Lamb in Love Read online

  Lamb in Love

  A NOVEL BY

  Carrie Brown

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  FOR JOHN

  AND FOR

  HELEN AND SANDY MCCULLY

  FOR TAKING ME THERE

  If love be good, from whennes cometh my woe?

  Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

  Contents

  Prelude

  One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen | Seventeen | Eighteen

  Postlude

  Also by Carrie Brown

  Lamb in Love

  PRELUDE

  HERE’S VIDA NOW, passing through the faint bars of afternoon sunlight striping the lane, come to meet Manford. High above her head, in a perfect proscenium arch, the boughs of the oak trees rise and fall on the wind. Pairs of clouds slide by, soundless against the blue sky. Vida’s long shadow trails behind her over the grass.

  To Norris Lamb, the postmaster who has hidden himself behind a nearby horse chestnut tree, Vida’s passage takes a church-like eternity, and his ears fill with the deafening sound of his own racing pulse.

  But at last she arrives. Not twenty-five feet from Norris’s position behind the tree, Vida Stephen takes her place quietly on the bench fitted into the alcove of boxwoods, folds her hands, and turns her chin slightly to face the vanishing point on the curve of the lane.

  Manford, Vida’s poor charge, will be along now any moment.

  IT IS A warm afternoon, the last day of July. It has rained each morning over the last week, but in the afternoons the weather has cleared. By five—customarily the hour when Vida leaves Southend House to walk down the lane to meet Manford—the light is low and devotional, finely particled as though you could sift it through your hands.

  Vida and Norris wait there now, one upon her bench, her hands motionless in her lap, the other hidden behind his tree. Minutes tick past. Norris feels his diaphragm expand and fall with each breath, his heart steadying now after the first excitement of seeing Vida again. Then, as if at a signal from an unseen hand, the silent air around them ignites with the rise and fall of buzzing sound. Swarms of dragonflies—devil’s darning needles, Norris calls them—lift from the tall grass and veer down the lane. Vida raises her head at the purring their wings make.

  Despite her gravity at this moment, her patient attitude, her careful clothes, Norris sees Vida as something wild, something barely contained—something greater, perhaps, than she is. After all, she might protest, what is she but a middle-aged woman (forty-two in December), not very striking in any way? Though with lovely chestnut hair—everyone in the village agrees about that.

  What else can be said of her that they might all agree upon?

  That she has been loyally employed for nearly twenty years now as nanny to the retarded son of an expatriate American architect. That she was an undistinguished girl, whose constancy with Manford has shown her to better advantage than her neighbors might have predicted. That she wears a hat to good effect. That she—well, they cannot think of anything else. And then perhaps they are surprised to realize they don’t know anything at all about her, really.

  But now it is Norris’s privilege and pleasure to see her as no one else does, for he has been struck by love for Vida. And in his eyes, under the transforming inspection of his gaze—well, who can tell? Vida may become something other, something more than she appears at this very moment, waiting quietly on her bench, the world breathing delicately around her.

  A FEW DAYS ago—on July 20, 1969, Norris’s fifty-fifth birthday, in fact—American astronauts landed on the dusty ridge of Mare Tranquillitatis and planted a flag atop an atoll on the moon’s marvelous ashen desert.

  Late that same night, after sitting for nearly two hours in front of the BBC, watching the snowy footage of Neil Armstrong advancing slowly as a mime across the moon’s surface, Norris went out for a nocturnal stroll, awed to find himself alive—indeed, celebrating a birthday—at a time when such a thing as a man’s landing on the moon might be possible. He’d gone out just to have a look at the real moon, as he thought of it, and had stood for a while in the middle of the Romsey Road, his head craned back. Then he’d walked out across the fields under the stars and paused by a silvery, moss-covered stile to stare up into the sky. And at last he found himself led as if by habit onto the lawn at Southend House; he had walked there often in the past, to admire the architecture of the gardens. The moon hung high in the sky above him, and Norris had stared up at it, distracted and amazed, thinking there could be no greater miracle.

