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Evening Chorus (9780544352971)

Page 16

by Humphreys, Helen


  Gregory places the puppy gently on the floor of the horse stall. He straightens up, touches Rose lightly on the shoulder. “Come in and say hello to Dad,” he says. “He would like the chance to see you while you’re here.”

  ROSE WALKS back across the forest. It’s a dull day, the clouds low and threatening, wind bending the grasses. She bought some eggs from the Spencers, but it is not the same as having been to the shops in the village, and she will no doubt be caught out in her lie. It is so strange to be thrust backwards in her life, back to when she was a child, trying to hide what she was doing from her mother’s critical bullying.

  There’s a movement up ahead in the bracken. A fox, standing still and sniffing the air in the direction of Rose’s approach. She stops and they regard each other.

  And then, out of the sky a bird appears, shrieking above her head. Rose is used to gulls, blown inland from the sea and wheeling across the heath. But there is something in the shape of this bird that is wrong. Its body is slender as a dart. Its beak is bright orange. And its behaviour is not exactly gull-like. True, it is as angry as any gull, but usually a gull’s anger is not attached to anyone, but rather is just a general complaint—at finding itself too far inland, at realizing it has to fight the wind to get back to the shore and any hope of food. Gulls are irritable, squawking to voice that irritation to everything around them.

  But this bird is directly upset with Rose. It dives towards her, stalls just feet from her head, back-paddling up into the sky, wings and tail spread, screaming. At first Rose thinks the fox has disturbed it, but the bird takes no notice of the fox. All its attention is focused on Rose. She wonders if she has wandered near its nest, but gulls are shorebirds. They won’t have a nest out in the middle of an open field. They make their nests on the ledges of cliffs or on rocky islands offshore, where they will be free from predators. She knows this much from having been briefly married to someone who liked to study birds.

  The bird dives at Rose once more, pulls back just in the nick of time, dives at her again. She covers her head with her arms, dropping the box of eggs in the process. The fox, unconcerned with the attack by the bird, sits on its haunches twenty yards ahead, waiting for Rose to move off so it can have at the broken eggs.

  The bird is so angry, but Rose can’t think what she has done to merit this anger. She stumbles across the field with the bird diving repeatedly at her head, only circling up and away once she reaches the road.

  Back at the house she looks it up in the bird guide, a present to her father from James. It seems to be an Arctic tern—a bird that migrates between the Arctic and Antarctic, a distance travelled of over twenty thousand miles each year. It has the farthest migration of any bird; the Arctic tern essentially lives in the air.

  Suddenly the behaviour of the bird makes sense to Rose. It might have no real experience of people, flying between such remote locations that when it does touch down, it does so in empty landscapes. It could be that she was the first human the bird had ever seen, and while it could recognize the fox as being from its world, clearly Rose was not seen as a creature of the earth. There is nothing natural about a human being, thinks Rose, even though we pretend, all the time, that this isn’t the case at all.

  THERE ARE a lot of rules for Rose, living in her mother’s house. She is sure there are more restrictions than the first time she lived here, but she has no choice except to obey.

  Bathing is allowed only once a week, and only at night, never in the afternoon. All lights must be out by ten o’clock. If Rose is reading and a light shows under her door, her mother will rap on the door from the hallway until the light is switched off. No music from the wireless, and no singing. Listening to the evening news is permitted, but the wireless is turned off after the broadcast is over. No mud in the house. No eating between meals. No tears.

  The list goes on and on. Rose can’t even remember all the rules, but she’s learned to fit herself into the spaces around them. At night, if she can’t sleep, she opens her window wide and sits on the sill, her legs dangling down over the bricks. She likes the feel of the night air on her skin, the soft sound of the owls in the pines at the back of the garden. For her weekly bath, she fills the tub right up to the brim and stays in it for as long as possible. She never sings in the house, but she sings outside, at full volume, when she is crossing the heath. She cries all the time.

  Tonight Rose begs off listening to the news with her mother, saying that she has to write a letter to an old friend, and she goes to her bedroom and closes the door.

  There is no letter. There are no friends. Rose lost touch with most of her schoolmates when she married James. And afterwards . . . well, even though she and Toby were careful, it seems the story of their affair had leaked out somehow, and by the time Rose divorced, the sentiment against her was such that it would have been hard to make a friend of anyone in the village.

  Mostly she doesn’t care. Mostly she would just prefer to have Harris back, to have dog company over human company.

  But tonight, sitting in her room, watching the sky darken slowly outside her window, she thinks of Gregory Spencer, of his kindness at not commenting on her confession, of his easy manner, and she wishes she could go and see him again. But there is no reason to go back to the farm. She can’t have a dog, and it would be painful to see the puppies again and know that she couldn’t tuck one under her arm and bring it home with her.

  Rose goes over to the window and opens it, leans her body across the sill, looking down into the back garden. She used to do this as a child, calling out to her father while he raked the leaves or dug the beds. He would always stop what he was doing and wave to her, sometimes doffing his cap in her direction.

  She misses her father, misses the alliance she shared with him against Constance, but she also doesn’t blame him for dying, and she always knew he would go first. His bluff and banter was no match for the steely freight of his wife. The strong don’t necessarily survive, but the mean invariably do.

