VIDA COMES TO stand beside Norris, and they look together out the window at the figure of the gardener below. After a moment she turns away. “I’ll just check the roast,” she says.
Norris, his hand idling along the soft drape of the curtain, turns and blinks at the empty door frame, the place where she had been a moment before. After a second, though, she reappears, her hat still in her hand. “Please, do make yourself at home.” She nods toward one of the yellow silk chairs near the fire. “I’ll just see to the potatoes, and then we’ll eat,” she says. “Manford, come along and wash up.”
Norris watches Manford rise from the table where he has been working a large puzzle and leave the room. A lump has risen unexpectedly in Norris’s throat. An ocean presses behind his eyelids. Why is this so very hard? he thinks. And then, surprising himself: I wish I were home.
Blinking rapidly to clear his eyes of the foolish tears that hover there, he turns back to the window. The gardener is bent over in a Herculean fashion, squatting, his arms around a stone urn on the lower terrace. As Norris watches, the young man stands, the massive urn lifted in his embrace. Even from his distance at the window, Norris can see the man’s neck swell perceptibly with effort. He sees his shoulders grow broad and flat, sees the muscles in his thighs flex like rabbits trapped in a bag, sees the black hair, dampened with sweat, curling over the temple, a coiled lash. The man’s entire body, concentrated on arriving at the delicate balance between the urn’s bulk and his own elastic strength, seems to Norris a sort of beau ideal, polished and perfect. It occurs to him, not for the first time, that the instrument of the body, especially when it is as young and beautiful as this gardener’s, is indeed worthy of idolatry. Norris leans closer to the pane; the young man staggers once, twice, his jaw jutted forward as if to confront an enemy, and moves the urn a foot to one side. Norris feels his own breath leave him in a sympathetic burst.
When the gardener stands upright at last, Norris realizes that he is not a large man, despite his ambitious efforts with the urn. He sees the man’s hand come up to clasp his opposing shoulder, as if to discourage some pain there. Norris feels his own head incline sympathetically toward his shoulder.
He jumps when Vida speaks from behind him, for he has been so absorbed in watching the gardener that he has not noticed that she has returned to the sitting room, has come to stand just behind him.
“He’s done a great deal of work,” she says quietly, craning round Norris and looking out the window with him. “He says he’ll never get it all to rights, not in years. But I think he’s made an enormous difference already.” She cocks her head; they both watch as the gardener strolls away. “He’s young, anyway,” she says. “He’s got years to finish.”
The gardener disappears down the steps by the fountain toward the greenhouses, a rake poised in his hand like a javelin. He vanishes as if he were actually descending into the earth, down a set of endless stairs; it’s an odd, disturbing effect. Norris frowns. Yes, a young man, he thinks. Young and handsome. But he wants to change the subject now, for something about the young gardener’s body, its display of strength, makes him aware of his own extreme and awkward height, the thinness of his shins and arms, the pale color of the skin on his shoulders.
Vida rescues him. “Shall we have wine, Mr. Lamb?” she says, and he looks down to see that she has laid her hand gently on his arm a moment. She withdraws it when she sees him looking at her hand and glances away. “I think there’s half a bottle of quite a nice red somewhere,” she says. “Would you care for a glass?”
“Yes, thank you,” Norris says gratefully, and turns to face her fully.
Who cares about a gardener, he thinks. Not him.
“Please—Vida,” he says, smiling at her. “Do let me set the table or something. This is so kind of you.”
NORRIS SMILES DETERMINEDLY at Manford, who sits across from him at the far end of the long kitchen table. Manford rests his large head on his folded arms, his eyes fixed on Norris.
Striving to maintain a pleasant expression, and forcing himself to keep his eyes on Manford’s face in what he hopes is a friendly manner, Norris directs a question at Vida. He’s afraid of being a Nosy Parker, but he would rather talk than have silence between them. Silence feels like failure, and there is so much he wants to know.
Her back is to them as she bends into the oven and pulls out a heavy roasting pan, the juices from the roast crackling.
“He can hear all right, can’t he?” Norris asks at last, clearing his throat and smiling broadly at Manford.
“Who? Manford?” She glances over her shoulder as she sets the pan down on the counter. “Yes, he hears you perfectly well.”
“But—” Norris scrapes his feet over the tile floor’s sandy surface. He glances at Vida. Her blouse has puckered prettily over the strings of her apron.
