VIDA SHUTS THE door behind Jeremy and stands there for a moment, her back against the wood. And then, as if she hasn’t a moment to lose, she runs up the stairs and into the bathroom, where she runs the water in the bath, violently turning the taps all the way so that the blue-tiled room fills with steam and an explosive cataract of water, the sound of obliteration. She lies in the water for half an hour, throbbing with heat, just her face breaking the surface, her hair billowing out around her in the tub. She lies there until the palms of her hands are wrinkled and her face is bright pink.
And then she remembers about Manford.
She had told Mrs. Blatchford she would stop in and check on him, and then she’d been taken hostage, as she now thinks of it, by Jeremy, and somehow the time has slipped away. She climbs out of the bath and wraps a towel round her and goes to sit, dripping, on the bed to dial the phone and ring Niven’s. It’s nearly four o’clock, she sees, glancing at the clock.
“But he’s not here,” Mrs. Blatchford says, picking up at last after ten rings, her tone surprised. “I should have thought they’d have been home long before now. They left hours ago.”
Vida feels a chill creep over her. “Who?” she asks. “Who’s they?”
“Why, Mr. Lamb!” Mrs. Blatchford pauses as though this should be sufficient explanation, but Vida detects something in her voice, something that makes her alarmed.
“Mrs. Blatchford,” she says now, standing up and gripping the telephone. “You must tell me: Has something happened? Why is Manford with Mr. Lamb?”
“Well, I should have thought—” Mrs. Blatchford begins, sounding offended. “Hang on.” Vida jumps as the phone is put down sharply on the counter. A moment later there is a deafening crash, the sound of a baking sheet hitting the tile floor. Vida stands by the side of the bed, frozen with fear. What could have happened to Manford? Surely Mr. Lamb would look after him? Surely he is seeing to him? Perhaps—perhaps he’s had to take him to Dr. Faber!
She has to sit down now; various angry-sounding noises from the bakery reach her distantly through the telephone. She puts her hand to her forehead. She never should have sent him on to Niven’s this morning after his fright over the spider’s web. She should have taken him to Dr. Faber’s right off, had him seen to; he might have suffered some sort of shock. Oh, she is a bad person, she thinks, an irresponsible person, she has no right—
And then suddenly, with an odd sort of relief—as if she had been standing in the middle of the road watching a car speed toward her and then woke to find it had all been a bad dream—it occurs to her that she is behaving very foolishly, has in fact been behaving foolishly all morning, maybe even for her whole life. Her silly worry over whether she might see Jeremy or not at the dairy—just like a schoolgirl! And then seeing him but acting as if she hadn’t any mind of her own, allowing him to be the spoiled, angry boy. And then letting him frighten her like that, and jump on her! Her, a grown woman, for God’s sake! She ought to be ashamed of herself. She stands up again, this time full of resolve.
Whoever he is, she thinks now suddenly and with a profound clarity, whoever he is, her secret lover—and suddenly the pleasure and pride of it comes over her as never before, like a mantle she has earned—this is not how he sees her, a sniveling, foolish woman, dallying with boys the likes of Jeremy. This is not how she wants to appear! She will be better than this.
“Mrs. Blatchford,” she shouts into the telephone. “Mrs. Blatchford!”
“I’m right here. You needn’t shout.” Mrs. Blatchford sounds breathless. “I had to take out the penny loaves.”
“Sorry.” Vida hitches her towel, trying to regain her composure. “But you must tell me, I—”
“Mr. Lamb came in and had a word with him, and if you must know, I’m all alone here today, Vida,” Mrs. Blatchford interrupts her, “and I was worried about him.” Her voice recedes for a moment, and Vida clutches the receiver as if to draw her back. Then her voice returns, close by again. “He was so quiet this morning. I thought it best just to have Mr. Lamb run him home. Perhaps he’s taken him off for tea? I shouldn’t worry if I were you. They left holding hands! I think Manford’s quite fond of him.”
Vida hitches her towel up again. Mr. Lamb? Holding hands with Manford? But, “He wasn’t ill?” is what she manages to say.
