The Evening Chorus (14 page)

Rose sits at the table. The door is half open. The warm air from outside blows into the room, carrying with it the scent of roses and the rinsed-fresh smell of morning.

A bird flies into the kitchen. It passes above the table, and then circles back and lands in front of Rose. It is a swallow, its forked tail a glossy bluish black.

The swallow sits on the table, and then it seems to fall asleep, hunched down in its cape of feathers. Rose dares not move. The bird is only inches away from her right hand. It sleeps and Rose remains perfectly still at the table, watching it. She wonders if it is one of Toby’s swallows from under the eaves at the Three Bells, although that is rather a romantic notion, as there are plenty of swallows around her cottage as well.

The bird sleeps and then it wakes up, shakes itself, and flies back out through the half-open door. There is no way of knowing how long it was on the table. The clock is in the parlour. The swallow could have been there for half an hour or five minutes.

When the bird leaves, Rose feels shaky and gets up. Her tea has gone cold. She looks out the door, but she can’t see the swallow or Harris. She goes upstairs and looks from the window in her bedroom, but there’s nothing to be seen from there either.

She walks into the sitting room, trying to settle herself, decides to do some mending that has been piling up beside her chair. When she opens the lid of her sewing box, she sees James’s unopened letters lying there, on top of the tray of buttons. It seems a very long time ago that she read a letter from her husband, and yet it’s probably only been about six weeks. This is the problem with time, thinks Rose. It doesn’t follow its own rules. It stretches or compresses at will. It’s either a lingering house guest or an escape artist.

James is from another life now, and his letters no longer have any power to hurt or irritate her. She slits open the envelope of the most recent one with a knitting needle. The letter is a single sheet of paper, folded in half. Rose opens it and reads.

Dear Rose,

What I like about bird behaviour is that it follows a cycle. There is mating, breeding, the incubation of the eggs, the birth of the chicks, the flight of the fledglings, the migration of the family. These activities span three seasons, but they speed the seasons forward with a greater urgency
than would exist if I were simply observing the changes from spring to summer to autumn that occur in the vegetable garden or the fluctuations in temperature. I appreciate the imperative of the redstart’s small and urgent life because it pulls mine along in its wake, and this prison, which becomes so oppressive and apparent to other men, is less so for me because of this.

Studying the birds here has given me purpose, and this has made all the difference. But something happened that has changed everything again. I cannot tell you the details—suffice to say that I thought I was going to die, but I didn’t. And this is what I thought, my darling Rose, when I expected to die. I thought about you. I thought about how much I loved you and our life in that little cottage at the edge of the Ashdown Forest. Nothing else mattered in that moment but you. Not my work or my ambitions or my education. Nothing that I owned, or thought, or wished to be. It was only you and the happiness I felt by your side, the great gift of love that you have given me. Nothing else was of any consequence at all.

T
OBY AND
his crew are limping back across the Channel in the Wellington on their return from a bombing raid on Cologne. One of their engines has been knocked out by the ack-ack guns, and the remaining engine must have been hit as well because it’s losing pressure.

The pilot, Fletcher, is young, but he has nerve and offers a sort of steely calm to his crew that Toby recognizes as barely controlled panic but the more inexperienced chaps take as confidence.

They need to put the plane down before the remaining engine seizes and quits, and the huge weight of the Wellington, really nothing more than a slow-flying bus, crashes to earth.

Toby sits behind Fletcher, drawing and redrawing his calculations, trying to determine how far they can make it, what air base they should aim for. Up front, the wireless operator, Curtis, waits for Toby to decide on a course of action so he can radio the corresponding wireless operator at whatever base they choose and tell him they need to put down there.

Toby has decided on Penshurst in Kent. It’s not far from the coast, and they’re already over land now. It’s an emergency landing ground, not a regular airfield, and it will suit if they have to make a hard landing.

