VIDA TWISTS AWAY from Jeremy. “You haven’t seen the library yet.”
She hears the frightened battery of her own footsteps, the fussy clicking of her heels as she hurries out of the ballroom away from him, the dead air of the room cool against her flushed cheeks. For a moment she thinks she hears him laugh, but she is not certain of this. Certainly, as she pulls away, she hears his breath escape in an expression of—disgust, she thinks. But she won’t wait for him now. It’s better not to wait, she thinks. It’s best just to go on, pretend nothing’s happened. And perhaps nothing has.
“Close the doors after you?” She hurries ahead down the hall. Her own voice sounds to her high and alarmed. Oh, what is there to be so frightened of? She is annoyed at herself. But, “I like to keep them shut in case of birds,” she hears herself call over her shoulder. “So many seem to find their way in.”
He is close at her heels now, having followed her toward the library, and she feels a slick of perspiration break out over her skin.
“You know what they say about that, don’t you?” he asks.
“What?” She does not turn to answer him but hurries away down the hall.
“Birds in the house,” she hears him say. “It’s a sign of bad luck. Evil omen.”
She waits an instant at the door to the library, her back still to him, before replying. “Well, I don’t believe in any of that,” she says firmly. “They’re just a nuisance.”
But she does believe it. An aching feeling of dread comes over her whenever she discovers a bird trapped in one of Southend’s airless rooms, the creature flapping away wildly and scaring her half to death when she opens the door. They come in through the chimneys, she believes. She has found several over the years, starlings usually; their oily black bodies leave smudges against the walls and on the heavy draperies at the windows. It is as if they became suddenly blind, as if they couldn’t see the walls around them; they fly at the plaster or the mullioned panes, falling stunned to the floor in collision after pointless collision. It’s the stupidity of it she hates. That they can’t see where they are. That they can’t see how they’d got in, such a simple thing, and so can’t get out, either.
“All the same, it is a bad omen. Whether you believe in it or not,” Jeremy says now from behind her. His tone is oddly companionable, agreeable; Vida finds herself annoyed by it. She turns to him. “You’ve certainly a morbid turn of mind today,” she says sharply. He just shrugs. “After you,” he says as she turns away again to open the door to the library.
She hears it then, no mistaking it—the sarcasm in his voice.
She had averted something, there in the ballroom. She understands that. And she had been frightened, she knows, recognizing it. He would have kissed her! When had she last been kissed? She’d been—she was—unprepared! Any other man—a good man, she thinks fiercely—would have seen that! He wouldn’t have come at her so—suddenly! But thinking of Jeremy, of his dark good looks, she feels a tidal surge of embarrassment. What would this man want with her, anyway?
Something’s wrong, she thinks. Or something’s wrong with him to be frightening her in this way.
She crosses the shadowy library to pull aside the heavy drapes, but as the chalky light of midday falls into the room, she hears the words from the letter, the love letter, as if they had been spoken aloud. I fall at your knees in worship, the letter had said.
But who had almost fallen there in the ballroom? Not Jeremy, she realizes. Someone else. She herself.
She takes a deep breath and switches on the light by the drawing table. In one of the wide, shallow drawers Mr. Perry uses to store his work, she finds the garden drawings. Several of Mr. Perry’s own sketches are laid on top of the yellowed sheets that detail the original diagrams, a complicated crosshatching of underground pipes and foundations for the fountain.
She stiffens as Jeremy leans in close over her shoulder.
“Did he do those?”
She nods.
He reaches past her for them. “Let’s have a look.”
He takes several sheets from her hand, walks to the window, and holds them to the light, where she can see black lines reversed through the transparent paper, Jeremy’s glove a dark blossom against the white. She doesn’t like the way he holds the drawings, as if he might damage them, crumple them suddenly in his hands.
“He’s an architect, for churches. Someone told me,” he says, still looking at the drawings.
“Yes.”
Jeremy seems transfixed by the drawings, tilting them this way and that to the light. He holds one up for her. “Where’s this?”
“Oh, that’s St. Nevin’s,” she says after a moment, pleased to recognize the little church with its circular window over the front door, like a brilliant eye. She remembers driving there with Mr. Perry and Manford, when Manford was just a boy. Mr. Perry had taken them along when he went to sketch the church the first time, and she and Manford played in the tiny close, setting fragments of twigs afloat in the pencil-thin stream of water that ran down the cobbled gutter. There hadn’t been anyone about except a char, a scarf knotted over her head and a pail and rag in her hand, who hurried through the gray courtyard, her glance pausing at Manford’s awkward antics.