“Only a bit quiet. Quieter than usual, I mean,” Mrs. Blatchford says. “Don’t worry, Vida. He and Mr. Lamb left here together like the oldest of friends, I promise you. I’d no idea, frankly, they were such chums. I’m sure they’re just having a ramble together. I’ll ring you if I see them pass by.”
“Yes. Well, thank you,” Vida says. “Thank you, Mrs. Blatchford.”
She sets the phone down and realizes she’ll have to find the directory for Mr. Lamb’s telephone number. She doesn’t want to go downstairs in her towel to look for it, so she takes the robe—the robe left by her secret admirer Saturday night—and puts it on. It feels like dressing in water. As she goes downstairs, she catches sight of herself in the long, dark pier mirror, a mysterious and lovely figure, like someone who might have escaped from a painting.
She finds his telephone number and rings his house, feeling suddenly shy. But there isn’t any answer, nor at the post office, either. And then, despite herself, she begins to feel alarmed again. She thinks she will just call round to Dr. Faber’s, only to make sure that he doesn’t have Manford there with him, but then she remembers that it’s Tuesday, Dr. Faber’s day to be at hospital. So instead she runs back upstairs and pulls on some clothes and then runs back downstairs and fetches her umbrella, though it isn’t raining, and her first-aid kit, which she keeps in a green canvas satchel hanging over a hook by the door. And then she leaves the house, stepping out into a day that is nearly gone now, afternoon just beginning to cross over toward evening, the new moon low on the horizon across from the sun, and the sky littered with columns of dark birds massing for their evening roost. She thinks she is as prepared as she can be.
THEY ARE COMING round the corner of the lane where the trees meet high overhead like a cathedral arch, Mr. Lamb and Manford, the latter cradling a sloppy bouquet of cowslips in his arms, Mr. Lamb talking excitedly, gesticulating with his hands. When Vida comes in sight of them, she sees Manford recognize her and then start up at a run, barreling toward her through the sweet-smelling air of the lane. When he reaches her, he thrusts the fragrant flowers, dripping their milky liquid, into her shirtfront and embraces her, laying his head against her shoulder. She holds her bouquet with both hands and takes in the scent of him. He doesn’t smell like himself. He smells like—like vetiver, she realizes, startled. And he isn’t wearing his own shirt. She draws Manford from her shoulder to look at his face again and gasps. The flowers fall to her feet.
But Mr. Lamb, smiling broadly, stoops and retrieves them, and then—more surprises!—leans forward to take her hand and kiss it in a courtly, satisfied way, handing the bouquet back to her!
“Did you have a lovely day?” he asks sweetly.
“A lovely day?” She feels as if she has been spun around in circles. She has an odd memory, quick as a pinch, of holding on to the reins of a little pony at a carnival once, when she’d been only a child; it had run her in tight little circles before the Gypsy man had hurried out into the field to rescue her.
“Yes! Whilst we were off! We’ve had a most exciting time,” Mr. Lamb says, as though this were all very ordinary. “And you mustn’t worry about his face. It’ll be all right by morning. He had a run-in with some bees. The both of us did, I’m afraid.” He touches his mouth apologetically; she sees his lip is blistered and puffy. “We’ve put mud on it, though. That always does the trick. Really,” he says, patting her arm in the kindest way, “you mustn’t worry. He’s quite all right. And we have so much to tell you.”
Vida stares at him a moment longer and then returns her gaze to Manford; her face softens. She lifts her fingers to his cheek, and he winces a little, looking balefully at her. “Oh, it must have hurt dreadfully,” she says softly. “You’ve never had a bee sting before.”
“I thought so,” Mr. Lamb says authoritatively. “I thought he never had, or else he’d have never touched that hive.” He nods wisely. “I think that will be the last time for that.
“And now—” he says, and as she looks away from Manford and back to Mr. Lamb, she sees that with the arrival of her gaze upon him he has grown suddenly shy again. He touches his hat.
“We’ve had an idea,” he says. “I hope you’ll—well, I hope you’ll like it.”
