Book Read Free

Evening Chorus (9780544352971)

Page 13

by Humphreys, Helen


  “I knew it had to do with Rose.”

  “That day I thought I was to be killed, I never loved her more. And she was already with Toby Halliday then.” James laughs. “I suppose if it gets too bad, it’s only a hundred and eighty-seven steps to the edge of the cliff.”

  “Don’t say that.” A pause. “Why have you counted them?”

  Her brother doesn’t reply.

  Enid takes the glass from his hands, sets it on the floor to try to make him forget about asking for another drink.

  “I wish you would come back with me to the city,” she says.

  “I don’t like the city. It’s too big and noisy. There are no birds there.”

  “What about transferring to an observatory in a bigger community?”

  “Perhaps.” James folds his hands across his chest. “But not until I’ve finished my book on the ocean birds.”

  “How far along are you?”

  “Halfway through.”

  “Finish it quickly, then, James.” Enid squeezes his hand. “Please. I worry about you out here. It’s not good for you to be so alone.”

  “I will finish it quickly. I will. I promise.” He sounds like the little boy he used to be. Jimmy, telling her stories on his back under the low West Country sky, or trussed up in bed recovering from measles, carefully studying the black-and-white photos in his pocket guide to British birds.

  ON ENID’S last day with her brother, she wakes up early and washes out James’s pajamas at the pump in the yard, pegging them onto a sagging piece of rope running from the corner of the cottage to the roof of the earth closet. The pajamas flap about like flags in the wind for half an hour and then dry stiff as cardboard.

  “Can I take you shopping today?” Enid asks James when he comes downstairs later that morning. “You have virtually nothing in your larder, and I’d like to see you well provisioned before I leave. I’d like to buy you at least one bloody saucepan. And a kettle.”

  “It’s a walk and a bus ride to the shops,” says James.

  “I don’t mind.”

  James grumbles about the time away from his shearwaters, but he actually seems glad when Enid marches him through the shops of the neighbouring village, buying him eggs, cheese, vegetables, a bit of bacon, a small joint of beef, some apples.

  “I don’t want you to starve,” she says. “Because it seems to me that you are starving.”

  “It’s hard to bother with food,” admits James, “when the shops are so far away.”

  “Well, we’ll get you some tins as well then, shall we? But promise me you’ll throw them out when they’re empty.”

  Enid is all business, and in his long experience of her in this mode, James knows better than to argue. He slouches meekly behind his older sister, carrying the shopping and protesting less and less when she takes out her purse to pay for the items she’s buying him.

  On the walk back to the cottage, the sun actually comes out for an hour or so and the sombre scrubby fields bask golden in the sudden light.

  “It’s beautiful,” says Enid when the sun transforms the landscape from unruly to hospitable. “I can see why you like it here.”

  “You’re never tempted by the country?” James walks beside her, eating an apple, ambling slowly along, not racing ahead as he had on the day she arrived. He’s more relaxed, thinks Enid, and she’s pleased with that thought. “You used to like living on the farm.”

  “I was a child then. Childhood is always romantic, no matter where one spends it.” Enid moves her hair out of her eyes. “I did like those weeks I spent in your cottage with Rose,” she says. “But no. The countryside doesn’t offer what the city does.”

  “And what exactly does the city offer?”

  “People, James. People.”

  “Ah.” He takes a bite of his apple. “People are overrated, Eenie. The five years I spent locked up with two thousand men on a few acres of earth was enough humanity to last a lifetime.”

  There’s a movement over the field and they both glimpse it at the same time. A white horse running along the horizon, fast and furious and alone. There is no one leading or trailing it.

  “Wild horse,” says Enid.

  “No such thing here,” says James. “It must have escaped from somewhere.”

  The horse is coming closer to them; it will cross the path they are on a few hundred feet ahead of them.

  When it does cross in front of them, they can see that its mane and tail are stuck with burrs and there are several long, bloody scratches scoring its flanks.

  “See?” says James. “It must have caught itself on a wire fence when it was pushing through or jumping over.”

  “Those are bramble scratches,” says Enid. “And look how tangled the mane is. That’s definitely a wild horse.”

  “It can’t be.”

  “But it is.”

  The horse thunders away from them, through the field to the left of the path they are on. It’s running hard, as though it is being pursued, even though there’s no one running after it.

  “It’s scared,” says James.

  “No, it’s free,” says Enid.

  LATER THAT afternoon, James walks Enid back along the path to the bus stop so she can catch the coach that will take her to the train that will, in turn, take her back to London. He carries her suitcase as they tramp through the empty fields. There’s no horse to be seen now, no evidence that it was ever there, and James wonders if the horse was real at all. He often thinks he sees things that aren’t really there, or else the wind brings voices to his window at night. It is hard to know what to believe, but this is why he likes the birds. He watches them and writes down what they do, and by attaching himself to their purpose, he keeps himself firmly attached to his own reality.

  James wishes both that Enid could stay longer and that she’d never come at all. Because now that she’s been to see him, he’ll miss her, and missing her will open up that hole in him that requires large amounts of whisky to fill. Her absence will be noticeable because her presence was welcome, and her coming to visit has made him realize how lonely he is, and this will be made worse once she leaves.

