NORRIS AWAKENS SO early Saturday morning that it is still dark. His sheets are hot and disheveled; he knows he has been dreaming.
But yesterday was no dream. He emerges into full wakefulness with the rising joy of one who has won a victory and is now realizing the full extent of the splendid consequences.
Vida has read his first letter. He has sent her flowers. She knows someone—a mysterious someone—loves her.
Norris rolls over in his narrow bed. A thin crease of gray light shows beyond the sill.
Mr. Calfo was wonderfully prompt about returning his letter, Norris thinks, and with a very pretty stamp, too. He must send him something by way of thanks—perhaps Mr. Calfo would like one of his stamps from those tiny little Faeroe Islands? A friend had put Norris onto these stamps—they were pretty, sunsets over the Baltic and so forth, and might one day be valuable. Norris had bought two at the time and thinks now that he might be willing to give one to Mr. Calfo for his expediency and cooperation.
But what could have happened to old Nesser, he ponders, rolling over again with restless happiness. Well, he supposes it will be along.
And the flowers, too—wasn’t that a bit of luck?
“Won’t you come along and dig up some of my lavender, Mr. Lamb?” Dr. Faber’s wife had said, stopping in the post office Friday morning shortly after Vida had left with his letter. “Or at least come and cut yourself a bunch. It’s a profusion!” And then she had stopped and sniffed, looking round the post office as if she couldn’t quite locate the source of some scent that had suddenly filled her nose.
So he’d gone round to the Fabers’ when he’d run home for lunch. Hermione Faber had been out in the garden herself—she was a spirited, handsome woman, with red cheeks and a high forehead and a cultivated accent, generally thought to do Dr. Faber credit, though he was well liked on his own. And she had the prettiest garden in Hursley, thought Norris, who prided himself on the performance of his own modest borders round the side of his cottage. Along with the lavender—she’d kindly put up three big pots for him; “Making room for these infernal hollyhocks,” she’d said—she’d also pressed on him an armload of pink roses. “Simplicity, this one’s called,” she’d said, laying the bundle in his arms, “but I told Dr. Faber they ought to call it Multiplicity! Have you ever seen so many flowers? Mind the thorns.”
But now, he thinks, rolling over to face the window again, pulling the sheet up over his shoulder—now he wants to do something more, something really clever. Nesser will send along his other letter, and won’t she be surprised when that one comes? But Norris must think of something else for the meanwhile.
He wants to buy her a gift. He stares out the window, where the slice of light has thickened to a slab. He can hear birds now. There’s no place in Hursley to go shopping, he knows, and everything will be closed if he waits until tomorrow. And this afternoon is the Sadie Hawkins races; he doesn’t want to miss those, as he might see Vida there.
Well, there’s no hope for it. He’ll have to close up shop.
It is still very early when he steps out onto the Romsey Road. The wide white paper shades are rolled down at the butcher’s, and the blacksmith’s is quiet as death, Fergus upstairs in his foul bedchamber sleeping off his habitual Friday night affair with gin. Norris hurries down the Romsey Road and lets himself furtively into the dark, damp-smelling post office, where he writes out a sign, which he props in the window with a box of Crunchie bars.
CLOSED FOR THE MORNING. SORRY.
Locking the door again behind him, he walks down the road and stands anxiously in front of the shuttered windows of the Dolphin, looking up and down the street, breathing in the cloudy odor of the stale bitters and ale spilled on the flagstones beneath his feet and examining his watch until the bus comes into view, like a large prehistoric animal insinuating itself through the old houses tilting close by the road. A historian who’d once done a study of Hursley dated parts of the village—based on various ornamented stones, including one that now formed part of the wall of Mrs. Patrick’s sheep pen—to 1138, when Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester, built a castle whose vast ruins stood inside an Iron Age fort two miles north of the village. The vicar himself, though an acknowledged amateur in such matters, believed that St. Alphage, particularly its tower, had undeniable roots in the fourteenth century. But in any case, it seemed to Norris that regardless of exactly how old Hursley was—Saxon, Norman, whatever—the modern contrivances of buses and autos would always seem out of place there. He would have liked to have seen the village when there was nothing but horse traffic on the Romsey Road, when Fergus, whose business was now mostly given over to repairing tools and the occasional length of wrought iron fence, still shod twenty horses a day right at his forge. Now only the occasional mare was brought in, usually one of Winstead-Harris’s. He rode them down into the village himself. Just like a lord, Norris thought. He’d always rather admired the man’s doomed and anachronistic flair.
Excited by the sense of freedom from his own life (and its novel undercurrent of disobedience, for he always opens the post office Saturday mornings), he climbs aboard the bus, when it grinds to a halt before him, and heads immediately for the upper deck, the last seat in the rear, where he can turn and watch the village disappear as the bus rocks round the last of the Romsey Road’s serpentine curves and gathers speed down the long slope through yellow and mint-colored fields toward Winchester. He blinks as the warm air of the compartment and the gritty stink of exhaust from the bus are replaced in a moment with the slightly sour, damp smell of a summer morning, riding the breeze through the windows.
He is pleased to have his seat. There are usually children who claim it, a row of squirming little boys in caps and high socks, and who appreciate the exaggerated bounce to be had at the back of the bus. But Norris, too, secretly likes the faintly thrilling quality of the ride in the last seat and the unobstructed view of what he is leaving behind, the trees swallowing the village behind him. In a shocking instant, Hursley is gone as completely as if it never existed, even the tower of St. Alphage and the silvery roof of Southend, and Norris experiences again the strange, empowering sensation of one feeling’s canceling out the other, of being able instantly to ameliorate his grief at seeing his place on earth disappear—for of course Hursley couldn’t just vanish. It will be there when he returns, rising up as they round the corner as magically as it has just now disappeared from view.
