The Evening Chorus (9 page)

Rose doesn’t open James’s letter that evening. She finishes her book, feeds the chickens, has a bath. In the hallway, searching for her helmet and armband before she heads out on patrol, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror near the coats. There’s no light on and her face is a smudge of darkness, but her eyes are as bright as a fox’s.

T
HE NEXT
morning when Rose wakes up, Harris is gone. She’s not sure how long the dog will be off with Clementine, but Rose recognizes the moment as an opportunity. She washes and dresses, doesn’t bother with breakfast, scatters some feed for the hens on her way out, and walks so quickly down to the village that the stones on the road chatter under her shoes the whole way.

It’s breakfast at the Three Bells, so Rose doesn’t need to have Toby rung for—he’s simply there, eating toast and marmalade in the bar. He looks up when she approaches his table, his face breaking into a smile.

“I missed you yesterday.”

“I had to go and see my parents.” Rose sits down at the table.

“Are you hungry? Would you like some breakfast?” Toby reaches across and squeezes her hand, but Rose quickly pulls it back into her lap.

“I know everyone in this village,” she says. “Or rather, everyone knows me.” She looks around the bar, but there are very few people in the room and no one she recognizes among the small scattering of patrons. “Come to the cottage tonight. I’ll make you supper.”

“Are you sure?” Rose hasn’t wanted Toby at the cottage before. The thought of it made her feel too guilty.

“Yes, I’m sure. Six o’clock.” Rose stands up to go. “You’ll probably get an omelette, I’m afraid. I have a lot of eggs to get through.”

“I love a good omelette. I can’t wait, my darling.” Toby blows her a kiss from behind his napkin.

Rose walks slowly back up the road to her cottage. She’s not sure it’s a good idea to have Toby come to the house, but she can’t keep sneaking into his room at the pub and expect to get away with it for much longer.

She wasn’t looking for this kind of trouble. It just happened. And Rose can’t seem to help herself. Best just to let the moments roll on, the momentum gaining acceleration with every touch or glance between them, so that by now what is to come feels inevitable and there is no stopping it.

Toby is stationed nearby, awaiting his orders to re-enter the war. Rose met him at the beginning of his leave, when he was wandering around on the forest, hopelessly lost, after taking himself there for a walk one afternoon. She helped him find his way. He invited her to tea. They laughed and talked well into the evening. He was easy to talk to, not like James, who was often quiet to the point of being withdrawn. Toby was cheerful and made Rose feel good. It felt natural to accept his kisses on the walk home. And now he is staying at the Three Bells so they can continue their affair on the room’s single bed, with its lone pillow and scratchy pink eiderdown, the flash of swallows at the window, leaving and returning to their nest under the eaves.

When it started—when Rose first went upstairs with Toby through the servants’ entrance, when she fell onto the bed with him and they fumbled the clothes from each other—she never once thought of James. And what she regrets now is not that she broke her marriage vows—a marriage so hastily made and of which so much came to be required—but that she could completely forget it in one swift flight of decisive action. She regrets that her marriage has come to mean nothing, has been worn down by the succession of days James has been away. She can no longer even imagine him, and the letters he sends, full of requests for her to do research for him, bring nothing useful to her, don’t help to strengthen what has grown slack between them.

When Rose gets back to her cottage, Harris is waiting by the door, her coat streaked with mud. She seems subdued, and it takes Rose a minute to realize that the dog probably hasn’t had any breakfast and is hungry.

“Sorry,” she says, and unlocks the door. She gives Harris an extra-large helping of horsemeat, puts the kettle on to make herself some tea, and then forgets about it when it comes to the boil. She wanders into the parlour and then wanders back to the kitchen, not sure why she left it in the first place. She takes an apple out of the larder and leaves it on the table.

Harris finishes her breakfast and then goes to lie down on her blanket in the parlour.

