Lamb in Love (7 page)

She reached over and touched Manford's hair, smoothing it away from his forehead. He took her hand, pressed it to his cheek, and then turned it over in his own and with his finger traced its lines and creases. He brought her hand up close to his face and sniffed.

“What do you think, Manford?” she said, smiling down at him. “Shall we see the world one day after all?”

She looked up and saw herself reflected in the window glass. Her face, from the small distance across the room, seemed tiny and insignificant—like the head on an old coin, she thought, someone long gone and unrecoverable, rubbed away beneath the thumb. She stared at herself a moment longer, the tiny, white, frightened triangle of her own face glowing in the window across the room.

When Manford clambered to his feet and crossed the room to turn on the television, the image of her reflected face was swallowed instantly in a square of brilliant blue, a blue, she thought, as bright and miragelike as the waters of the Ionian Sea.

Three

S
OMETIMES
N
ORRIS FEELS
as if he has been stopped up short by Cupid himself, stepping out from behind the corner of the pub and placing his small hand upon Norris's chest.

Steady now, Norris Anthony Lamb, Cupid says. I'm taking aim at your heart.

My old heart? Norris asks. After all this time? I've not the slightest idea how to do this, how to fall in love. I've come too late to this.

And the voice speaks to him again, saying, Norris, love is not ever wasted. Not even if it comes late in life. Especially if it comes late in life. Don't knock yourself down, Norris Lamb. You're as capable as the next man—more capable even, for waiting so long.

But whose is that voice, really? His own!

For after all, he has discovered he has a gift for it, a gift for being in love. He feels like a man who has at long last discovered his natural state. When he mounts the steps to the organ now on Sundays, when he takes his place before the pipes, he plays as never before.

“My dear
Norris,
” the vicar said to him after a recent service, stopping him on the walk, his balding head shining in the weak light. “That was truly—” Norris watched him appear to search for the word; actually, he'd probably found the music a trifle loud. “You were
inspired
this morning.” The vicar put his hand to his heart. “You quite moved me. I am
surprised
.”

“Vicar,” Norris said, “it's all due to the instrument. I am just—an
instrument of the instrument.” How true, he thought, thinking of Vida, thinking of love.

“And faith is
indeed
the most marvelous instrument,” the vicar replied, misunderstanding Norris completely but nevertheless pleased and moving away then with a nod toward the vicarage, where his lunch of salad and cream and potted shrimp awaited him.

N
ORRIS LIKES TO
quote Honoré de Balzac on such matters, when he says that the new organ is “the grandest, the most daring, the most magnificent, of all instruments invented by human genius.”

Norris believes that the organ procured for St. Alphage must be very nearly as perfect as anything can be. Norris quotes his “old friend Honoré” to anyone who'll listen, and indeed some are sorry to be in the post office at all these days, for Norris Lamb has turned into a babbling brook.

“As Honoré says, ‘Surely it is in some sort a pedestal on which the soul poises for a flight forth into space, essaying on her course to draw picture after picture in an endless series'—oh, how does it go?” Norris has to consult his notebook here, the notebook in which he keeps memorable sayings. “Oh, yes, here it is—‘to paint human life, to cross the Infinite that separates heaven from earth.'”

St. Alphage's organ committee, upon approaching Mr. Perry on one of his infrequent visits home, had been admitted to a sitting room at Southend House to explain its business. It had been thought that his career as a church architect would influence his contribution to the committee, though he was not a religious man, for he was rarely seen at church. And indeed it took him just a few moments to assess the nature of the committee's errand and
to wave away, in a manner Norris saw as wonderfully American, all polite preliminaries. He took out his checkbook immediately.

“How much do you want?” he asked.

There was some hesitation at this point. The members of the committee were unprepared for such directness. But finally Dr. Faber, who as Hursley's physician occupies a rank of some stature in the village, spoke up and said, quite firmly, “We're told that Renatus Harris—no doubt you are familiar with his work, Mr. Perry?—will himself come to St. Alphage for sixteen thousand pounds.”

Norris heard that Mr. Perry is said to have raised his eyebrows only fractionally at this point. “An instrument sui generis, I take it.”

“Nothing less,” averred Dr. Faber.

And that was all there was to it.

The organ at St. Alphage comprises four divisional organs, Norris likes to explain to anyone who will listen, one more than is generally appointed for a small church. The presence of the swell organ, however, in addition to the great, choir, and (of course) pedal organs, gives it an ability to occasionally outperform the choir on certain selections. (Norris has taken a wicked delight in this, especially when Lamartine Ramsey is the solo. Such a voice. Like a bombshell nearing its target.) In any case, the fourth makes it more of a concert organ than such a small church might be expected to need, but Norris believes Mr. Harris was right in persuading them of its virtue. With its splendid new organ, Hursley should be able to attract secular performers for the occasional weekend evening performance, and that would be a boon indeed. And, as Mr. Harris pointed out, it would have been a crime not to take advantage of the unique acoustical properties of
St. Alphage.

And so Norris plays now as if he has his whole life to live over. That's it, isn't it? he thinks. It's made him a young man again, this love for Vida Stephen. No, better than young. Entirely reinvented, and with more sensibility this time. Staring at the glass in the mornings now as he passes the razor carefully over his cheeks, he trembles at the possibility of affront that rises in his breast, the boldness he feels stirring within him. Sometimes his hand shakes so dreadfully that he cuts himself, and he has to open the shades at the post office in the morning with bits of plaster stuck to his face to stanch the flow of blood.