In Winchester a half hour later, the bus stops by the cathedral to let off a few passengers. Norris had gone by once to have a look-round after the archeological dig started there. But he had been vaguely disturbed by the sight of the underground civilization breaking through the terra firma beneath his feet, as if the ground he stood upon were not wholly stable. It had made him feel sad to imagine that his world, too, with all its lively industry, might one day be nothing but a layer of pottery shards and crude tools baked in the hot and dusty oven of the underground, the familiar rites of his own civilization rendered strange and somehow pathetic—for being lost and buried—by the passage of time.
Now, though, with his errand to consider, his mission firmly in his mind, he puts his cap on his lap and gazes quietly out the window at the inviting caverns of shade under awnings, the mysterious and interesting passages between buildings, the reassuring traffic of pedestrians going about their Saturday morning errands.
HE CONSIDERS WHETHER underthings might be appropriate. That’s a romantic gift, isn’t it? A catalog had come for Sam Saxon at the post office the other day, and Norris had taken the opportunity to glance over it. Saxon must have ordered something once for his wife, for Christmas perhaps. But, of course, she’s left him now, gone to London, Norris had heard, with a second cousin. So perhaps it had been a last-ditch thing that had failed, he thinks now, Sam’s ordering something from the catalog. How sad. Still, Saxon is rather an unappealing sort. Very bad teeth, Norris thinks.
But they’d had some lovely things in that catalog, nighties and so forth. He had admired one called the Hollywood, all in red, with a little jacket to it. But he had thought that red was not exactly Vida’s color; he’d only admired the Hollywood and its blond occupant objectively. Actually, he thinks he has in mind something trimmed with fur—he doesn’t know why, exactly. He likes the thought of little ermine cuffs. Or maybe something with feathers—pink feathers, such as an American woman might wear. But Vida’s not a schoolgirl, after all, and should have something that suits her level of maturity. No Little Bo-Peep bows and so on, he decides. No peekaboo.
HE PASSES THE women’s lingerie shop, which is just off the close, once, twice, three times, without being able exactly to walk in through the door; there always seem to be a great many customers inside. And then he thinks that he will just go and have a cup of tea in the lobby of the Wessex first. He feels in need of refreshment.
At the Wessex he is brought a pot of tea and some rather charred toast in a rack, and he sits by a window, almost hidden by the long gold-colored drapes. Outside, across the lawn stretching up to the cathedral, the young workers with their colorful head scarves and striped jerseys begin to arrive at the dig. The sky is cloudy; Norris stares up into its utterly flat surface. When a single raindrop slaps against the glass before him, he jumps as if a plate has been dropped.
On his way out of the hotel, he pauses by the fountain in the lobby and fishes in his pocket for a penny.
He stands there for some time, the penny in his hand, thinking, and while he is standing there, a little boy comes and stands beside him. The child glances up at Norris through spectacles so thick that Norris cannot see the child’s eyes, but only a rapid, blurring motion, like a hand waving from behind streaked glass.
“What will you wish for?” the boy asks.
Norris, who has been almost submerged by a wave of generalized, inchoate longing as he stands watching the water splash into the fountain, is speechless for a moment. The child waits and then glances away. “I always throw two, in any case,” he offers generously, as if letting Norris in on a trick.
Norris looks over at him. “Two?” he says. “In case of what?”
“In case I’ve made a bad wish,” the child says.
Norris considers this. “What’s a bad wish?”
The boy glances at Norris, as if to see whether he’s to be trusted. “Something I shouldn’t wish for,” he answers at last. He appears to be thinking. “Like—all the chocolate in the world,” he says finally.
“Oh!” Norris is vaguely relieved. “Well, that doesn’t seem such a bad wish,” he says jovially, as if to cheer up this serious little fellow.
The boy shrugs. “It’s never come true, anyway,” he says. “They don’t ever, do they?”
And now he is looking up at Norris, his eyes a blue, watery blur. Norris is stricken. He feels as if he had thrown the boy a life ring, but the child had missed it and was now vanishing under the waves.
“I think,” Norris says quickly, more heatedly than he intends, “that perhaps we only get one wish. One in the whole of our lifetime. But you never know when it’s going to be granted, you see. It might be anytime. So you might as well just keep on wishing. In fact, you’d better wish every chance you get, because if you don’t”—he looks down at the boy standing beside him—“if you don’t keep wishing, you might just miss your chance.”
THE SALESWOMAN IN the boutique is young. Norris is relieved by this. Addressing his needs to a woman more his age would be somehow embarrassing, he thinks.
There are three mannequins clustered near the door to the shop, and Norris negotiates their delicately dressed, immobile selves carefully, making his way to the center of the room. The carpet under his feet is a weary green; the walls, by contrast, are a fresh white, and the various gowns and nightdresses stand out like the occupants of a crowded and colorful aviary. The salesgirl, a plain young woman—with her pale blue shirt misbuttoned, giving her a somewhat lopsided appearance, Norris notes immediately—has looked up at him inquiringly.
“I’m looking—” He pauses, glancing around and feeling distracted by the fluttering racks of gauzy material. “I’m looking for a—gift.”
