Lamb in Love (27 page)

What does he need that for? she had thought, aghast.

“Sit down, Vida,” Dr. Faber had said, glancing over at her, the needle flashing through his fingers. “Can't have you going over on me. Put your head down.”

And then, to Jeremy, “Such a worrywart, our Vida! Always rushing Manford in here as though he were at death's door. That fellow will outlive us all, mark my words. He's a giant among men.” But he had winked at Vida when she'd raised her head at last, everything swimming; it was the blood, she thought. All that blood.

“She's a good sort, Vida,” she heard Dr. Faber say. “You could
have a worse nursemaid than Vida here, my friend,” he added to Jeremy. “She'll see you through.”

Jeremy had raised his eyes then to meet hers with a look so direct she had put her hand to her throat in a kind of weak defense. And it went through her mind suddenly that perhaps
he
had written the letters; perhaps
he
had sent the robe and the flowers. Perhaps it wasn't Mr. Niven at all!

For though she hadn't really been thinking about it deliberately, the notion of her mysterious lover had been there in the back of her head all day. And though she'd made herself settle on Mr. Niven, she recognized that it was a conclusion reached only by default. She'd even had, for a flash, the unpleasant suspicion that it might be Mr. Spooner in love with her, for the way he was always trying to pinch her bottom. He'd come round after her in the store, down the dark aisle in his musty socks. “Can I
help
you?” he'd say, breathing hard behind her. But of course she understood he wasn't interested in helping her find
anything!
Once he'd put his hand right on her bottom, as though she were a loaf of bread. “Hallo, hallo,” he'd said then softly, as if he were surprised to find her flesh beneath his palm. And she had never liked to say anything back, with Mrs. Spooner at the front of the store doing her sums with a little stub of a pencil, eating handfuls of bran from the sack on the floor, following Vida and the other women of the village with her worried eyes. Everybody knew Mr. Spooner was an affliction and a trial.

But she couldn't imagine Mr. Spooner would have such lovely things to say as were in the letters, anyway; “Hallo, hallo” was all he could manage, she thought, his hand on your bottom, as if his hand suddenly recognized you. And you just had to move away then quickly, Vida knew, as though it hadn't happened. You'd fetch whatever it was you'd come for and hurry out, wishing
there were another grocery. Vida thought that her mother would be horrified, seeing him in their old grocery with his terrible socks and groping hands.

Glancing surreptitiously at Jeremy beside her as they left Dr. Faber's and walked down the path to her car, she thought
he
would have something more to say than “Hallo, hallo,” anyway.

Something more like poetry, she supposed. It was something about him, she thought, the way he—well, the way he looked, she decided. He looked like a man who might write poetry.

“I'
LL DRIVE, SHALL
I?” she'd asked when they got to the car.

She'd expected to take him back to Southend House, but as they drove off, he said, “You can just drop me in the village, if you don't mind. I don't think I'll do any more today.”

“No, of course not,” she said quickly. “You shouldn't do another thing.”

“It's round by the dairy,” he said. “One of the bungalows back there.”

Vida drove down the muddy lane toward the dairy. It was always muddy in the lane, with the cows going up and down for milking twice a day. Yet it was overgrown with hawthorn, as well, so the scents of sweet flowers and rank milk and lime warred in the air. Jeremy rolled down the window and stuck his head out. Vida glanced to her right. The houses were a poor, sad lot, one-story bungalows with brown tile roofs and a lot of mud for gardens, except where someone had a tiny plot, stitched over now with thick lines of green and a tangle of tomato plants. The bungalows were dreary, with sheets up at the windows for curtains and washing on the lines.

“Here,” he said suddenly, and she was so surprised by the
sound of his voice that she stepped on the brake too hard, jolting them in their seats. Jeremy caught himself with his good hand. “Steady!”

She dropped her chin, a fierce blush rising into her cheeks again. She felt so stupid around him!

The house they had stopped before was dark and quiet. It looked as if no one lived there. Certainly no one was at home, she thought.

Jeremy put one leg out, as though he might be stiff. But then he seemed to think of something and turned back. And Vida saw his eyes close in on her own, felt his mouth come up against her cheek, felt the brush of his unshaven chin rough against her face.