  And then he had seen Vida.

  Not for the first time, of course; they’d known each other for forever.

  But he’d never seen her like that before. He’d never seen anything like that before.

  And you don’t see a nearly naked woman dancing in the moonlight in a ruined garden and then just go on about your business as though nothing has happened, do you?

  VIDA, OF COURSE, had watched the moon landing, too. That’s how it happened.

  After hours of the proceedings on the telly, when she was sure it wouldn’t be a moment longer before they actually set foot on the moon itself, she ran upstairs and woke Manford. She helped him into his dressing gown, hurried him back down the stairs and through Southend House’s interminable passageways, back to the sitting room off the kitchen.

  But no matter how hard she tried, she could not keep Manford awake. She told him it was an important moment, a historic moment. But he wanted to lie down on the floor or to put his head in her lap. He put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes and rocked back and forth and yawned like a hippopotamus, and at last she gave up on him, let him have the sofa, and sat cross-legged tailor fashion by herself on the floor in front of the set. Once she reached out and touched the picture before her; a shower of tiny electrical sparks met her fingertips.

  She was disappointed not to have company for the event; even Manford’s company would have been better than nothing.

  When the program reverted to the commentary again, she realized how late it was, and yet how strangely alert, how alive, she felt. Manford still lay curled on the sofa, his face turned away from her, his hair standing up in the back.

  She stood and crossed the room to look out the window.

  The casement was ajar. It was a warm night, and from below, the bright, souring scent of grass and boxwood drifted up to her nose. She looked up at the moon. And it wasn’t enough then, being there inside the house. She wanted to be outside, nothing between her and the moon. She wanted to be standing there on the lawn in the moonlight. That one night, she wanted nothing between her skin and the world, nothing, at last, to come between what she wanted and what, in the end, she would discover she had.

  THIS LOVE FOR Vida has swept over Norris, overtaken him after a lifetime of crisscrossing the same streets as she, going in and out the same doors, conducting their business over the same counters.

  Oh, Norris knows how silly it looks, how they’d laugh, all his neighbors, if they knew. He knows he is a victim of a delicious assault, a caress from a lion’s paw.

  In his better moments, his braver moments, his love for Vida inspires joy in him—now, at last, at such an age, he has fallen in love. But it fills him with terror, too. How unlikely his prospects are. He could stay up half the night worrying about how it will all come to nothing, or worse—to ruin. To humiliation. But sometimes he grows nearly hysterical with the pleasure of his fantasies.

  Norris is postmaster for Hursley, a small village a few hours southwest of London in the county of Hampshire. He is also, not surprisingly, a philatelist, a collector and admirer of stamps. As such, he carries in his head a mental reel of images n
ot unlike that of the serious scholar of art history. Both may see the past as one of those shutter books one flips with one’s thumb to make a motion picture, time streaking forward, image by image.

  So when Norris dwells on Vida, it is often through the world of his stamps. He sees her masquerading in all the stamps he knows and loves so well: in a severe white uniform, holding aloft a beaker of some foaming substance, a look of serious and intelligent consideration on her face—this from the Christmas Island stamp celebrating the phosphate industry. Or in a glowing and bristling headdress of beads and feathers, from a definitive series issued by Papua New Guinea. He sees her face where the Madonna’s should be, eyes downcast, in the cracked pigment of the image reproduced in a commemorative stamp for St. Thomas. And sometimes, though it seems a bit absurd, he finds her features arranged under the queen’s crown and demure coif, her face etched in purple or blue or forest green.