“For yourself?” The young woman smiles a tiny, almost sorrowful smile, revealing two long front teeth, slightly crossed one over the other.
Norris stares at her teeth in confusion. “No,” he says. “Not for myself. For someone else. I should like to buy something—for a female,” he adds, hoping to clarify matters. “But—I’ll be the one paying, if that’s what you mean.”
The girl smiles again. She has quite a pretty smile, Norris thinks, despite her teeth. He wishes she had got her shirt right. She stands there very patiently, as if she feels Norris is trying to remember something and she doesn’t want to interrupt his train of thought.
Norris feels frozen to the spot. This has been a bad idea, he thinks.
At last, somewhat shyly, the girl raises her eyelashes and asks, “Your age, is she?”
“A bit younger,” he manages to reply.
“Robe and nightie, or undergarments?”
Norris cannot completely believe that the word undergarments has come out of this nice young woman’s mouth. He manages to say, “Robe.”
Slow as a sleepwalker, the girl begins to move out from behind the counter. Norris closes his eyes, as if she might come out with no skirt on.
“We’ve several lovely matching sets.” He hears her voice and opens his eyes quickly to avoid being ambushed. But the girl is on the other side of the room, indicating a rack. She has on a thickly woven tweed skirt, knee-length.
She turns to him with a swirl, surprisingly graceful, and holds up a floor-length gown in Oriental silk, printed with pale blue waterfalls, peacocks, and yellow-and-red butterflies against a trelliswork of Chinese Chippendale in soft chestnut. A swarm of birds the color of indigo buntings flies across the cream-colored breast. The lapels are of brushed green silk, fringed with golden tassels. The girl shakes it slightly, and it rises and falls, a woman swaying, the world tilting. “This is for underneath,” she says quietly, and slips a cord to reveal a black silk nightdress, cut deeply across the shoulders in a ballerina neckline, smaller versions of the same butterflies and birds twinkling against the black.
“Isn’t it pretty?” she asks. “I thought we should put it in the window, all by itself. Just like a princess standing there. You wouldn’t need anything else, if you had this.”
And Norris is reminded then of his stamps of eighteenth-century costumes. They’re oversize, printed on the occasion of an exhibit of ladies’ dress mounted at the British Museum in Cairo. Norris had thought the stamps were curious, the elaborate gowns standing out in solemn relief against black backgrounds as if, as soon as the photographer aimed his camera, the women themselves had vanished, leaving only their clothing behind. He had thought there was something tragic about the empty dresses, like fallen film idols, or princesses taken hostage in a coup.
Norris feels it best just to stay where is he is, but he gestures toward the robe. “It’s very—” He pauses. “How much—”
The girl inspects the tags. “Fifty pounds. For the set.”
“Fifty pounds!” Norris reaches for his handkerchief, dabs at his neck.
“We’ve got them cheaper.” But she looks disappointed, begins to turn away with the gown folded over her arm, a discarded partner.
“No, no!” Norris’s heart contracts with shame. “No, I’ll take it.”
She brightens, like a child. “Oh! You do love her, don’t you?”
Norris stares at her, her thin neck inside the crooked collar of her blouse like the stem of a flower held in a rough hand. She’s used rather too much eyeliner, he notices. Her eyes, rimmed heavily in kohl, look like a baby owl’s.
“I can tell you do,” she goes on happily. “It’s in your face.”
She smiles again, her lips coming together over her teeth like a stage curtain, and moves back to the counter, where she begins to fold the robe and nightgown into elaborate pleats. “I knew you were the right sort,” she goes on shyly. “Not like the others. I saw it the moment you came in. You’re the real thing, aren’t you?”
She stops her folding for a moment and gazes up at Norris with eyes full of tears. “God,” she says, blinking up at him. “I wish I were old.”
THAT AFTERNOON, NORRIS sets his umbrella, rug, and hamper down on a weathered gray bench at the edge of the cemetery, looks through the trees to the lawns sloping down to the Tyre. The bridge over the gray water is woven with streamers and flowers, unnaturally bright in the greenish light that filters through the clouds. In a few minutes the young men will gather on the bridge, laughing and jostling one another. And then at a signal the girls will race down the grass and across the bridge, streaming over it in pursuit of the boys, who will take off over the far bank.
Norris sits down on the bench. He’s packed a lunch—hard-boiled eggs, meat sandwiches, a jelly roll—but he doesn’t think he will get to eat it here now, much less with Vida. He feels vaguely depressed after his morning of shopping, lonely and deflated. A few people have spread rugs across the grass, but a great many more stand by the road near their cars, where they can keep their luncheons safely dry should the rain begin.
This evening a dance will be held at Prince’s Mead. Norris’s grandmother used to play the piano for village dances, but over time, with the influence of the young, who prefer a different sort of music, real musicians had yielded to a phonograph and records. Norris could remember standing at his grandmother’s shoulder turning pages for her before she lost her sight, the couples spinning past him. “Go on and ask someone, Norrie,” his mother had whispered, coming up close behind him. “Go and ask Lucinda Horsey there. She’s sitting all by herself. Go on.”