They had remained there in the high-walled enclosure for the whole afternoon, racing a flotilla of seeds and twigs, watching them vanish through the gutter’s low aperture in the stone wall. Wondering what became of them, Vida had wandered to the gate, seen the gutter’s stream empty into a brook that wound, low in its bed, through a field waving prettily with poppies and Queen Anne’s lace. She would have liked to follow the stream, but Manford could not be persuaded away from the activity, tugging on her hand and drawing her to her knees on the hard stone, where they gathered more detritus to send down the quick channel. She had thought, in the end, that it was a penitent’s work, that between them they had cleared the whole close of anything the wind might lift. Still, Manford had loved it, the sensation of excitement as their little craft sped away and vanished. I know where they go, she’d thought, but to him it is like a magic trick.
She had hoped they would stop somewhere for tea on the way home, as it was late in the day when Mr. Perry finally finished and came to fetch them. But he pulled up outside a shop in Southampton and brought fish-and-chips out to the car for them instead. She had understood, at the time, that he didn’t want to bring Manford into a pub, where he could be closely observed, a silence falling among the patrons as the child’s strange, silent animation excited notice. So the three of them had sat in the car in silence, licking their fingers over the rumple of newspaper, Vida and Manford in the backseat together so she could help him. It began to rain, she remembers, and she looked out the window, which was beaded and streaked with water, the world gradually disappearing into the rain and early dark, an occasional car driving by and sending a spray of dirty gray water up from its tires. She sat beside Manford, reaching over to wipe his chin gently as he ate, the sweet fish hot and delicious.
Once, feeling eyes upon her, she had looked up and seen Mr. Perry watching her through the mirror. But he had turned his gaze away quickly, and she had felt embarrassed. He is thinking about his wife, she had thought, how he wishes she were still alive. And she had felt ashamed then to be herself, to be who she was.
Now, though, she is happy to recognize the church. “See, there’s the window,” she says, pointing. “The round one. That’s how I know it. It’s quite unusual, apparently.”
Jeremy nods his head. “It’s a talent, isn’t it?” he says. “To draw like this.”
His tone is so serious that Vida finds suddenly that she feels sorry for him. He’s young, after all. She softens, taking in his clear skin and shiny hair. He’s too young to have any accomplishments of his own, perhaps, and being a gardener, while very fine work, well, it isn’t nearly as grand as being a builder of churches, is it? It occurs to her that perhaps he envies Mr. Perry, and she thinks she understands that, that envy of class. Poor boy. She relents; why had she been afraid of him? Wasn’t it silly? They were alike, both of them. Servants, in the end.
She feels a prick of disloyalty then but goes on, wanting him to feel better. “Well, we all have our talents,” she says stoutly. “You’ve got your talent in the garden,” she adds.
He laughs, and she feels puzzled by this—hurt, really.
“And what’s yours?” he asks, looking over at her. “What’s your talent, Vida?”
The question so startles her that she thinks for a minute she might have imagined it. But the words ring there in the air between them, an echoing accusation.
How is it that I have no answer? she thinks wildly. How is it I have no answer to that question?
She has a talent for Manford, she wants to shout then. That’s not nothing. She has loved him.
She used to worry so, she thinks distractedly, over Manford’s not having any friends. She’d wanted him to go to school, but Mr. Perry had discouraged it. “What’s the point?” he’d asked, but not as if it were a discussion. “It’ll just be hard for him.”
He was wrong, she’d thought, but she hadn’t had any choice. He was the father, and she was nothing but the nanny.
Instead, when Manford was a little boy, she’d have other boys over, organize games for them, cricket and so on. But they grew up, those boys, and Manford didn’t. And that he couldn’t speak to them—they didn’t have the patience for him.
They had no imagination, she thinks now, staring over Jeremy’s shoulder toward the window. Perhaps, she thinks, you have to have imagination to love anybody.
“COME ON,” JEREMY repeats. “What’s yours?”
Vida turns away from him, his teasing tone. “I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I—I’m very dependable,” she finishes lamely.
