“WELL, YOU’VE MADE a quick recovery, I must say,” Vida says, helping Manford into his shirt Tuesday morning and turning him round to face her so that she can do his buttons. “Come on,” she says, beckoning with her free hand as she kneels on the floor before him. “Give us your leg.”
Manford obligingly inclines his foot, thick in its heavy sock. She loosens the laces of the shoe and opens it, its tongue bent backward. “You could learn to do this yourself, you know,” she grumbles, struggling with his foot; but her tone is gentle.
She is unprepared when Manford leans over suddenly and ruffles her hair with his hands.
“Oh! No, Manford! You’ll muss my hair!” She sits back on her heels and puts her hands to her hair defensively. Manford gives her a wild-eyed look, smiles hugely, and lunges at her again with both hands, fingers wiggling. She slaps at the air between them. “Manford! Leave go my hair, will you! What’s come over you? You’re a regular nuisance!”
He sits back, hands limp in his lap, a bored expression on his face.
“Now, that’s it then,” she says as she gives the laces a final tug. “You’re ready to go.” She sits back on her heels again to appraise him. “You’re certainly lively this morning,” she tells him. “I never saw someone turn around a fever so fast.” She puts her hand up and feels his forehead, brushing his hair aside. “Cool as the driven snow.” She smiles at him. “Dr. Faber says I’m a worrywart. Do you think I’m a worrywart?”
Manford winds his hands in his lap, glances at her face, and then stares off out the window. She follows his gaze. “It does look like rain, doesn’t it? Well, we’ll take an umbrella to Niven’s. You’re right enough to work, I think. Come on. The fresh air will do us both good.”
Downstairs in the kitchen, she fixes Manford toast, sits beside him while he eats. She had woken late last night in her chair, the fire low and her teacup on the table beside her. Mr. Lamb had been nowhere in sight; she supposed he had gone home. She hoped he didn’t think her rude to have fallen asleep. She had drifted up to bed at last feeling wonderfully restored, strangely content, and sleepy. When she’d woken this morning, she’d known that whatever it was that had made her feel so drippy the day before had passed. And though she’d been glad enough yesterday to wake feeling poorly, so as to postpone a meeting with Mr. Niven and whatever discomfort a meeting might cause them both, this morning the whole idea of Mr. Niven as her mysterious suitor seems positively absurd. What was it Mr. Lamb had said? That Mr. Niven hadn’t enough—imagination? He was right; it couldn’t be Mr. Niven. She feels a little thrill run through her. She stands up and takes Manford’s plate to the sink. Perhaps it is all still to be discovered.
“Will you have an egg?” she asks Manford over her shoulder, turning to the fridge and rummaging around inside. “Oh, dear. We’re out,” she apologizes, standing upright again and surveying Manford. “Perhaps you’d like to have a doughnut at Niven’s instead? I’ll go round later today for eggs. I know you love an egg.” Manford looks up from the tablecloth, where he has been pushing a little pile of crumbs to and fro. He smiles, puts his hands up, and wiggles his fingers at her.
She moves over beside him then, puts her hands on his head, and leans down to put her lips to the shock of heavy hair that stands up from his cowlick. “I’m sorry about the eggs,” she says. When he reaches up to clasp her hand, she holds his fingers tight in her own, rests her cheek against his hair. “It’s been ages since you’ve seen your father, hasn’t it?” she says quietly, her eyes closed. “Perhaps we’ll have a card from him today. See how he’s getting on in Amsterdam, or Italy—wherever he is. Isn’t he lucky, getting to travel like that, anywhere he likes? I wish he’d take us with him sometime. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Travel with your father? Travel in the high style?”
Manford reaches up with his other hand, covers hers with his soft palm.
“Good boy,” she says, and gives his hand a squeeze.