But no one had caught Norris at the races earlier in the day, and he was grateful for the duty of organizing the sheet music, of appearing busily occupied. He’d said nothing to his mother, had nodded vaguely and failed to move. He didn’t know why he had not been pursued by anybody at the race. He had tried not to run too fast, glancing over his shoulder. But the girls had flown past him, almost veering away deliberately, he’d thought in shame and agony. And he would have been so tender with any one of them, plaiting flowers for a crown, or kissing the sweet-smelling napes of their necks! He had stopped still at last, hopeless and stiff in his new shirt, and looked down at his feet. But that had been his fatal move, he’d thought. You mustn’t look as though you wanted to be caught. He had glanced around, seen that a few other young men had drifted away as if they were bored with the game, when it was plain to Norris that they, too, were among the unselected. He had understood suddenly the cruelty of the contest. Why do such rites exist? he’d thought. And also, It doesn’t matter what I think. I’ve no power to stop it.
Now, sitting on the bench watching the crowds assemble in a hesitant fashion on the lawns below, he hesitates. If it rains, Vida certainly won’t come. He had taken out the nightdress for her when he’d arrived home from Winchester, spread it across his bed, and stared at it a long while. The way it lay there, empty and lifeless, had left him feeling peculiarly sad and hopeless, like a man who has been abandoned by his wife. Like Sam Saxon, he’d thought in distaste.
“Oh, there you are, Mr. Lamb. Where’ve you been all morning? What little mystery are you up to?”
Norris startles at the voice of Mrs. Billy, who is approaching through the cemetery, a brightly patterned shawl round her shoulders. Mr. Billy walks placidly behind her, toting a large hamper. “Come and have a sausage pie with us, won’t you?” she invites Norris. “I’ve just made them.”
He looks up at her glumly. “Don’t you think they’ll cancel?”
“Oh, pish, I shouldn’t think so. The young don’t mind a bit of rain. Don’t tip the hamper, Mr. Billy. The cake will slide.” She directs her attention back to Norris. “You’re such a worrier, Mr. Lamb! Stay here under the trees like this and it will surely rain. You’ll be bad luck!”
But Norris shakes his head.
Mrs. Billy puts her hands on her hips. “Now Mr. Lamb. You’re a bachelor. You ought to be down there on the bridge, some pretty girl chasing you. You might find you enjoy it! You don’t think you’re too old now, do you?”
“It’s not a question of age,” he replies stiffly, looking away.
“Well, I’ve plenty of pies. Suit yourself,” she calls.
He’s offended her now. Mr. Billy marches past, nods impassively to Norris, his pipe clenched between his teeth.
Norris stares out through the trees. After a while, with a kind of grim relief, he hears the first of several large drops of rain smack the leaves overhead. The organizers of the festivities are running about under their umbrellas. Now they’ll just move things inside, Norris thinks, though he can see a group of young men, their white shirts already plastered to their backs with rain, still idling by the bridge. He stands up and turns to lift his hamper from the bench. And then he hears her voice, thin and high and sourceless among the tall monuments of the cemetery.
“Come on, Manford,” she is calling. “Hurry.”
HE LIFTS HIS head and sees her, in a white dress, running awkwardly with her basket, Manford lumbering along behind her, through the vicarage garden toward the west end of St. Alphage.
When he pulls open the door behind them a moment later, panting and drenched, Vida has set her basket down inside and is wiping her face, lifting her wet hair away from her cheeks strand by strand, her fingers delicately extended as though operated by an invisible puppeteer.
“Oh! Mr. Lamb! You were caught as well.” She turns to him, and her face glows in the dimness of the church, her white dress a sanctuary of shadows. “It came on very suddenly, didn’t it? We’re sopped.”
Manford crosses his arms in front of him and shivers, slaps at his chest, making a bright, hard smacking sound. Norris sees Vida glance at Manford and then vaguely around the vestibule. “Have they got a towel somewhere, do you think?” She holds out her arms hopelessly, her sleeves clinging.
Norris sets his hamper down. A violent shiver of fear and excitement runs through him. “There’s the choir robes. I’ll fetch them.”
He comes back into the shadowy vestibule with three robes over his arm. He hands one to Vida. “Would he like one?” he asks, gesturing with his head in Manford’s direction.
She helps Manford into the crimson robe. He looks heartbreaking in it, Norris thinks, the solemn and dignified cloth exaggerating his idiocy in a painful way. Manford lifts his arms experimentally and the sleeves billow. Vida smiles at him. “You look like an angel,” she says fondly.
She steps away from them to the door, the hem of the robe dragging on the floor. “It’s really raining hard now,” she says, speaking into the vicar’s garden through the open doors. “It’s a shame. It’s not nearly so much sport for them indoors.”
Norris watches her, framed in the doorway. She looks both important and childlike. Gusts of rain blow across the cemetery like the sails of phantom ships.
“Did you ever go to one indoors?” he asks. “The races?”
“I didn’t go to one ever,” she says lightly. “I thought they were awful.”
She turns around, apparently in search of Manford, who has moved off down the aisle, his arms wrapped round himself so that he appears, from behind, to be straitjacketed. He is looking up at the stained-glass windows. The light falls, faded and streaked, into the dim church. Manford stops below the repentance window, St. Peter with his keys and a cockerel.
Norris looks down at his feet, back up at her. “You never went to the races? I thought—”
“Oh, I went,” she says. “I just didn’t run.” She hesitates. “There weren’t enough girls. Didn’t you ever notice that? And it was all prearranged.”
“Prearranged?” Norris is baffled.
“Everyone knew who everyone else was going for. It was all set already.” She glances over at him and gives a small laugh. “But you ran. I remember.” Then she cocks her head. “Didn’t you know how it would be? Didn’t you know if someone was all set for you?”
“No. I—” Norris puts his hand to the back of his neck, drops of water trickling from his hair into his collar. “I only did it once. I wasn’t caught.”