Norris closes his eyes briefly and struggles with the confusing notion of Manford’s faculties: If he can hear, why can’t he understand? Or perhaps he does understand? Norris wasn’t sure.
“But—he can’t speak.” This isn’t exactly a question, he realizes. It’s obvious that Manford doesn’t speak.
“He’s never said a single word,” Vida replies, still with her back to him, sharpening a knife. “Not once.”
Norris looks down at his hands and frowns. He tries to think how he might rephrase his question. Vida’s tone suggests that matters should be clear now: He never speaks; can’t; won’t; though he appears to understand what you say. But Norris, though trying hard, still feels confused. Then he realizes, alighting happily upon the idea, that perhaps it is like being in the presence of a dog—an intelligent and kindly dog, no doubt—who catches the tone of what you are saying but not the actual meaning.
“Well!” He looks up, brightening. “He’s rather like a dog then, isn’t he? I mean, he attends to you as a dog might, but he can’t actually participate in the conversation. A very nice dog,” he adds hastily, the word dog suddenly conjuring up images of teeth and slobber and hair. Norris nods helpfully at Manford, as if Manford himself has just advanced this theory.
But when Vida says nothing, ceasing her business with the roast, standing still with her back to them, Norris feels sure he has misspoken in some way. It wasn’t what he meant exactly, Manford’s being like a dog. He tries to think.
“Or perhaps,” he says, and he can hear the suffocated tone that has crept into his voice, “perhaps it’s more like a foreigner. You know, someone who doesn’t speak the language, and yet it all seems familiar somehow, the hand gestures and whatnot. Have you ever noticed,” he goes on bravely, his voice rising, despite himself, “how one tends to speak more loudly in the presence of a foreigner? How one tries to enunciate a bit more clearly? As if it would help? It’s silly, I know, but—”
He rises abruptly to his feet. Vida’s back has begun to quiver, as if she were crying. Or laughing! Oh, which is it? Which would be worse?
He stands helplessly behind her, his hands dangling. Manford lifts his head from the table, looks at Vida, alert.
Oh, Lord! She’s crying. Another one, crying! He feels wild with despair and confusion. Why did they always have to be crying? What was it that he did to them?
“Vida,” he says, his voice low and ashamed. “Miss Stephen. I am so sorry. I didn’t mean—I’m only trying to understand. I so want to understand. Please, I know I’m very stupid, that it must seem very stupid, my asking such questions and saying it all so badly. But I do—”
I do what? he thinks.
I do love her so much.
HE WANTS TO know everything about her life, everything about how it is with Manford. He feels that he has never experienced anything so difficult in his whole life as this, this wanting to know about them. He had once thought that it was simple, he realizes now, how people come to know one another. He’d thought it was a simple accumulation of evidence. His grandmother would touch his face, hold it in her hands. “Norrie,” she’d say, “you’re getting the big nose like your father. Be a good boy, Norrie. Be so very good now, won’t you?” And then she’d release him. But he would notice that his mother had begun to cry, ever so quietly. And though she couldn’t see a thing, his grandmother knew her daughter-in-law was weeping away in her corner. “Don’t be sniffling now, Rosemary,” she’d say sharply. “It does no harm to tell him that he looks like his father.”
And Norris knew that it would never go away, that his being there was no replacement, really, for his father’s absence. And yet no one had to say so for him to understand that! And so he thought that was how it was done, how people came to know one another. With no words.
People came to understand one another not by words but by what had happened between them. It couldn’t be said, in so many words.
And yet it’s all he’s got now, he feels—nothing but questions, nothing but words.
He’s watched her. He’s seen her come and go about the village. Everyone seems to know her, or they’re used to seeing her, at least. But since spying her that night on the fountain, he believes that he understands her in some essential way. At that moment, standing in the garden at Southend, he had realized that he simply hadn’t been looking; that it was all a question of looking. If he’d looked before, surely he would have seen it, how lovely she is.
He knows something about her, and now he wants to know everything, for it’s as if he’s had a glimpse of something hiding behind the curtain, as if a drape has been pulled aside to show just a corner of a beautiful painting. He has something small now—like a postage stamp, he realizes happily—that small image of her upon the fountain, or waiting on the bench in the lane. But now he wants to pull the drape aside, wants to see the whole thing, wants something so large it fills the room, the universe!
