VIDA USUALLY FINDS the services at St. Alphage restful, and so when she comes to her knees at the pew Sunday morning, Manford kneeling heavily beside her, his hands folded in a pious fashion, she closes her eyes, hoping for relief.
Coming home last night from the book circle to find the robe laid out on her bed had been one of the most unsettling experiences of her life. That, and the accompanying letter, postmarked this time from Cairo:
I am the man with the world at his fingertips. I am the gateway to adventure. I am your personal ticket to paradise. I fall at your knees in worship.
As beautiful as the robe was—and it was beautiful—and as mysterious as the letter was, the charm of both had almost been destroyed for her by something very unexpected and unpleasant indeed—fear. Someone had been in her bedroom. Someone she did not know, or the emissary of someone she did not know, had put his hands where she lay down to sleep. Perhaps he had watched her enter the house, wave good night to Mr. and Mrs. Niven, had seen her light come on in her window. This was too much, she felt. It was too—near.
She had been looking forward to her hour in church this morning. She had hoped that it would calm her, the tedium and the music both immersing the congregation in a soothing bath of piety and fellowship. She had hoped it would remind her of the ordinariness of everything. But now she finds that she will not be soothed by the morning’s service in the least. The new organ is very loud, and there is a ferociousness to Mr. Lamb’s playing.
She rises from her knees, putting a hand on Manford’s arm, and stares dully at Mr. Lamb’s back as he sits at the organ, his head shaking wildly on his neck like a flower on a long stem, his hands darting over the keys, his knees pumping as though he were running a race. He seems to have gone mad, playing with a fervor that strikes her as profane, a profane gaiety. But it is not as if she can sit still herself. She wriggles and shifts on the pew; her shoulders feel tight and uncomfortable.
In the absence of any other evidence, it now seems likely to her that Mr. Niven might be her mysterious admirer, the deliverer of the robe, the writer of the letters. After all, he was the only one at the house last night. And now she can’t rid herself of the feeling that he must be sitting somewhere behind her, a notion that fills her with dismay. It isn’t at all pleasant to have to think of him in this new way. And, worse yet, something about it doesn’t seem exactly right. Still, she knows so little of the world, really, so little of human character; and though she doesn’t really like to be reminded of it, if she can dance about on the fountain like a fairy, then perhaps Mr. Niven, too, is capable of surprises.
Manford, as if sensing her discomfort, is as restless as she is. He tries repeatedly to stand up from the pew. She frequently has to prevent him from standing during church services, as if the music reaches him at some instinctive level, prompting from him a soldier’s salute. This morning he seems to require particular restraint, however. She turns and glares deliberately at him, her most reproving face, after several instances in which she has to clamp a hand on his knee. “Do be still, Manford,” she hisses at him.
But Manford, beaming and ignoring her reprimand, turns around in his seat and—to Vida’s horror, as she follows his gaze—catches sight of Mr. and Mrs. Niven a few pews behind them. Manford grins broadly and gives them a wave. Mr. Niven raises his hand and flutters his fingers in reply, meanwhile putting a finger to his lips. Mrs. Niven smiles indulgently. Vida freezes, an ugly flush creeping up the back of her neck. She snatches at Manford’s hand and squeezes it, harder than she intends. Manford, going limp next to her, looks down at his lap, takes back his injured hand, and nurses it carefully in the other, testing his fingers and giving her baleful looks.
Vida hates herself immediately. And an image of Manford from the night before, disheveled and forlorn in his nightshirt, arrives in front of her eyes. She shudders, puts her own hand apologetically on Manford’s fingers to still them, and wishes fiercely that he had not started sleepwalking again.
THE WHOLE NIGHT had been wrong, had gotten off to the wrong start, she thinks, beginning with the robe.
She hadn’t even noticed it right away. She’d seen the Nivens out and had gone straight up to bed, tired by the interminable chat of the book circle. She’d gone to wash up and had come back into the room, her hair in a towel—and then she had literally jumped. It was lying there on her bed like a royal visitor.
She had come forward, one hand holding the towel to her head, and had leaned down to touch the robe in disbelief, as if it might not be real. But it was real, cool and silky, and she had run her hands over the waterfalls and birds like peacocks, with long, trailing plumage, the butterflies like sapphires, the golden tassels. It had smelled extraordinarily sweet as well, like vetiver, she realized. She hadn’t smelled vetiver in years; her mother had always kept a bit tied up with the sheets. As she lifted the sleeve of the robe to her nose, though, it struck her that she’d smelled vetiver somewhere else, more recently. Where had it been?
