The Evening Chorus (15 page)

“You’ll probably be wanting to light out of here as quickly as possible. Next bus back.”

“No, I won’t,” says Enid. “It’s just been a tiring day, and I wasn’t expecting such a long walk at the end of it.”

“Yes, of course.” His politeness is a cover for hurt feelings, as always. His adult behaviour remarkably the same as when they were children.

It’s been six months since she last saw her brother, and this is the first time she’s visited him at the observatory. Their last visit, he came up to London to meet her. Enid doesn’t want to be angry with him, even though she still feels angry. She puts a hand on his arm and squeezes. He feels thin through his suit jacket. Her fingers close on bone.

“Show me the rest, James. I’d like to see it all. Show me where you do your work.”

There are two small bedrooms upstairs, pinched under the eaves. No WC in the house, or running water. There’s a dug well in the yard back of the kitchen and an earth closet tacked onto the outside wall of the sitting room—although “sitting room” seems too gracious a word for what is merely an extension of the kitchen.

After depositing her suitcase in one of the bedrooms, James takes Enid back outside and walks her to the edge of the cliff.

“Three hundred feet straight down,” he says.

She holds on to his arm to peer over the edge, the wind a strong hand at her back, trying to push her over. The waves below are white threads in a sheet of blue. The rocky beach is strewn with boulders from the sheer walls of the cliff face.

“God, James,” says Enid.

“I know. Seems like the end of the earth, doesn’t it?”

“Good thing you’re not a sleepwalker.”

A gull rises on the wind, white and angular, banking above them and gliding smoothly away.

“Manx shearwater,” says James. “There’s a huge population here. Also large populations of storm petrels and puffins, three kinds of gulls, the wheatear, chough, skylark, and oystercatcher.”

“You’re busy, then?” They step away from the edge of the cliff, walk back towards the cottage.

“I’m the only observer here. There’s a fellow comes to spell me off every once in a while, but mostly it’s just me.”

“Are you writing another book?”

James nods as he pushes open the cottage door for them. “Ocean birds. It seemed to make sense to group them, rather than focus on them individually, like I did for the redstart.”

“It still amazes me,” says Enid, “that you wrote that book while you were a prisoner of war.”

“What else was I to do there? It was good to have a project.”

James closes the door behind them, and the silence in the kitchen, after the noise of the wind, is deafening for the moment it takes to adjust to it.

“Do you think much about the camp?”

“Not if I can help it. Not unless someone brings it up.” James rubs his hands together, blows on them to warm them. “I could heat us up some soup for lunch, if you’d like?”

“That would be nice.”

He lights the stove under a large tin can. The label has been torn off and it takes Enid a moment to realize that James is using the can as a pot. She looks around the kitchen and sees other tin cans in various sizes, all without lids. There are no actual pots or mugs visible on the open shelves.

“Can’t you afford a saucepan?” she asks.

“This works just as well. Nothing wrong with it.” James lifts the tin can from the hob using the sleeve of his sweater.

“Can’t you afford an oven mitt?”

He doesn’t answer.

They eat at the rough wooden kitchen table, with its gouges and knife marks. James must use it as a cutting board, thinks Enid, but she doesn’t ask him. The way he lives in this cottage seems harsh and hard, but she doesn’t say this either. She sips the bland beef-and-barley soup and praises its taste. She chews the stale rind of bread he gives her and remarks on its pleasing texture. She tells him he looks good for all the fresh air and country living, instead of saying that he’s too thin and noting that his hands shake when he butters his bread. James, on the other hand, isn’t as charitable, or as careful in his comments.

“You look an awful lot like Mummy,” he says.

Their mother, dead now, was stout and square, with a miserable downcast expression and a rather frightening receding hairline.

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“Is it?” James shrugs. “She wasn’t so bad.”

“Maybe not as a person, but to look at?”

James shrugs again. “I miss them,” he says. “We’re all alone now, Eenie. No children to follow us. When we die, that’s it for our little family. Do you ever think about that?”

“Yes, I do.” Enid has been largely shocked by her passage into middle age. She has trouble recognizing her body when she passes a shop window or glances in the mirror. She doesn’t resemble her younger self at all, and worse, she doesn’t look anything like she imagines herself to look.

