Evening Chorus (9780544352971)

by Humphreys, Helen

  She decides on sleep, but then she hears a key turning in the lock, the sound of the flat door opening and closing, the tap of shoes as someone walks down the hallway towards the bedroom.

  “Enid?” A head pokes around the door frame. “Fancy going to the Crown? It’s half-price fish and chips night.”

  The Crown is as crowded as ever. Enid battles her way to the bar to get the drinks and place the order, then battles her way back again. By the time she returns to the table, she feels irritated and churlish.

  “Someone trod on my foot,” she says, slapping the drinks down on the wooden tabletop. “Right on the arch. Bloody painful. And he didn’t even apologize. Bloody idiot.”

  “Darling.” Margaret reaches over and squeezes Enid’s hand. “Don’t be cross. I’ve looked forward to seeing you all day.”

  “You have seen me all day.” Enid leans down, slips her foot out of her shoe, and rubs it where it’s been stepped on.

  “Well, not how I like to see you,” says Margaret.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I sometimes think you like to boss me around at the office more than you like being with me at home.”

  “That’s not fair.” Margaret takes a sip of her gin and tonic. “In fact, that’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “Is it?” Enid slips her shoe back on. “Yes, I suppose it is. I’m sorry. I’m tired from all the travel, and from freezing to death all weekend in James’s shepherd’s hut.”

  “Well, you don’t need to take it out on me.”

  “Who else am I meant to take it out on?”

  Their supper arrives, and after the first few mouthfuls of fish and greasy batter, Enid feels more cheerful. “I did miss you,” she says.

  “You have a funny way of showing it.”

  “Come on, Mags. Can’t we start again? I am sorry.”

  Margaret takes a healthy sip of her gin and tonic. “How was your brother?” she asks.

  “Terrible. I don’t think he eats, and he drinks too much. The cottage is so primitive he might as well be living in a cave. Probably warmer in a cave, come to think of it. He’s so miserable that I don’t think he can see how miserable he is.” Enid puts down her knife and fork. “How would you feel about going down there for Christmas with me? We could give him a proper Christmas, cheer him up a bit.”

  “Have you told him about us, then?”

  “No, not exactly.” Enid takes a sip of her drink. “Not at all, really. But I’m going to write him and tell him this week.” She takes another swallow of gin and tonic. “Or next week.” She drains the last of her glass. “Definitely by Christmas.”

  “We could just go down as friends,” says Margaret. “Workmates. Flatmates.”

  “Yes, that might be better.”

  “Colleagues,” says Margaret. “That’s the word for it.”

  “Well, it isn’t at all the word for it,” says Enid. “But it will have to do.”

  “It’s not entirely a lie.”

  “No, not entirely.” Enid crams the last of her chips onto her fork. “Will you come with me to Wales, then? To see James?”

  “Yes, I will. I’d be happy to, in fact. It will be a nice change from sitting in my parents’ stuffy parlour making small talk about my sister’s brats and the allotment.”

  “Good.” Enid pushes her plate away, feeling satisfied with both the conversation and her supper. “Shall I fetch us another drink?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  But when Enid goes back to the bar, there on a stool at the end by the taps is George Fletcher from Sales.

  “Where’s my drink?” asks Margaret when Enid returns to the table empty-handed.

  “Fletcher from Sales is sitting up at the bar.”

  “Do you think he saw you?”

  “I don’t think so. I kept my head turned.”

  Margaret grabs her purse from the bench beside her. “Shall I leave first, or will you?”

  “I’ll go. I’m already standing. Give me fifteen minutes’ head start. I’ll meet you by the tobacconist’s near the park.”

  “Just meet me at home.”

  “Mags, couldn’t we walk at least partway together?”

  “I just can’t risk it. You know how hard it’s been for me. This could ruin everything.”

  “But we could just be having a drink together. An innocent drink.”

  “It’s not innocent.”

