The Evening Chorus (13 page)

“Have you heard from him? Rose is short on news.” Frederick follows Enid’s example and lights a second cigarette from the fag end of his first.

“No. I’ve had nothing either.” Enid thinks about how the post arrives twice a day in the caged letterbox inside the cottage door. Many days she is the one to collect the post. She can’t remember there being a single letter from James in the weeks she’s been at Sycamore Cottage.

Frederick sighs, and the sigh turns into a long, protracted cough. He sputters to a close, wipes his watery eyes with a handkerchief.

“Funny,” he says.

“What’s funny?”

“Rose never mentions him anymore.”

“W
AS IT
excruciating for you?” asks Rose as they walk back over the heath. The mist has cleared and the forest reveals itself again, the muted colours of the heather and the bracken soothing to the eye.

“Your mother’s awful,” says Enid.

“Yes.” Rose feels guilty for being disloyal. “But my father’s all right.”

“He’s a tattler.”

“She’s hard to live with.”

“But he married her, so he chose his fate.”

Rose is silent for a few moments. Harris sprints past them, Clementine at her heels.

“But when he married her, he didn’t know his fate,” Rose suggests.

“Debatable,” says Enid. “But don’t mind me. You can’t expect me to be a supporter of marriage, can you?”

“No, I suppose not.”

They walk on. Enid notices a bog asphodel and the differences in the two varieties of gorse in their path.

“But when you marry,” says Rose, “you don’t know anything. You don’t know how it will turn out, or what you’ll feel later.”

“Rose.” Enid puts a hand on her arm, stops her. “What’s going on? Why hasn’t James written in so long? Has something happened to him?”

“Why is it James everyone is always so worried about and not me?” Rose shakes off Enid’s arm and bolts down the path, and the dogs, excited by her sudden running, give chase across the field.

When Enid gets back to the cottage, Rose isn’t there but the dogs are. Enid tidies up the dishes and sits on the chesterfield reading.

At midnight Rose still hasn’t returned, so Enid lets the dogs out one final time, switches off the lights in the cottage, and climbs the stairs to bed. In her room, she takes out her pad of writing paper and pen and begins a letter to her brother.

Dear James,

Are you well? I haven’t had a letter from you in ages, and it seems that Rose has not heard from you either.

James, if something has happened, please let me know. I worry about your welfare, even if when I write I pretend that all is well with you, and that everything is as it should be.

T
HERE’S WIND
against the panes again tonight, a whistle and shudder as it roams the trees outside the pub.

Rose squeezes closer to Toby.

“I’m not going home,” she says. “I’m just going to stay the night with you.”

“What about Enid?”

“I don’t care about the pretense anymore. Besides, she’s close to guessing that something’s up. She said as much to me today.”

“Good,” says Toby. “It’s better to have no secrets. Lies are always harder to manage than the truth.”

But in the morning when Rose wakes up, scrunched against the wall of the single bed, her hands numb and her neck aching, she feels terrible for not being home to feed the hens and tend to the dogs, even to have her morning cup of tea with Enid. Once her sister-in-law finds out the truth about Rose, she’ll have no more to do with her, and Rose has liked having Enid around these past weeks, has depended on her company. No, she doesn’t prefer the truth at all. She just wants to continue on with the lie.

The swallows have already left their nest under the eaves for their morning’s work of catching insects. They make passes against the glass, their agile bodies slicing the air, the shapes they make so daring and complicated.

“If our fighter pilots could fly like that, we’d win the war in a fortnight,” says Toby.

“How long have you been awake?”

“Just for a few moments.” He stretches his arms overhead and Rose scoots down beside him, lying across him, feeling the silky patch of blond hair in the centre of his chest against her cheek, not unlike the feeling of lying with her face pressed into Harris.

“I’m worried about what Enid will think,” she says. “What if she waited up for me last night?”

“She probably slept right through. You can sneak back up the road now, and she’ll be none the wiser.”

