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.”
Afterward the woman’s father had been oddly nervous around Norris, as though they shared some terrible complicity. So, women—well, until Vida, it all seemed simply too complicated, too important, for words. He has made do without, pushing the idea of the fairer sex, as he refers to them, far, far to the back of his thoughts. He knows other men who seem always to be on their own—Sir Winstead-Harris, for instance. He’s done all right, Norris thinks. Pots of money, anyway.
So. He is just a fifty-five-year-old stick whom his neighbors consider a confirmed bachelor. Terrified of women, perhaps? Or maybe a queer? (So careful with his appearance, etc.) He strikes some, in fact, as having the vulnerability of certain animals, the dolphin, perhaps, with its high, blunt brow and the dignity of a captive. With his mournful eyes and sometimes distracted manner, he is a fellow to be pitied, in a way, though he seems satisfied enough, always busy at the post office, full of helpful advice about the mails and so forth. Still, one does feel sorry for him; he’s exactly the sort you expect to be taken by surprise by a sudden myocardial infarction. Or to be bitten by a rabid dog. One senses—vaguely—some harm speeding toward him, its target certain, its course unswerving.
But he is more than that now, Norris thinks, walking through Hursley, opening up the post office, mounting the steps to the organ on Sundays, doing his wash or his gardening or his sweeping. He is more than any of that. No one has the slightest idea who he really is, what he’s capable of.
He can often be heard singing as he goes about his work these days.
He’s happy.
For the first time in his life, he thinks, he isn’t harm’s foolish target, the idiot about to be turned tail over teacup, the one with egg on his face. He’s standing directly in harm’s way now, isn’t he? He’s brave as a soldier, fully prepared. He has everything to risk, and everything to gain.
He is Norris Lamb in love. Lamb in love.
BUT HOW REALLY does Norris understand Vida? For that matter, Manford Perry?
Nowadays it’s no longer proper to call them idiots or fools, these souls with the strange air of the savant behind their otherwise childlike expressions. Handicapped is how Norris has overheard Vida describe Manford.
“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?
NORRIS 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.
“We should have a sign installed,” Mrs. Blatchford offered. “They have them for blind children, I think.”
“That’s deaf, you twit.” Mr. Niven snorted. “What would a blind child be doing crossing the road?”
“You know what I meant!” Mrs. Blatchford looked offended. “It’s the notion of it.”
“Yes, but what would it say? Idiot crossing? With a little silhouette of Manford on it?”
“Oh. Really.” Mrs. Blatchford shook her apron at him. “What a thought.”
Mr. Niven shrugged. “Well, I can’t be seeing to him every minute, can I?”
NORRIS WAS UNSETTLED by this conversation but grasped quickly the opportunity it presented. He now closes the post office just before four and walks down the road to see Manford (as unobtrusively as he can—he doesn’t wish to excite scrutiny) safely to the entrance to the lane.
It is fortunate that he has done so, for twice now he has saved Manford from some possibly terrible fate, favors of which Vida is unaware.
Once, having safely crossed the Romsey Road, Manford became distracted by a rare commotion at the blacksmith’s, which stands almost directly across the street from Niven’s Bakery. The two institutions—along with the church and the pub and a few of the older houses—fall into the category Mr. Niven refers to as Hursley’s historic jewels. It is true that few English villages still have a working blacksmith in 1969, though Norris sometimes thinks people continue to bring their horses and broken tools to Fergus simply because they are afraid not to, so foul is Fergus’s temper. On the first occasion of Norris’s acting as Manford’s anonymous protector, Fergus had been busy shoeing a difficult mare, and sparks flew from the fire. Manford ambled slowly toward the flame. Fergus, busy with the struggling horse, his own implements, and the glowing shoe, which had fallen with a clatter to the floor, failed to notice Manford sidling toward the fire; but Norris, loitering a ways down the pavement and trying not to appear unduly attentive, suddenly realized the danger. Who knew whether Manford understood fire at all?
