Lamb in Love (36 page)

“C
OME ON
,” J
EREMY
repeats. “What's yours?”

Vida turns away from him, his teasing tone. “I don't know,” she says quietly. “I—I'm very
dependable,
” she finishes lamely.

He laughs.

Why is he always laughing? she thinks, unnerved. She realizes that the few times she's been with him, he seems to laugh all the time, but it isn't always a nice laugh, and sometimes she doesn't see anything funny. And then a picture flashes into her mind of Mr. Lamb on his knees in the muddy street, of herself laughing as she reached down to help him stand, Mr. Lamb laughing, too, his hands held awkwardly away from his dirty trousers.

What had the first letter said?
I crawl along the rays of the sun.

“
I'm
dependable,” Jeremy says then. “You'd never go unsatisfied with me.”

She looks up, his tone having alerted her, but not quickly enough. He swerves and comes from behind her, reaches around and places his hands over her breasts. “I can promise you that,” he says.

He squeezes, fitting in close behind her, his mouth on her ear, biting on the small lobe. “You're nice, Vida,” he says. “You like me, don't you?”

She feels her heart thrash out against his hand, but her body will not move.

“You're all alone here, Vida. Aren't you lonely? Come on, dear. We could have us some fun. Wouldn't you like to have some fun?” His voice drops. “Wouldn't you like that?” His hands find her nipples; he pinches them between his thumbs and forefingers. “Come on.” He rocks against her, and she starts in real terror when he lifts his bad hand from her breast and holds it up close before her face.

“I'm wounded,” he says. “Don't you want to help me?”

He holds her tightly with his good arm, reaches down, and she sees her dress come up, his hand beneath the hem, the cracked leather of the glove against her thighs and belly. He bends her over, forcing her down. The skirt of her dress comes up before her face, his one hand holding it there over her mouth, the other pressing down across her shoulders where she might wear a yoke if she were a cow.

“I can't see,” she cries wildly at last, freeing her arms, struggling at the cloth before her face. “I can't see! Please!”

On her hands and knees she struggles to crawl away from him. “Get away from me,” she says. “Get away!”

For a moment he clings to her, a parasite against her back. And
then he rolls off. He lies on his back, breathing hard, holding his injured hand on the wrist below the glove. “I've hurt my hand,” he says dully, like a child.

Vida closes her eyes and places her cheek carefully against a bell-shaped silver flower woven into the carpet, its stem knotted into a helix. She reaches, her eyes still closed, to adjust her skirt over her thighs, curls her knees to her chest. She licks her lips; her mouth feels so dry. Her breasts ache.

I am your servant, your knight.

When she opens her eyes and looks at him, after just a moment, he is still lying on his back, his hand held over his chest, his eyes shut. His hair is damp at his temples, his cheeks flushed. His mouth is open slightly. She watches him swallow, a delicate movement at his throat. Though she tries to veer away from the thought, she sees herself then, a middle-aged woman lying on the ground, her dress wrenched around her.

He is standing over her when she opens her eyes again. “Get up,” he says. “You don't need to lie there. I didn't hurt you.”

And she thinks when she hears his tone that it is exactly that of a frightened child, petulant and angry. It's funny, she thinks, that when you're with someone who
doesn't
speak, you learn a different way of understanding people. You don't even need to hear them to know exactly what they're feeling. She has stood a pace away from Manford and closed her eyes and tried to listen with her heart, and her heart has heard something, she knows, something absolutely unmistakable, though it has no words. Once, she tried asking Dr. Faber about it, whether he believed there was something—oh, something
electrical,
perhaps—that passed between two people in place of words.

“I know what he wants,” she told Dr. Faber. “I can't tell you how I do, but I do.”

And he laughed at her and rapped at Manford's head with his knuckles and then looked back to Vida significantly. “Who can say?” he said. “Who can say what miracles the human heart is capable of?”

“I'
M
NOT
HURT
,” she says. She sits up and pushes her hands through her hair.

Jeremy turns away from her, walks over to the window, and picks up the drawings from the floor. He looks embarrassed. She assesses him, the cheap shoes on his feet, the pilled knees of his worn trousers. His profile, almost lordly from the nose up to the high brow, falls away at his mouth and chin, where some weakness, some failure of bearing, has made the lines selfish and small. He stares at the drawings in his hand as though nothing has happened, as though he has simply been considering them in a responsible fashion. For a moment she thinks she might laugh at him.

