Lamb in Love, page 23
Fourteen
“WELL, YOU’VE MADE a quick recovery, I must say,” Vida says, helping Manford into his shirt Tuesday morning and turning him round to face her so that she can do his buttons. “Come on,” she says, beckoning with her free hand as she kneels on the floor before him. “Give us your leg.”
Manford obligingly inclines his foot, thick in its heavy sock. She loosens the laces of the shoe and opens it, its tongue bent backward. “You could learn to do this yourself, you know,” she grumbles, struggling with his foot; but her tone is gentle.
She is unprepared when Manford leans over suddenly and ruffles her hair with his hands.
“Oh! No, Manford! You’ll muss my hair!” She sits back on her heels and puts her hands to her hair defensively. Manford gives her a wild-eyed look, smiles hugely, and lunges at her again with both hands, fingers wiggling. She slaps at the air between them. “Manford! Leave go my hair, will you! What’s come over you? You’re a regular nuisance!”
He sits back, hands limp in his lap, a bored expression on his face.
“Now, that’s it then,” she says as she gives the laces a final tug. “You’re ready to go.” She sits back on her heels again to appraise him. “You’re certainly lively this morning,” she tells him. “I never saw someone turn around a fever so fast.” She puts her hand up and feels his forehead, brushing his hair aside. “Cool as the driven snow.” She smiles at him. “Dr. Faber says I’m a worrywart. Do you think I’m a worrywart?”
Manford winds his hands in his lap, glances at her face, and then stares off out the window. She follows his gaze. “It does look like rain, doesn’t it? Well, we’ll take an umbrella to Niven’s. You’re right enough to work, I think. Come on. The fresh air will do us both good.”
Downstairs in the kitchen, she fixes Manford toast, sits beside him while he eats. She had woken late last night in her chair, the fire low and her teacup on the table beside her. Mr. Lamb had been nowhere in sight; she supposed he had gone home. She hoped he didn’t think her rude to have fallen asleep. She had drifted up to bed at last feeling wonderfully restored, strangely content, and sleepy. When she’d woken this morning, she’d known that whatever it was that had made her feel so drippy the day before had passed. And though she’d been glad enough yesterday to wake feeling poorly, so as to postpone a meeting with Mr. Niven and whatever discomfort a meeting might cause them both, this morning the whole idea of Mr. Niven as her mysterious suitor seems positively absurd. What was it Mr. Lamb had said? That Mr. Niven hadn’t enough—imagination? He was right; it couldn’t be Mr. Niven. She feels a little thrill run through her. She stands up and takes Manford’s plate to the sink. Perhaps it is all still to be discovered.
“Will you have an egg?” she asks Manford over her shoulder, turning to the fridge and rummaging around inside. “Oh, dear. We’re out,” she apologizes, standing upright again and surveying Manford. “Perhaps you’d like to have a doughnut at Niven’s instead? I’ll go round later today for eggs. I know you love an egg.” Manford looks up from the tablecloth, where he has been pushing a little pile of crumbs to and fro. He smiles, puts his hands up, and wiggles his fingers at her.
She moves over beside him then, puts her hands on his head, and leans down to put her lips to the shock of heavy hair that stands up from his cowlick. “I’m sorry about the eggs,” she says. When he reaches up to clasp her hand, she holds his fingers tight in her own, rests her cheek against his hair. “It’s been ages since you’ve seen your father, hasn’t it?” she says quietly, her eyes closed. “Perhaps we’ll have a card from him today. See how he’s getting on in Amsterdam, or Italy—wherever he is. Isn’t he lucky, getting to travel like that, anywhere he likes? I wish he’d take us with him sometime. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Travel with your father? Travel in the high style?”
Manford reaches up with his other hand, covers hers with his soft palm.
“Good boy,” she says, and gives his hand a squeeze.
BUT AS SHE is washing up Manford’s breakfast things, it occurs to her that Mr. Perry has never taken them anywhere, with the exception of that one trip to London to have Manford examined. They’d make an odd threesome, she supposes, though Manford is perfectly well behaved in public. Once, Mr. Perry had suggested he might take them to Paris; he’d seemed astonished that she’d never been. “It’s so close!” he’d said in surprise when she confessed that she’d never been out of the country at all. “Well, we’ll have to fix that,” he’d said, and had appeared to be thinking of some arrangement he might make. “How would you like to see Notre-Dame?” he’d said.