He’s not satisfied, anymore, with something small.
And he’s afraid that he will never be able to tell her how he feels, never be able to show her what a help he could be. Because he knows that he is good at helping, an expert, you might say. He knows how women are. His mother and grandmother would sit beside him on the bed at night after his father had been killed. “Is there anything you want, Norrie?” they’d say. “Is there anything we can get you?” And they’d argue between themselves. “Leave the boy alone,” one would say to the other. “Just let him sleep,” the other would reply, all the while both of them smoothing the coverlet, tucking in the sheet corner.
But he’d understood that they wanted him to stay awake for them.
“Should I play for you, Norrie, whilst you go to sleep?” his grandmother would ask.
Oh, yes, please. For that was what they wanted. And before he closed his eyes, he would see them, his mother winding her hands at the door frame in the square of light, his grandmother at the organ. He knew how to make a gift, then. He knew how to please.
He’d love to please Manford, too, if he knew how. He knows he likes stamps, and it frustrates him that he can’t simply give him stamps in quantity, lovely ones, as many as he’d like. He’d even give Manford one of his own collections, if he would enjoy it, Christmas all over the world—Renaissance religious paintings from the smaller islands of the British Commonwealth, and a jolly lot of colorful stamps from the United States, with happy snowmen and reindeer and so forth, and some charming ones from Ireland, the nativity in gold leaf.
He’s bought jam doughnuts, masses of them by now, enough to make a man sick.
He’s tried to be attentive.
But he doesn’t know what Manford wants; he doesn’t understand him.
What does he want? Norris thinks, staring at Manford across the table. How will I ever know?
HE WATCHES VIDA carefully put aside the towels with which she lifted the roasting pan. Her shoulders have quieted. She runs her hands down the front of her apron, touches her palms to her cheeks. But when she turns around, her face is gentle, kind; she smiles at him. Why, she wasn’t crying! Not a bit of it! She’s been—laughing!
But before she can speak, the kitchen door opens. The young man from the garden, black hair tousled over his forehead, his cheeks pale as milk, appears in the doorway, grasping one wrist with his hand. Blood spills on the floor.
“Hallo,” he says weakly. “Could I get a bandage?”
Norris backs away as Vida sweeps past him. “Oh, what have you done?” she cries.
The young man smiles. “Sorry to interrupt the party,” he says. He looks around the room.
Norris thinks he smirks at them, but perhaps he is only grimacing.
The young man indicates a chair with his elbow, smiles as if both Vida and Norris were idiots not to have offered it to him already, a man dripping blood on the floor. “Mind if I have a seat?” he asks, and his lip curls.
“No, no, of course!” Vida pulls out the chair for him; Norris sees that the young man has embarrassed her, made her feel guilty. Norris frowns.
She leans over the gardener’s hands, her back to Norris. “What happened, Jeremy?”
“Putting in another window in the greenhouse,” he says. “One of the sloping ones for the roof.” He lifts his hand slightly, experimentally, releasing the pressure on his wrist. Blood fountains up. “Should have waited for you,” he adds, and glances up at Vida, winking heavily. “Came right down on my wrist, just like a guillotine.” He makes a noise with his mouth, like something bitten off neatly.
Norris shivers.
Jeremy closes his eyes.
“I think you need stitching up!” Vida says. “Let me see it.”
The young man draws his hand away again. Blood bubbles up as his fingers release.
Vida gasps. “You must see Dr. Faber straightaway.” She reaches down and begins to lift him at the elbow. “I’ll take you in the car. Oh—let me get a towel first.” She turns as if to find one on the cluttered countertop beside the sinking roast and the scattered plates. Then she spins back to face Norris, as if she has just remembered something.
“Manford—” she begins. A high hot color has risen into her cheeks. “Mr. Lamb—do you, would you—could you mind him while I take Jeremy to Dr. Faber’s?” She says this, Norris thinks, as though he has not been here the whole while, listening to matters develop. “I’d rather not take him to Dr. Faber’s with me,” she goes on, lowering her voice. “He’s so squeamish about blood. Do you think you could stay here with him? He’ll be no trouble. I’d so appreciate it, Mr. Lamb.”
Her face is pleading; he glances down at her skirt, sees she has got some of Jeremy’s blood on her apron. Or perhaps it is from the roast?
