Lamb in Love, page 12
You could see that it only wanted some attention to be beautiful again.
THE FIRST THING she says to him is, “It looks much better.”
He turns round, holds his arm up before his face as a billow of smoke engulfs him in black.
Vida takes a step back, away from the smoke.
He coughs as the smoke swerves in a sudden breeze, sweeping toward him. He glances at her, his eyes red, then grinds a handkerchief to his face with his fist, rubbing. He coughs.
Vida waits a moment and then gestures behind her uncertainly.
“You’ve made tremendous progress,” she says, starting again. “I’d almost forgotten—” She indicates the garden beds.
He stuffs the cloth back into his pocket, regards her. “You must have been here awhile then, for this to seem an improvement.” He turns his head and spits to the side.
Vida jumps. “Oh, yes.” She laughs uncomfortably. She looks around. “Well, it used to be very grand.”
“It shouldn’t have been let go like this,” the man says. “It’ll take years to clear it out.”
“Oh, but I think you’ve made wonderful progress,” she repeats stubbornly. It seems important to her suddenly that the garden be nearly restored, that this gardener feel utterly committed to it, that the era of its flowering be near at hand again. She feels strangely defensive about it.
“You’re the cook?” he asks, squinting at her through the smoke.
Vida is taken aback a moment. She does cook, she considers, of course she does. They have to eat, don’t they? But that isn’t how she thinks of herself. She thinks to say she is the nanny, but it occurs to her, as if for the first time, that for a twenty-year-old man, a nanny seems a strange necessity. She hardly ever has to explain things to people. Everyone knows her, knows Manford.
“I look after the son,” she says, carefully choosing her words from the small store of appropriate phrases. “Mr. Perry’s son. Manford.”
The man coughs again and then turns to throw more brush on the bonfire. Sparks fly and collide.
“That’s the idiot?” he asks over his shoulder.
Vida flares. No one ever says such a thing! She is sorry now that she came down here to speak to him. How stupid he is! “Why do you call him that?” she says angrily.
He shrugs. “Someone told me. He’s the big one? I’ve seen him wandering about.”
Vida waits, though she’s not sure for what. She thinks of Manford sitting on the edge of the fountain, birds pecking at his feet. “He’s not an idiot,” she says finally, though less forcefully, she discovers, than she intends. “He’s handicapped.”
The man kicks the fire with his boot, jabs a pitchfork into the fragile tent of branches. “Like a golfer?” he says, laughing. “Is that it?”
But Vida withdraws as if she has been slapped. For the second time that day, a fierce blush rises to her cheeks. She stares at the man’s grimy shirt a moment, then turns to walk away. She will just go home, she thinks. He’s awful!
“Hey!” he calls after her, laughing. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Vida stops, spins toward him, and takes a deep breath. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says furiously. “You haven’t any idea what it’s like to be Manford.”
“No, I suppose not,” he says affably, and flashes his teeth at her in a smile. Vida looks back at him stonily. He kicks the fire again. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Vida waits, staring at the fire. She takes a step toward it, holds out her hands as if to warm them, though it is hot enough already, a surprising late-summer heat, muggy and still. “He’s very sweet,” she says at last. “He wouldn’t harm a single living creature.”
“He’s a big oaf, though, isn’t he?” the man says then. “I should put him to work around here, give me a hand. Twenty men couldn’t put this place to rights in a year. Don’t tell his lordship I said so, though,” he adds, jerking his thumb toward the house. “I need the job.” He steps back and surveys the garden. “It’s a crime, really, isn’t it?” he goes on, shaking his head. “It’ll cost him a small fortune. He’s got pots though, I suppose?”
Vida feels faintly affronted by this question. “I wouldn’t know,” she says delicately. “I suppose there’s enough.”
“Well, there’d better be, or I’ll be off for greener pastures, as they say.” The man laughs again. He looks at Vida. “I’m Jeremy Martin,” he says, sticking out his hand.