She had wanted to go very much. She remembered that. But nothing had ever come of it. Mr. Perry had left again, alone, shortly thereafter, the name of a hotel or private party left with Vida should she need to reach him. And what sort of good-bye did he ever make to Manford? He would stop, sitting before him silently a moment, watching him. Vida has always thought it made Manford uncomfortable to bear his father’s scrutiny in that way. But at last Mr. Perry would lean forward, put a hand briefly to Manford’s head. And then he would leave.
She did once want to see Notre-Dame; and with Mr. Perry, too. There was a day when she would have thought it romantic, would have cherished a silly girl’s hopes. But now the whole notion seems out of reach, impossible; and she wouldn’t want to go with Mr. Perry anyway. Really, she realizes, she’d want to go somewhere by herself. She’s never been anywhere by herself.
A few weeks ago, she was reading over her uncle Laurence’s letters and found an early one in which he asked if they could locate for him Heinzel, Fitter, and Parslow’s Birds of Britain and Europe with North Africa and the Middle East.
“It’s the guide for bird-watching in these parts,” he wrote. “And I’ve a mind to improve my education. In the holm oaks out behind the tavern where I’m staying lives a Scops owl who’s become my charming nocturnal companion. I hear him at night when I’m closing up, shoving off the last of the inebriates. He has the most plaintive call. Just the other night, as I was mopping up the terrace, I found one of our oldest patrons—I think the fellow’s a hundred years old at least, liver of steel—lying stretched out on the terrace wall. As I sloshed the bucket over the stones, he waved his arm at me in annoyance. And then I heard that owl call.
“‘Yianni! Yianni!’ the old man called back—it was perfectly heartbreaking! And then, raising himself on one elbow, he fixed me with his eye. ‘She calls for her lover, but he is gone for good,’ the old fellow told me. And then the owl sounded again, and the man pressed his hands to his eyes and wept, ‘Yianni! Yianni!’
“Now I sit awhile at night after closing, listen for the owl, and offer my poor reply.
“Won’t you see if you can’t find the book?”
Vida had been struck by this letter, as she had by so many of them. She remembered having been dispatched by her mother to ask the vicar about the book. After searching his shelves for some time, he had indeed found the guide Laurence wished and had turned it over, though not before giving Vida a long tour through its well-thumbed pages.
Now, she thinks, wiping a damp cloth over the kitchen table, she should like to hear that owl for herself, that owl calling “Yianni! Yianni!” into the starry night. Once, when she was a girl, she had thought she should see all sorts of things. It surprises her, in a way, to realize that she has been nowhere at all, has seen nothing of the world.
She turns from the table and stops, for Manford has moved to the little sitting room and stands in front of the tiny mirror there, his face pressed up close to the glass. He stands so near the surface of the mirror, in fact, that he must not be able to see anything at all, she thinks in surprise—nothing but his nose pressed flat like a pugilist’s, the distorted terrain of his own face, and a glimpse of the stranger who lives there behind his own eyes.
“AND WHAT WILL I do today whilst you’re off at Niven’s?” She tries to speak cheerfully, for she sees that Manford is now suddenly melancholic; left over from the fever, no doubt.
“Well, there’s the eggs,” she blathers on. “I’ll go round and fetch us some eggs.” She helps Manford into his mackintosh, shoos him out the back door ahead of her. “And, let’s see. There’s the sheets. We might as well have fresh sheets after both of us being ill. Do you know, Manford, I think that tea Mr. Lamb made me was quite the miracle cure. I feel entirely well this morning. We must ask him about it for the future.”
They descend the steps, Manford moving ahead of her, riding the air, his feet disturbing the morning mist. Vida feels the damp on her face and throat. The sky seems lowered, a tent pitched overhead. At the gates to Southend House, Manford stops, turns, holds out his hand. Vida takes it this morning without argument, though she’s been trying to break him of this habit, and tucks it under her arm. They pass out onto the lane, its long concourse braided with mist like a delicate, fraying twine. She pats his hand. “There,” she says. “You see? The mist is lifting.”