BUT AS SHE is washing up Manford’s breakfast things, it occurs to her that Mr. Perry has never taken them anywhere, with the exception of that one trip to London to have Manford examined. They’d make an odd threesome, she supposes, though Manford is perfectly well behaved in public. Once, Mr. Perry had suggested he might take them to Paris; he’d seemed astonished that she’d never been. “It’s so close!” he’d said in surprise when she confessed that she’d never been out of the country at all. “Well, we’ll have to fix that,” he’d said, and had appeared to be thinking of some arrangement he might make. “How would you like to see Notre-Dame?” he’d said.
She had wanted to go very much. She remembered that. But nothing had ever come of it. Mr. Perry had left again, alone, shortly thereafter, the name of a hotel or private party left with Vida should she need to reach him. And what sort of good-bye did he ever make to Manford? He would stop, sitting before him silently a moment, watching him. Vida has always thought it made Manford uncomfortable to bear his father’s scrutiny in that way. But at last Mr. Perry would lean forward, put a hand briefly to Manford’s head. And then he would leave.
She did once want to see Notre-Dame; and with Mr. Perry, too. There was a day when she would have thought it romantic, would have cherished a silly girl’s hopes. But now the whole notion seems out of reach, impossible; and she wouldn’t want to go with Mr. Perry anyway. Really, she realizes, she’d want to go somewhere by herself. She’s never been anywhere by herself.
A few weeks ago, she was reading over her uncle Laurence’s letters and found an early one in which he asked if they could locate for him Heinzel, Fitter, and Parslow’s Birds of Britain and Europe with North Africa and the Middle East.
“It’s the guide for bird-watching in these parts,” he wrote. “And I’ve a mind to improve my education. In the holm oaks out behind the tavern where I’m staying lives a Scops owl who’s become my charming nocturnal companion. I hear him at night when I’m closing up, shoving off the last of the inebriates. He has the most plaintive call. Just the other night, as I was mopping up the terrace, I found one of our oldest patrons—I think the fellow’s a hundred years old at least, liver of steel—lying stretched out on the terrace wall. As I sloshed the bucket over the stones, he waved his arm at me in annoyance. And then I heard that owl call.
“‘Yianni! Yianni!’ the old man called back—it was perfectly heartbreaking! And then, raising himself on one elbow, he fixed me with his eye. ‘She calls for her lover, but he is gone for good,’ the old fellow told me. And then the owl sounded again, and the man pressed his hands to his eyes and wept, ‘Yianni! Yianni!’
“Now I sit awhile at night after closing, listen for the owl, and offer my poor reply.
“Won’t you see if you can’t find the book?”
Vida had been struck by this letter, as she had by so many of them. She remembered having been dispatched by her mother to ask the vicar about the book. After searching his shelves for some time, he had indeed found the guide Laurence wished and had turned it over, though not before giving Vida a long tour through its well-thumbed pages.
Now, she thinks, wiping a damp cloth over the kitchen table, she should like to hear that owl for herself, that owl calling “Yianni! Yianni!” into the starry night. Once, when she was a girl, she had thought she should see all sorts of things. It surprises her, in a way, to realize that she has been nowhere at all, has seen nothing of the world.
She turns from the table and stops, for Manford has moved to the little sitting room and stands in front of the tiny mirror there, his face pressed up close to the glass. He stands so near the surface of the mirror, in fact, that he must not be able to see anything at all, she thinks in surprise—nothing but his nose pressed flat like a pugilist’s, the distorted terrain of his own face, and a glimpse of the stranger who lives there behind his own eyes.
“AND WHAT WILL I do today whilst you’re off at Niven’s?” She tries to speak cheerfully, for she sees that Manford is now suddenly melancholic; left over from the fever, no doubt.
“Well, there’s the eggs,” she blathers on. “I’ll go round and fetch us some eggs.” She helps Manford into his mackintosh, shoos him out the back door ahead of her. “And, let’s see. There’s the sheets. We might as well have fresh sheets after both of us being ill. Do you know, Manford, I think that tea Mr. Lamb made me was quite the miracle cure. I feel entirely well this morning. We must ask him about it for the future.”