  He would have been interested in the Arctic tern over the heath today. He would have laughed at the outrage of the bird on encountering a person for the first time. Frederick, like his daughter, made no secret of preferring the natural world to the human one.

  There was a lot of her father in Toby, thinks Rose. They were similarly easygoing. And now they are similarly dead. She hauls her body back over the sill and closes the window.

  HE COMES to the front door in the morning, after breakfast, when Constance is upstairs dressing for her biweekly bridge game with the retired colonel, his wife, and her widowed sister. Rose is in the kitchen doing the washing-up. The window above the sink faces out onto the front garden, so she sees him coming up the path and intercepts him before he has a chance to knock on the door and alert Constance.

  Rose steers Gregory back down the path, through the gate, and out onto the road in front of the house.

  “Sorry,” she says, “but my mother will come down if she sees you.”

  “And that would be bad?”

  “Terrible.” Rose manoeuvres Gregory behind the big yew hedge that borders the garden, where she knows they can’t be spotted from the house. “My mother is not like your father. She’s not a nice person.”

  Yesterday, old Mr. Spencer had made Rose switch chairs with him in the parlour so that she could enjoy the view out the window over the fields while she sipped her tea.

  Gregory takes off his cap. Rose can see that his hands have been scrubbed clean. The dirt that was under his nails yesterday is gone.

  “I came to say two things to you,” he says, looking her square in the eyes. “The first is that I was engaged to be married when I left to fight overseas, but my girl didn’t wait for me to come back. She left me while I was away, sent a letter to me in Africa to say that she was breaking off the engagement.”

  Rose feels her heart sink. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “No. Don’t be. I was gone five years. That’s too long a time to wait for
someone. To remain faithful to me, she would have had to stop living her life.” Gregory worries the brim of his hat between his fingers. “Why, if I loved her, would I want her to do that for me?”

  “But weren’t you heartbroken?”

  “For a time. Yes. But I understood and so I forgave her. I didn’t hold it against her.”

  Rose can feel the tears start in her eyes, tries to blink them away. “What’s the second thing?” she asks.

  Gregory Spencer smiles. He has crooked front teeth and lots of lines around his eyes that suggest he’s used to smiling.

  “I wanted to say that if you’ve had a dog, then you should have another. If you’ve had a dog, then it’s hard to do without one.”

  “But I can’t have a dog. I’ve already said that.”

  “You can’t have a dog here. You could, however, keep the dog at my farm and come and see it whenever you want, until your situation changes and you are able to have it with you all the time.”

  “But I don’t see my situation ever changing.”

  “All situations change,” Gregory says. “We’ve both learned that, haven’t we?”

  Rose lets the tears roll down her cheeks, doesn’t try to wipe them away. She doesn’t know what upsets her more, the kindness she’s being shown or the lack of it she’s lived with for so long. She leans in towards Gregory Spencer, buries her face in the shoulder of his coat. He puts his arms around her and gives her a squeeze.

  “Come now,” he says. “No need for tears. It’s a happy occasion, not a sad one. Fetch your coat and let’s go and pick you out a new dog.”

  Cedar Waxwing

  CHRISTOPH WALKS ACROSS THE QUADRANGLE TO his office. His boot heels ring on the stones, the strike of each foot echoing through the courtyard.

  There are three flights of stairs to climb, with a rest on each landing before continuing. At each rest he leans against the banister, looking out the small stairway window, measuring his progress by the diminishing square of stone and trees below.

  It’s been almost a week since he was in his office, and there is a stack of mail for him in the mailbox near the department secretary’s desk. He takes the letters and packages, not bothering to look at them, and drops them on the edge of his desk when he gets inside his office.

  Christoph removes his coat and hangs it on the rack by the door, tucks his briefcase beside the desk on the floor. He opens the shutters on the window. He sits down.

  Most of the letters are unremarkable—colleagues asking for favours, publishers trying to entice him to buy a particular book—but there is one small package whose postmark is unfamiliar. He turns it over in his hands, examining the cramped script on the brown paper, the foreign stamp. Finally he slits the sealed flap with his letter opener, extracts a folded piece of paper, and reads the single page.

  Dear Kommandant,

  It seems strange to address you using that term, but since that is the only way I knew you, I would find another form of address even more difficult.

  I pray that this letter finds you. I remember that you worked at the university in Berlin and so have sent this parcel there, hoping that, if you survived the war, you will have resumed your duties in the classics department.

  I am writing to you because for years I have thought of that day when you took me from the camp with a mixture of confusion and terror. You may remember that I believed you were removing me from the camp to be shot. But this morning, on what will be my last morning, I suddenly saw it all differently because I am no longer afraid, and I wanted to finally thank you for taking me to see the cedar waxwings. I can understand now what an extraordinary act of kindness it was, and I am grateful. Kindness should never go unacknowledged. I am enclosing the book I wrote on the redstarts that were around our camp. I hope you will see, when reading it, that I did indeed make a proper study of the birds.

