SO THEY KNEW after the trip to London that Manford would never be right. Arrested in his development, Mr. Perry said. Perhaps he would grow to have the mind of a five-year-old, but not likely more. Nor would he likely ever speak. He’d always be clumsy, childlike. Occasionally, they were told, he might exhibit some more mature talent, but it would be without significance—not indicative of anything. More like a stray bit of intelligence, random and unconnected, cropping up out of the fog of his mind. There would be nothing to attach itself to, though; no order.
“Like a lily in a patch of weeds, Vida,” Dr. Faber said, trying to explain it to her. “A daylily. Lasts just a day, no more, and then it’s gone.”
In the beginning she didn’t quite believe it. She thought they were wrong, for she could see that in some ways he was intelligent, lively in his mind, crawling round patiently after an ant on the terrace, letting it walk up on his finger. He was learning something there, down at eye level with the ground. She knew he was. And he was always so gentle with things, even when he was a baby. She imagined he would, slowly, over time, defy all their predictions, grow up into a man—maybe even a doctor himself, she thought wildly, like Dr. Faber.
And he has grown up, in his way, she acknowledges, though not ever as she’d hoped, of course. She has to say that now.
She used to read to him, page after page, Shakespeare and the Bible and Henry James and Chekhov, books she found in Mr. Perry’s library. And from the back, as he stands on the terrace looking out over the ruined gardens at Southend House, Manford looks grown enough, fully developed, broad shoulders and straight back. But when he turns, you see the belly slack like an old man’s, the wandering face, the untidy hair. And it gives you a start, Vida knows.
Still, there are things that do excite him. Flowers, for example, the scented variety in particular. Any sweet scent, for that matter. She remembers buttoning his shirt collar one day when he was a boy. He caught at her hand, raised it to his face, breathed in deeply. She was wearing on her wrists the scent Mr. Perry had given her for Christmas—Joy. She wears it every day now, has for years. She likes the way it makes her feel, a bit sophisticated. She knows it costs a lot of money.
Manford held her wrist the way a small child holds a bear to himself, hugging it. He dipped his nose to her hand, turned it over between his own, round and round as if he couldn’t fully catch the scent. She thought to put a dab of it on his own wrists and ran up to her room to fetch the bottle. But later she regretted it, as he kept his hands crossed up against his face all day, his eyes closed, breathing it in. Now she just wears it herself, lets him hold her arm if he likes. They sit like that sometimes, Manford holding her arm, looking at the gardens, just sitting and looking.
Sometimes, though, she would try to rouse Manford. She was just bored or impatient. She was young when she started with him, of course, and she can remember wanting to run, wanting to set up a clatter in the halls. On weekend nights, when she’d go to the pub with a friend, she’d be amazed at the commotion of it all, after the quiet of Southend House—the punching laughter in the warm room, the bristled darts flying toward the target hung on the wall, someone’s arm around her waist, teasing, tugging.
But she hated the way people spoke of Mr. Perry and Manford sometimes, the way they poked fun at him.
“Feed me, Nanny Stephen,” said a big, ugly lad named Simon one night, leaning heavily on her arm, showing her his open mouth, flooding her with his beery breath. “Feed me, Vida, like you do your idiot.”
She stepped back, revolted. And before she knew what she was doing, she slapped him hard across the face.
For a second he looked shocked, put his hand to his mouth. “Temper, temper,” he said then, softly, meanly, and turned away.
“He didn’t mean anything by it, Vida,” her friend Charlotte said, turning around on her stool as Vida gathered her things to leave. “Come on. Don’t be in a huff.”
But she couldn’t stay there in the pub then, not after that. Walking home alone to her parents’ house, she thought of Manford asleep in his bed, the moonlight falling into his room, his heavy head, his curled hands.
SHE’D HOPED HE could learn to catch a ball, and she played with him outside by the fountain. She’d work her arms around—“Watch my fantastic windup, Manford!” she’d call, in an American accent—and toss the ball at him. But unless it sailed right up into his face, he wouldn’t catch it. He couldn’t seem to follow it unless it was right in front of him. She would climb up on the fountain’s edge, play that she was going to fall in. “Help! Help!” she’d cry, to make him laugh.