“Here,” she says, turning quickly again and opening a drawer, withdrawing a stack of cellophane stamp envelopes. “There’s these you could do together, in his album? We haven’t got to them.” She holds them out to Norris. “They’re your recent ones. We haven’t had the time,” she adds apologetically.
Norris takes them from her hands. “No, of course,” he says faintly. He feels as if it were he who had lost a lot of blood, not this young gardener with the black hair and milk white cheeks.
“Oh.” Vida stops again as she lifts her coat from the stand in the corner. “Jeremy Martin,” she says, “Mr. Norris Lamb. I’m so sorry.”
She seems very young to Norris at this moment. The excitement has brought a high color into her lips as well as her cheeks, as if she has been pinched. He steps toward her, for it has come into his mind that he might kiss her now as if they were an old married pair, as if he were simply sending her on her way, on an errand of kindness.
But she is bending protectively over Jeremy. “Are you all right to stand?” Norris hears her say.
The gardener rises slowly to his feet. “Nice meeting you,” he says to Norris, and Norris feels ashamed of himself then, for Jeremy looks very young as well at this moment, and quite pale and sickly. There’s not a trace of the—what was it?—superiority he’d shown a few minutes ago.
Vida holds the towel toward Jeremy but then appears to realize that he can’t wrap it himself. Her eyebrows lift inquiringly. “Should I?”
“That would help,” he says.
She inclines toward him then, leaning necessarily close to him, wrapping the towel gingerly around his arm.
Is that her breast, brushing his shoulder?
His dark eyelashes come to rest slowly against his cheeks. His head, lolling, is inches from her.
Norris looks away, hard, at the floor, at the tiles there set in even rows, stretching away across the floor one after the other.
Norris hears the car start somewhere far below, far away, hears its motor recede. He stares at the door through which Vida and Jeremy exited, as if they might reappear at any moment. He sniffs the air, the damp smell of the meat’s pooling pan juices. It is, he realizes suddenly, very quiet. When he turns around with a start, he sees that Manford has disappeared.
Norris looks round wildly. “Hallo?” he calls to the empty kitchen.
He steps to the door of the small sitting room: empty. And then, furtively, as if he might be ambushed at any moment, feeling vaguely as though Manford might pop out at him, he sets off down the hall toward the interior of the house, calling loudly, “Hallo! Hallo?” He raps repeatedly on the wall with his knuckles as he passes, as if the sound, with its steady reverberations, might reach Manford more easily than a voice and with clearer purpose.
He senses that the afternoon has closed in as he steps into the front hall. Now day has passed the noon mark, with its spreading lap of possibility, that hour that seems to last from morning to night in an endless lull of time. He stands in the mingling shadows of the hall with its empty hearth, its walls of tapestries. The balcony runs high above, balanced, it seems, now that he sees it in daylight, upon the arched backs of what appear to be winged lions. He tries to calculate how late it is. There’d been the walk home from St. Alphage, all his pointless chatter, the bloody gardener—is it three? Or even four now? In the dim and silent hall, its stone walls ringing his footsteps back to him, he can’t be sure.
He hurries onward then, struggling to contain the feeling that Manford, too, is moving, can move so much quicker than he. He could be miles away by now, roving away down some distant lane, stroking the air in that odd way he has, as if feeling it billow past him like green waves around the trunk of a giant, a giant striding through the teeming leagues of an ocean, birds wheeling above his bowed head.
Norris scurries from room to room. The house is extravagant, baffling, hallways turning at invisible corners, double doors bracketed by carved wood panels opening here and there in the walls, the odd piece of furniture—an enormous chest, its brass fittings gleaming in the gloom, a chair forked with antlers—placed as if to trip him up. As he hurries from door to door, he sees that many rooms are almost entirely unfurnished, sheets webbing the chandeliers. In one—he judges it to be a ballroom, perhaps, the silvered pier mirrors streaked with gray—the tent of sheeting has come loose and dangles from the arms of the fixture high above, a sculpture of flowing marble, suspended stone.
Manford is nowhere to be found.
At last Norris enters a room that is, he senses, in use. The long gallery is hung floor to ceiling with dark paintings. An arrangement of settees and end tables are gathered in the center, newspapers and books lie scattered on the floor, and pillows and footstools are tucked among the larger furnishings for apparent comfort. A carved plaster ceiling caps the tall walls, cupping the light from several French doors that give out onto the garden.