THEY GO BACK to Southend House, and Vida fixes Manford a Ribena and puts on the telly for him, though he’ll have to wait for his beloved Dougal and The Magic Roundabout. And then she and Mr. Lamb, by mutual consent, have themselves a large gin—they both seem to need one, for separate reasons. They take their glasses out to the terrace and sit down at the little table in the shadow of the last of the Mercuries. A smile breaks out involuntarily over her face as she gazes at Mr. Lamb’s gray head bent over his glass, the hair damp and combed neatly over his scalp, his lip swollen.
“I’m sorry I worried you,” he says after a moment, replacing his glass on the table, but he fails to look precisely at her. He seems in fact to be squinting.
“Oh, no,” she says quickly. “It was all my fault, really, I—”
“I just thought I’d have him back by his usual time, and there wouldn’t be any—” He stops and blushes—a dark red the color of bricks—and looks away toward the garden.
Vida sits up straighter in her chair and stiffens; she feels herself growing alert. After a moment, without exactly intending to, she takes a deep drink of her gin. How does he know what time Manford usually arrives home?
“I saw you,” he says then suddenly, turning back to her, “with—what’s-his-name. The gardener.”
“Oh! Yes!” Her train of thought is interrupted, and she recognizes with dismay that now she is blushing fiercely. Though she is certain that this is conveying entirely the wrong message to Mr. Lamb, she cannot think how to correct the impression. “Yes,” she manages at last, feeling defeated already. “I met him at the dairy when I went round to fetch eggs. We were out. Of eggs,” she finishes flatly.
She steals a look at Mr. Lamb over the top of her glass. She cannot quite fathom his expression.
She moves her gaze away from him, up into the sky over his head. The moon has appeared in the twilight over the banks of yews. It hangs there, tiny and fragile.
She catches Mr. Lamb’s eye and he smiles at her, but it is rather a bitter smile, she thinks, and she feels deeply wounded by this. “I don’t,” she says desperately, “really like him. The gardener.”
Mr. Lamb says nothing at this, staring over her shoulder with a bored expression, as if watching an uninteresting program on the television.
She tries again. “He’s—aggressive,” she finishes. It isn’t what she means. What she means is that she is no judge of men.
But it brings Mr. Lamb round. He loses the slightly vindictive expression that has played around his mouth, and now he seems, if nothing else, resigned and quiet. He takes another long swallow from his drink. “Well,” he says. “Let’s not—” But it seems he cannot go on.
“You said you had an idea,” Vida prompts him now, for she is suddenly, unaccountably, afraid that he will leave.
He glances at her.
“Please,” she says encouragingly. “Do tell me.”
And so he does.
He tells her his idea, that Manford should do his shadows at the vicar’s talent show, and at first Vida thinks it’s preposterous. But as Mr. Lamb goes on, his voice gathering excitement, she starts to see how perfect it is, really. And then she begins to see it just as Mr. Lamb describes it, how he would station Manford up at the chancel with a light fixed behind him, and how he could do his shadows against the wall over the altar. Mr. Lamb says he will play for him, too, something to go with it—perhaps he could work out a transposition of Carnival of the Animals, he says. And then she begins to see exactly how it will be—how amazed they will be.
“He’ll be a smash. Just you wait. He’ll be a smash hit,” Mr. Lamb says.
“It’s perfect,” she says, and she means it. She really means it. She feels so grateful to Mr. Lamb that she could, she could—she almost begins to rise from her chair, lean forward, kiss his hand . . .
But he gets to his feet then, and she feels herself fall back.
He still wears a sad look. But he takes her hand a moment. “I won’t say good-bye to him,” he says, jerking his head toward the house, where Manford is still sitting; they can hear the sound of the television through the open window. “I’ll just let myself out—through the garden.”
She opens her mouth, She wants to say something.
One day you will know me, she thinks. And she hears the words as plainly as if Mercury himself had leaned down from his pedestal and put his stone-cold hand to her ear.
But Mr. Lamb is gone before she can say anything. He is descending the steps, his stick swinging ahead of him. He is fading away into the shadows. A deep blue light, sad as a prayer, has fallen over the garden. Vida comes to stand at the top of the steps. The garden appears to be filling with water, the quiet, violet hue of evening, and Vida thinks of the ocean, of Corfu, of her island of happiness, the idea that there might be something still waiting for her in the world. But all she can see, as she looks out over the garden, is a last sight of Mr. Lamb vanishing into the dark recumbent shadows of the oak grove. And before she can call him back, he is gone.