Though Norris hurried forward, he felt unsure about how to approach Manford, how to divert him. But as soon as Norris cried his name in alarm, Manford turned toward him. Thinking quickly—he was proud of himself later, for this—Norris fished a butterscotch from his pocket. Holding Manford’s eyes in his own with what he hoped was a conjurer’s hypnotic trance, he stepped slowly backward, proffering the butterscotch and urging Manford along with his beckoning hand. “Come,” he said slowly, in a low, commanding tone. “Come this way, Manford.” And Manford followed Norris obediently out the door of the blacksmith’s. He took, when Norris jiggled it in his palm, the sticky sweet. And then, apparently recalling what he was about, he trotted off in the right direction.
Norris, who is not really a religious man despite his weekly employment at St. Alphage, closed his eyes briefly and made the sign of the cross over his heart. Then he went back to the post office, only to find several annoyed customers there in a queue outside, trying to look under the black shade pulled down at the window.
The second occasion when he managed to make himself useful to Manford and therefore to Vida, Norris again had to move just in time—more swiftly than a man of his years, and with such a bad back, might be expected to move—to take Manford’s strong arm and yank him up from the gutter where he had stepped down into the street to retrieve a sixpence. A lorry sped by, spraying them with gravel, honking madly.
“Go along, Manford,” Norris said then, as quietly as he could, trying to smile reassuringly. He didn’t wish to alarm Manford, though he was shaking all over at their near escape. “Don’t keep Vida—Miss Stephen—waiting.” He resettled his glasses on his nose.
Manford, who didn’t appear much perturbed by the incident, moved as if to leave, but as he turned away, Norris reached out and caught his sleeve. It was the first time he’d ever looked closely into Manford’s face, though he had seen him hundreds of times. But suddenly Norris wanted to have a better look at Manford, wanted to understand what resided there, what intelligence struggled up from within him. Norris took his handkerchief, with which he had already mopped his own sopping brow, and wiped Manford’s fingers clean.
“Put the sixpence in your pocket now,” he said, but had to help him with it.
It was a strange feeling to touch Manford, to address this tall man as though he were a child. But Manford smiled pleasantly enough, a great wide smile so much like his handsome father’s.
“Here,” Norris said, fishing in his pocket. “Do you fancy these?” He put a peppermint in Manford’s hand and turned him gently then to face down the road and the entrance to the lane. “Go on,” he said. “There’s the way home. Hurry along now.” And Manford did.
At that moment, Norris was struck by what he might feel if Manford were his son—were their son. He noticed that Manford’s shirt had come untucked. Such untidiness looked odd in a grown man. If Manford were his son, he thought, he could just trot up behind him now and fix him up. Instead, of course, he had to let him go.
IN GENERAL, NORRIS tries not to be too obvious about his interest in Manford’s safety. He wants it to be a surprise, for Vida and for everyone, the realization of his tender care, how he’s helped protect Manford. To that end he has purchased more than his share of doughnuts from Niven’s lately, just to have the opportunity to say a kind word to Manford. He believes he knows how much such gestures would mean to Vida.
“Lovely doughnut, Manford,” Norris often calls out to him at Niven’s, craning round to catch sight of him where he sits at his high stool in the bakery’s annex. Norris then gives Manford a wave, too, showing him the doughnut clearly in his hand and smiling encouragingly.
But he cannot resist tempting curiosity a little bit. Part of him, he knows, desperately wants to confide his secret to someone.
“I’ve a terrible sweet tooth of late, Mrs. Blatchford,” he says impulsively one day, leaning over the glass counter and giving a great sigh.
She glances up at him. “Well, that explains the number of doughnuts I’ve sold you lately, Norris Lamb,” she says. “You ought to have your sugar checked.” She studies him from under her queer set of eyebrows, thatched gray and running right across her forehead in a straight line, with hardly any gap in between. Norris finds her rather marvelous looking, like a circus performer. Mrs. Blatchford looks away to replace the tray of iced buns on its shelf. She wipes her hands on a cloth. “It’s not natural, a sudden appetite for jam doughnuts,” she adds. “And the sugar can be a problem for those of us getting on, you know.”
