AS THEY LEAVE Niven’s courtyard and turn onto the pavement along the Romsey Road, Norris struggles with his feelings: He discovers he rather likes holding Manford’s hand, so large and substantial; through the slight pressure against his fingers he can feel the rhythm of Manford’s pace beside him, like the tugging rope of a buoy, something secure and friendly. But the intimacy of their attachment makes Norris uncomfortable, too, and though he is ashamed of his discomfort, he nonetheless looks about nervously to see whether anyone might be watching them.
After a few moments he dislodges Manford’s fingers from his own and waves his arms backward and forward in an enthusiastic manner, like a soldier. “Ah, the air does one good,” he says firmly, taking deep, military breaths and hoping to distract Manford from the gesture of separation. It seems to him that he has failed in some way, failed them both, but he simply cannot bring himself to walk down the Romsey Road holding hands with Manford Perry. “Come along,” he says as brightly as he can. He hopes he sounds, at least, as though he had some definite purpose in mind.
But as they draw near the post office, he feels even less sure of his errand.
Fergus is lounging against the doorjamb, tamping his pipe. He looks up as Norris and Manford approach, and his eyebrows rise in his face.
Norris stops. Manford waits beside him, looking at Fergus with interest and sniffing.
There is an awkward silence. Norris notices a bit of sparkling rubbish, a foil chocolate wrapper, lying in the gutter.
Fergus gestures to Manford with his pipe. “Got someone with you,” he says, as if Norris might not have noticed.
“Yes.” Norris puts his hands in his pockets. He cranes round Fergus and looks in the window of the post office as if he, too, were waiting for the shade to be rolled up, for himself to come to the door murmuring apologies and ushering them inside.
“Well? Aren’t you going to open up?”
“What?” Norris starts; it feels as though Fergus has pinched him somewhere!
“The post office,” Fergus says slowly, as if to an idiot, removing his pipe. “It’s your place, isn’t it?”
“I—I have some other business to attend to this morning,” Norris says finally, indicating Manford with a slight jerk of his head.
Fergus looks back and forth between the two of them, a doubtful expression on his face.
“Well, we’re off,” Norris says then, with as much resolve as he can summon, and moves around Fergus and down the pavement toward the Dolphin, Manford following behind him.
“Hallo!” Fergus calls after him. “I’m needing tobacco!”
Norris waves his hand behind his head in a vague gesture, as if to brush away a fly. “Yes, well,” he calls faintly. “I’ll be back.”
But in truth he cannot imagine how he will ever come back. He seems to be marching off not on some errand with Manford, some pleasant ramble, but on a journey whose destination is yet unknown to him. He feels now that he must marshal his faculties, bring himself under strict control. I’m responsible for him now, he thinks. It’s up to me to see that he doesn’t come to any harm.
It occurs to him that it would be so helpful, at moments like this, if Manford could speak.
A DOOR IN the stone wall before St. Alphage opens, and the vicar backs out. Norris has to come to a sudden stop to avoid ploughing into him.
“Ah! Lamb!” the vicar says, turning round, his eyes widening. “I’ve just rung you.” But he stops at the sight of Manford.
“We’re having a walk,” Norris says stonily, hoping to forestall any questions.
“A walk,” the vicar repeats, his eyebrows permanently arrested, it seems, in an upside-down victory symbol over his nose. “Lovely morning for it.” He stares at Norris and Manford a moment longer and then leans forward and reaches out his hand to Manford’s arm, placing his palm over Manford’s floury sleeve. “Good morning, Manford,” he says slowly and loudly, nodding and smiling.
“You don’t need to shout,” Norris says. “He hears you perfectly well.”
The vicar straightens up, embarrassed. “Yes, of course.” He glances back and forth between Norris and Manford. “Are you—in charge of him?”
“Yes, I am,” Norris says shortly, and folds his arms as if to suggest that he will not be answering any further questions.