And Manford would stand there and laugh, that choked and silent laugh, bent over with his hands planted on his thighs like an old man. The joke never seemed to get old for him, the funny idea of her falling in and getting all wet.
To help improve his balance, his coordination, she would play the phonograph for him—“Try a mazurka, or a rondo,” Dr. Faber suggested thoughtfully, when she explained her idea to him. “Anything with a strong rhythm. And let me know how you progress. I’d be interested.”
She started by trying to teach him to clap his hands, kneeling before him, bringing his palms together.
“Come on, Manford,” she’d say, staring at his face, trying to communicate what she meant with her enthusiasm, her smile, her eyebrows lifted high. But he couldn’t seem to catch the rhythm, couldn’t seem to catch on, watching her with a worried look, as she brought his hands together over and over again.
The night she tried to teach him to dance, he was nearly grown, eighteen or nineteen, with a heaviness to his limbs that came of overeating. She felt guilty about his size; but she hated to deny him anything, and he’d point to the cake tin so pathetically. She’d give him a despairing look. “Oh, only a little piece,” she’d say, laughing when he tried to hug her. “Think of your belly!”
She tried only once to teach him to dance; even today she doesn’t like to recall the occasion.
That night, Mr. Perry had been out to dinner in London; he’d said not to expect him until late. The house had felt especially big and quiet to Vida, one whole wing of it unused, unfurnished, the chandeliers hooded with sheets. Vida had laid a fire in the library, where Mr. Perry kept his phonograph. Though she and Manford usually occupied the sitting room off the kitchen, she felt it was a shame to have the whole lovely house going to waste, and Manford liked to watch the reflection of his face in the globes of the brass andirons in the library’s fireplace, his features there stretching like elastic as he veered in and out before them.
That night she drew aside the drapes for the view out onto the terrace, the row of moonlit statues there, their faces the color of quicksilver.
Manford sat with his stamp books while she cleaned up their supper things. But when she joined him by the fire, she found she couldn’t keep still. It seemed to her that something was happening out there in the world—something. Dawn was breaking over Corfu, where her uncle Laurence lay asleep in his white house at the edge of the surf. Fishermen were wading out into the sea, breaking the surface of the water, stars fading overhead.
They were missing it, she thought suddenly, desperate. She and Manford. They were missing it all.
She tried to read but kept looking up from the page, unnerved, as if something were about to happen—as if the door might blow open or a handful of stones clatter against the window.
At last she stood up and put a record on the phonograph, some of Mr. Perry’s American jazz—Benny Goodman. A friend had sent Mr. Perry the record. “Strut, Miss Lizzie.” That was the song she liked.
She swayed back and forth on the carpet before the windows, looking out into the dark garden.
When she turned around, she saw that Manford was watching her.
She smiled at him, lifted her arms, took a turn with an imaginary partner around the furniture, around the chair he was sitting in, so that he had to swivel his head to keep her in view.
“I’m dancing, Manford,” she called to him as she sailed away to the far side of the room. “This is how it’s done.”
And then she came back and stood before him, hopping up and down, smiling. “Come on,” she said, breathing hard now, holding out her hands, happy. “Come on up and have a dance with us.”
But he shook his head, put his face down on his forearm.
She leaned down, caught his hands in her own, pulled him up.
He stood woodenly before her, his face serious, and allowed her to hold his hands. She tried to swing them back and forth, smiling and nodding at him. “That’s it,” she said, as his arms began to loosen up, as she felt him begin to take up the rhythm.
She began to feel excited; perhaps this was what he’d needed, she thought—to learn to dance! And then he mightn’t be so clumsy; he wouldn’t fall so much. It was always shocking to see him fall, a grown man falling down like a child, like a little boy. She hated it, hated watching him pick himself up.
“Well done, Manford!” she said warmly. “That’s it!”
Manford had grown into a big man. That night she felt for the first time how big he had become. He wasn’t a boy anymore. Six feet two, and nearly fourteen stone. He swung his hands harder and harder, concentrating, his mouth open, his big head bobbing up and down. He began to stamp his feet.
