Lamb in Love (40 page)

“We've had an idea,” he says. “I hope you'll—well, I hope you'll like it.”

T
HEY GO BACK
to Southend House, and Vida fixes Manford a Ribena and puts on the telly for him, though he'll have to wait for his beloved Dougal and
The Magic Roundabout.
And then she and Mr. Lamb, by mutual consent, have themselves a large gin—they both seem to need one, for separate reasons. They take their glasses out to the terrace and sit down at the little table in the shadow of the last of the Mercuries. A smile breaks out involuntarily over her face as she gazes at Mr. Lamb's gray head bent over his glass, the hair damp and combed neatly over his scalp, his lip swollen.

“I'm sorry I worried you,” he says after a moment, replacing his glass on the table, but he fails to look precisely at her. He seems in fact to be squinting.

“Oh, no,” she says quickly. “It was all my fault, really, I—”

“I just thought I'd have him back by his usual time, and there wouldn't be any—” He stops and blushes—a dark red the color of bricks—and looks away toward the garden.

Vida sits up straighter in her chair and stiffens; she feels herself growing alert. After a moment, without exactly intending to, she takes a deep drink of her gin. How does he know what time Manford usually arrives home?

“I saw you,” he says then suddenly, turning back to her, “with—
what's-his-name.
The
gardener.
”

“Oh! Yes!” Her train of thought is interrupted, and she recognizes with dismay that now
she
is blushing fiercely. Though she is certain that this is conveying entirely the wrong message to Mr. Lamb, she cannot think how to correct the impression. “Yes,” she manages at last, feeling defeated already. “I met him at the dairy when I went round to fetch eggs. We were out. Of eggs,” she finishes flatly.

She steals a look at Mr. Lamb over the top of her glass. She cannot quite fathom his expression.

“Well,” he says quietly.

She moves her gaze away from him, up into the sky over his head. The moon has appeared in the twilight over the banks of yews. It hangs there, tiny and fragile.

She catches Mr. Lamb's eye and he smiles at her, but it is rather a bitter smile, she thinks, and she feels deeply wounded by this. “I don't,” she says desperately, “really like him. The gardener.”

Mr. Lamb says nothing at this, staring over her shoulder with a bored expression, as if watching an uninteresting program on the television.

She tries again. “He's—aggressive,” she finishes. It isn't what she means. What she means is that she is no judge of men.

But it brings Mr. Lamb round. He loses the slightly vindictive expression that has played around his mouth, and now he seems, if nothing else, resigned and quiet. He takes another long swallow from his drink. “Well,” he says. “Let's not—” But it seems he cannot go on.

“You said you had an idea,” Vida prompts him now, for she is suddenly, unaccountably, afraid that he will leave.

He glances at her.

“Please,” she says encouragingly. “Do tell me.”

And so he does.

He tells her his idea, that Manford should do his shadows at the vicar's talent show, and at first Vida thinks it's preposterous. But as Mr. Lamb goes on, his voice gathering excitement, she starts to see how perfect it is, really. And then she begins to see it just as Mr. Lamb describes it, how he would station Manford up at the chancel with a light fixed behind him, and how he could do his shadows against the wall over the altar. Mr. Lamb says he will play for him, too, something to go
with
it—perhaps he could work out a transposition of
Carnival of the Animals,
he says. And
then she begins to see exactly how it will be—how amazed they will be.

“He'll be a smash. Just you wait. He'll be a smash hit,” Mr. Lamb says.

“It's perfect,” she says, and she means it. She really means it. She feels so grateful to Mr. Lamb that she could, she could—she almost begins to rise from her chair, lean forward, kiss his hand . . .

But he gets to his feet then, and she feels herself fall back.

He still wears a sad look. But he takes her hand a moment. “I won't say good-bye to him,” he says, jerking his head toward the house, where Manford is still sitting; they can hear the sound of the television through the open window. “I'll just let myself out—through the garden.”

She opens her mouth, She wants to say something.

