Lamb in Love (22 page)

Now think, Vida, she'd admonished herself. Think carefully. Calm yourself. For it
must
be Mr. Perry—no one else could have got into the house—and there's nothing to be frightened of there. She'd thought he was in Venice, but of course she really had no way of knowing exactly where he was, and perhaps he'd been called to Cairo suddenly? He could be anywhere. Or everywhere—and at that, the fear began ticking away again inside of her. He could be in Cairo, and Corfu, and on the bench in the lane . . .
and in her bedroom!

He must have come home, she thought wildly. He'd come home unannounced, while she'd been out. He'd done such things before.

But wouldn't Mr. Niven have said so?

She stood up and went down the hallway to his bedroom. After a hesitation, she knocked. There wasn't any answer, of course, and she wouldn't open the door; she knew he wasn't there. She stood in the hall, the robe in her arms, her heart beating very quickly, like a moth trapped inside the cup of her hand. She had
not wanted to turn around. But at last she had mastered herself and had gone back to her own room.

It couldn't be Mr. Perry, she'd thought. It must be Mr. Niven himself.

But how funny: she was
disappointed.

She had wanted something else, hadn't she?

It was sad, just imagining it. Poor, red-faced Mr. Niven, with his hair always smudged with flour and his silly old putter—could he have fallen in
love
with her? And written those letters? It wasn't what she might have imagined, not at
all.
And poor
Mrs.
Niven! She was really a very sweet person, even if she did monopolize the book circle, she and Mrs. Billy going on and on about homosexuality.

She folded up the robe inside some paper and stowed it away in a drawer. Her hands trembled, so she shut off the light and lay down. But she couldn't rid herself of the feeling that whoever had brought her the robe, whoever had written her the letters, whoever
loved
her—as menacing an emotion as that now seemed—whoever he was, was watching her, she thought, watching her at that very moment. She lay there, staring up at the ceiling. She thought she might never sleep again.

But she did sleep, for she was woken sometime later in the night by a crash coming from somewhere below her in the house. She recognized the sound: a chair toppling as Manford plowed mindlessly through the rooms, stepping through the furniture as though chairs and tables were nothing more than tall grasses bending before his weight.

She sat upright in bed. Pulling on a cardigan, she looked in the door to Manford's room. His bed was empty in a square of moonlight; the coverlet pooled on the floor. Fear blossomed up in
Vida's heart.

Though she had no medical evidence for it, she had read somewhere—in a magazine, she thought it was—that it was very dangerous to wake a sleepwalker; the article had been somewhat unclear, suggesting profound mental alteration, even coma, as a consequence. And so her efforts to locate Manford during one of his spells were always prolonged in an agonizing way by her unwillingness to call for him, searching instead through the cold and dark house until she came upon him at last, often standing sentinel in the middle of a room or pressed up near the draperies by a window, nearly hidden by their long and dusty folds, his eyes staring strangely into the darkness.

Sometimes it was easy. He was so unaware of his own movements at such times that he could be found simply by the noise he made jostling through the rooms, knocking aside vases or clocks, catching tassels and the edges of carpets. But sometimes his path seemed eerily stealthy. He wound silently then, like a cat, narrowly missing things, his hands riding the invisible waves of air beside him.

Once she had been tempted to mention this habit to Dr. Faber, but she was sure he would recommend a lock on Manford's door. She did not like to invite this suggestion, as she was terrified of fire. She could not bear the thought of Manford's being contained in an inferno, vainly wrestling with the door latch applied against this mysterious habit of sleepwalking. And so she had trained herself to sleep lightly over the years. More often than not, she woke to the sound of Manford's rising from bed in the next room and could steer him back even before he reached the door.

But this night, no longer in the habit of waking, perhaps—Manford had been sleeping peacefully now for quite a long
stretch—she did not wake until the noise of the toppling chair, or whatever it was, reached her. He must have been abroad now for some time, she thought in alarm, hurrying down the hall.