“Oh. Well, that’s what I mean.” She speaks quietly. “Some were left out. I couldn’t bear that.”
“You’re so kind!” The words rush from him, and he has to stop himself from throwing open his arms. He is filled even more with admiration for her. So young, he thinks irrationally, and yet she had understood.
She laughs, surprised. “I don’t know. I think I was afraid of it, actually. Isn’t that silly? Now, I—” She pauses. “I think perhaps I was afraid to chase the one I wanted.”
The one she wanted? Norris can feel his face seize. Did she still harbor feelings for someone? Some chap now grown and married perhaps? Was that why she’d never married?
“Was there one?” His voice is very small.
“Oh, yes.” She laughs lightly. “There was always one or another, wasn’t there?”
Norris is stricken. Yet he senses something—some bravado—in her words.
She turns away from him, puts her hands to her face, brushes the wet hair away again. The wind pants just outside the door. The sky darkens purposefully. “I can’t think why I didn’t bring an umbrella,” she says. “I knew it would rain.”
Manford is standing now on the south side of the sanctuary beneath St. Stephen, his death by stoning. His own head thrown back and his mouth gaping open, Manford stares at the picture, St. Stephen’s broken and anguished form, the staff he’d held to protect himself. Norris glances around the church and then back to Vida, feeling that he has something more to say. How amazing, he thinks, to be having this conversation with her. He wants to say something important, about what those years had been like for him.
“I didn’t like it either,” he offers suddenly, “but I always wanted to dance, you know. I felt rather shy, I suppose. It’s funny—” He considers, and then looks up as if surprised. “I always thought I’d be quite a good dancer.”
She turns round from the door to look at him. “Didn’t you ever dance? Never once?”
He shakes his head. “You did, though?”
She looks at him. Norris is suddenly aware of how his hair must look, wet and disarranged oddly over the top of his head. He begins to raise his hand but stops when she starts to speak again.
“I loved to dance.” She pauses. “Sometimes I still think about it. But there isn’t any occasion for older people, is there? To dance, I mean.” She looks at him; it’s as if she has held out her hand.
“Are we older?” He smiles, grateful.
“Yes!” She laughs. “I am. And you certainly are, Mr. Lamb. You’re older than me!”
He takes a step toward her. “I am,” he says. “I am old, perhaps. But we’re not too old, are we? It’s not too late?” It seems to him that she will steer them away. “I believe,” he says, taking a deep breath, “I believe I would dance—like a gazelle!”
“A gazelle!” Her eyes are round.
“And you—” He takes another step, almost involuntarily, toward her. “And you’d be a—a—oh, what is it called?” He laughs. “One of those birds that leaps up from the ground, twisting and turning? A woodcock! That’s what it is! It’s their mating dance. Haven’t you ever seen it?”
She stares back at him. “A woodcock?”
“Yes!” He has caught up her hands, is wringing them. “It’s the most amazing thing. I’ve seen them, up near Winstead-Harris’s house, in a spinney there. They start low to the ground”—Norris crouches slightly, and Vida must crouch along with him, for he has hold of her hands—“and then the female bird, she spins straight up in the air! Like a corkscrew! Really! It’s fantastic!”
“Whatever for?” But she is laughing.
“Why, it’s all part of the ritual, I suppose. It’s how they do it.” But he hears his own words then, and drops her hands in embarrassment. A woodcock. Good lord.
“It’s a dance, you see,” he says helplessly. “It’s an art. A talent.”
She smiles, and then he can see recollection pass over her features. “Did you ever go to Miss Ferry’s pageants?” she asks him. “Do you remember them? The ones at Southend? I don’t know whether they do them anymore. They’ve never asked Mr. Perry about using the house. But we had to wear Gypsy skirts and bangles. We liked the way we looked, all made up, with mascara and eyeliner and lipstick. We thought we looked quite exotic. We used to kiss one another before we went out, for luck.”
Norris feels so happy. “Yes, yes, I remember,” he says. “Of course you would like that, wouldn’t you? Anyone would—like being somebody else. Someone with a more interesting life. More exotic, as you say.” He appraises her shyly, appreciatively. “I should think you’d be a wonderful Gypsy. I like costumes, myself. I—admire the change they can effect. I think I—long for it, really, in a way.”
“Being somebody else.” Vida repeats his words. “You long for that?”
Norris feels disconcerted. He can’t exactly judge her tone. Does she disapprove? “I used to think that I might have done so well, if only I’d had the chance,” he says, trying to explain, and the words and the time are getting all mixed up for him. “If things had been different, I might have been—”
“Somebody else? You might have been different, too?” She is eager now, almost straining inside her robe. Her wet hair is slicked back from her face. Norris can see the slight protrusion of her brow above her temples, the fine bone there curved like a shell. He wants to put his finger to it, touch her pulse, the steady, astonishing measure of her existence.
“I thought, in a way,” he begins awkwardly, touching his fist to his heart, the words coming slowly, carefully, for he has never said such things before, never to anyone; he is surprising himself, what he knows. “I thought once I might be capable of anything, really. Just that I walked and breathed—that seemed miraculous in and of itself! That I was one of the—the marvelous contrivances of the world, all so cleverly put together—” He wiggles his fingers like a man counting money. “The tympanic membrane of the ear, the great wings of the skull, and tissue and blood and ligament and bone. It all seems so fantastic, in a way, that it works!”
Vida looks baffled, almost agonized.
