WHEN NORRIS OPENS the door of the post office Monday morning, the room seems unfamiliar to him—smaller, somehow—as if he has been away on a long journey. Beneath his feet the linoleum, dark green and patterned with darker, ambiguous shapes suggesting the blurred hoofprints of animals, is worn and faded, buckling up along a filthy seam. When he raises the black shades at the window—just halfway, not enough to suggest he is open for business—a shaft of dull, pale light falls first across the high oak counter installed against the front wall beneath the window. There, his patrons address letters and packages, pause to gossip and chat. Pens attached to long beaded chains are riveted to the top of the counter, which is scarred and stained under its polished surface from many years of being borne down upon with damp palms and leaky pens. Small pink sponges swim in tiny bowls of filmy water.
Along another wall of the post office, Norris maintains a dual confectionery and stationers, selling tablets of onionskin and heavy, cream-colored stock, envelopes of all sizes, postal cards and gummed labels, all stacked on shelves alongside boxes of chocolates and sweets in tiny sachets, as well as sacks of tobacco and a few brands of cigarettes. Norris also keeps a contract with a company that manufactures greeting cards featuring pencil and watercolor drawings of baby animals, their faces and attitudes either fetching or pathetic, depending on the occasion. CHEER UP! reads the inside of one card featuring a small kitten with the large eyes of a malnourished creature. These cards are typically purchased by the older women of the village. Norris has kept this particular line in stock for so long that many ladies have received at least one and usually more from a neighbor over the years. Norris has been in enough of his neighbors’ houses to see the cards, some of them quite faded, lined up on the mantels, and the sight pleases him, as though he has contributed something important to his neighbors’ lives.
From time to time he has been approached by salesmen from other companies, who open their cases briskly on his counter and spread out their wares. But Norris hasn’t cared for the rude cartoons they assured him were popular.
“These are simple people, people who are fond of animals,” he protests. “I don’t believe they would care for these at all.”
Once, though, he agreed reluctantly to take a set of free samples from a pushy young woman selling cards of tarted-up old men and women apparently enjoying rather debauched birthday celebrations. “You’re not as old as you look!” the cards read inside. It was insulting! Norris watched surreptitiously as a few people took them off the display rack that first week and looked at them without expression, returning them after a moment. Some days later, when the young woman came back to see about how her cards had done, Norris was able to return the entire lot triumphantly to her.
“I’m afraid,” he said somewhat disingenuously, “I wasn’t able to sell a single one. They don’t know,” he added, “your company, what people really like. They like animals,” he repeated. “Small animals. Something dear.”
On the empty wall across from the shelves of stationery supplies, Norris has hung several framed stamp displays, including one of his own favorites—stamp errors—which he assembled and mounted while still a young man. It includes stamps with simple printing mistakes—one issued by the Bahamas, for instance, featuring the face of Queen Elizabeth in the foreground gazing over an oddly empty silhouette of Government House, a ghostly outline where the printer’s ink had run out. Another is a 1930 stamp from Germany, showing a portrait of the composer Robert Schumann against a background of sheet music—composed by Franz Schubert. And Norris is particularly proud of a 1903 stamp from St. Kitts-Nevis, depicting Christopher Columbus using a telescope—one hundred years before such an implement was invented. This stamp is especially rare and valuable now; Norris is proud of owning it and imagines that all of Hursley benefits from its presence among them.
Norris also framed, after his mother’s death, part of her collection of stamps featuring famous women, including an oversize portrait of pioneer pilot Harriet Quimby, her aviatrix’s goggles staring out darkly above a smile of brilliant white teeth. There is also a humble stamp depicting Clara Barton, and several of the Virgin Mary, of course. (His own private collection of breastfeeding stamps he keeps concealed at home in a box marked TROPHIES. It has occurred to him that someone might find these stamps pornographic at one level, but in fact he has an oddly reverent, almost paternal feeling for the scenes of domestic comfort they suggest; he keeps them shut away out of protectiveness rather than shame.)
