VIDA STANDS AT the deep sink in the kitchen of Southend House, washing up the morning’s dishes. From time to time she looks out the window at the figure of the new gardener, spade in hand, digging in the beds that curl in interlocking shapes around the fountain. A scrim of fine mist floats in the air; a flock of ravens briefly divides the sky.
At one point she sees the gardener look up. Leaning on his spade handle, he draws a cloth from his pocket and wipes it across his face. He gazes up toward the house, resting.
Vida turns back abruptly to the washing, plunging her arms deep in water.
Behind her, at the long table set on the uneven flagstones of the floor, Manford sits with his book of stamps open before him, his finger touching each tiny image: a series of the dun-colored, sun-backed humps of the Ascension volcanoes; a collection of the spiny pink protea from South Africa; a collection of birds and their eggs from the Grenadines of St. Vincent—the purple gallinule with its mauve-spotted egg, the gray kingbird beside its ink-splattered egg.
Norris Lamb, passing these over the counter to Manford and Vida the week before, had explained in excited tones the history of South Africa’s early postal system, how letters home to Holland or England from the colonists would be left under large stones at the coast and picked up by sea captains visiting Cape Town.
“Quite romantic, don’t you think?” Mr. Lamb had said, wiping his mouth with a white handkerchief, his eyes watery, looking at Vida.
They’d been interrupted by the vicar, who’d come in with a great many mysterious parcels in very many extraordinary shapes and sizes, bound up with long lengths of a hairy-looking twine—the vicar did not offer to explain what the parcels were, and Vida noticed that Mr. Lamb didn’t ask. She thought she would have asked, if she’d been in his place. The vicar also wanted to know how long Mr. Lamb thought it would be before there was a moon-landing stamp. He had a nephew in South Africa “excessively interested in all things having to do with the galaxy.”
Vida had startled at the mention of the moon landing and blushed—it had been a moment of uncharacteristic abandon on her part, that business of dancing around the fountain. But she had been even more startled at Mr. Lamb’s reaction to the vicar’s comment. He had turned a violent shade of purple, as though filling up with India ink, and had failed to answer at all.
“The Apollo moon landing,” the vicar had said helpfully after a moment, as if there might be another moon landing to confuse it with, and at last Mr. Lamb had appeared to recover slightly and said quickly that he was sure someone would do a stamp very soon. He’d been suddenly shy after that, and Vida and Manford had gone away soon afterward.
Manford lies on the rug now, his mouth making shapes as his finger travels over the pictures, his expression liquid and flowing. He turns the pages carefully, licking his thumb. He places his index finger squarely upon the faces staring out from the stamps, the explorers from the British Antarctic Territory—Lincoln Ellsworth smiling bravely out from within his white fur ruff, or Jean-Baptiste Charcot with his yellowed goatee and heavily shadowed eyes. Manford presses the soft ball of his finger flat upon the images as if taking the imprint of the men’s features, lifting their expressions from the page. His feet are hooked over the rung of the chair, his back bent low over the tabletop.
Drying her hands on a towel, Vida leaves the room and returns a moment later with her coat and Manford’s cap. Her coat folded over her arm, she tugs the cap down over Manford’s head, bending over to look into his face and push his hair up close beneath the brim, tugging down one lock in a gallant fashion and pinching it into place. She licks her finger and rubs it across a smudge on his forehead. He takes no apparent notice of her fussing. She puts on her raincoat and buttons it.
Manford glances up at her and smiles when she says his name, but returns almost immediately to his page, his mouth working.
“Time to go now,” Vida says, and reaches down to touch his elbow. He rises at her touch, although with apparent reluctance, and stands before her. She notices his soft belly, how it blossoms over his trousers. She gives it a poke. “Look at you,” she says. “Oh, dear. You’re getting quite fat, Manford.”
He doubles over, then stands back upright and attempts to poke Vida at the waist.
“No, no,” she says, twisting out of reach. “Not me. I mind my figure. Not like some I know,” she says meaningfully. “Too many jam doughnuts is your trouble. Come on. They’ll be waiting on you at Niven’s.”
Manford follows her out of the kitchen, down the long, tiled passageway whose whitewashed walls are punctuated by doors that open onto small pantries, the shelves there neatly stocked with cups and glassware and plates, fading labels in Vida’s handwriting pasted to the woodwork: WHITE WINE, RED WINE, CHAMPAGNE, SPIRITS, APERITIF, DIGESTIVE, TEACUPS, DEMITASSE, DINNER, DESSERT, EVERYDAY, CONSOMMÉ, SOUP.
As they step outside into the small courtyard containing the coal and the wood sheds, the overgrown espaliers there woven through and choked with dead wood, Vida glances behind her through the passageway to the rear lawns. She sees the gardener crouched on the grass, his hands busy in the earth. He’s been around for several weeks now, but she’s never sure when he’s working and when he’s not. He hasn’t come by the house at all. Mr. Perry has been away, though. Perhaps that’s why.
Behind her, Manford stretches out his hands and bounces his palms gently on an invisible current.
Descending the steps to the gravel drive, shaking her coat hem free of coal dust, Vida hurries along briskly. This morning, she has decided, she will walk Manford only as far as the bench on the lane. Not a wink farther.
