“I didn’t know you at all,” he says.
“You knew me,” says Harry. He grins at James. “You just weren’t an expert on me.”
The guards at the front of the line are almost out of sight. James lowers the rucksack from his shoulders, takes out the remainder of his meat roll, and passes it to his friend.
“Think of me sometimes,” he says. “And please, Harry, don’t get yourself shot.”
The front guards disappear around the bend.
Harry tucks the meat roll inside his shirt. “Bless you, James,” he says, and he leans over and kisses him on the cheek. Then he steps down into the trees bordering the road, and he’s gone.
Ash
ROSE FLICKS ON THE READING LAMP BY HER CHAIR and turns over her husband’s unopened letter in her lap.
Every week or two, she receives a letter from the camp where he is being held prisoner. Mostly he talks about the birds he is spotting around the area, or he asks her to look something up for him. He never mentions what is happening in the camp, or describes his surroundings, or even mentions the bloody weather. Each letter is simply a catalogue of bird behaviour, most of it so subtle and particular that Rose can’t bring herself to care at all.
The dog raises her head, grunts, and flops back down on her blanket by the fire. Rose slides out of her armchair and onto the floor, putting her head on the dog’s side, listening to Harris’s heartbeat, loping fast and strong under her vaulted rib cage. The dog smells like wet socks and rotten fish. She must have rolled in something earlier that day.
The small cottage parlour looks cosy in the glow from the reading lamp. There are curtains at the window, a thick rug on the floor, chairs, a bookcase by the doorway with books and photographs on it. It is a modest home for a young married couple with prospects. They have rented this cottage from a friend of Rose’s father who has charged them very little; the plan was to stay here until they started having children, and then they would need to look for something a little bigger.
The cottage is right on the lip of the Ashdown Forest and was once lived in by a shepherd. Until Rose and James moved in, peat—cut from a low boggy place on the forest and dried through the summer—was burned in the fireplace. The parlour still smells smoky and rich from the peat, the odour of it soaked right into the walls of the cottage.
At the back of the house is a large kitchen with a cooker and table, and a door that leads to the rear garden, much of which is taken up now with the chicken coop and Rose’s Victory Garden. Upstairs there are two bedrooms tucked under the eaves and a water closet and bath, each in a separate tiny room, both of which must have been, in the shepherd’s day, box cupboards.
Rose grew up near the Ashdown Forest, and although she went to London to work in an office for a year, she was happy to return to her childhood landscape as a young married woman. She had found the grit and busyness of London unsettling. The quickness of life there always made her feel out of step, and her memories of that time all involve hurrying or being late.
Rose and James met in London. He was living there while doing his teacher training, and they had both joined a club called the Coffeepot to try to extend their meagre social lives. What Rose liked about James from the moment she met him was his quiet steadiness. In the midst of all the rush and bother of her London life, he felt like a place where she could shelter. For their first date they took a packed lunch to Hampstead Heath and looked for birds. Rose can’t remember the birds they saw that day, but she does remember that they ate hard-boiled eggs and tomato sandwiches, and that the flask of tea they’d brought along was cold by the time they got around to drinking it.
The war has, of course, altered their plans for married life. Now Rose is here in the cottage by herself. She has chickens and a Victory Garden, her war job, Harris. She got the dog from a farmer near Duddleswell, on the other side of the forest. Since she was alone and fairly isolated in the cottage, it felt sensible to her to get a dog for companionship and protection. And Harris has not been a disappointment. No, the dog is not a disappointment.
Rose buries her face in Harris’s neck, not caring that this is where the dead animal smell is the strongest.
AT TEN o’clock, Rose sets off on her appointed rounds. Later than usual, but not feeling very apologetic about it, she marches down the lane towards the road, Harris trotting optimistically behind her. In her rush to get out the door, Rose has forgotten her helmet and armband.
The edge of the forest is black, like a dark sea, but Rose knows the landscape so well that she never needs a torch to make her way down the lane from Sycamore Cottage.