THE GARDEN IS especially beautiful at night. Vida stands in the door of the library near midnight, after Manford has gone to sleep, and pushes it wide open to smell the air. The thin, papery light of the moon plays over the row of Mercuries. She looks up at it and thinks about the astronaut Armstrong stepping into the deep sands of the moon. That night when she had watched it on the telly, she’d thought that the moon seemed so far away. She remembers, with a vague but by now almost unimportant embarrassment, wanting to be rid of her clothes that night, wanting to feel that distant, cold, magical presence on her skin.
But tonight the moon seems tiny, near at hand, a little pearl.
She steps out onto the terrace, wrapping her Oriental robe—his robe—around her.
It’s funny, she thinks, looking out into the garden, how the architects of Southend hadn’t wanted what she thought of as an English garden. Mr. Perry was right. They’d wanted to evoke something else, another world, with a formality more like Italy’s; as if it were better to be someone they weren’t, she thinks, and to have a garden that proved it! Below her the lawns lie solemn and quiet, laid out in straight lines and diagonals, so that no matter in which direction you walk, eventually you meet up with yourself again, steered back in the direction from which you’ve come, the lines crossing and interconnecting like the facets of a diamond. In the moonlight the breeze flickers through the trees and shrubs, igniting a silver light among the leaves. The dark, running shadows lie sharp as spear points across the grass. She thinks there can be no place on earth more beautiful than this place. How has it happened?
Once, she would have been frightened to be out here alone at this hour. This garden had felt to her like the end of the world, a place she and Manford alone inhabited, it seemed, a place where no one else would ever come. And yet now, she realizes, it doesn’t seem like the last place on earth, but more—oh, more the inside of her own head. Clean and quiet and dark; a map of herself, if she could draw such a thing, or one of Mr. Perry’s resurrected buildings, the walls and roof and even the air inside it straightened and restored and blown free of dust.
She can see a light in the window above the stable; Jeremy must be there. She has to laugh at that, the fact that he’s come to roost here now, after what he did. She imagines him setting up his things, his few things, whatever they are, in the stable apartment. Often, she thinks, there’s surprisingly little we bring with us when we arrive. She had thought he was established with someone else, over there at the dairy. But maybe they’ve had a parting of the ways, Jeremy and his friend, and she sees that he thought he might have a new arrangement for himself here, with her.
And then she really is amused and sits down on the top step, pulling the robe over her knees. She feels herself smiling from ear to ear.
She is so surprised, still, to have figured it out.
She feels herself smiling into the dark, into the shape of Mr. Lamb standing there, smiling back at her as if to say: Here I’ve been all along. Here I am. I’ve been waiting for you.
NORRIS SITS IN his kitchen. After a frantic search he’s found Laurence Minor’s letter to Vida in the pocket of his trousers. He spreads it out on the table before him, working it smooth with his fingers, over and over again, hour after hour, until it lies flat, though it continues to hold the creases. Laurence’s handwriting is faint, barely legible, the script swimming away in places where Norris’s fingers have smudged it.
He sits for a long while in his darkening kitchen, thinking. In the fields around him, a fox creeps from its den, runs swiftly through the wood. Fern fronds at the feet of the great trees wind their stems ever tighter against the cool of night, their soft coils curling inward on themselves.
Norris looks up and stares at the empty wall across from him. Hallo, Cupid, you Artful Dodger. And it seems to him only justice, after all, that he should be visited by the notion of his old friend Cupid now, the cherub sitting down at the table across from him, laying down his bow and quiver, his face full of disappointment.
Oh, come, Norris thinks, pushing himself away from the table, disgusted.
Is this not, he thinks, what he had imagined when he’d felt Cupid put a tiny hand to his heart, stopping him in his tracks? Surely Cupid himself had had this experience before—the arrow flying straight toward its mark and then veering off into the wood, landing instead against a tree or deep in the soft earth. Landing nowhere.
But no. Because he’d felt it, hadn’t he? Norris Lamb had felt Cupid’s arrow. He had been struck.
