Lamb in Love, page 11
She herself couldn’t have dreamed up the things he seems to know about the world. But between knowing and imagining, she thinks maybe knowing things is better, in the end.
You can count on it.
“WELL, HE WOULDN’T do it,” she says in exasperation a few minutes later, ushering Manford in the door at Niven’s with an impatient shooing motion. Manford heads quickly for the pantry, where his stool awaits, sits down immediately, and begins filling the doughnuts with the pastry cone. Vida and Mrs. Blatchford crane round and stare at him.
“What a busy bee,” Mrs. Blatchford says. “Well, I am sorry. Still won’t leave go your hand, will he?”
“He turned right around and ran home! I had to fetch him back! I don’t know what to do.” Vida hears the uncharacteristic despair in her own voice and is a little ashamed of herself. But since Manford has started at Niven’s, she has enjoyed, more than she ever expected, their interest in him, their growing understanding of his ways. They’ve all taken to him, no question, Mrs. Blatchford fixing the buttons on his cardigan for him, Mr. Niven clapping him on the back. And who wouldn’t love him, after all, so gentle and so quiet? And yet full of surprises, in his own way. Vida thinks what intelligence Manford has is sly and wondrous—creatures springing to life on his bedroom walls at night. Now, feeling herself among friends, among Manford’s friends, she allows herself an instant of confession.
“It is so worrying!” she exclaims. “Mrs. Blatchford—think of it! What if something should, should”—she lowers her voice, as if to prevent him from hearing—“should happen to me? Then where would he be? Oh, I felt sure he could learn this.”
Mrs. Blatchford gives her a correcting glance. “Now, Vida,” she says, as if speaking to a small child. “Nothing whatsoever is going to happen to you. Let’s not have any such nonsense.” She hands Vida a doughnut, which Vida takes but only holds, as if she’s forgotten that they are things to be eaten.
“Not that I think it would be a bad thing,” Mrs. Blatchford goes on, “his being able to do it on his own. He’s come so far really, hasn’t he? But I can understand your wanting him to be as independent as possible. After all, what if”—she appears to search for a reason—“what if you should want to, oh, go on holiday, for instance? Had you ever thought of that, Vida? Having a holiday?” She stops wiping the glass counter and looks straight at Vida. “Have you ever had a holiday?”
Vida stares at her. “A holiday,” she repeats. “No, I—not as you would call it, I suppose. No. I’ve—” But she can’t finish. For suddenly it strikes her as so odd, that she hasn’t ever had a holiday, that the idea has never even occurred to her. Or maybe it had once, a long time ago. But, of course, what she does—it no longer feels like work to her. It feels like her life. It is her life. And then she thinks of her uncle Laurence, what he’d written about going to Corfu in one of his earliest letters: “Where else but on an island,” he’d asked, with undisguised enthusiasm, “can one reinvent oneself so entirely? The only thing to fear is that one day one’s old identity will wash up on shore like a shipwreck.”
“Well, I do see what he means, but would that be such a dreadful thing?” Vida’s mother had asked at the time, looking up at Vida from Laurence’s aerogramme. Her eyes had held a wounded look. “His old self?”
“Well,” Mrs. Blatchford says smartly now, “I think a holiday is most certainly in order. Perhaps his father will look after him for you when you go,” she adds irrationally, as if it were a fait accompli.
“But where would I go?” Vida asks, baffled. “And besides, Mr. Perry’s rarely there! He’s hardly ever at home.”
Though he had been home more of late, she thinks now. He’d hired the gardener, for instance. Mr. Perry had told her the fellow would be taking his meals at the house, but he’d never yet come inside, at least not when she’d been around. She hoped Mr. Perry didn’t want an accounting from her of how the man spent his time. Oh well. It wasn’t any of her business what the gardener, whoever he was, did with himself. Perhaps he was eating in the village. Or perhaps he had a home somewhere nearby. She’d set a place for him at the table one afternoon when she’d glimpsed him puttering around the greenhouses, but he’d never come up to the house. She and Manford had eaten their supper with the third place empty, as if for a ghost. It hadn’t been a special supper anyway, just beans on toast.
