Evening Chorus (9780544352971)

by Humphreys, Helen

  The dog shoots past Enid on the staircase, almost knocking her over on her way downstairs.

  “Don’t let Harris out,” Rose warns as they pull on rubber boots at the front door. “She’ll bolt in a storm. I made the mistake of letting her out once, and she was gone for three days.”

  Harris, who seems to have forgotten this memory and her fear of storms, pushes eagerly against their legs when they open the door, and Enid has to knee the dog back inside the hallway and then quickly slam the door to stop her from escaping.

  Outside, the wind swirls the tops of the trees and tangles Enid’s nightie around her legs. The weak lick of torchlight doesn’t reach as far as the gate. Beyond it, the night swells and rages, invisible and noisy.

  “I can’t see a damned thing,” says Enid.

  Rose swings the useless torch up towards the roof of the cottage, but the light won’t extend that far. “Shall we walk around the house?” she suggests. “You could go one direction, and I will go the other. Just to see if there’s a tree fallen on the roof.”

  Enid takes the left side of the building, starting at the sitting-room window and working her way slowly around to the kitchen door. She keeps one hand on the stone wall, not daring to lose contact with the building as she stumbles through the old flower beds and bits of rubble that border Sycamore Cottage.

  Often in London, if she was out after the blackout, Enid would have to negotiate her way through the streets in a similar fashion, trailing her fingers along the iron railings of the park or bumping along the low stone wall outside the terrace of flats on her road. There was always a mix of thrill and terror in this blind fumbling towards home, and when Enid meets Rose at the back of the cottage, she is suddenly flooded with relief.

  “Did you see anything?” asks Rose.

  “Nothing.”

  “Must have come down in the lane, then.” Rose puts a hand on Enid’s arm and can feel how cold her skin is. “Let’s go back in,” she says. “I’ll make some cocoa to warm us up.”

  ROSE WAKES up early. The sun has not yet risen. She lies in the darkness for a few moments, and then she reaches over and switches on her bedside lamp to see if the electricity is back on. The light haloes out into the room, falling most strongly on the photograph of her and James that stands beside the lamp on the night table.

  What Rose remembers of her wedding day is that there was a heat wave. Her bouquet wilted. Her dress stuck to her body.

  She looks closely at the photograph, sees how firmly she’s holding on to James’s arm, how open his face looks. Why can’t she remember that part? Why can’t she remember how it felt to stand at the front of the church and Repeat after me?

  Rose lays the photograph face down on the night table.

  Enid is up when Rose goes downstairs. She is wearing slippers, a wool skirt, and at least two cardigans. She looks a bit like a madwoman who’s escaped from the asylum.

  “The lights are back on,” says Rose. “I thought I might go out and see what the damage is.”

  She takes the dog with her. There’s still the smell of rain, even though the morning is dry. There’s another smell too. Rose stops and sniffs the air. Harris, who’s disconcerted that Rose is behaving like a dog, stops and sniffs the air as well. It’s the smell of green wood, and it belongs to a massive oak that’s fallen across the laneway and squashed the garden shed of Linden Cottage. The branches of the tree are cracked and broken, the roots exposed and dripping with earth.

  Rose puts her hand gently on the rough bark of the fallen tree, as though she were a nurse feeling the forehead of a sick patient.

  When she gets back to the cottage, Enid comes into the hallway to meet her.

  “Well?” she asks.

  “An oak came down in the lane,” says Rose, shucking her boots onto the mat by the door. “I used to collect acorns from that tree when I was a child. It’s very old. My grandfather remembered it as being old—that’s how old it is. It’s so sad it’s come down.” She hands something to Enid. It’s a small twig with a couple of leaves attached. “I thought you might like this for your collection.”

  Enid is touched. She doesn’t have the heart to tell Rose that she isn’t collecting mementos but is doing a much more scientific survey of the natural history in the area.

  “Thank you.” She tucks the twig into the pocket of her cardigan.

  “You are coming with me today, aren’t you?” asks Rose.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  Rose is taking Enid to her parents’ house for Sunday lunch. Her sister-in-law’s presence will be a buffer to any awkward questions about James.

  They set off across the heath at noon, Harris bounding along beside them. It’s a foggy day, the mist sheathing the dry grass fields, and the dog looks ghostly as she disappears and then reappears ahead of them.

  It’s a good idea to bring Enid to lunch, but still Rose worries about the event and wishes she didn’t have to go, wishes she could just nip down to the Three Bells and spend the day with Toby instead.

  “My mother’s difficult,” she says. “You might not like her.”

  “Oh, I don’t need to like her,” says Enid. “I just need her to be a good cook.”

  But Enid is appalled at Constance’s controlling manner at the dinner table. Every item that is lifted off the tablecloth has to be replaced exactly where it was taken from, and if it isn’t, Constance quickly moves out a hand to fix the error. They sit in strained silence until the courses are in the process of changing, and then Enid and Frederick bolt for the garden to have a cigarette.

  Harris is out there, lying mournfully on the flagstones, her head between her paws.

  “Meals aren’t really Constance’s forte,” says Frederick. He bends down to pat the dog. “She’s never been very good at enjoying herself.”