Though she raised a prayer against it, as she reached the landing, the old feeling of terror came over her. Oh, you've seen too many films, Vida Stephen, she thought, to comfort herself. But there it was, all the same, this unreasonable but certain fear, as if the house itself were animated by demons and stalkers, bad men with no business being there, its expressionless gargoyles and fading frescoes suddenly transformed into leering monsters. And the presence of the robe laid upon her bed, which she remembered now as she descended the stairs, seemed to confirm her sense that the house itself was not trustworthy, that she was not safe there. Mr. Perry thought Southend a lark; he called its strange carvings and paintings a bit of Italian import. But sometimes, at times like this, she thought they made the house seem possessed.

But it wasn't just the house, its endless rooms and hallways, its hidden staircases and warren of damp basement chambers, ganglions of iron hardware for storing smoked meats and draining fowl hanging from the beams. The worst was that she was afraid, could be made afraid, of Manford himself. It was as if the parts of him that were unknown to her, and even to him, perhaps, were not just absent—missing faculties, as she sometimes thought of them, like the dead air of so many unused rooms—but hidden away and subject to possession by evil forces. She did not know why she thought this. Manford had never exhibited even the faintest tendency in this direction. In fact, he was just a baby, lying down on the floor by the fire in the evenings and pushing a little lorry back and forth or dreamily stroking the threadbare mane of a stuffed lion.

Still, it was the mystery of him, the impossible idea of there
being nothing there. She was sure that, at some level, Manford had an appreciation of the ways of the world that he could not express but that remained trapped within him, a glittering hoard in the silt of his damaged mind, the crushed and lopsided cells of his brain. Sometimes she was so proud of him, his odd ability to render what he saw in the tendrils of icing he drew over Niven's cakes, the curious botanical likenesses he could fashion, or the play of his hands against the slanting light of late afternoon, shadow shapes leaping from his fingers. That he was sympathetic by nature, stroking her arm or touching her face gently with his fingertips—this only increased her admiration of him. The world could be full of meanness. In its midst, Manford was a sort of artist, she thought, a genius in his own way, too good for the world. A saint.

But at night, when he rose from his bed and wandered through the house, she was sometimes seized by this unreasonable terror of him. Coming upon him, she would think he seemed larger than she remembered, the muscles twitching beneath the soft skin of his arms. She would touch him tentatively then, as though he might lash out at her.

“Is he—frustrated—do you think?” she had asked Dr. Faber anxiously once when Manford was fourteen or fifteen and had suffered a spell of upsetting attention to his own body, his hands straying to the buttons of his trousers time and again, a pained look on his face.

Dr. Faber had shaken his head. “It's just adolescence, I would say,” he said. “Though, of course, it's hard to tell.”

“No, I mean—” Vida had paused, embarrassed, turning her head aside carefully as she helped Manford do himself up. She did think he needed his privacy, like anyone else, but it was awkward tending to him in front of other people. She stared at a black vein
in one of the cracked green tiles on the floor of Dr. Faber's examining room. Really, sometimes she simply had to look at him. You can't do buttons with your eyes closed, she thought, and Manford was most uncooperative.

She tried to think how to ask Dr. Faber what she meant. Though perturbed by it in public, she was not really worried about the business of Manford's manliness exactly, or rather his awakening interest in it. It seemed natural enough to her, though sometimes she was surprised at how he had grown up to be so big. If she had to tussle with him over something—putting aside his stamp albums at night or bringing him in from the garden—she found herself struck by how strong he had become. But she did worry, in a general way, that Manford was coming to understand his own limitations more and more. It seemed to her he was fretting about something. That he was embarrassed. When they rode the bus or went for a walk in the village, he had taken to hiding behind her shoulder and averting his face from people they knew when they spoke to him. Sometimes he even waved them off. And, of course, hiding behind her was useless, even when he was just thirteen or fourteen. He was already nearly a foot taller than she by then.

She had finished with Manford's shirt, knelt to help stuff his feet into his shoes.

“Does he,” she'd said slowly at last, “—do you think he knows how he is?”

