Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown Page A

for censure and receiving none, shares a cigarette with him as they sit down on a stile, a rabbit limp and warm within the bag. Norris does not inquire about the man’s business, does not appear surprised to encounter another solitary traveler.
    â€œLovely evening,” he says.
    He has, standing in the lane with its high blackthorn walls, been surprised by someone’s husband, tying up his trousers, sprinting from the back door of someone’s wife’s kitchen. Or awoman in her blouse, rinsing her face in the trough at the door, soaping under her arms before she retires for the night, weeping all the while.
    He takes in all such sights without judgment, as if his own mind were too occupied with another, more pressing problem to consider the implications of what he sees. Nothing may shake loose the formula in his head, the arranging and rearranging patterns of it.
    So what can it be that awakens him so suddenly in his fifty-fifth year, that accosts him so roughly and yet with such unbearable sweetness, that travels a finger up his bony leg and touches the cleft and root of his manhood, awakening it at last?
    Vida.
    It is Vida.
    He doesn’t know how even to begin.

Six
    S O THEY KNEW after the trip to London that Manford would never be right. Arrested in his development, Mr. Perry said. Perhaps he would grow to have the mind of a five-year-old, but not likely more. Nor would he likely ever speak. He’d always be clumsy, childlike. Occasionally, they were told, he might exhibit some more mature talent, but it would be without significance—not indicative of anything. More like a stray bit of intelligence, random and unconnected, cropping up out of the fog of his mind. There would be nothing to attach itself to, though; no order.
    â€œLike a lily in a patch of weeds, Vida,” Dr. Faber said, trying to explain it to her. “A daylily. Lasts just a day, no more, and then it’s gone.”
    In the beginning she didn’t quite believe it. She thought they were wrong, for she could see that in some ways he was intelligent, lively in his mind, crawling round patiently after an ant on the terrace, letting it walk up on his finger. He was learning something there, down at eye level with the ground. She knew he was. And he was always so gentle with things, even when he was a baby. She imagined he would, slowly, over time, defy all their predictions, grow up into a man—maybe even a doctor himself, she thought wildly, like Dr. Faber.
    And he
has
grown up, in his way, she acknowledges, though not ever as she’d hoped, of course. She has to say that now.
    She used to read to him, page after page, Shakespeare and the Bible and Henry James and Chekhov, books she found in Mr. Perry’s library. And from the back, as he stands on the terracelooking out over the ruined gardens at Southend House, Manford looks grown enough, fully developed, broad shoulders and straight back. But when he turns, you see the belly slack like an old man’s, the wandering face, the untidy hair. And it gives you a start, Vida knows.
    Still, there are things that do excite him. Flowers, for example, the scented variety in particular. Any sweet scent, for that matter. She remembers buttoning his shirt collar one day when he was a boy. He caught at her hand, raised it to his face, breathed in deeply. She was wearing on her wrists the scent Mr. Perry had given her for Christmas—Joy. She wears it every day now, has for years. She likes the way it makes her feel, a bit sophisticated. She knows it costs a lot of money.
    Manford held her wrist the way a small child holds a bear to himself, hugging it. He dipped his nose to her hand, turned it over between his own, round and round as if he couldn’t fully catch the scent. She thought to put a dab of it on his own wrists and ran up to her room to fetch the bottle. But later she regretted it, as he kept his hands crossed up against his face all day, his eyes closed,