Mr. Niven has assured her that he thinks Manford has become very canny about the traffic on the Romsey Road, and so between them they have agreed to allow Manford to try crossing on his own. Mr. Niven has taught him to look in both directions for oncoming cars before stepping down from the curb. As an added inspiration, Mr. Niven has also instructed him to raise his hand like a bobby stopping traffic. In this way, Manford now walks home across the street by himself in the afternoons, his hands solemnly held high, palms outward to the invisible traffic. Mr. Niven has told Vida he watches from the entryway to the courtyard in front of the bakery, just to be safe.
“Well done, Manford,” he calls when Manford is safely across and headed for home.
“Poor chap,” he confessed to Vida one afternoon, uncharacteristically emotional. “Nearly breaks my heart sometimes, watching him.”
But Vida knows that for Manford, leaving Mr. Niven, who has never once taken his hand, is not the same thing as being parted from her. She still allows Manford to twine his fingers with hers as they walk down the lane.
At the bench this morning she stops, disengages her hand, and folds her arms. Manford stares straight ahead of him, not moving a muscle.
Now we’re going to have a moment, Vida thinks. She looks upward into the trees, at the still tent of leaves. “I want you to do the rest yourself now,” she says firmly after a minute. “Go on. You know the way. It’s right down the end of the lane.”
Manford sidles a bit closer to her, reaches with one hand toward her folded arms.
“No,” she says, twitching away. “I will not hold your hand any longer. You must do it yourself.”
Manford licks his lips, reaches up, and with his fingers curled close together pushes his hair slowly under the brim of his cap. Vida has attempted to teach him this, to tidy his appearance. Now she sighs impatiently.
“Thank you, Manford. Very well done,” she says. “Your hair looks lovely. Very handsome. Now, go on.”
But Manford turns suddenly and starts to move at a lumbering trot, not quite an out-and-out run but still deliberate, back down the lane toward the gates of Southend House.
“Oh, Manford,” Vida cries, and stamps her foot. “Please! Why won’t you do this?”
She stares reproachfully at him. Perhaps she shouldn’t hold his hand at all anymore, if this is what comes of it—such obstinacy. Why, she’s spoiled him! But that doesn’t feel quite right. His hand in hers is comforting to them both, she feels. In fact, she knows Manford’s body almost as well as she knows her own, she thinks, his hands and face and the shape of his toenails and the curve of his back. Sometimes, if he is agitated, she will lie down on the bed beside him when he goes to sleep at night, the two of them staring at the circling figures of pretty colored fish thrown by the night-light Mr. Perry brought back from Italy for Manford many years ago. Vida admires its cleverness—it’s just a box, fitted all around with onionskin. But inside is a cylinder of stiff paper, with the shapes of fish and seaweed and a tilting galleon cut out of it and pasted over with different-colored cellophanes. The cylinder revolves round a tiny lightbulb and throws the colored shapes onto the ceiling, very large, like the shadows you can make with your hands. Sometimes Manford leans over and laces his fingers together over the light. And then Vida thinks it is as if a net has been tossed over the sea, a net that would catch everything, even the stars in the sky. It’s clever, the way he figured that out, she thinks. He does a bird with his hands, too, a diving pelican, its knuckled beak snapping, and a vaulting gazelle or a springbok—or perhaps it’s a prehistoric horse. Sometimes she thinks he’s made up the creatures he does with his shadow hands, as she calls them. And then every now and then she’ll come across him looking at one of his picture books, and she’ll realize that, no, he hasn’t made anything up. It’s all right there. It’s real.
She herself couldn’t have dreamed up the things he seems to know about the world. But between knowing and imagining, she thinks maybe knowing things is better, in the end.
You can count on it.
“WELL, HE WOULDN’T do it,” she says in exasperation a few minutes later, ushering Manford in the door at Niven’s with an impatient shooing motion. Manford heads quickly for the pantry, where his stool awaits, sits down immediately, and begins filling the doughnuts with the pastry cone. Vida and Mrs. Blatchford crane round and stare at him.
“What a busy bee,” Mrs. Blatchford says. “Well, I am sorry. Still won’t leave go your hand, will he?”
“He turned right around and ran home! I had to fetch him back! I don’t know what to do.” Vida hears the uncharacteristic despair in her own voice and is a little ashamed of herself. But since Manford has started at Niven’s, she has enjoyed, more than she ever expected, their interest in him, their growing understanding of his ways. They’ve all taken to him, no question, Mrs. Blatchford fixing the buttons on his cardigan for him, Mr. Niven clapping him on the back. And who wouldn’t love him, after all, so gentle and so quiet? And yet full of surprises, in his own way. Vida thinks what intelligence Manford has is sly and wondrous—creatures springing to life on his bedroom walls at night. Now, feeling herself among friends, among Manford’s friends, she allows herself an instant of confession.
“It is so worrying!” she exclaims. “Mrs. Blatchford—think of it! What if something should, should”—she lowers her voice, as if to prevent him from hearing—“should happen to me? Then where would he be? Oh, I felt sure he could learn this.”
