Lamb in Love (3 page)

“He is
neither,
” Norris once heard Vida say, “a spastic
nor
a vegetable. Those are two different things
entirely.
”

At the time, Norris took no special notice of her remark, beyond the upsetting nature of its context. It was near Christmas, well over a decade ago, at the annual children's party at the vicarage. The little children were playing pop goes the weasel, all of them arrayed in an uneven circle in the small wooden chairs carried over from the Sunday school into the parlor at the vicarage. The horsehair sofas, the ottomans, and the slipcovered chairs had been pushed back against the wall. The dark glass before the gloomy pictures—of rained-on moors and ruins and abbeys and so forth; what a sad lot of pictures the vicar surrounded himself with, Norris thought—held the reflection of the wavering spire of the Christmas tree. Yellow and red and blue bulbs threaded through the boughs glowed dully. The stiff faces of little wax dollies hanging from its branches, the spheres and spirals of the ornaments, the woolen mittens, the toy autos and lorries parked beneath—all this could be seen in the glass of those dreary pictures.

The children had just finished trimming the tree. The vicar himself balanced atop the wobbly ladder affixing the angel, meanwhile adjuring the children to take their places for the game.

Just over a quarter century before, this same room had been employed during air raids as a general shelter. Then, too, the furniture had been pushed back against the walls in precisely the same way, to make room for them all and provide a sort of buffer against explosion, Norris had thought, imagining feathers and horsehair drifting over their heads in the aftermath of impact. Norris himself had been refused by the British military service thanks to poor eyesight and a weak back, a rejection he'd taken
very hard. As a consequence, however, he had remained in Hursley for the war and thus remembered the black shades at the vicarage pulled down before the windows, the yellow lamp shade shrouded in a dark cardboard sheath, so that only a small saucer of honey-colored light fell on the tabletop. Kneeling there beside his trembling neighbors, Norris had made himself believe that the church would deflect a bomb by virtue of its very holiness, that his mother and grandmother and all their friends would be safe. And, in the end, his prayers were answered, for Hursley itself was completely untouched by the war, though it suffered heavy losses among sons and fathers overseas. Norris's own father, Terry Lamb, was killed while on patrol in Winchester with the Dad's Army, when he was struck by a grief-stricken woman on a bicycle bearing home to her children the news of their own father's death in France. In his fall to the pavement, Terry Lamb suffered both a heart attack and a massive blow to the head, though either injury alone would have been enough to kill him.

Though no one ever suggested it, something about his father's death always felt ignominious to Norris. During the war years, no death, unless it was in direct service to the war effort itself, seemed quite justified. Ordinary passings on—by accident or by disease—even seemed vaguely embarrassing, a slacking off, as it were. Though there was a small service held for Terry Lamb at St. Alphage, and enough men were rounded up to carry the coffin, Norris would always remember the occasion as a family humiliation.

A decade went by; much changed in the village. But on the occasion of Vida's comment about Manford and spastics and vegetables, the common room of the vicarage looked very much as it had when the Germans had been bombing London and Norris had been bowed, cheek by jowl, beside his grandmother and a lot
of other old pensioners, their anxiety perfuming the close air of the crowded room with a sour potage of fear and apology.

On this particular afternoon, the afternoon of Vida's remark, the vicarage had been stiflingly hot. The radiators hissed and steamed in a musical way. The vicar, perspiration running down his temples and into his clerical collar, had been anxious to move the festivities along. From his place near the Christmas tree, where he was cordoned off now by the circle of children, he held up his hand and raised his index finger, nodding vigorously at Norris. Taking the vicar's cue, Norris bore down on the piano. It was horribly out of tune, as usual, Norris noted, with that same stubborn resistance to the pure tone, especially the sharps.

As the music began, one little boy, young Davey Horsey, jumped up and began to race round the circle of children, stopping at last behind Manford's chair to pat him on the head. At Davey's touch, Manford looked up, his expression one of happy surprise, as though a star had perhaps just fallen and lighted on his head, twinkling there and pirouetting on one delicate point. But when he failed to jump up and give chase to Davey, the boy gave him another tap on the head—harder this time—and then again and again as Manford simply continued to sit there, his expression evolving to anxiety, young Davey walloping away stubbornly at Manford's head.