  “But how is Fletcher to know that?”

  “He would know.” Margaret smooths her skirt. “He would see the way you look at me. The way I look at you.”

  There is to be no argument on the matter. Enid pushes her chair into the table. “I’ll see you back at the flat, then.”

  Margaret is the only female editor at Country Ways, a fact that always strikes Enid as ridiculous, although she knows the struggle it’s been for Margaret to achieve this level of success. Even Enid’s own presence in the art department is out of the norm, and she has also had to fight hard for her lowly position of paste-up artist. And to think of all the jobs women used to do in the war, when the men were off fighting. There was nothing a woman couldn’t do in those days, including flying commercial aircraft. Now the choice is between being a secretary or a nurse, or perhaps a teacher at a junior school. And these jobs are for the unmarried woman. The married woman’s entire purpose in life is to be a loving wife and mother, serving her husband and children all day long, sitting down with a quick cup of tea in the afternoon to leaf through her latest copy of Country Ways.

  Country Ways—read almost entirely by women and staffed almost entirely by men.

  Enid lowers her head so she won’t be recognized by Fletcher and walks quickly to the door of the pub, pushing it open and stepping outside into the cool night air.

  Sometimes life seems very unfair. But right on top of thinking that, Enid thinks of all the men who died in the war, and how it made sense that those who didn’t die—those who returned from fighting—would want their jobs back. It was their right, really, to try to pick up where they had left off, and they should be helped to do that, not blocked.

  She lights a cigarette, thinks of Toby Halliday crashing his plane into the heath so close to Rose’s cottage that it was hard not to believe he was heading straight for her. Enid half wishes she’d still been there, so Rose would have had her to lean on during the horror of that time, as she had had Rose to lean on, briefly, after Oliver’s death. But that would have meant Rose’s confessing about the affair with Halliday, and Enid wouldn’t have wanted that secret, wouldn’t have wanted to know anything that James didn’t.

  She starts walking along the pavement in the direction of the flat. Still. Rose had told her, eventually, although James knew too at that point. He’d had her letter asking for a divorce. Rose had then written Enid a short note after the plane crash. Enid can still remember most of it. She scuffs her foot through some fallen leaves. Her arch still hurts where that imbecile in the Crown stepped on it.

  You might have heard about the plane crash on the forest. One of the airmen who died in that crash was the navigator, Toby Halliday. He was my lover, Enid. I mean, I loved him. And I don’t know what to do now that he’s gone. I don’t know how to continue.

  That was basically it, Enid thinks, although she can’t really be sure. It was so long ago now since she received that note, since she spent those weeks with Rose at Sycamore Cottage.

  Enid had sent Rose a card with the words “I’m sorry” on it. She hadn’t known what else to say because at that point she wasn’t sure James knew anything about Toby Halliday. But now she wishes that she had said something else. Now that she’s in love again herself—a complete surprise really, after all this time, and with someone she never expected to be in love with—Enid would tell Rose that she understands love is never the same. You can love different people over the course of a lifetime, but you won’t love any two of them the same way, and quite frankly, you will love some of them more than others. A great deal more. If Toby was that to
Rose—if he was the one she loved the most—then Enid would have said to her, “You will continue. But you will not recover. Don’t expect that.”

  Enid was shocked to fall in love with a woman, but after getting over the initial astonishment, she realized that what had attracted her to Margaret was very similar to what had attracted her to Oliver. They were both rather imperious and, as they were used to being in charge at work, rather bossy. Enid, an elder child and a prefect at school, often found the role of being a leader burdensome, and so it was a relief to be bossed about by her lovers.

  Another similarity was that there was no openness allowed in the relationships. Oliver had been married. Margaret was a woman, and she and Enid worked together. This similarity, Enid told herself, was an accident, but she sometimes wondered if it wasn’t a little bit deliberate on her part, as if she couldn’t entirely trust happiness, so she chose lovers with restrictive circumstances.