“Well done,” she said, gently now, quieter. “Lovely dancing, Manford.”
And then she began to resist him a little, to try to calm him, slow him down. He was, she realized, so much stronger than she.
“Manford,” she said at last, breathless. “You’re hurting my hands.”
She stopped dancing and stood still, tried to stand still.
She held fast to his hands to stop him from swinging. She pulled on his arms, but he only looked at her with a kind of desperation, stamping more wildly now, opening his mouth wider, as if he were being pulled apart somehow, as if there were a feeling inside of him that couldn’t get out, something he wanted to be rid of, wanted expelled from his body.
She shook her head at him, frowned, tried again to wrest her hands away.
“No,” she said. “That’s enough now,” she said.
And then, when he failed to stop, she had to speak sharply to him and heard, unmistakably, the little flicker of fear in her voice.
“No, Manford!” she said.
And then again, louder, “No! Manford!” she cried. “No! Stop it now.”
And then finally she broke one hand free.
He was frightened, terrified, she saw, as his face came up close to hers. He’d seen that she wanted to get away from him, that she was angry, fearful, and so he tried to hug her to him—she understood it even as it was happening, with a kind of slow-moving clairvoyance. He was trying to prevent her from leaving him, trying to climb into her arms like a baby.
The weight of him as he jumped against her, still bobbing wildly up and down, was enough to knock her over.
She fell, striking her head against the claw foot of the table.
Manford dropped to his knees and crawled away fast across the rug, scurrying like a rabbit. She saw him trying to fit himself into the knee space beneath his father’s desk, but he was too big. Only his head and shoulders were hidden.
Vida sat up, reeling, and touched her head. A little smear of blood, shockingly bright, came away on her hand. “Manford,” she managed, to the twinkling air before her eyes. “It’s all right.”
Her head hurt terribly, and she felt sick to her stomach. “It’s all right,” she said. “Come out. Come on.” She looked around for him, her vision clearing. There he was, still under the desk. “Manford,” she said again. “Come on.” But he wouldn’t move, wouldn’t turn round and look at her.
She got carefully to her feet, walked unsteadily across the room to where his backside protruded from beneath the desk. She could see how he shook. She knelt down, put her hand on his back, crooning his name. He flinched away from her. “It’s all right,” she said. “It was my fault. Come on out now.”
She saw him contract his shoulders, as if trying to fit more of himself inside the well space of the desk. She sat down heavily beside him, put her head in her hands. The last notes of the record fell away. All over the world, she thought, things were passing from view, never to be seen again. Shooting stars. Ships disappearing over the horizon.
She reached over and put her hand on his back, began to rub gently between his shoulder blades.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. It was all my fault.”
THE VERY MORNING she writes her thank-you letter to her uncle Laurence for the painting for her birthday, she decides, as she’s walking down the road after leaving Manford at Niven’s, that she will pick up a cellophane envelope of stamps for Manford for his collection. Mr. Lamb has been very helpful about this in the past, and Vida has encouraged the hobby. It seems so normal. Manford has several bound volumes of stamps, from all over the world. He pastes them in place very neatly and can sit for hours turning the pages, looking at the tiny pictures.
She enters the post office that morning, the bell jingling overhead. Mr. Lamb is nowhere in sight.
“Hallo? Mr. Lamb?” she calls out.
He appears a moment later, bursting through the black curtain hung before the door to the rooms in back like a musketeer drawing his sword, making her jump.
“Oh! Good morning!” she says. He looks possessed, she thinks, glancing away from him awkwardly. She hands him her letter to post. He takes it and sets it down on the countertop. He puts his hands to his hair and smooths it back nervously.
“I thought I’d see if you have any stamps for Manford,” she says after a minute, looking away again. Mr. Lamb has been so odd lately, she thinks, so—disorganized. Perhaps he’s going senile!
“Of course, of course,” he says very heartily. He stares at her a moment longer and then bends over to shuffle madly through the drawers under his countertop. At last he stands up and extends toward her a sheet of eight stamps, all sailing vessels. He is red in the face.