But Enid is waiting for Rose when she gets home, pacing up and down in the kitchen, furious.

“I imagined all sorts of terrible things,” she says. “You had no right to rush off like that without telling me when you’d be back. How was I to know something awful hadn’t happened to you? And what about your blackout patrol last night? Did you even do that?”

“Oh, no.” Rose had completely forgotten about her blackout watch. She sits down at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I went to stay with a friend for the night.”

“Really, Rose,” says Enid. “Sometimes you behave as though you’re twelve.” And with that, she stomps out of the kitchen. A few moments later, Rose hears the front door slam.

Enid marches across the heath for an hour before her anger wears off. She has neglected to bring her books and bags, but that’s all right. Enid doesn’t feel calm enough to work on her natural history this morning.

Rose is lying to her. There’s probably a man at the bottom of it all. A sordid mess, thinks Enid, her anger fired up again. Poor James. But frankly, it’s the lying that irks her the most. She had warmed to Rose. They had been good companions of late. The lying makes them seem nothing but strangers.

Time to go, thinks Enid. She’ll write to her friend Molly in Bath and see if she can visit there for a few weeks until she gets herself sorted. There’s nothing to be gained from embroiling herself in trouble between her brother and his wife. Nothing to be gained at all.

R
OSE COMES
home the next day to find the cottage quiet and tidy, a short note for her from Enid with a forwarding address in Bath. Upstairs, Enid’s bed is stripped, the eiderdown carefully folded at the foot of the mattress, the sheets in the laundry bin.

Rose sits down on the bed. The afternoon sun angles in the small window, sends a shaft of light across the wooden floorboards. Rose follows the light over the boards to the bureau. There, on top of the bureau, is Enid’s notebook for her natural history. There’s no note to accompany it, but it’s clearly been left rather than forgotten. Rose stands at the bureau turning the pages and reading some of the entries. It is not what she had thought Enid was doing, which was to dryly catalogue and describe the various bits of flora she took from the forest on her morning’s walk. No, Enid’s natural history is not what she’d expected at all.

R
ED
S
QUIRREL
:
Too plentiful to list all locations, but mainly to be seen in the wooded areas of the forest. Native to England. First appeared at the end of the last ice age, some ten thousand
years ago. Can be either right- or left-handed. Once the choice of fur for the nobility, called vair and especially popular as slippers. Cinderella’s lost slipper at the ball was made of vair. The prince knew she was from the same class as him because he also had red squirrel slippers. In the translation from French to English, the word was changed to verre, and the slipper went from squirrel fur to glass.

N
IGHTINGALE
:
I have heard two while I’ve been here. One in the wooded area near the Weald way, and another near Gills Lap. Melodious songbird. Distantly related to the robin. It has been the inspiration for a great deal of poetry and song, most recently the popular tune "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. ” Oliver was fond of that song. He would often sing it to me.

R
ED
A
DMIRAL
B
UTTERFLY
:
Seen all over the heath, particularly in areas where there is an abundance of wildflowers. Named after and known for their "admirable” colours. They are unusual in that they fly at night. Most butterflies are active only in daylight hours. Migratory. Territorial. Not afraid of humans. Short-lived. Some cultures believe them to be the transformation of human souls.

C
OMMON
D
ARTER
:
Spotted over the more boggy areas of the forest. Born under water, but spending their lives in the air. The last dragonfly species to be seen at the end of summer, and still alive well into October. Mate over water. Often used as a way to explain death. The underwater nymph bears no resemblance to the dragonfly it becomes, and exchanges one world for another. It cannot communicate to the other nymphs it left behind because they won’t recognize the new form it has taken.

T
OAD
:
Found in the low-lying boggy areas of the forest, and near the little stream that runs through the Five Hundred Acre Wood. Toads walk rather than hop like frogs. Can live up to forty years. Eat what is dark and in motion. Shed their skin and consume it, rather than simply moving from it as a snake will. They will
instinctively return to the same pond as their ancestors. Here they will hibernate for the winter, emerging each spring as though returning from the land of the dead.