And then she’d noticed the letter. She sat down on her bed to open it—and that’s when all the lovely wonder turned to fear. I am the man with the world at his fingertips.
She didn’t like the sound of it. It implied a kind of dark magic, she thought, a promise that couldn’t be kept and was therefore no sort of promise at all but only a taunt. She wound her hands together and tried to breathe deeply, her yoga breathing—she’d learned some yoga from a show on the telly once—but it didn’t really help. It occurred to her that she would be unable to scream, for her heart had rolled into a high, tight place, lodged against her windpipe like a stone before a cave.
Now think, Vida, she’d admonished herself. Think carefully. Calm yourself. For it must be Mr. Perry—no one else could have got into the house—and there’s nothing to be frightened of there. She’d thought he was in Venice, but of course she really had no way of knowing exactly where he was, and perhaps he’d been called to Cairo suddenly? He could be anywhere. Or everywhere—and at that, the fear began ticking away again inside of her. He could be in Cairo, and Corfu, and on the bench in the lane . . . and in her bedroom!
He must have come home, she thought wildly. He’d come home unannounced, while she’d been out. He’d done such things before.
But wouldn’t Mr. Niven have said so?
She stood up and went down the hallway to his bedroom. After a hesitation, she knocked. There wasn’t any answer, of course, and she wouldn’t open the door; she knew he wasn’t there. She stood in the hall, the robe in her arms, her heart beating very quickly, like a moth trapped inside the cup of her hand. She had not wanted to turn around. But at last she had mastered herself and had gone back to her own room.
It couldn’t be Mr. Perry, she’d thought. It must be Mr. Niven himself.
But how funny: she was disappointed.
She had wanted something else, hadn’t she?
It was sad, just imagining it. Poor, red-faced Mr. Niven, with his hair always smudged with flour and his silly old putter—could he have fallen in love with her? And written those letters? It wasn’t what she might have imagined, not at all. And poor Mrs. Niven! She was really a very sweet person, even if she did monopolize the book circle, she and Mrs. Billy going on and on about homosexuality.
She folded up the robe inside some paper and stowed it away in a drawer. Her hands trembled, so she shut off the light and lay down. But she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that whoever had brought her the robe, whoever had written her the letters, whoever loved her—as menacing an emotion as that now seemed—whoever he was, was watching her, she thought, watching her at that very moment. She lay there, staring up at the ceiling. She thought she might never sleep again.
But she did sleep, for she was woken sometime later in the night by a crash coming from somewhere below her in the house. She recognized the sound: a chair toppling as Manford plowed mindlessly through the rooms, stepping through the furniture as though chairs and tables were nothing more than tall grasses bending before his weight.
She sat upright in bed. Pulling on a cardigan, she looked in the door to Manford’s room. His bed was empty in a square of moonlight; the coverlet pooled on the floor. Fear blossomed up in Vida’s heart.
Though she had no medical evidence for it, she had read somewhere—in a magazine, she thought it was—that it was very dangerous to wake a sleepwalker; the article had been somewhat unclear, suggesting profound mental alteration, even coma, as a consequence. And so her efforts to locate Manford during one of his spells were always prolonged in an agonizing way by her unwillingness to call for him, searching instead through the cold and dark house until she came upon him at last, often standing sentinel in the middle of a room or pressed up near the draperies by a window, nearly hidden by their long and dusty folds, his eyes staring strangely into the darkness.
Sometimes it was easy. He was so unaware of his own movements at such times that he could be found simply by the noise he made jostling through the rooms, knocking aside vases or clocks, catching tassels and the edges of carpets. But sometimes his path seemed eerily stealthy. He wound silently then, like a cat, narrowly missing things, his hands riding the invisible waves of air beside him.
Once she had been tempted to mention this habit to Dr. Faber, but she was sure he would recommend a lock on Manford’s door. She did not like to invite this suggestion, as she was terrified of fire. She could not bear the thought of Manford’s being contained in an inferno, vainly wrestling with the door latch applied against this mysterious habit of sleepwalking. And so she had trained herself to sleep lightly over the years. More often than not, she woke to the sound of Manford’s rising from bed in the next room and could steer him back even before he reached the door.