“Well, that’s fine,” the vicar says with warmth. Norris thinks how the vicar can revert to enthusiasm at the drop of a hat, as though to be amiable were a sort of clerical duty. Usually he quite likes this about the Reverend Keble, his benign and sympathetic manner. Yet there is a certain air of the dead end about him, too; no matter what befalls you, the vicar always manages to convey a vast tolerance for life’s injustices, as if your own fury and frustration were of no consequence when weighed in the enormous context of the hereafter.
As if deciding that it would be too complicated to inquire any more about how Norris and Manford have come to be in each other’s company, the vicar smiles at Norris and resumes briskly. “My dear Lamb,” he says, blinking in the weak light of the sun and gazing about approvingly as though the common sights around them—trees, wall, road—have been arranged specifically for the purpose of looking pleasing. “I’ve been meaning to ask you whether you wouldn’t like to play for the talent show Saturday.”
He reaches into his basket, pulls out a slip of paper, and unfolds it laboriously. “Where are my glasses?” he mutters, searching his pockets. “Ah, here they are. Now, let me see. We’ve a splendid program this year. I thought you might fit in beautifully”—he points to the paper—“here, between the Hughes-Onslow sisters’ gymnastics and Mr. Niven’s “When Delia on the plain appears.” George Lyttelton, that is. Do you know him? Undervalued poet, and Mr. Niven does a spotless job with it. We’d an audition the other night, tea and sherry and whatnot. Ian was just leaving with his terrier—you know, the one that does the tricks? Races round in circles barking, plays dead, walks on his hind legs? You’ve seen him? No? Well, quite remarkable. Very clever little dog. And Mr. Niven stuck his head in the door and said he’d do a spot of poetry for us! Oh, dear, that’s a bit dull, I thought, but he’s quite the elocutionist, it turns out! In any case”—he runs his finger down the paper—“there’s no other music, other than Mrs. Ramsey, of course—”
Norris rolls his eyes.
“And I thought we could do with something from the organ.” The vicar wrinkles his brow, frowns at the page. “Or perhaps we could put you here, in between Sammy’s sword dance and my own poor offering—just a few birdcalls,” he adds modestly, glancing up and then hastily back to his paper as he takes in Norris’s impassive expression. “Well! No, perhaps it’s as I first thought; you’re better off toward the end of the program, after all, near the raffle. Several ladies will be doing squares of an afghan—I thought I’d have them under the west window, you know, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, but off to the side perhaps, and Mrs. Spooner’s very kindly said she’d sew it all together, she’s so very speedy.” He pauses. “And there’s the bells from the fourth form at Prince’s Mead,” he says faintly. “But that’s not the same as our splendid new organ.” He looks up hopefully.
“I’ll consider it,” Norris says.
“Right!” The vicar waves his arm in a salute as Norris takes Manford’s arm and hurries him away down the pavement. “Something uplifting, I thought?”
AS NORRIS AND Manford pass Spooner’s, Mrs. Spooner comes to the door, her hands deep in the pockets of her cardigan. She cranes her thin neck round the door frame to look up the road, which is temporarily empty of traffic, and stops at the sight of Norris and Manford passing on the opposite side of the street, Manford bouncing along happily. He gives her a delighted wave, as though signaling from an airplane. She raises her hand slowly in reply and then quickly ducks back inside. Norris glances behind him and sees Mr. Spooner join his wife at the door, their faces white like two balloons bobbing over their doorsill.
Well, he thinks, it can’t be helped, whatever people want to imagine. What do they imagine, though? he wonders. He himself doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t want Manford to feel uncomfortable, though; he glances at Manford’s face and is about to say something reassuring—though Manford seems perfectly contented, even happy—when he has to stop for Dr. Faber, who is backing his car down his drive in front of them. Dr. Faber drives a Morris Minor, a car far too small for him. He always looks so crowded in it.
Dr. Faber stops the car, rolls down his window, and looks out at them.