  Rose never wrote to Enid again, and who can blame her. They had become close in that short time—another thing that had surprised Enid—and Rose must have expected more from her sister-in-law than a banal “I’m sorry.”

  Enid walks past Russell Square, her head full of Rose Hunter and the dark cottage on the edge of the forest where they spent six weeks together a decade ago. In another time, things might have turned out differently and they could have remained friends. Another time might be easier than this one, but there’s only the time you’re in, thinks Enid. And it’s always going to be lacking somehow. Best to spend some of your moments here on earth noticing what else is here with you instead of concentrating solely on your own misery.

  Thank god that James has his birds. The simple act of looking up must do something to make him feel better every day. It is a good thing, Enid thinks, to be curious about something outside of one’s own thoughts and feelings. She and James are lucky because they are inclined this way, but Rose . . . well, Enid is fairly sure that Rose is trapped largely inside herself and has no talent for observing the world around her.

  A cat shoots by Enid in the darkness, startling her. There are so many more stray dogs and cats since the war, most having escaped from bombed-out buildings where their owners perished.

  The war has been just as hard on animals as people, thinks Enid. She remembers the Regent’s Park zoo broadcasting assurances at the start of the war that the public need not worry about dangerous animals escaping. The keepers had taken the precaution of killing all the poisonous snakes and insects. The polar bears and large cats had been locked inside tunnels to prevent their getting out in case a bomb hit the zoo.

  One night the glass roof of the aviary was hit by a small bomb and three hummingbirds escaped, never to be found again. Enid smiles when she remembers the zoo’s announcement that the public had nothing to fear from the hummingbirds, that they weren’t considered dangerous. War made everyone so fearful. It was hard to believe that anyone could ever have thought to caution the public about a bird the size of a moth that drank the nectar of flowers.

  BACK AT the flat, Enid undresses, puts on her nightie, brushes her teeth, and gets into bed. She knows that Margaret will wait a decent interval before following Enid out of the pub, and that decent interval could easily stretch to an hour. It will be so much better when Enid can leave Country Ways and work elsewhere, although the job prospects are rather dismal these days, and it could be months before she is able to find a suitable position.

  The curtains haven’t been pulled carefully and there is a gap between them of at least a foot. The streetlamps bleed into the room. Enid sits up against her pillows, switches off her bedside light. Through the gap in the curtains, she can see the dark lines of the trees in the park opposite. She feels she should get out of bed and close the curtains properly, but she’s also lazy and warm now, so she does nothing, just lies there and frets a little, thinking of Rose again and how she used to walk the village streets of Forest Row looking for just this sort of crime.

  It’s not only love, thinks Enid. It’s not only love that isn’t the same again but every moment of a life. And just as one doesn’t love two people the same way, one feels that some moments are much more important than others, but that often isn’t apparent from the vantage point of the moment itself. From here—closing in on fifty, in a small flat in the middle of London, loving someone secretly, working at a job that some days has purpose and other days seems pointless—Enid can see which moments were the important ones in her life, and she is surprised to find that the time she spent with Rose in Sycamore Cottage is among them.

  When she came to her sister-in-law, Enid was bombed out and in exile. And somehow from that place of exile, from the wandering she did up on the forest, and from her interaction with Rose and the dogs, she found herself on solid ground again. That cottage had felt, at first, like a prison, but in the end it had proved to be Enid’s liberation.

  She wishes she could thank Rose. Would it hurt, after all this time, to write her a letter? Would such a small act still count as a betrayal of James?

  A key scrapes in the lock. The door to the flat creaks open. There’s the knock as Margaret’s shoes are kicked off and topple over on the tiles, then the pad of her stockinged feet down the long wooden hallway.

  The bedroom door swings open and Margaret strides into the room. She takes a few confident steps and crashes into the end of the bed.

  “It’s pitch black in here,” she says. “Are you trying to cripple me? Turn on a light.”