Manford had raised his arms protectively and cowered in his chair, his mouth wobbling with dismay, tears springing from his eyes. Lacey Horsey, Davey's mother, had rushed forward and slapped her boy. Taking him roughly by the arm and putting her mouth close by his face, she said to him in a loud whisper, “Not the spastic vegetable, Davey! Can't you see he doesn't know how?”

By then a good number of the other children were in tears,
too. Davey's assault and Lacey's reprimand and Manford's weeping had upset them all. Mothers hurried into the circle to comfort their children. And so Vida's fiery rebuke to Lacey—about Manford being neither a spastic nor a vegetable, but only a little boy,
for God's sake
—was lost perhaps to everyone but Lacey and Norris himself, his hands poised above the keys in midphrase.

The mothers hushed their children and led them back to their seats to begin the game again. Vida turned away from Lacey, went to Manford in his chair, and wiped his face with the white cuff of her shirtsleeve. She knelt before him, looked into his face, and said his name quietly. When he raised his gaze, she reached out and touched his cheek. “Mind me now, Manford,” she said. “It's easy as anything. When someone taps you on the head, you must stand up and run right after them fast as you can. Run, Manford. That's all you have to do.” And then she gave him a brilliant smile and a hug and stood up.

Norris had been watching her. She walked briskly back to the edge of the room, where she turned to stare out the window into the darkness of the cemetery beyond the vicar's famous Christmas garden, the bare trees there bedecked with ghostly gray suet shapes for the birds. Norris had found himself staring at her back, but when she turned to face the room again he hurriedly averted his gaze. And as he sat there stupidly at the piano, a memory of an illustration from a picture book he'd had as a child came into his head. The painting had been an allegorical representation of the virtue Mercy, a towering female figure turning the brilliant benediction of her smile on a pastoral depiction of the harvest. In her pale-as-plaster hands, Mercy cradled a young calf; at her knee a tiny farmer had put aside his knife and embraced the lamb. The scene had been painted in minute, exquisite detail, like an illuminated manuscript, and had fascinated Norris. But one day, months
after first opening the book, he discovered that one detail had escaped his notice: despite the figure's patient smile, despite the gamboling lambs freed from the farmer's knife, one damning, crystalline tear hung quivering at the figure's eyelash. Norris struggled with the presence of this tear. When he put his own fingertip to the page, he half expected to see the tear come away, with a little shine of wetness. That tear—somehow so real, so necessary—complicated the picture beyond his understanding.

But on the afternoon of pop goes the weasel, when Norris looked up from where his hands rested on the piano keys, the vicar, signaling firmly, caught his eye. And Norris shook himself free of his reverie and set to playing.

Round and round the mulberry bush.

From time to time, he saw Manford's eyes stray hopefully to Vida's back. But no one hit him for pop goes the weasel again. A shame, Norris thought.

Still, he wondered: If not a spastic or a vegetable . . . then
what?

N
ORRIS SEES HOW
Manford, grown into adulthood, has become a handsome man in a way, though he appears like a child in most other respects.

Vida, who began as Manford's nanny when she was twenty-two, has been looking after him his whole life, twenty years, Norris calculates. Before starting work at Niven's, Manford had spent all his time with her. But Mrs. Blatchford, who works at Niven's, has confided to Norris that it is Vida's program to instill something of the “thrill of independence” in Manford now, by coaxing him to walk part of the way home by himself when his work is finished.

Since his infatuation with Vida began, Norris has watched very
carefully as Mr. Niven escorts Manford across the Romsey Road, the baker's white apron flapping, his dusty flour cloth waving Manford along.

Stopping in the bakery for a loaf of bread late one afternoon, Norris paused at the door to watch Mr. Niven and Manford waiting at the curb. Mrs. Blatchford stepped outside at that moment and began pinching the brown leaves from the geraniums in the window boxes.