Mrs. Blatchford gives her a correcting glance. “Now, Vida,” she says, as if speaking to a small child. “Nothing whatsoever is going to happen to you. Let’s not have any such nonsense.” She hands Vida a doughnut, which Vida takes but only holds, as if she’s forgotten that they are things to be eaten.
“Not that I think it would be a bad thing,” Mrs. Blatchford goes on, “his being able to do it on his own. He’s come so far really, hasn’t he? But I can understand your wanting him to be as independent as possible. After all, what if”—she appears to search for a reason—“what if you should want to, oh, go on holiday, for instance? Had you ever thought of that, Vida? Having a holiday?” She stops wiping the glass counter and looks straight at Vida. “Have you ever had a holiday?”
Vida stares at her. “A holiday,” she repeats. “No, I—not as you would call it, I suppose. No. I’ve—” But she can’t finish. For suddenly it strikes her as so odd, that she hasn’t ever had a holiday, that the idea has never even occurred to her. Or maybe it had once, a long time ago. But, of course, what she does—it no longer feels like work to her. It feels like her life. It is her life. And then she thinks of her uncle Laurence, what he’d written about going to Corfu in one of his earliest letters: “Where else but on an island,” he’d asked, with undisguised enthusiasm, “can one reinvent oneself so entirely? The only thing to fear is that one day one’s old identity will wash up on shore like a shipwreck.”
“Well, I do see what he means, but would that be such a dreadful thing?” Vida’s mother had asked at the time, looking up at Vida from Laurence’s aerogramme. Her eyes had held a wounded look. “His old self?”
“Well,” Mrs. Blatchford says smartly now, “I think a holiday is most certainly in order. Perhaps his father will look after him for you when you go,” she adds irrationally, as if it were a fait accompli.
“But where would I go?” Vida asks, baffled. “And besides, Mr. Perry’s rarely there! He’s hardly ever at home.”
Though he had been home more of late, she thinks now. He’d hired the gardener, for instance. Mr. Perry had told her the fellow would be taking his meals at the house, but he’d never yet come inside, at least not when she’d been around. She hoped Mr. Perry didn’t want an accounting from her of how the man spent his time. Oh well. It wasn’t any of her business what the gardener, whoever he was, did with himself. Perhaps he was eating in the village. Or perhaps he had a home somewhere nearby. She’d set a place for him at the table one afternoon when she’d glimpsed him puttering around the greenhouses, but he’d never come up to the house. She and Manford had eaten their supper with the third place empty, as if for a ghost. It hadn’t been a special supper anyway, just beans on toast.
She hadn’t really been surprised much by the gardener’s mercurial comings and goings, though. They confirmed a rather vague idea she had of the rest of the world’s being always engaged in urgent business; she frequently worried that she was interrupting people. She remembered calling Dr. Faber late one night, when Manford was still a young child. It had seemed to Vida at the time, passing her hand over his forehead, that he was running an unnaturally high fever. Mr. Perry had been abroad, as usual. She’d been terrified, alone in the enormous house with the silent, feverish boy. She’d rung her mother at home and woken her. Her mother, sleepy but understanding, had said she’d try to reach Dr. Faber for her. But hours had gone by, and still there was no sign of him.
At last, about two o’clock in the morning, Dr. Faber had rung the bell. Vida, who’d been nearly hysterical with anxiety at that point, had hurried him upstairs to Manford’s bedroom.
“Well, we might open the windows for starters,” he’d said, preceding her into the room and blowing out a noise of annoyance. “It’s hot as blazes in here, Vida!”
Advancing to the window, he had pushed the drapes aside and struggled with the latch on the casement, grunting with effort. “Damn,” he’d muttered under his breath. And then it had given way at last, an envelope of cool, wet air sliding into the room, the moon floating full and white.
Dr. Faber had peered into Manford’s eyes with a little light, listened carefully to his chest.
“He’ll be all right,” he’d said at last, straightening up. “Nothing but a cold. You can bring him by in the morning if you like, though. I’ll have another look at him then.” He glanced down at the boy, whose eyes followed the physician’s face. “I think you’ll live to see morning, Manford. All right?”
He had turned to Vida, who was standing at the foot of the bed and winding her hands anxiously. She saw a quick sympathy rise into his eyes. “I’m sorry it took me so long to come, Vida,” he said. “I had another case to attend to.”
She waved her hands. “I quite understand,” she started to say, but suddenly found herself very near tears.
Dr. Faber took off his glasses, folded them, and put them into his pocket. He picked up his bag and came around the bed to her, where he stopped and put a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve done a fine job here, Vida,” he said then kindly. He looked down at Manford again and then back to Vida. “Not many have the patience for it, you know,” he said after a minute. “They make a lot of mistakes along the way. Some can be quite cruel. But you seem—” He paused. “Well, I admire you, is all. . .. You’ve stuck with it. Manford’s a lucky chap.” He unwound the stethoscope from around his neck, held it in his fist. “Of course, he could be a great deal more difficult,” he added. “It’s a blessing he’s not. Some of them aren’t, you know, and then we can all be grateful, but many of them can be quite trying in their own ways.” He glanced back at Manford curled in the bed, his bright eyes watching them. “Still doesn’t speak?”
