MANFORD IS HABITUALLY a late sleeper. This morning, opening his door a crack and peering in at him before going downstairs, Vida observes that he sleeps the way a giant would, laid down as if felled over a patchwork of fields, his body cradled by a valley, fir trees bent like rushes beneath his cheek. Manford’s dark, heavy head rests on a thick forearm. One calloused foot protrudes from the end of the bedclothes. Vida leans in and picks up his trousers and shirt from the floor, folds them over her arm. She retreats and goes quietly downstairs. Dim morning light, wavering with rain, lies across the floor in fluid stripes.
Since Manford started at Niven’s, Vida has had more time than she knows what to do with. Still, she’s uncomfortable with nothing to do—it makes her nervous—and so this morning she fixes herself a cup of tea and then sits down at her little desk in the sitting room off the kitchen to write a letter. Behind her, light rain falls against the window glass with the soft sound of fingertips striking a tabletop.
“Dear Uncle Laurence,” she begins.
“I’m ashamed it has taken me so long to write and thank you for the card and the lovely little painting you sent for my birthday. (Forty-one years old! Can you believe it?) You’d think that with only Manford to look after I’d have heaps of time, but somehow—actually, I don’t really know how to account for it—the time seems to go by so quickly. In fact, I’ve more time than ever these days because—you’ll never guess—I have got Manford a job! Yes! Mr. Perry doesn’t know yet; he’s off in Amsterdam, I think it is, this week. Or perhaps that’s next. In any case, Manford’s working at Niven’s now. You remember Mr. Niven? And Mrs. Blatchford? They’ve been so kind, really, and I think it will do Manford a world of good, being a useful member of society. And now that he’s working and gone most of the day, I have all this time to myself. So much time! Perhaps too much, really. I don’t exactly know what I shall do with myself.
“But I do want to catch up on all my correspondence, and you are first on my list. It is a lovely painting, really. I do thank you. I think one of your earlier letters (I have them all, you know, saved in a box!) mentioned the pensione where you first stayed when you went to Corfu. Do you remember? Is this painting the view from the terrace there? I thought it might be. Something about it—perhaps that funny group of big rocks out in the water—made me think of that letter. Oh! And the Palinurus elephas you ate for dinner each evening; that was in the letter, too, and now I see them here on the table—a still life, isn’t it?—right in your painting! (You see, I’ve nearly memorized your letters!) Spiny lobster just brought up from the sea! I like the sound of that! It’s quite a grand thing, you know, having a relative in such an exotic place as Corfu. I think it makes me quite the celebrity here, though Mrs. Billy’s got a daughter in Australia now.
“And what news have I to tell you? Well, very little has changed here in Hursley (ha ha. What would you expect?) except that St. Alphage has a new organ since this spring. Some people say Mr. Lamb has been inspired ever since. Do you remember Mr. Lamb? He hasn’t changed at all since you’ve gone away. It’s funny, actually, now that I think about it—in fact, he looks probably very much the same as when you left! Still very tall and thin. So, he’s the same, except that he seems a bit more, oh, impulsive, I find him lately. In conversation, that is. In any case, I do think I detect a change in his playing since the new organ arrived—it seems a trifle ferocious, if you ask me. But perhaps it is just the instrument. It is very grand. Mr. Perry helped pay for it, of course.
“I’ve planted a pot of lavender at Mum’s stone in the cemetery at St. Alphage. It looks very nice. The vicar says it’s the lime in the stone that makes the lavender flourish so.
“Well, I’ll sign off now. Thank you so much again for remembering my birthday. Forty-one years old! Think of it! My life’s half over, isn’t it?
“Your loving niece, Vida Stephen.”
When she finishes writing, Vida looks up at the clock on the mantel and sees that it’s nearly half past eight, time to wake Manford if he’s to be at Niven’s on time. He likes an egg for his breakfast, too, and she likes to have him well fortified for the day, especially now that he’s a working man, as she tells him. Perhaps he’d like a bit of ham to go with his egg, she thinks. He so loves salty things.
For a moment she wonders what her uncle Laurence, her romantic uncle Laurence, gone to Corfu now nearly twenty years ago, would be having for his breakfast. She turns her head slightly, as if to encompass a different view, and the pictures fly up easily, habitually, before her eyes, the way one encounters photographs in a long-familiar scrapbook: She imagines banquets laid upon tables at a cliff side, imagines herds of bright white goats sending stones scuttling down the mountain face, imagines silver fish twisting free of the sea, imagines a bell ringing. She has thought of Corfu so often over the years, bringing it up to comfort herself if she’s worried about something, or going over the island in her mind if she’s having trouble falling asleep. Of course, it isn’t the real island—only the one she knows from Laurence or from what she’s made up. It’s her imaginary place.