But this night, no longer in the habit of waking, perhaps—Manford had been sleeping peacefully now for quite a long stretch—she did not wake until the noise of the toppling chair, or whatever it was, reached her. He must have been abroad now for some time, she thought in alarm, hurrying down the hall.
Though she raised a prayer against it, as she reached the landing, the old feeling of terror came over her. Oh, you’ve seen too many films, Vida Stephen, she thought, to comfort herself. But there it was, all the same, this unreasonable but certain fear, as if the house itself were animated by demons and stalkers, bad men with no business being there, its expressionless gargoyles and fading frescoes suddenly transformed into leering monsters. And the presence of the robe laid upon her bed, which she remembered now as she descended the stairs, seemed to confirm her sense that the house itself was not trustworthy, that she was not safe there. Mr. Perry thought Southend a lark; he called its strange carvings and paintings a bit of Italian import. But sometimes, at times like this, she thought they made the house seem possessed.
But it wasn’t just the house, its endless rooms and hallways, its hidden staircases and warren of damp basement chambers, ganglions of iron hardware for storing smoked meats and draining fowl hanging from the beams. The worst was that she was afraid, could be made afraid, of Manford himself. It was as if the parts of him that were unknown to her, and even to him, perhaps, were not just absent—missing faculties, as she sometimes thought of them, like the dead air of so many unused rooms—but hidden away and subject to possession by evil forces. She did not know why she thought this. Manford had never exhibited even the faintest tendency in this direction. In fact, he was just a baby, lying down on the floor by the fire in the evenings and pushing a little lorry back and forth or dreamily stroking the threadbare mane of a stuffed lion.
Still, it was the mystery of him, the impossible idea of there being nothing there. She was sure that, at some level, Manford had an appreciation of the ways of the world that he could not express but that remained trapped within him, a glittering hoard in the silt of his damaged mind, the crushed and lopsided cells of his brain. Sometimes she was so proud of him, his odd ability to render what he saw in the tendrils of icing he drew over Niven’s cakes, the curious botanical likenesses he could fashion, or the play of his hands against the slanting light of late afternoon, shadow shapes leaping from his fingers. That he was sympathetic by nature, stroking her arm or touching her face gently with his fingertips—this only increased her admiration of him. The world could be full of meanness. In its midst, Manford was a sort of artist, she thought, a genius in his own way, too good for the world. A saint.
But at night, when he rose from his bed and wandered through the house, she was sometimes seized by this unreasonable terror of him. Coming upon him, she would think he seemed larger than she remembered, the muscles twitching beneath the soft skin of his arms. She would touch him tentatively then, as though he might lash out at her.
“Is he—frustrated—do you think?” she had asked Dr. Faber anxiously once when Manford was fourteen or fifteen and had suffered a spell of upsetting attention to his own body, his hands straying to the buttons of his trousers time and again, a pained look on his face.
Dr. Faber had shaken his head. “It’s just adolescence, I would say,” he said. “Though, of course, it’s hard to tell.”
“No, I mean—” Vida had paused, embarrassed, turning her head aside carefully as she helped Manford do himself up. She did think he needed his privacy, like anyone else, but it was awkward tending to him in front of other people. She stared at a black vein in one of the cracked green tiles on the floor of Dr. Faber’s examining room. Really, sometimes she simply had to look at him. You can’t do buttons with your eyes closed, she thought, and Manford was most uncooperative.
She tried to think how to ask Dr. Faber what she meant. Though perturbed by it in public, she was not really worried about the business of Manford’s manliness exactly, or rather his awakening interest in it. It seemed natural enough to her, though sometimes she was surprised at how he had grown up to be so big. If she had to tussle with him over something—putting aside his stamp albums at night or bringing him in from the garden—she found herself struck by how strong he had become. But she did worry, in a general way, that Manford was coming to understand his own limitations more and more. It seemed to her he was fretting about something. That he was embarrassed. When they rode the bus or went for a walk in the village, he had taken to hiding behind her shoulder and averting his face from people they knew when they spoke to him. Sometimes he even waved them off. And, of course, hiding behind her was useless, even when he was just thirteen or fourteen. He was already nearly a foot taller than she by then.
She had finished with Manford’s shirt, knelt to help stuff his feet into his shoes.
“Does he,” she’d said slowly at last, “—do you think he knows how he is?”