The Bennetts have their blackout in place. So too does the house next to theirs, and the house next to that.
She knocks on the door of number forty-seven.
“There’s some light showing on the second floor,” she says when Mrs. Turner answers the knock. “Bedroom on the right. The curtains aren’t quite pulled together.”
“Thank you, Rose. I’ll see to it. Goodnight now.”
“Goodnight.”
Rose continues down the road, knocking on two more doors to warn the occupants that their blackout precautions are inadequate.
When she gets to Mrs. Stuart’s house it is as though she’s standing in front of a bonfire. All the lights are blazing in the sitting room and bedrooms. None of the curtains are drawn.
“Again,” she says to Harris, unlatching the gate and walking up the path to the front door.
Harris waits in the road, sniffing at the patch of ground where the rubbish bins usually stand.
Mrs. Stuart is close to sixty. She lost her husband in the first war and has been living alone since then. Her children never visit. Rose knows this because every night she has knocked on Mrs. Stuart’s door to tell her to mind the blackout restrictions, and every night Mrs. Stuart has asked her to come in and help her with something, blaming her non-visiting children for the fact that she can’t lift the coal scuttle or fix the door of the pantry. Most nights Rose has been obliging, has gone in, but tonight, she tells herself as she marches up the mossy stone path, she will not. It is late enough that surely Mrs. Stuart is thinking about retiring for the night.
Mrs. Stuart answers the door on the first knock, as though she was waiting right behind it, spying on Rose through the little window above the letterbox. She is wearing a red dressing gown. Her white hair is down and brushed to her shoulders.
“Rose, dear,” she says, opening the door wider, “could you come in and help me with the pilot light in the cooker? It’s gone out and I just can’t reach that far in with the match.”
“It’s late,” says Rose. “I really should be getting on. I still have half my sector to do.”
“Oh, it won’t take any time at all,” says Mrs. Stuart. “How will I make do without the oven?”
“And I have the dog with me.”
“I love the dog!” Mrs. Stuart claps her hands and shouts, quite loudly, into the front garden. “Harris! Harris! Come here, girl.”
Harris bounds cheerfully up the path.
“Traitor,” murmurs Rose under her breath as Harris shoots by, rushing down the carpeted hallway towards the kitchen. Mrs. Stuart often leaves a plate of scraps on the floor by the back door for her.
The kitchen is warm and stuffy, as though the windows haven’t been opened in years. Rose kneels on the floor, her head angled into the oven. The interior smells burnt. The pilot light catches on the third match. When she pulls her head back out of the cooker, Mrs. Stuart hands her a cup and saucer.
“I thought you’d appreciate a nice cup of tea after your hard work, dear,” she says.
“I really have to go, Mrs. Stuart.”
Rose perches on the hard edge of a flowered wing chair in the sitting room, the cup and saucer balanced on her lap so she won’t forget to drink the tea, and to drink it quickly.
The surfaces of the room are cluttered with memorabilia of the former Mr. Stuart—his medals, set in blue velvet and hung
in a frame over the mantelpiece; numerous photographs of him in his officer’s battledress. Rose has been given the tour of these artifacts so often that she knows their history as well as Mrs. Stuart does. But the one item she returns to voluntarily is the photograph of the Stuarts on their wedding day. In the photograph they are emerging from the arch of the church door into sunlight. Mrs. Stuart wears a white satin dress with a veil and a train; the veil is lifted back over her dark hair. Mr. Stuart is in his uniform. They walk through a corridor of swords raised by Mr. Stuart’s fellow soldiers.
Rose likes to look at this photograph because the expression on Mrs. Stuart’s face is one of such happiness that it always makes Rose happy to see it. But she can’t seem to match the expression in the photograph with Mrs. Stuart’s face now, although she tries every time she is at the house.
Harris saunters into the sitting room and comes over to Rose. She has gravy on her whiskers and her breath smells of rubbish.
