Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown

as her birthday. Vida’s parents, who’d run the small grocery in Hursley now managed by the Spooners, thought he’d felt guilty, abandoning them. He’d always been different, though, Vida remembered, wanting nothing more than to wander around the downs, painting pictures. One day he’d abruptly sold them his share in the grocery, and a week later he had left for Corfu, surprising them all. He was a bit mysterious about his life on Corfu, but he’d never asked for money, and his letters were always happy.
    He’d written almost weekly in the first years he was gone, describing Corfu and his days there, how he spent them painting landscapes or arrangements on tables; he always employed the Greek words for what he saw: the bottles of
kokkino,
the spiny mauve heads of
anginares
and tempting shapes of
kolokithia,
the salads of dandelion leaves. Sometimes he sent a painting by parcel post, a dense little landscape carved out with a palette knife on a block of wood with canvas stretched across it. Once he’d sent a lovely figure of a young man, nude, bent over the rocks by the sea. Vida’s mother had hung the paintings on the wall behind the counter at the grocery and would point them out to customers.
    â€œLaurence is coming along splendidly over there in Greece,” she’d say. “He’s sent us another canvas. Isn’t it grand?”
    To Vida, who imagined Laurence’s life in brilliant, cinematic detail, the presence of this relation in her life felt sometimes like its most important, most precious aspect.
    V IDA IS IN the habit of saying to Manford every little thing that comes into her head, though he can’t say a word in return. But she runs on, asking a question and answering it herself, amusing them both. She knows that people have a laugh at her, seeing her walking along with Manford, chattering away to him. The other day she saw deaf old Patrick Farley, sitting on the wall by the blacksmith’s, point her out to Fergus. Patrick always spoke much louder than was necessary. “There they are,” she heard him shout, ducking his head and spitting a caramel-colored wad into the street. “
Two
Daffy Ducks.”
    But Vida
likes
to talk, loves the whole
idea
of conversation—people pushing what she sees as a little boat of goodwill back and forth across a pond; she watches people in tearooms, at church, studying the way their mouths work, their expressions as they talk. So she talks to Manford, talks to the violent-tempered green budgerigar in his cage in the kitchen, talks to herself.
    One evening, Vida read aloud to Manford a bit of one of Laurence’s earliest aerogrammes, the paper fine as tissue between her fingers. Laurence’s script was massive and gorgeous, the ascendant strokes like mountain peaks.
    â€œThis week I have been painting the olive orchards,” she read to Manford, settling herself in her chair. “The trees are monumental, fifty feet tall some of them, and as old as five hundred years. The Greeks rig up white netting beneath them to catch the fruit when it falls and spare them the tedious job of picking. It looks like a shroud drifting among the trees, or a mist. It is very beautiful, and very green, here. Much like the countryside roundHampshire, in an odd way.”
    â€œOh, think of it, Manford,” Vida said, sinking back against the pillows of her chair, looking out the window into the darkening gardens at Southend House. Manford lay on the rug before her, pushing his toy lorries back and forth over the carpet, his head resting on his arm, his heels showing through the holes in his socks. “Old Uncle Laurence,” Vida went on, “sitting at the base of Mount Pantokrator, watching the schools of dolphins, painting the olive orchards. Wouldn’t you like to see that for yourself?”
    She reached over and touched Manford’s hair, smoothing it away from his forehead. He took her hand, pressed