Those of you, you mean, Norris thinks gaily. But not much can insult him anymore. He just feeds the doughnuts to the sparrows, anyway, a bit at a time crumbled off between his fingers as he walks back to the post office, the birds hopping along beside him. (He brings an empty envelope for the jam; you wouldn’t want that under your heel!)
He worries that the birds draw attention to him, though perhaps no more so than the shades pulled down now over the windows at the post office rather more frequently and at odd times, in order for him to conduct what he refers to as his mysterious errands of love. Though so far, he has to admit, he hasn’t actually executed any of these errands, other than saving Manford’s life on those two occasions, of course. He’s still in what he thinks of as the planning stages.
He knows Vida would die should anything happen to Manford.
He does what he can.
EVERY DAY NOW, since Manford started at Niven’s, Vida comes out the gates of Southend House and walks down the lane and seats herself on the bench in the alcove of boxwoods, the bench with the pair of broody doves carved into the backrest. If he is quick, Norris can see Manford safely to the corner of the lane before hurrying down the path that winds through the cow-slips and nettles and over the cattle guards and by Mrs. Patrick’s well and round all the cow paddies to his spot behind the horse chestnut tree. From there he can catch Vida emerging from Southend House and, a moment later, Manford’s shambling progress toward her down the lane.
Often as not she has a hat on her head—a small gray hat, with a black ribbon around the brim and forking over the back like a duck’s tail. She’s lovely, Norris thinks, so lovely he wonders again that he never saw it before, her pale face like a cameo, and her long hands, and her chestnut hair. It perplexes Norris that he went so many years apparently insensitive to Vida’s charms. It seems to him that until he fell in love with her he must have been trapped in ice, like a mastodon.
He made sure to mention to Mrs. Billy when she stopped in the post office last week what a lovely job she’s been doing with Vida’s hair. It’s a pleasure for Norris to hear Vida’s name spoken aloud, to feel it pass from between his own lips as though it—she—were something with which he was intimately familiar.
“Doesn’t Vida Stephen look smashing lately,” he’d said casually as he wrapped up Mrs. Billy’s chocolates, took her parcel, and weighed it on the scales. “I caught sight of her just the other day and thought to myself—well, Millicent Billy’s not lost her touch, has she? You’re a wonder, you are, Mrs. Billy. You’ve a true talent for hairstyling, indeed.”
“Oh, she’s got lovely hair,” Mrs. Billy confided. (Privately, Norris calls her the Milly-Billy, or the Silly-Billy, or just the Billy. She has long, comical ears, with a chip of some dull stone affixed to the lobes, a turned-up nose, eyes a bit red at the rims, a kindly demeanor. Her husband is Mr. William Billy—to Norris, the Billy-Billy, or the Willy-Billy. With his bloodstained apron, as he peers out from between the skinned carcasses of pigs twirling dreamily on their meat hooks, Mr. Billy looks like a fox, Norris thinks, with a long brown flank and toothsome expression.)
Mrs. Billy leaned toward Norris, the chocolates he’d just sold her melting already in her damp hands.
“So thick, Mr. Lamb,” she said. She was wide eyed, Norris saw with satisfaction.
“And all that natural wave to it,” Mrs. Billy went on. “Of course, I’ve been dying to give her a stylish cut, but she never would let me. And then, right out of the blue she says to me the other day, ‘Not just the usual today, I think, Mrs. Billy. Time for—’ And then, don’t you know, she just stopped! Well, we exchanged our looks between us then, you know, Moira and myself. ‘Is it a man then, Vida?’ I teased her, taking up her hair in my hands, all that lovely hair. ‘Have you a boyfriend now?’ But she wouldn’t say a word more, and I gave her the same cut as usual. Such a pity.”