Dr. Faber had patted her shoulder, turned to rinse his hands in the sink of his examining room. “Not any more than a dog knows he's a dog,” he'd replied. “Don't play with yourself now, Manford,” he'd added sternly, turning round and drying his hands on a rough bit of paper toweling. “It's not polite company.”

Though it was unlike Vida to question anybody, least of all Dr.
Faber, whose learning she admired, she had been unsatisfied at these remarks. No, more than unsatisfied. She had been angry. She'd never had a dog, but she felt sure that it was inappropriate to compare Manford to one.

S
HE HAD PAUSED
at the bottom of the stairs, listening. Though she knew the sound that had woken her had come from below, she couldn't help sweeping her eyes over the gallery that ran round three walls of the great hall, the closed doors there each with their carved lintels and brooding faces. She half expected a door to creak open as she glanced anxiously over them.

She stood lightly on her feet. Perhaps Manford had hurt himself, was lying in a pool of blood somewhere! Her heart wrenched at the thought, but she gathered herself together and walked resolutely across the hall. I shall just go room by room, she said to herself, and I shall certainly find him.

At the door to the drawing room, she paused again. White light from the uncurtained French doors fell in leaning parallelograms across the floor, pebbling the carpet like a stony beach. She had been to the seaside only once, to Brighton with her mother and father on a holiday. They had stayed in a little hotel with a damp kitchenette and sand in the pots. She still recalled the feel of the stones beneath her feet at the edge of the water, how they had shifted alarmingly under her tread. Now, stepping noiselessly across the carpet, she recalled the sensation of it. Manford was nowhere to be seen.

She passed through the whole house, arriving at last at Mr. Perry's library. The door, which she kept closed in Mr. Perry's absences, was ajar. Inside, one of his drawing tables had been overturned. There were three such tables, arranged corner to corner in the center of the room so that Mr. Perry could spin on his chair
and easily reach one or the other, shifting his focus from drawing to drawing, the perspectives differing one to the next. Vida had tried it once and it had made her dizzy, gazing now up or down or from some impossible perspective right
into
a particular building, as though she were hanging upside down from one foot. Now, though, the table nearest the door had fallen over. The roll of white tissue hinged cleverly to the back of it lay unfurled across the floor, a ghostly path.

Yet Manford was not there.

Now Vida's alarm spread beyond her control. She knew she would start to cry. It was too much, too much. She was so afraid of the house at night as it was, and now to come upon this scene—it was so disturbing, as if something dreadful had happened—and not find Manford anywhere. She tried to calm herself. I mustn't call for him, she thought, a near hysteria sweeping her. I mustn't frighten him.

And she saw what she had not seen before: the hidden door at the rear corner of the room, a door that led by a narrow passage into a small and ornate greenhouse erected on a high terrace, was open. This door, cleverly paneled so as to seem part of the wall itself, had not been opened for years.

Vida and Mr. Perry had inspected the greenhouse once, shortly after she had begun working at Southend House, when Mr. Perry was busy furnishing the estate to his own tastes. What they found there had shocked them both.

“I guess no one wanted these,” Mr. Perry had said after a moment, when the two of them had emerged blinking into the bright and arid space of the greenhouse and stopped up short at the sight that greeted them, the shelves of the high, curving étagères crowded with enormous Japanese porcelain pots, each sprouting a dead and brittle miniature tree, its twisted limbs and
writhing roots curling over the vases' rims. There were perhaps fifty of the little bonsai trees, a dead legion. The air in the greenhouse had felt to Vida like the air of a tomb, as if it had acquired a deathly weight of its own that supplanted the characteristic liveliness of light.

Mr. Perry had stepped toward the shelves, reached out to touch one of the little trees. A tiny branch broke away in his hand. He regarded it a moment before dropping it to the floor. Then he looked around and sighed impatiently.

“You need a particular sort of mind for this, don't you?” he asked.

Vida, unsure of her place with Mr. Perry then and feeling herself unsophisticated beside him, had said nothing. But she had felt moved to sadness by the forest of dead trees, each bound in its beautiful urn. “They're very old, aren't they?” she'd said at last. “Hundreds of years perhaps?”