Evening Chorus (9780544352971)

by Humphreys, Helen

  It’s fifteen steps down the stone path to the gate. The gate also makes a noise when it is swung open, so Rose climbs it instead, dropping down soundlessly on the other side. Then there’s just the road to cross and the ditch to navigate and she is up onto the forest.

  This is when she misses the dogs the most, these first few steps onto the heath. She can almost see the blurred shapes of Harris and Clementine as they race away from her, ecstatic in the hull of morning, pounding their exuberant bodies to vapour.

  But the dogs are dead. First Clementine, hit by a motor car one early morning four years ago, and then Harris, just last winter from cancer. Rose buried Harris on a small rise just outside Sycamore Cottage. Most mornings she goes and stands on the rise, watches the sun climb out of the hollows where it has slept all night. But this morning there isn’t enough time to walk the distance across the top of the forest to the cottage where she used to live. This morning she goes instead to the patch of ground where the plane went down, where Toby Halliday was killed.

  She had come up here as soon as she was allowed after the crash, when the site was no longer being guarded, when the bodies and the charred wreckage of the plane had been removed. She came to the place where Toby had died and she lay down in the crater caused by the crash, on the scorched earth, looking up at the sky and the tops of the distant birches. And even though the officials had scoured the ground for clues about the crash, digging down into the crater, Rose was still able to find a few items they had missed. She found the buckle end of a flight harness, most of it buried in the earth at the centre of the blackened grass. She found a brass button from an RAF flight jacket. And most disturbingly of all, she found a tooth, a front tooth, lying in a small depression by some stones.

  Rose keeps the brass button around her neck on a chain, tucked down the front of her dress so that no one will see it. The oils and heat from her skin keep it shiny and polished. She keeps the burned buckle from the flight harness inside one of a pair of old shoes at the back of her wardrobe. The tooth she keeps wrapped in a handkerchief in the top drawer of her bureau.

  There were six men who died in that plane crash, and Rose knows, logically, that probably none of the items belonged to Toby Halliday, and certainly not all three. But she has told herself over the years that the buckle, the button, and the tooth all came from him. Because aside from the rabbit’s foot that the dogs took from his corpse, Rose has nothing left of her lover. Toby’s possessions and his body were sent to the family. Rose had no legal right to anything of his, and so she is left with nothing.

  The blackened grass has grown back green. The pit in the ground gouged out by the impact of the plane has filled in with bracken and wildflowers. None of the bodies of the airmen were buried at the site, but the village erected a marker to commemorate the crash. It resembles a tombstone and has the men’s names etched on its grey granite face and the date they perished. It was placed at the edge of the crash site, and now that there is nothing left to distinguish the site, it looks orphaned, sitting in the middle of the tufted grass in the vast expanse of heath that is the Ashdown Forest.

  Rose sits down with her back against the stone, draws her knees up to her chin. In the days after the accident, she would come up here and lie on the black grass and cry. When the monument was erected, she would sit as she is sitting now, with her back against the stone, sobbing. But it’s been ten long years and all emotion has been spent. What she has now are the rituals associated with those old feelings, and there is still some comfort to be found from bending her body to those rituals.

  It was decided that the crash was caused by engine failure and the subsequent loss of control of the aircraft. The last radio contact suggested that the plane was headed for the airfield at Penshurst to make an emergency landing, but the crew members clearly had to ditch it before they could reach there. None of the airmen were from the area, so Rose knows that it must have been Toby’s idea to land on the forest. There is a measure of solace in this, in thinking that Toby tried to keep his promise and return to her.

  The stone is hard against Rose’s back. There is dew coating each blade of grass in front of her, misting the bases of the trees in the distance.

  Already she has been away from the house longer than she meant to, but she feels too weary to stir herself. Again, she thinks of the dogs and longs for the way they leapt and bounded across the heath, recalls how movement for them was always joyful, full of purpose.

  And just as Rose’s body remembers her rituals of grieving, it remembers her attachment to the dogs, and she whistles for them without thinking, the sound dying away slowly, like the cry of a mournful, solitary bird.

  BACK AT the house there is no creeping about to avoid detection. Constance is up and in full sail, sitting down to breakfast alone in the dining room.

  “Where were you?” she asks as Rose tries to tiptoe past and escape back up the staircase.

  “I went for a walk.”

  “There was no one here to boil my egg.”

  From the hallway outside the dining room, Rose can see that Constance has a boiled egg in front of her on her plate.

  “I had to do it myself,” says Constance, finishing Rose’s thought.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why do you need to go out for a walk anyway? You don’t have that wretched dog anymore.” Constance takes a slice of toast from the silver rack in front of her. “There’s no reason for you to leave the house before I’m up.”

  “No. I suppose there isn’t.” Rose has given up arguing with her mother. She has found it easier just to agree with whatever Constance says. When she first moved in with her, after her father died suddenly of a heart attack, she had tried to defend herself from every accusation. But it was more wearing to argue back than it was simply to accept what was being said. And ultimately, all arguments reached the place where Rose couldn’t argue back—the place where her mother reminded her that she had been taken in because she was a divorced woman and could no longer support herself. This was a place of shame for Rose, and she wanted to avoid going to it whenever possible.