  Yet, released from time to time from his library of stamps, he finds himself surprisingly—uncharacteristically, he would say—inspired. Closing his eyes, he imagines Vida without her blouse, her hair unwound, flying from the prow of a ship—a figurehead. He sees her all in white, ministering to a fallen soldier (himself, of course) safeguarded in a ruined Italian convent serving as hospital; her hands are infinitely gentle on the man’s broken limbs. He sees her dreamy and restful, her arms bathed in soapsuds, washing up his dinner plate. He even sees himself, bearing her in his arms onto an endless crescent of shore from a limpid, gaseous ocean; his own bathing trunks are dark blue, and his physique, very manly. This fantasy feels faintly apocalyptic to him. He couldn’t say where it comes from.

  LEANING AGAINST HIS horse chestnut tree, trying to breathe quietly, Norris travels over his image of Vida, so restful and patient now upon her bench. Why is he so sure that some recklessness resides within her, some capacity to surprise him, surprise them all? He is slightly shocked to realize that he can imagine claws retracted inside the soft pad of her foot, her teeth buried within her still and watchful face.

  Perhaps it is just the fact of Manford, her poor charge. Nothing should ever happen to Manford. Norris understands that Vida would, at all costs, prevent that.

  Although Manford is not young now. Not anymore.

  In light of that truth, that Manford is now a man himself, Norris sees as he never did or cared to before what Vida has within her. All along she has been faithful steward to Manford. She has prevented every accident, every misfortune—and certainly if ever there was a person who needed protection, Manford is it. Norris himself is quite overwhelmed by the notion of children, all the dangers waiting to befall them. Sometimes he finds himself almost intimidated by Vida, as if she has already seen right through him, seen how nervous children make him, how inept he becomes in their presence.

  He tries to see Vida now first as he thinks others must see her: As a pleasant woman with quiet manners, attractive, though not in any way you might consider showy. A woman who’s done her duty. And she’s grown into such a capable person—no one would have pegged her as someone to last with Manford Perry. Not that he isn’t sweet; it’s just—well, how dreary it must be sometimes. With no one to talk to.

  For Manford is not only retarded, but mute, too. Though perhaps it’s for the best—think what he might say if he could speak. Nothing but gobbledygook, likely. From their own doors and windows on the Romsey Road, the neighbors watch Vida pass down the street, Manford beside her, Vida chattering away happily as if they were actually having a conversation, her hands busy describing shapes in the air. And Manford himself squinting at the sun, shaking his head, running a hand over his hair, distractible as a dog. Almost no one can remember Vida as a girl anymore, when she ran errands for her mum at the shop, up and down the Romsey Road, those long braids flying out behind her, pink in her cheeks. Now the gestures of her youth, once so fluid and excitable, appear careful, economical. Vida is almost old enough now to be considered a spinster. And no one has ever known her to have a young man.

  What a pity, people say. She might have had children of her own.

  But Norris knows—he believes he alone knows—what is still there to be rescued and revived. He imagines that he sees what others, lacking the wondrous prism of his passion, cannot. She has been waiting, he thinks. All along, she has been waiting. And now, could she love him? Could she?

  Impossible, he thinks, closing his eyes against the surge of disappointment, the embarrassment. But then he reels, steadies himself against his tree, rights himself, his heart: I will love her so well, he thinks, that she will have to love me back. That’s the way it works.

  ONCE IN HER life, a long time ago, there was a spell when Vida was wild to get away from Manford, wild to be with people like her, to have what she used to think of as a “normal” life. It was almost as if she could see her life trailing away like a distant curl of smoke, going on without her. Her desperation lasted a little while—she had fits of weeping, wrote many letters of resignation to Mr. Perry that she tore up into tiny bits. And then somehow, one day, it was gone, and she felt like a person who has had a very high fever for several days and then wakes one morning to find the world calm and dry, a sparrow singing at the windowsill, a kettle blowing a shrill whistle from the kitchen downstairs.

  Sometimes, though she cannot say why, she finds herself blinking away tears—it happens occasionally when she sits quietly like this, waiting for Manford. She has a sudden apprehension, so quick and sharp that it feels like pain, of what she thinks of as the world’s transparency, the way everything is held together so loosely, so delicately, so impossibly—raise her hand, she thinks, and it will all fly apart; she will lose it forever.