But the moment passes, and she lies back down again and stretches her arms over her head. Around her the carpet blooms with a hundred species of wildflowers, their vines and tendrils interlocked in an intricate pandemonium. She rubs the back of her hand lazily over the coarse nap of the weave.

“What are you doing?” he asks, annoyed.

“I'm looking,” she says, “at the sky.”

He gives a huff of surprise. “You're crazy.”

She looks up at him seriously. “No,” she says. And though she wouldn't say it aloud, she hears the letter again, that voice:
You are the moon and the stars.

He snorts again and turns away.

When she says nothing, remaining silent like a felled statue on the meadow of carpet, he turns back to her. “Aren't you going to get up?”

“I suppose so.” She stands at last and smooths her dress carefully. She does not look at him.

“Well, I'm sorry,” he says after a moment. “I thought you wanted a bit of fun.”

She turns her eyes on him then, and she knows her look holds only a suggestion of all she is feeling. “You have no idea what I want,” she says. “None at all.”

W
HEN THE TELEPHONE
rings a moment later, they both jump. Vida crosses the room to answer it after a delay in which she cannot, for a second, recall the meaning of the sound. Hardly anyone calls at Southend.

“Vida?” Mr. Perry's voice sounds as if he were shouting from far off, the volume whisked away by the wind, diverted and cupped into the bowl of a mountain or driven down into the sea. “How's everything?”

She glances at Jeremy, who stands frozen, the drawings in his hand. She touches her hand to her hair. “Everything's quite all right,” she says after a moment.

Jeremy turns away and busies himself with the drawings. She can sense his relief.

“Manford's had a touch of a flu, but we're both over it now,” she manages to say. “How are you coming on? In Florence, are you?”

“We've had some delays. Bad weather. They don't like to work on the frescoes when it's wet, and it's been raining here for two weeks,” he says. “The fixative won't set when it's wet out. What's Manford been up to?”

Vida hesitates. She hadn't consulted Mr. Perry about the job at Niven's, not out of deceitfulness or even a suspicion that he might not like the idea, but mostly because it had come to her so
suddenly. One day she'd had the notion of it, and the next he was there working. Now, though, it occurs to her that Mr. Perry might in fact disapprove in some way, though he's never had any complaint about her care of Manford. But it doesn't seem right to be dishonest about it.

“Well, you'll never guess,” she says now, a false tone creeping into her voice. She sees that Jeremy has moved over to Mr. Perry's desk and is examining the pens and brushes. He lifts a pen and unscrews the cap, puts the nib delicately to his fingertip. Vida makes a sharp motion to him to put the pen down.

“I've got Manford a job!” she says brightly into the phone.

There is a pause at the other end. She isn't sure whether it is Mr. Perry's surprise or the delay of the long distance.

“A job?” His voice arrives in her ear at last.

“Yes, at Niven's,” she says. “He's working at Niven's.” She thinks how to add to that information, but the truth of it, that he stuffs the doughnuts with jam, suddenly sounds pathetic to her. “He's doing marvelously,” she says instead. “They all love him.”

“He's there without you?”

Now there's no mistaking it, she thinks—Mr. Perry's tone of uncertainty.

“He's done very well,” she says. She draws a breath. “I think it's good for him. And to be away from me,” she adds, though she hadn't meant that exactly.

“What do you mean?”

Now his voice sounds decidedly suspicious. Anger flares up in her.

“He's not a baby, you know,” she says hotly. “He's a grown man. He's needed an
occupation.
” She is right about that; she knows she is. They couldn't have gone on, playing as though he
were just the idle scion of an aristocrat. This was Manford's life, here in the village, even if his father behaved like a sort of distant lord. He needed to be able to step fully into it instead of remaining locked in his tower with her, the two of them roaming the perimeter of the garden like prisoners who do not know they are kept.

“Hold on.” Mr. Perry's voice sounds rough, as if scratched over with a file.

