The Evening Chorus (11 page)

R
OSE AND
Toby are lying naked on the single bed in his room at the Three Bells. The bed is so narrow that they are forced to lie on top of each other, and since this tends to lead to another round of lovemaking, they have been here hours longer than they intended.

Rose has seen the window shimmer with dusk and then close to darkness. She knows it is late, but she doesn’t dare ask Toby the time, even though his watch ticks right against her ear. She is horribly worried and doesn’t care at all, both feelings happening simultaneously. She can’t remember being this much in love with James, but she must have been. Why would she have married him otherwise?

It’s all so confusing, and mostly what Rose wants in this moment is simply to kiss Toby again, to brush her hand across his face, to nestle into the hollow between his neck and collarbone (for she is lying on top this time).

“I can’t go,” she says, “and yet I feel dreadful that Enid is waiting up at the cottage for me. I wasn’t very nice to her today. And she is James’s sister. It’s not her fault that her flat was bombed.”

“Who are you trying to convince?” asks Toby, running his hand over Rose’s bare back.

“Myself, I guess.”

“And to what purpose?”

“So that I’ll like her more than I do. So that I won’t feel so guilty about not liking her.”

“Ah. Here’s a question: Does it matter whether you like her or not?”

“No, I suppose not.” Rose pushes up from his chest so that she can look into his blue eyes. “And truthfully, I don’t really think she likes me much either.”

“There you go, then. Mutual loathing. Nothing like it.” Toby smiles and Rose thinks that he is much more handsome than James, and though she shouldn’t care about something as petty as this, she enjoys making the comparison anyway.

Toby walks Rose home, up Ashdown Road in the dark, right to the edge of the path to her cottage. She won’t let him come any farther in case Enid has retired upstairs and sees them in the back garden.

They stand at the edge of the path, kissing in the shadows of the trees, not wanting to break apart.

“I should go,” says Toby.

“Yes,” agrees Rose. “You should go.” But this announcement just makes them cling more tightly together.

Something knocks into Rose and she squeals loudly enough for Toby to clamp a hand over her mouth. It’s the dogs, back from their day on the forest, banging exuberantly against her legs. They are ecstatic at finding Rose in the darkness, so close to the cottage where the horsemeat is kept and where there is a warm blanket in the sitting room to lie on and rest their tired bones.

“They’ve got something,” says Toby. The dogs are tugging at opposite ends of what looks like a coat sleeve. He bends down, pries Harris’s jaws open, and dangles the item in front of Rose. “Looks like they’ve caught a rabbit.” The carcass of the animal hangs from his fingers; all that’s left is the skin and the four paws.

“Horrid dogs,” says Rose. “They’re very good hunters, I’m afraid. Don’t throw it away. They’ll just go after it again.”

Toby slings the rabbit skin over his shoulder, like a poacher. “I’ll dispose of it on my way back to the pub,” he says. “Better get those hellions indoors before they kill something else.” He gives Rose a quick kiss and turns to make his way back down the road.

The dogs crowd against Rose, not minding that their prize has been taken away, glad to have found her instead. She pats their flanks, scratches the tops of their heads. “Come on, you horrible dogs,” she says. “Let’s go home.”

Thankfully Enid is in bed when Rose gets in. There’s nothing to eat, and she forgot to go to the shops, even though that had been her excuse for leaving the cottage. She breaks off a hunk of cheese from the block in the larder and eats it standing in the middle of the kitchen. I’m turning into an animal, she thinks, but the thought doesn’t really displease her.

She leaves the dogs in the cottage when she goes back out a half hour later on patrol. It seems that Clementine means to stay the night. She has made no move to leave, and Rose doesn’t bother trying to make her go. If she stays it means the dogs will remain downstairs and she won’t have to share her bed with Harris.

It’s dark and cold and she’s tired. Love is exhausting, or perhaps it’s the lack of food. In any case, she’d rather be home than marching through the streets of Forest Row, looking for slivers of light leaking from the darkened houses.

Mercifully, people are obedient tonight and there are only a few transgressors. But of course, when she gets to Mrs. Stuart’s house the lights are all blazing and not a single curtain is drawn.

