Lamb in Love by Carrie Brown Page A

it to his cheek, and then turned it over in his own and with his finger traced its lines and creases. He brought her hand up close to his face and sniffed.
    â€œWhat do you think, Manford?” she said, smiling down at him. “Shall we see the world one day after all?”
    She looked up and saw herself reflected in the window glass. Her face, from the small distance across the room, seemed tiny and insignificant—like the head on an old coin, she thought, someone long gone and unrecoverable, rubbed away beneath the thumb. She stared at herself a moment longer, the tiny, white, frightened triangle of her own face glowing in the window across the room.
    When Manford clambered to his feet and crossed the room to turn on the television, the image of her reflected face was swallowed instantly in a square of brilliant blue, a blue, she thought, as bright and miragelike as the waters of the Ionian Sea.

Three
    S OMETIMES N ORRIS FEELS as if he has been stopped up short by Cupid himself, stepping out from behind the corner of the pub and placing his small hand upon Norris’s chest.
    Steady now, Norris Anthony Lamb, Cupid says. I’m taking aim at your heart.
    My old heart? Norris asks. After all this time? I’ve not the slightest idea how to do this, how to fall in love. I’ve come too late to this.
    And the voice speaks to him again, saying, Norris, love is not ever wasted. Not even if it comes late in life. Especially if it comes late in life. Don’t knock yourself down, Norris Lamb. You’re as capable as the next man—more capable even, for waiting so long.
    But whose is that voice, really? His own!
    For after all, he has discovered he has a gift for it, a gift for being in love. He feels like a man who has at long last discovered his natural state. When he mounts the steps to the organ now on Sundays, when he takes his place before the pipes, he plays as never before.
    â€œMy dear
Norris,
” the vicar said to him after a recent service, stopping him on the walk, his balding head shining in the weak light. “That was truly—” Norris watched him appear to search for the word; actually, he’d probably found the music a trifle loud. “You were
inspired
this morning.” The vicar put his hand to his heart. “You quite moved me. I am
surprised
.”
    â€œVicar,” Norris said, “it’s all due to the instrument. I am just—aninstrument of the instrument.” How true, he thought, thinking of Vida, thinking of love.
    â€œAnd faith is
indeed
the most marvelous instrument,” the vicar replied, misunderstanding Norris completely but nevertheless pleased and moving away then with a nod toward the vicarage, where his lunch of salad and cream and potted shrimp awaited him.
    N ORRIS LIKES TO quote Honoré de Balzac on such matters, when he says that the new organ is “the grandest, the most daring, the most magnificent, of all instruments invented by human genius.”
    Norris believes that the organ procured for St. Alphage must be very nearly as perfect as anything can be. Norris quotes his “old friend Honoré” to anyone who’ll listen, and indeed some are sorry to be in the post office at all these days, for Norris Lamb has turned into a babbling brook.
    â€œAs Honoré says, ‘Surely it is in some sort a pedestal on which the soul poises for a flight forth into space, essaying on her course to draw picture after picture in an endless series’—oh, how does it go?” Norris has to consult his notebook here, the notebook in which he keeps memorable sayings. “Oh, yes, here it is—‘to paint human life, to cross the Infinite that separates heaven from earth.’”
    St. Alphage’s organ committee, upon approaching Mr. Perry on one of his infrequent visits home, had been admitted to a sitting room at Southend House to explain its business. It had been thought that his career as a