“Mrs. Thomas, the one whose son was shot down over the Channel last month,” says Mrs. Stuart. “She’s had word this morning that he’s been captured.” She sips at her tea delicately, clearly intending to make her cup last for at least an hour. “Perhaps he’ll be taken to the same camp as James. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“I suppose so.” Rose drains her tea in one gulp and burns the back of her throat.
“How is James? Have you had a letter?”
Rose thinks of the unopened letter on the table by her armchair and immediately feels guilty. She stands up, walks over to the sitting-room window, and decisively draws the curtains.
“I really have to be going, Mrs. Stuart. I still have two streets to cover, and I want to finish before midnight. It doesn’t seem fair to wake people from their beds for the blackout.”
“No, no. Of course not.” Mrs. Stuart reluctantly puts her cup of tea aside. Before they’re out of the sitting room, Harris has walked over and lapped up the rest of it.
“You’re horrible,” says Rose when they’re outdoors. But she reaches down and rubs the top of the dog’s head anyway.
THE NEXT morning Rose wakes up to the barking of a dog. At first she’s confused because Harris lies sprawled across the end of her bed. But the barking continues, and when Harris, also waking to the sound, suddenly lifts her head and leaps off the eiderdown, Rose knows what’s happening.
Clementine is sitting by the front door when Rose opens it. She bounds into the cottage, and she and Harris start wrestling in the hallway until Rose pushes them outside. The dogs race around the garden for a few revolutions and then head up onto the forest, running at top speed over the golf course greens and into the bracken beyond.
When Rose bought Harris, the farmer decided to keep one of the puppies himself. When the dogs were very young, Rose would take Harris over the forest to play with her sister. Now that the dogs are well over a year, they do the visiting on their own. Sometimes Rose will wake up to find Clementine downstairs, and sometimes she will wake up to find Harris gone.
Rose gets dressed and makes a cup of tea. The dogs return for breakfast, panting and muddy, their coats stuck with burrs.
Rose takes a slab of horsemeat from the larder and slaps it onto two plates, putting one at one end of the kitchen and one at the other. If the dogs eat too close to each other, they fight over the food. They are best friends outdoors, but sometimes they scrap indoors.
It’s a damp and misty morning. Rose finishes her tea, makes some toast, and scrapes butter across it from the end of her week’s ration, adding a dollop of marmalade. Then she goes out to the hens to feed them and collect the eggs—eight this morning. She still hasn’t used the seven from yesterday, so she’ll package up a dozen and take them over to her parents today.
Rose stands at the back door eating another piece of toast and marmalade while the dogs sniff eagerly along the tracks of a rabbit. Rose hardly ever sits down for meals now. Her habits have grown slovenly in this new single life she has been forced to lead. She often sleeps on the floor with the dog in the sitting room. She eats standing at the open back door or bent over the sink. The abandonment of routine is a response to loneliness, she thinks. But it is also far less unpleasant than one would think to live in this new unstructured way.
Clementine is still inside when Rose is ready to set off on the journey across the forest to her parents’ house. The dogs are lying together by the empty fire, sleeping off their breakfast. Harris has her head nestled into Clementine’s neck. Two white dogs with the musculature of horses. English pointers. Almost identical.
“Walk,” says Rose, and they scramble to their feet and get to the door before she does.
Rose has lived within sight of the Ashdown Forest most of her life. She knows the sight and feel of it, the smell of it, so well that she could probably find her way across it in the dark. Once a hunting park for Henry VIII, it has always been used by the inhabitants of the village as a necessary and sustaining feature of their daily lives. The bracken is still cut for animal bedding for those cottages and small farms on the outskirts that have cows and sheep. The spring in the centre field was once used as the water source for the villagers. Before it was a golf course, people hunted its copses and woods, shot birds from the open stretches of grass. Although it’s called the Ashdown Forest, there are actually no ash trees on it. In fact, there are hardly any trees at all, because Henry VIII cut them all down to build his navy. But there never were any ash trees. The land was named after a Frenchman who used to own it. The English couldn’t pronounce his name, and the bastardized version became Ash.
