The Evening Chorus (8 page)

“I love the dog!” Mrs. Stuart claps her hands and shouts, quite loudly, into the front garden. “Harris! Harris! Come here, girl.”

Harris bounds cheerfully up the path.

“Traitor,” murmurs Rose under her breath as Harris shoots by, rushing down the carpeted hallway towards the kitchen. Mrs. Stuart often leaves a plate of scraps on the floor by the back door for her.

The kitchen is warm and stuffy, as though the windows haven’t been opened in years. Rose kneels on the floor, her head angled into the oven. The interior smells burnt. The pilot light catches on the third match. When she pulls her head back out of the cooker, Mrs. Stuart hands her a cup and saucer.

“I thought you’d appreciate a nice cup of tea after your hard work, dear,” she says.

“I really have to go, Mrs. Stuart.”

Rose perches on the hard edge of a flowered wing chair in the sitting room, the cup and saucer balanced on her lap so she won’t forget to drink the tea, and to drink it quickly.

The surfaces of the room are cluttered with memorabilia of the former Mr. Stuart—his medals, set in blue velvet and hung in a frame over the mantelpiece; numerous photographs of him in his officer’s battledress. Rose has been given the tour of these artifacts so often that she knows their history as well as Mrs. Stuart does. But the one item she returns to voluntarily is the photograph of the Stuarts on their wedding day. In the photograph they are emerging from the arch of the church door into sunlight. Mrs. Stuart wears a white satin dress with a veil and a train; the veil is lifted back over her dark hair. Mr. Stuart is in his uniform. They walk through a corridor of swords raised by Mr. Stuart’s fellow soldiers.

Rose likes to look at this photograph because the expression on Mrs. Stuart’s face is one of such happiness that it always makes Rose happy to see it. But she can’t seem to match the expression in the photograph with Mrs. Stuart’s face now, although she tries every time she is at the house.

Harris saunters into the sitting room and comes over to Rose. She has gravy on her whiskers and her breath smells of rubbish.

“Mrs. Thomas, the one whose son was shot down over the Channel last month,” says Mrs. Stuart. “She’s had word this morning that he’s been captured.” She sips at her tea delicately, clearly intending to make her cup last for at least an hour. “Perhaps he’ll be taken to the same camp as James. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“I suppose so.” Rose drains her tea in one gulp and burns the back of her throat.

“How is James? Have you had a letter?”

Rose thinks of the unopened letter on the table by her armchair and immediately feels guilty. She stands up, walks over to the sitting-room window, and decisively draws the curtains.

“I really have to be going, Mrs. Stuart. I still have two streets to cover, and I want to finish before midnight. It doesn’t seem fair to wake people from their beds for the blackout.”

“No, no. Of course not.” Mrs. Stuart reluctantly puts her cup of tea aside. Before they’re out of the sitting room, Harris has walked over and lapped up the rest of it.

“You’re horrible,” says Rose when they’re outdoors. But she reaches down and rubs the top of the dog’s head anyway.

T
HE NEXT
morning Rose wakes up to the barking of a dog. At first she’s confused because Harris lies sprawled across the end of her bed. But the barking continues, and when Harris, also waking to the sound, suddenly lifts her head and leaps off the eiderdown, Rose knows what’s happening.

Clementine is sitting by the front door when Rose opens it. She bounds into the cottage, and she and Harris start wrestling in the hallway until Rose pushes them outside. The dogs race around the garden for a few revolutions and then head up onto the forest, running at top speed over the golf course greens and into the bracken beyond.

When Rose bought Harris, the farmer decided to keep one of the puppies himself. When the dogs were very young, Rose would take Harris over the forest to play with her sister. Now that the dogs are well over a year, they do the visiting on their own. Sometimes Rose will wake up to find Clementine downstairs, and sometimes she will wake up to find Harris gone.

Rose gets dressed and makes a cup of tea. The dogs return for breakfast, panting and muddy, their coats stuck with burrs.