  The waxwings were beautiful, were they not? Chatting and busy in the tops of the pine trees. Such sleek little fellows. Such a soft, pale yellow. I wish we could go and visit them together again now that the war is well over.

  Flight is not the astonishing thing. I have always thought that the miracle of birds is not that they fly, but that they touch down.

  Yours truly,

  James Hunter

  Christoph folds the letter, puts it down on top of his desk, and slides the book from the package. It is a slim volume with a coloured illustration of a redstart on the front and the single word “Redstart” above the bird with James Hunter’s name below.

  Christoph’s hands are shaking. What a strange thing it is to receive this book and letter, for the past to rise up and meet him here.

  He remembers very clearly the day he took James Hunter to see the waxwings.

  It had been unusually cold the night before. His body was stiff from the cold when he awoke. He remembers shaving in the early morning before setting out on his journey to visit a friend who was in command of a smaller prison camp sixty miles distant from his own. He remembers dragging the razor slowly across the stubble on his cheeks, making faces in the mirror to flatten out the planes of his face and avoid any nicks from the blade.

  The mirror was small, which meant that Christoph had to stand a certain distance from it in order to view the whole of his face. This distance was farther than he could see without his glasses, so he wore them for the shave but had to constantly remove them to wipe the steam from the lenses.

  Aging is an annoyance, he had thought at the time. And right after that, War is a young man’s game.

  It seemed unfair to be made to participate in another war at the age of forty-six, an age when he should have been feeling the waning of ambition and enjoying his position at the university. But many soldiers who had distinguished themselves in the first war were appointed to command positions in prisoner-of-war camps. His predicament was not unusual.

  Christoph had driven himself that morning because he liked to have time alone, and there was precious little of that at the camp. He also wanted to feel, just for one day, not like a man in control of two thousand English officers, but like the classics professor he had once been. He wanted to imagine he was living that relatively uncomplicated life again, merely going for a drive, merely visiting a friend.

  The drive out in the morning was slow and peaceful. He arrived at Wilhelm’s camp in time for lunch. They ate and drank well. He had felt relaxed in his friend’s company—more relaxed than he’d been for months. It was a relief to be out of the camp, not to feel the burden of his command pressing down on him every minute of every day as he waited for the war to end and his life to resume its familiar shape.

  Perhaps it was the wine, or perhaps it was the loosening of the clamp he always kept tightened down on his emotions, but halfway through the drive back to his camp, Christoph started to panic. He hadn’t wanted the war, hadn’t welcomed it, was surprised to have been given a command. He wasn’t a member of the Nazi party and was, frankly, afraid of their swagger and cruelty. When SS officers came to perform inspections of his camp, Christoph was always nervous and tried to move them through quickly. He didn’t want them to linger and find any discrepancies with how he ran things. When prisoners escaped, he tried to make sure they were brought back alive. He believed in the Geneva Conventions and upheld their principles. But even so, the war was working its way into his bones.

  The day before, he had been sitting at his desk in his office and had heard what he thought was birdsong. He’d stood up and made his way to the window, just in time to see one of the guards shoot a prisoner through the head while he tended his little garden in front of the bunkhouse. The casualness of the act had shocked Christoph so deeply that he forgot to breathe for a minute or two. The prisoner’s beautiful song had drawn the Kommandant to the window, the same song that had infuriated the guard and driven him to murder. It was yet another example of the difference that existed between Christoph and the men around him.

  He wanted to be out of the war. He missed his wife so acu
tely that he either was overwhelmed by memories of her or couldn’t recall her face. The pain of missing her brought her back in full force or not at all, as though his mind couldn’t decide which would be the easier state for him to bear, and so offered him both at once.

  His friend at lunch was full of bravado, seemed to prefer his new life as Kommandant to his old life as a civil engineer. Christoph did not want that to happen to him. He was finding it hard to get the execution of the gardening prisoner out of his head.

  He pulled the car off the rutted road, stopped the engine, and walked out into the darkening landscape. It was early evening. He trudged over the stiff grass towards a copse of trees at the edge of the road. He walked into the trees, hoping to clear his head of the clamour of his anxious thoughts.

  At first Christoph thought the murmuring of the birds was the wind in the top branches of the trees, but it became louder, more distinct, and when he stopped to listen, when he looked up, he saw the bobbing heads of the cedar waxwings, their slick plumage pale against the dark green of the pines.

  Christoph has always liked birds. When he was a boy he had collected eggs and nests. He would go out in the early mornings to look for different varieties to add to his species list.

  He knew that the cedar waxwing, while native to North America, was rarely seen in Europe. He had seen Bohemian waxwings only once before, when he was that boy who rose early and went out into the world with a notebook and a pair of spyglasses.

  Christoph looked at the birds in the trees. He thought of the prisoner in his camp, Hunter, who had been watching the redstarts down by the river. Hunter had probably never seen a waxwing. The birds were as rare in Britain as they were in Germany. Perhaps Christoph would bring the prisoner here tomorrow to see the cedar waxwings. He would show Hunter that they were not so different as men. The war may have separated them, but their love of nature joined them together. It would be a small but humane gesture, to take a prisoner out of camp for the day, to bring him here to see the birds.

 

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