But Manford will have to settle for an egg and ham and no view at all, she thinks then, closing her eyes briefly, and reaching up to shut the lid of her desk. An egg and ham and a pot of tea.
WHEN THEY REACH the Romsey Road an hour or so later, Vida takes her hand from Manford’s and turns his attention to her. “Run along now, Manford,” she says, affecting an air of casualness. “They’re waiting on you at Niven’s.”
Manford does not acknowledge that she has spoken to him but bends over and inspects an insect at his feet.
“Manford!” Vida says pleadingly, all pretense dropping away.
He raises his head guiltily.
“Go on,” she says, now that she has his attention. She waves her hand. “Go on now, while there’s a lull.”
Manford turns and steps off the curb. When he pauses and looks back over his shoulder, Vida taps her wristwatch. “You’ll be late,” she says warningly.
But Manford fails to move, standing there in the road as if something important has just occurred to him. Vida makes an impatient noise and steps into the road to take Manford by the arm, escorting him briskly across the street. At the courtyard to Niven’s Bakery, she leaves go his arm, brushes at a smudge on his lapel, gives him a kiss on the cheek and then a little nudge. A bus speeds past behind them in a cloud of sour exhaust.
“Now hurry,” she says, and turns her face away deliberately.
Manford hesitates a moment and then disappears obediently into the courtyard. Vida remains with her back turned until she’s sure he’s gone inside. Then she leans round the corner of the wall and checks, just to be certain he isn’t lurking outside the door, suddenly shy. But no, she can see Mrs. Blatchford coming out from behind the counter with Manford’s apron on her arm, so it’s all right. She thinks she can see Mrs. Blatchford smiling, but it’s difficult to tell.
Vida straightens her skirt. She regards Niven’s courtyard, the geraniums at the window. Perhaps another day, she thinks. Perhaps another day and he’ll do it himself. Still, she mustn’t be in a rush. It has gone so well, this matter of finding Manford independent occupation. She thinks of him on the high stool in the annex, surrounded by the sweet smell of baking bread. She thinks of the close, high walls of the courtyard before the bakery door, the safety of the small enclosure. She thinks of the small view from the windows: the whitewashed walls, the geraniums, the verbena. She travels over it in her mind like a list, every hazard accounted for.
It is part of her training to have Manford walk a bit of the route to Niven’s by himself each day. A little more each week, she’d thought, until he could do the whole job himself, from Southend House all the way to the bakery, and back home again at the end of the day. But he won’t leave hold of her hand except for the last bit, when they are right at the courtyard. She doesn’t know what to do about this. Lately, and for the first time—she cannot say why, though perhaps it is just having Manford be even this slightest bit independent now—it has occurred to her that something might happen to her, something fatal. She is grateful that she has—God knows why—been prevented from entertaining this thought before, for she finds it so painful as to be almost intolerable. And now she feels an awful urgency to teach Manford so many things. There are so many important things she has neglected to teach him, she sees now. Why, at any moment she might be—oh, struck by a bus, she thinks, turning away from Niven’s courtyard and facing the Romsey Road. Struck by a bus! And then what would happen to Manford! She feels a real pain in her heart.
Oh, don’t be such a worrywart, Vida Stephen, she tells herself helplessly. No one likes a worrywart.
MRS. BLATCHFORD SETS Manford up each morning with a cup of tea on the high stool in the old dairy, where she can keep an eye on him from the bakery by stepping into the hyphen, calling to him until he turns around slowly, his great smile taking over his whole face.
“Every morning! And always with a big smile! It’s like he hasn’t seen you for an age!” Mrs. Blatchford tells Vida in an undertone, when Vida stops in around midday later that same day on her way to the post office. She often stops in, just to check on Manford.
“I know,” Vida says. “It’s like that every time.”
As if to demonstrate his happiness, Mrs. Blatchford leans over the counter and calls to him. “All right, Manford? Are you coming on?” He waves and smiles and goes back to his work.
“He’s been no trouble at all,” Mrs. Blatchford says, returning her attention to Vida. “Not in the least. Really—” She seems to want to say something grand now, something about how wonderful it is to have him there, something to make all of them—Vida, Manford, and herself—part of a fortunate group. “I can’t think how we ever got on without him,” she says at last. And Vida sees surprise suddenly flutter up into Mrs. Blatchford’s face. She really does mean it, Vida discovers. She really can’t imagine what it was like before Manford.