“Hallo, Lamb,” he says. He smiles up at Manford. “Good morning, Manford. What have you done with your better half?”
Norris glances surreptitiously at Manford and then leans down toward Dr. Faber. “They had a small—difficulty with him at Niven’s,” he says in a whisper. “I’m just helping matters out temporarily.”
Dr. Faber frowns. “What sort of difficulty?”
“Well—” Norris considers how to explain. He leans closer. “He did a spider’s web on a cake.”
Dr. Faber stares at him a moment and then throws his head back in surprise and laughs. “A spider’s web! I’ll bet they didn’t care for that,” Dr. Faber says.
“Well, no!”
“He has an odd talent, I’ll say that for him,” Dr. Faber concedes, resting an arm on the window of the car, looking fondly at Manford. “Hermione brought home one of the cakes he’d done the other day. Had weeds all over it! In raspberry jam! Absolutely delicious, though. Startlingly good likeness, too, I must say. Good idea of Vida’s, to get him that job.” He looks up at Norris. “What are you doing with him?”
But Norris feels that Dr. Faber does not understand the problem properly. It had been a very good spider’s web; anyone could see that, he thinks. But he wants Dr. Faber to appreciate that he, Norris, has stepped in to rescue Manford at this moment; that he’s saving him from disgrace. “Mrs. Blatchford was quite upset,” he says.
Dr. Faber laughs again. “Well, I’m sure she was,” he says. “But it’s a talent anyway, whether you do a spider’s web or a lot of little roses. Talent,” he says, “is whatever comes straight and true from the human heart. With Manford here, you see, it’s a direct route.” He knocks at his own temple with his knuckles. “Nothing to run interference,” he adds significantly.
Norris steps back a pace. Manford is watching a departing lorry, its kite string of black exhaust. “But don’t you think,” he says slowly, turning back to Dr. Faber, “don’t you think that, even with all that talent he has, it would be better if—it would be helpful to know what he thinks? In words, I mean?” He looks at Dr. Faber’s face, his mild blue eyes, his heavy jowls, his balding head flushed a healthy pink. “Dr. Faber, does Manford have a language? A word language? And”—he finds himself hastening toward the notion—“why shouldn’t he speak one day? Just out of the blue?”
Norris is humiliated to see Dr. Faber sigh and then turn his gaze to stare out the windshield of the car at the small garden fronting his house, the yews there clipped neatly into regular waves; I must have said something very stupid, Norris thinks, ashamed.
“They always want to know that,” Dr. Faber says, though to Norris it seems as if he weren’t speaking to anyone in particular. “It’s natural, I suppose.” He turns back to Norris. “Those aren’t easy questions,” he says. “And I haven’t got any good answers for you, I’m afraid. But I don’t know why he would speak—now, after all this time. There’s not much precedent for a mute recovering—or discovering—his voice all of a sudden.” And then he squints up at Norris. “You should ask Vida about that, anyway. She claims to know exactly what he’s thinking, no words needed at all. Isn’t that right, Manford?”
Manford looks up from his interested perusal of the street, meets Dr. Faber’s appraisal with a blank look.
Dr. Faber turns his eyes away from Manford and finds Norris’s face. “Vida listens with her heart,” he says, clamping his fist to his chest and thumping it once significantly. “We should all try it more often.”
NORRIS STANDS UPRIGHT as Dr. Faber puts the Morris Minor into gear and waves at him out the window. “Must be going,” Dr. Faber calls. “Off to hospital!” He says this last almost gaily, Norris thinks. How does a man who deals so regularly in life and death and the body’s terrible betrayals manage to be so unafraid, so blithe? It’s all what you’re used to, Norris thinks, putting his hands in his pockets. It’s whatever is your natural climate.