“Vida Stephen,” she says, and for a moment their hands touch, but not before Vida sees how filthy his are.
SHE STAYS WITH him that morning, though she’s not sure why. After all, he’s so unpleasant at first. But then he asks her to give him a hand with a broken window in the greenhouse, holding the frame while he putties in the new pane.
“You need three hands for this job,” he says, and she thinks it’s charming the way he says it, so friendly.
And then he asks if she would have a look at the roses with him, advise him about the shapes and all. She tells him she doesn’t know the first thing about it, but they go up there, and then suddenly Vida finds herself feeling exhilarated by the fresh air, feels that she wants to work, to “really put my back into it,” she says, looking up eagerly at Jeremy. “Don’t you have another spade?” she asks, looking around.
He laughs but fetches one for her, and they dig awhile together. Vida thinks she has never seen such big worms as those they discover in the rose beds. Jeremy holds one out on his palm for her to see, a giant one with a bulbous gray ring around its middle. And then suddenly, brutally, he splits it in half with his knife.
“That’s it,” he says, dropping the pieces on the ground. “Like Christ dividing the endless loaf. You can chop them into a hundred pieces, and each one will grow a whole new worm. Did you know that?”
She doesn’t think this is exactly right, but she doesn’t say anything. The worm’s divided selves disappear into the grass. A queer chill runs over her arms.
He’s nice, though, she thinks.
He has pretty eyes.
AT NOON, VIDA makes tomato sandwiches, brings them out to the garden on a tray with a jelly roll and some iced tea and some figs.
“That hit the spot,” Jeremy says afterward. He shifts from his elbows and lies back down on the grass, hooking his arms beneath his head.
“What do you do with yourself all day, now he’s got a job?” he asks idly after a minute. “Tidy the house?” He laughs.
Vida laughs, too, the thought of the huge, empty house with its innumerable unused rooms cloaked in dust and sheets. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I clean the whole house, top to bottom.” Yet a twinge of some feeling, disloyalty perhaps, sweeps through her as soon as she’s said this.
“It’s quite sad, really,” she says soberly after a moment, wanting vaguely to make amends. “It’s a lovely house, and Mr. Perry’s rarely home. No one to enjoy it.”
“You enjoy it, though.” Jeremy turns to look at her and winks.
Vida feels uncomfortable. She can’t catch the meaning behind this conspiratorial wink. She thinks of herself and Manford, sitting in the small sitting room off the kitchen in the evenings, working on his stamp books. Sometimes she has him help her polish the silver. He seems to like that.
She decides to change the subject.
“And what about you?” she asks, taking the warm, round weight of a fig in her hand. “The stable apartment’s all right for you?”
“I’m not there much,” Jeremy says lazily. “It’s all right.”
“You live nearby then?”
“Well, I’ve a friend,” he says. He closes his eyes.
Vida looks him over shyly. He’s not a big man. Not half as big as Manford, for instance. But he’s good looking, she thinks, the strong color of youth in his cheeks and lovely long eyelashes. Dark hair, curly. She realizes suddenly, blushing, that friend means a woman. “I see,” she says, turning away.
Jeremy opens his eyes, hoists himself to a sitting position. “Back to work,” he says. He leans over, claps Vida once on the back. “Thanks for the grub,” he says, and his hand touches her shoulder blade and rests there a moment. Vida jumps.
“I won’t bite you!” he says, laughing, getting to his feet. “Thanks for the company, too. See you.”
And he walks off toward the greenhouses, whistling, pausing once to fetch the barrow and trundle it along in front of him.
“Good-bye!” she calls. But he doesn’t seem to hear her.
INSIDE, VIDA WASHES up their lunch things, and then she rinses out some underwear for herself in the laundry sink, and then she does a cardigan of Manford’s, laying it out on a towel in a spreading parallelogram of sun that falls in the French doors of the library. Kneeling on the carpet, the sun on her back, she feels a sleepy languor come over her.