There’s a moment when it all seems possible. Curtis talks to the wireless operator at Penshurst and they’re cleared for landing, with an open airfield and full lights on to guide them in. Fletcher has the plane on a corresponding course. Toby can, for the first time since they lost power in the right-hand engine, put his map and pencil aside. The gunners behind him and the observer, Thomas, are quiet but hopeful. The plane, vibrating with the single engine at full throttle, also vibrates with all their prayers and optimism. For that moment—and for that moment only—it seems they will make it down, will stumble from the plane, laughing with relief at their close call and slapping each other on the back as they head to the mess for a well-earned pint.

But that moment closes and another one opens. The new moment contains the information that the functioning engine is losing oil pressure quickly now. The leak must have increased.

“We won’t make it to Penshurst,” says Fletcher. “We need to put her down now.”

Toby grabs for his map. Thomas, hearing what the pilot has said, is mumbling, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” into the back of Toby’s head.

“How fast?” Toby asks. “How fast are we losing pressure? How much time do we have?”

“Minutes,” says Fletcher grimly. “Find us an airfield, Halliday.”

But minutes won’t take them close enough to anything. Toby wipes the sweat from his forehead, finds it hard to keep himself from repeating Thomas’s incantation of fear.

And then he sees where they are, not from the air—where it is all, in daylight, a blur of greens and browns, the pretty patchwork of rural England rolling out beneath the plane—but instead from the ground. The town of East Grinstead with its twisty cobbled streets. The long hill down into Forest Row. The road rising up to Rose’s cottage, and the flat heath beyond.

“The forest,” he says. “You can put her down on the forest. It’s flat enough. It’s as good as any airfield.”

“Ashdown Forest?”

“Yes. It will work.” In his mind, Toby strides across the flat open space, turns, and waves his hand to the plane he is in. “It’s heath. Hardly any trees.”

“Will do,” says Fletcher. He pushes the control column forward and the nose of the plane tilts downwards.

“Damn the blackout,” says Toby. It’s a clear night, but there are no lights visible from East Grinstead. And if Rose is out doing her job, there will be no lights to guide them in towards Forest Row either. He has to trust his numbers, trust that the angle they are cutting through the darkness will bring them right over the village, down over Rose’s cottage, and safely onto the flat heath beyond.

The plane shudders with the noise of the one working Rolls-Royce engine, and then it is silent and Thomas’s
fuck, fuck, fuck
is its own engine, drawing them forward to their doom.

Fletcher works the toggle for the engine. Nothing. The plane descends.

“Brace yourselves,” he yells to his crew. And then, when he looks at the airspeed indicator and realizes how hard they will crash down, he adds, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The pilot always thinks it is his fault, thinks there was something else he could have done to save them. Toby remembers this from the last time he was in a plane that went down. He reaches forward, grasps Fletcher by the shoulder, wants to say something reassuring, but as it turns out, there is no time for any more words.

T
OBY WAKES
up and feels warm. He moves his left arm, but the sharp pain when he does this tells him that it’s broken. He turns his head and sees the Wellington on fire about two hundred yards away. The heat from the fire warms the whole left side of his body. The fire pops and crackles as it undoes the plane, turning it back from a bird into a machine made of wood and fabric. From somewhere beyond the fire, Toby can hear a man moaning, and it takes him several moments to realize that the moaning man is himself. He tries to move his legs, to curl them under him and stand up, but he can’t seem to feel them. He tries to call out, but his voice is dry and small, like a child’s. It falls off into the darkness, barely reaching past the edge of his body.

His good arm feels around him, his hand clutching at the dry clumps of grass he lies on. Overhead, the stars burn in their sockets. Suddenly he is very cold and his teeth chatter in his skull.

And then, out of the night, from the opposite direction to the burning Wellington, come two white angels to take him up to heaven. He shakes his head. No, it can’t be. He shakes his head and the angels transform into dogs. Harris and Clementine, racing across the heath towards him. When he calls out, even with his small voice, they hear him.