Rose, never much of a cook, wants to make Toby something special tonight, something other than the omelette she promised. She still has her ration of meat to purchase this week. If the butcher has a bit of steak, maybe she can bake Toby a steak and kidney pie. She should be able to manage that. She spends some time thumbing through her one cookbook, and then some time blaming her mother for not teaching her how to cook properly. When she had asked her mother for some lessons once, Constance told her to work it out for herself. “I’m not much interested in cooking,” she had said. Constance was always rail thin, and always finding everyone else too fat. “Gluttony is the worst of the sins,” she said to Rose when she was young. “Mind you don’t let yourself go.”

“That’s no help at all, is it?” says Rose to Harris. She has wandered back into the parlour. Harris, asleep on her blanket, offers no response.

T
OBY IS
prompt, arriving at Rose’s front door at precisely six o’clock that evening. He is taller than James and has to duck his head under the door frame when he enters.

Harris, who had been sleeping up to the moment when Toby knocked at the door, bounds out of the parlour and jumps on him. The dog’s enthusiasm makes Rose feel shy, as though Harris’s excitement at seeing Toby is an embodiment of her own.

“Sorry,” she says, hauling the dog off by her collar. “I don’t get many visitors. She’s really horribly behaved.”

“Don’t apologize,” says Toby. “I like the candour of dogs. They’re always honest about what they’re feeling.”

Rose, holding the powerful dog engine that continues to move forward, even while Rose is using all her strength to prevent this, realizes that the enthusiasm of Harris is also the embodiment of how Toby Halliday feels.

The cottage seems inadequate—poor and poky and full of dust. The biscuits she baked that morning to accompany their tea taste dry and bitter. The beef stew is cold. They sit either side of the small kitchen table, eating the stew and drinking the ale Toby brought from the pub.

“I’m sorry,” says Rose. “I took the stew out sooner than I ought.”

“It tastes delicious.”

“And I left the biscuits in longer than I meant to.”

“They’re the best I’ve ever had.”

“You washed each bite down with tea. I’ve been watching you.”

Toby leans across the table and puts a hand against Rose’s cheek. “Honestly, Rose. I’ve never had a better meal. More beautiful surroundings. More lovely company.”

“You’re a liar,” says Rose, but she smiles and kisses his hand where it lies against her face.

She had feared that it would be too hard to have Toby Halliday at the cottage, but it isn’t. It feels like he has always been there with her, and James seems as distant as the shepherd whose house the cottage used to be. Rose can’t conjure him up at all, although she’s also not trying very hard.

“I love you,” she says.

“I love you too.”

Upstairs in her double bed under the sloping ceilings, with the curtains drawn against the half darkness, Rose and Toby lie on their backs, holding hands and talking. This is so different from being with James, who was furtive when making love to Rose, coupling only when the lights were out, awkwardly flailing on top of her like a fish hauled from the ocean and left to die on shore. Afterwards he always curled into himself, not talking, falling asleep immediately.

“Will you stay?” asks Rose. “Here. For the whole night?”

“On one condition.” Toby squeezes her hand. “That come morning, you make me that omelette you promised.”

“It would be my pleasure.”

Having Toby in the cottage hasn’t erased James so much as replaced him with a better version. Rose married the wrong man. It is that heartbreakingly simple. And what is she going to do about it now?

I
N THE
next morning’s post is a letter. Rose’s heart sinks. She hasn’t even read the last letter from James yet. But when she plucks the envelope from the metal cage at the front door, she doesn’t recognize the return address, printed neatly in blue ink in the top left corner of the envelope. This letter is not from the German prison camp but from London.

It’s a letter from James’s sister, Enid, who wants to come and stay with Rose. She’s been bombed out of her flat and left homeless.

I know you have the room
, she writes, rather rudely.
And I have nowhere else to turn
.

Rose has met Enid only once, when she came to the wedding. She remembers her as sharp-tongued—James’s elder sister and still bossing him around as though they were children. She’d given them binoculars as a wedding gift, which had rather pleased James but had disappointed Rose. She would have preferred wine glasses to spyglasses.

