YES, IT MOST certainly was Vida, going down the road with the gardener, and as soon as he can free himself from his customers, Norris hurries down the pavement toward Niven’s in pursuit of her. He does not actually intend to speak to her, and he certainly does not want her to think he’s following her. He tells himself that he just wants to see that she’s all right.
Something must be amiss. Of course, it’s fine that she’s up and about. But to be walking about in this damp, with the gardener—what can she be thinking? Only last night, she was too weak even to finish her nettle tea, falling asleep with it only half gone!
Norris frowns into the thick, damp air before him as he passes the blacksmith’s and turns the corner near Niven’s; he does hope this fogginess will burn off. He feels positively suffocated.
There’s something about the gardener he does not like, he thinks as he walks quickly down the pavement, trying to catch sight of Vida. He can’t quite put his finger on it, but he would venture to guess that that young gardener is not a wholly reliable sort of person. It was very careless, Norris considers now, his dropping that glass pane on himself on Sunday. And what a bother, his appearing all bloodied up and Vida’s having to take him off to Dr. Faber’s! She was awfully kind, wasn’t she? And now he’s got her off on another errand, and she just over the flu!
How inconsiderate.
How thoughtless.
And how bold he is, dragging her through the village like that.
LAST NIGHT, STEPPING into the black river of the lane on his way home from Southend House, he had felt himself disperse into the night air as effortlessly as the air itself. A sudden trill of alarm from a thrush disturbed upon its nest had risen in the wood near him, a wild, sharp cry from an unseen throat, and then nothing. Norris had raised his head at the sound and taken in the stars lining the road of the sky overhead, the narrow strip of black paving a path between the tops of the trees.
He had been grateful for the sensation of a steady walk. Out on his perambulations, he often lost all sense of purpose. He had no destination, no sense of time, only some compass within his body accustomed to steering him like a gentle hand at his back. At the end, near dawn, there would be the surprise of his own door, his bed, and sleep.
Norris knew that he seemed, probably to most of Hursley, a happy-enough man. He knew his duties; he talked to himself and others in a kindly and busy way, dispensing postage, admiring the stamps, asking after his neighbors. He was not insensitive, and he knew he could be charming if he chose to be. Week after week he would climb the steps to the organ; he understood its complexities, and he could play well enough to satisfy the congregation and the vicar. But it had now become too late for anything else, he feared. No one would ever really know him. He did not, perhaps, even know himself. The more time went by, the more he sensed that a gulf between him and the rest of the world was growing larger, a more dangerous crossing.
Yet walking through the darkness last night toward his own house, he had felt urgently that he needed to be successful now. He had been drawn to Vida—and to Manford, too, for Manford had become part of this cure Norris imagined for himself, this bringing together of the lost and the found, this one final effort he must make.
In the lane, doves called back and forth to one another in the soft summer-night air over his head. Norris saw the lights of the village ahead. He felt fiercely, as he passed the bench, how desirable another person’s separateness could be, how hospitable, a sea in which to wade, another world unto itself.
Seeing Vida alone that night on the fountain’s rim, he had recognized something, the wondrous, private theatrics of the unobserved self. Together, he’d imagined, he and Vida could step out onto the stage of their unknowing and enact the perfect event of creation, of creating themselves together. He believed he saw her, really saw her, and saw Manford, too. He believed he knew them, because he himself knew what it was to be lost.
Hadn’t he been right to go slowly, to be a gentleman?
But now she thinks she’s being stalked. That was the word she had used—stalked.
Dear God, he thought, turning on the light in his kitchen at last, blinking at the glare. It is not what I meant.
HE SAT IN his chair for an hour, but he had been unbearably restless, trying to sort out his feelings; he felt wretchedly guilty after steaming open and reading Laurence’s letter to Vida. A hot shame—the same as a thousand needles, he told himself sorrowfully—prickled him all over his body whenever he thought about it. He had arrived at a wall through which there seemed to be no door in his campaign to win Vida’s heart. She thought her admirer was—peculiar.
Peculiar!
Finally, though it was getting on toward midnight, he took up his stick and left the house again.
He walked in the darkness, up toward the farm where his grandmother’s cottage, now falling into disrepair, still stood. After her son, Norris’s father, had died and she had moved in with her daughter-in-law and young grandson, the three had gone back to the house occasionally—the summer cottage, they called it, as if giving it that romantic name changed its purpose in their lives, made it seem a luxurious second property, not the scene of his grandmother’s eyesight’s gradual failure, the shared grief over Norris’s father’s death, the beginning of his grandmother’s end.