She hadn’t really been surprised much by the gardener’s mercurial comings and goings, though. They confirmed a rather vague idea she had of the rest of the world’s being always engaged in urgent business; she frequently worried that she was interrupting people. She remembered calling Dr. Faber late one night, when Manford was still a young child. It had seemed to Vida at the time, passing her hand over his forehead, that he was running an unnaturally high fever. Mr. Perry had been abroad, as usual. She’d been terrified, alone in the enormous house with the silent, feverish boy. She’d rung her mother at home and woken her. Her mother, sleepy but understanding, had said she’d try to reach Dr. Faber for her. But hours had gone by, and still there was no sign of him.
At last, about two o’clock in the morning, Dr. Faber had rung the bell. Vida, who’d been nearly hysterical with anxiety at that point, had hurried him upstairs to Manford’s bedroom.
“Well, we might open the windows for starters,” he’d said, preceding her into the room and blowing out a noise of annoyance. “It’s hot as blazes in here, Vida!”
Advancing to the window, he had pushed the drapes aside and struggled with the latch on the casement, grunting with effort. “Damn,” he’d muttered under his breath. And then it had given way at last, an envelope of cool, wet air sliding into the room, the moon floating full and white.
Dr. Faber had peered into Manford’s eyes with a little light, listened carefully to his chest.
“He’ll be all right,” he’d said at last, straightening up. “Nothing but a cold. You can bring him by in the morning if you like, though. I’ll have another look at him then.” He glanced down at the boy, whose eyes followed the physician’s face. “I think you’ll live to see morning, Manford. All right?”
He had turned to Vida, who was standing at the foot of the bed and winding her hands anxiously. She saw a quick sympathy rise into his eyes. “I’m sorry it took me so long to come, Vida,” he said. “I had another case to attend to.”
She waved her hands. “I quite understand,” she started to say, but suddenly found herself very near tears.
Dr. Faber took off his glasses, folded them, and put them into his pocket. He picked up his bag and came around the bed to her, where he stopped and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve done a fine job here, Vida,” he said then kindly. He looked down at Manford again and then back to Vida. “Not many have the patience for it, you know,” he said after a minute. “They make a lot of mistakes along the way. Some can be quite cruel. But you seem—” He paused. “Well, I admire you, is all. . .. You’ve stuck with it. Manford’s a lucky chap.” He unwound the stethoscope from around his neck, held it in his fist. “Of course, he could be a great deal more difficult,” he added. “It’s a blessing he’s not. Some of them aren’t, you know, and then we can all be grateful, but many of them can be quite trying in their own ways.” He glanced back at Manford curled in the bed, his bright eyes watching them. “Still doesn’t speak?”
Vida shook her head. It was true that Manford had never uttered a word, not even a sound that might approximate a word, an infant’s blundering attempt at precise speech. Still, she felt she understood him. Sometimes, it seemed to her, Manford could speak if he wished. His expression was often so—complicit. As if he agreed with everything you said, a sort of silent witness to your own conscience.
Dr. Faber shook his head. “Strange,” he said. “I might have thought—” But he said nothing else.
Vida had closed the door after him, had stood in the front hall with its cavernous, empty fireplace, the two small, velvet-covered chairs with their twisted legs standing by either side of it, their faded and unraveling tassels stirring slightly in the draft from the closing door. She thought of the strange, mute child above her, his twisted bedsheets and dull expression. She had wanted, at that moment, to run from the house and had hated herself for that feeling. At last, her hand on the banister, she had climbed the stairs slowly and had taken her place at Manford’s bedside, where she passed the night sleeping fitfully in a chair, her hand upon the coverlet, Manford curled beside her palm.
Now, with Mrs. Blatchford gazing at her sympathetically, it seems to her that the idea of a holiday is the silliest thing she’s ever heard of.
She couldn’t ever leave Manford. He would never love anyone as much as he loved her.