He stands there, quietly watching Manford, who is ambling slowly up and down the pavement, running his hands lightly through the hollyhocks that crowd the top of the wall. But the next moment, as if in answer to some question Norris has been unable to formulate, the double-decker rumbles into view toward its morning stop before the Dolphin; he sees, with a sudden, odd clarity, two glasses from the night before, tilting precariously atop the stone wall before it. And at this moment, it strikes Norris that perhaps what is called for, this afternoon, is a real outing, not just a ramble round the village or out into the fields. They should go into Winchester; they could have tea at the Wessex. Perhaps they’d bring Vida some chocolates.
But suddenly, though he has nearly started forward, Winchester seems too far away, too dangerously far.
The bus rumbles past them. Manford turns around from the hollyhocks to make shooing motions with his arm as it recedes down the road.
Norris stands morosely watching the bus depart, Manford at his side. What is he afraid of? That Manford will do something peculiar? Yes, that. You can never tell what he might do. Imagine if he wandered off, Norris thinks with a shudder, like the other night at Southend, and got himself lost in Winchester? But there’s something else, too, he knows. It’s as if leaving Hursley with Manford would break a contract with the world; Manford is safe, Norris senses, as long as he stays in the village. It’s even possible for Norris to imagine now a kind of benevolent fate that anticipates a person’s needs and then arranges circumstances to suit them. He believes the world understands that for someone like Manford, someone so innocent, so easily lost, there must be a place where his face is known at every door. Then, should he wander off—indeed, should it be his privilege to wander off—he would be recognized, welcomed, gently returned. In a vague way, Norris understands that this is true of him, too.
Through his stamps he has become an eager and gregarious armchair traveler, a man with a spyglass at the window, even a raconteur. But he wouldn’t ever really go anywhere, would he? It isn’t in him to leave. It’s the fact of the village behind him, its Norman stones and ancient mortar, its known quantities—this is what sets him free. For him, at least, just imagining the world is quite enough, as much as he can bear, in fact. His stamps alone show such a proliferation of objects and artifacts: animals and fishes, stars and oceans, seeds and grains and wedding cakes, flowers no bigger than a thimble and enormous monuments, flags and white-bearded monarchs, strangely shaped sailing vessels and the earliest biplanes, kites and tapestries, beautiful native women and tiny cubist paintings, autos and locomotives, cities and deserts and shrines, face after face after face after face, all of it—all of us, he thinks—crowding the planet like plants in a jungle, jostling for space, men and women on an endless series of embarkations.
He reaches out and takes Manford’s arm. “Let’s go,” he says, for he feels suddenly stifled; he needs air.
But he feels Manford stiffen slightly in resistance, sees that his face has taken on a look of thoughtful wariness. He stops, looks Manford full in the face; he has only one thing to offer, he knows now: his good intentions.
“I’ve got something I want to show you,” he says then, kindly. “I think you’ll like it. And we’ll pick flowers for Vida—a great bouquet.” He smiles. “Come on. It’s a secret. My secret. I’m letting you in on it. Let’s not waste another moment, or someone else will stop us.”
THEY TURN OFF the Romsey Road onto the lane that leads up toward his grandmother’s cottage. The sky has lifted and a breeze ushers the clouds up higher, disarranging the leaves of the trees that sway beside the lane and turning up their pale undersides. Manford glides along beside Norris, wobbling his outstretched hands with a delicate motion.
When they draw near the cottage, set back in its clearing beneath the canopy of towering copper beech trees, Norris stops at the gate. It doesn’t look as inviting as it had in the moonlight; neglect seems to have set in overnight, one stone wall listing dangerously out from beneath the thatch, the weeds formidable, as though threatening to engulf the tiny house. When he unlatches the gate, a pheasant blows out from among the brittle white stalks of silkweed, traverses the clearing at a dead run, and disappears into the woods.
“Squatter.” Norris pushes air from his cheeks, making a sound of defeat.
They walk down the path, Norris’s gloom growing as they approach the house. He feels uncomfortably hot, too. He pauses to rummage for his handkerchief and realizes in annoyance for the second time today that he has lost it to Mrs. Billy and her watering eye.