“Sweet Jesus! What's happened to you, Lamb?” Fergus barked out the other morning, come in for his tobacco. “Had a quarrel with your razor?”

And Norris was self-conscious all morning after that, terrified lest Vida should drop in for something or other and see him that way, patched up like an old dog who's been in a fight.

So he looks himself in the eyes now of a morning and says aloud, “Steady on, Lamb. There's nothing to be frightened of. You can do it. Just pace yourself, my boy, and think it all through.”

In the evenings now when he takes his walk, he tries to consider his campaign, how it should progress, what special thing he might contrive for her. He might leave flowers on the bench in the lane, he thinks. Or a box of chocolates on her pillow—if he could figure out how to get to her pillow. He wants to astonish her with how wonderful it is to be alive, to have her wake one morning and discover the world marvelously altered.

You've been awakened, Norris Lamb, he says to himself, after a long sleep, as it were, a sleep that might have, save for Providence's intervention, gone on forever.

This is it, he says. Carpe diem.

O
NE AFTERNOON
N
ORRIS
takes a chance—he wouldn't wish to frighten her, have her think he's
lurking
—and peers out directly at Vida from behind the horse chestnut. He does admire her hair, her face, her profile. As she waits on the bench, he thinks, as he has so often, that she would make a lovely picture, just like this.
Woman Waits, Wearing Hat.

In a moment Manford will appear from around the corner, his head with its untidy hair twisted into sticky cowlicks, his hands outstretched as if resting on the backs of great unseen lions who pace beside him. And when Manford sees Vida, he will begin to run, with his lumbering gait. She will rise, Norris knows, as she always does, take a step away from the bench, and prepare herself for his collision with her shirtfront, the embrace he delivers. She will stagger backward a moment, catch at her hat, smile, touch his face. And then, turning, they will clasp hands and carry on, back down the lane, back through the gates of Southend House, which will close slowly behind them.

And then Norris will step out from behind the horse chestnut, take up his blackthorn stick and tap it on the ground, peer up into the sky, eggshell white and fragile. This will be his only glimpse of her today, unless this evening, restless in his own house at night, he penetrates by means of a sweet stealth the garden at Southend House. There he might linger by the fountain. He might happen to see her hourglass form against a window.

S
INCE IT ALL
began, he has gone over in his mind a thousand times the instant of his transformation, the blinding instant in which Vida appeared—oh, not as a stranger, nor even as a neighbor whom he might meet from time to time and to whom
he might raise his hand in greeting, taking note, meanwhile, in a desultory way, of some slight change in her appearance, some gradual change in her fashion or manner that suddenly makes itself apparent.

Certainly he has known her for a long time, his entire life—or her entire life, at least, as he's fifteen years ahead of her at least, he thinks. And there was, he is now certain, no warning, not even the merest suggestion, of their linked fates in all the years they have lived nearly side by side in Hursley.

Norris has tried to remember being a child, tried to see how far back he can go and still find her there. He remembers her as one in a string of girls in their straw boaters and blue plaid jumpers, each holding a jar containing a water hyacinth, the long, pallid roots waving in the water, the flowers cresting the top of the glass. The girls were on their way back to the classroom from a science walk, Norris knew, in which they had traversed Hursley's streets to the banks of the Tyre. He imagined each girl wading into the water through the tangled cress, socks and sandals removed, dresses carefully tucked inside knickers.

But which was Vida? Which among the pairs of girls was she? And why is Norris, on an errand for his mother—sent home from the post office, perhaps, to fetch their luncheon—so struck, suddenly, by this procession of solemn acolytes, the girls passing before him, the water hyacinths sloshing in their jars, Miss Newman at their head with her great, bound bust and brave forehead?

He is sure that he is right—Vida is the last of the lot, walking alone, their total being an odd number. She does not look up as they pass Norris, but he is struck by her profound attention to her task, her certainty that should one little drop of water spill she will be devastated. And he thinks it odd that no one has ever explained to her that the trick to carrying a full glass of water is
never once to look at it.

Now she is alone, the last of the girls ahead of her having disappeared around the corner. Vida stops, squats upon the pavement. And then, as if some long buried, feral instinct has just returned to her, she plucks the flower from the glass and takes it carefully, root first, within her own moist and watery mouth, the blossom protruding from between her lips. This accomplished, she raises the glass again and with her free hand covers the top of it like a lid. And then she begins to run, to catch up with the others, and is gone in an instant.

He thinks now, considering this memory, what an artful and womanly solution that was. How generous. How clever. How, he now sees, like a woman.

But what did he think at the time? For he merely continued on his way, home to his family's cottage, where his grandmother had prepared their luncheon, moving blindly about the small kitchen, diverted by this task from her customary place before the organ. He said not a word to her about this strange moment he had witnessed, a girl crouching in the road and taking a flower into her mouth.

T
HIS BEING IN
love—it's all very well, he thinks, but what about the technical difficulties? For instance, there's the challenge (he won't use the word
problem
) of how to make his feelings known. He doesn't want to do something dull, such as engage her in friendly conversation or ask her to dinner. No! This sort of love, he tells himself—like Antony's for Cleopatra, or Troilus's for Criseyde, or Romeo's for Juliet—requires something very grand. Something imaginative.

Such as—what?

Sometimes, after Vida and Manford have disappeared into the gates at Southend House, Norris paces up and down the lane, his
hands behind his back, his blackthorn stick trailing behind him, and tries to think.