Mrs. Billy shook her head and sighed. “All those years, trapped with that poor dear boy in that empty house. She’s needed a husband, that’s what, but never had a moment to look and find one.” She leaned forward, regarded Norris carefully, as if to assess how he might respond to her next admission. “But do you know, Mr. Lamb? She’s a bit of a treat in store. We’ve invited her to join our book circle. We’re newly formed,” she went on, straightening her back and jutting out her chin. “We were saying amongst ourselves just the other day how we’d been neglecting the life of the mind. And then it came to us that we might do a book circle at the vicarage of an evening. I’m quite a reader myself, you know. And we’ve our first novel already chosen. Oh, don’t let’s start small, I said, with Pride and Prejudice or Emma. I’m so sick of Emma. Just because Miss Austen’s buried at Winchester cathedral, everyone thinks we must always read her and nothing else, just to be loyal! Let’s begin with a challenge, shall we, I said. Boldly forth, I said, into the avenues of learning. And Moira’s daughter has recommended us Lady Chatterley’s Lover, instead.” She lowered her voice. “It’s a bit racy in parts.”
But Norris was not listening. He had closed his eyes a moment against the imagined feel of Vida’s head in his hands, the rich and violent fall of her brown hair. “Yes, a scorcher,” he said dreamily.
“Oooo! No! Not that bad, Mr. Lamb. We’re not quite ready for that in Hursley, I think!” Mrs. Billy clasped her handbag, twitched at the wrists of her cardigan. “But we’ve asked her to join and she’s said yes. So that will be something for her, won’t it? And—well, you never know what may happen. A little change in our appearance, a little social activity, a little loitering amongst the great works of literature . . . Why, I’ve a feeling our Vida may be in for a bit of a wake-up. Hold on to your hat, I say, Mr. Lamb. I believe our Vida may be on the mark.”
She paused then. “Haven’t you ever thought, Mr. Lamb,” she said slowly, “that it would be the most romantic thing if they fell in love after all this time? She’s a bit young for him, I know. But wouldn’t it be just like—oh, like Jane Eyre! Mr. Rochester and the governess? And he is so very handsome.” This last she uttered sotto voce, peculiarly husky.
Norris stared at her. “What? Who?”
Mrs. Billy then gave him a great wink.
Norris continued staring at her a moment longer until her meaning became clear to him. Oh! How awful! “Mr. Perry?” he sputtered. He had to restrain himself from reaching across the counter and shaking Mrs. Billy, wringing the abominable notion from her. He’d never had any such thought, indeed. Given the circumstances, it seemed positively—heinous. “No, Mrs. Billy,” he managed at last, with as much force as he could muster. “I think that would be most—improper!”
“Oh, you men.” Mrs. Billy leaned over and patted his hand comfortingly. “You’ve no imagination,” she said airily. “None at all. I recommend a dose of literature for you as well, Mr. Lamb.”
“I think literature has nothing to do with it. I think—”
“Do you know?” She interrupted him. “I wanted to give her a rinse, as well. She’s more than a bit of gray. You take a close look next time you spy her. Tell me what you think. I’ve just the shade. Venus, it’s called. One of the new natural products. Lovely red highlights. You might say something to her in its favor.”
“Venus?”
“It’d take years off her, too,” Mrs. Billy said confidently. And then, putting the chocolates in her string bag, she gave Norris a coy look. “But aren’t you one to notice now, Mr. Lamb?”
Norris attempted to recover himself, drew himself upright. “Women are the flowers of the universe, Mrs. Billy.” He stopped. He liked the way it sounded. “It would be a crime not to stop and smell the roses now and again, wouldn’t it?”
Mrs. Billy opened her eyes wide then, as though all of a sudden, after years of doing business with Norris Lamb, passing him air letters for the daughter gone to Australia, watching him parcel up a package for the grandchild she’s never seen, she’d never noticed this romantic streak in him.
“Well then. I suppose we are,” she said, smiling. She gave him a little wave and a wink. “Flowers of the universe—I fancy myself a rose. What do you think?” She tittered. “And you, Norris Lamb. You’re nothing but an old bee now, aren’t you?” And then she left, twittering, the bell jangling behind her.
A bee? Perhaps, he thought. Something that alights for just an instant, gathers a lick of sweetness upon its tongue, moves on to the next flower. Though he shall never move on. Not now. Not now that it’s come to him, in this surprising and wonderful way, a veil drawn away from his eyes. Not now, he thinks, that he’s seen the light.