The Evening Chorus (10 page)

No one comes to answer the door. Enid stops knocking. She goes round to the back of the cottage, getting scratched in the process by a scraggly climbing rose at the side of the house.

There’s a chicken coop in the far corner of the garden and an overgrown vegetable patch closer to the cottage. There’s also a dog, sitting patiently on the flagstones outside the kitchen door.

“Hello there,” says Enid. She didn’t know that Rose and James had a dog. She puts out a hand for the dog to sniff, but the dog remains steadfast in its task of staring fixedly at the closed door.

There’s no answer at the back door either. Enid puts her suitcase on the flagstones and sits on it. She’s tired from her walk down the hill, and she could do with a cup of tea and a sandwich. She’s had nothing to eat all morning. How rude of Rose to be purposefully out when she arrives. Surely she received her letter with the time of the train?

This is not what Enid wants at this moment, to have nothing to occupy her mind but the night she is trying so hard not to think about. She supposes she could take a tour of the garden, visit the hens, try to identify the various flowers that have withered to stalks in the beds. But that would be so tedious. She scuffs the heel of her shoe across the stones. Her shoes are worn down from the London pavements and won’t last the summer. For a moment she lets herself remember crawling over wood and plaster in what had once been the sitting room of her flat. There was a shoe upright in the midst of the debris, as though the foot had just stepped out of it.

“There you are!” It’s Rose, marching across the garden with another dog at her heels, identical to the one sitting vigil at the back door.

Enid stands up. “Yes, here I am. Didn’t you get my letter?”

“Of course I got your letter.” Rose is flustered, her face red. She must have walked quickly up the rise of Ashdown Road. “I went to meet your train.”

“But I didn’t ask you to meet my train.”

“I thought it would be nice.”

“I got out early. Walked down from East Grinstead.”

“Well, how was I to know that?”

“How was I to know you’d meet my train?”

This is the most they’ve ever spoken. Enid remembers Rose as shy and serious. Now she seems snappy and churlish. Still, James’s absence must be hard on her. Enid puts out a hand. “Thank you,” she says. “For taking me in. I’m sure it’s an inconvenience, and I appreciate it.”

“Glad to help,” says Rose, not sounding glad at all. She doesn’t shake Enid’s outstretched hand.

The dogs are wrestling in the dusty bit of ground in front of the chicken coop.

Rose unlocks the door. “Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“Well, come in, then. I’ll make us some lunch.”

Enid follows Rose into the kitchen. The house is as she remembers, dark and low ceilinged. This confirms her earlier thought that it was once a stable. It’s easy to picture straw on the stone floor and a cow or a couple of sheep standing contentedly about, masticating.

“James never mentioned a dog in his letters,” she says, watching the dogs through the small window as they tear around the garden. “Let alone two.”

“They’re sisters. Only one is mine. Harris. The other one, Clementine, lives across the forest. They like to visit each other.” Rose turns from the pantry. “I could make you eggs and toast?” she says.

“Lovely. Thank you.”

“I got the dog after James was taken prisoner. For company.”

“Well, I’m sure that James will like him. There was always a dog on the farm when we were growing up.”

“Her,” says Rose. “The dog is a bitch. Harris. I call her that because it sounds like the name one would call an assistant. A last name instead of a first. She is my assistant. My companion.” She breaks two eggs into a bowl. “Why don’t you take your case upstairs while I’m making lunch? Yours is the first room at the top of the landing. I’m afraid it’s a bit cramped. It was meant to be the nursery.”

The ceilings are even worse upstairs than down. They slope at alarming, skull-cracking angles, and Enid anticipates knocking herself cold just getting out of bed in the night to go for a wee. The small room she has been given looks down into the back garden. She has a perfect view of the chicken coop and the back hedge. In London, she looked down onto the tops of buses, onto people walking briskly along Union Street on their way to work and then home again. In London, she was part of the shifting human landscape of the city. Here there is nothing but vegetation and a few brainless hens.

But when she goes back downstairs, the toast and scrambled eggs taste better than she expected. The tea is good and hot. They eat at the little table in the kitchen with the back door open so the dogs can come and go as they please. The breeze from the garden is warm and fragrant with the scent of flowers, something Enid realizes has been absent from her life these past months. London smells of plaster dust and burnt wood and the sharp, caustic aroma of cordite.