He laughs.
Why is he always laughing? she thinks, unnerved. She realizes that the few times she’s been with him, he seems to laugh all the time, but it isn’t always a nice laugh, and sometimes she doesn’t see anything funny. And then a picture flashes into her mind of Mr. Lamb on his knees in the muddy street, of herself laughing as she reached down to help him stand, Mr. Lamb laughing, too, his hands held awkwardly away from his dirty trousers.
What had the first letter said? I crawl along the rays of the sun.
“I’m dependable,” Jeremy says then. “You’d never go unsatisfied with me.”
She looks up, his tone having alerted her, but not quickly enough. He swerves and comes from behind her, reaches around and places his hands over her breasts. “I can promise you that,” he says.
He squeezes, fitting in close behind her, his mouth on her ear, biting on the small lobe. “You’re nice, Vida,” he says. “You like me, don’t you?”
She feels her heart thrash out against his hand, but her body will not move.
“You’re all alone here, Vida. Aren’t you lonely? Come on, dear. We could have us some fun. Wouldn’t you like to have some fun?” His voice drops. “Wouldn’t you like that?” His hands find her nipples; he pinches them between his thumbs and forefingers. “Come on.” He rocks against her, and she starts in real terror when he lifts his bad hand from her breast and holds it up close before her face.
“I’m wounded,” he says. “Don’t you want to help me?”
He holds her tightly with his good arm, reaches down, and she sees her dress come up, his hand beneath the hem, the cracked leather of the glove against her thighs and belly. He bends her over, forcing her down. The skirt of her dress comes up before her face, his one hand holding it there over her mouth, the other pressing down across her shoulders where she might wear a yoke if she were a cow.
“I can’t see,” she cries wildly at last, freeing her arms, struggling at the cloth before her face. “I can’t see! Please!”
On her hands and knees she struggles to crawl away from him. “Get away from me,” she says. “Get away!”
For a moment he clings to her, a parasite against her back. And then he rolls off. He lies on his back, breathing hard, holding his injured hand on the wrist below the glove. “I’ve hurt my hand,” he says dully, like a child.
Vida closes her eyes and places her cheek carefully against a bell-shaped silver flower woven into the carpet, its stem knotted into a helix. She reaches, her eyes still closed, to adjust her skirt over her thighs, curls her knees to her chest. She licks her lips; her mouth feels so dry. Her breasts ache.
I am your servant, your knight.
When she opens her eyes and looks at him, after just a moment, he is still lying on his back, his hand held over his chest, his eyes shut. His hair is damp at his temples, his cheeks flushed. His mouth is open slightly. She watches him swallow, a delicate movement at his throat. Though she tries to veer away from the thought, she sees herself then, a middle-aged woman lying on the ground, her dress wrenched around her.
He is standing over her when she opens her eyes again. “Get up,” he says. “You don’t need to lie there. I didn’t hurt you.”
And she thinks when she hears his tone that it is exactly that of a frightened child, petulant and angry. It’s funny, she thinks, that when you’re with someone who doesn’t speak, you learn a different way of understanding people. You don’t even need to hear them to know exactly what they’re feeling. She has stood a pace away from Manford and closed her eyes and tried to listen with her heart, and her heart has heard something, she knows, something absolutely unmistakable, though it has no words. Once, she tried asking Dr. Faber about it, whether he believed there was something—oh, something electrical, perhaps—that passed between two people in place of words.
“I know what he wants,” she told Dr. Faber. “I can’t tell you how I do, but I do.”
And he laughed at her and rapped at Manford’s head with his knuckles and then looked back to Vida significantly. “Who can say?” he said. “Who can say what miracles the human heart is capable of?”
“I’M NOT HURT,” she says. She sits up and pushes her hands through her hair.
Jeremy turns away from her, walks over to the window, and picks up the drawings from the floor. He looks embarrassed. She assesses him, the cheap shoes on his feet, the pilled knees of his worn trousers. His profile, almost lordly from the nose up to the high brow, falls away at his mouth and chin, where some weakness, some failure of bearing, has made the lines selfish and small. He stares at the drawings in his hand as though nothing has happened, as though he has simply been considering them in a responsible fashion. For a moment she thinks she might laugh at him.
