Lamb in Love (31 page)

Norris clucks his tongue. “It's very beneficial,” he says. “You'll see.”

Vida looks up at him. “You used to drink this?”

He nods firmly. “Got so's I didn't even mind the taste. I knew it would set me to rights.”

She wrinkles her nose. “It smells awful, brewing.”

“Yes.” He turns toward the kitchen. “I think it smells worse than it tastes, though.”

Vida makes another face, glances up at him skeptically.

He crosses the room and kneels at the hearth. He builds a careful fire from the basket of twigs, laying the sticks neatly to form a box, and then lights it with a long match from the box on the mantel. When he turns around, Vida's head has fallen gently to the side, the teacup tilted in her lap, a little tea spilled into the saucer. Her eyes have closed. Norris crosses the room and looks down at her pale face for a long while. And then he raises his eyes and stares out the window, a light, steady rain falling outside as the afternoon darkens into evening.

Woman waits, he thinks. In her dressing gown.

H
E TRIES TO
remember when he last thought seriously about a holiday. Once, he knew, he'd wanted to rent one of those brightly painted tinker's caravans in Ireland, take a month to do the coast, ending up at Dingle, perhaps, or the Aran Islands. And once, he'd investigated—thanks to Mr. Nesser, who'd first put the opportunity before him—renting a house-boat
in India near Kashmir. Seems Nesser is related to someone there who has them. Teddy Roosevelt had let one several years in a row, Nesser had written Norris; he'd had a grand one, of course, all hung round with Indian tapestries and so forth and filled with heavy British colonial furnishings and silver service. Nesser's great-uncle, or something like that, had been Roosevelt's Himalayan guide, apparently. Norris had liked the notion of it—the locals would moor up to the houseboats in their little boats and sell you flowers or fruit, and at dawn you could hear the Moslem call to prayer drift out across the water. But it all proved too dear for Norris's salary. He still has the photos Nesser sent, though. He takes them out and looks at them from time to time. In his head he's woven quite a story about his houseboat, his adventures on it.

N
ORRIS'S GAZE LINGERS
on Vida's face for another moment, and then he turns and leaves the room. He climbs the staircase quietly, reaches a door partly ajar, and then pauses as a sensation of unsteadiness arrives at his feet. The room has become unmoored; were he to step over the threshold, he would find himself lost in a strange land. A trembling light spills out from over the sill and around the edge of the door, the heavy light of late afternoon melted at last into evening. And something else.

He pushes slightly against the door. It swings inward, and Norris's eyes widen at the swimming, swirling shapes around him—orange and turquoise fish circling the walls and ceiling, diving and darting; a yellow sun spinning madly as if at the end of a tether; clumps of wavering water plants bobbing through blue waves. The shapes flow round the walls like ghosts, over the paintings, over the cavernous wardrobe, the long windows, the wide bed with its heavy headboard and the body beneath the
sheets. Beside the bed, on a small nightstand, the night-light glows. The shadow shapes spiral out from it and into the falling dark.

Norris steps into the room, feels the light against his face, feels the bouncing fish and the sun sweep over him, feels the blue sea close in around him, feels the seaweed brush his hands. It is as exquisite as longing, like a face in a dream that inclines toward your own and then withdraws, hands poised lightly over your body, breath in your ear. He stands still, the sweet, pure colors thrown by the night-light, the whole world, flowing over him.

At the bed the body moves slightly, Manford's shoulders rising, hesitating, and then falling again. Norris steps closer. In his sleep, Manford's hair has slicked to his forehead and parted in waves over the heavy brow, damp from fever.

Norris raises his hand. A fish swims through it, capillaries and corpuscles and flesh and blood no obstacle for a moment. For a moment he holds the sun in his hand.

He touches him then, feels his forehead. It is moist, cool.

It's passed, Norris thinks.

He covers Manford's foot, heavy and white, shaken loose from the blankets. He raises the sheet gently to Manford's shoulders, smooths it lightly with his fingertips. How many times has
she
done this, he thinks, tiptoed in here, covered Manford again as though he were a baby. Through so many years. Years and years of vigilance over Manford's preposterous failure to grow, to speak, to walk away, to take matters into his own hands. All these years they have had this between them, this love. How lucky.

He backs away from the bed, from the body within it, the pretty rain of colored shapes falling over them both now, the universe spinning around them, infinity reduced in this room to a child's crudely shaped school of fish, a punched-out sun, the stiff
grasses waving at heaven, and a milky blue light, far away. All of it, the whole world, here.

And not until he arrives home later that night, soaking wet from the rain but cleansed in a way he has not been, he thinks, for perhaps his whole life, does he remember Laurence's letter to Vida. The words, for having been in his pocket the whole while, are blurred but still, for anyone who might want to try to read them, faintly, barely legible.

Fourteen

“W
ELL,
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.

B
UT 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.