This morning, staring around the post office, he walks irresolutely into the center of the room and pauses. He inspects the stamps on the wall; their effect, he senses suddenly, is to make him feel peculiarly tiny, as though he has shrunk uncomfortably to the size of a pencil and is passing through a gallery of paintings now scaled perfectly to his new stature. He frowns, shakes his head slightly against the sensation of diminishment, the dismaying sense that everything around him has grown either small or shabby or both.
At the back of the room runs Norris’s postal counter; he has always wished for a grille for it, something that suggests that when you pass your letters over, they will acquire, in that moment, some worldly and important mission of their own—like a child sent off for the first time to perform an errand by himself—passing into the wondrous stream of mail traveling to distant corners of the globe. He has never found exactly what he wants, though, and so makes do instead with a large leather-trimmed blotter flanked by tall, unsteady cardboard stamp displays. And he tries to make his manner, when he takes a letter or parcel in his hands, both serious and mysterious at once, perhaps as compensation for the modest environment. He tries to maintain a cachet about the transactions.
Beneath the counter are shallow drawers containing stamps, aerogrammes, stamped postcards, and registered mail envelopes. Against the back wall are his scales, his cancellation machine (recently and reluctantly purchased to replace the failing hand-operated duplex cancel he had continued to use, despite vastly improved mechanical equipment), and the pigeonholed cabinet into which he sorts received mail. A black rubber mat that holds the indentations of his feet lies across the floor.
Norris slowly crosses the room and steps behind his counter. A small door, between the scales and the pigeonholed cabinet, opens to a narrow hallway with a buckled brown tile floor that slopes noticeably downhill. To one side is the lavatory; to the other is the tiny room Norris maintains as an office for himself, with a desk and a narrow chair, an electric kettle for tea on an unsteady rattan table, and on the wall a framed engraving of a chasqui, the helmeted runner employed in ancient Peru to deliver messages from Sapa Inca, the emperor.
Norris sits down at his desk, his head in his hands. Since parting from Vida last night he has hardly slept, lying awake on and off all night, aware of the sense of urgency their conversation has created in him. That he might have actually frightened her by leaving the robe on her bed—the thought is dreadful! He closes his eyes, shakes his head back and forth within the brace of his hands. He had managed to reassure her a little, it’s true, but he also suspects that it will prove to be only a temporary comfort. Now, he fears, it is time to show himself to her, to declare himself. And yet he feels utterly unprepared for this. He had planned—what? Weeks of courtship, flowers left here and there in surprising places, gifts of dresses and jewels, more letters, each more enticing, more deliciously romantic than the last. By the end, he had supposed, there would be no question: He would have won her entirely. She would be in love already just with the idea of him.
But if he is done with that now, what is left? Nothing but himself, the poor excuse of himself. This is a terrible notion; and he finds that he has risen unconsciously to his feet behind his desk, as if to defend himself before a jury. He is not ready! He will never be ready!
And now, running his hands through his hair again, turning around and around in the oppressively close confines of this little, windowless room, he realizes as well that there is Manford to be considered. He had not counted on that, not counted on having to consider him at all, in fact. Oh, foolish man—what had he thought? That he would marry Vida Stephen, take her away, and someone else would step in to replace her at Southend House? The idea is preposterous! What would Manford do without Vida? They can no more be separated than—well, he can’t exactly find a comparison. But there can be no question about it, he realizes now. And there is something special about the boy, Norris thinks, something that makes him want to take care what he does, take very great care.
He is startled at this moment by the distant sound of a fist pounding on the door outside. He hurries into the front room to open the door, where he nearly falls over the mail sacks slumped against the jamb.
“You’re late opening up. Got anything to go out?” A young man Norris has never seen before, an annoyed look on his face, is climbing into the postal truck idling at the curb. He leans out when Norris does not answer immediately.
“The other fellow brings them inside,” Norris says stiffly, ignoring the young man’s obvious impatience and bending to lift the sacks himself to carry them.
