Free Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown Page A

take her compact from her purse, powder her nose, and ready herself, gazing up at the house. She considered herself a fortunate girl to have found work at Southend House. So many of her friends had left for London, for dull jobs as secretaries or clerks. But Vida loved the known confines of the village, and she was deeply attached to her mother. She enjoyed wandering the house with Manford, imagining herself lady of the manor. And her affection for Manford grew each day as the child, though he never uttered a sound, came to know her, welcome her, his eyes changing expression as she came into view before him, smiling and repeating his name—Manford Arthur Perry, Manford Arthur Perry—waiting for him to one day say the words back to her. From time to time she thought of Manford’s mother and how different it might have been if Mrs. Perry had lived, how different her own life would have been. She was ashamed, sometimes, to realize that there would have been no place for her in Manford’s world, or the world of Southend House, had Manford’s mother survived; the knowledge of her own good fortune comingat such a high cost to another made her feel fierce and hopeless, all at once. She felt indebted to a ghost and under constant surveillance.
    Once Manford’s condition was known, Mr. Perry appeared to have more and more opportunities to leave home, and Vida noticed that some necessary repairs to the house and grounds began to be postponed, that two of the three gardeners were let go, that the horse and pony were, quietly one weekend, sold and taken away. Mr. Perry traveled widely. Sometimes he intimated that he had work abroad. Sometimes, Vida suspected, he traveled simply for pleasure or to forget about his son. And Southend House began to unravel, as if ghostly hands were pulling loose one thread at a time.
    Standing at the window of her bedroom, Vida saw the lawns below ravaged by the tunneling paths of moles, saw the trees tangled with their own broken limbs. She wondered what it would take to bring Mr. Perry home again.
    I N THE BEGINNING it had been so lovely. She would take Manford out in his pram to the lawns and stroll him back and forth by the stone pool, the fountain’s music lulling him to sleep, the birds tossing water from their wings.
    How soon had they realized that something was not right with Manford? It was slow, a slow dawning. He didn’t speak, of course; even his crying was soundless, though there was no mistaking misery or pain from the look on his face. He’d wind his hands above his head, turning and turning them as if they were strange birds hovering above, twisting in a channel of air. But sweet, he was, Vida remembers—his heavy head falling to your shoulder, his eyes looking off into the distance, never a moment of nastiness, not in his whole life.
    Manford was diagnosed as retarded, a mute, and permanently handicapped with some generalized motor impairments as well. One morning at church, shortly after news of this diagnosis had had sufficient time to spread round the village, Vida found herself saying hotly, in response to the vicar’s wife’s innocent inquiry about their health, that Manford was
perfectly lovely,
thank you. In fact, she went on hysterically, he was a kind of saint-child, really. He’d never been disobedient or unpleasant even for a moment. There wasn’t another child in the whole village as sweet as Manford, in the whole of
England
probably.. . . She’d gone on and on and then burst into tears and had to be led away to the washroom in the vicarage to comb her hair and collect herself. The women exchanged looks of pity among themselves as the vicar’s wife walked Vida down the garden path, her hand on her back.
    â€œShe’s too attached, poor thing,” they said. “Too attached. And he’s not even her
own.
”
    V IDA REMEMBERS THE evening they first spoke of it, she and Mr. Perry. It had become her habit