“You're a love,” he said. “Thanks for everything.”

And then he was gone.

“Y
OU KNOW
,” M
R.
Lamb says at last, wiping his lips and pushing back from the table. “He's really astonishing, isn't he?”

He leans toward Vida and lowers his voice as if to prevent Manford from hearing, though he's sitting right there between them at the kitchen table. “You've seen that, I'm sure, what he does with his hands? The shadows?”

Vida looks up from her plate, the tired-looking purple beef and the shrunken potatoes. Dinner had sat too long in the oven.

“Pardon?” she says. And then, as if she were coming to after having been asleep, she manages, “Oh, yes. His shadow play?” She is surprised that there'd been an occasion for Manford to demonstrate this talent to Mr. Lamb while she'd been at Dr. Faber's. What could have caused it? She lifts her fork, hesitating a moment. “Did he do the birds?” She can't help feeling oddly disoriented—one moment she's with Jeremy, she thinks, and there's
all that blood and Dr. Faber's needle, and the next she's here, with Mr. Lamb, who is still sawing away at his meat with vigor.

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Lamb says, with the faintly superior air of an expert impatient with a novice. “Yes, he did the birds.
And
a lot of others as well!”

Vida puts down her fork and knife. Manford must like him, to have shown Mr. Lamb his shadows. She sees Mr. Lamb glance over at her plate and notice that she's left most of her roast. He looks away, and she feels guilty that she hasn't more of an appetite. It was lovely of him to have taken over with the dinner. She feels slightly ashamed that she doesn't seem able to manage a greater display of gratitude. And now he won't even look at her, she sees with regret, but busies himself with his meat.

When she stands to take her plate to the sink, Mr. Lamb leaps up, overturning a glass of water. “Please!” he cries. “Please! Let me do the washing up.”

They collide in the front of the sink, both of them reaching for a cloth to mop up the spilled water, and for a moment, when she feels his shoulder against her own, Vida wants suddenly to wrap her arms around him, the two of them somehow shoring each other up the way two trees that have collapsed together will each prevent the other from falling to the ground. He's so desperately awkward. She feels she'd do anything to soothe him, to make him happy. She only wants to make him happy now!

“Thank you,” she says, as earnestly as she can, so that he will believe her gratitude. “Thank you, Mr. Lamb. That would be lovely.” She finds she is breathing hard; with an air of desperation she hands him a tea towel. “I'm afraid I asked you to supper and then I—”

He raises his hand to halt her. His confidence seems restored and his eyes have a grateful look.

“Not a bit of it,” he says warningly. “None of that, now. I'm an expert washer-upper.”

Manford has gone to stand by the door. Vida notices him there, waiting expectantly, and smiles. “It's getting on late,” she says to him, handing Mr. Lamb a plate from the table and then going over to take Manford's napkin from under his chin. “You don't want to walk tonight, do you?” But Manford turns around and opens the door, then glances back at Vida.

“He wants to take a walk?”

Vida turns around again; she had forgotten Mr. Lamb for a moment.

“I like to walk as well,” Mr. Lamb offers, and he looks amazed, as if it were such a coincidence. “I walk all the time.”

“We go through the village sometimes in the evening,” Vida says, smiling at him. “Manford likes that. He likes looking in the windows, I'm afraid,” she adds, lowering her voice in mock seriousness, but Mr. Lamb laughs rather too loudly, and she suspects for a moment she has caught him at something.

“It's funny,” he says after a moment, staring at her. “I've never seen you walking in the evenings.”

And then—she doesn't know what prompts her to say such a thing—she tells him, “Well, that's because we're invisible, Manford and I.”

She expects him to laugh, but his face has grown quiet, and she sees that he understands the truth of this, that people in a bright room at night can't see out the windows. In fact, what you see if you look out is only your own face staring back at you. It's not a fiction, not a fancy, she realizes. They
are
invisible, she and Manford, passing along the street in the darkness. No one ever sees them. It's as if they weren't there.