He pulls on the latch to the door of the cottage and swings the door wide. Inside, the kitchen is full of a shadowy calm. Norris kicks aside a cache of beechnuts, the prickly cases burst and tangled with filth and leaves. It all looks beyond repair, seamed with moss and mildew. Behind him, Manford claps his hands over his nose and mouth against the sour odor of damp; Norris looks over his shoulder and sees him.
“What was I thinking?” He turns back to face the room.
Manford comes and stands close to him a moment, twin bands of sunlight striped across his chest. He wipes his hands together gently, one on top of the other.
“It will never do,” Norris whispers, sitting down on one of the chairs by the table. “She would hate this.”
He looks up when he feels Manford approach him. Something about Manford’s posture makes Norris think he will be embraced, and he almost begins to adjust himself to receive this kindness, for he can tell, also, that it is kindness Manford intends. But it is much easier than that. For Manford only gazes down at him with a sympathy so full of understanding that Norris is shocked by its intelligence. And then Manford leans down and presses his cheek tenderly to Norris’s bowed head, the gesture of a mother to a son.
Under the dense, forgiving, sweet-smelling weight of Manford’s head resting against his own—for Manford still smells like a child, Norris realizes, not like a grown man at all—the force of Norris’s disappointment and humiliation seems at first to crowd his ribs like a vicious black balloon inflating beside his heart; all of it, all of it, his ineptitude, his temerity, his failure to be bold or brave or successful, threatens to extinguish what remains of his ability to be purposeful in this endeavor, to be hopeful; threatens to overtake him altogether. And yet, as they pause there—mysteriously, generously, a faint heat radiating from Manford’s cheek through the top of Norris’s head—the sensation disperses, and Norris feels it leave him as if the devil himself has just left by a window. He is, quite suddenly, as grateful as he has ever been in his whole life. He puts his arm up awkwardly and cups his palm around Manford’s broad, smooth neck.
After a moment, as if he is restless, Manford stands up and extends his hands before him into the whirling sunlight. Norris sees the light shatter and tremble as Manford juggles the invisible matter of air, the fool bewitching the sun. Manford moves through the room, through the light. At a small door a step off the floor, Manford stops, tries the latch, pulls the door open. A narrow flight of stairs curves up into the darkness.
“That’s the bedroom,” Norris tells him. He turns away. He hears the steps protest beneath Manford’s weight. Norris can hear Manford’s explorative tread above him. His eyes rest on an old calendar, its photograph pale and faded, on the wall by the window; on a green-checked cushion lying crookedly on the opposite chair; on a single spoon, its bowl blackened, on the floor by the Aga; on the aperture of the window crowded with green.
And then he hears it. The cry is sharp, full of anguish and fear, the pitch high and unnatural, like an animal’s.
Like a child’s, Norris thinks, springing up from his own chair.
A child crying.
NORRIS TAKES THE stairs at a run, crosses the room in two enormous paces, past the gray matter of the bees’ nest shattered on the floor, and reaches through the swarm to grab Manford by the arm and drag him back toward the stairs, swinging wildly. Some bees fly into his mouth; he rears back his head and spits, but not before he feels his tongue begin to swell; the pain is fierce. Manford’s face, when Norris pauses for one second on the stairs to look at it, is already so misshapen he cannot discern his expression. The bees have stung him all over his head. He must have put his hand right into the nest. Staring at Manford, Norris wonders for a moment if he’d imagined it, the sound. But no, he could not have imagined that. He’d heard it. Manford had made a sound.
As he drags Manford down the stairs, he thinks, Thank God it was a cool morning—they weren’t truly lively, or they’d have killed him.
Norris can feel the venom making his heart race, and under his grasp, Manford shakes terribly.
But he cried out, Norris thinks, running out the door. He cried out.
It was the pain that did it.