And now—has it all come to nothing? Has he been pierced by love’s tiny arrow, only to bleed forever? He’d wondered, even then, when it first began, whether it wasn’t too late already. And yet he was given hope somehow. Each time he felt himself failing, something would happen and he could go on.
But there’s nowhere to go now, he thinks. I’m done for here. It’s over.
He looks down at the letter on the table. He knows what it means: Vida has had an invitation to spend the rest of her life in easy retirement, on a beautiful island, in the company of her family. If he closes his eyes, he can picture her bag on the bed, her dresses folded, the delicate underthings and stockings wrapped in tissue. He can see her hat, placed on the bed by her coat, waiting. He can even see her on the boat; the Strintzis Lines ferry leaves Dubrovnik for Corfu. (He knows this, for he has a stamp of it; there was a handsome series of ferries issued several years back.) And there it is, a white prow breaking the water. He can see Vida at the rail now, her hat in her hand, the wind in her hair, her eyes alight with the wonder of it all. She belongs there, he thinks. It is just as he’s always imagined her, like a ship’s figurehead. She’d be a painting for all eternity, for every woman who has ever wanted to see the world. If they made it into a stamp, he thinks, it would circulate round the globe. Maiden Voyage, he’d call it.
And he is nothing but a criminal, a tamperer with the mails.
He could lie, of course, suggest some mishap, tell her he’s never seen a letter so badly damaged, that he’s quite horrified by its condition. He could suggest, imply, the terrible strain of carelessness that has crept into the mail service, the young people’s increasing ambivalence about quality service, about doing a job well. He could speak with passion of the battle, how the Old Guard of the postal ranks fight with every fiber of their bodies, how they attend with heroic vigilance to each letter, each flown soul of a letter.
Yet, he might say, so many mishaps may occur! Why, airplanes veer mysteriously into the Andes, to crash and be lost forever in the muffling white snows! A letter carrier pedaling barefoot down a dusty lane is stricken by a heart attack, his front tire wobbling madly, his spilled cargo lifted at last by an errant wind and scattered across the dry plain. A lorry traversing some serpentine pass disappears in a reckless shower of stone. A letter floats out to sea and is swallowed by a whale. Oh, so many things that may go wrong! How can we guard against each one!
But even if he doesn’t confess his crime—that he has opened and read her mail, that he has steamed open a letter in the back room of the post office—well, the result will be the same. She will leave Hursley.
And the terrible thing, he realizes, is that she’s earned it. She deserves it. He’s never felt anything as fiercely as he feels this, though his heart breaks to know it.
And what will become of Manford?
Norris frowns. What about Manford?
A FEW MINUTES later, Norris stands up, folds Laurence’s letter carefully, takes his cardigan from the hook in the hall, and puts the letter in his pocket, deep, so it won’t fall out. He gathers up his stick from the front door and lets himself out into the night. He stops for a moment at his gate, turns his head to look down the lane. The lights have come on in his neighbors’ houses, a blue light here and there where a telly is on, a yellow light over a kitchen sink, a white light blurring behind lace curtains in a bedroom. He doesn’t often walk through the village, especially not if he is going to Southend, when he senses a certain stealth is appropriate; but tonight he feels drawn to the pavements and front gardens, the everyday business of the world closing up for the night, his world closing up for the night. Hidden doves rustle in the trees overhead, their soft warbling calls emanating sweetly from among the dark leaves.
He passes slowly before the houses, thinking of Vida—“Come on, Mr. Lamb. Come along with us. Perhaps you’ll be invisible, too.” No one sees him now; only the eyes of an owl follow him, or a sly cat wending its way into an alley. He looks in a window, sees Mrs. Thompson-Harris asleep over her knitting, sees the Bates boys building something, a model airplane, at the kitchen table; sees Horace the milkman cleaning his shoes at his back step; sees Mr. Blevins stepping across his sitting room in his undershirt, a stack of newspapers in his arms.
AND ANY ONE of them, looking up, might have wondered about Mr. Lamb’s walking through the village at this hour. Some of them, in fact, attempting to collect their mail or post a letter or buy a box of stationery, had stood perplexed at the closed door and drawn shades of the post office earlier that afternoon, had wondered what had become of the postmaster, usually so dependable.
