Lamb in Love (8 page)

Skywriting? Could he hire some bloke with a little plane to write a message of some kind in the sky over Southend? He read in the paper once about someone who did that. But what if she didn't happen to be looking up at just the right moment? And what exactly would such a message say?

Could he sing under her window? Well, he has a passable tenor, but frankly the notion embarrasses him.

Could he ring at the door and, when she opened it, give her a box with a ring in it?

No.

He paces up and down, shaking his head. All these sorts of approaches seem too bold, too declarative, too insistent—too unlike him, he realizes sadly. And it's been days now, days and days, since he found himself falling so precipitously in love. Days, and he's yet to do a single thing except spy on her.

He sits down at last on the bench, puts his chin in his hand. The light of late afternoon closes in gently around him. He looks up, squints a little, attending to the light music in the leaves overhead, the squirrels, the sparrows.

There should be someone to help, it seems to him, and he feels suddenly aggrieved at the loneliness of his position. Why is there no one to help him? Why is there no one to consult? Why didn't his father tell him about such things? All those years, when his father might have helped him, he said nothing at all. There was just that once, when his mother had that scare with the lump in her breast. Norris had been—what? Sixteen? Seventeen? He tries to remember. He and his father had sat in the hospital waiting room together. Terry Lamb had looked at his hands, turning them over and over before him, his nails bitten to the quick.

“Norrie,” he'd said at last, but so quietly that Norris could barely hear him. “Don't think,” he said, “don't think that though you see me so sick at heart here now, today, that it hasn't all been worth it. Your mum . . .” And then he'd stopped, and his face had taken on a surprised expression, as if the feeling that pressed up out of his heart at that moment was transforming him into a different man. “Why don't . . .” He tried to go on, but he never did finish, and Norris, who had been terrified by the circumstance of his mother's illness, had hoped in a way that he wouldn't. It was all too much, too important to speak of.

But now—he jumps up from the bench in sudden frustration, begins to pace again. Oh, why is it all so difficult? Because his feelings—why, they're so simple, clear as day.

I love you, he wants to say to her.

Marry me, he wants to say.

He wants to jump out from behind his horse chestnut tree one day, drop to his knees before her. I'd do anything for you, he'd say. Anything to make you happy.

Oh, say yes, he thinks, stopping his pacing and staring at the bench now as though she might materialize there before him. And then, experimentally, he closes his eyes. After a moment he sinks slowly and painfully to one knee, puts out his hand to take her imagined fingers, cool and weightless as a breeze, between his own. Kneeling there, the stones of the lane beneath his kneecaps, he smiles at her astonishment.

Ah, Vida, he whispers, and leans forward.

There is a sharp report, and Norris lurches forward, his eyes flying open. He prods with his stick, scrambles to his feet, whirls around, breathing hard.

But there is nobody there.

High above, a raven flaps off heavily through the wood. The
bird's hunched, miserable shape reminds Norris for one terrible moment of his father, going down the path to the end of the garden with a spade under one arm and the body of the Lambs' old fox terrier wrapped in a blanket under the other. Norris hadn't wanted to go with his father to bury the dog; he had been afraid of the stiff little body, found under the kitchen sink that morning. He had stood inside at the window, watching his father work the spade into the dark earth beneath the hawthorn tree, his father's back rounded as an old man's, a light rain beginning.

How horribly easy it is, he thinks now, breathing hard, watching the light retreat down the lane, to go from good to bad, from the dream to the memory, from what we want to all we've ever had.

Four

V
IDA FEELS DISMAY
that Southend House has been let go so over the years, the gardens and the house both. When she started with Mr. Perry so long ago, Southend House was the pride of the village. The lawns were smooth, the orchards bore fruit, the stables and greenhouses were in perfect repair. A corporation, Standard Oil, she thinks it was, had bought the property, and for several years maintained the estate in absentia for visiting executives, continuing to host the annual Guy Fawkes Day celebration and other village events on the generous striped lawns. Vida remembers her spring dancing pageants held there, remembers the effigies of Guy Fawkes falling year after year into the bonfires, remembers sausages and potatoes hot from the coals.

Then, in 1949, Mr. Perry was hired as part of the international team planning a restoration of Winchester cathedral, and Vida's life changed overnight.

Thomas Perry had been a junior member of an American firm specializing in sacred architectures when he attracted the attention of the firm's principal partners. They'd admired his interpretation of the vernacular elements in an addition to a nineteenth-century monastery in the Hudson River valley. (Vida has seen his drawings for this monastery, a set of solemnly beautiful watercolors, and thinks them lovely, like the illustrations of a sorcerer's castle in a children's picture book.) Mr. Perry's mentors, sympathetic to the tragic circumstances of his wife's sudden death in childbirth earlier that year, had thought to distract him from his grief with
the assignment in Winchester. He had leaped at the opportunity. “I always was a secret Anglophile,” he told Vida later.

Leaving Manford, then just three months old, in the care of a nurse, he had come immediately to England, bought Southend House, and in a matter of days hired a full staff to run the place.

At the post office on one of his whirlwind mornings through the village, he had asked Norris Lamb about local girls who might help with his baby son. Norris had been completely unhelpful, but Vida's mother had been in the post office that morning and had volunteered her daughter to the handsome young American. That afternoon, in the huge, empty kitchen at Southend House, in an interview so brief and strangely elliptical that Vida walked around for days afterward feeling as though she might have been mistaken about the whole matter, she was hired as Manford's nanny.

One overcast morning two months later, Mr. Perry arrived at the port in Southampton with his personal effects and his infant son. His sister had made the passage with them and had been seasick the entire voyage, and she'd handed Manford over to Vida almost as soon as they alighted from the car in front of Southend. “Thank God you're here,” she'd said. “I need a bath.”