Rose takes a slab of horsemeat from the larder and slaps it onto two plates, putting one at one end of the kitchen and one at the other. If the dogs eat too close to each other, they fight over the food. They are best friends outdoors, but sometimes they scrap indoors.

It’s a damp and misty morning. Rose finishes her tea, makes some toast, and scrapes butter across it from the end of her week’s ration, adding a dollop of marmalade. Then she goes out to the hens to feed them and collect the eggs—eight this morning. She still hasn’t used the seven from yesterday, so she’ll package up a dozen and take them over to her parents today.

Rose stands at the back door eating another piece of toast and marmalade while the dogs sniff eagerly along the tracks of a rabbit. Rose hardly ever sits down for meals now. Her habits have grown slovenly in this new single life she has been forced to lead. She often sleeps on the floor with the dog in the sitting room. She eats standing at the open back door or bent over the sink. The abandonment of routine is a response to loneliness, she thinks. But it is also far less unpleasant than one would think to live in this new unstructured way.

Clementine is still inside when Rose is ready to set off on the journey across the forest to her parents’ house. The dogs are lying together by the empty fire, sleeping off their breakfast. Harris has her head nestled into Clementine’s neck. Two white dogs with the musculature of horses. English pointers. Almost identical.

“Walk,” says Rose, and they scramble to their feet and get to the door before she does.

Rose has lived within sight of the Ashdown Forest most of her life. She knows the sight and feel of it, the smell of it, so well that she could probably find her way across it in the dark. Once a hunting park for Henry VIII, it has always been used by the inhabitants of the village as a necessary and sustaining feature of their daily lives. The bracken is still cut for animal bedding for those cottages and small farms on the outskirts that have cows and sheep. The spring in the centre field was once used as the water source for the villagers. Before it was a golf course, people hunted its copses and woods, shot birds from the open stretches of grass. Although it’s called the Ashdown Forest, there are actually no ash trees on it. In fact, there are hardly any trees at all, because Henry VIII cut them all down to build his navy. But there never were any ash trees. The land was named after a Frenchman who used to own it. The English couldn’t pronounce his name, and the bastardized version became
Ash
.

Rose never gets tired of being out on the forest, of the smoky smell of the bracken and the mist sheathing the hollows. She likes the quiet of it, and how she can strike across it for a whole day and not meet a single person.

The dogs charge ahead of her. One of them has a stick and the other gives chase. They crash through the ferns and bushes with reckless exuberance. Rose sometimes feels she should have tighter control over them, but she also rather likes their joyful plunge through the morning.

The mist dissipates on the walk across the heath. The sun moves higher into the sky, and it slants across the bracken, warming Rose’s face and releasing the smell of the earth—a rich, loamy perfume that is pleasant to breathe in and suddenly makes Rose feel hungry.

R
OSE DOESN’T
knock at the front door of her parents’ house but instead scoots round the back. Her father is raking grass cuttings in the garden.

“Hello, Daddy.” Rose puts the basket down and gives him a kiss on the cheek. Harris romps across the grass, barking her greeting. She’s alone. Clementine left them at the top of the road, trotting happily home, no doubt to scrounge a second breakfast.

“Hello, darling. What a nice surprise.”

“I’ve brought you some eggs.”

“Lovely.”

The back door of the house opens and Rose’s mother, Constance, leans her head out and calls up the garden, “Rose, what are you doing? Come into the house at once.”

“Be right there,” Rose calls back. She turns to her father. “How are you, Daddy?”

Frederick sighs, then fumbles in his jacket pocket for a cigarette. “She’s been blowing a regular gale, my darling,” he says. He strikes a match, breathes the smoke deeply into his lungs. “I’ve been out here since daybreak. But it’s no shelter.”

“Rose!” calls Constance from the doorway.

“Nothing for it, then,” says Rose. She picks up her basket. “Are you coming?”

“I’ll stay and finish my smoke first, if you don’t mind,” her father says. “You know how she loathes the smell of it in the house.”