They descend the steps, Manford moving ahead of her, riding the air, his feet disturbing the morning mist. Vida feels the damp on her face and throat. The sky seems lowered, a tent pitched overhead. At the gates to Southend House, Manford stops, turns, holds out his hand. Vida takes it this morning without argument, though she’s been trying to break him of this habit, and tucks it under her arm. They pass out onto the lane, its long concourse braided with mist like a delicate, fraying twine. She pats his hand. “There,” she says. “You see? The mist is lifting.”
Manford smiles as they step into the mist, its gray wreaths circling the tree trunks; she sees some feeling she cannot fathom pass over his face. He blinks, opens his mouth, raises his free hand, and wobbles his fingers in the air. He purses his lips and blows the vaporous steam of his breath into the lightening morning.
When he stops up short, she is startled. “What is it?” she says, turning to look at his face. And then she follows his eyes.
The bench in the lane where they so often rest, where Vida waits for him in the afternoons, where a few days ago she had found the flowers, is now strung from armrest to armrest with an elaborate spider’s web, each strand beaded with pearls of dew, like a hammock of silver chains strung across the seat. If she reaches out and plucks a strand, Vida thinks irrationally, it will chime a perfect note.
“Oh,” she breathes. “Isn’t that something, Manford? Like what a fairy would do. It’s a fairy bench, Manford. Look!”
But he is looking; he is staring at the bench as though watching the web for some sudden movement—as though it might fly up and flit off into the mist, or fly toward them, the lightest of chain mail, an invisible encumbrance. When he shudders, drawing nearer to Vida, she looks at him, puzzled, and then laughs, nudging him in the ribs.
“Oh, it’s just a spider’s web! You’re not afraid of it, are you?”
Manford takes a few steps to the side, giving the bench a wide berth, eyeing it like a shy horse.
“Look,” she says again, tugging on his arm, anxious for him to see what a lovely thing it is. “You could do this on one of your cakes,” she says. “Look how pretty it is, Manford.” She drags him with her, approaching the bench with its stirring, glinting web. She puts out her hand as if to touch it, but he grabs at her arm, jerks her backward, hard.
“Manford!” She turns, surprised. “Why, you are afraid of it! Oh, that’s silly! It’s nothing but an old spider’s web!”
But Manford lets go her hand then and pulls away from her, throwing up his arms and fluttering his hands around his head as though there were bats flying at his eyes. He ducks and swerves, running circles in the lane, his own hands pursuing him. He moves his mouth in odd ways, but no sound comes from his lips. He brushes his hands wildly about his hair, grimacing, his eyes squinted shut.
“Manford!” Vida cries. “Stop!” She raises her own hands to stay him, but he twitches away from her, his hands frantically slapping his hair, his head ducking.
Looking around in a panic, Vida catches sight of a piece of broken branch. She darts to it, catches it up, and runs toward the bench, waving it wildly. “Look!” she cries. “Look, Manford! I’ll be rid of it!”
And she sweeps the stick through the web, its sticky warp collapsing, tangling. She bears the stick down upon the seat, crashing it against the rungs, the filaments of web flying upward, dissolving into nothing. She swings as hard as she can, Manford reeling behind her, his face tormented. The stick shatters in her hand, wormy wood, cottony and soft. She feels she is beating nothing, the air itself. At last she drops the stick to the ground, turns to Manford.
He is standing at the far side of the lane in the rut, crouched low, shaking.
“There,” she says, and realizes she is trembling. “I’ve got rid of it. It’s all right now. Come on to me, Manford. It’s all gone. I’ve killed it, do you see?”
“WELL! UP AND about again, I see,” Mrs. Blatchford says as Vida and Manford come in the door of Niven’s. “Right as—” She stops abruptly as she takes in Vida’s white face, Manford’s disarray.
Vida puts her finger to her lips.
“Here you are, then,” Vida says in a tone of forced cheerfulness, helping Manford off with his coat. “Now, right to work with you,” she orders. Manford trots obediently into the dairy, sits down hard on his stool, and immediately begins filling the paper cone with jam and squirting it into the tray of doughnuts waiting for him.