“I’m going to be late! And your blinds weren’t up!” the man retorts, blowing a gust of cigarette smoke out of his mouth. “Come on,” he repeats after a moment, racing the engine. “I haven’t got all day. Be a good chap and bring out what you’ve got, won’t you?”
“I haven’t anything,” Norris says primly. “It all went Friday with Mr. Howard. Where is Mr. Howard, anyway?”
“Had an accident. Banged up a vehicle. I’m doing Hursley and Stoke Charity.” The man grinds the gears of the truck. “See you at five, then,” he calls as he drives off.
Norris surveys the still-empty street a moment and then hefts the canvas sacks himself and pulls them inside. Mr. Howard always carries them in himself and hands them to Norris over the counter; they exchange a word or two. It is a moment Norris enjoys, the two men remarking about the volume of mail that day, Mr. Howard offering some bit of news from the central post office in Winchester. He hopes now that Mr. Howard wasn’t seriously injured in the accident. How like that young man not to have said; probably couldn’t care less about Mr. Howard! Tugging the bags across the floor, Norris feels his distaste for the task; it’s like trolling a dead body.
Behind the counter he begins the business of sorting the letters and magazines, church bulletins and advertisements. He has developed over the years the trick of catching a fistful of envelopes and splaying them quickly in his hand, like a card trick. Many he recognizes simply by color and shape, and he can fit them into their accustomed boxes almost without thinking. Each day he likes to time himself, glancing at the clock and promising himself a certain number of minutes to finish the task. He hardly ever stops to look at a letter for more than a fraction of a second, just long enough to see who it’s for. Unless, of course, there is an interesting stamp on it.
He pauses now, in fact, distracted by the stamp on a long, slender, almost weightless envelope. It’s a truly striking stamp, a careful engraving of an ancient building, its front studded with pillars, set against a midnight blue sky. Below the templelike building, a landscape of curling russet lines and the shadowy folds of chalky cliffs tumble toward a distant skyline rendered in inky black silhouette, the jumbled rooftops and spires of a foreign city. It’s a copper photogravure, Norris thinks in surprise; one doesn’t see many such stamps nowadays. Though offset printing produces stamps with sharper images, Norris thinks recess-printed stamps have a special quality. Like snowflakes, no two are alike.
And then his eyes drift, almost accidentally, from the stamp itself to the name on the envelope: MISS VIDA STEPHEN.
The shock of seeing her name gives him a jolt, an uncomfortable one.
He finds himself staring vacantly across the post office now, the letter still held in his hand, as if someone might at that moment step forward in accusation: Oh, you’re a bungler, Norris Lamb. Nothing but a bungler. Go on, step aside. Give it up. She won’t look twice at you!
Dazed by the force of this imagined reproof, he looks down at the letter again. He had tried to persuade Vida that there was no one to fear, that the mystery of this campaign to woo her would end well, would end—happily. He had spoken with a confidence he does not really possess. He had spoken from sheer will. But he has never imagined that there might be some unexpected rival, some intervention from the world itself; it is as if his own ardor, abandoning him in disgust, has formed itself into someone against whom he can never hope to compete, some man who is everything Norris wishes himself to be. The postmark of the letter has been nearly obliterated by a damaging smudge; he can’t make out where it might have been sent from. Norris brushes at it with his fingertip; there is no return address, either. There is only the handwriting to go by, a heavy, masculine, admirably formed hand, the letters of Vida’s name executed with a triumphal flourish.
IF NORRIS HAD anyone to advise him, if he had a friend who could clap him on the back and give him courage, he might be rescued from what comes next. But he is so sure of his failure, so confident that despite all his longing—because of all his longing, perhaps—he will be humiliated, that he can’t think clearly now. He thinks not what a reasonable man might suppose—that this is a letter about some business or legal affair, that this is a correspondence of some official capacity. It does not occur to him that this letter might be from a friend or even from her uncle Laurence, though he knows she has recently written to him; and the building in the stamp does look like the Parthenon, a stamp Laurence might easily have come by. Instead of such conclusions, his mind leaps ahead like a dog madly in pursuit of a phantom fox.