Rose sighs, opens the gate, walks up the path, bangs on the front door. No response. She bangs again. Usually Mrs. Stuart is waiting right behind the door, eager to entice Rose inside with some flimsy excuse for company. So it’s strange that the old woman doesn’t answer. Rose bangs on the door for a third time. Nothing. She jumps off the stoop and down into the front garden, treading on a flower bed so she can peer through the sitting-room window.

There, lying on her back on the carpet, one leg twisted under her at an odd angle, is Mrs. Stuart. She’s wearing an apron. Her spectacles, which must have come off her face when she fell, are lying by the fire.

Rose raps on the window with her fist. She calls Mrs. Stuart’s name. There’s no response. She rushes round to the back garden and tries the kitchen door. It’s locked. All the windows are shut fast.

No one answers next door when Rose knocks there. It’s late. Everyone must be in bed by now; the whole street is dark and silent. She stands for an indecisive moment in the road, not knowing what to do. Her cottage isn’t far. She can rush home, grab something to break a window, and come back to Mrs. Stuart’s house, all within minutes. And she’ll bring Enid with her for support. Enid’s been through an emergency. She’ll be helpful. She’ll know what to do.

E
NID WAKES
up to her name being called, often and urgently. She struggles upright and stumbles out to the top of the stairs. Rose is halfway up the staircase, still shouting for her.

“What is it?” Enid says, hurrying down. “What’s the matter?”

“Mrs. Stuart’s collapsed. I need you to help me break into her house.”

Enid looks at her sister-in-law. “Why are you wearing a helmet?”

“I’m in the ARP. Why are you fully dressed?”

“It’s very damp in your house, if you haven’t noticed.” Enid grabs Rose’s arm and they hurry through the kitchen to the back door. “To stay warm, I went to sleep in all my clothes.”

The dogs, woken by the excitement, try to follow them, but Rose slams the door before they can muscle through. She whips open the shed and grabs a shovel. As they rush past the chicken coop, she realizes, with a pang of guilt, that she’s forgotten to feed the hens.

They hurtle down the road in the dark. It’s only been ten minutes, maybe fifteen, since Rose left Mrs. Stuart’s house, and nothing has changed. She rushes towards the sitting-room window. Mrs. Stuart still lies motionless on the carpet. Rose raises the shovel, but Enid puts a hand on her arm.

“No, don’t. It will be expensive for her to fix. Here. Let me.” She takes the shovel from Rose and, hopping nimbly onto the stoop, breaks the small window that flanks the door, then reaches in and turns the bolt. She opens the door for Rose.

In the sitting room it’s Enid who’s all business. She bends over Mrs. Stuart, lifting her wrist to feel for a pulse.

“Call an ambulance,” she says to Rose. “There’s a pulse. He’s alive.”

Rose finds the telephone in the hallway by the kitchen. When she returns to the sitting room, Enid is still crouched beside Mrs. Stuart, holding on to her wrist.

“They’re on their way,” says Rose.

Enid doesn’t look up. “His pulse is too rapid,” she says. “I think he may be in shock.”

The ambulance comes. The men with their boots on seem huge and ungainly in Mrs. Stuart’s fussy front room. They haul her onto a stretcher, and at the sudden movement, she comes to, starts groaning.

“What’s the matter with her?” asks Rose.

The taller ambulance attendant shrugs his shoulders. “Stroke,” he says. “Heart attack. You never know with the old dears. It could be anything. Their bodies are bombs, waiting to go off.”

Mrs. Stuart is loaded into the ambulance. Enid goes over to talk to the attendants as Rose is turning out the lights in the house and drawing the curtains. When Rose comes back outside, the ambulance is gone and Enid is standing on the stoop, smoking a cigarette.

“We’ll have to call someone,” says Enid.

“She has children. I’ll go and look for her handbag.” Rose hesitates by the front door. “I didn’t know you smoked,” she says.

Enid exhales. “I stopped months ago. Cadged one off the ambulance driver. It felt like a good night to start up again.”

“You were very professional in there,” says Rose. “Thank you.” She has her hand on the doorknob but takes it off again. “But why did you keep calling Mrs. Stuart a he?”

“I did that?” Enid draws on her cigarette, exhales. “I didn’t know I was doing that.”

She tries to concentrate on the smoke rising up into the darkness, on the glowing tip of her cigarette, but it’s too late. Her mind is filling with images. There’s the man’s shoe, upright in the debris, a whole room away from where Oliver lies crushed under the ceiling beams.