Dr. Faber had patted her shoulder, turned to rinse his hands in the sink of his examining room. “Not any more than a dog knows he’s a dog,” he’d replied. “Don’t play with yourself now, Manford,” he’d added sternly, turning round and drying his hands on a rough bit of paper toweling. “It’s not polite company.”
Though it was unlike Vida to question anybody, least of all Dr. Faber, whose learning she admired, she had been unsatisfied at these remarks. No, more than unsatisfied. She had been angry. She’d never had a dog, but she felt sure that it was inappropriate to compare Manford to one.
SHE HAD PAUSED at the bottom of the stairs, listening. Though she knew the sound that had woken her had come from below, she couldn’t help sweeping her eyes over the gallery that ran round three walls of the great hall, the closed doors there each with their carved lintels and brooding faces. She half expected a door to creak open as she glanced anxiously over them.
She stood lightly on her feet. Perhaps Manford had hurt himself, was lying in a pool of blood somewhere! Her heart wrenched at the thought, but she gathered herself together and walked resolutely across the hall. I shall just go room by room, she said to herself, and I shall certainly find him.
At the door to the drawing room, she paused again. White light from the uncurtained French doors fell in leaning parallelograms across the floor, pebbling the carpet like a stony beach. She had been to the seaside only once, to Brighton with her mother and father on a holiday. They had stayed in a little hotel with a damp kitchenette and sand in the pots. She still recalled the feel of the stones beneath her feet at the edge of the water, how they had shifted alarmingly under her tread. Now, stepping noiselessly across the carpet, she recalled the sensation of it. Manford was nowhere to be seen.
She passed through the whole house, arriving at last at Mr. Perry’s library. The door, which she kept closed in Mr. Perry’s absences, was ajar. Inside, one of his drawing tables had been overturned. There were three such tables, arranged corner to corner in the center of the room so that Mr. Perry could spin on his chair and easily reach one or the other, shifting his focus from drawing to drawing, the perspectives differing one to the next. Vida had tried it once and it had made her dizzy, gazing now up or down or from some impossible perspective right into a particular building, as though she were hanging upside down from one foot. Now, though, the table nearest the door had fallen over. The roll of white tissue hinged cleverly to the back of it lay unfurled across the floor, a ghostly path.
Yet Manford was not there.
Now Vida’s alarm spread beyond her control. She knew she would start to cry. It was too much, too much. She was so afraid of the house at night as it was, and now to come upon this scene—it was so disturbing, as if something dreadful had happened—and not find Manford anywhere. She tried to calm herself. I mustn’t call for him, she thought, a near hysteria sweeping her. I mustn’t frighten him.
And she saw what she had not seen before: the hidden door at the rear corner of the room, a door that led by a narrow passage into a small and ornate greenhouse erected on a high terrace, was open. This door, cleverly paneled so as to seem part of the wall itself, had not been opened for years.
Vida and Mr. Perry had inspected the greenhouse once, shortly after she had begun working at Southend House, when Mr. Perry was busy furnishing the estate to his own tastes. What they found there had shocked them both.
“I guess no one wanted these,” Mr. Perry had said after a moment, when the two of them had emerged blinking into the bright and arid space of the greenhouse and stopped up short at the sight that greeted them, the shelves of the high, curving étagères crowded with enormous Japanese porcelain pots, each sprouting a dead and brittle miniature tree, its twisted limbs and writhing roots curling over the vases’ rims. There were perhaps fifty of the little bonsai trees, a dead legion. The air in the greenhouse had felt to Vida like the air of a tomb, as if it had acquired a deathly weight of its own that supplanted the characteristic liveliness of light.
Mr. Perry had stepped toward the shelves, reached out to touch one of the little trees. A tiny branch broke away in his hand. He regarded it a moment before dropping it to the floor. Then he looked around and sighed impatiently.
“You need a particular sort of mind for this, don’t you?” he asked.
Vida, unsure of her place with Mr. Perry then and feeling herself unsophisticated beside him, had said nothing. But she had felt moved to sadness by the forest of dead trees, each bound in its beautiful urn. “They’re very old, aren’t they?” she’d said at last. “Hundreds of years perhaps?”