  She sounds irritable and tired, and she’s being very selfish, thinks Enid. What if I had been asleep? This is what the years together bring, she thinks, switching on the bedside lamp—not distance brokered by reserve, but distance created by a sort of bullying familiarity. The voice one uses inside one’s head, the private voice, eventually becomes the public voice, the voice that is used on one’s lover.

  Margaret rubs her knee, sits down on the end of the bed. Her hair has come loose from her scarf and twists in tendrils around her face. She must have hurried, thinks Enid, and her attitude towards Margaret softens in light of this new observation.

  “Come to bed, Mags,” she says. “It’s late.”

  When Margaret is lying beside her in bed and the small lamp beside Enid has been switched off again, she realizes that she had meant to tell Margaret to pull the curtains, and because she forgot to do this, the gap in them is still there. The light from the streetlamp is still visible—as are the dark lines of the trees in the park opposite.

  And suddenly Enid knows what happened to her during those weeks in Forest Row. She changed the way she saw the world. All those days of walking the heath, collecting her specimens, reinforced in her a need to look to the natural world for her own location. Now, even in London, she is constantly searching out the trees and grass, the flowers, to determine her position in the urban landscape. She looks to the natural world to guide her in how she moves through the city, in how she thinks about her own life.

  Enid feels the clumsy fumbling beside her as Margaret searches for her hand under the bedclothes.

  They lie on their backs in the London dark, holding hands, the light from the streetlamp ribboning in through the window. Enid wants to tell Margaret about Rose Hunter and the cottage in Forest Row, about what she has just decided about that time, but it’s a long story now, and the hour is late. Margaret has to be in the office in the morning well before Enid.

  “Remind me to tell you about Rose Hunter one day,” she says.

  “How will I possibly remember to do that?” says Margaret. She still sounds irritated, but anger is the place where Margaret’s emotions land. It’s where she goes when she feels tired, or ashamed, or frustrated, or sad. Sometimes it takes a very long time for Enid to parse out how Margaret is really feeling. She squeezes Margaret’s hand, suddenly sorry for her.

  “I wish we could have stayed in the pub,” she says. “I was so looking forward to another drink with you, to a longer evening.”

  Margaret squeezes
her hand back. “I know. Me too.”

  They turn at the same time so that they’re facing each other, and they kiss.

  “Better?” asks Margaret.

  “Much.”

  It all seems right again. The worry about James drifts away. The annoyance at seeing Fletcher in the pub disappears, along with the busyness of the office that waits for them tomorrow and the problem of trying to keep their relationship secret. Now there are just the trees at the window and the warmth of their joined breath.

  They kiss again, deeper and longer.

  “What did you say about it in the end?” asks Enid, pulling away.

  “Say about what?”

  “The marsh gentian.”

  Margaret puts her hands under Enid’s nightgown.

  “I said that it is rare and one would be lucky to find it, but that the rarity makes it more desirable.” Margaret struggles Enid’s nightgown up and over her head. “I said that even though you might not find it if you look, you should look all the same—because if you do find it, there is nothing more beautiful.”

  “Oh, that’s just right,” says Enid. “Darling, that’s just perfect.”

  Arctic Tern

  ROSE REMEMBERS HOW TO NEGOTIATE THE STAIRS so that they make no sound, stepping down them at the edges, avoiding the centre of the treads, where years of weight in the same place have worn the boards thin, causing them to groan and creak in protest when they are breached.

  The front door is trickier. After the key has been turned in the latch, the heavy oak door must be opened by increments to stop it from squeaking. This takes ages, and Rose has to remind herself to be patient and not rush the job and ruin the chances of her escape.

  Outside, the same care must be taken to close the door, but outside she can already feel her freedom and this task is not so freighted with worry. She eases the door closed, then presses her thumb down slowly on the latch to bring the massive door snugly back into place against the frame.