“How is it possible,” she says, “for a shoe to come off a foot and the laces still to be tied?”

“What?”

Enid leans against the door. “How is it possible?” she says again.

“Are you all right?” asks Rose.

“No, I don’t think I am.”

“Here, come and sit down.”

Rose leads Enid to the edge of the stoop. They sit down, Enid leaning her body into Rose the way Harris sometimes does when there’s a thunderstorm. When Enid starts to cry, Rose puts her arm around her. They sit like that for several minutes, not speaking. The night around them is silent, and they become absorbed into that silence.

Then an owl hoots from a nearby tree.

There’s the slam of a door down the road. The clink of milk bottles being set out on a front step.

Enid wipes her eyes with her coat sleeve. “I had a lover,” she says. “Oliver. He died in my flat the night it was bombed.”

“Oh, god,” says Rose.

“It gets worse. He was my boss. My married boss. No one knew of our affair, and when he died, it all became public. I had to leave my job, flee London. I’m a fugitive, Rose. I came here to hide out.”

Rose squeezes Enid’s shoulder. “You’re safe with me,” she says. “You can be a fugitive here as long as you like. The forest is a very good place to hide out. Look how well it shelters all the animals that live on it.”

Enid laughs. “Am I an animal, then? A rabbit shivering in its burrow?”

“I think of you as something a little more predatory than that,” says Rose, which makes Enid laugh again.

“S
HE’S NO
different from you, then,” says Toby, when Rose tells him the story of Enid and her married lover.

“You’re not married.”

“But you are.” Toby props himself up on his elbow. “Rose, what are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

They’re lying on the floor of the sitting room in Rose’s cottage. Enid has gone out for the day. She’s taken a packed lunch and has said she won’t be back until dark. The moment she left, Rose ran down to the Three Bells to fetch Toby. They’ve spent the morning in bed, and now they’re downstairs, on the pretext of eating, but they haven’t made it as far as the kitchen yet.

“What are you going to do about James?”

“Can’t we just go on like this?” Rose asks. “It’s not as though he’s coming home any time soon.”

“Yes, but I’ll be going. And I want to go into the war with some reassurance that you’re mine.”

“I am yours.”

“Not as long as you’re married to another man.”

It seems to Rose that this is how she was persuaded to marry James—the threat of his disappearance into the war. But the truth is that she feels more certain about her feelings for Toby than she did her feelings for James. And in this moment, it seems an easy thing to give Toby Halliday what he wants.

“I’ll write to him,” she says, “and ask for a divorce.”

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’ll never love anyone the way I love you, Rose. I want to marry you. I want to travel the world with you.”

Toby is set to take over his father’s tea-importing business when the war is over. He will work in a small office in London, and it is unlikely that they will be able to travel the world, but Rose doesn’t say anything to dissuade him. She likes his passion for her, and she likes how that passion expands to include everything around him. They are evenly matched—the same age, the same excited feelings for each other. If Toby is willing to believe that they will have a life of adventure together, then Rose is willing to believe it too. She will go where he goes because she wants only to be with him, and it doesn’t matter to her where they live.

They make love again. Then Rose goes into the kitchen to get Toby a cup of tea before he has to leave for the pub. The dogs, gone since breakfast, are at the back door when she puts the kettle on the hob. She lets them in and they bound into the cottage to greet Toby. When Rose comes back with the tea, he’s wrestling with both dogs on the sitting room floor.

“Careful,” she says. “They’re demanding when they love you.”

Toby has Harris in a headlock. She squirms free and he grabs her again. “I like dogs,” he says. His face is red from the exertion of wrestling. He grins at Rose. He looks happy, she thinks, setting the tea tray down on the coal box. Today I have made one man happy, and tomorrow I will set about making another very unhappy.

E
NID IS UP ON THE HEATH BY NINE IN THE MORNING
with her specimen bag and her books. She has been at this for several days now and has a system worked out. Using a detailed map she found in one of her brother’s reference books, she focuses on a particular area of the forest one day, a different area the next. She picks samples of flowers and ferns, writes down in her notebook the names of any animals she sees. At one o’clock she breaks for lunch, spreads her mackintosh on the ground, and unwraps her sandwiches or peels a hard-boiled egg. At two she is back on task again. At four she is hurrying across the heath, home to Sycamore Cottage.