And yet—she looks down at her hands now, perturbed; for how strange it is, she thinks. Because what she is feeling, really, is not how much he loves her, but how much she loves him, how much she depends on it. And for a moment she sees herself in the lane, waiting and waiting, a dark, wet wind whistling away over the fields, Manford never coming, never again coming home from Niven’s, the moon rising slowly overhead, herself turning to stone.
“I expect his father wouldn’t know how to look after him properly anyway,” Mrs. Blatchford says then.
Vida looks up, startled. “Oh,” she says, and the sun comes up again; the world floods with the plain, unremarkable light of morning. “Yes,” she says, blinking. “Well, he hasn’t ever had to.”
“No, I suppose not. Men,” Mrs. Blatchford says then, and gives a low snort.
Vida leans over the counter for a last look at Manford. He seems to be avoiding her eye. She sighs, touches the collar of her coat. “Well, I’m off,” she says then. “Going round to pick up the post.”
There seems nothing else to say.
Outside, she stops to adjust her hat and have a final look at Manford through the window.
“What does she do with herself all day?” she hears Mrs. Blatchford say to Mr. Niven, who’s just come through the door with a tray of bread in his arms.
He shrugs. “Can’t imagine.”
“Isn’t it a shame about her holiday, though,” she hears Mrs. Blatchford say to him.
“What holiday?” he says. “Is our Vida going somewhere?”
And then Vida can’t hear them anymore, because they’ve turned away.
After a minute she walks down the side of the building and peeps carefully in the window at Manford, his shaggy head bent over his work. His cap has fallen to the floor, where it is pinned under one of the legs of the stool, acquiring a snowfall of dusty sugar. One foot is planted on the brim, crumpling it. But he looks exactly, she thinks, like a statue. A Greek statue.
IN THE POST office she has to ring the bell for Mr. Lamb, who comes out immediately, as if he’s been waiting for someone behind his curtain. He is wearing a suit—a rather old suit, with narrow lapels and a greenish cast to it. A white rosebud is pinned to his lapel, and his hair has been freshly dampened and combed.
Perhaps he’s going to a funeral, she thinks.
“Good morning, Mr. Lamb—” She stops, for she finds herself suddenly shy in the presence of his unusually formal appearance.
He utters not a word but turns around to get her mail for her.
Perhaps it’s the grief, she thinks, disconcerted, looking away. Perhaps it’s a sort of observation of respect, not to speak. She notices, however, despite herself, a thin, glistening line of sweat running from his temple down into his shirt collar and thinks that, after all, he must be rather hot in his suit. She sniffs, detecting an odd odor. It’s Mr. Lamb himself, she realizes, smelling of something old-fashioned and medicinal, though she can’t exactly place it.
He turns back around and hands her her mail. His expression is strange, she thinks, glancing up briefly into his face and then away again. He appears to be—holding something in his mouth! Oh! She reconsiders, trying to think, trying not to look at him. He can’t be. Why would he have something in his mouth? No, no. Perhaps he is trying not to cry? She steals another glance at him and then looks away in horror. For it is not grief he is suppressing, she sees now. It is mirth! He isn’t trying not to cry. He is trying not to laugh!
Well! Not very suitable for a funeral, she thinks, her forehead creasing.
She turns away from him and begins to sift through the envelopes. But as she does so, she thinks to ask Mr. Lamb whether he’s got any more stamps for Manford.
She looks up, her mouth open. But he has disappeared. The black curtain to his rear rooms billows slightly. Not a sound comes from the corridor.
“Mr. Lamb?” she says hesitantly after a moment to the empty room. But her voice seems to echo queerly in the silence.
She frowns, shrugs a little, returns to her letters.
A weak light falls across the floor, threading through the window’s many tiny panes between mullions thick and ridged with years of paint. She does not see the sunlight advancing toward her but feels the unexpected heat across the back of her neck, like a warm, possessive hand resting there.
Among the usual sorts of things in the daily post is an overseas envelope addressed to her in an unfamiliar handwriting, postmarked from Corfu. She frowns again. It doesn’t look like Laurence’s script.