Norris hurries across the room, soundlessly crossing a carpet of spring flowers and grasses, endless repetitions of nodding bells in faded greens and silvers and blues and rose. It strikes him that he has seen a stamp of this pattern once, a brocade—from Austria? The Alps?
One of the French doors is ajar. Norris steps outside. Set at intervals on the broad terrace, poised as if to leap to the garden below, are several marble statues—of Mercury, Norris realizes now, though he has seen them before from afar.
He moves quietly among them now in the dove gray light of late afternoon, raising his hand to touch the pitted feet, the wings sprouting from heels, the arms raised in a delicate attitude of balance, the platonic ascent. The statues’ hooded eyes stare past him; the genitals float, soft and obscure.
Norris has seen the figures from the garden below while wandering on his evening walks through the wilderness areas of orchard and stanchion oaks and passing through the bowed hedges of boxwood that circle the fountain and its surrounding Venetian grotto. But he has never been up to this side of the house, never been so close to the statues before, never felt, as he does now, the inevitability of their flight nor the heroism of their sacrificial pose. He rests his hand on the outflung calf of the nearest statue, follows the figure’s ecstatic gaze.
And there he finds Manford.
Down below in the grotto, seated on the curving bowl of the fountain’s rim, he looks exactly, Norris thinks, like a portrait of Melancholy.
And now that he can see him, now that the high pulse of his fear has begun to steady, Norris waits, staring at Manford. He feels a profound and painful surge of sympathy—how sad Manford must be, so alone in whatever world he lives in. For there can be no other like him in that place, Norris supposes, no other with exactly the same disarranged features and mind. How does it all arrange itself for Manford, Norris wonders, the complicated universe flattened out to suit his understanding of it? As he stands there, staring at Manford, an image of Manford’s mind rises before Norris—he imagines it held aloft in some strange light, like an image from a dream. It revolves slowly, some torch’s beam trained on it, its surface mottled like a planet, run through with the branching streams of capillaries, the dark lakes of desire, of yearning.
Norris shakes his head, puts out a hand against Mercury’s calf as if to steady himself. What do we know of ourselves except as through a prism, he wonders, the endless refractions of our mind turning back on itself like a dog chasing its own tail? And Manford? What does he think when he thinks of himself? Does he think a word, or a picture that tells him who he is?
And what about the heart, the heart as the seat of the soul?
What about Manford’s heart?
NORRIS DESCENDS THE steps from the terrace, advances across the newly clipped lawns. Shadows fall over the grass, the elongated shapes of the topiary urns spreading over the green. Norris’s own shadow wavers and bleeds at the edges, shivering and contracting around him, spinning under his feet as he passes from west to north and at last enters the grotto through its twisting stair, the parapet around it bristling with the pruned canes of roses.
He steps out onto the flagstones at last, breathing hard. “Here you are!” he says, as if just discovering Manford. “Gave me quite a start when you disappeared like that.” He tries to smile.
But Manford does not look up at him. It’s as if he isn’t interested, Norris thinks, his relief ceding briefly to annoyance at what seems like Manford’s obstinate silence. He tries to check this feeling in himself—it doesn’t seem right to be irritated. And then his own attention is diverted anyway by the fountain, the glassy surface in the basin pebbled with droplets of water, the rising obelisk in the center bearing, at its crest, a bronze froth of statuary, a bouquet of erect female forms, arrows threaded through their bows. They are all Dianas, Norris recognizes, marveling; their bows aimed into the darkening wood beyond. From the feet of the grave and slender figures, from the massed and tangled bodies of swans, their beaks open, crests of bright water rise into the sky. For a moment the image of Vida on the basin’s rim flashes before Norris—her white feet, the dark patch.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it,” Norris says quietly at last, “to have the fountain turned on again?”
He glances at Manford, sitting oddly on the rim of the fountain with his feet splayed wide apart, his arms outstretched, his hands held before him, his interlocking fingers twisting and writhing.
And then Norris sees what is happening, how the flagstones beneath their feet grow lively and tremble with the dancing shapes of Manford’s hands, the shadows thrown from the descending sun through his webbed fingers. Norris draws a step closer.
Manford works his hands with a puppeteer’s concentration, the imbroglio of his fingers spreading a pantomime across the stones, a lavish tapestry of animals melting one into the next: A delicate swan pedals through water, giving way to some hooked and horned beast, and then to an amusing crouched cat, its back lithe, its ears two pointed knuckles. They come so fast, a carnival of creatures both known and fantastic, that Norris cannot catch them all. He leans forward, his mouth gaping.
