NORRIS HAS SEEN nude women. He saw his mother in her white drawers and his grandmother in her narrow gray woolens. Before they had indoor plumbing, it was his job to fill the bath Saturday evenings, to carry the kettle back and forth. “Mind the heater, Norris,” his mother would say from the tub, where she crouched, folded in upon herself like an old white mattress. “Don’t slip now with the kettle.”
He has seen, despite himself, the disturbing photographs in the magazine to which Mr. Blevins subscribes.
“Have a look, Lamb,” Blevins said one day with a leer, leaning over Norris’s clean counter and spreading the pages wide. “Look at those titties!”
“My!” Norris said. And they certainly were large.
“And look at this,” Blevins said, showing Norris another picture, most distressing, of a young woman bound by the hands and feet to a tree.
“What will they think of next, Mr. Blevins,” Norris said. “My, my.”
People frequently show him things from their periodicals, Mrs. Billy with her Afghan Bee, Nigel Spooner with his motorbike journal. They flip through the pages as they stand there, commenting on this or that. He affects an interest, to be polite.
So he is not entirely naive about women, despite his lack of practical experience. But until that night in the garden at South-end House, he had never seen anything quite so beautiful as Vida. It’s not often that one sees something like that, something that must, in the end, be interpreted as a sign.
But who had turned on the fountain again?
MR. PERRY HAD turned on the fountain—or, more correctly, he’d seen to it that the fountain was turned on. He had returned to Southend House in June after a long absence. His first morning home, he’d gone round to have a chat with Dr. Faber, who had prescribed sleeping tablets for him some months before. Perry’s spirits were better than usual, Dr. Faber thought—he spoke of doing some entertaining, issuing an invitation, perhaps, to a young Italian woman with whom, he intimated, he’d had a pleasant dalliance in Rome. Perhaps he’d even reunite some of his oldest friends from the States for a holiday, he said—a hunting holiday.
“I’d like to see the house and grounds as they were in the beginning,” Mr. Perry told Dr. Faber, suddenly serious. And something about his face at that moment made Dr. Faber recall his first glimpse of Thomas Perry, some twenty years before. He’d thought then that no one so young should have cause to look so eaten away by grief already. “I’d like to see it all as it used to be,” Mr. Perry went on, “when the place looked like paradise.” He smiled, rather sadly, Dr. Faber thought. “When I thought it would soothe me to be somewhere so beautiful.”
A week or so later, Mr. Perry hired a gardener, a young man named Jeremy Martin. He offered him an exorbitant wage and told him simply, “Clean it up. Clean it all up. There’s an apartment above the stables. I think it’s all right. Let me know if you need anything. Vida will cook for you.”
JEREMY MARTIN UNDERSTOOD that Mr. Perry did not want to be consulted much, after a first look-round. He did not want to be bothered.
They toured the property together one Saturday in late June, before business called Mr. Perry abroad again. Jeremy explained that he would need a fortnight to let go his previous commitment, asked various questions about original drawings for the garden, water pipes and conduits, glass for the greenhouse, sprays for the orchards, and so forth. He appeared knowledgeable. He asked, too, about an account with Lauder and Lauder, a nearby nursery.
Mr. Perry waved his hand. “Whatever,” he said shortly. “Whatever it takes.”
Jeremy pursed his lips but felt he would not react to this largesse. “Priorities, sir?” he asked.
Frowning at the tennis courts, which were choked with weeds, Mr. Perry seemed to be considering. Then he looked up toward the big house, the heavy, silent shape of the fountains. “I’d like the fountains turned on again,” he said impulsively. “I don’t know what’s the matter with them. Something with the plumbing, I guess. Rust? Do that first.”
“Might be moles in the pipes,” Jeremy said, his feet planted. “Or tree roots. Terra-cotta, I imagine they are. Could be prohibitive, sir.”
“Whatever it takes,” Mr. Perry repeated stubbornly.
That evening he mentioned briefly to Vida that he had hired someone to do something about the gardens.
“What?” But she didn’t mean to sound so surprised.