“Having his lesson,” she said, following Norris's gaze to the two figures waiting patiently before the stream of traffic. “Vida's depending on us, you know.” She lowered her voice, though there wasn't anyone else there to hear. “I do believe she's worrying about what will happen to him when she—
you know.
She wants to lengthen the reins a bit now, to prepare him.”

Norris turned away from the cars on the Romsey Road and Mr. Niven and Manford waiting at the curb. He stared at Mrs. Blatchford, stricken. “When she
what?
” he managed finally. “What do you mean by ‘you know,' said in that way?”

He felt himself growing fuzzy around the edges, the beginning of a faint—he was familiar with the symptoms. He'd fainted often when he was younger and doing most of his growing. Something to do with his blood pressure, Dr. Faber had said. “When she
dies?
” he asked finally, appalled.

Mrs. Blatchford glanced over at him. “Oh,
tsk!
Norris Lamb!” she said. “Every time someone mentions dying, all you men grow faint in the head! What a pack of ninnies you are! Vida's not going to die—at least, not before her time, we may hope,” she said primly. She crumbled the dry leaves of the geranium, put them in her apron pocket. “She's just
worrying
about the day, whenever it may come. That's what we women do. We
must
worry. We're the designated worriers, if you will.” She leaned over the window box.

Norris felt his heart begin beating again. He licked his lips. His mouth had gone dry.

“Of course, no one's asking me,” Mrs. Blatchford went on blithely, “but I think his father might have done a bit more for him over the years. He's left him entirely in Vida's hands, you know. And he's plenty of money, I should think. He might have found a good institution for him! Left Vida to get on with her life.”

Norris turned away from Mrs. Blatchford to watch Manford step down from the curb at Mr. Niven's urging, pausing in what Norris thought was a perilous manner to wave back at him. He felt distracted by the danger of their undertaking and wasn't able to pay full attention to Mrs. Blatchford. “He's not very attentive to traffic, is he?” he observed.

“What? Oh, no,” Mrs. Blatchford said. “Not
yet
.”

They watched Mr. Niven shoo Manford across. It seemed to Norris, who had little faith or understanding of Manford's dependability, a risky enterprise.

And then he turned around and looked at Mrs. Blatchford again. “An
institution,
did you say?” he asked abruptly, as if he'd just heard her. “Surely he doesn't need—all that? Restraints—and so forth? Aren't they rather—grim?”

“Oh, we're not in the Victorian age anymore, you know, Mr. Lamb. I think some of them are very modern, like individual flats and so forth. Atriums and lifts and craft circles and whatnot. Latest techniques, you know.” Mrs. Blatchford leaned toward the geraniums again and wrenched at a brown stalk. “It's not that he's a bother. I like having him about. Makes one feel—quite homey,
actually. I would have suggested it myself long ago, if I'd thought of it. But it's a shame for Vida, I say. Wild horses couldn't tear him from her now. Attached like a leech, he is.”

“But she—cares for him.” Norris felt squirmy at the mention of leeches.

Mrs. Blatchford dusted her hands on her apron. “Why, she
loves
him. I should say she does. Anyone would,” she said defiantly, as if Norris had just contradicted her. “Why, you've only to spend a day with him and you'd see it,” she went on. “So eager to please. That's just it.”

“Well—that's not a
bad
thing then, is it?”

Mrs. Blatchford sighed and looked out across the Romsey Road. “No, not bad. Just—rather difficult. For
her,
I mean.”

Norris turned and watched Manford disappear round the corner. Mr. Niven came back into the courtyard, stood in the doorway of the bakery, and lifted his face to the weak afternoon sun. His cheeks were bruised looking, crosshatched with dozens of broken capillaries.

“Bunch of lunatics they hire to drive those lorries,” he said. He squinted at Mrs. Blatchford and Norris. “You know, I was born here—1901, it was”—at this remark Mrs. Blatchford rolled her eyes toward Norris; Mr. Niven was famous for hating change of any sort in Hursley—“and I never thought that one day I'd see the Romsey Road turned into a motor speedway. I'd have said you were mad! But there it is. Those idiots will make a puddle of Manford one day, mark my words.”

Norris glanced at the street, the blur of traffic. He thought unpleasantly of Manford reduced to a vague shape splayed across the tarmac.