“I’m sorry if I was rude,” says Rose. “Earlier. When you arrived.”

I know when you mean, you idiot, thinks Enid, but she doesn’t say this. “No need to apologize,” she says instead. “It’s not an ideal situation, my having to come down here and bunk with you. I’m sorry to intrude. Really, I am. But rest assured, I’ll be gone as soon as I can find another job.”

“You lost your job
and
your flat?”

“Yes. It wasn’t a very good week.” Understatement, Enid thinks. It was the worst week of her life.

Rose rises to fetch the dogs their dinner, as they’ve both suddenly materialized in the kitchen, humid and panting. “What did you do in London?”

“What was my job, you mean?”

“Yes.”

Enid watches Rose slap down great chunks of horsemeat onto two plates and put them on the floor for the dogs. The meat is gulped down almost before the plates hit the stone tiles.

“I worked for an advertising agency,” she says. “I was the assistant to one of the owners of the firm.”

“Has the war affected advertising?” asks Rose.

Enid can see where she’s headed. “I didn’t lose my job because of the war,” she says, standing up and pushing her chair neatly into the table, just as she was taught at boarding school when she was six, and as she has continued to do at every meal since, the surprising legacy of an institution she loathed.

“Thank you for lunch. It was lovely. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I would like to go upstairs and unpack.”

E
NID SITS
on the bed beside her suitcase. It makes no sense to unpack. It will seem as though she has more possessions if she leaves them in the case, rather than spreading them sparsely through the bureau on the wall opposite. She wishes she’d been able to rescue something other than clothing from the blast. A book, perhaps, or a flower vase. Even a ruddy fork.

The thoughts of that night are pushing into her head against her will. She goes over to the window to see if the dogs are up to anything interesting, but there’s no sign of them in the garden. They’re no doubt sleeping off their great hunks of horsemeat. Enid supposes she could go and try to engage with Rose again, hard work as it’s been so far. She could go and look around the house, at any rate. That might work to keep her mind at rest.

There’s an airing cupboard on the upstairs landing, and the closed door of Rose’s bedroom across the hall. Enid wants to have a look inside that room but fears the door will squeak on its hinges, so she leaves it shut.

Downstairs there’s a pitifully small parlour. Enid sits in a chair by the bookcase. It’s lumpy and uncomfortable, overstuffed. The sun at the low window is not even enough light to enable her to read the spines of the volumes beside her. She wishes that she didn’t find knitting so slappingly dull, or that she was interested in drawing. How on earth is she going to pass the weeks she’ll be forced to spend in this dreadful little hovel without going bonkers?

Rose pokes her head into the room. “I’m off to the shops, then.”

“Here’s my ration book.” Enid fumbles it out of her cardigan pocket, hands it over. “Could I make a request for some meat? A bit of beef, perhaps? Maybe a chop?”

“I’ll see what I can manage.” Rose pops her head out of the room and then pops it back in again. “If the dogs want out, just let them go.”

“Will do. Do you want some money?”

“You can buy the next round.”

Enid listens to the kitchen door snap shut. The dogs don’t even lift their heads at the sound. She nudges the nearest dog with her foot, and it grunts and rolls over onto its back, exposing its hairless pink belly. Upside down it looks a bit like a pig. She waits a decent interval, long enough for Rose to be well down the road, and then she gets up and goes back upstairs.

The door to Rose’s bedroom does indeed squeak on its hinges when Enid pushes it open. She steps inside. The room is at least three times the size of the one she has been given. It has two windows—one that looks down on the front garden, and a smaller one that overlooks the side of the cottage, where the scratchy rose grows up the stone. There are the same sloping ceilings that Enid has in her room and a larger version of her bureau. On top of the bureau are a silver-backed mirror and a clothes brush. On the bedside table is a photograph of James and Rose the day they were married. The curtains are flowery and pulled back. There is a wardrobe in the corner and a small Turkish carpet on the floor beside the bed. There is barely any evidence of Rose in her own bedroom, and the only indication of James, aside from his presence in the photograph, is the heavy wooden trouser press bulwarked up against the side of the wardrobe.

