Lamb in Love Read Free Page A

that now, Norris thinks, walking through Hursley, opening up the post office, mounting the steps to the organ on Sundays, doing his wash or his gardening or his sweeping. He is more than any of that. No one has the slightest idea who he
really
is, what he’s capable of.
    He can often be heard singing as he goes about his work these days.
    He’s happy.
    For the first time in his life, he thinks, he isn’t harm’s foolish target, the idiot about to be turned tail over teacup, the one with egg on his face. He’s standing directly in harm’s way now, isn’t he? He’s brave as a soldier, fully prepared. He has everything to risk, and everything to gain.
    He is Norris Lamb in love. Lamb in love.
    B UT HOW REALLY does Norris understand Vida? For that matter, Manford Perry?
    Nowadays it’s no longer proper to call them idiots or fools, these souls with the strange air of the savant behind their otherwisechildlike expressions. Handicapped is how Norris has overheard Vida describe Manford.
    â€œHe is
neither,
” Norris once heard Vida say, “a spastic
nor
a vegetable. Those are two different things
entirely.
”
    At the time, Norris took no special notice of her remark, beyond the upsetting nature of its context. It was near Christmas, well over a decade ago, at the annual children’s party at the vicarage. The little children were playing pop goes the weasel, all of them arrayed in an uneven circle in the small wooden chairs carried over from the Sunday school into the parlor at the vicarage. The horsehair sofas, the ottomans, and the slipcovered chairs had been pushed back against the wall. The dark glass before the gloomy pictures—of rained-on moors and ruins and abbeys and so forth; what a sad lot of pictures the vicar surrounded himself with, Norris thought—held the reflection of the wavering spire of the Christmas tree. Yellow and red and blue bulbs threaded through the boughs glowed dully. The stiff faces of little wax dollies hanging from its branches, the spheres and spirals of the ornaments, the woolen mittens, the toy autos and lorries parked beneath—all this could be seen in the glass of those dreary pictures.
    The children had just finished trimming the tree. The vicar himself balanced atop the wobbly ladder affixing the angel, meanwhile adjuring the children to take their places for the game.
    Just over a quarter century before, this same room had been employed during air raids as a general shelter. Then, too, the furniture had been pushed back against the walls in precisely the same way, to make room for them all and provide a sort of buffer against explosion, Norris had thought, imagining feathers and horsehair drifting over their heads in the aftermath of impact. Norris himself had been refused by the British military service thanks to poor eyesight and a weak back, a rejection he’d takenvery hard. As a consequence, however, he had remained in Hursley for the war and thus remembered the black shades at the vicarage pulled down before the windows, the yellow lamp shade shrouded in a dark cardboard sheath, so that only a small saucer of honey-colored light fell on the tabletop. Kneeling there beside his trembling neighbors, Norris had made himself believe that the church would deflect a bomb by virtue of its very holiness, that his mother and grandmother and all their friends would be safe. And, in the end, his prayers were answered, for Hursley itself was completely untouched by the war, though it suffered heavy losses among sons and fathers overseas. Norris’s own father, Terry Lamb, was killed while on patrol in Winchester with the Dad’s Army, when he was struck by a grief-stricken woman on a bicycle bearing home to her children the news of their own father’s death in France. In his fall to the pavement, Terry Lamb suffered both a heart attack and a massive blow to the head, though either injury alone would have been enough to kill