She fits the other letters and catalogs under her elbow, lifts the flaps of the air letter with her fingernail, tearing the paper slightly and biting her lip. She unfolds the sheet and begins to read.
And then she feels her face grow bright red. She almost drops her bundle of mail. She folds over the sheet again quickly, looks up hastily as though whoever has sent her this must be standing right there, watching her. And postmarked from Corfu? Who did she know in Corfu except Laurence? No one!
And no one, no one has ever said such things to her.
She couldn’t even have imagined them, not if she tried for days and days and days.
She peeks at the letter again.
Vida Stephen. The sun may rise and fall, but nothing shall ever eclipse your beauty. You are the moon and the stars and everything in the world to me. You are a beacon in the dark night, an eternal flame. I crawl along the rays of the sun and they lead a path to your feet. I am your servant, your knight. One day you will know me.
The black curtain twitches, but Mr. Lamb does not emerge.
Her face scarlet with embarrassment, Vida gathers up her things hurriedly and rushes out of the post office, the bell clanging loudly behind her. She walks quickly along the Romsey Road back toward home, the letter held tightly in her sweating hand, her heart beating so wildly that she feels deafened by the sound of her own racing pulse.
Turning onto the lane on shaking legs, she thinks that she must calm herself. She actually finds that she wants a nip of something for her nerves! And she never wants a drink.
At the bench in the lane she feels so weak she has to sit down. She takes out the letter again, opening it with shaking fingers. Moon and stars, eternal flame, beacon in the dark, beauty . . . My! she thinks. My, my!
Tears have begun to fall mysteriously down her cheeks.
But she is smiling.
Oh, such a mystery! Such excitement! Such strangeness!
But then—oh, why is she to be forever embarrassed by this! It almost makes her angry!—she finds herself remembering the night of the moon landing, the night of her escapade on the fountain.
She jumps up from the bench, crumpling the letter into her pocket, gathers up the other letters and her handbag, and hurries down the lane toward Southend House.
In the silent, shadowy library she pours herself a small amount of brandy from one of the crystal decanters in Mr. Perry’s bar, takes the glass to a chair, and sits down heavily in it. She puts her hand over her heart a moment.
It was the fountain itself, she thinks now. It was hearing it again after so many years. It was only the fountain that was to blame. But why should this letter—she leans down and picks it up from the floor near her feet, where she had dumped her belongings, and unfolds it more calmly now—why should this letter make her think of that night?
She takes another sip of brandy.
It was that she’d heard something, she thinks now. She’d remembered suddenly the new gardener in his apartment above the stables; she had fled in shame.
And this letter—it too exposes her somehow, in exactly the same way she’d felt exposed that night in the garden. One day you will know me—that was what made her think of it.
She leans her head back against the chair. She does not understand it at all. It is wonderful and awful and disturbing and exciting, all mixed together. She cannot exactly separate the feelings it produces in her, a sort of twin column of fear and desire at once.
Who would love her, Vida Stephen?
She takes another tiny sip of the brandy, holds it in her cheeks, grimaces as she swallows, and then wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. Setting the glass on the table beside her, she stands and moves to the window.
She is surprised to find the gardener there, dragging the large dead limb of a tree toward a bonfire he has built down near the greenhouses, a greasy smoke issuing from it in a thin curl. She watches him a moment as he wrestles with the wood, levering it into the pile. When it falls, an explosion of sparks flies up into the air.
Stepping outside through the French doors onto the terrace, she takes in the sharp scent of the smoke, the raked and emptied condition of the beds. It didn’t look very pretty, she considers, but you could see how it was the right thing to do, clearing it all out, how the spines and arms of the garden had begun to stand out again what with all the rubbish being pruned away. You couldn’t really tell what the garden had once been like, whether it had ever been grand, so overgrown had it become after years of neglect. But now, now you could see how fine it was, how fine it could be again. She admires the sweeping terraces, the graceful stone walls and balustrades now released from their burden of overgrowth.