Manford smiles as they step into the mist, its gray wreaths circling the tree trunks; she sees some feeling she cannot fathom pass over his face. He blinks, opens his mouth, raises his free hand, and wobbles his fingers in the air. He purses his lips and blows the vaporous steam of his breath into the lightening morning.
When he stops up short, she is startled. “What is it?” she says, turning to look at his face. And then she follows his eyes.
The bench in the lane where they so often rest, where Vida waits for him in the afternoons, where a few days ago she had found the flowers, is now strung from armrest to armrest with an elaborate spider’s web, each strand beaded with pearls of dew, like a hammock of silver chains strung across the seat. If she reaches out and plucks a strand, Vida thinks irrationally, it will chime a perfect note.
“Oh,” she breathes. “Isn’t that something, Manford? Like what a fairy would do. It’s a fairy bench, Manford. Look!”
But he is looking; he is staring at the bench as though watching the web for some sudden movement—as though it might fly up and flit off into the mist, or fly toward them, the lightest of chain mail, an invisible encumbrance. When he shudders, drawing nearer to Vida, she looks at him, puzzled, and then laughs, nudging him in the ribs.
“Oh, it’s just a spider’s web! You’re not afraid of it, are you?”
Manford takes a few steps to the side, giving the bench a wide berth, eyeing it like a shy horse.
“Look,” she says again, tugging on his arm, anxious for him to see what a lovely thing it is. “You could do this on one of your cakes,” she says. “Look how pretty it is, Manford.” She drags him with her, approaching the bench with its stirring, glinting web. She puts out her hand as if to touch it, but he grabs at her arm, jerks her backward, hard.
“Manford!” She turns, surprised. “Why, you are afraid of it! Oh, that’s silly! It’s nothing but an old spider’s web!”
But Manford lets go her hand then and pulls away from her, throwing up his arms and fluttering his hands around his head as though there were bats flying at his eyes. He ducks and swerves, running circles in the lane, his own hands pursuing him. He moves his mouth in odd ways, but no sound comes from his lips. He brushes his hands wildly about his hair, grimacing, his eyes squinted shut.
“Manford!” Vida cries. “Stop!” She raises her own hands to stay him, but he twitches away from her, his hands frantically slapping his hair, his head ducking.
Looking around in a panic, Vida catches sight of a piece of broken branch. She darts to it, catches it up, and runs toward the bench, waving it wildly. “Look!” she cries. “Look, Manford! I’ll be rid of it!”
And she sweeps the stick through the web, its sticky warp collapsing, tangling. She bears the stick down upon the seat, crashing it against the rungs, the filaments of web flying upward, dissolving into nothing. She swings as hard as she can, Manford reeling behind her, his face tormented. The stick shatters in her hand, wormy wood, cottony and soft. She feels she is beating nothing, the air itself. At last she drops the stick to the ground, turns to Manford.
He is standing at the far side of the lane in the rut, crouched low, shaking.
“There,” she says, and realizes she is trembling. “I’ve got rid of it. It’s all right now. Come on to me, Manford. It’s all gone. I’ve killed it, do you see?”
“WELL! UP AND about again, I see,” Mrs. Blatchford says as Vida and Manford come in the door of Niven’s. “Right as—” She stops abruptly as she takes in Vida’s white face, Manford’s disarray.
Vida puts her finger to her lips.
“Here you are, then,” Vida says in a tone of forced cheerfulness, helping Manford off with his coat. “Now, right to work with you,” she orders. Manford trots obediently into the dairy, sits down hard on his stool, and immediately begins filling the paper cone with jam and squirting it into the tray of doughnuts waiting for him.
Mrs. Blatchford glances at Vida, a question on her face, and then goes to fetch Manford’s apron. Tying it round his waist, she speaks kindly to him. “One day away and you’ve forgotten already,” she says. “You’ll have jam all over without your apron.”
Mrs. Blatchford raises her eyebrows at Vida when she comes back into the room.