The dogs lick his face, which Toby realizes is wet with either tears or blood. The dogs lick his face, and then they lie down, one on either side of him, pressing their bodies close so that he is no longer cold. He reaches out with his working hand and touches the head of the dog lying on his right. It’s all fine now, he thinks. The fire flickers in the grate, and the dogs are lying with him on the floor of Rose’s cottage, and any moment now she will come and lead him upstairs to bed.

W
HEN
R
OSE
first opens her eyes in the morning, she forgets about having read James’s letter the night before. The room is quiet. The first light at the window is weak through the curtains. She remembers a sound in the night. She moves her feet under the blankets.A dream, perhaps, or a storm. She stretches her arms above her head. And then she remembers the contents of the letter and feels ill.

Downstairs she opens the front door to look at the morning, and there on the steps are the dogs. They don’t rush her with enthusiasm as they usually do. They don’t make a move at all, and Rose puts a hand out to make sure that they’re real, that they’re not part of her dream. She puts a hand on Harris’s head, and Harris drops something on the stone tiles by Rose’s feet.

It’s the rabbit’s foot with the bit of copper wire twisted around the top. It’s the rabbit’s foot that Toby had given her, and that she had made him take back, had made him take with him, for luck.

E
NID GETS OFF THE BUS AT THE END OF THE LINE
. There are several houses poised on the edge of a cliff, too few to be called a village. It looks like the houses have just roosted there, like birds, and will fly away at any moment.

It’s windy when Enid steps from the bus, so windy that it knocks her suitcase against her legs and tries to rip the cardigan from her shoulders. The bus exhales and moves off. Enid looks around, thinking he hasn’t come, but there he is, standing stiffly beside a telephone pole. He’s wearing a suit.

They walk towards each other at the same time, embrace awkwardly. He pats her back. She knocks her face against his collarbone.

“You dressed up for my arrival,” says Enid. “I’m touched.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. It was either this or my holey green jumper and torn grey flannels. I don’t have much company, and the birds don’t care that I look a fright.” James takes Enid’s suitcase from her. “Is this all you have?”

“I travel light. My flat was bombed in the war, remember. I lost everything.”

“Oh, come on. Surely you’ve replaced most of it by now.”

“You’d be surprised how little is really important.”

“No, I wouldn’t.” James strides ahead of her, then calls back over his shoulder, “Wait until you see where I’m taking you. It’s a very minimal life out here. Big change from London.”

Enid had expected her brother to fetch her in a motor car, and she’s more than a little disappointed to be taken instead on a forced march along a rutted dirt track for what seems like miles, trotting after James’s back as he stalks away from her through the fields. When she tries to call out for him to wait, the wind tears the words right out of her mouth and shreds them into meaningless syllables. She finally gives up trying to make him have any compassion for her and trails along behind him, falling farther and farther back with each step, stoking a murderous rage that erupts when he eventually comes to a stop outside a low whitewashed cottage on the edge of a cliff.

“You could have waited for me”—she strains to be heard above the roar of the wind—“instead of being such a bloody idiot!”

James just pushes open the unlocked cottage door. “You’re soft from your city life,” he says. “You need to toughen up.” He steps into the dark interior of the cottage and Enid follows, her skirts twisted by the wind and her hair so tousled that she’s sure she will have more success chopping if off than getting a brush through it again any time soon.

The building is very simple. Two rooms downstairs, barely distinguishable from each other, although one has a cooker and therefore must be the kitchen. There’s a table and chairs in that room as well. In the other room there’s a fireplace and a chesterfield, a few shelves of books. The floors are uneven. Enid walks two steps into the kitchen and trips twice.

“It was a shepherd’s hut,” says James. “I’ve fixed it up a little.”

“How? By moving the sheep outdoors?” Enid still feels angry about the long walk from the bus.

James drops her suitcase and jams his hands into his trouser pockets. “Well,” he says, “I suppose it doesn’t look like much after London. I suppose it does seem a bit squalid.”

“No, it’s fine.”