Rose never gets tired of being out on the forest, of the smoky smell of the bracken and the mist sheathing the hollows. She likes the quiet of it, and how she can strike across it for a whole day and not meet a single person.
The dogs charge ahead of her. One of them has a stick and the other gives chase. They crash through the ferns and bushes with reckless exuberance. Rose sometimes feels she should have tighter control over them, but she also rather likes their joyful plunge through the morning.
The mist dissipates on the walk across the heath. The sun moves higher into the sky, and it slants across the bracken, warming Rose’s face and releasing the smell of the earth—a rich, loamy perfume that is pleasant to breathe in and suddenly makes Rose feel hungry.
ROSE DOESN’T knock at the front door of her parents’ house but instead scoots round the back. Her father is raking grass cuttings in the garden.
“Hello, Daddy.” Rose puts the basket down and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Harris romps across the grass, barking her greeting. She’s alone. Clementine left them at the top of the road, trotting happily home, no doubt to scrounge a second breakfast.
“Hello, darling. What a nice surprise.”
“I’ve brought you some eggs.”
“Lovely.”
The back door of the house opens and Rose’s mother, Constance, leans her head out and calls up the garden, “Rose, what are you doing? Come into the house at once.”
“Be right there,” Rose calls back. She turns to her father. “How are you, Daddy?”
Frederick sighs, then fumbles in his jacket pocket for a cigarette. “She’s been blowing a regular gale, my darling,” he says. He strikes a match, breathes the smoke deeply into his lungs. “I’ve been out here since daybreak. But it’s no shelter.”
“Rose!” calls Constance from the doorway.
“Nothing for it, then,” says Rose. She picks up her basket. “Are you coming?”
“I’ll stay and finish my smoke first, if you don’t mind,” her father says. “You know how she loathes the smell of it in the house.”
“I’ll leave Harris with you, then.”
“That would probably be best.”
Her mother holds the door open and ushers Rose inside. “Why don’t you come to the front door, like a normal person?”
“I have the dog with me.” Rose proffers the basket. “I brought you some eggs. The hens have been layi
ng well this week.”
Constance takes the basket. “Grubby little creatures. You don’t still have that one in the house with you, I hope.”
“Beatrice? No, she’s healed up now and is back outside.”
“You shouldn’t name them, Rose.”
They walk down the hallway towards the kitchen.
“Why not?”
Constance opens the larder and puts the egg basket inside.
“Because they’ll end up in a pot sooner or later,” she says, slamming the door shut. “And it’s harder to eat something that has a name.”
“But I’m not going to eat them.”
“Rose. You know nothing about war.” Constance takes the lid off the tea tin and puts the kettle on the hob. “You’ll stay for a cup of tea.”
It’s not a question, so Rose doesn’t bother to answer. She watches her mother prepare the tea—warming the pot before the water boils, measuring the length of time the tea brews. Constance still wears her nurse’s watch pinned to her blouse, even though she hasn’t been a nurse since the end of the first war. But that watch comes in startlingly handy on a regular basis in Constance’s daily life.
Frederick never returns to the house. Rose and her mother sit in the parlour to drink their tea. The carriage clock ticks loudly on the mantle. The china cups clatter on the saucers.
“James is well, then?” asks Constance.
“Yes. I had a letter this morning.” Rose doesn’t mention that she hasn’t opened it yet.
“I hope you’re working hard at keeping up his morale.”
“I suppose I am.”
“It’s your duty, Rose.” Constance sips at her tea. From outside, Rose can hear Harris barking. The dog is most likely protesting the fact that she’s not been allowed into the house.
“When William went to serve, I wrote him every day.”
William was Constance’s first husband. He died, impossibly young, in the first war, in his second month of fighting. Constance was a widow at nineteen. It was after that, after William’s death, that she became a nurse and met her second husband, Rose’s father, while she was working on the ward. He was her patient, a handsome young soldier with a bullet wound in his shoulder.
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