Enid stands by the bedside table and looks at her brother and his young wife on their wedding day. Ten years still seems like too large a gap in age and experience. When James married her, Rose was only twenty-two. Now she’s just twenty-three. What can she possibly know about anything? Still, in the photograph, James looks happy, his smile wide and his eyes bright. He stands on the church steps in his best suit. Rose has hold of his right arm with both of her hands, as though she can’t pull him in close enough to her that day. And Rose is beautiful. Even in the black and white of the photograph, her dark hair shines and her face is radiant.

In the weekly letters she writes to James at the camp, Enid never mentions Rose. She wouldn’t know what to say about her. She tells her brother about London life, about what she sees on the streets or in the shop windows. She never mentions the bombings, or the scarcity of food either. She thinks it must help him to have positive news of home, to be able to imagine the flavour of the world that continues, as he remembers it, outside the cage where he is being kept. But Enid is not really sure her cheerful disregard for his circumstances is the right approach. That said, it is one he mirrors, sending her letters back that describe the birds he has seen around the camp. Sometimes he asks her to look something up about a particular bird, and she especially likes those letters because they make her feel useful.

She did write to James and tell him that she was coming down to stay with Rose in the cottage, and he did write back to say that he thought it was a wonderful idea, and that Rose would be glad of the company.

But Rose isn’t glad of the company. Enid can clearly see that from their testy exchanges today. And yet, standing here in her sister-in-law’s sparsely furnished bedroom, Enid wonders why Rose isn’t pleased to have her come and stay. What kind of life can she be living, isolated in the countryside with only two dogs for companionship, and just the hens and the patchy garden as evidence that she is doing anything useful with her days?

There are still hours to go before tea time, and Enid is too restless to write to James or try to read a book. She doesn’t want to be alone in the cottage with her uncomfortable thoughts, so she decides to go and explore the stretch of heath she can see from Rose’s bedroom window.

The dogs shoot through the door ahead of her the moment she opens it. They are gone—blurred, muscled forms racing across the bracken. They run so hard and so fast that the way their paws come together and then push apart in the action of their running reminds Enid of the clench and unclench of a heart. The dogs’ gathering in and pushing off happening in the steady rhythm of a heartbeat.

They’re gone, just like that, and Enid walks out into a field of grass and rusted ferns, pink heather and mounds of yellow gorse. It is prettier than she’d thought. The summer sun looks lovely in its halo above the birches.

She walks and walks, filling her pockets with the small flowers and ferns she doesn’t know the names of, walks until her mind is numb with fatigue. She sees a rabbit sitting upright in the bracken, ears cupping the sounds of her approach. Luckily the dogs aren’t around to see it too, chase it down and pull it to pieces. Enid stops for a moment, watching the delicacy of its whiskers twitching in the watery sun, the stubble-coloured weft of its fur.

There was a rabbit in London the night her flat was bombed. She was standing outside the building, watching the firemen arc their hoses into the flames, destroying in the process what hadn’t already been burned or crushed. She was standing with the other inhabitants of union Street when she heard someone say, “Look, there’s a rabbit!” And sure enough, at the base of a lamppost was a white rabbit. It must have been a pet, or perhaps kept for food, and its cage had been ruined in the blast. Now it was free in the centre of London, on a busy street where it was sure to get run over. How strange, Enid had thought at the time, that the safer place for an animal that had once been wild was in captivity. Standing there, her life finished, the ambulance with Oliver’s body disappearing up the street, Enid had wanted nothing more than to save the rabbit, to catch it and keep it with her in a box until she could build it a cage. But the moment she stepped towards it, the rabbit hopped along the pavement, away from her and into shadow.

When Enid returns to the cottage, Rose still isn’t back from the shops. It’s past tea time and coming on to supper. The eggs that Enid had for lunch have worn off, and she’s hungry again. It seems polite to wait for Rose, as Enid is a guest in her house, but after an hour, Enid thinks, Sod this, and ravenously starts poking through the larder, looking for something to eat. She finds a tin of salmon and boils a couple of potatoes to go with it. There’s an opened bottle of red wine under the sink, probably for cooking, but she helps herself to a liberal glass of it anyway. After the third mouthful, it tastes just fine. While she is eating at the little table in the kitchen, Enid spreads out beside her plate the flora she has brought back from the Ashdown Forest. She is sure that James will have reference books in the cottage, and after she has eaten she will go and look up these wisps of grass and scraps of flower. It will be good to know what it is she’s found. It will feel like she’s accomplished something today.