  “Is there anything you need me to fetch from the shops for you today?” she asks.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact there is.” Constance pushes aside her plate with the half-eaten egg and untouched piece of toast. An entire other adult could be fed with what Constance neglects to eat at each meal.

  “What’s that, then?”

  “I need you to go into East Grinstead and buy me some new undergarments.”

  “Underpants?”

  “Yes.”

  Oh, the unfairness of it all, thinks Rose, going into the dining room to clear her mother’s plate—having to live in her parents’ home again, as powerless and timid as the child she used to be.

  IT’S EARLY closing, so East Grinstead is busier than usual when Rose steps off the bus into the high street. She delays purchasing the underpants, a small act of rebellion witnessed by no one and therefore pointless, and instead goes into the grocer to get some jam and chocolate biscuits for tea. The rationing has recently been lifted on chocolate biscuits, so Rose buys them every chance she gets. The war has been over for five years now, and yet there is still rationing for tea, sugar, meat, cheese, and sweets. Soap rations were recently lifted too, but it could still be years before all the rationing ends.

  After rationing comes hoarding, and there are barely any packets of chocolate biscuits left in the shop. Rose has to make do with a single packet that she finds behind some tins, where it must have rolled in the grab and snatch of the mob that had emptied the biscuit aisle before she got there.

  “Mrs. Hunter?” Rose looks up to see a man in a jumper and tweed jacket, his wavy brown hair escaping in tendrils from under a cap.

  It has been so long since she was called by that name that it takes her a moment to realize the man is addressing her.

  “Yes?”

  “Gregory Spencer. You bought a dog once from my father. The sister of his d
og, Clementine, I believe.”

  “Oh, yes.” Rose doesn’t remember Gregory.

  “We never met,” says Gregory, noticing her puzzled expression. “Not properly. I was away in Africa for the war, but I remember you from the village when we were children.”

  “How is your father?”

  “Older. Less able. I’m back on the farm helping him these days.” Gregory takes off his cap, runs a beefy hand through his hair. “He told me that your dog died?”

  “Cancer,” says Rose. “She died last Christmas. I still miss her so much.”

  “Well, Clementine’s granddaughter has had a litter and there are some puppies left. You should come by and pick yourself one. There are some real beauties.”

  “I couldn’t,” says Rose, thinking of her mother’s house and how any dog brought there would be left chained up in the garden for its whole miserable existence.

  “Sorry to hear that.” Gregory moves off a few paces, and then comes back. “Isn’t it a sad thing,” he says, “that in a full human life, we will have only five or six dogs? It doesn’t seem enough, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “And that’s if you have them one after the other.” Gregory puts his hat back on, touches the brim with his finger. “If you change your mind, Mrs. Hunter, come and see us.”

  “I will. I mean, I won’t. But thank you, Mr. Spencer.”

  “Gregory.”

  “Rose.”

  He walks away, and Rose has a moment of thinking how odd it was for them to use their first names at the end of their conversation rather than the beginning, as though they were just meeting.

  Six pairs of high-waisted, extra-elasticized beige underpants later and Rose boards the bus just before the shops shut at lunch. She gets off in Forest Row, at the bottom of Ashdown Road, and walks up towards the edge of the forest.

  Sycamore Cottage is closed up now. It hasn’t been rented since Rose moved out. The windows are shuttered and the garden has grown wild. She tries the kitchen door, out of long-ago habit, but of course it is locked tight against intruders.

  The mound where Harris is buried commands both a view of the forest and a view of the cottage. It has been dug recently enough that no grass has grown back on top of it. Rose stands on the small muddy hillock, looking first at Sycamore Cottage and then out over the expanse of heath at Broadstone Warren.

  “It continues to be awful,” she says to her dead dog in the ground beneath her feet. “More hellish every day. I wish you hadn’t gone and left me to it.” Who would have thought that she would long for the war years, that they would be the height of happiness for her? It was ridiculous, really, when so many families wanted to forget the horror of that time. Yet here Rose was, trying to call it back every day, because it contained all the moments of pleasure that she would likely ever have.

  OF COURSE she’s late for tea, without even knowing what time it is when she returns. But if she hadn’t been late for tea, then she would have trekked mud into the house, or forgotten to buy something at the shops, or worn the wrong colour skirt. Rose is convinced that her mother has a chart where she checks off her daughter’s trespasses, of which there are an ever-increasing number daily.

  “I nicked the last packet of biscuits,” Rose says, carrying a plate liberally covered with them into the sitting room, where her mother is ramrod straight in her wing chair by the fire, reading the newspaper.

  “Chocolate biscuits,” says Rose, and at that, Constance puts down her paper and takes one of the biscuits, nibbling round the edges like a mouse.

  “You need a job,” she says suddenly. “If you have no marriage prospects, then you should be put to work.”

  “There are no jobs for women these days,” says Rose. “And I’m not really qualified for anything.”

  “Well”—Constance puts her half-eaten biscuit back on the plate with the uneaten ones—“you can’t expect me to keep you forever. You’ll have to think of something to do.”