But the moment passes, and she lies back down again and stretches her arms over her head. Around her the carpet blooms with a hundred species of wildflowers, their vines and tendrils interlocked in an intricate pandemonium. She rubs the back of her hand lazily over the coarse nap of the weave.
“What are you doing?” he asks, annoyed.
“I’m looking,” she says, “at the sky.”
He gives a huff of surprise. “You’re crazy.”
She looks up at him seriously. “No,” she says. And though she wouldn’t say it aloud, she hears the letter again, that voice: You are the moon and the stars.
He snorts again and turns away.
When she says nothing, remaining silent like a felled statue on the meadow of carpet, he turns back to her. “Aren’t you going to get up?”
“I suppose so.” She stands at last and smooths her dress carefully. She does not look at him.
“Well, I’m sorry,” he says after a moment. “I thought you wanted a bit of fun.”
She turns her eyes on him then, and she knows her look holds only a suggestion of all she is feeling. “You have no idea what I want,” she says. “None at all.”
WHEN THE TELEPHONE rings a moment later, they both jump. Vida crosses the room to answer it after a delay in which she cannot, for a second, recall the meaning of the sound. Hardly anyone calls at Southend.
“Vida?” Mr. Perry’s voice sounds as if he were shouting from far off, the volume whisked away by the wind, diverted and cupped into the bowl of a mountain or driven down into the sea. “How’s everything?”
She glances at Jeremy, who stands frozen, the drawings in his hand. She touches her hand to her hair. “Everything’s quite all right,” she says after a moment.
Jeremy turns away and busies himself with the drawings. She can sense his relief.
“Manford’s had a touch of a flu, but we’re both over it now,” she manages to say. “How are you coming on? In Florence, are you?”
“We’ve had some delays. Bad weather. They don’t like to work on the frescoes when it’s wet, and it’s been raining here for two weeks,” he says. “The fixative won’t set when it’s wet out. What’s Manford been up to?”
Vida hesitates. She hadn’t consulted Mr. Perry about the job at Niven’s, not out of deceitfulness or even a suspicion that he might not like the idea, but mostly because it had come to her so suddenly. One day she’d had the notion of it, and the next he was there working. Now, though, it occurs to her that Mr. Perry might in fact disapprove in some way, though he’s never had any complaint about her care of Manford. But it doesn’t seem right to be dishonest about it.
“Well, you’ll never guess,” she says now, a false tone creeping into her voice. She sees that Jeremy has moved over to Mr. Perry’s desk and is examining the pens and brushes. He lifts a pen and unscrews the cap, puts the nib delicately to his fingertip. Vida makes a sharp motion to him to put the pen down.
“I’ve got Manford a job!” she says brightly into the phone.
There is a pause at the other end. She isn’t sure whether it is Mr. Perry’s surprise or the delay of the long distance.
“A job?” His voice arrives in her ear at last.
“Yes, at Niven’s,” she says. “He’s working at Niven’s.” She thinks how to add to that information, but the truth of it, that he stuffs the doughnuts with jam, suddenly sounds pathetic to her. “He’s doing marvelously,” she says instead. “They all love him.”
“He’s there without you?”
Now there’s no mistaking it, she thinks—Mr. Perry’s tone of uncertainty.
“He’s done very well,” she says. She draws a breath. “I think it’s good for him. And to be away from me,” she adds, though she hadn’t meant that exactly.
“What do you mean?”
Now his voice sounds decidedly suspicious. Anger flares up in her.
“He’s not a baby, you know,” she says hotly. “He’s a grown man. He’s needed an occupation.” She is right about that; she knows she is. They couldn’t have gone on, playing as though he were just the idle scion of an aristocrat. This was Manford’s life, here in the village, even if his father behaved like a sort of distant lord. He needed to be able to step fully into it instead of remaining locked in his tower with her, the two of them roaming the perimeter of the garden like prisoners who do not know they are kept.
“Hold on.” Mr. Perry’s voice sounds rough, as if scratched over with a file.
She hears a crackling sound, the phone being shifted or some static interrupting the line. She takes a deep breath, stares down at her feet.
“I can’t hear you very well.” Mr. Perry’s voice comes through again, but crinkled somehow, like crushed paper. Another pause. “What did you say he was doing?”
Vida closes her eyes. “He’s filling the doughnuts.”