Mrs. Blatchford glances at Vida, a question on her face, and then goes to fetch Manford’s apron. Tying it round his waist, she speaks kindly to him. “One day away and you’ve forgotten already,” she says. “You’ll have jam all over without your apron.”
Mrs. Blatchford raises her eyebrows at Vida when she comes back into the room.
“He had a terrible fright this morning,” Vida whispers, leaning toward her, her voice low. “It was all over a spider’s web! He went berserk!”
“A spider’s web!” Mrs. Blatchford rears back. “Frightened by a spider?”
“No!” Vida whispers. “It wasn’t anything like that. We didn’t even see a spider! It was just the web, over the bench in the lane. It was very large—I’ve never seen one like it. But he was—he was terribly afraid of it. It was the strangest thing. I’ve never seen him like that before.”
“No spider at all?”
“No.” Vida glances at Manford. He still looks worried. In his haste he has crumpled the paper cone. Jam has spilled onto his hand and the table. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have made him come on,” she says. “Do you think he’ll be all right?”
Mrs. Blatchford looks at Manford doubtfully. “He went berserk, you say?”
Vida stops. She hears something in Mrs. Blatchford’s tone that suddenly raises all her alarms. As much as they might seem to love him, she knows, he is essentially beyond knowing for them; they could cast him out, would cast him out, at the first sign of—of anything they couldn’t understand. But she would not have him turned out now! She would not! No one, no grown man, ought to spend all his days with a nanny, shut up in a big, empty house. He needs friends. He needs to be in the world.
She has to be very careful. Words like berserk—well, when used in conjunction with Manford—people might make the wrong assumption. She considers what she might say. “He was frightened by it,” she offers at last, stressing the word.
“What did he do?” Mrs. Blatchford inquires, her eyes wide.
“Well, he just—” Vida pauses, for it had been alarming. He had behaved as if a net had been thrown over him, trapping him like a fish. She’d never seen him so wild. “He didn’t want it touching him,” she says finally.
“But it wasn’t—touching him,” Mrs. Blatchford repeats, watching her.
“No.” Vida collects up her purse straps then, throws Manford another glance. He is sloppily filling the doughnuts, setting them unevenly on the tray. “I’m just going round to pick up eggs,” she says. “I’ll stop back on my way home and check on him. I’m quite sure he’ll be all right.” She gathers in a breath. “You mustn’t worry,” she says to Mrs. Blatchford, and her tone suggests she will have nothing more to say, that such things happen from time to time and signify nothing. “Just carry on as you usually do. I’m sure he’ll calm down presently. Perhaps a cup of tea would soothe him.”
“I haven’t anyone with me today,” Mrs. Blatchford calls after Vida as she leaves. “I’m all alone! Mr. Niven’s taken Mary into Winchester—they’re seeing about a new sofa!”
But Vida doesn’t wait to answer her.
SHE IS HALFWAY down the dairy road, its close shoulder thick with the briery hawthorn, before she remembers Jeremy, the house with the drawn curtains and ringing silence. Thinking of Jeremy makes her think of her mystery lover—for hadn’t she imagined it might be Jeremy himself writing to her?—and she grows suddenly awkward and watchful, wondering if whoever this suitor is could be observing her right at this moment. She realizes that she is looking about under hedges and up in the trees as if this man weren’t actually real but were composed instead of magical elements—a talking frog, for instance, or hedgehog.
When she rounds the corner and sees the string of dreary bungalows, the stained white walls of the dairy on the far side of the road, she tries to keep her eyes away from the house. She ducks her head and averts her face and begins instead to peer interestedly at the hawthorn, its white flowers stirred by agitated bees storming the blossoms. The sky feels so heavy that it seems to rest directly upon her sleeve, the crown of her head. In the humid air, the astringent lime from the dairy pinches her nostrils. She wrinkles her face.