Vida glances at him, dismayed. “Oh,” she says, “he already has these.”
But she is unprepared for the violence of Mr. Lamb’s apology. He looks undone. “Oh! Has he? I’d forgotten, I’m so sorry, I—” He rushes over his words.
Vida stands there, frowning at him. He’s been so queer lately, she thinks.
“I’ve written my friend at the Hellenic Post Office in Athens,” he goes on desperately, “but I’m afraid they’ve misunderstood. This is all they would send.” He holds his hands up helplessly.
Vida looks down at the stamps and then back at Mr. Lamb. His eyes are watering. She notices that he has a bit of sticking plaster on his chin and finds herself distracted by this. “Well, I am sorry,” she says at last, finally dragging her eyes away from his chin. “It isn’t your fault, Mr. Lamb.” She closes her purse; suddenly she wants to be on her way.
But Mr. Lamb has disappeared from view. He has bent over and is rummaging beneath his counter again. Vida can hear his heavy breathing.
“I have these,” he says, popping up suddenly and startling her. “From the Commonwealth of Dominica?”
He spreads the stamps before her on the counter. His hands are shaking slightly. She is dismayed by this.
She inspects the stamps. They feature American cartoon characters. Minnie. Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Goofy. They are all playing musical instruments.
“Will these do?” Mr. Lamb asks, wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. He puts a finger on one. “They’re very bright.” He touches his mouth with the handkerchief. “I thought, as they were very bright, he might—”
“Yes, well, thank you, Mr. Lamb.” Vida finds herself strangely breathless, too, as though she has been breathing for Mr. Lamb as well as for herself. She’s feels almost light-headed, in fact, and fumbles for her handbag to pay Mr. Lamb for the stamps.
“Shall I post this for you?”
She looks up.
Mr. Lamb is holding her aerogramme aloft. “Writing to your uncle Laurence?” he says.
But it doesn’t sound like a question, she thinks. More like a comment about the weather. Poor thing, she thinks hopelessly. And then, surprised, she thinks, poor us! Poor us, to be standing here like this!
“Yes. To Laurence,” she says unnecessarily. “You’re very kind,” she says quickly then, desperate but wishing to be kind herself. And she turns to go.
“And how is he? Painting coming on?”
Vida pauses, turns back again to face Mr. Lamb. His eyes are full of a strange pleading.
“Very nicely,” she says weakly. “Nice of you to remember, Mr. Lamb.” She looks around her vaguely, as though the post office is somewhere she’s never been before. “He’d be pleased you remembered his painting.”
“Oh, yes!” Mr. Lamb says emphatically, giving her a brilliant smile then. “Oh, yes. Marvelous painter, Laurence was. Is.” He opens his mouth but nothing more comes out.
Vida tries to manage another little smile, as friendly as she can make it, but her face feels stiff, as if she’s been cold. When Mr. Lamb says nothing more, she turns again to leave. He has fallen silent, staring down at his feet, apparently lost in thought. Then he lifts his head, looks out the window of the post office. “Ah! There goes the double-decker,” he says brightly. He takes a deep breath. “Do you ever,” he says, as she turns back to him again, confused about whether he is speaking to her or just to himself, “do you ever think about just hopping on a bus? Going someplace? Wherever it might take you?”
Vida looks at him. “That bus always goes into Winchester,” she says at last.
“Yes.” Mr. Lamb looks worried. “But some other bus, perhaps?”
“Perhaps.” She smiles. He’s funny, Mr. Lamb; what a notion! Jumping on a bus when you don’t know where it will go! A vague relief, like the sun coming out, comes over her. She actually feels warmer.
“Seems as though we’ll have fine weather for our Sadie Hawkins Day,” he goes on. He looks calmer now, she sees. He’s smiling, too. And he’s stopped perspiring quite so much.
Vida pauses. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I’d forgotten.”
“Such good fun, Sadie Hawkins Day.”
Vida doesn’t know how to reply to this, exactly. She doesn’t really like Hursley’s Sadie Hawkins Day. It’s an embarrassing business, she thinks, girls chasing after the boys, a custom imported to Hursley by an American woman who was briefly headmistress at Prince’s Mead.
