HERE’S VIDA NOW, passing through the faint bars of afternoon sunlight striping the lane, come to meet Manford. High above her head, in a perfect proscenium arch, the boughs of the oak trees rise and fall on the wind. Pairs of clouds slide by, soundless against the blue sky. Vida’s long shadow trails behind her over the grass.
To Norris Lamb, the postmaster who has hidden himself behind a nearby horse chestnut tree, Vida’s passage takes a church-like eternity, and his ears fill with the deafening sound of his own racing pulse.
But at last she arrives. Not twenty-five feet from Norris’s position behind the tree, Vida Stephen takes her place quietly on the bench fitted into the alcove of boxwoods, folds her hands, and turns her chin slightly to face the vanishing point on the curve of the lane.
Manford, Vida’s poor charge, will be along now any moment.
IT IS A warm afternoon, the last day of July. It has rained each morning over the last week, but in the afternoons the weather has cleared. By five—customarily the hour when Vida leaves Southend House to walk down the lane to meet Manford—the light is low and devotional, finely particled as though you could sift it through your hands.
Vida and Norris wait there now, one upon her bench, her hands motionless in her lap, the other hidden behind his tree. Minutes tick past. Norris feels his diaphragm expand and fall with each breath, his heart steadying now after the first excitement of seeing Vida again. Then, as if at a signal from an unseen hand, the silent air around them ignites with the rise and fall of buzzing sound. Swarms of dragonflies—devil’s darning needles, Norris calls them—lift from the tall grass and veer down the lane. Vida raises her head at the purring their wings make.