But she still feels like the person she used to be, and she tells herself that this is the important thing, that this is what matters most.

“It’s awful what happens to us, Eenie,” says James, getting up abruptly from the table.

“What happens to us?” asks Enid, but James has clattered his dishes into the sink and has moved off into the other room. She follows him. He’s standing with his back to her, and when she gets closer he turns around. He has a glass full of amber liquid in his hand. Scotch, she guesses. He holds it out to her.

“Bit early in the day, isn’t it?” she says.

James downs the drink, starts to pour another.

Enid puts a hand on his shoulder. “Show me your work,” she says. “I’d like to see your book in progress.”

“It’s all in the room where you’re sleeping,” says James. “You can look at it any time you like.” He collapses onto the chesterfield, a cloud of dust rising when he sits down.

It’s cold in the room, in the cottage, in Wales. It’s only September, but it might as well be winter.

“I’ll make us a fire,” says Enid, getting down on her hands and knees in front of the grate. At least he has seen fit to get in a supply of logs and kindling. She wrings some sheets of newspaper into twists, lays the twigs on top. “Matches?”

James digs into his trouser pocket and tosses her a box.

The fire makes everything seem better. Enid sits on the chesterfield beside her brother, her feet curled under her for warmth, even though she’s still got her shoes on.

“Are you still working at that magazine, then?” asks James.

“Yes. I like it. There’s always a deadline. Keeps me on my toes.”

“And no romance?”

“I’m happy on my own.”

“Wouldn’t you like some nice retired colonel in Tunbridge Wells?” James grimaces in an attempt to smile, and Enid can see that whatever hole he fell into, he’s climbing back out now.

“Just shoot me,” she says, “if I ever find a retired colonel from Tunbridge Wells appealing.”

James sips his second drink. His hands have stopped shaking.

“Do you ever see her?” he asks. “Does she ever write to you?”

“Who?”

“Rose.”

Enid lays her head on his bony shoulder. He flinches, but then he yields, and she can feel his body unclench a little. “Not for years, James,” she says. “Not since I lived with her that summer.”

“Did you ever see them together, she and Halliday?”

“No.”

The fire gains strength, crawls up the logs. The room brightens accordingly.

“I think I guessed, though,” Enid says. “She was always coming and going, all flustered, forgetting things. Always late. I was a bit naive, in retrospect. It was actually quite obvious.”

“She was in love, wasn’t she?” says James. “With Toby Halliday. You know, I don’t think she ever really loved me. How could she have, if she went off with him?”

“You can’t assume she didn’t love you,” says Enid. She suddenly sees Rose bursting into the kitchen, looking healthy and happy, her big white dog at her heels. “She was young. You were far away. It’s the arithmetic of war.” She lifts her head from his shoulder. “You know that Halliday died? Crashed on the forest?” They haven’t spoken of this in ages, not since the divorce, and Enid can’t remember what her brother does and doesn’t know.

“Of course I know that.” James gets up, pours another drink, and sits back down beside his sister. “I was happy when I heard about it.”

“Do you still feel like that? All these years later?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” James sips his Scotch. “Time doesn’t really soften anything. Memories heave up, you know. Still sharp.”

“Forgetting takes practice,” says Enid. “You have to work at it.”

She thinks of how she doesn’t really remember Oliver at all. After years of pushing the thoughts of him away, now she doesn’t think of him. If you pretend to feel a certain way, eventually you do feel that way. That has been a surprisingly pleasant lesson to learn in life.

“Maybe you’re too isolated here,” she says delicately. “Maybe you have too much time to brood on the past.”

“My work is solitary work,” says James. “I can’t help that.”

“Yes, but do you have to do it so far away from people?”

“Birds don’t like crowds. They’re wild creatures. They can put up with my presence, just barely, but they wouldn’t tolerate a group of us. Solo observation has always been the most effective way to study them.” James turns to look at his sister. “I’m not just brooding here, Enid,” he says. “I’m working.”