When she reaches the gate at the corner of the dairy yard, she pauses to find a path through the mud. She does not like stopping here; she is too aware of the house behind her, of Jeremy’s possible presence there. Suddenly she is mortified at the thought of seeing him, though whether it is her own shame at having thought him responsible for her love letters or her memory of the odd admiration she’d felt, seeing him without his shirt in Dr. Faber’s office, she does not want to consider.
But she is stepping to the side of the gate, preparing to execute a small leap over the worst of the mud, when he calls to her.
He is standing at the door of the bungalow in a gray jersey. Even from her distance across the road, she can see how pale he is.
He raises his arm. “I thought it was you,” he calls. His voice sounds very far away, as though there were something wrong with her ears.
“Yes,” she calls back, and hears her own echo. She waits a moment. “I’ve come for eggs.”
He does not reply; he seems to be waiting for something else.
“Generally I have them delivered, you know, along with the milk,” she calls desperately, her voice overly loud in the still air. “I’ve run out early, though, so I thought I’d come myself.”
He seems to be thinking. Presently he says, “Half a sec,” and disappears inside. A moment later he reappears, closing the door behind him, and walks across the road to her. When he reaches her, he holds up his hand, sheathed in a black glove. “Look like a murderer, don’t I?” he says. “The strangler.” He surveys the mud around the gate. “Stinking mess. Look,” he says, gesturing with his good arm. “You can go on round the back.”
She follows him to a green-tiled passageway, low and dim and shrouded thick with dusty cobwebs. He stops at the entryway, takes out a cigarette, and lights it. “You going back home after?”
She nods.
“I’ll walk with you then,” he says. And then he adds, as though needing to explain himself, “I want to have a look at some of the drawings for the garden. He said they were in the library. Can’t do much else anyway like this.” He raises his black hand, regards it with a frown. She stares at it. He returns his attention to her after a moment, dragging his eyes away from his hand. “You can take the eggs right from the fridge,” he says.
In the small, cool room, Vida takes six brown eggs from the cardboard trays lined up on shelves in the refrigerator. A bit of straw clings to one; she pries it loose with her fingernail. She puts the cool egg to her cheek briefly, rolls it between her palm and the concave shell of her cheek; she thinks of Jeremy with his black glove, waiting. She leaves her coins on the enamel tray on the table under the window.
Outside, when she rejoins him, he stubs out his cigarette and sets off down the lane. Vida does not know what to say; she walks along carrying the eggs carefully, cradled in a paper sack close to her chest. At last she glances over at him. “How’s your hand?”
“Actually, it’s bloody painful,” he says.
And then he does not say anything else. Vida, remembering his kiss, is a little offended by his silence. She thinks he might thank her again for taking him to Dr. Faber’s, but he doesn’t seem to have anything to say to her. They leave the lane for St. Andrew’s Place, pass the few houses there off the Romsey Road. Tony Spooner, Nigel’s son, mounts a bicycle leaning against a fence before one of the houses and pedals off down the road ahead of them, his tires issuing a spray of water as he sweeps through the puddles. These are among the smallest houses in the village; the grander residences front the Romsey Road. Vida’s parents’ old house is here, now occupied by a retired teacher from Prince’s Mead, a swaybacked spinster who cultivates a large perennial border, working all the spring and summer folded like a praying mantis over her flowers and wearing a cotton hat. Vida tries to admire the roses sprayed over the walk to the front door, a bower of white and pink, but realizes she is having to work to be cheerful.
When they turn onto the Romsey Road, the silence between them feels as though it has acquired something noticeable, that by walking along side by side without speaking, they are calling attention to themselves. But Jeremy does not look at her; he seems in a black humor, his gloved hand hanging limply by his side, his face averted and closed as a stone. She hurries to keep pace with him, holding the eggs tightly.