He is jealous, flagrantly jealous, wounded deep in his heart by what feels, already, like an infidelity, and so he reads the script on the front of the envelope as the haughty penmanship of some very well-to-do gentleman, a friend of Mr. Perry’s perhaps, someone he has brought back to Southend House once or twice. And this gentleman, this friend of Perry’s—well, he would have had occasion to meet Vida, wouldn’t he? She might even have made up his bed for him in the morning, or hung up his shirts as a courtesy, or brought him a gin while he sat in the garden. And Mr. Perry would have had the most marvelous things to say about her, of course, about how she’s like a mother to Manford. The gentleman friend, eyeing her retreating back as she walked away across the lawn with the pitcher of water and the plate of limes, would have noticed her beauty. “I see why you’ve kept her here in hiding, Thomas,” he might have said, his eyes never leaving her back. And then he would have found opportunities to speak to her here and there, in the kitchen or the garden. They would have spoken about his business and his travels; she would have told him how she’d always wished to travel herself. He would have heard this remark, received it in thoughtful silence. And since then, he would have found that he cannot forget her. She seems to be everywhere, no matter where he goes, no matter what room with splendid views he unpacks his bag in, no matter what countess or rich American divorcée takes his hand across a table. He would not be able to forget Vida.
I could lose her, Norris thinks, gripping the envelope between his fingers. A surge of hate rises up in him, so vicious that he feels nearly suffocated by it. Who is this man, imposing himself on her in this insidious and disgusting way! He glares at the envelope as if it has emitted some foul odor, as if it contained the evidence of some monstrous, criminal urge.
He puts out a hand, finds the back of the tall chair he uses behind the counter, and lowers himself into it. He is shaking; the feeling terrifies him, sickens him. He is used to frustration, not rage, though he understands that sometimes, when matters seem too confounding, too intransigent, he experiences moments of an indifference so final that it seems permanent, as permanent as his own skin. He has felt his own eyes roll briefly to the back of his head as if he could will himself to faint in the middle of his own life, will himself to be absent from whatever troubles him. At his mother’s funeral, he had felt himself hardly present, for instance; waves of a sliding unconsciousness folded over him again and again as he stood at the graveside, a clod of earth clenched in his hand. As he leaned forward and scattered the earth into the grave, prompted by a touch from the vicar at his elbow, he heard the sod smack hard upon the coffin, like a rock, and the sound frightened him. Afterward, returning alone to the empty house, he moved quietly through the dark rooms, sat down before his grandmother’s organ. Yet he did not play; he felt the muscles in his arms seize—he understood that some part of him wished to smash the instrument with his fists. He forced himself, at last, to play a chorale, his hands trembling. And afterward he tasted blood, realized he had bitten himself. Stumbling to the lavatory, he pulled the chain for the light, fumbled vainly in the cupboard for something to help, felt the warm blood in his mouth, and spat into the basin. He fell to his knees on the cold tile floor and wept then, blood and spittle dribbling down his chin.
NOW HE STARES down at the envelope still in his hand. He lets the others fall from his grasp, scatter over the floor.
In his office he puts the letter carefully on his desk. He fills the kettle with water from the rusty sink in the lavatory, plugs it in. He sits heavily in his chair, as if drunk, waiting until steam rises from the kettle. When he holds the envelope to the vapor, trying to angle it in his hand so that the steam pries up the sealed edge, his fingers burn from the wet, sharp heat, and he sucks in his breath and retreats. Casting about, he spies a pair of scissors, fixes the letter gently between the blades, and then offers it to the chimney of steam again. After a minute the envelope begins to curl. He shakes the scissors, turning them like a long fork. The sealed seam of the envelope begins to buckle and part.
“My dear Vida,” he reads.