“The women having their go at things, for once.” Mr. Lamb raises his eyebrows, smiling and leaning over the counter. He winks at her and then backs up, looking vaguely appalled at himself. He collects himself. “So you will—you will be going?”
“Well, I hadn’t thought of it.” Nearly everyone in the village did go, she considers. If the weather was fine, it could be a jolly enough afternoon, a chance for Manford to be out and about. “I might take Manford round,” she concedes finally.
“Oh, fine idea,” Mr. Lamb says enthusiastically. “He’ll enjoy that. All those girls racing round.”
Vida gives him a tight smile. Honestly, she thinks, what do they understand about Manford? Absolutely nothing!
But Mr. Lamb doesn’t appear to notice. “I was quite a sprinter in my day, you know,” he says.
Vida looks him over. It is true that he’s quite tall, she thinks in surprise. And long legged as well. And she has a sudden memory then, as if it were a photograph held up before her eyes, of races day at Prince’s Mead. She was young then, just twelve or so, and assigned late in the day, after her own events, to the spoon races for the younger set. Norris, she remembers, was one of the older ones, ten or more years ahead of her, most of them already done with school and working in the village or at nearby farms or in Winchester. But they all came back home for the games that day, the schoolgirls swooning over the older chaps, who were sporting soft new beards. She is surprised to find herself remembering Norris, tall and spindly in cricket whites, doing the pole vault, his limbs spread against the blue sky. She had looked up that afternoon from a gaggle of children at her knees to see Norris close by. “Well done, Lamb,” she’d heard someone say, but Norris had brushed past, his long, narrow face flushed. He’d turned an ankle or something, hadn’t he? She thinks she remembers him sitting down alone on a bench, nursing his foot, rolling back his sock, and probing tentatively at his shin, a worried look on his face. She had watched him, had noticed his white leg extending like a root, like something peeled, from within his trouser leg. After a while he’d stood up and hobbled away. Someone had veered into him, clapped him on the back, but she’d seen him wince, make fluttering gestures with his hands, say something inaudible.
“I remember—” She pauses and looks up to find Mr. Lamb surprisingly near, as though he has veered up into close focus. “You had an accident,” she says vaguely. “You—” She stops.
“An accident?” Mr. Lamb looks alarmed. “I don’t recall—”
“Yes.” Vida pauses. “I remember you—up there. In the sky. Doing the pole vault.”
Suddenly Mr. Lamb looks thrilled. “Yes, yes!” he cries. “The pole vault. I remember!” He spreads his arms up high. “Like this!” He throws his arms wide, a gesture of tossing something overboard.
Vida smiles at him. “Only, you fell. You hurt your ankle or something.”
The excitement leaves Norris’s face, replaced by something else. “It’s so—remarkable,” he says, looking at her, quieting, “that you should remember that.”
“Yes,” she says slowly. “Isn’t it?”
There is a silence between them. They are both surprised to find themselves staring at each other.
“We’ve known one another such a long time,” he says then, strangely tender, and as Vida looks at him, she suffers a surprising rush of feeling for them as young people again. She herself had been shy, but with passionate, speechless crushes on the boys around her. She’d been too young for real affairs, and by the time she was old enough, well, there was Manford. But she remembers watching the older boys and girls, wishing she were older, as well—old enough. Had she ever had feelings for Norris?
The notion surprises her and she finds herself staring at him. No, she thinks. Not a crush. And yet there had been a kind of curious recognition she’d felt for him as she’d watched him sitting on the bench that afternoon, nursing his ankle. At the end of that day, she’d stood by herself under the spreading arms of the cedars at the edge of the school grounds, watching couples disappearing arm in arm into the shade of evening, the boys in their whites stained green at the seat and on the knees, the girls changed hurriedly from their gymnasts’ uniforms into spring skirts and blouses. Beneath her foot she had pushed at the fallen needles, a blanket of spongy turf, and had wondered how they would feel against her bare back, the relief of a boy’s unnatural weight spread over her.