Mr. Perry had not addressed her remark directly. “Maybe these are worth something,” he’d said, stooping and tracing his finger over the scene of a waterfall painted on one of the sloping vases. “I’ll call Sotheby’s, I guess. Get someone to come and take a look at them. But I guess they wouldn’t have left them if they’d been worth anything. Still, you’d think—I mean, some of these must have been around a couple of centuries ago. Or something like that.” He squinted, frowned. “It’s kind of criminal, just leaving them here like this. Who was it, do you think? It’s strange—they’ve been untouched all these years?”
He had put his hands on his hips, squinted again at the dusty panes overhead, the litter of broken branches from the oak trees lying black against the glass. And Vida had gazed at the little bonsai trees, gray and withered, and had felt a sort of guilty conspiracy, as if by coming across this scene, so terrible and sad, like unearthing old bones in a potter’s field, she bore some responsibility for what had happened.
Mr. Perry had turned after a moment and ushered her out. “Let’s just leave it for now,” he’d said. “I’ll make a couple of calls about it.” But he never had. Vida didn’t even know whether he’d ever gone back in there. She herself had been back only once, when it was discovered that squirrels were nesting in the house. She had let a pair of old men with traps back there, stopping, herself, at the door.
“There’s this,” she’d said, wrenching the door open for them. “But I don’t suppose they’d be in there.”
And later, when the men were leaving, one of them had said to her, “That’s a queer little place, that greenhouse. What do you call those things?”
Vida had startled. She’d forgotten the trees. “Bonsai,” she’d said, and had felt guilty all over again.
“Well, they’re all dead, you know,” the man had said implacably. “Oh,” he’d added. “I took care of a pair of blackbirds in there for you. No charge for that. They were dead, too.” He laughed. “I don’t charge for the dead ones. Tell him he needs to have the roof mended, though.” He tipped his hat. “I’ll be back for the traps.”
Now the image of the silent, tortured trees reared up in Vida’s mind; she shrank before the memory of them. Oh, he can’t be in there. Please.
But he was.
He was seated on the lowest of the étagères, wedged between two vases like an unmoving shelf of rock. His hands were folded carefully in his lap; his eyes were wide open. His hair stood on end, tufted and torn looking. His nightshirt was wrenched about him, as if he’d tried to free himself from it. He was gray in the moonlight, as gray as the landscape of tiny gray trees, the faded porcelains, the shelves’ chalky paint chipped upon the floor.
Vida fought the impulse to retch at the sight of him, a boy grown suddenly old, a man aged before his time, changed overnight into a ghost, colorless and ancient and webbed with dust. As she knelt before him and took his hands gently into her own, she felt her own tears fall on her hands like something sharp, diamonds or crystals.
HE ROSE WITHOUT protest, allowed her to take his hand. She led him upstairs. They left behind them as they passed through the house a trail of white footprints, growing fainter as the dust and paint chips wore off onto the carpets. At his bedside, her hands trembling, she stripped him of his soaked nightshirt, exchanged it for a fresh one hung inside his wardrobe, fitted the buttons carefully, her lips moving soundlessly, a soundless comfort. When she pressed him to the pillows, he closed his eyes at last, reached for her, and caught a measure of her dressing gown in his hand. She lay down beside him, fitted her knees up against his own. She wept into his back.
She dreamed that night of Corfu, of her uncle Laurence standing on the sand by the sea, waving a red handkerchief toward her, his mouth moving. She was on a rock, and in the wake of a passing boat spread the extravagant silken robe, waterfalls and peacocks, sunset and sunrise both. She had leaned down to disturb the surface of the water, and then, in her dream, Manford had become a dolphin, a porpoise with Manford’s aggrieved expression, his swollen brow. She had knelt at the shore, but he could not come to land to meet her.
NOW, IN CHURCH this morning, holding Manford’s fingers between her own, she regrets her sharp tone. “Listen to the music,” she whispers, stroking his hand. He quiets, sits heavily against her, his eyelids drooping. She must dispatch this business with Mr. Niven, she thinks resolutely, if in fact it is him. One firm word from her—uttered privately, of course—and it will be over.
Yet she feels, instead of relief, a thick fury. Something has come and gone, leaving her the same as before.
Well, what had she hoped for? Stupid woman, she thinks with vehemence. Stupid woman.
When they rise for the final hymn, Manford pulls his hand away from hers and begins to clap, not quite in time with the music. Vida stops him. He has been a nuisance this morning; she hopes no one has minded. She does like to bring him to church, believing at some level that God notices Manford particularly, is especially tender with this damaged lamb, that He likes having him under His roof.