B
ELL
H
EATHER
:
Simply everywhere. This and the bracken were the first plants I saw when I stepped out onto the forest for the first time. Once used to stuff mattresses, because when dried it was not only cushiony but fragrant as well. Also used for animal bedding. The flowers are bellshaped, hence the name.

A
GRIMONY
:
Near the roadside hedgerows. A yellow flower spike that is pretty but followed by a seed casing of burrs. During medieval times, it was thought to be a cure for internal bleeding when combined with pounded frogs. Also used to detect witches, although I’m not sure how. Invasive. Produces a yellow dye. Can be brewed, and when drunk will produce a merciful dreamless sleep.

T
OBY GETS HIS ORDERS AT THE BEGINNING OF
August. Rose tries to be cheerful about it, even though she feels nothing but dread at his leaving. He comes to the cottage on the morning he is to take the train to the air base to join his squadron. There’s barely an hour before the train leaves, not enough time to go upstairs to bed, or even to sit down in the kitchen for a cup of tea. They stand in the downstairs hallway with their arms around each other for most of the hour.

“Promise me you’ll come back,” says Rose.

“I promise.”

“Here. That you’ll come back here, to me.”

“I promise.”

Toby’s suitcase waits by the door. Rose can see it over his shoulder, standing on the mat like a patient dog.

“Shall I walk with you to the station?” she asks.

“No. That would be painful,” says Toby. “I’d like to leave just like any other time I’ve left. I’ll walk down the road and think about walking back up it again. In no time at all.”

“I’ll come to the top of the path with you, then,” she says.

“No. Just walk me to the door.”

They stand at the door for a few moments, leaning against each other. Toby reaches into his pocket.

“This is for you,” he says, handing Rose a small object.

It’s a rabbit’s foot, the severed part where it once attached to the rabbit’s leg wrapped tightly in copper wire.

“I cut it off the rabbit the dogs caught,” says Toby. “Seemed a shame to waste the corpse. It will bring you luck while I’m gone.”

Rose closes her hand around the rabbit’s foot. She can feel the bones in the foot and the little ticky
tack nails of the dead animal as they dig into the flesh on her palm. The foot, dead, feels no different than it would have alive.

She hands it back to him. “You take it. You’ll need the luck more than I will.”

“But I made it for you.”

“Well, make sure I get it back, then.”

“That’s a promise.” Toby drops it into his pocket, kisses her one last time, opens the door, and then is gone.

R
OSE IS
lonely without Toby in the village and Enid in the house. She mopes around with the dogs, forgets to eat or collect the eggs from the hens, and lingers on her patrols at night, watching people in their lighted houses for a long time before cautioning them to close the curtains, as though their lives are a play staged entirely for her benefit.

Toby writes from the air base where he’s been posted, and then again to say he’s being sent out on active duty as a navigator. He tells her not to worry. He tells her that he loves her.

James doesn’t write at all. Rose has never heard from him after she sent him the letter asking for a divorce. James doesn’t write. Enid doesn’t write. Toby writes again to say how much he misses her.

Loneliness is sometimes cured by visiting with people, and sometimes it’s made worse by the same thing. It’s often hard to know what course of action to take, but Rose avoids company in case she will hate it, preferring to slouch around the cottage, moving from one meaningless task to the next.

She sometimes reads Enid’s natural history in the long stretch of evening between supper and ARP patrol. It comforts her and brings Enid’s voice, momentarily, back into Sycamore Cottage.

On an early August morning, Rose is sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea. The door is open because Harris has gone outside and it’s easier when she can come back in herself. Harris and Clementine both have the annoying habit of sitting in front of a closed door, waiting for it to open, not announcing their presence to the person on the other side of the door by scratching or barking.