Vida shook her head. It was true that Manford had never uttered a word, not even a sound that might approximate a word, an infant’s blundering attempt at precise speech. Still, she felt she understood him. Sometimes, it seemed to her, Manford could speak if he wished. His expression was often so—complicit. As if he agreed with everything you said, a sort of silent witness to your own conscience.
Dr. Faber shook his head. “Strange,” he said. “I might have thought—” But he said nothing else.
Vida had closed the door after him, had stood in the front hall with its cavernous, empty fireplace, the two small, velvet-covered chairs with their twisted legs standing by either side of it, their faded and unraveling tassels stirring slightly in the draft from the closing door. She thought of the strange, mute child above her, his twisted bedsheets and dull expression. She had wanted, at that moment, to run from the house and had hated herself for that feeling. At last, her hand on the banister, she had climbed the stairs slowly and had taken her place at Manford’s bedside, where she passed the night sleeping fitfully in a chair, her hand upon the coverlet, Manford curled beside her palm.
Now, with Mrs. Blatchford gazing at her sympathetically, it seems to her that the idea of a holiday is the silliest thing she’s ever heard of.
She couldn’t ever leave Manford. He would never love anyone as much as he loved her.
And yet—she looks down at her hands now, perturbed; for how strange it is, she thinks. Because what she is feeling, really, is not how much he loves her, but how much she loves him, how much she depends on it. And for a moment she sees herself in the lane, waiting and waiting, a dark, wet wind whistling away over the fields, Manford never coming, never again coming home from Niven’s, the moon rising slowly overhead, herself turning to stone.
“I expect his father wouldn’t know how to look after him properly anyway,” Mrs. Blatchford says then.
Vida looks up, startled. “Oh,” she says, and the sun comes up again; the world floods with the plain, unremarkable light of morning. “Yes,” she says, blinking. “Well, he hasn’t ever had to.”
“No, I suppose not. Men,” Mrs. Blatchford says then, and gives a low snort.
Vida leans over the counter for a last look at Manford. He seems to be avoiding her eye. She sighs, touches the collar of her coat. “Well, I’m off,” she says then. “Going round to pick up the post.”
There seems nothing else to say.
Outside, she stops to adjust her hat and have a final look at Manford through the window.
“What does she do with herself all day?” she hears Mrs. Blatchford say to Mr. Niven, who’s just come through the door with a tray of bread in his arms.
He shrugs. “Can’t imagine.”
“Isn’t it a shame about her holiday, though,” she hears Mrs. Blatchford say to him.
“What holiday?” he says. “Is our Vida going somewhere?”
And then Vida can’t hear them anymore, because they’ve turned away.
After a minute she walks down the side of the building and peeps carefully in the window at Manford, his shaggy head bent over his work. His cap has fallen to the floor, where it is pinned under one of the legs of the stool, acquiring a snowfall of dusty sugar. One foot is planted on the brim, crumpling it. But he looks exactly, she thinks, like a statue. A Greek statue.
IN THE POST office she has to ring the bell for Mr. Lamb, who comes out immediately, as if he’s been waiting for someone behind his curtain. He is wearing a suit—a rather old suit, with narrow lapels and a greenish cast to it. A white rosebud is pinned to his lapel, and his hair has been freshly dampened and combed.
Perhaps he’s going to a funeral, she thinks.
“Good morning, Mr. Lamb—” She stops, for she finds herself suddenly shy in the presence of his unusually formal appearance.
He utters not a word but turns around to get her mail for her.
Perhaps it’s the grief, she thinks, disconcerted, looking away. Perhaps it’s a sort of observation of respect, not to speak. She notices, however, despite herself, a thin, glistening line of sweat running from his temple down into his shirt collar and thinks that, after all, he must be rather hot in his suit. She sniffs, detecting an odd odor. It’s Mr. Lamb himself, she realizes, smelling of something old-fashioned and medicinal, though she can’t exactly place it.
He turns back around and hands her her mail. His expression is strange, she thinks, glancing up briefly into his face and then away again. He appears to be—holding something in his mouth! Oh! She reconsiders, trying to think, trying not to look at him. He can’t be. Why would he have something in his mouth? No, no. Perhaps he is trying not to cry? She steals another glance at him and then looks away in horror. For it is not grief he is suppressing, she sees now. It is mirth! He isn’t trying not to cry. He is trying not to laugh!
Well! Not very suitable for a funeral, she thinks, her forehead creasing.
She turns away from him and begins to sift through the envelopes. But as she does so, she thinks to ask Mr. Lamb whether he’s got any more stamps for Manford.
She looks up, her mouth open. But he has disappeared. The black curtain to his rear rooms billows slightly. Not a sound comes from the corridor.
“Mr. Lamb?” she says hesitantly after a moment to the empty room. But her voice seems to echo queerly in the silence.
She frowns, shrugs a little, returns to her letters.
A weak light falls across the floor, threading through the window’s many tiny panes between mullions thick and ridged with years of paint. She does not see the sunlight advancing toward her but feels the unexpected heat across the back of her neck, like a warm, possessive hand resting there.
Among the usual sorts of things in the daily post is an overseas envelope addressed to her in an unfamiliar handwriting, postmarked from Corfu. She frowns again. It doesn’t look like Laurence’s script.