OUTSIDE ON THE grass, Norris pushes Manford down and tries to roll him, hoping to squash the bees inside his clothes. He feels his own eyelids blossom and swell, feels his lip surge up, stiff and hot. A shuddering pain runs through him. He looks around wildly. A few bees still fly angrily around them, stunned and slowing now in the brighter air. Norris drops to his knees beside Manford, tries to pull his hands from his face. He slaps at the bees at his neck and ears. Hives are funneling up out of his skin, bulbous and hot.
“My God.” Norris holds Manford’s hands away from his face, the contorted features. “But Manford,” he says, close by and breathing hard into his face, “you made a sound. You heard it? You made a sound.”
He waits for more, staring at Manford. He is certain that now there will be more, that Manford will open his mouth, and words, rusty and unfamiliar, will fall out.
But Manford says nothing, fights only to free his hands and replace them over his eyes. Norris reaches down and cradles Manford’s face, turning it this way and that in disappointment and grief and pity.
“You’ve been stung,” he says. “It’s bees. Never before? Never before been stung? It’s all right.” He takes in a long breath. “But you spoke, Manford. You spoke.”
He lets go his hands, and Manford, shaking and cringing, rolls over and draws his knees to his chest.
And then Norris remembers the water.
He drags Manford to the bend in the stream, helps him shuck off his shirt, struggling with the buttons. Manford stands bent over, wagging his head from side to side. Norris, too, hears a singing in his ears, knows it to be the venom. Norris strips off his own shirt as well and takes Manford by the hand. He can hardly speak; his words are thick and furred from the swelling of his mouth and lips. “The water will help,” he says. He squeezes Manford’s hand, and they step together into the quick current.
Norris won’t let go of Manford’s hand for fear he’ll lose him. He has to push his head down under the water, and Manford fights him then, rearing up, the water running down him as though down a mountain. Norris feels a stone pierce the soft part of his foot but keeps going, wading out deeper, for he can tell that it is better in the water, cold enough to halt the shock. It occurs to him that Manford does not know how to swim, for though at first he tried to free himself from Norris’s grasp, now he clings like a terrified child. Norris tries to soothe him, to show him how to cup his hands to run the water over his head. He reaches down, his chin level with the current, and scoops mud from the bottom of the stream, plastering it to his face against the swelling. Manford, trembling, allows him finally to touch him, to put the mud on him in dark, heavy poultices. When Norris steps back, he sees how ugly Manford is, his white shoulders dripping with epaulets of mud, his hat of mud, the dirty water running down his face.
Seeing him there like that, ugly and ridiculous, Norris realizes that though he had never thought it would be easy, trying to win Vida Stephen, he had never once imagined that it would be this hard. He could not have imagined this love, he thinks now, his heart pumping madly from the bee venom and the cold of the water and something else, too—a kind of happiness.
For the first time in his life, he thinks, he has something to lose. He’s sure of it.
ON THEIR WAY back to Norris’s house in the village, they encounter no one; even the Romsey Road is empty. Norris is grateful for this minor miracle.
Once safely in the house, Norris fetches them both clean shirts—though his own are ridiculously small on Manford—fixes them some brown bread and cheese, and makes a pot of tea.
Manford sits across from Norris at the little table, cramming bread into his mouth. It occurs to Norris that he has never had a guest before. He takes down a jar of Marmite, spreads some on his bread, and places a slab of cheese over the top. He offers Manford some Marmite, but Manford makes a face at the smell, wrinkling up his nose, and makes as if to push Norris’s hand away. Norris shrugs. “Suit yourself.” They sit there, eating meditatively, and when they finish, Norris clears their plates and takes his seat across from Manford again.
“Your face looks a little better.” He gestures across the table. “It’s only large still round your eyes.” He touches his own face gingerly, feels the swelling at his lip. He peers at Manford critically. “That was a hive you disturbed,” he says. “You shouldn’t ever put your hand to a hive.” He looks down at the table. “Though I don’t expect you’ll do that ever again.”
Manford looks vaguely around the kitchen, his hands winding quietly in his lap. There are crumbs on his face, and a bit of cheese.