When they pass the post office, Vida turns her head involuntarily and glances through the window. She sees Mr. Lamb, engaged in some transaction with a customer at the counter, look up and meet her eyes before she passes from view. She raises one hand to him, but he freezes as he catches sight of her, and suddenly she feels that she is engaged in something improper, even hurtful. She wants to speak to Mr. Lamb—she wants to thank him for the night before, the nettle tea. Where had he gone when she’d fallen asleep? When she’d woken, still in her chair, the house had been silent, still. How long had he stayed by her side?
But there seems no way to address these complicated questions. Jeremy is hurrying on.
At the courtyard to Niven’s, it occurs to her that she wants to stop and check on Manford as she had said she would, but now she cannot imagine breaking the silence between them to explain her errand. And then they are turning onto the lane to Southend House, the sound of the Romsey Road receding behind them as they enter the long tunnel of green. They walk along, their tread soundless. As they draw near the bench, Vida glances surreptitiously to the side, sees that no trace of the web remains. The growing heat of the morning has evaporated it like the memory of a dream that gradually disintegrates as the day wears on. Remembering the bouquet of flowers, she tries to see whether Jeremy looks, too, whether the place holds any significance for him, but he stares straight ahead.
In the kitchen she puts the sack of eggs on the table and takes off her coat. Jeremy looks around the room, then steps to the door of the small sitting room and pokes his head in. “You eat in the kitchen?” he asks abruptly.
“Usually,” Vida says, a bit surprised at the question. “Or sometimes in there.” She indicates the sitting room. “In front of the telly, if there’s something on.”
Jeremy laughs. “He never has you eat in the dining room with him?”
“If there’s houseguests.” She feels confused by this line of questioning. “They eat in the dining room then.”
“Ah, yes. Houseguests.”
He moves to the pantry, stops, runs a finger over the labels on the shelves. She watches him a moment and then returns to the center of the room by the table, waiting and winding her hands together. After a pause she puts the eggs away and turns to fill the kettle. “Will you have a cup of tea?” she calls.
He does not answer. When he comes back into the room, he is carrying an enormous soup tureen, its fluted sides painted with minute pastorals, a formal Italian parterre seen in columns as though divided by a trick of light. “Everyday china?” he says, holding it aloft oddly.
Vida draws in her breath sharply. “It’s very old,” she says quickly. “I’ve never used it.”
“An antique,” he says. She holds her breath. “He has nice things,” he says calmly after a moment and returns with the tureen to the pantry.
The kettle shrieks and Vida jumps. In relief she fills the pot with the dry tea, pours in the water, and replaces the lid carefully, resting her hand over the faint halo of steam that escapes around the lid.
“Right, then. Let’s have a look at the library,” he says, returning to the room.
She is glad to see that he is empty handed this time. “I’ll bring my tea, then,” she says. She fills a cup. “Will you have one?”
“No. I drink too much tea,” he says.
She leads the way down the passage, through the great hall with its dim balcony. In the center of the room, Jeremy stops and whistles, craning his head back. “How many bedrooms?”
“There’s fourteen.”
“Musical bedrooms,” he says, and laughs again. “For the houseguests,” he adds, and winks at her.
She walks on, but he wants to stop again and again, standing in the doorways, staring at the rooms. “You could put up the whole bloody village in here,” he says quietly at one point, walking into one of the unused rooms, the few furnishings covered with dusty cloths. He stares around him. “He doesn’t use much of it, does he?”
“During the war,” Vida says slowly, “I believe many people stayed here.”
“Refugees from London,” Jeremy says, running a hand over the curved back of a settee. “Running from the bomb.”
Vida thinks of that for a moment—the sitting room crowded with various people, the remnants of families, perhaps single ladies like her or early war widows, invited to stay at Southend for the long months of the bombing, when whole sections of London were falling under the rain of shelling, ruins toppling into ruins, heaps of ancient stone. She doesn’t remember much from then, though she seems to recall that some people from London had come out to stay at Southend. It seems odd to imagine the house full, servants catering to the odd collection of people who must have taken shelter here. Since then, of course, the house has been mostly empty, unused, she and Manford and, less often, Mr. Perry, moving through its grand and deserted spaces like refugees themselves, alert, easily alarmed, nervous. As if someone were missing. Or in danger. As if they all were.