She fits the other letters and catalogs under her elbow, lifts the flaps of the air letter with her fingernail, tearing the paper slightly and biting her lip. She unfolds the sheet and begins to read.
And then she feels her face grow bright red. She almost drops her bundle of mail. She folds over the sheet again quickly, looks up hastily as though whoever has sent her this must be standing right there, watching her. And postmarked from Corfu? Who did she know in Corfu except Laurence? No one!
And no one, no one has ever said such things to her.
She couldn’t even have imagined them, not if she tried for days and days and days.
She peeks at the letter again.
Vida Stephen. The sun may rise and fall, but nothing shall ever eclipse your beauty. You are the moon and the stars and everything in the world to me. You are a beacon in the dark night, an eternal flame. I crawl along the rays of the sun and they lead a path to your feet. I am your servant, your knight. One day you will know me.
The black curtain twitches, but Mr. Lamb does not emerge.
Her face scarlet with embarrassment, Vida gathers up her things hurriedly and rushes out of the post office, the bell clanging loudly behind her. She walks quickly along the Romsey Road back toward home, the letter held tightly in her sweating hand, her heart beating so wildly that she feels deafened by the sound of her own racing pulse.
Turning onto the lane on shaking legs, she thinks that she must calm herself. She actually finds that she wants a nip of something for her nerves! And she never wants a drink.
At the bench in the lane she feels so weak she has to sit down. She takes out the letter again, opening it with shaking fingers. Moon and stars, eternal flame, beacon in the dark, beauty . . . My! she thinks. My, my!
Tears have begun to fall mysteriously down her cheeks.
But she is smiling.
Oh, such a mystery! Such excitement! Such strangeness!
But then—oh, why is she to be forever embarrassed by this! It almost makes her angry!—she finds herself remembering the night of the moon landing, the night of her escapade on the fountain.
She jumps up from the bench, crumpling the letter into her pocket, gathers up the other letters and her handbag, and hurries down the lane toward Southend House.
In the silent, shadowy library she pours herself a small amount of brandy from one of the crystal decanters in Mr. Perry’s bar, takes the glass to a chair, and sits down heavily in it. She puts her hand over her heart a moment.
It was the fountain itself, she thinks now. It was hearing it again after so many years. It was only the fountain that was to blame. But why should this letter—she leans down and picks it up from the floor near her feet, where she had dumped her belongings, and unfolds it more calmly now—why should this letter make her think of that night?
She takes another sip of brandy.
It was that she’d heard something, she thinks now. She’d remembered suddenly the new gardener in his apartment above the stables; she had fled in shame.
And this letter—it too exposes her somehow, in exactly the same way she’d felt exposed that night in the garden. One day you will know me—that was what made her think of it.
She leans her head back against the chair. She does not understand it at all. It is wonderful and awful and disturbing and exciting, all mixed together. She cannot exactly separate the feelings it produces in her, a sort of twin column of fear and desire at once.
Who would love her, Vida Stephen?
She takes another tiny sip of the brandy, holds it in her cheeks, grimaces as she swallows, and then wipes the back of her hand across her mouth. Setting the glass on the table beside her, she stands and moves to the window.
She is surprised to find the gardener there, dragging the large dead limb of a tree toward a bonfire he has built down near the greenhouses, a greasy smoke issuing from it in a thin curl. She watches him a moment as he wrestles with the wood, levering it into the pile. When it falls, an explosion of sparks flies up into the air.
Stepping outside through the French doors onto the terrace, she takes in the sharp scent of the smoke, the raked and emptied condition of the beds. It didn’t look very pretty, she considers, but you could see how it was the right thing to do, clearing it all out, how the spines and arms of the garden had begun to stand out again what with all the rubbish being pruned away. You couldn’t really tell what the garden had once been like, whether it had ever been grand, so overgrown had it become after years of neglect. But now, now you could see how fine it was, how fine it could be again. She admires the sweeping terraces, the graceful stone walls and balustrades now released from their burden of overgrowth.
You could see that it only wanted some attention to be beautiful again.
THE FIRST THING she says to him is, “It looks much better.”
He turns round, holds his arm up before his face as a billow of smoke engulfs him in black.
Vida takes a step back, away from the smoke.
He coughs as the smoke swerves in a sudden breeze, sweeping toward him. He glances at her, his eyes red, then grinds a handkerchief to his face with his fist, rubbing. He coughs.
Vida waits a moment and then gestures behind her uncertainly.
“You’ve made tremendous progress,” she says, starting again. “I’d almost forgotten—” She indicates the garden beds.
He stuffs the cloth back into his pocket, regards her. “You must have been here awhile then, for this to seem an improvement.” He turns his head and spits to the side.
Vida jumps. “Oh, yes.” She laughs uncomfortably. She looks around. “Well, it used to be very grand.”
“It shouldn’t have been let go like this,” the man says. “It’ll take years to clear it out.”
“Oh, but I think you’ve made wonderful progress,” she repeats stubbornly. It seems important to her suddenly that the garden be nearly restored, that this gardener feel utterly committed to it, that the era of its flowering be near at hand again. She feels strangely defensive about it.
