she's worried about something, or going over the island in her mind if she's having trouble falling asleep. Of course, it isn't the real island—only the one she knows from Laurence or from what she's made up. It's her imaginary place.

But Manford will have to settle for an egg and ham and no view at all, she thinks then, closing her eyes briefly, and reaching up to shut the lid of her desk. An egg and ham and a pot of tea.

W
HEN THEY REACH
the Romsey Road an hour or so later, Vida takes her hand from Manford's and turns his attention to her. “Run along now, Manford,” she says, affecting an air of casualness. “They're waiting on you at Niven's.”

Manford does not acknowledge that she has spoken to him but bends over and inspects an insect at his feet.

“Manford!” Vida says pleadingly, all pretense dropping away.

He raises his head guiltily.

“Go on,” she says, now that she has his attention. She waves her hand. “Go on now, while there's a lull.”

Manford turns and steps off the curb. When he pauses and looks back over his shoulder, Vida taps her wristwatch. “You'll be late,” she says warningly.

But Manford fails to move, standing there in the road as if something important has just occurred to him. Vida makes an impatient noise and steps into the road to take Manford by the arm, escorting him briskly across the street. At the courtyard to Niven's Bakery, she leaves go his arm, brushes at a smudge on his lapel, gives him a kiss on the cheek and then a little nudge. A bus speeds past behind them in a cloud of sour exhaust.

“Now
hurry,
” she says, and turns her face away deliberately.

Manford hesitates a moment and then disappears obediently into the courtyard. Vida remains with her back turned until she's sure he's gone inside. Then she leans round the corner of the wall and checks, just to be certain he isn't lurking outside the door, suddenly shy. But no, she can see Mrs. Blatchford coming out from behind the counter with Manford's apron on her arm, so it's
all right. She thinks she can see Mrs. Blatchford smiling, but it's difficult to tell.

Vida straightens her skirt. She regards Niven's courtyard, the geraniums at the window. Perhaps another day, she thinks. Perhaps another day and he'll do it himself. Still, she mustn't be in a rush. It has gone so well, this matter of finding Manford independent occupation. She thinks of him on the high stool in the annex, surrounded by the sweet smell of baking bread. She thinks of the close, high walls of the courtyard before the bakery door, the safety of the small enclosure. She thinks of the small view from the windows: the whitewashed walls, the geraniums, the verbena. She travels over it in her mind like a list, every hazard accounted for.

It is part of her training to have Manford walk a bit of the route to Niven's by himself each day. A little more each week, she'd thought, until he could do the whole job himself, from Southend House all the way to the bakery, and back home again at the end of the day. But he won't leave hold of her hand except for the last bit, when they are right at the courtyard. She doesn't know what to do about this. Lately, and for the first time—she cannot say why, though perhaps it is just having Manford be even this slightest bit independent now—it has occurred to her that something might happen to her, something fatal. She is grateful that she has—God knows why—been prevented from entertaining this thought before, for she finds it so painful as to be almost intolerable. And now she feels an awful urgency to teach Manford so many things. There are so many important things she has neglected to teach him, she sees now. Why, at any moment she might be—oh, struck by a bus, she thinks, turning away from Niven's courtyard and facing the Romsey Road. Struck by a bus!
And then what would happen to Manford! She feels a real pain in her heart.

Oh, don't be such a worrywart, Vida Stephen, she tells herself helplessly. No one likes a worrywart.

M
RS
. B
LATCHFORD SETS
Manford up each morning with a cup of tea on the high stool in the old dairy, where she can keep an eye on him from the bakery by stepping into the hyphen, calling to him until he turns around slowly, his great smile taking over his whole face.

“Every morning! And always with a big smile! It's like he hasn't seen you for an age!” Mrs. Blatchford tells Vida in an undertone, when Vida stops in around midday later that same day on her way to the post office. She often stops in, just to check on Manford.

“I know,” Vida says. “It's like that every time.”

As if to demonstrate his happiness, Mrs. Blatchford leans over the counter and calls to him. “All right, Manford? Are you coming on?” He waves and smiles and goes back to his work.

“He's been no trouble at all,” Mrs. Blatchford says, returning her attention to Vida. “Not in the least. Really—” She seems to want to say something grand now, something about how wonderful it is to have him there, something to make all of them—Vida, Manford, and herself—part of a fortunate group. “I can't think how we ever got on without him,” she says at last. And Vida sees surprise suddenly flutter up into Mrs. Blatchford's face. She really does mean it, Vida discovers. She really can't imagine what it was like before Manford.

Vida thinks of how Manford sits there all morning, slowly filling the doughnuts with jam from the canvas bag, setting them
out on their paper-covered trays. At eleven, when the sun arrives at the windowsill and lights up the cool, whitewashed walls in the bakery, the geraniums glowing in the window box, she knows that Mrs. Blatchford will come and fetch Manford for tea and a bite to eat. Mrs. Blatchford tells her that he holds her hand when she comes to lead him to the table, but only for a moment. He seems a little wary still, she says. He puts his hands over his face when she speaks to him if he's feeling too shy for conversation.

I
N THE EVENINGS,
during their supper, Vida has been working on his manners. She's ashamed that she hasn't spent more time on this—she believes that it pains him to be so awkward. But it isn't easy, and sometimes she thinks it's better just to let him eat in peace, without always nudging him about where his elbow is or leaning over to wipe his chin for him.