Vida, dressed carefully for the occasion in a white blouse and serge skirt, had been waiting nervously in the front hall for the sound of the approaching car. At Mr. Perry's instructions, she had seen that the furniture shipped three weeks before was in place. That afternoon, she carried Manford to his new nursery, changed his nappy, and laid him down to rest in the Perrys' heirloom cradle with its intricately turned spindles. Manford turned his heavy head gently from side to side, quietly restless. After a moment, regarding him solemnly, Vida took him in her arms again and carried him to the window. She held him up to see the view, and he
blinked his eyes against the light, turning his face aside to nuzzle into her neck. As she held the warm, sweet weight of him against her, she contemplated the things that were his—the silver brush and comb engraved with his initials, the beautiful gardens below, the splendid house, the handsome father. And yet no mother, she thought, looking down at Manford in her arms. Rich as a lord, this baby, but yet so poor.

“Come see,” she whispered. And she held him then to face the mirrored glass of the wardrobe doors. “I'm Vida,” she said to his sleepy face. “We say it this way: Vee-da. You must just sing right out whenever you need me.”

Later, when they were certain he would never speak, she remembered with hot shame having given him that particular instruction. For Manford would never sing out—never sing, nor shout, nor even whisper.

V
IDA KEPT A
photograph of Manford's mother in a silver frame on the dresser in Manford's room. Eleanor Perry had been blond and lovely, and as the years went by, Vida could see that Manford's good looks came from his mother as much as from his father. But sometimes, in the beginning, looking at herself in the mirror, she thought she saw a likeness between her and the grave and silent child now under her charge and pretended he was her own. It was easy enough to do, really, with no
real
mother to confront her. She would hold Manford's pudgy hands to the looking glass next to hers, where they left a moist and ghostly imprint. “Now you see it, now you don't,” she said, and was rewarded one day by Manford's first smile.

Sometimes Vida turned around to catch sight of Thomas Perry standing silently in the door of the nursery, watching them. She would duck her head shyly—he was
so
handsome, his hair black
as a crow's back, his nose so straight, his eyes so blue. But he always turned away after a moment. Before long he had begun to travel. Soon he was hardly ever at home.

For the first few years, Southend House was maintained in perfect repair. Mr. Perry kept a horse in the stable and, for Manford, though he was too young to ride him, a shaggy Shetland pony (of whom Vida was secretly afraid). Water flowed in the fountains. The roses bloomed with magical profusion, their intricate, blameless faces opening wide and then falling away silently, petal by petal, onto the emerald grass.

On her way to work in the mornings, when she still lived in her mother and father's house, Vida would come up through the wood. At the big horse chestnut tree on the lane, she would stop and take her compact from her purse, powder her nose, and ready herself, gazing up at the house. She considered herself a fortunate girl to have found work at Southend House. So many of her friends had left for London, for dull jobs as secretaries or clerks. But Vida loved the known confines of the village, and she was deeply attached to her mother. She enjoyed wandering the house with Manford, imagining herself lady of the manor. And her affection for Manford grew each day as the child, though he never uttered a sound, came to know her, welcome her, his eyes changing expression as she came into view before him, smiling and repeating his name—Manford Arthur Perry, Manford Arthur Perry—waiting for him to one day say the words back to her. From time to time she thought of Manford's mother and how different it might have been if Mrs. Perry had lived, how different her own life would have been. She was ashamed, sometimes, to realize that there would have been no place for her in Manford's world, or the world of Southend House, had Manford's mother survived; the knowledge of her own good fortune coming
at such a high cost to another made her feel fierce and hopeless, all at once. She felt indebted to a ghost and under constant surveillance.

Once Manford's condition was known, Mr. Perry appeared to have more and more opportunities to leave home, and Vida noticed that some necessary repairs to the house and grounds began to be postponed, that two of the three gardeners were let go, that the horse and pony were, quietly one weekend, sold and taken away. Mr. Perry traveled widely. Sometimes he intimated that he had work abroad. Sometimes, Vida suspected, he traveled simply for pleasure or to forget about his son. And Southend House began to unravel, as if ghostly hands were pulling loose one thread at a time.

Standing at the window of her bedroom, Vida saw the lawns below ravaged by the tunneling paths of moles, saw the trees tangled with their own broken limbs. She wondered what it would take to bring Mr. Perry home again.

I
N THE BEGINNING
it had been so lovely. She would take Manford out in his pram to the lawns and stroll him back and forth by the stone pool, the fountain's music lulling him to sleep, the birds tossing water from their wings.

How soon had they realized that something was not right with Manford? It was slow, a slow dawning. He didn't speak, of course; even his crying was soundless, though there was no mistaking misery or pain from the look on his face. He'd wind his hands above his head, turning and turning them as if they were strange birds hovering above, twisting in a channel of air. But sweet, he was, Vida remembers—his heavy head falling to your shoulder, his eyes looking off into the distance, never a moment of nastiness, not in his whole life.

Manford was diagnosed as retarded, a mute, and permanently handicapped with some generalized motor impairments as well. One morning at church, shortly after news of this diagnosis had had sufficient time to spread round the village, Vida found herself saying hotly, in response to the vicar's wife's innocent inquiry about their health, that Manford was
perfectly lovely,
thank you. In fact, she went on hysterically, he was a kind of saint-child, really. He'd never been disobedient or unpleasant even for a moment. There wasn't another child in the whole village as sweet as Manford, in the whole of
England
probably.. . . She'd gone on and on and then burst into tears and had to be led away to the washroom in the vicarage to comb her hair and collect herself. The women exchanged looks of pity among themselves as the vicar's wife walked Vida down the garden path, her hand on her back.