“You’re the cook?” he asks, squinting at her through the smoke.
Vida is taken aback a moment. She does cook, she considers, of course she does. They have to eat, don’t they? But that isn’t how she thinks of herself. She thinks to say she is the nanny, but it occurs to her, as if for the first time, that for a twenty-year-old man, a nanny seems a strange necessity. She hardly ever has to explain things to people. Everyone knows her, knows Manford.
“I look after the son,” she says, carefully choosing her words from the small store of appropriate phrases. “Mr. Perry’s son. Manford.”
The man coughs again and then turns to throw more brush on the bonfire. Sparks fly and collide.
“That’s the idiot?” he asks over his shoulder.
Vida flares. No one ever says such a thing! She is sorry now that she came down here to speak to him. How stupid he is! “Why do you call him that?” she says angrily.
He shrugs. “Someone told me. He’s the big one? I’ve seen him wandering about.”
Vida waits, though she’s not sure for what. She thinks of Manford sitting on the edge of the fountain, birds pecking at his feet. “He’s not an idiot,” she says finally, though less forcefully, she discovers, than she intends. “He’s handicapped.”
The man kicks the fire with his boot, jabs a pitchfork into the fragile tent of branches. “Like a golfer?” he says, laughing. “Is that it?”
But Vida withdraws as if she has been slapped. For the second time that day, a fierce blush rises to her cheeks. She stares at the man’s grimy shirt a moment, then turns to walk away. She will just go home, she thinks. He’s awful!
“Hey!” he calls after her, laughing. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Vida stops, spins toward him, and takes a deep breath. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says furiously. “You haven’t any idea what it’s like to be Manford.”
“No, I suppose not,” he says affably, and flashes his teeth at her in a smile. Vida looks back at him stonily. He kicks the fire again. “Look, I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean anything.”
Vida waits, staring at the fire. She takes a step toward it, holds out her hands as if to warm them, though it is hot enough already, a surprising late-summer heat, muggy and still. “He’s very sweet,” she says at last. “He wouldn’t harm a single living creature.”
“He’s a big oaf, though, isn’t he?” the man says then. “I should put him to work around here, give me a hand. Twenty men couldn’t put this place to rights in a year. Don’t tell his lordship I said so, though,” he adds, jerking his thumb toward the house. “I need the job.” He steps back and surveys the garden. “It’s a crime, really, isn’t it?” he goes on, shaking his head. “It’ll cost him a small fortune. He’s got pots though, I suppose?”
Vida feels faintly affronted by this question. “I wouldn’t know,” she says delicately. “I suppose there’s enough.”
“Well, there’d better be, or I’ll be off for greener pastures, as they say.” The man laughs again. He looks at Vida. “I’m Jeremy Martin,” he says, sticking out his hand.
“Vida Stephen,” she says, and for a moment their hands touch, but not before Vida sees how filthy his are.
SHE STAYS WITH him that morning, though she’s not sure why. After all, he’s so unpleasant at first. But then he asks her to give him a hand with a broken window in the greenhouse, holding the frame while he putties in the new pane.
“You need three hands for this job,” he says, and she thinks it’s charming the way he says it, so friendly.
And then he asks if she would have a look at the roses with him, advise him about the shapes and all. She tells him she doesn’t know the first thing about it, but they go up there, and then suddenly Vida finds herself feeling exhilarated by the fresh air, feels that she wants to work, to “really put my back into it,” she says, looking up eagerly at Jeremy. “Don’t you have another spade?” she asks, looking around.
He laughs but fetches one for her, and they dig awhile together. Vida thinks she has never seen such big worms as those they discover in the rose beds. Jeremy holds one out on his palm for her to see, a giant one with a bulbous gray ring around its middle. And then suddenly, brutally, he splits it in half with his knife.
“That’s it,” he says, dropping the pieces on the ground. “Like Christ dividing the endless loaf. You can chop them into a hundred pieces, and each one will grow a whole new worm. Did you know that?”
She doesn’t think this is exactly right, but she doesn’t say anything. The worm’s divided selves disappear into the grass. A queer chill runs over her arms.
He’s nice, though, she thinks.
He has pretty eyes.
AT NOON, VIDA makes tomato sandwiches, brings them out to the garden on a tray with a jelly roll and some iced tea and some figs.
“That hit the spot,” Jeremy says afterward. He shifts from his elbows and lies back down on the grass, hooking his arms beneath his head.
“What do you do with yourself all day, now he’s got a job?” he asks idly after a minute. “Tidy the house?” He laughs.
Vida laughs, too, the thought of the huge, empty house with its innumerable unused rooms cloaked in dust and sheets. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I clean the whole house, top to bottom.” Yet a twinge of some feeling, disloyalty perhaps, sweeps through her as soon as she’s said this.
“It’s quite sad, really,” she says soberly after a moment, wanting vaguely to make amends. “It’s a lovely house, and Mr. Perry’s rarely home. No one to enjoy it.”
“You enjoy it, though.” Jeremy turns to look at her and winks.
Vida feels uncomfortable. She can’t catch the meaning behind this conspiratorial wink. She thinks of herself and Manford, sitting in the small sitting room off the kitchen in the evenings, working on his stamp books. Sometimes she has him help her polish the silver. He seems to like that.