  “Well, it’s hard to learn how to do, isn’t it?” says Enid. “I don’t think I’m very good at it myself.”

  “But you probably don’t count the number of Brussels sprouts that each person takes and remove from their plate any that exceed the quota.”

  “What is the quota?”

  “Eight.”

  They wander down to the back of the garden, stand by a mound of dead leaves against the fence.

  “For burning,” says Frederick. “I save that chore up until I need an excuse to be out of the house for several hours.”

  Why do you bother? thinks Enid. But she is used to men complaining about their wives and knows that it hardly ever translates into their leaving them. She smokes her cigarette and kicks at the pile of leaves with her foot. The smell that rises from them is loamy and sharp.

  “You look like James,” says Frederick.

  “When we were children, it was hard to tell us apart. I was taller than him for years.”

  “What is the age difference?”

  “I’m two years older.” Enid lights another cigarette off the tip of the first. She’s not ready to go back inside the house yet. She’s not sure how she’ll be able to manage the strict rules that will undoubtedly exist around the pudding and the cheese and biscuits.

  “Have you heard from him? Rose is short on news.” Frederick follows Enid’s example and lights a second cigarette from the fag end of his first.

  “No. I’ve had nothing either.” Enid thinks about how the post arrives twice a day in the caged letterbox inside the cottage door. Many days she is the one to collect the post. She can’t remember there being a single letter from James in the weeks she’s been at Sycamore Cottage.

  Frederick sighs, and the sigh turns into a long, protracted cough. He sputters to a close, wipes his watery eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Funny,” he says.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Rose never mentions him anymore.”

  “WAS IT excruciating for you?” asks Rose as they walk back over the heath. The mist has cleared and the forest reveals itself again, the muted colours of the heather and
the bracken soothing to the eye.

  “Your mother’s awful,” says Enid.

  “Yes.” Rose feels guilty for being disloyal. “But my father’s all right.”

  “He’s a tattler.”

  “She’s hard to live with.”

  “But he married her, so he chose his fate.”

  Rose is silent for a few moments. Harris sprints past them, Clementine at her heels.

  “But when he married her, he didn’t know his fate,” Rose suggests.

  “Debatable,” says Enid. “But don’t mind me. You can’t expect me to be a supporter of marriage, can you?”

  “No, I suppose not.”

  They walk on. Enid notices a bog asphodel and the differences in the two varieties of gorse in their path.

  “But when you marry,” says Rose, “you don’t know anything. You don’t know how it will turn out, or what you’ll feel later.”

  “Rose.” Enid puts a hand on her arm, stops her. “What’s going on? Why hasn’t James written in so long? Has something happened to him?”

  “Why is it James everyone is always so worried about and not me?” Rose shakes off Enid’s arm and bolts down the path, and the dogs, excited by her sudden running, give chase across the field.

  When Enid gets back to the cottage, Rose isn’t there but the dogs are. Enid tidies up the dishes and sits on the chesterfield reading.

  At midnight Rose still hasn’t returned, so Enid lets the dogs out one final time, switches off the lights in the cottage, and climbs the stairs to bed. In her room, she takes out her pad of writing paper and pen and begins a letter to her brother.

  Dear James,

  Are you well? I haven’t had a letter from you in ages, and it seems that Rose has not heard from you either.

  James, if something has happened, please let me know. I worry about your welfare, even if when I write I pretend that all is well with you, and that everything is as it should be.

  THERE’S WIND against the panes again tonight, a whistle and shudder as it roams the trees outside the pub.

  Rose squeezes closer to Toby.

  “I’m not going home,” she says. “I’m just going to stay the night with you.”

  “What about Enid?”

  “I don’t care about the pretense anymore. Besides, she’s close to guessing that something’s up. She said as much to me today.”

  “Good,” says Toby. “It’s better to have no secrets. Lies are always harder to manage than the truth.”

  But in the morning when Rose wakes up, scrunched against the wall of the single bed, her hands numb and her neck aching, she feels terrible for not being home to feed the hens and tend to the dogs, even to have her morning cup of tea with Enid. Once her sister-in-law finds out the truth about Rose, she’ll have no more to do with her, and Rose has liked having Enid around these past weeks, has depended on her company. No, she doesn’t prefer the truth at all. She just wants to continue on with the lie.

  The swallows have already left their nest under the eaves for their morning’s work of catching insects. They make passes against the glass, their agile bodies slicing the air, the shapes they make so daring and complicated.

  “If our fighter pilots could fly like that, we’d win the war in a fortnight,” says Toby.

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Just for a few moments.” He stretches his arms overhead and Rose scoots down beside him, lying across him, feeling the silky patch of blond hair in the centre of his chest against her cheek, not unlike the feeling of lying with her face pressed into Harris.

  “I’m worried about what Enid will think,” she says. “What if she waited up for me last night?”

  “She probably slept right through. You can sneak back up the road now, and she’ll be none the wiser.”

  But Enid is waiting for Rose when she gets home, pacing up and down in the kitchen, furious.