Norris tries to think. What is it he wants to say? He runs on desperately, despite himself. “But then, I don’t know—one day I realized that I wasn’t really so miraculous after all.” He thrusts out his hand. “I’ve got a wart on my finger. You see? And I’ve got terrible eyesight. And a bad back. Kept me out of the war!” He says this last as if accusing himself, accusing his own back of having prevented him from being heroic. “But still, I’ve got to hope, don’t I? Don’t I? Don’t we all?”
“Yes, of course,” Vida says, but the baffled look hasn’t left her face. Norris feels as though he will burst. He is so stupid! Why can’t he just tell her?
A sudden, dull crash causes them to turn away. Manford flounders in a pile of hymnals down near the last pew. The tower he’s built of them lies scattered.
Vida hurries down the aisle. She helps Manford to his feet, picks up the books, and arranges them neatly. She returns to Norris, holding Manford tightly by the hand. Manford’s skin looks gray in the poor light.
She takes off her robe, hands it gravely to Norris without exactly looking at him. He reaches for it, holding it tightly, as if holding the robe will cause her to stay.
“It’s let up a bit,” she says. She helps Manford out of his robe, hands it to Norris, too.
She will leave now. Norris feels as though he were being buried in sand, that soon even his mouth and eyes will be buried.
She turns after ushering Manford outside.
“It was lovely seeing you,” she says suddenly, warmly.
“Yes. Thank you,” he replies.
WHEN HE STEPS outside, he finds Mr. Niven and his wife sitting under the dormer, a rug over their laps, and a thermos be tween them.
Mrs. Niven looks up in surprise. “Another refugee?” she says. “But it doesn’t look as though you made it quite in time, Mr. Lamb.”
“No,” Norris says, feeling vaguely guilty, as though he’s been caught at something. Had they seen Vida and Manford as well?
“Did you see Miss Stephen inside?” Mrs. Niven asks.
“Ah—yes. I did.” He pauses. “She was wet as well,” he adds.
Mr. Niven glances up at him. “Tea?” He extends a mug.
“Yes, thank you,” Norris says, for he feels unnatural and lightheaded, as though he has run a hard race.
“We’ve our book circle tonight, Mr. Lamb,” Mrs. Niven says, leaning round her husband. “And, do you know, Charles has said he’ll mind Manford for Miss Stephen while she joins us. Don’t you think that will be lovely for her?”
“I’m going to practice with my putter is all,” Mr. Niven says gruffly. “She said he’d be asleep.”
But Norris is hardly hearing them, for suddenly an idea has come into his head. “So,” he says, bringing the steaming tea to his lips. “Your book circle is tonight, is it? An hour of intellectual adventure on the high seas of literature?”
“Oh, not just an hour, Mr. Lamb. We shall be going on late into the evening,” Mrs. Niven says. “We’re having wine, as well,” she adds. “A rosé. I expect I’ll have to wake Charles, we’ll go on so long. We’re all terribly excited.”
“I’m sure you are. It sounds fascinating,” Norris says. Now he feels much better. All his botched efforts this afternoon, babbling on at Vida like an idiot—showing her his warts, for God’s sake! But he can redeem himself now. Could he, really, get past Niven? Get the robe to her bedroom? He feels infinitely revived.
He takes a mouthful of tea. “Pity about the race, isn’t it?” he says casually.
“Oh, they’re so disappointed,” Mrs. Niven says.
Norris hands his cup back to her. “That was just the thing, Mrs. Niven,” he says. “Now I’ll just run home and change into some dry clothes.”
Mr. Niven looks up at him. “Are you opening up later?”
Norris is perplexed. “Sorry?”
“The post office?” Mr. Niven says, as if reminding him. “You weren’t there this morning. I’ve something to post.”
“Oh! Yes. Of course. Sorry for the inconvenience.” He gives them a brilliant smile, touches two fingers to his forehead in a salute, and moves off. But he has no intention of spending his afternoon at the post office. He has far too much thinking to do.
THAT EVENING, NORRIS folds the nightgown and robe carefully in tissue and then in a length of torn sheet taken from the linen chest. When he opens the cupboard, a bundle of curled, dry roots tied with string falls out on the floor. Norris picks it up and puts it to his nose—vetiver, the smell of his bedsheets. He replaces it on the shelf and then puts the wrapped nightdress in a haversack. He senses that he might need both hands free for this mission, though if he had stopped to examine that thought he might have been embarrassed. What, did he expect to scale the brick and stone of Southend’s facade, a patch over one eye and ivy tickling his chin, and enter through a window?
But he will not allow reason to interfere with the anticipation of adventure, even danger, that accompanies the matter of delivering his gift. He has in mind to lay it across her bed so that she might, stepping into her room later that night—possibly naked—from the bath, find it there waiting, as if someone watching had followed her. He has in mind something magical, impossible. He has in mind to surprise her. Everybody loves to be surprised, he thinks.
When he steps from his back door into the darkness, the pair of doves that nestle in the wisteria are disturbed and blow a long, warbling cry into the night, like the imitative whistle of a young boy meeting a cohort for a secret assignation. Then all is quiet.
He lets himself in at the post office as quietly as he can. He doesn’t want to turn on a light and excite the suspicion of the drunken patrons at the Dolphin, lounging about on the corner at the two oak tables there, and so instead takes a torch from his haversack and trains it on the supply of letters and parcels that had come Friday afternoon. He had expected to sort the post Saturday morning, and then the notion of traveling to Winchester had seized him instead. But he hopes now that his second letter to Vida will have arrived, courtesy of old Nesser. He wants to deliver it along with the robe.