It was a lovely place, though, on a bend of the Tyre. They had brought picnics there from time to time. Norris’s grandmother had liked to go back and poke around the place with her stick, rooting around in the jack-in-the-pulpits and the violets that grew down by the water, exclaiming over all its small delights, the things she could still see if they were brought up close before her eyes.
“You might like this for yourself one day, Norrie,” she’d said. “It’d be a little retreat for you. A gentleman’s retreat.”
But instead of the usual comforting nothingness that swept over him when he walked, that he’d been so glad of, walking home from Southend just an hour before, his head was bristling. It was the guilt, he thought again. He’d broken a cardinal rule. He had read another person’s mail. He had steamed open an envelope like a common criminal. He knew things he should not know.
He came upon the house in its little glade.
He unlatched the gate and walked down the path. Round the side of the cottage, by the water, was a small terrace where his grandparents had placed a round table and a bench. He sat at the bench, watched the moonlight fall in delicate sheets over the grass and the water. The darkness was comforting on his face and hands. He saw that the house needed a whitewash and the thatch needed mending. But the garden had gone to weeds that flower at night, white and fragrant. It was all lovely, he felt. And then he had a vision, a vision of Vida there on the terrace, her face lifted to the moon.
He leapt up, almost frightened by the clarity of this picture, how real and near she seemed.
He began poking around the house, and after a while he came to see that, really, there wasn’t so much work to be done after all. He let himself in through the kitchen and stood in the empty first room. Vines came in through the casement, fingering the stone. But there was the good, deep sink and the old Aga.
And he allowed himself to think then that they could have a little holiday themselves, right there. It wasn’t Corfu; of course it wasn’t, he told himself. But it was away from the world in its own fashion. Perhaps they could come only at night, he thought, and he’d wash Vida’s hair in the deep sink and dry it in his fingers on the terrace in the moonlight. He’d bring his phonograph. They’d have music, and they could dance on the deep moss.
He could have the whole place mended, restored.
He would come to her with roses. He would blindfold her. He would lead her by the hand to the cottage, unwrap her eyes, and all the darkness would fall away.
“AH, HERE IT is, just in time,” the Billy said early the following morning in the post office, shaking out a small catalog and holding it up for Norris’s inspection. “Morris’s puzzlers. He’s just yesterday finished the last of the previous month’s.”
She folded the catalog around her other mail, adjusted the lot beneath her arm, and painstakingly shook out her rain hat. “Looks like rain again, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Lamb? The garden’s very glad of it, I must say, but it’s brought out the beetles something terrible. Why, they’re all over the cabbages, and me out with my beetle jar in the mornings, picking them off.” She sighed.
Norris rolled his eyes, and that was when he caught sight of Vida.
He struggled vainly to see around Mrs. Billy’s billowing rain hat, its blue cellophane sheen obscuring his view through the window.
And it certainly was Vida, being towed along by the gardener.
“Matter with your neck, Mr. Lamb?” Mrs. Billy inquired. She nodded sympathetically. “It’s the damp what does it. A terrible stiffness in the joints, this weather causes. I should have thought it might be fine this month, last month being so wet. But, that’s it then. Can’t do a thing about it. Think of them over in Saudi Arabia, Mr. Lamb. Now, aren’t you glad you don’t live there? Parching away in the desert like a lot of dried-up crisps?”
Norris glanced at her in annoyance and then back to the window.
“Oh, dear!” Mrs. Billy bent over suddenly, her mail slipping from beneath her arm, her hand to her face. “Oh! Something’s in my eye, Mr. Lamb!” She dabbed at her eye, which was squeezed shut. “Oh! Something sharp!”
Norris gave a last, frantic look out the window. The Billy’s envelopes had scattered at her feet. She held both hands to her face.
“Oh! Most annoying,” she cried in agitation. “Whatever can it be?”
“Let me help you,” Norris said, sighing, and he came round his counter. He put his hands out. “Let me have a look.”
Mrs. Billy turned her face toward him, her features bunched up in discomfort, her eyes tearing from beneath short, clenched lashes.
Norris poked at her face. “You need to open your eye,” he told her. “I can’t see whether there’s anything in it like that.”
Mrs. Billy contorted her face, one eye gaping open hotly at him, pooling water. Norris peered at her. “Now, let me—” He reached with a finger, gently pulled down the skin beneath the eye. The eyeball rolled, a pickled egg. “Ooooh,” Mrs. Billy moaned. “Quick, quick, it’s there.”