  “I imagined all sorts of terrible things,” she says. “You had no right to rush off like that without telling me when you’d be back. How was I to know something awful hadn’t happened to you? And what about your blackout patrol last night? Did you even do that?”

  “Oh, no.” Rose had completely forgotten about her blackout watch. She sits down at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I went to stay with a friend for the night.”

  “Really, Rose,” says Enid. “Sometimes you behave as though you’re twelve.” And with that, she stomps out of the kitchen. A few moments later, Rose hears the front door slam.

  Enid marches across the heath for an hour before her anger wears off. She has neglected to bring her books and bags, but that’s all right. Enid doesn’t feel calm enough to work on her natural history this morning.

  Rose is lying to her. There’s probably a man at the bottom of it all. A sordid mess, thinks Enid, her anger fired up again. Poor James. But frankly, it’s the lying that irks her the most. She had warmed to Rose. They had been good companions of late. The lying makes them seem nothing but strangers.

  Time to go, thinks Enid. She’ll write to her friend Molly in Bath and see if she can visit there for a few weeks until she gets herself sorted. There’s nothing to be gained from embroiling herself in trouble between her brother and his wife. Nothing to be gained at all.

  ROSE COMES home the next day to find the cottage quiet and tidy, a short note for her from Enid with a forwarding address in Bath. Upstairs, Enid’s bed is stripped, the eiderdown carefully folded at the foot of the mattress, the sheets in the laundry bin.

  Rose sits down on the bed. The afternoon sun angles in the small window, sends a shaft of light across the wooden floorboards. Rose follows the light over the boards to the bureau. There, on top of the bureau, is Enid’s notebook for her natural history. There’s no note to accompany it, but it’s clearly been left rather than forgotten. Rose stands at the bureau turning the pages and reading some of the entries. It is not what she had thought Enid was doing, which was to dryly catalogue and describe the various bits of flora she took from the forest on her morning’s walk. No, Enid’s natural history is not what she’d expected at all.

  RED SQUIRREL: Too plentiful to list all locations, but mainly to be seen in the wooded areas of the forest. Native to England. First appeared at the end of the last ice age, some ten thousand years ago. Can be either right- or left-handed. Once the choice of fur for the nobility, called vair and especially popular as slippers. Cinderella’s lost slipper at the ball was made of vair. The prince knew she was from the same class as him because he also had red squirrel slippers. In the translation from French to English, the word was changed to verre, and the slipper went from squirrel fur to glass.

  NIGHTINGALE: I have heard two while I’ve been here. One in the wooded area near the Weald way, and another near Gills Lap. Melodious songbird. Distantly related to the robin. It has been the inspiration for a great deal of poetry and song, most recently the popular tune "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. ” Oliver was fond of that song. He would often sing it to me.

  RED ADMIRAL BUTTERFLY: Seen all over the heath, particularly in areas where there is an abundance of wildflowers. Named after and known for their "admirable” colours. They are unusual in that they fly at night. Most butterflies are active only in daylight hours. Migratory. Territorial. Not afraid of humans. Short-lived. Some cultures believe them to be the transformation of human souls.

  COMMON DARTER: Spotted over the more boggy areas of the forest. Born under water, but spending their lives in the air. The last dragonfly species to be seen at the end of summer, and still alive well into October. Mate over water. Often used as a way to explain death. The underwater nymph bears no resemblance to the dragonfly it becomes, and exchanges one world for another. It cannot communicate to the other nymphs it left behind because they won’t recognize the new form it has taken.

  TOAD: Found in the low-lying boggy areas of the forest, and near the little stream that runs through the Five Hundred Acre Woo
d. Toads walk rather than hop like frogs. Can live up to forty years. Eat what is dark and in motion. Shed their skin and consume it, rather than simply moving from it as a snake will. They will instinctively return to the same pond as their ancestors. Here they will hibernate for the winter, emerging each spring as though returning from the land of the dead.

  BELL HEATHER: Simply everywhere. This and the bracken were the first plants I saw when I stepped out onto the forest for the first time. Once used to stuff mattresses, because when dried it was not only cushiony but fragrant as well. Also used for animal bedding. The flowers are bellshaped, hence the name.

  AGRIMONY: Near the roadside hedgerows. A yellow flower spike that is pretty but followed by a seed casing of burrs. During medieval times, it was thought to be a cure for internal bleeding when combined with pounded frogs. Also used to detect witches, although I’m not sure how. Invasive. Produces a yellow dye. Can be brewed, and when drunk will produce a merciful dreamless sleep.

  Swallow

  TOBY GETS HIS ORDERS AT THE BEGINNING OF August. Rose tries to be cheerful about it, even though she feels nothing but dread at his leaving. He comes to the cottage on the morning he is to take the train to the air base to join his squadron. There’s barely an hour before the train leaves, not enough time to go upstairs to bed, or even to sit down in the kitchen for a cup of tea. They stand in the downstairs hallway with their arms around each other for most of the hour.

  “Promise me you’ll come back,” says Rose.

  “I promise.”

  “Here. That you’ll come back here, to me.”

  “I promise.”

  Toby’s suitcase waits by the door. Rose can see it over his shoulder, standing on the mat like a patient dog.