Fergus, foul-tempered without his tobacco, had kept his eye out from the forge, begged a pipeful from the odd man lingering there, peering in the window, cupping his hand to the glass.
“Gone out walking with Perry’s idiot,” Fergus had said, hurrying up whenever he had the opportunity, holding out his pouch for a pinch, as if this news were obligatory trade for tobacco.
“What? Manford Perry? What’s happened to Vida?” they’d asked, surprised, and Fergus had shrugged, uninterested now that he had his pipeful. That was all he had to offer.
Even Dr. Faber, stopping round at the end of the day for a box of chocolates for his grandson who was coming to spend the weekend, had paused at the dark post office and wondered about Norris. A little hinge of unease had opened in his thoughts, something unpleasant and unfamiliar, when he remembered seeing Norris and Manford together earlier that day. He liked Manford, as much as you could genuinely like someone so deficient, he’d thought. There was a sweetness to him, an unguarded nature that Dr. Faber, as a physician, found simple and relaxing to confront—no invented symptoms, no distracting terrors about mortality. He’d sworn under his breath, pacing in front of the dark window.
Someone should have given Vida more help, Dr. Faber thought fiercely, and felt suddenly and uncomfortably guilty. Really, she’d been surprisingly intelligent about Manford all these years, if a bit of a worrier. He wouldn’t have expected it from a girl in the village, such patience. Even, from time to time, inspiration. Like getting him that job at Niven’s. Now, who’d told her that would be such a good idea? He had learned a few things from her, he thought. On her visits to his office with Manford, and the few times he’d been round to Southend to answer some urgent call from her, he’d been impressed by her, by her thoughtfulness. She’s had a hard go of it, he decided, and a surprising anger gripped him for a moment. He thought of Manford, unable to lace his own shoes, Vida kneeling at his feet.
Good Lord, you don’t hand it round very evenly, do you? he thought.
He’d stared a moment longer through the dark window of the post office, vaguely reviewing the sight of Mr. Lamb and Manford from earlier in the day. They were a likely pair, in a way, he’d thought, surprised.
But he felt tired that evening, uncharacteristically weary. And so he’d set his hat then and turned for home.
There’s only so much, he’d thought, any one of us can do.
AND IN FACT no one does look up from his or her business that evening. Norris passes down the pavement, his head wagging from side to side as he looks in every window, curious, as if he has found himself in a foreign country. Aren’t the gardens pretty, he thinks, noting the pale strawberry of the foxgloves, the lantern yellow of the butterfly orchid. He counts the ghostly pickets until he reaches the corner and turns onto the Romsey Road.
A few patrons are standing outside the Dolphin, their caps pulled down low on their heads; they turn at the sight of him rounding the corner, watch him until he disappears into the darkness along the street. They down their glasses, think instinctively of their wives and children, resolve to have just one more and head for home. Perhaps their children will be asleep by then, the pubescent girls so startlingly mature suddenly, their breasts budding beneath their nightgowns, their profiles so exotic in the shadows, so like their mothers’, traces of forbidden lipstick, perhaps, still on their mouths, blue eye shadow still in a faint smear on their eyelids. How these men love to come upon their daughters like that at night, to touch them tenderly on the head, sweep the hair from their faces, gaze at them. And the little boys, their rooms strewn with toys, one baby arm—scarred at the elbow from scrapping in the street—flung free from the sheets, a soiled plaster dangling by a corner. How sweet they all are.
How quickly the time has passed.
AT THE BENCH in the lane, Norris nearly loses his courage. He could simply leave the letter there; he could go home then and fall into bed, into dreamless sleep. She could find it in the morning, and by then he’d be gone, he thinks wildly, on a packet bound for foreign shores from Southampton—it’s not so far to Southampton. He imagines, briefly, that he can escape everything he has set in motion.
She doesn’t love him. She never has. She never will. She won’t even have the opportunity.
And somehow, oddly, the coldness of this thought steadies him. He sits quietly on the bench, breathing deeply, thinking of all the times he has stood behind the horse chestnut tree here and spied on Vida. Happy memories, they seem to him now.