She hears a crackling sound, the phone being shifted or some static interrupting the line. She takes a deep breath, stares down at her feet.

“I can't hear you very well.” Mr. Perry's voice comes through again, but crinkled somehow, like crushed paper. Another pause. “What did you say he was doing?”

Vida closes her eyes. “He's filling the doughnuts.”

And she could see Mr. Perry then: He would be in a chair by a window, she thinks, overlooking the scattered surface of a canal, its quick water like a black fault line through the earth. The window would be open, his jacket tossed across a bed. Several streets away, a small chapel would be harnessed within the delicate framework of a scaffolding, the crumbling white walls billowing against a web of wood and rope. She has seen photographs of this chapel, its listing wall scored in the picture with Mr. Perry's blue lines, the corrected angle. Mr. Perry had pointed to the damaged wall, explained how the frescoes inside had to be protected before they could tear off the side of the chapel and rebuild. “Just the sort of job I hate,” he'd said, tossing the photographs on the desk. “Too many things can go wrong.”

Still, she knew he had been pleased to have it, an excuse to leave again. His hair, which sprang back from his forehead, would be mussed now from the damp, she knows. She sees him
place a hand before his eyes, the gesture he applies so often when talking to her of Manford, as if he could stand either to think of him or to see him, but not both at once. Both were too much, the awful truth of Manford's circumstances, his bouncing gait and fat belly, colliding with Mr. Perry's own horror. She has seen him kneel before the boy, take him in his arms once or twice. She was encouraged at those moments, hoping for some sustaining embrace between them. But Mr. Perry is afraid of his son, she thinks. Sickened by him. And because of her, he has been able to leave him. She thinks of Manford, the hopeful, concentrated way he lifts his hands to make his shadow play, the springing menagerie that tumbles like a row of circus acrobats across a wall, the intelligent agility of those creations. And she thinks, too, of the look of terror on his soft, surprised face when he saw the spider's web on the bench. Mr. Perry has missed so much.

“Vida, I can't hear you. Vida?”

“Yes. I'm here,” she says faintly. A surge of static fills the receiver. She hears one word, “Damn,” clearly.

“You mustn't worry,” she says vaguely, though with feeling. And then, because she recognizes it suddenly herself, and because she thinks Mr. Perry will appreciate this at least, she adds, “Manford's made a sort of friend, too. A patron. Someone looking out for him.”

She is not sure what Mr. Perry hears then, whether any of her words reach him or whether they drift apart like unraveling stitches, some warp disintegrating like that fading fresco. “It's Mr. Lamb,” she says, surprised to hear herself say it. “They have stamps in common. And some other things.”

And she sees Mr. Lamb then, his funny way of imitating Manford's walk, not in a mean way, she understands, but in delight at Manford's perfect manner of having his body express what his
heart must feel. She sees Mr. Lamb again in the kitchen, his hand on Manford's head, the long spoon held in his other hand. “We've been getting to know one another,” he'd said.

“Are you there?” she asks into the silence. There is no reply. “You mustn't worry,” she says again, kindly.

His voice breaks free then. She startles at it in her ear, suddenly clear and close. “Vida, I can't hear you very well. Look, I'm delayed here. I'll be another month. We'll talk again. I'll call again.” There is a pause. She thinks it best to say nothing.

“Vida?”

“All right,” she says finally.

“Give him my love.” Then she hears the receiver click off and the line go dead.

J
EREMY IS STILL
toying with the things on Mr. Perry's desk. Vida replaces the phone carefully on its cradle. She crosses the room and picks up the stack of drawings for the garden. “Do you want these?” she says, holding them out in her hands.

He shrugs.

And she feels, as she stands there waiting for him to cross the room to her, that something has shifted between them; some balance of power has now inclined itself delicately toward her, like a boat's cargo sliding slowly across a deck. Her heart beats quickly, aroused by her conversation with Mr. Perry and her sense that she needed to defend herself, defend this thing she had done, getting Manford a job. Mr. Perry might want to keep them shut up here, she thinks clearly, as if for the first time, but it is too late. They're out in the world now, she and Manford. And though she does not know how it will end, though she cannot say what might happen next, nor that they won't, in the end, be defeated, she feels as sure of her decision as she has ever felt about anything.