The Evening Chorus (7 page)

“Davis is missing.” James feels his heartbeat increase at the thought that his young cabin mate has managed to escape.

But at the end of the line of the eleven living prisoners are four guards, two on either side of the two remaining men. The guards are dragging the prisoners by the arms. The prisoners are not moving. One of them is Ian Davis.

“Bastards,” says Harry.

The guards drop the dead men at the foot of the porch in front of the Kommandant’s office. Davis has been shot in the forehead. The other man has been shot through the chest. James feels bile rising in his throat and chokes to keep it down.

The Kommandant stands on his porch while the living escapees are dragged off towards the stone building that is used as the camp jail. He doesn’t say anything, just watches with the rest of them as the captured prisoners are hauled away. James notices that the Kommandant avoids looking down at the dead men lying on the ground at his feet. He says nothing at all during the whole event. It is the adjutant, a thin, jittery man with a permanent angry expression, who yells out at the assembled prisoners.

“See! This is what happens if you try to escape. There is no escape. You will not escape. This is what happens.”

No one likes the adjutant. He seems half crazy and operates at a fever pitch, always yelling and stamping around.

The Kommandant turns and walks back into his office. James thinks that perhaps he doesn’t like the adjutant either, or the killing of the prisoners.

“Were they running?” he whispers to Harry. “Didn’t they stop when the guards yelled?”

“They weren’t running,” says Harry. He spits in the earth at their feet. “They were shot in the front, not the back. Executed.”

Were they shot simply to send a message to the rest of the prisoners? Was Ian Davis’s life worth nothing more than that? James has the uneasy feeling that perhaps the Germans did know of this new tunnel after all, and that the entire episode was staged for the benefit of this warning, the opportunity for the guards to kill some Allies.

T
HE DEAD
men are buried outside the wire, the mounded earth of their grave visible from James’s bunkhouse window. He tries not to notice it every time he looks out the window—tries to focus on the sky, the clouds—but it is always there, in the bottom corner of every scene, a heavy underscore to the drifting clouds or the upright slashes of the pines.

Ian Davis’s bunk is not yet filled by another prisoner. His model village, in its cardboard box, sits on the pillow, waiting to be posted.

James almost writes to Rose about the escape, but he doesn’t want to worry her, and anyway the letter would pass through a German censor who would, he knows, delete any reference to it.

A
FTER THE
escape attempt, James doesn’t see the Kommandant again. He remains in his office, doesn’t come out to stand on his little wooden porch during roll call for a week after the killings. And then, the week after that, the prisoners are informed that they are to move and become part of another camp, with another Kommandant already in place there. The Kommandant at their Oflag is to remain behind with a few of the guards until he has orders to transfer elsewhere.

The prisoners are told about the move at the last minute. They’re given half an hour to grab their belongings and what food they have left from the Red Cross parcels and assemble in the yard to begin the march. They are not told how far away the next camp is, how long they will be walking.

James wraps his notebook with his redstart findings in the piece of canvas the men in his bunkhouse have been using to remove the kettle from the stove, and puts this package at the bottom of his rucksack. On top of it he places the letters from Rose and his parents, the German bird guide, and Davis’s box with his model village, and on top of that he puts the last of a meat roll, some biscuits, a few squares of chocolate. It is not enough food for more than one meal. He hopes they won’t be on the road for days.

“It must mean the Jerries are on the run,” says Harry, stuffing a paperback novel in each jacket pocket, so that his uniform bulges like a packhorse. “They’re probably moving us deeper into the heart of the Fatherland. Here’s hoping the new camp is bigger and not as barren.”

But James doesn’t think of this camp as barren. He will miss the river, and the tree where he stood to watch the redstarts, and the old stone wall where they used to nest, and even the dark ashy colour of the limestone buildings in the rain. The new camp could very well be worse than this one, have less in it, especially if Harry is right and the Germans are on the defensive.

They march out of the camp gates four abreast, with guards positioned at the front and rear of the long line of prisoners.