  CONSTANCE KEEPS her bedroom door closed, and there is usually no reason for Rose to enter her mother’s room. But today she goes in there to put away the underpants she purchased in East Grinstead. She carefully folds them into the top drawer of her mother’s bureau and turns to leave, not wanting to linger in the room any longer than she has to. She sees it out of the corner of her eye, the photo on the table by her mother’s bed. For all the years she can remember, there has always been a photograph there of her father as a young man, leaning on a stile near a wood, hatless, sleeves rolled up, the knot of his tie loose. In that photograph his head is thrown slightly back, as though the picture was taken while he was laughing.

  That photograph is gone. In its place—in the same frame, even—is a picture of a young man in a hat and greatcoat. William, Constance’s first husband, dressed for the first war, just married and looking like a child.

  THAT NIGHT, Rose sits on the edge of her bed, fully dressed. She doesn’t have a light on and her curtains are pulled expertly across the windows, so there’s no leakage from outside.

  Nights are the worst. In the daytime, Rose can busy herself with all the trivial tasks of existence, but at night there is less to do and she is left alone with her thoughts, none of which offer her any mercy.

  Who knows what she feels anymore? It’s all so long ago, and yet she’s held there, unmoving, playing everything over and over in her mind.

  James did love her after all. She should have waited for him, should never have written to him asking for a divorce. They could be living happily together right now. James’s book was a success. He would find it easy to get a position, and often there was a house that went with an observatory. Rose and the children would make that house their own.

  Or, Toby didn’t die in the aeroplane crash, didn’t even crash, but survived the war and came back to Rose, as they had hoped he would. They would marry after Rose’s divorce came through and travel together, living a life of adventure and pleasure, moving from one exciting place to another.

  The emotions are gone. Rose is left with the facts, the husk of her life’s experience, not the kernel of feeling that exists at the centre of it all.

  The truth is that you do forget people. When you conjure them up, long after they have gone, you can’t recall the essence of them, just the outline.

  Rose loved James and betrayed him. Or, Rose never loved James and finally found the right man in Toby, only to have him die. Either way, it ends badly for Rose. In the first story she is guilty. In the second she is heartbroken.

  Rose extracts the brass uniform button from between her breasts. It is warm from lying against her skin. She holds it to her lips, lets it fall back down the front of her dress.

  She moves through the familiar dark of the bedroom—this room that was hers as a child and still has the same sparse furniture—and slides open the top drawer of her bureau. She carefully unwraps the handkerchief that holds the tooth, and then, just as carefully, slips the tooth into her mouth, feeling the cold clink of it against her own teeth, the smooth square of enamel lozenge lying on her tongue, the small weight of it like a word just before it’s said.

  ROSE REMEMBERS the way, even though it’s been years since she was last there. She leaves her mother’s house the next morning on the pretext of going to the village, but she walks instead across the heath, then along the road and up the muddy farm lane.

  There’s no answer at the front door. She walks round the side of the house, towards the barn, and finds Gregory out near the chicken coop.

  “Hello there.” He looks up from his task of spreading feed over the ground in front of the enclosure. “Changed your mind, then?”

  “Yes. No. I can’t have one, but I thought I’d come and take a look at them anyway.” Rose leans on the fence, watching the chickens peck at the feed. “I used to have chickens. During the war.”

  “Stupid creatures really.” Gregory shakes out the last of the tin pail, opens the gate, and comes over to where Rose is standin
g.

  “I didn’t mind them,” says Rose. “Their needs were simple, easy to meet.”

  Gregory puts the metal pail on the ground, wipes his hands on his coveralls. “Come on, then,” he says. “Let’s take you to see those pups.”

  The dogs are in a horse stall in the barn. Four white puppies with brindle markings. They are curled up with their mother in the straw when Rose and Gregory first get to them, but they immediately wake up when they hear the human voices.

  Gregory opens the half door on the stall, and he and Rose step inside. The puppies try to climb up their legs. Rose kneels down and lets them clamber over her. Their joyful energy makes her feel like crying.

  “They’re all bitches,” says Gregory, bending down to pick one up and let it lick his face. “There were seven pups altogether. The others have gone.”

  “They’re adorable.”

  “I’m going to keep one for myself, but the rest need to find homes. Soon. They’re getting too old to leave contained, and they wreak havoc in the barn if I let them out. Yesterday they knocked over the milking pail and drank all the milk.” Gregory hands the puppy he’s been holding to Rose. “Wouldn’t you reconsider, Mrs. Hunter?”

  “I can’t,” says Rose, but she tucks the puppy under her chin, inhaling the sweet puppy smell on the top of its head. “And I’m not Mrs. Hunter anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “No, no. James didn’t die,” says Rose. “I divorced him. He was a prisoner in Germany for the entire war, and I didn’t wait for him to return. Now I live with my mother because I can’t afford to be on my own. She despises dogs and won’t allow them in the house. Poor Harris had to spend her last years out of doors. I couldn’t do that to another dog.” She hands the puppy back to Gregory. “I’m sorry.” She feels a little emotional at having said so much, blames it on the wriggling high spirits of the puppies shaking something loose in her.