“I’m so glad you liked the little painting. I’ve got boxes of them here, I have to tell you; you’ll probably inherit them when I go, and have to sell them off for a shilling apiece to cover my funeral expenses! But no, now that I think of it, Ari has already said he’ll have me burned at the stake and my ashes tossed into the Aegean! Have I written you about Ari? I hired him about a year ago to help me clean up around here; your old bachelor uncle has never been much good with the mop, I’m afraid. Ari arrived in answer to a few vague inquiries I’d placed in the village, perfectly gorgeous to look at and not a word of English, and now he claims he’ll never leave me. What have I done to deserve such riches, I ask you!
“But I ramble, and there isn’t any need of me going on and on about Ari (though I could go on and on, I assure you), because I want you to meet him in person. Your last letter made me think—your mother would never forgive me if I didn’t see to it that we had you here in Corfu to visit, at least once. I know you’ve been the soul of conscientiousness with Manford, and I admire you for it; but your news that he’s working at Niven’s now (does Mr. Niven still wear that funny monocle?) made me think that this was just the right time for you to have a proper holiday. Or a permanent one, for that matter. What’s holding you in Hursley, after all? Here I’ve got this gorgeous, rambling old place, with the most spectacular views on earth, and Ari brings me figs and olives and fresh fish every day, and I sell enough paintings (particularly in the summer, to the silly tourists) to provide for all three of us—you, me, and Ari. I remember you, Vida. I knew we really were blood relations because you were such a romantic. I remember how much you wanted to see the world once. Come along and join us, dear girl. It would do my selfish old heart good to think your mother would be proud of me. I think I need some real family around me at last, and Ari’s too splendid a cook to waste on just me.
“Ari is painting your room, as we speak—sky blue. He can’t imagine anyone not wanting to come to Corfu, in any case, and wants to know whether I think you’d prefer a rose-colored blanket on your bed or palest dove gray. Well? Which shall it be? We await you, my dear, with open arms.
“Fondly, fondly, fondly, your uncle Laurence.”
Norris’s hands are shaking. He tries to fold the paper, forces it back unevenly into the envelope, and then, quivering, tries to lick the edges to seal it again. The paper is wet, though, and comes away on his tongue, bits of weak blue paper, sweetish-tasting. He tries to press the folds closed with his trembling fingers, but the damp paper refuses to lie smoothly. He puts it down on the desk, presses his palms against it, leans down as though trying to stifle the breath from a man. The ink bleeds away under his hands. The letter is ruined.
She will go away.
Go on then, he thinks. Go on. Damn you. Damn you.
“HALLOO? MR. LAMB? Anyone at home?”
The voice holds a false, happy trill. The Billy.
Norris freezes, his hands still over the letter. He picks it up after a second, folds it hurriedly several times, and shoves it into his breast pocket. He touches his upper lip, feels the sweat there and a bit of paper, which he picks off with shaking fingers.
“Coming!” He buttons his cardigan and tries to take a deep breath, but his heart feels as if it has been shot full of holes; he will never stop up so many wounds.
“Ah, Mrs. Billy,” he says, coming through the door at last. “What a pleasure. And how are you this morning?”
But he feels as mean as he has ever felt in his whole life.
HE PASSES THE day in a stupor. He hardly speaks to the villagers who stop in to collect their mail. He forgets to have anything to eat. He sits at his stool and stares ahead of him. He hears the sound of waves, far off, and sees, again and again, Vida’s body on the fountain’s rim, tiny and tempting like a ballerina on a music box.
At last, at four, he pulls down the blinds with a fierce clatter and locks the door and goes round to Niven’s. The bakery is empty. Norris cranes round the door to look in the annex where Manford usually sits, but it’s empty there as well, Manford’s stool pushed beneath the high table. On the counter is a tray of iced buns. Norris stares at them, then reaches out and pushes his finger deliberately into the top of one, collapsing the pastry and grinding the icing. When he hears a sound from the back of the bakery, he grabs the bun and stuffs it in his pocket, smearing sugar on his coat.