After a few minutes, he puts his hand to the arm of the bench, pushes himself painfully to his feet. He touches the letter in his pocket. He stands there a moment, waiting. Despite himself, he feels in his heart the old excitement of this errand, of creeping to the low lawns beneath Southend, gazing up at the house, searching for her form against a window. Did she have to be so beautiful? he thinks, a groan gathering within him. There was so much more I could have done. I never even told her how I feel. Such a simple thing.
A breath of wind eddies down the lane, setting up a dark music, castanets in the leaves. A twig cracks sharply, somewhere in the bracken. Then all is silent.
Norris leaves the bench, walks toward the house. One last time, he thinks. I’ll go the way I’ve always gone. Invisible.
VIDA RUBS HER bare foot against the cool, smooth slate of the terrace steps. She glances up at Manford’s darkened window behind her and her own beside it, one lamp left on at her dresser, another burning still in the kitchen, at the far end of the house. The randomness of the lights makes the house itself appear like a rocky island, two distant occupants alone, each on their promontory. For a moment, a chill of fear leaping up inside her, she thinks she sees smoke, swirling forms that step forth and gesture to one another, mute and meaningful, full of intention.
But she shakes her head. There they are, her silly old fears.
Everything’s all right, she tells herself.
There’s no fire in the house. Manford is safe.
She stands up, drawing her robe close around her throat. She looks down into the chiaroscuro of the garden below, the fountain, the gray ribbon of walls, the towering velvet yews and boxwoods, each black blade of grass, the white gravel of the paths, the ghostly entabulature of the grotto.
She sets a foot down upon the first step and then the next, her hand resting on the stone balustrade as though gently grazing the arm of a lover. She holds her head high, looking out over the garden. She sees the light in the stable wink once, twice, as though a form has passed before it; and then there is nothing, just a steady yellow glow as though the room has suddenly emptied, its occupant having quit the closely lit space for someplace darker, for the darkness of the garden.
HOW MANY PEOPLE move in the garden this night? It is hard to tell in the darkness, for the shadows don’t hold still for inspection, not so you can be certain, the angle of the moonlight and the presence of even a small wind altering the tableau as if it were the surface of a pool. And of course there are animals, too, a whiskered badger venturing out on purposeful claws, a pair of deer turning in alarm, the thousand silent burrowings of earthworms and snails in the soil, the freakish shape of an owl falling on its cloak into the dark wood. Across the lawn runs a tiny mouse—two; three; no, more. Or are those errant leaves turning and turning?
Jeremy’s work, the cleaned flower beds etched neatly and sharply at the edges with a spade. The work of a strong young man only temporarily inhibited by his injury, the hand nursed now tenderly in the other, more tenderly than is necessary perhaps, as he steps from the stable below the garden into the shadow of a sycamore, relieves himself there against the backdrop of the fountain’s white noise. A late woolly catkin, having clung on stubbornly past its time, flutters down now from the birch, turning in a gyre, pale yellow. And then a little phantom cloud of white night moths stirs from the wood near Jeremy. He watches them break free, disperse. He steps forward.
There is another footfall at the same moment, so the two cancel each other out, two sounds scored in the same instant. The blackthorn stick descends silently, a third leg making its inaudible step, the interval in the gait.
Does Norris Lamb need this stick for walking? No, but for resting against, for poking and prodding at the earth, a comforting metronome at his heel, a second party accompanying him everywhere. He has raised the stick in anger before, though. He knows it can do the necessary damage if applied properly. There’s nothing as stout as blackthorn, otherwise known as sloe, whose black, plumlike fruit flavors gin, the drink you take when you have lost your love, a child, a war.
But Norris is not a man who drinks.
He stands in the high arch between the yews, the poisonous berries glowing a deep red, almost black, among the spiny green. He is scored all over with the fine shadows of the leaves. Even if he moves now you will not trust your eyes. You cannot be certain what you have seen.
And who is the third? The last? The form so unmistakably, even unfashionably feminine, with its full hips and round calf, moving slowly, sedately down the gray steps in the moonlight, the breeze picking up the hem of her robe, fluttering it like white surf at her ankle. She thinks to try it, walking like Manford, her arms reaching as if above the cold spray of the waves, Manford’s invisible companions pacing beside her, her eyes closed and head flung back, trusting the current.