  One

  SOMETIMES, WHEN HE is hiding behind the horse chestnut and spying on Vida, Norris dares to lean slightly to the east and watch for Manford.

  Since he has been pondering Vida and the circumstances of her life, Norris cannot decide for himself whether Manford is blessed or cursed. Certainly Manford has been lucky to have Vida, he thinks, though of course it is an unwelcome blessing to need a nanny all your days, no matter how charming and dependable she may be. And blessed, too, after a fashion, by his state of permanent innocence. But surely in all other ways it is a curse to be as dim-witted as Manford, unequipped to consider the marvelous complexities of the world, to tarry awhile in the amusing company of one’s own thoughts and the genius of society’s inventions. Does Manford, grown to manhood now, a strapping twenty-year-old fellow recently employed at Niven’s Bakery to stuff the doughnuts with jam, have even a single thought? Something that might be described as having a beginning and a middle and an end, with a little flash of revelation glowing in the center of it? What does he think as he fills those doughnuts? Norris can’t say for certain that Manford thinks anything at all, and the notion perplexes him.

  Whenever he’s there in the lane, hoping to catch sight of Vida, Norris prepares himself for the sound of her voice, for the frisson of delight that runs over his body. He hears her, of course, for Manford does not speak, has never been known to speak. Every time, Norris listens for the receding murmur of Vida’s voice as she receives Manford’s staggering embrace and inquires after his day (but isn’t it pointless to ask if you can’t be answered?) and leads him back down the lane to Southend House.

  At that moment, after they’ve gone, Norris always thinks: It is so pretty in the lane. And he raises a hand delicately as if toward a work of art.

  ALONG WITH SERVING as Hursley’s postmaster, Norris is also amateur organist for St. Alphage, an entirely voluntary situation inherited from his grandmother, who, until she lost her sight, was pleased to be the only woman in Hampshire, she imagined, to hold the position of organist. As a consequence of her gender, she had begun offering her abilities free of charge, some vague understanding between her and the church committee that hers was a temporary service until the original organist was returned—safely, they all prayed—from the war. He was not, however. And by the time Norris
was sufficiently proficient, the job was thought to be a sort of family office. He’s never had a shilling for all his Sundays, though his repertoire is, he acknowledges, somewhat limited.

  A philatelist and bachelor and collector of obscure reveries, Norris has never in his whole life had what might be described as a love affair. But he still remembers the name—Mary—of the sweet-faced girl who sat in front of him in the third form and whom he tried to kiss one day after school, darting out from behind a monkey puzzle tree and grabbing her to him. He remembers the feel of her upper arms within the circle of his hands, the slight yield of her flesh. But the girl had pulled away from him in horror, wiped her hand across her mouth, and burst inexplicably into tears, a response that mortified Norris so powerfully that the memory of it haunted him forever after, the scene replaying itself over and over again in excruciating detail, just when it seemed he might be free of it.

  There was that one other time, the sad and mysterious incident with the weeping woman. Why do they all always seem to cry?

  This woman’s father, a postmaster in Winchester and an acquaintance of Norris’s through the stamp league, had asked whether Norris wouldn’t play escort to his daughter at a dance held at the St. Jude Hospital, where she was a nurse; her boyfriend, the father intimated, was a doctor who’d recently given her the brush-off. Norris, though nearly sick with anxiety, had dutifully presented himself to the girl at her flat. They had a cup of Pimm’s at the dance, meanwhile watching other couples go round and round the large, empty room with its green walls and white plumbing. A steady rain beat dark against the window-panes. Norris, his heart racing, had asked the young woman to dance—she was quite pretty, after all. But once in his arms, she had wept so profusely and with such ferocity that she had soaked the shoulder of his suit coat. Eventually, with dismay, he had managed to steer her outside, still pressed to his shirtfront. He had driven her home and there he had left her off, still crying so hard that he could understand nothing of what she said other than, “Do forgive me.”