On the way out, though, Manford crouches suddenly like a baboon and makes a face at a small girl in a pretty blue dress, her yellow hair done up fussily with ribbon. Though Vida understands Manford’s gesture is playful, the child shrinks from him, pressing back against her father’s knee. The man grimaces at Vida, who catches Manford hurriedly under the arm and pushes him forward. “Sorry,” she says, but cannot spare more this morning.
When they arrive at the door, the vicar takes her hand gently in his, reaching for Manford with the other. Vida looks with relief at the square of light from the opened door, the disappearing heads of people as they pass down the path ahead of her. The vicar is kind, but all she wants, right then, is to be out in the air, away from people, away from the Nivens, and walking home with Manford.
The vicar detains her, however. “God bless you both,” he says, smiling. Vida smiles back, but she is busy keeping a wary eye out for Mr. Niven. And meanwhile she sees that Manford’s attention has been caught at that moment by Mr. Lamb, who is standing a few feet away energetically pumping Dr. Faber’s hand and saying something in an excited tone about the organ. Vida sees Manford withdraw from the vicar’s grasp and go to stand up close beside Mr. Lamb. She attempts to disengage herself from the vicar as well, but he is asking about the book circle. He murmurs inquiries; she glances away from Manford, tries to attend to the conversation. And then, out of the corner of her eye, she sees in horror that Manford has thrust his hand inside Mr. Lamb’s coat pocket.
The smile fades from Mr. Lamb’s face and he stands frozen, stiff as a rake, Manford fishing in his pocket. Dr. Faber has turned around, recalled to someone by a tap on his shoulder, and as Vida breaks away from the vicar at last and hurries up to disengage Manford’s arm, Mr. Lamb flushes a deep, mortifying shade of red.
“He thinks—” he says to her, low and urgent, worried, “he thinks I’ve a sweet in my pocket. I haven’t any—today,” he adds incomprehensibly.
“Manford!” Vida says, tugging on his arm. “Do leave go Mr. Lamb’s pocket!” She looks up at Norris. “I’m terribly sorry,” she says, struggling with Manford and feeling horribly flustered. “I can’t think why he would do such a thing!”
Norris clears his throat with difficulty, glancing down at Manford’s hand as if it were a small animal with a sharp bite. “Well, perhaps—” he says, trying delicately to twist his jacket away from Manford’s grasp, “perhaps he’s hungry? It was rather a long—or rather, it is nearly time for lunch!” He says this last quite brightly, as if glad to have an explanation.
Vida succeeds in removing Manford’s hand, but they have moved down the path by now, jostled together, carried along by the press of people behind them.
“I am so terribly sorry,” she begins again, reaching up to adjust her hat, a small, deep purple cloche that belonged to her mother and that has fallen forward on her forehead. She can feel a trickle of sweat proceed down between her breasts. She is forced to take another step closer to Mr. Lamb as a group of people come up behind her, laughing and chattering.
“Pardon me,” she says.
And then she looks up into Mr. Lamb’s face.
It is quite close to her, for though she has stepped toward him, he has not moved away so as to make room for her and Manford. She can smell some odor on him, tooth powder, mixed with the strong tannin of tea, she thinks, and—how odd—vetiver! She’d smelled it in the post office the other day, too, she realizes, when he was so dressed up for that funeral. And now his eyes—she notices how they look down into her own at that moment—how blue they are.
“I can’t think—” she begins faintly, but a wild feeling has come over her; she wants to run away!
He interrupts her. “I have given him a peppermint, once before,” he says quickly, staring into her face, his tone apologetic and serious, as for a confession. “And a lozenge. Orange, I think it was. Or, no. Butterscotch.” He pauses. “My God. I hope I didn’t do wrong.”
Vida stares at him. They are in such close proximity that she can detect a tiny, crescent-shaped scar above one of his eyebrows. Gave Manford a sweet? When? “No,” she begins, “but when—”
But Mr. Lamb smiles at her then, blinding. “Oh! I’m so glad!” he says, and puts a hand over his heart.