One day you will know me,
she thinks. And she hears the words as plainly as if Mercury himself had leaned down from his pedestal and put his stone-cold hand to her ear.

But Mr. Lamb is gone before she can say anything. He is descending the steps, his stick swinging ahead of him. He is fading away into the shadows. A deep blue light, sad as a prayer, has fallen over the garden. Vida comes to stand at the top of the steps. The garden appears to be filling with water, the quiet, violet hue of evening, and Vida thinks of the ocean, of Corfu, of her island of happiness, the idea that there might be something still waiting for her in the world. But all she can see, as she looks out over the garden, is a last sight of Mr. Lamb vanishing into the dark recumbent shadows of the oak grove. And before she can call him back, he is gone.

T
HE GARDEN IS
especially beautiful at night. Vida stands in the door of the library near midnight, after Manford has gone
to sleep, and pushes it wide open to smell the air. The thin, papery light of the moon plays over the row of Mercuries. She looks up at it and thinks about the astronaut Armstrong stepping into the deep sands of the moon. That night when she had watched it on the telly, she'd thought that the moon seemed so far away. She remembers, with a vague but by now almost unimportant embarrassment, wanting to be rid of her clothes that night, wanting to feel that distant, cold, magical presence on her skin.

But tonight the moon seems tiny, near at hand, a little pearl.

She steps out onto the terrace, wrapping her Oriental robe—
his
robe—around her.

It's funny, she thinks, looking out into the garden, how the architects of Southend hadn't wanted what she thought of as an English garden. Mr. Perry was right. They'd wanted to evoke something else, another world, with a formality more like Italy's; as if it were better to be someone they weren't, she thinks, and to have a garden that proved it! Below her the lawns lie solemn and quiet, laid out in straight lines and diagonals, so that no matter in which direction you walk, eventually you meet up with yourself again, steered back in the direction from which you've come, the lines crossing and interconnecting like the facets of a diamond. In the moonlight the breeze flickers through the trees and shrubs, igniting a silver light among the leaves. The dark, running shadows lie sharp as spear points across the grass. She thinks there can be no place on earth more beautiful than this place. How has it happened?

Once, she would have been frightened to be out here alone at this hour. This garden had felt to her like the end of the world, a place she and Manford alone inhabited, it seemed, a place where no one else would ever come. And yet now, she realizes, it doesn't seem like the last place on earth, but more—oh, more the inside
of her own head. Clean and quiet and dark; a map of herself, if she could draw such a thing, or one of Mr. Perry's resurrected buildings, the walls and roof and even the air inside it straightened and restored and blown free of dust.

She can see a light in the window above the stable; Jeremy must be there. She has to laugh at that, the fact that he's come to roost here now, after what he did. She imagines him setting up his things, his few things, whatever they are, in the stable apartment. Often, she thinks, there's surprisingly little we bring with us when we arrive. She had thought he was established with someone else, over there at the dairy. But maybe they've had a parting of the ways, Jeremy and his friend, and she sees that he thought he might have a new arrangement for himself here, with her.

And then she really is amused and sits down on the top step, pulling the robe over her knees. She feels herself smiling from ear to ear.

She is so surprised, still, to have figured it out.

She feels herself smiling into the dark, into the shape of Mr. Lamb standing there, smiling back at her as if to say: Here I've been all along. Here I am. I've been waiting for you.

N
ORRIS SITS IN
his kitchen. After a frantic search he's found Laurence Minor's letter to Vida in the pocket of his trousers. He spreads it out on the table before him, working it smooth with his fingers, over and over again, hour after hour, until it lies flat, though it continues to hold the creases. Laurence's handwriting is faint, barely legible, the script swimming away in places where Norris's fingers have smudged it.

He sits for a long while in his darkening kitchen, thinking. In the fields around him, a fox creeps from its den, runs swiftly
through the wood. Fern fronds at the feet of the great trees wind their stems ever tighter against the cool of night, their soft coils curling inward on themselves.