And then she sees the letter, the mysterious love letter, fallen on the floor by the armchair, along with her overturned sherry glass.
She sits up. How could she have forgotten!
Someone is in love with her!
Fetching the letter from under the chair, she sits down and smooths the paper on her thigh. Bringing the envelope closer to her face, she examines the stamp. She sees that it is in fact a tiny photograph of some ruins, reduced to minute proportions and hand-painted in palest turquoise, rose, and yellow, as though the sun were setting behind the empty arches. A man and a woman, their arms entwined, stand beneath the capstone of the arch. Vida holds up the letter and reads the words again. Such short, declarative sentences, such fierce ardor. Like a man who speaks through clenched teeth.
But who would be in love with her?
She leans back against the seat of the armchair. Sunlight falls like an anvil, hard and hot, on the part in her hair. The letter is unfathomable, really. It makes such little sense that she can hardly connect it with herself. She cannot imagine anyone who might have sent it.
She runs over in her head the men she knows. The parade of unlikely suspects leaves her aghast. Why, who are the men she sees regularly? She decides to go through them one by one. Mr. Niven? He’s only interested in golfing. She knows that from his wife. Oh, Lord, she thinks with a shock—not nasty old Fergus? Well, he might be an old lecher, that wouldn’t surprise her. But he’d never send a letter like this. Why, she didn’t even think he could write properly! There was the vicar—well, he was completely above suspicion. He was the vicar, for heaven’s sake. Dr. Faber? No, no, no. And she trusted him.
She looks down at the letter again. What about Tony, at the Dolphin? He pours out the pints, she thinks now, and is friendly to everyone. Has a soft spot for poetry, too. Bartenders seem to, she thinks. But she hardly ever goes in there anymore. It’s been years, fifteen years anyway, since she went regularly with her old friend Charlotte. And the young men of her youth—only a few of them are still about, and those she can name are all married, with a brood of children.
And then she goes quite cold. Another idea has struck her.
Perhaps it’s a joke. A very cruel joke.
A terrific headache suddenly announces itself to her, as though the sun has succeeded finally in breaking open her skull with its riveting insistence.
Who would do such a thing to her? It’s nearly as unthinkable as the notion of some sincere lover, some waiting suitor. Oh, the cruelty of it, if it were a joke! But it can’t be. It can’t be.
One day you will know me. But does that mean she doesn’t know him now? Well, then, how could he know her?
She reads the sentences again. She admires them. Someone sophisticated must have written them. It wasn’t the work of a boy. These are a man’s words, she thinks. And then, quite by surprise, a picture of Mr. Perry’s face flashes into her head. There it is—the sadness, and the elegance, the educated hand.
She stills inside.
Yes, she had thought of it once, thought of being in love with him. Actually, it was Charlotte who’d suggested it. “Perhaps he’ll marry you,” she’d said in an offhand way one evening—oh, it was years ago, now—when she and Vida had been sitting on the wall outside the Dolphin.
Vida had been sharing with Charlotte her opinion of Mr. Perry’s summer houseguests that year, an American couple and a woman Vida took to be a divorcée—a friend of the family, Mr. Perry had said. But Vida hadn’t liked her, hadn’t approved of the way she draped herself on the arm of Mr. Perry’s chair when they sat in the garden. She’d been sickening with Manford, too, she’d told Charlotte, talking baby talk to him, patting him on the head. And she’d overheard her talking with the other woman, the wife, when the ladies had come in before dinner to wash up.
Having settled Manford in front of the telly with his supper—he was only six or seven then—Vida had come back through the hall with a tray for the glasses from the garden. The two women had been lounging in the library, drinks in hand, their shoes kicked off. When Vida heard their voices, she had paused in the hall.
“Well, he’s depressed, Sally, for God’s sake,” she heard one of the women say.