She jumps at the sound of the double doors across the hall being swung open, Jeremy wrenching the stiff hinges against disuse. The rich parquet floor of the ballroom spreads out before them, gleaming chestnut dulled under the glaze of dust, the cool morning light like frost, the mirrors full of silver. Vida sneezes, but Jeremy laughs and strides into the room, shattering the cool silence. “Aha!” he cries. “It’s a party!” He takes a silent turn around the floor, upright and military, his black-gloved hand stiff as a raven tied to his wrist.
“Come on,” he says, stopping before her, gesturing in a way that seems to her, for an instant, faintly crude.
“Oh, no,” she says, cringing. But he comes at her, puts his good hand round her waist, a hard grip, and raises her other hand lightly in the fork of his black glove. With a wrenching movement he turns with her, executes another turn round the room. She feels the stiff hand holding hers, imagines she can feel the raised line of black stitches along his hand and wrist, the seam holding him together.
“Oh, be careful!” she cries out.
But he is laughing, galloping her around the room until she is dizzy. She catches her own reflection in the mirror, her white face, her dress hiked up in the back. He smells like stale tea. “Watch out!” he cries. “We’ll take them all down!”
She feels the force of his thighs parting hers, the neat scissoring of their paired steps; and she remembers this about dancing, remembers her instinct for it. There’d been that boy, James, her partner at the dancing school held on Sunday evenings in the chilled dining hall at Prince’s Mead, the boys and girls of the village scrubbed clean, the parents conscripted by the definite and regal Miss Ferry to bring their unruly youngsters, awkward and uncomfortable, for formal lessons. Being a gentleman. Being a lady. And James, at thirteen already the tallest boy in the village, a sapling, down on his upper lip, had agreeably taken her round the waist and whispered to her, “Let’s get it right then.” So they had learned it, James speaking to the air above her head, “That’s it, that’s the way. My mum and dad can dance, you know. They’re grand together.”
And she’d loved it, loved him. She’d loved that they seemed to dance so well together, just like his parents, whom Vida imagined in their own closed bedroom, twirling in front of the dark glass on an uneven floor, James’s father loosening his wife’s hair, the combs flying loose, his red neck bent over, obscuring her white face. Vida had imagined herself married to this James, this black-haired boy; she’d thought of herself as his partner in this familiar place, the various smells of the room—old bread and soup, wet wood—peeling away before the honorable smell of this boy, his clean sweat, his easy dancing, his parents in love. But she’d been only ten or eleven, too young even for possibility; they’d been paired randomly, Miss Ferry nudging couples together with her stick.
“I love you,” she had whispered once into his chest, feeling as though she would have given up her life for him at that moment, there in the cleared dining hall with the black windows, the faraway smells, the evanescent music.
“What?” he’d said with his sweet breath, bending down his head. And, stepping on her foot, he’d said, “Oh, sorry.”
“I’M SORRY,” SHE says breathlessly now and pulls away from Jeremy, overcome by the memory the dancing has roused in her, by what she had felt back then.
“Tired you out?” Jeremy laughs. “Don’t tell me you’re getting too old for this.”
But it isn’t a question. Vida sees that. Perhaps he does consider her old, she thinks, feeling foolish; not the sun and the moon and stars.
Oh, what had ever happened to James?
“My teacup,” she says faintly.
He looks at her, looks around as if annoyed that she would be worrying about her cup. “You could be a good dancer,” he says then, and spying her cup, he picks it up and hands it to her. “You must have been good at it once.”
“Yes. Once, perhaps,” she says. She looks away.
“You should enjoy yourself more, Vida.” He holds out his hands, the black glove. He glances around the empty room, the windows full of dust and light, no one there. “We could enjoy ourselves.” He takes a step toward her. “It’s all just going to waste, you know. You’re wasting away here, Vida.”
She feels him darken the light from the window.