Norris leans forward. “You made a sound back there, Manford, didn’t you?”
Manford looks away from Norris, squinting up at the low ceiling.
“I heard you!” Norris bangs his fist on the table.
Manford jumps, throws Norris a terrified look. Norris tries to regain his composure. Why am I so—so upset by this? he thinks. But he is. He is upset. He reaches forward, puts his hand on Manford’s arm. “You made a sound. That means you can. You can if you want to,” he says. He looks at the clock on the wall, its arms fine as hairs, and turns back to look at Manford again. “Don’t you see how pleased Vida would be?”
He realizes then that even more than he wants Manford to speak, he wants to return him to Vida with this miracle made manifest. He wants Manford to tell Vida everything he has felt over their lifetime together. He wants Vida to have that gift. And he wants Vida to believe that he, Norris Lamb, has made it possible.
He is instantly shamed by this realization. He puts his head in his hands. What have I become? he thinks. When he looks up again, Manford is gazing at him quietly.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it, to be a disappointment?” Norris says then quietly. “But you mustn’t think I mind. For either of us. We’ve done the very best we can.”
Manford stands then, restless again. Norris watches him wander the room, inspecting various objects—the clock on the wall, the split seam in the gray paper over the plaster, Norris’s stiff washing strung over a clotheshorse in the larder, the cup and saucer on the drainboard. Manford pauses at the door to the sitting room, casts a look back over his shoulder at Norris.
“Go on. Help yourself.” Norris nods to him.
There is silence for a minute or two; Norris almost forgets Manford is there with him. And then he hears a key struck on the organ, just a single note.
He pushes away his chair and goes to the doorway. Manford is standing in the dark room, facing the instrument. The lace curtains are drawn, their fine work blurred and soft. Norris often plays the organ in the dark, the way his grandmother did when she lost her sight. She told him it had taken her hardly any time to learn to play that way. “My hands have become my eyes,” she said, resting a dry palm against his cheek. “You’d be amazed at what I see, Norrie. You would.”
He moves beside Manford now. “This was my grandmother’s organ,” he says. “You know I play in church. She played far better than I do.”
Manford raises one hand exploratively over the keys but withdraws it after a moment. Norris leans over and plays a chord for him. Manford looks at Norris, surprised, smiling, his eyes delighted. He splays his fingers, holding them above the keys, tense and excited; he steps back and forth from one foot to the other.
Norris laughs. “There aren’t many as like to dance to the organ!” He watches Manford jump around in front of the instrument.
“Look. Here. I’ll play so’s you can see.” Norris crosses the room and pulls aside the curtains, letting a dull haze in through the glass. He returns to the organ and takes his seat before it, playing the opening measures of the Lyra Innocentium.
And when he raises his eyes, he sees a movement against the wall beside him, the fluttering accompaniment of Manford’s shadows flowing across the faded paper, a hawk or eagle flexing its wings against the old pattern of roses and yellowed trellis-work. The shape of the bird swells as if drawing in breath, lifts its wings, and shakes them.
Norris drops his hands from the keys, spins on his chair, and stares at Manford.
“Of course!” he says. “Your shadows! You could do them in church, at the talent show! That’s your talent, Manford.”
He claps his hands on his thighs, leaps up, and grasps Manford by the arm. “Could you do that?” Norris raises his own hands, sees their shadows leap up to the wall, long and furred. He turns and looks at Manford again.
“Let’s take you home,” he says. “Oh, let’s go home. You look dreadful still, but it’s all right.”
They let themselves out the back door, squinting against the late-afternoon sunlight. Little puddles shine in the road like tiny bits of mirror, reflective fragments; it must have rained, Norris realizes. Just a shower, while they were having tea. He hadn’t noticed.
Norris takes Manford’s hand, and this time he doesn’t think about who might be watching.
“Hurry, Manford,” he says. “We’ve got to tell Vida. This is a plan.”