She decides to change the subject.
“And what about you?” she asks, taking the warm, round weight of a fig in her hand. “The stable apartment’s all right for you?”
“I’m not there much,” Jeremy says lazily. “It’s all right.”
“You live nearby then?”
“Well, I’ve a friend,” he says. He closes his eyes.
Vida looks him over shyly. He’s not a big man. Not half as big as Manford, for instance. But he’s good looking, she thinks, the strong color of youth in his cheeks and lovely long eyelashes. Dark hair, curly. She realizes suddenly, blushing, that friend means a woman. “I see,” she says, turning away.
Jeremy opens his eyes, hoists himself to a sitting position. “Back to work,” he says. He leans over, claps Vida once on the back. “Thanks for the grub,” he says, and his hand touches her shoulder blade and rests there a moment. Vida jumps.
“I won’t bite you!” he says, laughing, getting to his feet. “Thanks for the company, too. See you.”
And he walks off toward the greenhouses, whistling, pausing once to fetch the barrow and trundle it along in front of him.
“Good-bye!” she calls. But he doesn’t seem to hear her.
INSIDE, VIDA WASHES up their lunch things, and then she rinses out some underwear for herself in the laundry sink, and then she does a cardigan of Manford’s, laying it out on a towel in a spreading parallelogram of sun that falls in the French doors of the library. Kneeling on the carpet, the sun on her back, she feels a sleepy languor come over her.
And then she sees the letter, the mysterious love letter, fallen on the floor by the armchair, along with her overturned sherry glass.
She sits up. How could she have forgotten!
Someone is in love with her!
Fetching the letter from under the chair, she sits down and smooths the paper on her thigh. Bringing the envelope closer to her face, she examines the stamp. She sees that it is in fact a tiny photograph of some ruins, reduced to minute proportions and hand-painted in palest turquoise, rose, and yellow, as though the sun were setting behind the empty arches. A man and a woman, their arms entwined, stand beneath the capstone of the arch. Vida holds up the letter and reads the words again. Such short, declarative sentences, such fierce ardor. Like a man who speaks through clenched teeth.
But who would be in love with her?
She leans back against the seat of the armchair. Sunlight falls like an anvil, hard and hot, on the part in her hair. The letter is unfathomable, really. It makes such little sense that she can hardly connect it with herself. She cannot imagine anyone who might have sent it.
She runs over in her head the men she knows. The parade of unlikely suspects leaves her aghast. Why, who are the men she sees regularly? She decides to go through them one by one. Mr. Niven? He’s only interested in golfing. She knows that from his wife. Oh, Lord, she thinks with a shock—not nasty old Fergus? Well, he might be an old lecher, that wouldn’t surprise her. But he’d never send a letter like this. Why, she didn’t even think he could write properly! There was the vicar—well, he was completely above suspicion. He was the vicar, for heaven’s sake. Dr. Faber? No, no, no. And she trusted him.
She looks down at the letter again. What about Tony, at the Dolphin? He pours out the pints, she thinks now, and is friendly to everyone. Has a soft spot for poetry, too. Bartenders seem to, she thinks. But she hardly ever goes in there anymore. It’s been years, fifteen years anyway, since she went regularly with her old friend Charlotte. And the young men of her youth—only a few of them are still about, and those she can name are all married, with a brood of children.
And then she goes quite cold. Another idea has struck her.
Perhaps it’s a joke. A very cruel joke.
A terrific headache suddenly announces itself to her, as though the sun has succeeded finally in breaking open her skull with its riveting insistence.
Who would do such a thing to her? It’s nearly as unthinkable as the notion of some sincere lover, some waiting suitor. Oh, the cruelty of it, if it were a joke! But it can’t be. It can’t be.
One day you will know me. But does that mean she doesn’t know him now? Well, then, how could he know her?
She reads the sentences again. She admires them. Someone sophisticated must have written them. It wasn’t the work of a boy. These are a man’s words, she thinks. And then, quite by surprise, a picture of Mr. Perry’s face flashes into her head. There it is—the sadness, and the elegance, the educated hand.
She stills inside.
Yes, she had thought of it once, thought of being in love with him. Actually, it was Charlotte who’d suggested it. “Perhaps he’ll marry you,” she’d said in an offhand way one evening—oh, it was years ago, now—when she and Vida had been sitting on the wall outside the Dolphin.
Vida had been sharing with Charlotte her opinion of Mr. Perry’s summer houseguests that year, an American couple and a woman Vida took to be a divorcée—a friend of the family, Mr. Perry had said. But Vida hadn’t liked her, hadn’t approved of the way she draped herself on the arm of Mr. Perry’s chair when they sat in the garden. She’d been sickening with Manford, too, she’d told Charlotte, talking baby talk to him, patting him on the head. And she’d overheard her talking with the other woman, the wife, when the ladies had come in before dinner to wash up.
Having settled Manford in front of the telly with his supper—he was only six or seven then—Vida had come back through the hall with a tray for the glasses from the garden. The two women had been lounging in the library, drinks in hand, their shoes kicked off. When Vida heard their voices, she had paused in the hall.
