Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown

consequence. The women in his life were in the habit of making resigned and repeated reference to what little time remained left to them. “When I’m gone,” they would say, and Norris heard the disguised petulance, even anger, in their voices. “Why, then you’ll be able to get on with things, Norrie. Won’t be long now.”
    He feels, in some way, that they were making excuses for him, excuses that neatly served their own purposes. How could he find a wife, produce progeny, how could he carry on, when those closest to him were marking their own time in such minute and interminable quantities? He excused his grandmother’s morbidity as the lingering sorrow over her husband’s and then her son’sdeath. His mother’s grief he saw as a result of the peculiarity of her wartime duties, a few years condensed into a lifetime of delivering death notices. As a consequence he too came to believe that furnishing his own life with the normal attributes of hope—such as a family—was, in some ways, entirely pointless.
    And yet he has been restless, given to fantasies that seem to have no toehold in reality, faceless women or the women of his stamps stepping forth and disrobing for him, a sultan weighing his wives for an evening’s diversion. His fantasies have been peopled by the women of history—Joan of Arc, Carry Nation, Eleanor Roosevelt—unlikely figures all, but women, nonetheless, who are familiar to him, their faces in his stamps like dear friends, tolerant and loyal.
    His restlessness, for never being assuaged by gratification, has been inclined to manifest itself as a state of unnatural torpor. He might spend an hour in his chair in his darkened sitting room, watching the last light of the day squeeze into a single purple column between his drapes, a book unopened at his fingertips. He appears nearly asleep, but his mind at those moments is in a state of anticipation so acute that he could swear, were you to rouse him suddenly by shaking his arm with your hand, that something was just about to happen, had just been about to happen. What? He could not say. Something.
    Also, he is a walker, a perambulator, banging out his back door through the damp pantry at odd hours of the evening, setting out over the fields with his stick. He walks in haste with his head forward, his eyes to the ground. Many in the village are familiar with his distant form, his coat flapping behind him, eclipsing a hillside or disappearing down a lane.
    He is a haunter of ruined places. He investigates ruined cottages, the sky visible in shards through disintegrating thatch, a bitof cutlery or pottery unearthed by Norris’s blackthorn stick, rubbed free of soil with his fingers, and pocketed. He has stood inside such places, erect and alert, listening, the sound of raining seed drifting from the roof, his tread soundless on the damp earth, the infinitesimal progress of earwigs resuming their interrupted path at his feet.
    He has lain down in the wood, his eyes open. And when he leaves, there is a declivity in the tall weeds, as though an animal had curled there, matting the grass into the shape of its body.
    He has found the bomb shelter deep in the wood beyond Southend House, in a clearing devoid of trees, a place so strange and frightening that village children (who also know of its whereabouts) avoid it. Or else terrify themselves by threatening to tie one unfortunate member of their unruly band to a nearby stump and leave him there. Norris has stood atop the shelter’s heavy earthen roof and imagined a gunner crouched below, a man who does not know the war is over, the world changed, less reckless now. A soldier, he thinks, who has been living off the stores of tins, oiling his rifle, muttering in the dark, growing pale, the color of moonlight or mushrooms.
    Norris stamps his foot on the sod, listens.
    He has come across the occasional misdeed—a poacher on the prowl, who, waiting