And she could see Mr. Perry then: He would be in a chair by a window, she thinks, overlooking the scattered surface of a canal, its quick water like a black fault line through the earth. The window would be open, his jacket tossed across a bed. Several streets away, a small chapel would be harnessed within the delicate framework of a scaffolding, the crumbling white walls billowing against a web of wood and rope. She has seen photographs of this chapel, its listing wall scored in the picture with Mr. Perry’s blue lines, the corrected angle. Mr. Perry had pointed to the damaged wall, explained how the frescoes inside had to be protected before they could tear off the side of the chapel and rebuild. “Just the sort of job I hate,” he’d said, tossing the photographs on the desk. “Too many things can go wrong.”
Still, she knew he had been pleased to have it, an excuse to leave again. His hair, which sprang back from his forehead, would be mussed now from the damp, she knows. She sees him place a hand before his eyes, the gesture he applies so often when talking to her of Manford, as if he could stand either to think of him or to see him, but not both at once. Both were too much, the awful truth of Manford’s circumstances, his bouncing gait and fat belly, colliding with Mr. Perry’s own horror. She has seen him kneel before the boy, take him in his arms once or twice. She was encouraged at those moments, hoping for some sustaining embrace between them. But Mr. Perry is afraid of his son, she thinks. Sickened by him. And because of her, he has been able to leave him. She thinks of Manford, the hopeful, concentrated way he lifts his hands to make his shadow play, the springing menagerie that tumbles like a row of circus acrobats across a wall, the intelligent agility of those creations. And she thinks, too, of the look of terror on his soft, surprised face when he saw the spider’s web on the bench. Mr. Perry has missed so much.
“Vida, I can’t hear you. Vida?”
“Yes. I’m here,” she says faintly. A surge of static fills the receiver. She hears one word, “Damn,” clearly.
“You mustn’t worry,” she says vaguely, though with feeling. And then, because she recognizes it suddenly herself, and because she thinks Mr. Perry will appreciate this at least, she adds, “Manford’s made a sort of friend, too. A patron. Someone looking out for him.”
She is not sure what Mr. Perry hears then, whether any of her words reach him or whether they drift apart like unraveling stitches, some warp disintegrating like that fading fresco. “It’s Mr. Lamb,” she says, surprised to hear herself say it. “They have stamps in common. And some other things.”
And she sees Mr. Lamb then, his funny way of imitating Manford’s walk, not in a mean way, she understands, but in delight at Manford’s perfect manner of having his body express what his heart must feel. She sees Mr. Lamb again in the kitchen, his hand on Manford’s head, the long spoon held in his other hand. “We’ve been getting to know one another,” he’d said.
“Are you there?” she asks into the silence. There is no reply. “You mustn’t worry,” she says again, kindly.
His voice breaks free then. She startles at it in her ear, suddenly clear and close. “Vida, I can’t hear you very well. Look, I’m delayed here. I’ll be another month. We’ll talk again. I’ll call again.” There is a pause. She thinks it best to say nothing.
“Vida?”
“All right,” she says finally.
“Give him my love.” Then she hears the receiver click off and the line go dead.
JEREMY IS STILL toying with the things on Mr. Perry’s desk. Vida replaces the phone carefully on its cradle. She crosses the room and picks up the stack of drawings for the garden. “Do you want these?” she says, holding them out in her hands.
He shrugs.
And she feels, as she stands there waiting for him to cross the room to her, that something has shifted between them; some balance of power has now inclined itself delicately toward her, like a boat’s cargo sliding slowly across a deck. Her heart beats quickly, aroused by her conversation with Mr. Perry and her sense that she needed to defend herself, defend this thing she had done, getting Manford a job. Mr. Perry might want to keep them shut up here, she thinks clearly, as if for the first time, but it is too late. They’re out in the world now, she and Manford. And though she does not know how it will end, though she cannot say what might happen next, nor that they won’t, in the end, be defeated, she feels as sure of her decision as she has ever felt about anything.
Jeremy takes the papers from her, shamefaced.
She waves him out of the room and follows him, shutting off the lights. She wants a wash, she thinks. She wants to wash every bit of him off her, and then she’ll go and fetch Manford, and—take him out to dinner. They’ll go to the pub and have fish-and-chips together. They’ve never done that.
They’ll have a new thing, every day from now on, she thinks. Something new, every single day.