And there it is, an envelope of pale blue paper, a stamp on its face so lovely he feels instantly grateful to Nesser for his good judgment and excellent taste. It must have been from his own collection, Norris thinks, from a series he remembered that represented the civil virtues, issued by the independent Republic of San Marino some years back. Each stamp is a sketch, loosely drawn like a Matisse, showing a woman’s body in various attitudes, heroic or modest. This stamp, depicting love, is of a beautiful woman seen in profile, her neck inclined backward in a faintly ecstatic pose, her gaze half-lidded and erotic. The faintest suggestion of her naked breasts can be seen, rising mounds beneath her collarbones. Norris is reminded of his own secret collection of breast-feeding stamps. He has several Madonnas, of course, and one stamp from Laos showing a pert young mother in an opened blouse with a high Oriental collar, her infant at her nipple. Another, from Tanzania, in celebration of the Year of the Child, features a dark-skinned woman, her enormous teat stretched by her hungry child. A Bostwanian stamp shows a woman tilting her large nipple playfully toward a cartoonish crocodile, its jaws stretched into a smile. Norris’s favorite, though, is from Transkei, one of the South African homelands with its own postal service. In this stamp an older woman, a wet nurse, perhaps, naked from the waist up except for a massive necklace of rough white shells, offers her breast to a tiny starveling. Norris likes this stamp for the woman’s patient service, her grave and heavy features, and the supposed life-giving magic of her milk.
Oh, Nesser is a marvel, he thinks now. How perfect this is.
He puts the envelope in the haversack, flicks off his torch beam, and steals quietly back outside.
HE DOES NOT expect to find the doors at Southend locked. No one in Hursley ever locks a door. He walks soundlessly through the high-pruned white oaks; a wide, leafless blackness, serene as a museum chamber, lies beneath the massive branches. Through a ragged passage in a towering boxwood already strung with the moist netting of spiders’ webs, he steps into the garden and looks up at the house. A broad flight of steps, the capitals of the columns at its base carved with stone fruit borne lightly on a frozen froth of waves, leads to the terrace. And he imagines then that he can rise to her room like a hero, his heels sprouting wings.
But naturally he must walk like any ordinary mortal, and so he ascends the steps to the house, advances quietly along the terrace until he reaches the lighted frame of a set of French doors. He peeps round the frame.
Mr. Niven is there with his back to Norris, his putter gripped between two hands, his shoulders rounded, his gaze fixed on the golf ball and, fifteen feet away across the infinitely varied terrain of an Oriental rug, an overturned sherry glass that serves as the hole. The chandelier above him spreads light into the vast room with its coved ceiling; the dangling prisms issue a confetti of blue-white snowflakes the color of evening moths. Mr. Niven rocks slightly on his feet. He strikes the ball. Norris, crouched by a parapet, watches it roll soundlessly across the carpet and glance off the edge of the faceted glass with a single, perfect chime.
Oh, too bad, he thinks.
Mr. Niven walks across the room, fetches his ball, and returns again to his original position. Through the window, Norris follows the second shot, sees it roll clear of the glass altogether.
Tucking the club under his arm like a shotgun, Mr. Niven advances on the glass and touches it gingerly with his foot, adjusting its angle slightly, and then aligns himself over the ball again, somewhat nearer this time. Norris sees the ball describe a gentle arc and sink, with the sound of ice hitting the bottom of a tumbler, into the glass.
But he cannot stay and watch, though something in Mr. Niven’s patient endeavor, something in his complete ignorance of Norris’s presence outside the French doors, makes Norris feel somnolent and contented, like a sleepy child watching his mother’s hands form dumplings or knit and purl an afghan. The danger of his errand, its preposterousness, licks at the back of his mind the way a forgotten caution rises into the conscience of a child—there is something he is supposed to remember, though he only wants to watch Mr. Niven and his ball traverse the carpet, back and forth, all night, the little white ball rolling.
But when Mr. Niven turns his back and bends over his putter again, Norris rouses himself and walks softly the length of the terrace to the short flight of steps that leads down to the kitchen garden by the back door. The beds there are a tangle of overgrown herbs, the long, spiny stalks of lavender waving like sea grass, the rue perfuming the air with its sour, volatile fragrance. At the kitchen door he stops and unlaces his shoes, tucking them beneath the dank boxwood, releasing a tiny shower of drops from the leaves cupped like tiny bowls.
The door moves inward lightly, soundlessly, swinging wide like doors in dreams.
He feels his breath quicken now, for he has never been inside Southend before. At last he is in the presence of so many things she has touched, the fraying cloth hung over the handle of the stove, the slick, pearly oval of white soap in the dish by the sink—it might have slid into the bend of her wrist, up her white arm!—the teacups draining on the board, an apple, partly eaten, browning on a plate with a scalloped edge. Norris wants to put the bitten slice to his own lips, to run his tongue over the clean edge, like a shelf of coral, made by her teeth. He steps close to the sink, to the windowsill, where an assortment of objects lies perfectly arranged as if by a painter: a tangle of hairpins; a small jar of hand lotion, pink gel crusted round its rim; two knobbed horse chestnuts from some previous autumn, their luster dim; the spindly dried flower of a tulip poplar like a medieval crown of thorns; one broken and lifeless monarch butterfly, its scales turning to dust. What did it say about her that she had chosen to collect these things? he wonders. He reaches his hand to touch them, sends the chestnuts wobbling, stirs the pins.