She starts from her reverie to see Mr. Lamb before her still. She feels, as she stands there, that he is witnessing that moment again with her. That she can travel back into her own life and he will be there, too, standing to the side, watching. They had missed each other then though, hadn’t they, the fragile young man on the bench, wounded in some insignificant way, and she in the speechless torment of those adolescent years, her hair wild and coming unloosed, her expression pained. She looks up at him.
“I seem to remember—so many things,” she says, feeling faintly stunned, as though she’d been hit over the head and were just coming round.
“Yes. Yes, I do as well,” he says urgently. “So many—moments.”
“Of course, we’re still here. So we would. I mean, there are so many reminders.” Vida glances around vaguely.
“Yes.” Mr. Lamb looks down at his blotter. “I remember—how very pretty you were.” He speaks so quietly that Vida feels the words brush against her ear. She looks up at him. She feels her grasp tighten round her purse.
“You had this—hair. It’s such a lovely color.” He gestures round his head in circles, as though wrapping a turban. “And you were so—” He glances away. “You always seemed so inspired.”
The room has gone suddenly very bright. Vida feels she might need to close her eyes but manages to keep them open.
“I think your hair now—the way you’ve done it—” He points a trembling finger in her direction. “It’s very—attractive.”
She meets his eyes, reaches up her hand, touches her hair gently.
“You’re happy—here in the village?” His voice is low, as if inviting a confidence.
“It’s what I know,” she says at last, dazed as a bird that has collided with a windowpane, its own reflection.
“That is how I feel,” he says, letting out a long breath. “All of it.”
They both jump as the bell above the door clatters. Fergus comes in on a draft of animal odor. Horse fear, Vida senses, recoiling.
“Yes?” Mr. Lamb straightens up, glares at Fergus impatiently.
“Box of matches,” Fergus says shortly.
And Vida takes the opportunity then, with relief, to back away from the counter.
“Thank you,” she calls. “For the stamps.”
Mr. Lamb tosses a box of matches at Fergus. “I’ll write them again!” he calls after her. “I’ll tell them they must send some other stamps! A commemorative issue! The liberation perhaps?”
She waves, nods, passing quickly away down the pavement.
HE WAITS A moment, placing both his hands flat on the counter’s varnished surface, and closes his eyes. When he opens them, Fergus is emptying his pipe into his cupped palm, looking shrewdly at Norris.
“Well? Don’t be making a nasty mess on my floor,” Norris says.
“Ah, no.” Fergus laughs. Then he jerks his head after Vida. “Done herself up lately,” he says.
Norris stares him down. “Will there be anything else?” he inquires coldly.
“Not at all. Not a thing,” Fergus says blithely. “Must be getting back. To work.” He opens the door to leave. “Haven’t got a cushy spot like you, Lamb. I’ve no time for chatting up the ladies. Good morning.”
WELL, HE’S DONE it. He’s spoken to her. He’d thought he’d open with something better, but in the end, perhaps this was just right.
He is so excited. Almost too excited, he thinks. It can’t be good for him, such excitement. But, oh, she remembers him! From their childhood! This must be significant.
He wants to do something now, anything, but he can’t even think straight. He hops around the post office like a child unable to contain himself.
And then he catches sight of Mrs. Billy passing down the pavement outside. She has stopped and is staring in the post office window at him, bobbing up and down on the tiled floor of the post office. Well of course she thinks he’s gone bonkers! He stops jumping and stands perfectly still, frozen in position; perhaps she’ll think she imagined it.
Still, he doesn’t really mind. And at the end of the day, when he goes home, Norris jogs round and round in the rooms of his house. Finally, just as evening begins to fall, he runs out his door, down the lane, past the pub, and along the Romsey Road to St. Alphage.
He passes the vicar, sitting on a moss-covered bench in the graveyard reading a letter, and gives him a wave.
Once inside, he takes his place at the organ and plays the “Triumphal March” from Aida, over and over again. It’s one of the first pieces he committed to memory.
The vicar will wonder, he knows, what he is doing there, bent over the organ as if weeping on a Wednesday evening. But perhaps he will just be grateful, Norris thinks fiercely. Grateful for love. Grateful for everything. Grateful for anything at all.