“Come on, Mr. Lamb,” she says then, and reaches for his hand
across the long space of the air between them. “Come along with us. Perhaps you'll be invisible, too.”

T
HE IDEA STAYS
with her, that they can't be seen.

Manford leads the way, walking fast, his arms riding the air. Vida sees Mr. Lamb glance at her, smile, raise his own arms in a pantomime of Manford, bouncing high on his feet. He dips around her like a long-legged insect, like that silly woodcock he'd told her about in church that time. She laughs.

She brushes the hair from her eyes as they descend to the dark tunnel of the lane, its soft air, the pretty lace of the shadows like a veil drawn behind them, obscuring them from the world. Glancing from side to side as they walk, she feels as though she has eyes like a bat, rays of light beaming, streaming into the dusk. Beneath her shoes, she feels the turf and cobble of the lane. A fine sweat rises on her upper lip. She loosens her collar; moisture prickles her temples.

They pass from the lane onto the Romsey Road, the high hedgerows and open fields of its passage through the countryside giving way to the stretch of buildings close upon its curbs, the butcher's and the blacksmith's, Niven's Bakery behind its high courtyard walls, the post office and Dr. Faber's brick house with its annexed office. They pass small houses with curtains drawn at the windows, St. Alphage with its ancient cemetery and gardens, the stones there bathed in green moss. They pass the playing field and Prince's Mead with its wide steps, the basin garden beside it with its sloping, slumbering border of high yews, its postage stamp of grass. They pass before Vida's parents' old grocery, now managed by the Spooners. Vida recalls the dark rooms tilting away within it, the low ceilings and freezers with their crusts of bitter frost, the smooth floorboards worn in gentle waves. Strange,
breathless Nigel Spooner, when he is not pursuing ladies down the aisles, has smartened things up a bit, cleared the window of its dusty collection of tins and boxes with faded labels. His wife has built clever tiers of cans there instead, their labels turned carefully to the street. She's even hung a bit of curtain up high, white and lacy. Vida notices a new sign, propped in the window:
SPOONER'S CONVENIENCE.

Mr. Lamb walks quietly at her side. How strange it is to be walking with someone she can talk with, who can answer her back, and yet to whom she suddenly has nothing to say. She wonders about him—she's never known him to be sociable, exactly. He takes her parcels and her letters at the post office, usually without remark except to say something about the weather perhaps, or some bit of news from the village. He's been very kind and helpful about stamps for Manford over the years, though appearing a bit surprised that he'd be interested in such things. He has always seemed to her to be lost in thought. She often feels, as the bell above her head rings when she opens the door to the post office, that she has interrupted him. And yet, he's rather sweet, she realizes. He's been rather sweet.

Now having him beside her, trudging along, she feels she ought to say something.

“I really must thank you, Mr. Lamb—”

“Norris,” he says quickly. “Please.”

“Norris—” Vida pauses. “Well, Norris, I do want to thank you—for watching Manford while I went with Jeremy.” She takes a little breath and goes on. “He's going to be quite all right, Dr. Faber said. A nasty cut, but clean. There was quite a lot of blood, though. He took it very well, I thought. He was very brave . . .” She trails off, disappointed. It seems to her that Mr. Lamb hasn't heard her, for he makes no reply.

After a moment, though, he asks abruptly, “Does he always walk that way?”

Manford's dark shape wavers ahead of them. From time to time he raises his arms, billows them on air.

“Ever since he was little,” Vida says, trying to adjust to this turn in the conversation. “I used to think it was for balance. He's clumsy, you know. Such children often are. It has to do with the brain damage. But now I think it's to—” She pauses, searching for the right words. “To feel the air. I think he feels it in a way we don't. I think he feels it around him, on his skin.”

“Yes,” Norris says quietly.

Vida's eyes follow Manford, his hands plying the invisible undulations of air. “It's as though something's beside him, walks beside him,” she continues, and she realizes, as she speaks, that this really
is
what she believes—that in his mind Manford keeps company with, oh, not spirits of the air, but the air itself, its scaffolding and frescoes of light and shadow and moisture. He keeps company, she thinks, with the unseen.