He moves soundlessly through the room, his gaze caressing each surface her hand might have trailed across, might have rested upon.
When he stands at last in the central hall, he feels frightened for the first time. He does not know exactly where Mr. Niven is; the house is so large. It occurs to him that explaining his presence here to him would be almost worse than explaining it to Vida herself. So when he hears the distant sound of a door opening and a set of approaching footsteps, he turns and runs wildly up the staircase, reaching the landing just as Mr. Niven, putter under his arm, and a bottle of sherry in one hand, passes through the hall, whistling tunelessly under his breath.
On his knees on the landing, Norris touches his forehead gently to the carpet as Mr. Niven’s steps recede.
And then he raises his eyes to find that he is in a nightmare, faces with distorted Teutonic features growing like burls out of the lintels over the doors, strange creatures—half wyvern, half stag—emerging from the scrollwork, feathery-tailed dolphins diving from the wall brackets, all of it rococo and queer, the gold paint faded and glowing morosely.
Standing shakily, moving down the hall, he looks into several rooms and then arrives at what must be Vida’s. He finds her bed, where the coverlet has been disarranged as though she had lain down briefly before going out, her hair, her cheek, against the pillowcase. He puts his face to it, and a wild feeling comes over him, as though he has lost her, as though she has died.
It is the room of a penitent, the small white bed pushed beneath the window, where the sleeper would have a view of the moon at night.
DOWNSTAIRS, MR. NIVEN returns through the hall with his glass of sherry and his putter. At the foot of the stairs he stops. Putting on her hat earlier that evening at the door, while thanking him profusely, Vida had said nervously that Manford would be asleep, that Mr. Niven needn’t go check on him.
“Of course, he does sleepwalk from time to time,” she’d added, turning round as he began to close the door after her. “But he hasn’t done it for some time now, so I wouldn’t worry. But if he does, you should just steer him back to bed. Don’t, though,” she said earnestly, as Mr. Niven again tried to close the door, “attempt to wake him. That can have—consequences.”
Mr. Niven takes a sip of his sherry, glances up the darkened stair. Perhaps he will just go up and have a look in on him. He’d done that with his own children when he was left to mind them while his wife went off for some evening’s entertainment. Of course, Manford isn’t a child. But he is helpless, Mr. Niven thinks. And he begins to ascend the stairs, but as he does so, he looks up and meets the heavy-lidded eyes of one of the carvings, a great ho-ho bird standing atop the newel post at the landing. Mr. Niven stops uncomfortably at the sight of the coiled creature, its head thrown back over its bristling shoulder. He takes one more step, keeping his eyes fixed on the thing, and then turns round abruptly and heads back toward the kitchen and the small sitting room there. I think I’ll just have a look at the telly, he thinks. And, How does she stand this place all by herself?
NORRIS UNPACKS THE nightdress, lays it across the bed, and pulls and pinches its folds until it looks just right to him. Then he fetches the letter Nesser had forwarded and places it carefully atop the gown. At last he steps back and looks around. The nightdress makes the room seem even shabbier, in a way, like the queen visiting a prisoner in his cell. He picks up a piece of the tissue that has fallen to the floor and is about to put it back in the haversack when he hears Vida’s voice from the stairs.
“Good night!” she calls. “Thanks ever so much!”
Norris, frozen with terror, hears Mr. Niven’s muffled, unintelligible reply. He looks around wildly and then steps quickly into the closet and closes the door after him, sinking to his knees inside as if his limbs have turned to water. He cannot see or hear anything. He feels the floor with his hands, places his palms flat against it, and tries to breathe deeply. But as he moves, as quietly as he can on his trembling hands and knees, toward what he supposes is the back of the closet, where he might hope to remain undetected if Vida has to open the door, he is surprised to fail to encounter a rear wall. In fact, the closet seems unnaturally deep. He ducks his head beneath the slips of hanging dresses, their intimate odor, and crawls slowly until the cloth brushing his forehead no longer has the light, hesitant brush of a woman’s hemline but has become heavier, like a hand pressed to his shoulder. He reaches up in the darkness and feels velvety nap and rough wools, realizes that they are overcoats, that it must be a shared closet, that he has crawled from Vida’s chamber into the closet used by Mr. Perry for his winter storage. And suddenly the thought of their garments intermingling in that single space, that tunnel—the thought of the insignificant weight of her dresses beneath the masculine heft of Mr. Perry’s topcoats—makes Norris practically ill. He closes his eyes.
He falls asleep in the closet eventually, drowning in shame. Or perhaps he faints; he is not sure which. Sometime late in the night, he wakes and crawls out quietly into an unused bedroom. He feels as though he has been ill for a long time. The house is so dark and still that as he passes down the stairs in his socks he wonders what spell has overtaken them all, Vida and Manford and Mr. Niven and perhaps even the whole village fallen asleep, shafts of moonlight laid over their faces like veils. He is cold and exhausted.
By the back door he finds his shoes, full of water, and walks home. But as he walks, he looks up and sees that the moon has come out and bobs along behind him cheerfully like a toy on a string. As he turns the corner from the lane onto the Romsey Road, the moon swings round his shoulder as if to light the way, and when Norris reaches the street, he has to gasp, for there she has laid down a trail of silver for him to follow, a carpet rolled out for a king.
And now he can hold his head up again as he steps onto this river of light, the windows behind which his neighbors sleep filled with the blinding reflection of wonder, the moondust sparkling and twinkling around his forehead in a crown of a thousand brilliant stars.