When Enid goes up to bed that evening, she sees that he’s been telling her the truth. With a candle (for there is no electric light in the cottage), she looks through his pages and pages of notes, each written in a meticulous, tidy hand, all dated, and the dates trailing each other in reliable succession. Perhaps it is her presence that has upset his balance, made him think about the past? Perhaps he is not this way every night? She tells herself these things, sitting on the edge of the creaky single bed in the dark, but she does not altogether believe them.

J
AMES DOESN’T
mention Rose the next morning. He makes soft-boiled eggs for them and they eat the rest of the hard bread, which is much better toasted. After breakfast, James takes Enid on a walk through the fields and along the cliff path. She sits with him while he watches the shearwaters scale and descend the air along the cliff face. She is pleased to see that he still has the binoculars she gave him for a wedding gift, and that, from the worn look of the carrying strap, he uses them almost every day at the observatory.

Enid has brought a blanket from her bed to wrap herself in. She is determined not to be as cold as she was yesterday. They have a flask of tea with them, but she doesn’t want to drink it too soon and then want it much worse later on, when it’s already been consumed.

It’s so hard to get life right, she thinks, pulling the blanket tight around her shoulders. All the small balances are impossible to strike most of the time. And then there are the larger choices. It’s hopeless. She might as well be one of those shearwaters, tossed about by the gusts of wind that drive up from the Atlantic.

“Do you think they’re flying?” she asks James, who’s busy making notes beside her. “Or are they just being buffeted about? I mean, do you think they’re going where they want to go?”

“More or less. They’re better at it than we are, I’d say.”

He has been thinking the same thing as she has, and this makes Enid feel close to her brother again, as though time has not come between them, as though they are still children on the farm. Back then, every day was an adventure they embarked on together.

“I remember you as a little boy, Jimmy, lying on your back in the fields, watching the birds and making up stories about them for me.”

James looks at her. “Did I do that? I don’t remember.” He puts his pencil down. “I hope they were good stories.”

“Very good.” Although Enid is hard pressed to recall any of her younger brother’s tales now, she does remember her delight at hearing them.

Two shearwaters circle their heads and then slide sideways on a current of air, disappearing over the edge of the cliff.

“Look,” James says. “The shearwaters that fly on course and the ones that get thrown about by the wind mostly end up in the same place, so perhaps effort doesn’t matter, isn’t what ensures survival.”

T
HAT NIGHT
, James drinks less. They sit on the chesterfield by the fire, and he writes up his notes for the day, drawing little pictures of the birds in the margins of his notebook.

“If I draw them, I get a better sense of them,” he says when Enid peers over his arm to look at the miniature ink birds arcing off the edges of the page. “I can feel their bodies, rather than just seeing them.”

Her brother’s notebook and his drawings make Enid think back to her own collection of specimens from the Ashdown Forest.

“Did you ever see the little natural history I made of the forest?” she asks. “I left it for you at the cottage.”

“Did you?” James looks up, then looks back down and finishes drawing the right wing of a shearwater. “That’s a shame. I never went back to that cottage, and Rose didn’t include it with the things she sent on to me in Bristol.”

James had come home from the war and gone to stay near their parents while he waited for the divorce to go through.

“Did she ever apologize?” Enid cannot believe that Rose wouldn’t have had regrets about divorcing James. After all, Toby Halliday was dead, and it seemed he was the sole reason for the divorce.

“She wrote and said some nonsense about making a mistake,” says James, the strokes of his pen nib making a scraping noise as he shades in the wing of the shearwater.

“Maybe it was a mistake? Maybe she had regrets?”

“Too late, Eenie, even if that was what she felt. You can’t undo actions with words.”

“What good are words, then?” For Enid thinks that this is precisely what words are for—to change what was awful into something you can live with. She has made a neat story of her affair with Oliver Matheson. It is a story fuelled by desperate loneliness (hers) and rampant opportunism (his), set within an atmosphere of fear and unease (the start of war). It makes sense to her to understand it this way, and it’s much easier to live with than her earlier version, which involved a lot of guilt and shame on her part, and had Oliver in the role of tragic hero, dying in her arms during the bombing raid—which isn’t how it actually happened, but somehow became how it happened. Enid has even told the story out loud several times, and she is surprised to find that something that played such a large part in her younger life takes only the length of one gin and tonic to disclose.