“Oh! Mr. Lamb!” Mrs. Blatchford comes through the door with her arms full of boxed cakes, her face flushed red.
Norris stares at her impassively.
“Well? What have you got up your sleeve?” she asks impatiently when Norris fails to say anything. “Just standing here like a ghost? There’s the bell, you know! You might have rung if you’d wanted something.” She jerks her head toward the bell on the counter and sets down her boxes with a thud.
“Where is he?” Norris says.
“Who? Manford?” Mrs. Blatchford glares at him. “Well, aren’t we pleasant today?” She bends over heavily, fitting the boxes into the glass shelves below. “A lovely day to you, too, Norris Lamb. Just the day for pleasantries. Mr. Niven gone off to his golfing and me here all alone, the vicar needing six cakes for the committee, and no one’s thought to tell me until the last moment.” She huffs, stands up again. “He’s never come in today. Vida rang up, said they were both ill. What’s it to you, anyhow?” she adds sharply.
But Norris doesn’t answer her. He bangs out the door and sets off down the lane.
She laughed at me, he thinks. She laughed when I fell down in the mud.
At the front door to Southend House he reaches for the chain, pulls hard on it. After a long moment, Vida opens the door. She is wearing an old dressing gown—not his gift—a worn blue one with the satin collar faded away. Her face is very pale. She cranes round the door and stares up at Norris, puts her hand up to her mouth as if she might be sick. She seems very small, smaller than ever. He sees the declivity at her throat, her tiny wrist crossed before her chin.
“Mr. Lamb!” she says. “I thought you might be Dr. Faber.”
“No,” Norris says. “Sorry.”
“Excuse me.” She closes the door slightly and disappears behind it; he hears her cough. She opens it again and looks out at him.
Norris glances away as if something up in the trees has just caught his eye. “Manford?” he asks, not looking at her. “He’s not well either?”
“He’s in bed.”
Norris waits. “Nothing serious, I hope,” he says quietly after a moment.
She makes a gesture of slight fatigue. “Just a flu, I’m sure,” she says, “but I like to have Dr. Faber see him, in any case.”
“Of course.” Norris looks down at his feet and then glances up only as far as her throat, stopping before he meets her eyes. He points to her dressing gown. “You’ll catch cold, with that thin thing on,” he says. He allows his eyes to linger on the fragile proportions of her neck. “Perhaps you need a fire,” he says.
He looks up at last and meets her gaze. “And some tea,” he says. “My mother used to make me a nettle tea. Very effective. Very—soothing.”
Vida looks back at him; her eyes have filled surprisingly with tears. Her lips part but no sound comes from her.
He steps toward her then, takes her arm. “Come on,” he says gently, and feels how his heart has suddenly sent forth a million branches, buds flinging themselves open to the rain. “I’ll make you some tea,” he says. “We’ll see about Manford.”
“ALL RIGHT THEN?” He tucks the rug around her knees, places the teacup on her lap. She steadies it with her fingertips, leans back against the chair, and closes her eyes. “Go on. Take a sip,” he says, standing over her. Vida puts the cup to her lips, takes a swallow, grimaces.
Norris clucks his tongue. “It’s very beneficial,” he says. “You’ll see.”
Vida looks up at him. “You used to drink this?”
He nods firmly. “Got so’s I didn’t even mind the taste. I knew it would set me to rights.”
She wrinkles her nose. “It smells awful, brewing.”
“Yes.” He turns toward the kitchen. “I think it smells worse than it tastes, though.”
Vida makes another face, glances up at him skeptically.
He crosses the room and kneels at the hearth. He builds a careful fire from the basket of twigs, laying the sticks neatly to form a box, and then lights it with a long match from the box on the mantel. When he turns around, Vida’s head has fallen gently to the side, the teacup tilted in her lap, a little tea spilled into the saucer. Her eyes have closed. Norris crosses the room and looks down at her pale face for a long while. And then he raises his eyes and stares out the window, a light, steady rain falling outside as the afternoon darkens into evening.