They walk all morning and then stop for half an hour while the guards come down the line with buckets of water and a ladle. It’s hot out, the sun directly overhead, all the men sweating in their filthy uniforms.

James crams a few biscuits into his mouth while he’s waiting for his ladleful of water. He offers one to Harry, who is standing beside him in the line, but Harry shakes his head.

“Too thirsty,” he says. He lights a cigarette. “Lovely day for a walk, though, isn’t it?”

“A walk, not a march,” says the Gardener, on the other side of James. “My boots aren’t up to this. They’re falling apart.” He holds up a foot to show James and Harry how the sole of his boot has come away from the leather uppers and flaps open like a duck’s bill.

They keep on for another few hours. James has blisters on both heels, making every step painful. He tries to forget about his feet, about the walk, about his body, and thinks instead about the redstarts, the ease and lightness of their flight above the river. He wonders where they are now, if any of the chicks survived into adulthood. And he wonders—absurdly, he knows—if any of the redstarts will remember him and miss his devoted vigil at the river.

The men start around a long curve in the road, deep woods on either side of them.

Harry leans over and whispers to James, “I’m going.”

“What?”

“When we get to the middle of the curve, the guards will have either gone around it or not reached it yet. They’ll be out of sight. I can just step off the road and into the woods. They won’t notice I’m gone until you get to the new camp. I’ll have hours on them.”

“But you’ve always thought the tunnels stupid! You’ve only ever stayed in your bunk, reading. You don’t want to escape.”

“I’ve just been biding my time,” says Harry. “Tunnels are a waste of energy, but this—this is an opportunity.” He puts a hand on his friend’s arm. “Be a sport and move over a bit after I’m gone so they don’t notice the hole in the line.”

“Harry.” James doesn’t know what to say. Harry Stevens has been his closest friend in the camp. He was counting on them seeing out the war together. What will he do without Harry in the bunk below, reading his novels and making snide remarks? Harry, always cheerful, making James feel better simply by virtue of his good nature. But James can’t very well ask Harry to stay just because he will miss him. He can’t ask him to stay just because James does not want him to go.

“I didn’t know you at all,” he says.

“You knew me,” says Harry. He grins at James. “You just weren’t an expert on me.”

The guards at the front of the line are almost out of sight. James lowers the rucksack from his shoulders, takes out the remainder of his meat roll, and passes it to his friend.

“Think of me sometimes,” he says. “And please, Harry, don’t get yourself shot.”

The front guards disappear around the bend.

Harry tucks the meat roll inside his shirt. “Bless you, James,” he says, and he leans over and kisses him on the cheek. Then he steps down into the trees bordering the road, and he’s gone.

R
OSE FLICKS ON THE READING LAMP BY HER CHAIR
and turns over her husband’s unopened letter in her lap.

Every week or two, she receives a letter from the camp where he is being held prisoner. Mostly he talks about the birds he is spotting around the area, or he asks her to look something up for him. He never mentions what is happening in the camp, or describes his surroundings, or even mentions the bloody weather. Each letter is simply a catalogue of bird behaviour, most of it so subtle and particular that Rose can’t bring herself to care at all.

The dog raises her head, grunts, and flops back down on her blanket by the fire. Rose slides out of her armchair and onto the floor, putting her head on the dog’s side, listening to Harris’s heartbeat, loping fast and strong under her vaulted rib cage. The dog smells like wet socks and rotten fish. She must have rolled in something earlier that day.

The small cottage parlour looks cosy in the glow from the reading lamp. There are curtains at the window, a thick rug on the floor, chairs, a bookcase by the doorway with books and photographs on it. It is a modest home for a young married couple with prospects. They have rented this cottage from a friend of Rose’s father who has charged them very little; the plan was to stay here until they started having children, and then they would need to look for something a little bigger.

The cottage is right on the lip of the Ashdown Forest and was once lived in by a shepherd. Until Rose and James moved in, peat—cut from a low boggy place on the forest and dried through the summer—was burned in the fireplace. The parlour still smells smoky and rich from the peat, the odour of it soaked right into the walls of the cottage.