“To fix them up,” he said, a little defensive, and looked away from her. “I’ve been meaning . . .” He put his hand over his eyes, that gesture Vida recognized so well. “You won’t mind feeding him, will you?” he asked.
Vida, turning to stare out the window at the littered lawns, the overgrown and crumbling balustrades, the blackened roses, said, “Of course not. How lovely.”
FOR YEARS, LONG before discovering himself in love with Vida, Norris had walked through the grounds of Southend House from time to time for his nightly walk, drawn to the overgrown gardens there and the circus antics of bats that swerved sharply like tiny, dark kites against the fading sky. He’d been dismayed to see the property deteriorate over the years, understanding that he knew nothing of the reasons, but that there could be a hundred explanations for allowing something so beautiful to fall apart. He’d stolen a plant or two, taken it home in a leather sack, and planted it in his own garden. He did not consider this theft, exactly, but more a form of mercy.
And then, the night of his fifty-fifth birthday, that evening of the moon landing, Norris set out again. The air was soft, ambient; he sniffed—something fragrant was in bloom. The moon hung overhead, buoyant as a breath. He’d looked up, trying to imagine what it must be like to be up there so high, looking down at the earth. The sky had deepened from blue to rose to the silver gray of twilight to the lush velvet black of midnight. Norris felt peaceful, benevolent, charmed by the knowledge of the astronauts treading the moon so far above his head. It felt companionable, in a way, knowing they were out there, too.
He walked through the village, down the Romsey Road, and into the fields, crossing onto the estate of Southend from the low pasture. He hadn’t been by there in a few weeks, having discovered some swans on the Tyre and, being fond of swans, deciding to walk down to the river every night instead. But the swans had flown off the previous evening, and so this night—still full of the miracle taking place so high above his head—he passed into the woods around Southend and through the pavilions of oaks. He passed the tennis courts, thick with Queen Anne’s lace and nettles, the rose garden with its crumbling walls. He registered methodically the estate’s familiar disrepair, statuary tumbled from their pedestals, gardens overgrown with weeds.
But parting the yews that surrounded the highest lawn at Southend, he stepped onto the still-warm grass surrounding the grotto and the fountain and stopped up short, for it appeared an army had been at work. Even in the darkness he could see that the beds had been hacked clean. The black earth overturned within them was rich as chocolate. Bowers of vine and branch had been pruned back sharply and bore a new froth of delicate white-and-yellow blossoms. Tools and implements lay scattered on the grass.
Norris gazed about him in surprise. Finally his eyes came to rest at the fountain, its tall plume of water breathing a fine mist into the evening air. It had been so long since he’d seen water in the fountain that for a moment he was transported back in time to the summer performances of the girls from Prince’s Mead. Their annual pageants had been held on the lawns at Southend House, the fountain playing a joyous accompaniment to the assemblies of young ladies in pretty costume dancing figure eights across the grass. He remembered the music teacher, Miss Ferry, with her deep bodice and the silver serpent with ruby eyes that coiled round the loose flesh of her upper arm.
HE THOUGHT VIDA was a nymph at first, some trick of memory occasioned by the sudden blossoming of the fountain. And then he realized, no, not a nymph, not a figment nor a phantasm, but a real live woman, dancing there on the edge of the fountain in her dressing gown, the marvelous moon high overhead, the arcs of water raining onto the grass from a pyramid of arcing swans, their necks twisting with joy.
Norris’s own heart twisted then. He came to his knees on the grass. On the terrace above him, at the thick stone lip of the fountain’s edge, with the moon above her head inside a gauzy penumbra, Vida stood balanced on her toes, the silhouette of her body revealed inside her loosened dressing gown, facing the spray of the fountain. Norris withdrew on his knees into the lap of shadow thrown by a yew, his stick dropping soundlessly beside him.
At first she walked the way a child walks along a wall, balancing with her arms outspread. But she gained speed as she went, and at last she was running, around and around on the edge of the fountain, joyous and quick. Norris saw the high arch of her foot and her agile toes, her rounded calves and tiny waist, her throbbing neck and outflung hair and private, private pleasure.
He felt his limbs grow cold and then hot, as if brushed by cotton dipped in alcohol and drawn slowly across the skin. A tentative breeze touched his face. He watched her, his breath held high and light in his chest.