Woman waits, he thinks. In her dressing gown.
HE TRIES TO remember when he last thought seriously about a holiday. Once, he knew, he’d wanted to rent one of those brightly painted tinker’s caravans in Ireland, take a month to do the coast, ending up at Dingle, perhaps, or the Aran Islands. And once, he’d investigated—thanks to Mr. Nesser, who’d first put the opportunity before him—renting a house-boat in India near Kashmir. Seems Nesser is related to someone there who has them. Teddy Roosevelt had let one several years in a row, Nesser had written Norris; he’d had a grand one, of course, all hung round with Indian tapestries and so forth and filled with heavy British colonial furnishings and silver service. Nesser’s great-uncle, or something like that, had been Roosevelt’s Himalayan guide, apparently. Norris had liked the notion of it—the locals would moor up to the houseboats in their little boats and sell you flowers or fruit, and at dawn you could hear the Moslem call to prayer drift out across the water. But it all proved too dear for Norris’s salary. He still has the photos Nesser sent, though. He takes them out and looks at them from time to time. In his head he’s woven quite a story about his houseboat, his adventures on it.
NORRIS’S GAZE LINGERS on Vida’s face for another moment, and then he turns and leaves the room. He climbs the staircase quietly, reaches a door partly ajar, and then pauses as a sensation of unsteadiness arrives at his feet. The room has become unmoored; were he to step over the threshold, he would find himself lost in a strange land. A trembling light spills out from over the sill and around the edge of the door, the heavy light of late afternoon melted at last into evening. And something else.
He pushes slightly against the door. It swings inward, and Norris’s eyes widen at the swimming, swirling shapes around him—orange and turquoise fish circling the walls and ceiling, diving and darting; a yellow sun spinning madly as if at the end of a tether; clumps of wavering water plants bobbing through blue waves. The shapes flow round the walls like ghosts, over the paintings, over the cavernous wardrobe, the long windows, the wide bed with its heavy headboard and the body beneath the sheets. Beside the bed, on a small nightstand, the night-light glows. The shadow shapes spiral out from it and into the falling dark.
Norris steps into the room, feels the light against his face, feels the bouncing fish and the sun sweep over him, feels the blue sea close in around him, feels the seaweed brush his hands. It is as exquisite as longing, like a face in a dream that inclines toward your own and then withdraws, hands poised lightly over your body, breath in your ear. He stands still, the sweet, pure colors thrown by the night-light, the whole world, flowing over him.
At the bed the body moves slightly, Manford’s shoulders rising, hesitating, and then falling again. Norris steps closer. In his sleep, Manford’s hair has slicked to his forehead and parted in waves over the heavy brow, damp from fever.
Norris raises his hand. A fish swims through it, capillaries and corpuscles and flesh and blood no obstacle for a moment. For a moment he holds the sun in his hand.
He touches him then, feels his forehead. It is moist, cool.
It’s passed, Norris thinks.
He covers Manford’s foot, heavy and white, shaken loose from the blankets. He raises the sheet gently to Manford’s shoulders, smooths it lightly with his fingertips. How many times has she done this, he thinks, tiptoed in here, covered Manford again as though he were a baby. Through so many years. Years and years of vigilance over Manford’s preposterous failure to grow, to speak, to walk away, to take matters into his own hands. All these years they have had this between them, this love. How lucky.
He backs away from the bed, from the body within it, the pretty rain of colored shapes falling over them both now, the universe spinning around them, infinity reduced in this room to a child’s crudely shaped school of fish, a punched-out sun, the stiff grasses waving at heaven, and a milky blue light, far away. All of it, the whole world, here.
And not until he arrives home later that night, soaking wet from the rain but cleansed in a way he has not been, he thinks, for perhaps his whole life, does he remember Laurence’s letter to Vida. The words, for having been in his pocket the whole while, are blurred but still, for anyone who might want to try to read them, faintly, barely legible.