“He had a terrible fright this morning,” Vida whispers, leaning toward her, her voice low. “It was all over a spider’s web! He went berserk!”
“A spider’s web!” Mrs. Blatchford rears back. “Frightened by a spider?”
“No!” Vida whispers. “It wasn’t anything like that. We didn’t even see a spider! It was just the web, over the bench in the lane. It was very large—I’ve never seen one like it. But he was—he was terribly afraid of it. It was the strangest thing. I’ve never seen him like that before.”
“No spider at all?”
“No.” Vida glances at Manford. He still looks worried. In his haste he has crumpled the paper cone. Jam has spilled onto his hand and the table. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have made him come on,” she says. “Do you think he’ll be all right?”
Mrs. Blatchford looks at Manford doubtfully. “He went berserk, you say?”
Vida stops. She hears something in Mrs. Blatchford’s tone that suddenly raises all her alarms. As much as they might seem to love him, she knows, he is essentially beyond knowing for them; they could cast him out, would cast him out, at the first sign of—of anything they couldn’t understand. But she would not have him turned out now! She would not! No one, no grown man, ought to spend all his days with a nanny, shut up in a big, empty house. He needs friends. He needs to be in the world.
She has to be very careful. Words like berserk—well, when used in conjunction with Manford—people might make the wrong assumption. She considers what she might say. “He was frightened by it,” she offers at last, stressing the word.
“What did he do?” Mrs. Blatchford inquires, her eyes wide.
“Well, he just—” Vida pauses, for it had been alarming. He had behaved as if a net had been thrown over him, trapping him like a fish. She’d never seen him so wild. “He didn’t want it touching him,” she says finally.
“But it wasn’t—touching him,” Mrs. Blatchford repeats, watching her.
“No.” Vida collects up her purse straps then, throws Manford another glance. He is sloppily filling the doughnuts, setting them unevenly on the tray. “I’m just going round to pick up eggs,” she says. “I’ll stop back on my way home and check on him. I’m quite sure he’ll be all right.” She gathers in a breath. “You mustn’t worry,” she says to Mrs. Blatchford, and her tone suggests she will have nothing more to say, that such things happen from time to time and signify nothing. “Just carry on as you usually do. I’m sure he’ll calm down presently. Perhaps a cup of tea would soothe him.”
“I haven’t anyone with me today,” Mrs. Blatchford calls after Vida as she leaves. “I’m all alone! Mr. Niven’s taken Mary into Winchester—they’re seeing about a new sofa!”
But Vida doesn’t wait to answer her.
SHE IS HALFWAY down the dairy road, its close shoulder thick with the briery hawthorn, before she remembers Jeremy, the house with the drawn curtains and ringing silence. Thinking of Jeremy makes her think of her mystery lover—for hadn’t she imagined it might be Jeremy himself writing to her?—and she grows suddenly awkward and watchful, wondering if whoever this suitor is could be observing her right at this moment. She realizes that she is looking about under hedges and up in the trees as if this man weren’t actually real but were composed instead of magical elements—a talking frog, for instance, or hedgehog.
When she rounds the corner and sees the string of dreary bungalows, the stained white walls of the dairy on the far side of the road, she tries to keep her eyes away from the house. She ducks her head and averts her face and begins instead to peer interestedly at the hawthorn, its white flowers stirred by agitated bees storming the blossoms. The sky feels so heavy that it seems to rest directly upon her sleeve, the crown of her head. In the humid air, the astringent lime from the dairy pinches her nostrils. She wrinkles her face.
When she reaches the gate at the corner of the dairy yard, she pauses to find a path through the mud. She does not like stopping here; she is too aware of the house behind her, of Jeremy’s possible presence there. Suddenly she is mortified at the thought of seeing him, though whether it is her own shame at having thought him responsible for her love letters or her memory of the odd admiration she’d felt, seeing him without his shirt in Dr. Faber’s office, she does not want to consider.
But she is stepping to the side of the gate, preparing to execute a small leap over the worst of the mud, when he calls to her.
He is standing at the door of the bungalow in a gray jersey. Even from her distance across the road, she can see how pale he is.