Vida thinks of how Manford sits there all morning, slowly filling the doughnuts with jam from the canvas bag, setting them out on their paper-covered trays. At eleven, when the sun arrives at the windowsill and lights up the cool, whitewashed walls in the bakery, the geraniums glowing in the window box, she knows that Mrs. Blatchford will come and fetch Manford for tea and a bite to eat. Mrs. Blatchford tells her that he holds her hand when she comes to lead him to the table, but only for a moment. He seems a little wary still, she says. He puts his hands over his face when she speaks to him if he’s feeling too shy for conversation.
IN THE EVENINGS, during their supper, Vida has been working on his manners. She’s ashamed that she hasn’t spent more time on this—she believes that it pains him to be so awkward. But it isn’t easy, and sometimes she thinks it’s better just to let him eat in peace, without always nudging him about where his elbow is or leaning over to wipe his chin for him.
During their practice sessions, which she has begun since he started at Niven’s—as he takes both lunch and his tea there now—she holds the cup to his lips, touches his mouth with her finger, speaks softly to him. His eyes watch her face. He tries.
“Gently, Manford,” she says. “As though kissing a flower.”
She spills a bit of tea into the saucer and he practices holding it, watching the tea lap the edge.
“Little bites,” she says, passing him a triangle of toast spread with jam. He tries.
“Your napkin goes here,” she says, spreading it on his lap where he pats it. She doesn’t like it tied around his neck anymore. Makes him look the baby.
AT NIVEN’S THEY have elevenses and lunch and tea, and after each meal Manford goes back to the dairy to work. Now they have him icing the cakes as well. This he does surprisingly well, Mr. Niven says to Vida, the tiny garlands and miniature roses each set in their place, sometimes a fantastically shaped leaf or cluster of petals that the others come gradually to recognize as a likeness—a good likeness, in fact—of some native plant, nettle or cowslip.
Mr. Niven, who isn’t usually one to appear surprised by much of anything, likes to stop his work and look over Manford’s efforts from time to time. “It’s quite remarkable,” he tells Vida. “It’s as if he’s—memorized things. The way they look.”
“He does have a talent for it, doesn’t he?” Mrs. Blatchford agrees. She cocks her head and looks over a tray of cakes. “Though they’re not what you would call traditional looking, are they?”
Mr. Niven frowns at a particular cake, iced with a tapestry of rampant, though lovely, green weeds. “Shall we have trouble selling it, do you think?”
“Well, we mustn’t discourage him,” Mrs. Blatchford says with conviction. “No one wants it, we’ll just give it to the vicarage. They slice all their cakes aforehand.”
THE IDEA OF the job at Niven’s came to Vida so suddenly one day that she couldn’t quite believe it hadn’t ever occurred to her before. It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted to see him feeling useful. One time, in fact, she’d explored the possibility of the Spastic Society’s workshop, where people like Manford could have a job. She and Manford had gone on the bus one day into Winchester, and they’d had a look at the place.
The workshop was in an old garage, converted into a hall so brightly lit that Vida found herself squinting as she introduced herself to the woman who bustled over to greet them and introduced herself as Matron, of all things! As if Dickens or Trollope or someone might have invented her, Vida thought.
The employees—the clients, as Matron referred to them—some of them tied up in wheelchairs with twisted sheets so they wouldn’t slump over, sat at long tables, nodding off over their work. As far as Vida was able to tell—Matron was Indian and had such a pronounced accent, full of wobbles, that Vida could hardly make out her trebled inflections—the employees were assembling luncheon trays for prison inmates. A plastic cup, plastic cutlery (no knife) wrapped in cellophane, and a paper serviette were put on each tray, and then the whole thing was sealed in more sticky cellophane by three young, overweight chaps stationed at the end of the table.
Occasionally clients would look up at Vida and Manford as they passed with Matron. Their expressions—desperate and defeated, as though their tongues had been cut out—had made Vida feel frantic with sympathy. On a table by the door, an urn for hot water sputtered steam; a collection of mossy mugs and tea things were arranged on a tray on an old desk under the one window, its glass still greased over with streaks of whitewash. A box with half a tired-looking cake in it sat nearby on a folding chair. Someone had rather inexpertly painted a rainbow and several disproportionately large flowers on the wall near a hand-lettered sign that read: WE WORK QUIETLY. WE KEEP OUR HANDS TO OURSELVES. WE NEVER, NEVER BITE OURSELVES OR ANYONE ELSE.
Manford had been positively ashen when they’d left, as if he’d been breathing in tiny, shallow breaths the whole while.
Riding home on the bus that afternoon, after a comfortingly large lunch in a cheerful, busy tearoom, Vida had held Manford’s hand between her own and squeezed it often. He’d seemed subdued, and she had worried that she’d done the wrong thing by bringing him with her, though she didn’t know who else she would have left him with.