“Well, he’s depressed, Sally, for God’s sake,” she heard one of the women say.
“Oh, I know, I know.” Sally sighed. “But it’s so boring. You’d think he’d be over it by now.”
There had been no reply from her companion.
“And it’s not good for him to be holed up here away from all his friends,” Sally went on petulantly. “And that child—you have to feel sorry for him. But wouldn’t he be better off someplace where he could be taken care of? And that nurse—she treats him as if there weren’t a thing wrong with him! But of course you can see it—all over his face.” Vida heard a pause. “God, poor Eleanor. She would have just died.”
Vida heard ice clatter in a glass. Her own fingers and face had turned to stone.
“You’re cruel.” The other voice was reproachful.
“Oh, I don’t mean it like that. You know I don’t. What I say is, just put it all behind him! Get the poor boy in some place where they’re all just like him, where he won’t feel—you know. And then let Thomas get on with his life.”
“You mean, get on with your life.” The other woman laughed.
Sally laughed, too. “I wouldn’t mind.”
Vida heard the soft sound of a pillow thrown across the room, landing with a thick thud. She jumped. The women laughed again.
“I could use some fun. I admit it. Divorce makes one so—disgustingly celibate.”
Vida had turned then sharply and gone back to the kitchen. Manford had looked up at her as she’d come into the room and dropped to her knees beside him. She put her arms around him. Manford craned round her shoulder to see The Magic Roundabout. Egg on his face smeared onto her collar.
“I love you,” she said fiercely into his neck. “Such a good boy, my Manford.”
He had patted her shoulder kindly.
But conveying her outrage to Charlotte later that night had left Vida feeling not more comforted, but less. Mr. Perry didn’t need to forget about Manford—she’d understood that from the beginning. He needed to take him in. To recognize him. And her, too, she’d thought once. He needed to recognize her. We could be a family, she’d thought fiercely.
But it had lasted only a moment, this thought. Because almost at the same moment, she had realized the absurdity of the notion.
It was true she thought Mr. Perry handsome. She still did. But more than just their stations separated them. It wasn’t just that she was the nanny to the retarded son, he her distant employer. Though they’d known each other nearly twenty-one years now and had developed the habit of familiarity between them, something stood between them, had always stood between them. Though they both loved Manford—for she believed that Mr. Perry did love his son—only she took any pleasure from that. Mr. Perry was, despite his wealth, his talent, his worldliness, small in her eyes.
She could never forgive him, in a way, for being such a coward.
She looks down at the letter in her hand now. Would Mr. Perry have written this to her? After all these years? Was he trying to find his way back? Mailing love letters to her from distant lands, still unable to stand in the same place as she and look at what lay between them, the daft boy with his terrible innocence? Could it be? After all this time? She closes her eyes. She knows she wanted it once, her own expectations so much larger, richer, finer, than what might have been possible. They’d been a child’s expectations. She had thought, a moment here and moment there, that he might have touched her. In gratitude or for comfort, a touch that might have led to something. But on the whole, she thought, her love for Mr. Perry—if you could even call it that—was so much less than for his son, this boy she had raised as her own.
If he loved her now, if Mr. Perry had fallen in love with her—oh, would she even want it?
She thinks of him coming home, loosening his tie, throwing it across the room toward the back of a chair. She had stood there so many times for this ritual, holding Manford’s hand, the two of them watching him, the event of his homecoming. The tie would sail lightly, endlessly. “Any gin in the house, Vida?”
But he would not look directly at them.
She had watched Mr. Perry’s tie flying through the air and had thought, as she stood there with Manford’s hot hand held in her own, of her own shedded clothing lifting, billowing in air, leaving the body behind, warm and expectant.
“I’ll be out for dinner tonight, Vida,” he would say.
“But you’ve only just come home!”
She had been surprised, expecting once, twice, a hundred times, that he would stop before Manford, bring some gift from his pocket, touch him gently, lovingly. But Mr. Perry had turned away from her reproach, embarrassed. She had been so angry.
Now she hardly ever thinks of him.
A chill travels up her breast and to her face. The sun has moved on now, lingering on the fire irons, the empty grate, a lonely china shepherdess on the mantel, her gilded crook glowing.
It couldn’t be Mr. Perry, she thinks. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.
But if not him, then who?
Returning to the kitchen, she folds the letter neatly and puts it in a drawer. Then she turns to regard her face in the small mirror over the old sideboard. She touches her hair, its springy weight bouncing around her face and neck. She pushes her fingers through it tentatively. What was it Mrs. Billy had said about that hair color? Venus, did she call it?
She looks at her watch. She has just time, she thinks, for a rinse before Manford is done at Niven’s. She goes and fetches her coat.
But on her way down the lane toward the village and Mrs. Billy’s, her eyes, caught by a flash of color, fly sideways to the bench, the bench where she waits for Manford in the afternoons. There, resting on its seat as though left behind, is a bouquet of flowers, tied with a ribbon.
Vida stops, frozen. Then she spins round as if to catch some departing figure, the owner, or the conveyor, of the bouquet. There is no one there. She takes a step closer. A small card is fitted into the ribbon. Gingerly she lifts it free, brings it close to her face.
For you.