At the back of the house is a large kitchen with a cooker and table, and a door that leads to the rear garden, much of which is taken up now with the chicken coop and Rose’s Victory Garden. Upstairs there are two bedrooms tucked under the eaves and a water closet and bath, each in a separate tiny room, both of which must have been, in the shepherd’s day, box cupboards.

Rose grew up near the Ashdown Forest, and although she went to London to work in an office for a year, she was happy to return to her childhood landscape as a young married woman. She had found the grit and busyness of London unsettling. The quickness of life there always made her feel out of step, and her memories of that time all involve hurrying or being late.

Rose and James met in London. He was living there while doing his teacher training, and they had both joined a club called the Coffeepot to try to extend their meagre social lives. What Rose liked about James from the moment she met him was his quiet steadiness. In the midst of all the rush and bother of her London life, he felt like a place where she could shelter. For their first date they took a packed lunch to Hampstead Heath and looked for birds. Rose can’t remember the birds they saw that day, but she does remember that they ate hard-boiled eggs and tomato sandwiches, and that the flask of tea they’d brought along was cold by the time they got around to drinking it.

The war has, of course, altered their plans for married life. Now Rose is here in the cottage by herself. She has chickens and a Victory Garden, her war job, Harris. She got the dog from a farmer near Duddleswell, on the other side of the forest. Since she was alone and fairly isolated in the cottage, it felt sensible to her to get a dog for companionship and protection. And Harris has not been a disappointment. No, the dog is not a disappointment.

Rose buries her face in Harris’s neck, not caring that this is where the dead animal smell is the strongest.

A
T TEN
o’clock, Rose sets off on her appointed rounds. Later than usual, but not feeling very apologetic about it, she marches down the lane towards the road, Harris trotting optimistically behind her. In her rush to get out the door, Rose has forgotten her helmet and armband.

The edge of the forest is black, like a dark sea, but Rose knows the landscape so well that she never needs a torch to make her way down the lane from Sycamore Cottage.

The Bennetts have their blackout in place. So too does the house next to theirs, and the house next to that.

She knocks on the door of number forty-seven.

“There’s some light showing on the second floor,” she says when Mrs. Turner answers the knock. “Bedroom on the right. The curtains aren’t quite pulled together.”

“Thank you, Rose. I’ll see to it. Goodnight now.”

“Goodnight.”

Rose continues down the road, knocking on two more doors to warn the occupants that their blackout precautions are inadequate.

When she gets to Mrs. Stuart’s house it is as though she’s standing in front of a bonfire. All the lights are blazing in the sitting room and bedrooms. None of the curtains are drawn.

“Again,” she says to Harris, unlatching the gate and walking up the path to the front door.

Harris waits in the road, sniffing at the patch of ground where the rubbish bins usually stand.

Mrs. Stuart is close to sixty. She lost her husband in the first war and has been living alone since then. Her children never visit. Rose knows this because every night she has knocked on Mrs. Stuart’s door to tell her to mind the blackout restrictions, and every night Mrs. Stuart has asked her to come in and help her with something, blaming her non-visiting children for the fact that she can’t lift the coal scuttle or fix the door of the pantry. Most nights Rose has been obliging, has gone in, but tonight, she tells herself as she marches up the mossy stone path, she will not. It is late enough that surely Mrs. Stuart is thinking about retiring for the night.

Mrs. Stuart answers the door on the first knock, as though she was waiting right behind it, spying on Rose through the little window above the letterbox. She is wearing a red dressing gown. Her white hair is down and brushed to her shoulders.

“Rose, dear,” she says, opening the door wider, “could you come in and help me with the pilot light in the cooker? It’s gone out and I just can’t reach that far in with the match.”

“It’s late,” says Rose. “I really should be getting on. I still have half my sector to do.”

“Oh, it won’t take any time at all,” says Mrs. Stuart. “How will I make do without the oven?”

“And I have the dog with me.”