And then she gasps as he reaches for her, grasps her hand. “Would you—” He is so eager, so eager! And his words come in a rush, come so fast that a bit of white spittle gathers at the corner of his mouth. Vida stares, astonished. He leans toward her, holding her hand, his face inclined down toward her mouth, so close that she can feel the brush of his jacket against her breast. “Would you care to have lunch with me?” Mr. Lamb is asking, and at first all she hears is a row of unintelligible sounds, as if she were underwater. She comes up for air—“Seeing as he’s peckish already,” Mr. Lamb is saying, and now she can understand him, “and of course I have quite an appetite myself after that, and, I thought, perhaps, it might be nice to have fish. I so rarely have fish, unless there’s an occasion. And this is an occasion, I think. I—”
Fish? Vida thinks.
“I haven’t a car, but we could take the bus?” Mr. Lamb stops, his hand still holding her own. “He does ride the bus?” he asks, worried.
“Yes, of course,” Vida says. Why wouldn’t he ride the bus? Of course he rides the bus. But—is he asking us to lunch? And then she thinks of the last time she ate a meal out, as if somehow this thought will help her understand what is happening now, at this moment.
Mr. Perry had been home at the time and had said jovially to her at breakfast that she ought to have a day out, an outing for herself. He’d even said he’d mind Manford; he was going round to have a word with Peter Shields about the cows and would take Manford along. Manford likes the cows but he won’t walk over the cattle guard, Vida had told Mr. Perry; he’s dreadfully afraid of the cattle guard. You’ll have to go round the other way, drive up to the house. Yes, yes, he had said. Stop worrying!
So she’d had a hamburger at a pub in Winchester, had looked in the shops. She’d gone by the cathedral, too, to see about the dig. A young, round-faced woman there had shown her a bit of a pot she’d found—it had a fragment of a drawing on it, faint and pink, like a fossil. “Isn’t it grand?” the young woman had asked Vida, and Vida had found herself swelling with a near sob of appreciation for that chip of pottery, for the young woman, for the cathedral, for the whole sacred enterprise of the dig. She had had to look away from the girl, in fact, almost overcome.
The young woman had helped Vida step down a little ladder into the tiny, boxlike chamber in which she was working. It had been a kitchen, she’d said. Vida had stood there, breathing the ground, breathing the old, cold air. A chill of unmistakable, suffocating familiarity had risen up around her. She’d thought of the women who had worked in that place so many centuries before, how they might have looked, thick, olive-colored foreheads like Neanderthals, or tall and pale like Norse goddesses, and then she had known, as if the great book of her own life had opened and shown her, that she had been there before, had been someone with a different life, a heart engaged with things she could no longer imagine, though they had once been her own feelings.
She had looked back as she was leaving and had seen the city emerging in the shade of the cathedral wall, a lost, buried civilization, lines of string running every which way, little steps carved out of the dirt, deep down inside the pits. The young woman had raised a hand to her, waving good-bye, and Vida had reeled at the sense of her former self bidding her a hopeless farewell.
That was the last time she’d had lunch out.
“I’VE A ROAST in the oven,” she says at last to Mr. Lamb, because she cannot think what else to say, and because it is true.
“A roast—”
“I always put a roast in on Sunday. Before church.”
“Oh. Well, then—” He glances away, devastated.
“Perhaps—” She thinks of Mr. Lamb in the kitchen at Southend House, his shoes off, perhaps, his hair mussed. “Perhaps you would join us?” she says, surprising herself. “It’s not fish,” she apologizes hurriedly.
He is so close to her. She thinks she sees his shirtfront move over his heart, thudding and thudding, as though he’s run a race. She stops before she puts a hand there, to quiet it.
“I do love—” he says then, the breath leaving him, “I do love a good roast. How very kind. Yes, I should. Yes.” And he releases her hand.
For a moment she thinks he will offer her his arm. But he reaches instead for his handkerchief. He touches it to his eyes and turns away, showing her for a moment only the green field of his shoulder.
SHE HAD ALWAYS thought that someday she would be in love with someone.
Her friend Charlotte had told her that before she and Tommy were married he would try to coax her round back to the shed behind his parent’s house. He had a sofa there and his phonograph, and some posters and whatnot on the walls. “Very dark and cozy,” Charlotte had confided to Vida. “We’ve come this close,” she’d say, squeezing the air between her fingers. “Go on!” she’d squeal, when Vida would look at her skeptically. “Tell me you don’t want it too, Vida Stephen.”
