Lamb in Love Read Free Page B

him.
    Though no one ever suggested it, something about his father’s death always felt ignominious to Norris. During the war years, no death, unless it was in direct service to the war effort itself, seemed quite justified. Ordinary passings on—by accident or by disease—even seemed vaguely embarrassing, a slacking off, as it were. Though there was a small service held for Terry Lamb at St. Alphage, and enough men were rounded up to carry the coffin, Norris would always remember the occasion as a family humiliation.
    A decade went by; much changed in the village. But on the occasion of Vida’s comment about Manford and spastics and vegetables, the common room of the vicarage looked very much as it had when the Germans had been bombing London and Norris had been bowed, cheek by jowl, beside his grandmother and a lotof other old pensioners, their anxiety perfuming the close air of the crowded room with a sour potage of fear and apology.
    On this particular afternoon, the afternoon of Vida’s remark, the vicarage had been stiflingly hot. The radiators hissed and steamed in a musical way. The vicar, perspiration running down his temples and into his clerical collar, had been anxious to move the festivities along. From his place near the Christmas tree, where he was cordoned off now by the circle of children, he held up his hand and raised his index finger, nodding vigorously at Norris. Taking the vicar’s cue, Norris bore down on the piano. It was horribly out of tune, as usual, Norris noted, with that same stubborn resistance to the pure tone, especially the sharps.
    As the music began, one little boy, young Davey Horsey, jumped up and began to race round the circle of children, stopping at last behind Manford’s chair to pat him on the head. At Davey’s touch, Manford looked up, his expression one of happy surprise, as though a star had perhaps just fallen and lighted on his head, twinkling there and pirouetting on one delicate point. But when he failed to jump up and give chase to Davey, the boy gave him another tap on the head—harder this time—and then again and again as Manford simply continued to sit there, his expression evolving to anxiety, young Davey walloping away stubbornly at Manford’s head.
    Manford had raised his arms protectively and cowered in his chair, his mouth wobbling with dismay, tears springing from his eyes. Lacey Horsey, Davey’s mother, had rushed forward and slapped her boy. Taking him roughly by the arm and putting her mouth close by his face, she said to him in a loud whisper, “Not the spastic vegetable, Davey! Can’t you see he doesn’t know how?”
    By then a good number of the other children were in tears,too. Davey’s assault and Lacey’s reprimand and Manford’s weeping had upset them all. Mothers hurried into the circle to comfort their children. And so Vida’s fiery rebuke to Lacey—about Manford being neither a spastic nor a vegetable, but only a little boy,
for God’s sake
—was lost perhaps to everyone but Lacey and Norris himself, his hands poised above the keys in midphrase.
    The mothers hushed their children and led them back to their seats to begin the game again. Vida turned away from Lacey, went to Manford in his chair, and wiped his face with the white cuff of her shirtsleeve. She knelt before him, looked into his face, and said his name quietly. When he raised his gaze, she reached out and touched his cheek. “Mind me now, Manford,” she said. “It’s easy as anything. When someone taps you on the head, you must stand up and run right after them fast as you can. Run, Manford. That’s all you have to do.” And then she gave him a brilliant smile and a hug and stood up.
    Norris had been watching her. She walked briskly back to the edge of the room, where she turned to stare out the window into the darkness of the cemetery beyond the vicar’s famous Christmas