And Norris can imagine her maiden voyage begun, her trip already under way, Corfu beckoning. She steps away from earth on the milk white sea of moonlight, the pebbled beach of the garden.
And Norris sees that it is her great sympathy that has made him love her so. Her list-making and storing of provisions, her vigilance through so many nights over the boy’s common colds and more, over his whole lifetime of brave, failed endeavor, her exorcism of bats and spiders and other children’s cruelties, the thousand times she’s thrown a ball or held his hand or soaped his back or trimmed his hair, the way she adjusts the spoon in his hand, the flower in his lapel, his hat against the sun. The way she fits herself up against him at night and holds him, loves him.
Loves him. That’s it. That’s her reward, her privilege. She loves Manford.
And she understands that Manford has been a gift to her, the world rocking in one terrible instant, parting open along a crevasse and swallowing one human being, leaving a baby motherless, only to fill that woman’s place with another, a soul so unprepared that it has taken her twenty years to learn what she is made of. And that modesty has made her what she was always destined to become, the heroine of her own tale—the woman who will be at last, before it is too late, the great love of one man’s life and the salvation of her own.
NORRIS SEES HER pausing there against the flight of steps, her arms at rest upon the air, her face a tiny white moon.
He sees her. They both do, the two men lurking there at the perimeter of the garden.
But Norris sees Jeremy first.
This is his advantage, that by remaining hidden longer, by waiting, he can recover whatever distance he might have lost in pausing. He turns and runs awkwardly, skirting the edge of the yews, making for the steps of the grotto, where Jeremy now appears, his shoulders rising as he ascends the stair. Norris comes from the dark, something fantastic speeding along the running shadows of the ancient shrubs, a form aggrandized, towering, rising up out of its own darkness. He raises the stick. His eyes show a holy fury, but something else, too. Sadness.
“Down there,” Norris hisses, gesturing with the stick back toward the curving stair that leads away from the grotto. “Or I’ll give it to you.”
“Jesus!” Jeremy backs away, terrified.
Norris hushes him fiercely, prods with the stick.
Jeremy raises his hands in protest a moment and then glances at Vida, motionless and distant at the far end of the garden on the stairs. He had meant nothing. He hadn’t even seen her until the last moment!
Norris drives the stick toward him, breathing hard.
“You’re crazy!” Jeremy expulses it under his breath like a curse, an evil wind. But he backs away from Norris’s stick, down the steps. At the bottom he turns once. Norris stands at the parapet, leaning on it, trying to quiet his jagged breaths.
“This is a crazy house,” Jeremy says low. And then he laughs, as something occurs to him. “You won’t get any out of her, you old bugger.” And then he is gone.
VIDA HAS OPENED her eyes to see something move by the grotto, some bent form backing into the shadows. But there is nothing there now. She blinks, takes a breath.
She moves forward toward the grotto and the fountain, gliding down the path, her robe billowing.
For Manford, and for Norris, she is irreplaceable.
If she leaves them, they will mourn her as though she were dead.
She ascends the winding steps of the grotto, unaware of Norris’s presence where he crouches beneath her in the recess of the stairs, the relief of a giant shell framing his averted face. She steps to the fountain’s edge, presents her palms to the delicate spray from the fountain, feels the delicious chill of it run over her body. She had thought, once, that she wanted nothing between her and the world, that moon waiting overhead. But she knows now that she is already of this world, one miraculous invention rising up out of the sea and shot through with the perfect magic of being alive.
HE WAITS UNTIL she has gone, until she has run lightly down the steps of the grotto and across the lawn and up toward the house, behind the row of Mercuries, their feet raised as if to ascend into the heavens. He sees the door close behind her, a mirror shutting in a wall.
He steps soundlessly from the grotto then, reaches up and closes his hand around the thorny cane of a rose, snaps it off, and brings the beautiful flower close to his face.
He does not know what will happen now when he returns to the house. He does not know what will happen when he rings the bell at the door, presents her with the rose, gives her the letter from Laurence, and makes his confessions. He looks at his pocket watch, tilting the face under the moon to catch the light. It is almost one in the morning, he sees. But it can’t wait. He can’t wait anymore.