That evening, Mr. Perry, who had been in London, had come home unexpectedly. Knocking at the door of his study that night, she had entered at the sound of his voice and stood before his desk, rigid with determination, to relate the events of the morning.
“And under no circumstances,” she had said, finishing up, “will I remain in your employment any longer if you will be recommending that Manford attend such a facility.”
Mr. Perry had looked up at her, surprised and faintly amused. “Why, Vida,” he said. “I never said I was in favor of it.”
She had stopped. “No,” she said, hesitating. “No, I know you didn’t. I’m just saying—it was awful. I just thought you should—know that.”
“Well, thanks.” Mr. Perry had smiled up at her. “Thanks for letting me know.”
And after that, she’d put the matter of Manford’s occupation out of her mind—until just this summer, passing the bakery with Manford, the thought of it suddenly came to her again. She had stopped and stared in through the window at the glass cases with the cakes and buns, the loaves of bread stacked like bricks. She’d heard the bell jangle, heard Mrs. Blatchford laugh. A customer, leaving, tipped his hat to Vida and Manford, looked over Manford the way people who don’t know him do, taking a secretive second look as if they might have been mistaken about what they’d seen and were fearful of being rude. Manford looked back and then up at the sky, squinting. Vida patted his arm and then opened the door.
“Well, good morning to you, Vida,” Mrs. Blatchford had said.
“Good morning, Mrs. Blatchford,” Vida replied. Vida saw Manford look the buns over hungrily, though he’d just had egg-in-a-hole at home. He is a bottomless pit, Vida thought, always after something to eat.
She asked Mrs. Blatchford for a loaf of wheat bread and looked around with what she imagined to be casual interest. “It’s a busy job you have here, Mrs. Blatchford,” she said. “Do you still do all the baking yourself?”
“Oh, yes. Myself and Mr. Niven,” Mrs. Blatchford said, sighing. “We can hardly keep up with it some days.”
“You’ve enough help, though, I suppose?” Vida asked.
“Oh, we’ve never enough help. Can’t keep them, you know. They’re all off to London, the young nowadays. Don’t want to stay in the village.”
“Manford, here—he loves the bakery,” Vida said then.
“Well, we’ll have to give him something special then, today,” Mrs. Blatchford said. “A jam doughnut in the bag for you, Manford.” And she turned, a bit of tissue in her hand, to lift one from a tray, put it in the paper sack.
“Oh, Manford,” Vida said. “Look at what Mrs. Blatchford’s given you. Such a kind thing. A jam doughnut. You know,” she went on after a moment, “Manford is a steady soul. Completely tireless, in fact. Not like myself. I’m getting on now, Mrs. Blatchford. I can hardly keep up with him anymore.” She laughed a little.
“Oh, Vida. Now, how old are you?” Mrs. Blatchford looked her up and down. “What is it? Thirty-five? Thirty-six?”
“Oh, no! Forty-one, Mrs. Blatchford! I’m forty-one now!” Vida said. And then she brightened, deliberately. “But isn’t it fortunate,” she said, “our having this conversation this morning?” She waited a moment, allowing her gaze to travel over the place, its sweet smell of bread rising, the sugared buns, the iced cakes. “For I’ve been looking for a place of employment for Manford, Mrs. Blatchford. Something useful for him to do during the day. We all need to feel useful in the world.”
“We do,” Mrs. Blatchford said, standing still, staring at Manford.
“He could be most useful to you,” Vida said.
“Could he,” Mrs. Blatchford said slowly.
And it was done.
HE STARTED THE next Monday. And once they saw that he could take care of himself all right, spend a penny on his own, come out buttoned up properly, not bother anyone, they took him in as if they’d been waiting for an opportunity like this all along. Vida could have told them this, if they’d asked, how he would make them feel happy.
But once he’d begun at Niven’s, in that first week, when the days without him seemed so long and empty, she had time on her hands, time in great quantity.
During one of those empty mornings, she’d set about going through her mother’s things. She’d been putting it off for a long time. It made her feel sad to look at the boxes; she missed her mother, whose last months had been painful and unhappy. Nursing her own mother, along with looking after Manford, had been a strain on her. While it was going on, she stopped by Dr. Faber’s one day to have him look at a funny toenail of Manford’s for her. But Dr. Faber had instead looked her over with studious concern, noting the tired shadows on her face. He’d wanted to give her something to help her relax, sleep better at night. But she’d worried about not being wholly alert—one might be needed at any moment, she’d pointed out to him—and so had declined.