“Oh, I know, I know.” Sally sighed. “But it’s so boring. You’d think he’d be over it by now.”
There had been no reply from her companion.
“And it’s not good for him to be holed up here away from all his friends,” Sally went on petulantly. “And that child—you have to feel sorry for him. But wouldn’t he be better off someplace where he could be taken care of? And that nurse—she treats him as if there weren’t a thing wrong with him! But of course you can see it—all over his face.” Vida heard a pause. “God, poor Eleanor. She would have just died.”
Vida heard ice clatter in a glass. Her own fingers and face had turned to stone.
“You’re cruel.” The other voice was reproachful.
“Oh, I don’t mean it like that. You know I don’t. What I say is, just put it all behind him! Get the poor boy in some place where they’re all just like him, where he won’t feel—you know. And then let Thomas get on with his life.”
“You mean, get on with your life.” The other woman laughed.
Sally laughed, too. “I wouldn’t mind.”
Vida heard the soft sound of a pillow thrown across the room, landing with a thick thud. She jumped. The women laughed again.
“I could use some fun. I admit it. Divorce makes one so—disgustingly celibate.”
Vida had turned then sharply and gone back to the kitchen. Manford had looked up at her as she’d come into the room and dropped to her knees beside him. She put her arms around him. Manford craned round her shoulder to see The Magic Roundabout. Egg on his face smeared onto her collar.
“I love you,” she said fiercely into his neck. “Such a good boy, my Manford.”
He had patted her shoulder kindly.
But conveying her outrage to Charlotte later that night had left Vida feeling not more comforted, but less. Mr. Perry didn’t need to forget about Manford—she’d understood that from the beginning. He needed to take him in. To recognize him. And her, too, she’d thought once. He needed to recognize her. We could be a family, she’d thought fiercely.
But it had lasted only a moment, this thought. Because almost at the same moment, she had realized the absurdity of the notion.
It was true she thought Mr. Perry handsome. She still did. But more than just their stations separated them. It wasn’t just that she was the nanny to the retarded son, he her distant employer. Though they’d known each other nearly twenty-one years now and had developed the habit of familiarity between them, something stood between them, had always stood between them. Though they both loved Manford—for she believed that Mr. Perry did love his son—only she took any pleasure from that. Mr. Perry was, despite his wealth, his talent, his worldliness, small in her eyes.
She could never forgive him, in a way, for being such a coward.
She looks down at the letter in her hand now. Would Mr. Perry have written this to her? After all these years? Was he trying to find his way back? Mailing love letters to her from distant lands, still unable to stand in the same place as she and look at what lay between them, the daft boy with his terrible innocence? Could it be? After all this time? She closes her eyes. She knows she wanted it once, her own expectations so much larger, richer, finer, than what might have been possible. They’d been a child’s expectations. She had thought, a moment here and moment there, that he might have touched her. In gratitude or for comfort, a touch that might have led to something. But on the whole, she thought, her love for Mr. Perry—if you could even call it that—was so much less than for his son, this boy she had raised as her own.
If he loved her now, if Mr. Perry had fallen in love with her—oh, would she even want it?
She thinks of him coming home, loosening his tie, throwing it across the room toward the back of a chair. She had stood there so many times for this ritual, holding Manford’s hand, the two of them watching him, the event of his homecoming. The tie would sail lightly, endlessly. “Any gin in the house, Vida?”
But he would not look directly at them.
She had watched Mr. Perry’s tie flying through the air and had thought, as she stood there with Manford’s hot hand held in her own, of her own shedded clothing lifting, billowing in air, leaving the body behind, warm and expectant.
“I’ll be out for dinner tonight, Vida,” he would say.
“But you’ve only just come home!”
She had been surprised, expecting once, twice, a hundred times, that he would stop before Manford, bring some gift from his pocket, touch him gently, lovingly. But Mr. Perry had turned away from her reproach, embarrassed. She had been so angry.