And then at last Manford stops. He drops his head. His hands, like the hands of a musician or a conductor—like his own hands fallen from the organ’s keys, Norris recognizes—come to rest slowly in his lap.
“Oh! Don’t stop!” Norris lurches forward in dismay, flutters his hands. “Don’t stop! That’s—marvelous! That’s the most marvelous thing I’ve ever seen! How do you do it?”
He flickers his own long fingers. The shadows lengthen like flares and then contract, extinguished. He makes a fist, sees it bleed huge and menacing across the stones. He raises his arm, sees the tower of it loom. He snaps his ankles together, flattens his arms to his side, rocks like a penguin, and laughs to see his bouncing shape roll. He laughs again, flaps his arms, and sees the cloak of his shadow unfold, immense and piratelike, dashing and iconoclastic.
He turns to Manford, panting. “How do you do it?” He is beaming, breathing hard. “All those clever shapes! It’s stunning, Manford! It’s perfectly wonderful!”
But Manford makes no reply, looking away from Norris at the ground as if trying to divine himself how those shadow figures appeared, as if they might have struggled up from the earth itself, parting the flagstones with their mortar of ancient moss, raising the roof of the globe.
Norris feels vaguely rebuked, as though his own enthusiasm has been ridiculous beside the exact sophistication of Manford’s creations—the turkey with its quivering wattle, the dog begging a bone, the alert rabbit, twin birds in flight. He pulls out his handkerchief and mops at his brow. And then he takes a seat beside Manford on the fountain’s rim, turns his face toward the cooling spray, and closes his eyes.
“You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to do any more of it. That’s all right. I understand,” he says quietly, not opening his eyes. “I’m just glad to have found you. I was worried, you see. Vida’s entrusted you to me for this little while, and when you wandered off, I thought I’d failed her in the blink of an eye. She cares terribly for you, you know. She—”
He opens his eyes, stares at the back of Manford’s heavy head framed against the sky. “I wish,” he says after a moment, “that you could tell me what I might do for her. How I might make her love me. I know—I know I’m a poor sort of suitor in some ways. Many ways, perhaps. I know you amuse her in all sorts of ways, that she’s chosen you, after a fashion, chosen to live her life here with you. I must tell you—I wouldn’t want to change any of that. I understand how it is. But—”
He stops then, for Manford has raised his hands.
A swirl like smoke floats at first over the flagstones, a face materializing from the darkness, a tantalizing flash of profiles like inkblots.
Norris stares, transfixed.
The image steadies, stills.
And Norris sees the face then—the clown’s peaked hat, crumpled at the top, the white wink of an eye, Punch’s great hooked nose and hinged jaw working slowly, up and down, the mirthless jester berating his audience.
They stare together, Manford and Norris, at the famous fool; the bent proboscis, the snapping jaw, the inaudible stream of exhortation. Silence is all around them.
FROM THAT MOMENT on, Norris feels he wants to stay near Manford. It is as if in Manford’s presence something might happen—Norris might see something, he thinks, witness it as he witnessed those shadows that came out of nothing, out of nowhere, with the agility of air itself.
By the time Vida returns from having tended to Jeremy, Norris and Manford have come back up to the house. Norris had wept, surprising himself, though the tears had been threatening all day, he knew. He had taken Manford’s arm in his own, walked back up to the house, no longer worried that he might try to run off. He knew he wouldn’t, somehow; he understood that Manford had made him a gift, had linked the two of them together in that final shadow of Punch.
Manford sat quietly at the table, looking over his stamp books, while Norris sliced the roast and put the potatoes in a pan to warm. He set the table, too, noting with pleasure how everything in the pantry was labeled so neatly and clearly.
When Vida comes in and hangs up her coat, Norris doesn’t say anything at first; he just feels happy to have her there, the three of them now together. He wants it to last, the moment to last, is happy to have the meal all ready for her. He wants her to see that, to have time to take it all in.
She looks from one to the other of them.
And then Norris steps forward and touches Manford’s head with his palm, resting it there and smiling at her, the long spoon in his hand, her apron tied round his waist.
“Welcome home,” he says. “We’ve been getting to know one another.”