  He wishes he could go to London with her and start again somehow, but he knows he can’t. He is over forty, too old to start anything again. He has his work, and most days he can cleave to that, to the rise and fall of the birds’ wings, to their strict routines, to the urgent occupancy of their small, short lives. They are predictable and comforting, and he depends on their existence for his own.

  The bus puffs up the street. James hands Enid her suitcase.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” he says, trying to smile.

  “Don’t drink so much.” She kisses him on the cheek, squeezes his arm. “Take care of yourself, Jimmy. I’ll write to you.”

  The bus pulls up in front of them and the doors shush open. Enid steps towards them, turns back.

  “A letter is a good thing, you know,” she says. “Sometimes we can write what we can’t say. You could write to Rose.”

  “I did that once,” he says. “It didn’t turn out so well.” She starts to say something, but he nudges her shoulder. “Go on, Eenie. Don’t hold up the driver now.”

  She waves from her seat inside the bus, and though James means to turn and walk away, he ends up standing in the road, waving at the bus until it is long out of sight.

  ONCE JAMES saw a redstart outside the observatory. It was a migrant, probably blown off course by a storm, and it sheltered for two days under the eaves of his bedroom, perching on the window ledge before flying away to spend the winter in Africa. He wondered if it was a descendant of one of his redstarts in Germany, if that was where it had originated. He wondered if it had memory in some part of its bodily cells of him watching the redstarts in the prison camp and this is why it had come directly there, to him.

  This is why James likes birds—because they are all possibility. They make a line in the air, the invisible line of their flight, and this line can join up with
other lines or lead somewhere entirely new. All you have to do is believe that the line exists and learn how to follow it.

  And sometimes life will make this same invisible line for him, make him see where he came from, what he is attached to. Enid flew up out of his past, and he can follow the line of her all the way back to the farmhouse in the West Country, to the smell of animals in the barn and his mother’s bread baking in the kitchen, to that point in time when he was Jimmy Hunter, a boy who believed in the goodness and possibility of absolutely everything.

  Marsh Gentian

  ENID GOES STRAIGHT TO THE MAGAZINE, EVEN though it’s early evening by the time she gets back to London.

  But they’re going to press next week, and as always, there’s a mad scramble to meet the deadline. And even though it’s almost seven o’clock, all the lights are burning on the third floor of the building where the Country Ways offices are housed, and practically every single employee of the magazine is still hard at work.

  Enid works in the art department of Country Ways as a paste-up artist. It is her job to receive the finished galleys from typography, wax them, and fix them to the paste-up boards so they can be photographed and made into plates, then run off on the printing press and gathered together as the pages of the magazine. Country Ways is a complex mix of text and advertisements, photographs and illustrations. Each of these things has to be carefully put down on the boards according to the wishes of the designer. Being a paste-up artist requires a good eye and steady hands, as the text has to go down straight and there are lots of instances—captions of photos, for example—where individual lines of type have to be carefully cut out and even more carefully laid into position. It is finicky work, but Enid likes it. There is satisfaction in getting the pages loaded up with their text and images. This is also the point at which Enid reads the magazine, never bothering with it when it is actually finished and out on the newsstands. She reads the articles as she lays them out on her drafting table in her little corner of the art department, with the window at her back that looks down onto the moving tide of people and the tops of the London buses in the streets below.

  Country Ways tries to speak fully to the inhabitants of the countryside, men and women alike, although even with so many men so recently back from the war, the audience for the magazine remains largely female. The magazine ambitiously tries to address every one of Britain’s roughly twenty-five million women. It seems to be working, as the number of new readers increases with each monthly issue. Now in its eighth year of production, Country Ways continues to be popular. The people of Britain can’t ignore the effects of the war and the lingering rationing, but the magazine’s heady mix of recipes, knitting patterns, instruction in watercolour, pointers for gardeners, travel recommendations, and jaunts in the countryside is a welcome distraction.

  Enid jams a new block of wax in her waxer to melt and goes round the corner to Editorial.

  She pokes her head into Margaret’s office.

  “For the new issue,” says Enid, “it’s thatched cottages, the marsh violet, plum jam, and the vole. Is that right?”

  “I think the vole is in with gardening,” says Margaret. She pushes her glasses up her nose, and Enid sees a strip of Elastoplast holding the bridge together. “As in, how to get rid of the vole, not how to understand it.”

  “Oh, right,” says Enid. “The vole is a villain now.” Switch categories, switch context. This was a constant practice at Country Ways. There would be the heartfelt story of a lamb raised by hand in one issue and a delicious recipe for lamb stew in the next. “What happened to your glasses?”

  “Tripped on something. They flew off my head, and then I stepped on them. Is it very noticeable?” Margaret looks worried.

  Enid wavers between lying and telling the truth, but decides to lie. “Hardly at all,” she says. “Only if you look directly at your nose.”

  “Oh, dear.” Margaret still seems worried, so Enid ducks out of the younger woman’s office and goes back to her drafting table.