She had, though, decided she could wait to go through her mother’s things until she felt recovered. So three days into Manford’s first week at Niven’s, after doing as much housecleaning as she could contrive for herself, she carried the boxes with her mother’s belongings from a spare room into the sitting room off the kitchen, where she and Manford spent most of their time. And among the papers and mementos, she found her uncle Laurence’s letters to the family from over the years.
Vida had been nineteen when Laurence left, just after the end of the war. Over time, he’d become in her mind a figure so improved in stature that she could scarcely feel her relation to him. She’d seen him only three or four times since his move to Corfu, most recently at her mother’s funeral, but he had always written regularly, and he was good about remembering important occasions such as her birthday. Vida’s parents, who’d run the small grocery in Hursley now managed by the Spooners, thought he’d felt guilty, abandoning them. He’d always been different, though, Vida remembered, wanting nothing more than to wander around the downs, painting pictures. One day he’d abruptly sold them his share in the grocery, and a week later he had left for Corfu, surprising them all. He was a bit mysterious about his life on Corfu, but he’d never asked for money, and his letters were always happy.
He’d written almost weekly in the first years he was gone, describing Corfu and his days there, how he spent them painting landscapes or arrangements on tables; he always employed the Greek words for what he saw: the bottles of kokkino, the spiny mauve heads of anginares and tempting shapes of kolokithia, the salads of dandelion leaves. Sometimes he sent a painting by parcel post, a dense little landscape carved out with a palette knife on a block of wood with canvas stretched across it. Once he’d sent a lovely figure of a young man, nude, bent over the rocks by the sea. Vida’s mother had hung the paintings on the wall behind the counter at the grocery and would point them out to customers.
“Laurence is coming along splendidly over there in Greece,” she’d say. “He’s sent us another canvas. Isn’t it grand?”
To Vida, who imagined Laurence’s life in brilliant, cinematic detail, the presence of this relation in her life felt sometimes like its most important, most precious aspect.
VIDA IS IN the habit of saying to Manford every little thing that comes into her head, though he can’t say a word in return. But she runs on, asking a question and answering it herself, amusing them both. She knows that people have a laugh at her, seeing her walking along with Manford, chattering away to him. The other day she saw deaf old Patrick Farley, sitting on the wall by the blacksmith’s, point her out to Fergus. Patrick always spoke much louder than was necessary. “There they are,” she heard him shout, ducking his head and spitting a caramel-colored wad into the street. “Two Daffy Ducks.”
But Vida likes to talk, loves the whole idea of conversation—people pushing what she sees as a little boat of goodwill back and forth across a pond; she watches people in tearooms, at church, studying the way their mouths work, their expressions as they talk. So she talks to Manford, talks to the violent-tempered green budgerigar in his cage in the kitchen, talks to herself.
One evening, Vida read aloud to Manford a bit of one of Laurence’s earliest aerogrammes, the paper fine as tissue between her fingers. Laurence’s script was massive and gorgeous, the ascendant strokes like mountain peaks.
“This week I have been painting the olive orchards,” she read to Manford, settling herself in her chair. “The trees are monumental, fifty feet tall some of them, and as old as five hundred years. The Greeks rig up white netting beneath them to catch the fruit when it falls and spare them the tedious job of picking. It looks like a shroud drifting among the trees, or a mist. It is very beautiful, and very green, here. Much like the countryside round Hampshire, in an odd way.”
“Oh, think of it, Manford,” Vida said, sinking back against the pillows of her chair, looking out the window into the darkening gardens at Southend House. Manford lay on the rug before her, pushing his toy lorries back and forth over the carpet, his head resting on his arm, his heels showing through the holes in his socks. “Old Uncle Laurence,” Vida went on, “sitting at the base of Mount Pantokrator, watching the schools of dolphins, painting the olive orchards. Wouldn’t you like to see that for yourself?”
She reached over and touched Manford’s hair, smoothing it away from his forehead. He took her hand, pressed it to his cheek, and then turned it over in his own and with his finger traced its lines and creases. He brought her hand up close to his face and sniffed.
“What do you think, Manford?” she said, smiling down at him. “Shall we see the world one day after all?”
She looked up and saw herself reflected in the window glass. Her face, from the small distance across the room, seemed tiny and insignificant—like the head on an old coin, she thought, someone long gone and unrecoverable, rubbed away beneath the thumb. She stared at herself a moment longer, the tiny, white, frightened triangle of her own face glowing in the window across the room.
When Manford clambered to his feet and crossed the room to turn on the television, the image of her reflected face was swallowed instantly in a square of brilliant blue, a blue, she thought, as bright and miragelike as the waters of the Ionian Sea.