But it wasn’t what Vida had ever imagined for herself—not some nasty old shed with dirt for a floor and a smelly old sofa. Not some small, familiar space with the sounds of the kitchen nearby. She couldn’t explain it, exactly—not to Charlotte, certainly, and not even really to herself. It was all because of Uncle Laurence, she thought, his letters about Corfu. She’d listen to her mother reading them aloud, about the sea and the olive orchards and the little wayside shrines in the middle of nowhere—like lamps in the night, Laurence had written. Wandering the hills once in search of subjects to paint, he had come upon and tasted the water from the Kardaki Spring, a trickle that flowed from the mouth of an ancient Venetian lion, its features nearly worn away by the centuries. The water, he’d written, was said to transform one.
How? she had wondered. How?
And he was eating well, he’d said, better than ever, damsons and wild strawberries for breakfast, and kumquats, a very Corfiote fruit.
He’d told them about swimming through the eel grass at Agios Gordis at night, and the schools of tiny phosphorescent fish there like sparks in the dark.
He’d written about a panagiros, when they all walked up to the summit of Mount Pantokrator and danced and danced round the crumbling walls until the sky was thick, blistered with stars. He fell asleep that night, dead drunk on aspro, he wrote exultantly, beside a young boy in one of the cells in the monastery there. And when he woke in the morning in his bed of straw, he and the boy were both wearing crowns of flowers, valerian and the narcotic pheasant’s-eye, grass of Parnassus and early sternbergia.
Vida had thought then—or not exactly thought; it was as though she could see it, as though a picture had been placed before her eyes while she slept—that one day something like that would happen to her. One day, she thought, she would fall asleep and would be wakened wearing a crown of orchids and the tiny woven bodies of Orchis italica, its pink blossoms like the human form itself. And she thought that she would like to live someplace beautiful. That when she awoke one morning in that beautiful place, she would be beautiful. That she would know how things happened, why they happened.
That it would happen like that.
“AH,” MR. LAMB says, arriving at the door to her little sitting room. He had kept up, the whole walk home, a baffling stream of conversation so circular and incongruous, with references to stamps and the complexities of the new organ, that she could scarcely follow it, much less offer a reply. At one point, when they had passed the Hughes-Onslow’s lawn, five mean peacocks had come racing out from round the corner of the low whitewashed house and rushed over the grass, hissing, their fabulous tails fanned out behind them.
“I so admire peacocks,” Mr. Lamb had said, completely ignoring the nasty spirit of aggression with which they seemed to be pursuing one another. “Peacocks and butterflies are among the world’s loveliest creations. Don’t you agree?” He had turned to her, fixed his eyes on her, and Vida had nodded vaguely; a picture of her robe, its Oriental birds and flashing monarchs, had flown up before her, as though two invisible hands held it aloft and invited her to step within the circle of its golden cord.
“So this is where you live. I can tell,” Mr. Lamb says now, turning to her, light in his eyes. “This is the room you like best. Isn’t it?
“Miss Stephen,” he says. “Vida, if I may? What a very cozy room indeed. I can see exactly why you like it here.
“Ah!” He spies Manford’s stamp albums on the table and hurries over to them. “May I?”
He pulls out a chair, sits down, and opens the first book. Then he spins round. “Oh,” he says, dismayed. “Perhaps I am delaying the meal? Forgive me.”
He stands up again, wipes his hands pointlessly on his trousers.
He’s so nervous, Vida thinks. Perhaps he’s shy. Perhaps, like me, he hasn’t much occasion for company. This is all new to him, as it is to me. I must help us along. Friendship is such a rare thing. “No,” she says. “Not at all. Please. Be comfortable, Mr. Lamb.”
Mr. Lamb turns to look out the window but stiffens suddenly. “There’s someone—” He points out the glass, accusing. “There’s someone in your garden.”
Vida takes a step forward, follows his finger. “Oh!” A little tremor of excitement has found its way into her voice, surprising her. “That’s—Jerome,” she says. “Or—” How can I not remember his name? she thinks desperately. Jason? Jonathan? Justin? “No, no—it’s Jeremy,” she says at last in relief. She remembers the curling eyelashes, the spiny rake in his hand, his body laid upon the grass.
Mr. Lamb turns slowly to look at her, and for some reason she cannot bring herself to meet his eyes.
“Jeremy’s the new gardener,” she says. There is an awkward pause. And after a moment she adds, although she isn’t sure exactly what she means, “He’s changing everything.”