  The waxer is hot enough now, the block of wax under the roller nicely melted. Enid rolls the back of the first galley for Country Ways, cuts it to fit, and sticks it down on the layout board. She skims the article on thatched cottages, finding it boring and needlessly detailed. The plum jam recipe is one she’s seen before. Enid is sometimes stirred enough by guilt over her own mother’s jam-making prowess to attempt to make preserves herself, but it always ends in disappointment. Her jam, no matter what recipe she follows, is too sticky or too thin, too thick to spread easily on toast or running off the edges onto the plate.

  Recently, Country Ways has run a series on botanical illustration. Each month they introduce a flower and then lead the reader through a series of simple line drawings that show how to portray it. At the start of the article there is a black-and-white photograph of the flower, and at the end of the article is the fully rendered illustration, which apparently any idiot housewife can duplicate.

  This month the marsh gentian is the flower of choice. Instead of the usual single photograph of the flower at the beginning of the article, there are two. One photograph shows the flower open, and one shows it closed—the two states in which the walker is likely to discover it.

  Enid likes the botanical illustration series. She likes reading about the flowers, and sometimes, on a rainy evening, she tries her hand at the illustration herself. It seems a useful thing to learn. Enid has a habit of judging the content of Country Ways in direct reference to her own preferences, and she would much rather learn to draw a flower than knit a pair of booties or frost a cake.

  She starts reading about the marsh gentian. The flower is characterized by bright blue, trumpetshaped blooms that are often striped with pale green. It has narrow leaves that grow in pairs up the stem of the plant. It blooms from July through October in acidic bogs and wet heathlands, can grow to a height of twelve inches, and is one of the few flowers that flourish in the transitional space between the mire of the bog and the firmer ground of the heath.

  Enid goes back to Margaret’s office, knocks delicately on the open door.

  “Sorry,” she says, “but that violet—the marsh gentian?—it’s rare. There are only three places in England where it’s ever seen. How is anyone supposed to draw it if they can’t find it?”

  Margaret takes off her glasses and pinches the bridge of her nose, which is red from where the Elastoplast has been rubbing against it. Enid tries not to stare but can’t stop herself.

  “That Saunders,” Margaret says. “I should fire him. That’s the second thing he’s got wrong in this issue.”

  “He’s just a writer,” says Enid. “They make mistakes. Wasn’t it proofed?”

  “Yes, of course it was proofed.”

  Margaret sounds irritated, and Enid wants to point out that the fault lies not with her for bringing the error to Margaret’s attention, but rather with the error itself. But she doesn’t say this.

  “Thank you, Enid,” says Margaret. “I’ll see to it.”

  Enid backs out of the office, but then comes in again. “What was the first thing?” she asks.

  “What first thing?”

  “The first thing Saunders got wrong.”

  Margaret sighs, puts her glasses back on again. “He misjudged the distance for ‘A Ramble Round the Cotswolds.’ Instead of a pleasant five-mile stroll, it’s actually fifteen miles. If someone starts out for a nice walk after lunch, they’ll be finishing it in darkness.”

  “Probably not finishing at all,” suggests Enid. “More likely lost and stumbling around for ages. Perhaps never to be found again.”

  “Anything else?” Margaret sounds even more irritated.

  “No.” Enid leaves the office for the second time.

  Back in her little corner of the art department, she looks at the two photographs of the marsh gentian. They might as well be completely different flowers. The closed flower, with its slender, tapering bloom, looks completely opposite to the open, sta
rshaped version of the violet. Even without the fact of it being a rare flower, the marsh gentian really was a ridiculous choice for illustration, because you would find the flower in one of those two states, either open or closed, but which one was really the true example of the specimen?

  One of the three places in Britain where the flower is found is in the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex. Enid is reminded again of those days she spent exploring the forest almost ten years ago now. Wouldn’t it be nice to go back there again and see the heath in all its glory?

  But that thought is quickly followed by one of Rose. Enid doesn’t know what has become of her. Perhaps she is still in Sycamore Cottage? Perhaps she has married and moved elsewhere? Enid has doubts about the likelihood of this second scenario. She doesn’t remember seeing Rose with Toby, but she does remember seeing Rose happy, and she knows it was because of Toby. In the dimly lit vault of memory, she contrasts this happiness with what she remembers of Rose and James’s wedding. She knows that Toby made Rose happier than James did, and that happiness would probably not be easy to set aside. So a jaunt down to see the Ashdown Forest in summer would inevitably lead Enid to Rose’s cottage, and although she has, in many ways, remembered that time with Rose fondly, Enid is also fiercely loyal to her brother and won’t do anything to upset him.

  She looks again at the photographs of the marsh gentian. She will never see it in her lifetime. And just as twitchers make a list of birds they have spotted, Enid makes a list in her mind of some of the things she will never see again: a marsh gentian, the Ashdown Forest in summer, Rose.

  WHEN ENID finally gets back to her flat, it’s gone nine and she’s exhausted. She kicks off her shoes and lies down fully clothed on the bed, trying to decide if she’s more hungry or tired, if she should rouse herself to get something to eat or just go straight to sleep.

 

‹ Prev