“Well, I can’t see anything,” Norris said in irritation. “Honestly, there’s nothing there. It might just be a sty.” He dropped his hands. “Or perhaps you’ve cried it out.”
Mrs. Billy blinked madly, her hands fluttering before her. “Why, yes,” she said at last. “I believe I have.”
She smiled gratefully at him. “It’s gone! Have you a hankie?”
Norris reached in his pocket, withdrew a handkerchief, and handed it to her. She patted her eye tenderly. “Now then—”
Norris stooped to the floor, collected her envelopes, and handed them to her.
“Thank you ever so much, Mr. Lamb,” she said as Norris took her by the elbow and steered her toward the door.
“Not at all,” he said hurriedly. “Not at all.”
But as Mrs. Billy headed away down the street, waving her hand at him, Norris realized he was too late. Vida must have turned the corner by the blacksmith’s already, was heading—where? Home, perhaps?
Another customer came in, Mr. Titus’s grown and married daughter, wanting chocolates and cigarettes for herself. Norris tried to hurry her along. The ugly shape of jealousy was arranging itself in his heart.
NOW, NEARLY OUT of breath from hurrying down the pavement in pursuit of Vida along the Romsey Road, he turns in the door of the bakery.
Mrs. Blatchford looks up at him from behind the counter and frowns. “I hope you’re in a better humor than you were yesterday,” she says tartly.
Norris tries to appear contrite but decides to forgo any apologies. It seems too complicated to explain his anxiety of yesterday. And now—now he feels such a mixture of things, both cheered, even emboldened, by his vague plan with his grandmother’s cottage, his restoration of it, the gift of it to Vida, and perplexed and worried by Vida’s appearance outside his window with the gardener. He will just check on Manford, he thinks. And then? He doesn’t know exactly.
“All alone again today, are you?” he says sympathetically to Mrs. Blatchford instead. He leans round and sees Manford at his worktable, a two-tiered cake with dark icing before him. Manford holds a pastry cone in his hand, is bent over his work. “Except you have your helper back today,” he adds. “Hallo, Manford!” he calls brightly.
But Manford makes no reply.
Mrs. Blatchford sighs. “Vida says he hears quite well,” she says in a confiding tone to Norris, “but I’ve noticed that sometimes he doesn’t seem to hear you at all. It’s quite selective, I have noticed.”
Norris regards Manford. “Mind if I have a word with him?” he asks. “I won’t keep him. Just see how he’s getting on?”
Mrs. Blatchford shrugs. “Oh, he’s everybody’s favorite now,” she says. “You’d think it was he did all the work round here. No one minds old Mrs. Blatchford anymore. I’m just a fixture.”
“Oh, you’re necessary as the sun and the moon, Mrs. Blatchford,” Norris says soothingly. “We all know that. And I’ve just got stamps for him,” he adds, patting his empty pocket. “Won’t be a minute.”
WHEN HE STEPS into the hyphen, Norris pauses a moment. Manford is bent low over the cake, the arc of his back that of a defender or protector, his work concealed. One shoelace dangles limply; his ankles are crossed over the rung of the stool like a schoolboy’s.
“Feeling better, Manford?” Norris inquires, and steps forward. But he stops, for though Manford has made no sound, nor even any apparent gesture, Norris sees the muscles across his back tighten, his posture over the cake grow rigid.
“Working on a cake today?” Norris says, and then the stupidity of the remark floods his face with embarrassment.
But as he takes a step forward, intending to pat Manford’s shoulder in a jovial way, Manford’s hand freezes and he turns his face slightly, not to look directly at Norris, but as if in allowance of Norris’s presence, in acknowledgment of some helplessness to prevent what will happen.
For Norris stops then, astonished once again by Manford, by his hand, by whatever mechanism in his mind snaps and closes like a shutter, releasing the world in little pictures—shadow play, a replication of some tiny corner of the universe. The cake is iced with an elaborate spider’s web, its white filaments fine as hairs, bowed in the center as if a drifting wind has caught it.
Norris steps away slowly and returns to Mrs. Blatchford.
“Well, it’s rather odd, I must say.” He searches for his handkerchief and then realizes in dismay that he lent it to the Billy.
“What?”
“Well, it’s quite inventive. It’s—” He pauses, glances at Manford, who has retrieved his pastry cone and is bent again over the cake. “Do you let him have free rein like that?” he whispers. “I mean, it’s a bit gothic.”
“What’s he done?” Mrs. Blatchford looks at him suspiciously.