Then suddenly she froze, crumpled from her prancing pose, and fell to a crouch, glancing over her shoulder. After a moment, she climbed quickly to the ground, pulled her robe close around her, and ran from the grotto up toward Southend House, the white soles of her feet flickering. The house, its balanced wings of smooth stone, its terrace lined with statuary, swallowed her.
It was her leaving, the heartbreak of seeing her shame, her dancing interrupted, that struck Norris so hard. That, and the wild desire he experienced after she had gone. Not just desire for her, though there was that, but on her behalf. As if he should, from that moment on, stand sentinel at the garden of Southend House, see that it suffered no infiltrators, no sudden sounds or alarming rustles, nothing that might arrest Vida in her pursuit of such complete and glorious and utter abandon. He raised his blackthorn stick, spun round to strike whomever, whatever, had been responsible for Vida’s fright. But there was no one there.
Who had turned on the fountains again? What was happening at Southend House?
He glanced up at the house, one light burning high in a bedroom, another far away in the deep interior of a sitting room. All was still. He turned to survey the garden, its checkerboard of shadows, his breath held. There was not a sound, but his mind raced like something darting through the darkness, checking everywhere for danger. Was there someone there? Someone who could spoil it all? Not an innocent voyeur like him, but someone who might dare to step forth into that scene, arrest the figures there, change the tableau, the unfolding, the ending?
A terrible fierceness gripped him. One should never be denied one’s heart’s desire. Dear God, he thought, putting his face in his hands.
BUT WEEKS AFTER this miraculous event, Norris still cannot settle on a plan of action.
Vida comes and goes, in and out of the post office. Sometimes he can speak to her, but more often he has a long queue of chatty customers and can do nothing except gaze significantly and mournfully at her as he hands over her mail.
And then one day, late in August, he receives an official inquiry from the Hellenic Post Office in Athens, noting the issue of a new set of commemoratives sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund. The stamps depict native animal species on the Ionian archipelago: the dolphin; the jackal, Canis aureus; seals colonizing beneath the Erimitis cliffs.
And the same day there is an envelope from his old friend Mr. Calfo on Corfu, enclosing a complimentary set of the new issue and accompanied by a brief note asking after his general health and spirits.
Norris stares at these two letters for some time.
And then he sits down, his pen in hand, and writes several letters, two to Vida—these come to him more easily than he might have imagined, flights of poetic fancy—one to his dear friend Petros Calfo, and another to old Nesser.
TO MR. CALFO, at the Corfu post office on Alexandras Avenue, he writes, “Dear Petros. I have received your kind gift of the new stamps from your islands. They are very handsome. Thank you. I have a customer who will appreciate them particularly.
“I have a rather odd request to make of you. Would you please attach a stamp to the enclosed letter and mail it off for me? I have in mind a stamp with love as its subject, should you have one lying about. (Not mother and child, however; I should prefer something romantic.) I enclose some stamps of the equivalent value for your trouble, a very nice set of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, from America.
“I know you are wondering what funny business I am up to! I assure you it is nothing that should disturb your conscience. It is just that I am engaged in a bit of a romp, you might say, and the foreign postmark is part of the plan, you see. I hope it gives you, as a member of the world’s most romantic citizenry, some pleasure to have had a hand in my own little English love story! I do thank you.
This he fits inside an envelope, along with his first letter to Vida.
Then he takes out another sheet of paper. This letter he addresses to Mr. Nesser at the Philatelic Office, Postal Organization, Cairo, United Arab Republic.
“My dear Nesser,” he writes.
“Greetings! Do forgive the unorthodox nature of this request, old chap, but would you be so kind as to affix a stamp—theme of love, if you will—to the enclosed envelope and mail it off for me? There is nothing untoward here, I assure you. Only a little manner of amour I am engaged in. You can imagine how exciting this is.
“I inquire about your gout. Is it any better?
“Gratefully, Norris Lamb.”
He seals this up, after enclosing his second letter to Vida.
Now he feels inordinately pleased with himself. This business of writing—it’s really so easy, once you get the hang of it.