“I don’t want her here,” she whispers to Harris, who has wandered into the hallway to see what’s up. Toby is finishing his breakfast in the kitchen. “Why can’t she go and stay with her parents?” But Rose knows the answer to that question the moment she asks it. James’s parents live in a small flat in Bristol. James’s father had a stroke at the beginning of the war, and they had to move from their farm. There would be no room for Enid there, and it’s a lot farther from London, which presumably she’ll be returning to before very long.

Rose stands in the hallway, holding the letter from Enid. She can hear Toby running the water to wash the breakfast dishes, another thing James never did once in their brief life together.

She can’t very well refuse James’s sister the shelter she requests. But having Enid to stay will mean that Toby will be banished to the Three Bells once more, and that Rose will not be able to step into the new life she wants so badly. Instead, she will have to step back into a marriage that no longer feels like it belongs to her.

E
NID DECIDES TO GET OFF THE TRAIN IN
E
AST
Grinstead and walk the three-mile hill down into Forest Row. She has only one small suitcase and it doesn’t weigh much, filled as it is with the few pieces of clothing she has managed to salvage from her bombed flat.

It’s a pleasant day, the sun stirring from behind the clouds for a change, the air not too cool. No breeze.

The hill curves down from the town into the village. The suitcase bangs against Enid’s legs as she walks, and for a good part of the journey she carries it in her arms instead of holding it by the handle. Trees crowd the edge of the road, and behind them, down long driveways, Enid can glimpse the large houses of the rich members of this Home County. Money buys privacy, she thinks, rather scornfully. Money makes it possible to live behind the screen of yews, behind the stone wall, and go about your business as usual. Money makes it possible to forget about the war—especially here, where there aren’t bombs falling every night and heaps of debris to negotiate every day.

The last time Enid was in this part of England was for James’s wedding. She was surprised that he’d decided to marry someone he’d known for only a few months. She’d assumed the thoroughness—almost caution—that had been on display since childhood would hold true in all circumstances, even love. But the war had no doubt helped to speed the romance along.

And now her brother was a prisoner somewhere in Germany, and here she was, on her way to live, temporarily, with his young wife. Enid was glad that James was in relative safety in the POW camp instead of still being in active service. He would be a terrible soldier. She’d told him this when he joined up. “You can’t even kill an ant,” she had said. “What will you do when you have to kill a person?”

But James had circumnavigated that problem by signing up for the air force, so, as he explained to his sister, he wouldn’t actually have to see the people he was killing.

Thank god he’d been captured before he’d dropped even a single bomb.

Enid regrets getting off the train early. She thought it would be a way to ease into her new situation, the slow walk down the hill giving her time to adjust to being in the country and having to come and live with Rose. But instead, her suitcase is awkward and hard to manage, and the houses of the wealthy Sussex inhabitants are irritating her. She also doesn’t like how the trees mass so densely at the side of the roadway. They don’t soften her mind towards the pastoral, but instead make her feel jumpy and claustrophobic. There was more breathing room in London, even with the bombs falling.

But thinking about London brings back the sights and sounds of that terrible night two weeks ago, and Enid has to dodge that memory as much as possible if she is to keep functioning today.

The village bores her. A posh country hotel, a village hall, a parade of shops, a memorial to the local lads who perished in the first war. Nothing distinctive. No pond or close-clipped green. The pub looks cosy, but there’s no one to have a drink with here, so she walks quickly past the Three Bells and on up Ashdown Road.

When she gets close to the row of cottages at the top of the road, she stops for a moment, sniffing the air like a dog. The burning smell is familiar, but it’s a smell from far back in her life, from the days of her childhood, at the farm with her parents and James. It takes her several minutes to place it. Peat. It’s the smell of burning peat. A rich, dense, dark smell, almost like pipe tobacco, that conjures up the smoky farmhouse kitchen in Dorset.

Enid prides herself on her memory and good navigation skills. Quite frankly, she would have made a better soldier than James. Despite having been to her brother’s rented cottage only once before, she is able to pick it out immediately. The small stone building looks rough enough to have once been a stable, more fit for animals than humans.

The gate creaks. The path is overgrown with weeds. No one answers her knock at the front door. Enid tries again, harder this time, banging with her closed fist on the thick wooden slab, the action making her suddenly feel like crying.