“Well, it’s a—it’s a—well, it’s a spider’s web, I’m afraid.” Norris looks at her helplessly.
“I shouldn’t think many would find it appetizing,” he says, confession in his voice.
“Well, no!” Mrs. Blatchford looks undone. “It’s nasty!”
“Perhaps, after being ill—perhaps his mind has taken a dark turn,” Norris says. “Perhaps he’s not quite well yet.”
Mrs. Blatchford glances sidelong at Manford, appears to be thinking it over. “Mr. Lamb,” she says sweetly, cajolingly, after a moment. “Do you think—would you mind just running him home? I don’t want to hurt his feelings”—she lowers her voice—“but I can’t have him doing spiders’ webs and such on the cakes. There’s three more to do, and if he’s in that frame of mind, I’m afraid they’ll all be ruined. Perhaps he’d be best off at home today, resting. Would you mind?”
“No bother at all, Mrs. Blatchford,” he says, calculating the advantage of this proposal; now he’ll have an excuse to pop in on Vida.
But he stops in the hyphen, struck by Manford’s concentration on his labor. He knows what Mrs. Blatchford means about not wanting to hurt Manford’s feelings. He seems so devoted to his work. Every time Norris has stopped in at Niven’s and seen Manford there, he has been surprised at Manford’s air of delighted occupation—just like Rumpelstiltskin, Norris thinks now, thrilled to have another pile of straw to weave into gold. He never seems to see it as straw, though, all those jam doughnuts. And how is he to know, anyway, that one doesn’t put a sugar spider’s web on a cake? That some might be put off by that? Suddenly Norris feels horrible, as if extracting Manford from the bakery is tantamount to kicking a dog, a good dog who only wants to be friendly.
Perhaps he should propose an outing, something that might be taken not as a rebuke but as a reward. After all, to take him straight home—well, that’s like being in disgrace. And that won’t do. That isn’t what should be conveyed here. No, Manford is doing his very best, and he should never be discouraged. Vida would hate that.
So instead Norris makes a great show of being impressed by the cake. “Well done, Manford!” he says, clapping Manford strongly on the back. “You’ve certainly earned your shilling today!”
Too loud, he thinks nervously; he’ll have to lower his voice. He leans forward and gently takes the sticky pastry cone from Manford’s hands, lays it gingerly on the table. “Manford,” he says, “I’ve an idea. How would you like to have a walk with your old friend Norris, here? You love a good walk, don’t you?”
Manford looks up at Norris.
“Well, come on then!” Norris says, making an enthusiastic rising motion with his arms, like a conductor. “Up you go. Let’s have our walk. You’ve done splendidly here,” he adds hastily.
Manford stands. Norris looks him over, points to his shoes. “You’ve a lace undone.” He shakes a finger in the direction of Manford’s shoe. Manford cranes over and looks at his lace. When he sits back down heavily on his stool and inclines his foot, Norris looks at him and searches his face in confusion.
“Can’t you do it yourself?” he asks in surprise.
But Manford continues to hold his foot out in the air. He raises his leg a little and looks off vacantly into the distance somewhere beyond Norris’s right shoulder.
After a moment, Norris kneels awkwardly and laces Manford’s shoe. “Fine,” he says, standing back up, breathing hard.
But the tail of Manford’s shirt hangs loose; his hair is flyaway, unkempt. Norris gestures awkwardly at him. “You might want to tidy yourself up a bit,” he begins.
Manford licks his fingers slowly then, tucks his curled fingers under his fringe, and pushes the hair slowly to one side, his eyes rolling upward strangely, following the motion of his hand.
Norris regards him. Manford still looks as though he’s had an encounter with a lot of bats, the creatures sweeping into him, tangling his hair in their sticky wings.
And so Norris reaches out with his own hands to smooth Manford’s hair. Manford drops his head, submits to Norris like a small child. Under his fingers, Norris feels the solid bone of Manford’s skull, the rigid substance of it. He keeps his hands there, smoothing and smoothing, and realizes then that he has never touched another person like this. And as Norris stands there holding Manford’s head, Manford reaches forward suddenly to clasp Norris by the lapels, burying his face briefly against his shirtfront, inhaling. When Manford raises his face, it wears the sweetest smile.
Norris smiles back, a smile he knows isn’t half so good as Manford’s; he deserves so much more.
And when they pass together through the bakery hand in hand, Mrs. Blatchford raises her eyebrows at them. “Well, Mr. Lamb,” she says. “Turns out you’ve quite a way with him, doesn’t it?”