Norris looks up and stares at the empty wall across from him. Hallo, Cupid, you Artful Dodger. And it seems to him only justice, after all, that he should be visited by the notion of his old friend Cupid now, the cherub sitting down at the table across from him, laying down his bow and quiver, his face full of disappointment.

Oh, come, Norris thinks, pushing himself away from the table, disgusted.

Is this not, he thinks, what he had imagined when he'd felt Cupid put a tiny hand to his heart, stopping him in his tracks? Surely Cupid himself had had this experience before—the arrow flying straight toward its mark and then veering off into the wood, landing instead against a tree or deep in the soft earth. Landing nowhere.

But no. Because he'd felt it, hadn't he? Norris Lamb had felt Cupid's arrow. He
had
been struck.

And now—has it all come to nothing? Has he been pierced by love's tiny arrow, only to bleed forever? He'd wondered, even then, when it first began, whether it wasn't too late already. And yet he was given hope somehow. Each time he felt himself failing, something would happen and he could go on.

But there's nowhere to go now, he thinks. I'm done for here. It's over.

He looks down at the letter on the table. He knows what it means: Vida has had an invitation to spend the rest of her life in easy retirement, on a beautiful island, in the company of her family. If he closes his eyes, he can picture her bag on the bed, her dresses folded, the delicate underthings and stockings wrapped in
tissue. He can see her hat, placed on the bed by her coat, waiting. He can even see her on the boat; the Strintzis Lines ferry leaves Dubrovnik for Corfu. (He knows this, for he has a stamp of it; there was a handsome series of ferries issued several years back.) And there it is, a white prow breaking the water. He can see Vida at the rail now, her hat in her hand, the wind in her hair, her eyes alight with the wonder of it all. She belongs there, he thinks. It is just as he's always imagined her, like a ship's figurehead. She'd be a painting for all eternity, for every woman who has ever wanted to see the world. If they made it into a stamp, he thinks, it would circulate round the globe.
Maiden Voyage,
he'd call it.

And he is nothing but a criminal, a tamperer with the mails.

He could lie, of course, suggest some mishap, tell her he's never seen a letter so badly damaged, that he's quite horrified by its condition. He could suggest,
imply,
the terrible strain of carelessness that has crept into the mail service, the young people's increasing ambivalence about quality service, about doing a job well. He could speak with passion of the battle, how the Old Guard of the postal ranks fight with every fiber of their bodies, how they attend with heroic vigilance to each letter, each flown soul of a letter.

Yet, he might say, so many mishaps may occur! Why, airplanes veer mysteriously into the Andes, to crash and be lost forever in the muffling white snows! A letter carrier pedaling barefoot down a dusty lane is stricken by a heart attack, his front tire wobbling madly, his spilled cargo lifted at last by an errant wind and scattered across the dry plain. A lorry traversing some serpentine pass disappears in a reckless shower of stone. A letter floats out to sea and is swallowed by a whale. Oh, so many things that may go wrong! How can we guard against each one!

But even if he doesn't confess his crime—
that he has opened and
read her mail, that he has steamed open a letter in the back room of the post office
—well, the result will be the same. She will leave Hursley.

And the terrible thing, he realizes, is that she's earned it. She deserves it. He's never felt anything as fiercely as he feels this, though his heart breaks to know it.

And what will become of Manford?

Norris frowns. What about Manford?

A
FEW MINUTES
later, Norris stands up, folds Laurence's letter carefully, takes his cardigan from the hook in the hall, and puts the letter in his pocket, deep, so it won't fall out. He gathers up his stick from the front door and lets himself out into the night. He stops for a moment at his gate, turns his head to look down the lane. The lights have come on in his neighbors' houses, a blue light here and there where a telly is on, a yellow light over a kitchen sink, a white light blurring behind lace curtains in a bedroom. He doesn't often walk through the village, especially not if he is going to Southend, when he senses a certain stealth is appropriate; but tonight he feels drawn to the pavements and front gardens, the everyday business of the world closing up for the night, his world closing up for the night. Hidden doves rustle in the trees overhead, their soft warbling calls emanating sweetly from among the dark leaves.