“I’ll leave Harris with you, then.”

“That would probably be best.”

Her mother holds the door open and ushers Rose inside. “Why don’t you come to the front door, like a normal person?”

“I have the dog with me.” Rose proffers the basket. “I brought you some eggs. The hens have been laying well this week.”

Constance takes the basket. “Grubby little creatures. You don’t still have that one in the house with you, I hope.”

“Beatrice? No, she’s healed up now and is back outside.”

“You shouldn’t name them, Rose.”

They walk down the hallway towards the kitchen.

“Why not?”

Constance opens the larder and puts the egg basket inside.

“Because they’ll end up in a pot sooner or later,” she says, slamming the door shut. “And it’s harder to eat something that has a name.”

“But I’m not going to eat them.”

“Rose. You know nothing about war.” Constance takes the lid off the tea tin and puts the kettle on the hob. “You’ll stay for a cup of tea.”

It’s not a question, so Rose doesn’t bother to answer. She watches her mother prepare the tea—warming the pot before the water boils, measuring the length of time the tea brews. Constance still wears her nurse’s watch pinned to her blouse, even though she hasn’t been a nurse since the end of the first war. But that watch comes in startlingly handy on a regular basis in Constance’s daily life.

Frederick never returns to the house. Rose and her mother sit in the parlour to drink their tea. The carriage clock ticks loudly on the mantle. The china cups clatter on the saucers.

“James is well, then?” asks Constance.

“Yes. I had a letter this morning.” Rose doesn’t mention that she hasn’t opened it yet.

“I hope you’re working hard at keeping up his morale.”

“I suppose I am.”

“It’s your duty, Rose.” Constance sips at her tea. From outside, Rose can hear Harris barking. The dog is most likely protesting the fact that she’s not been allowed into the house.

“When William went to serve, I wrote him every day.”

William was Constance’s first husband. He died, impossibly young, in the first war, in his second month of fighting. Constance was a widow at nineteen. It was after that, after William’s death, that she became a nurse and met her second husband, Rose’s father, while she was working on the ward. He was her patient, a handsome young soldier with a bullet wound in his shoulder.

Rose wants to say that her mother would have had to write to William for only two months, whereas she’s been dutifully sending letters to her husband for over six months now, and it gets a bit wearing. “I’m writing to James,” she says.

“And saying nothing negative, I hope,” says Constance. “He does not need to know about your petty grievances while he’s got so much on his plate.”

James’s last letter was a series of questions, all relating to the redstarts. Rose had answered every one, even though it took her a full two days of thumbing through reference books.

“I don’t think he’s doing anything useful over there,” she says. “But I don’t complain.”

“I’m sure he’s sparing you the worst in his letters.”

Rose puts her empty cup down on the saucer, and then places the cup and saucer on the coaster on the mahogany table beside her chair. The coaster is one in a series with pictures of English villages. This springtime village is Alfriston. She recognizes the coaster from her childhood and suddenly feels defeated by the memory. “I’m going to take some tea out to Daddy,” she says.

“Take a mug,” says her mother. “I don’t want him chipping one of the Spodes. You know how he is.”

O
N ROSE’S
return journey across the heath, the clouds are low and hang in the tops of the trees. Harris, obviously tired from the strenuous exercise of the morning, trots close by Rose. She’s glad of the dog’s company. The early morning mist, the low clouds, and the visit to her parents have left her feeling lonely. She used to associate this feeling primarily with missing James. Those two things were directly equated—James was away and Rose missed him, felt lonely because he was gone from her daily physical life. But now that the reality of James has itself grown dim, Rose realizes that the feeling of loneliness she is constantly caught in might have nothing to do with her husband’s actual absence. The loneliness might just be a condition she’s always had, and while it disappeared in the first rush and flush of marriage—Rose and James wanted to secure their union before the war came and so married after knowing each other for only a few exhilarating months—it has returned now that her initial passion for her husband has diminished.

When Rose gets back to the cottage she’s tired and chilled from her walk over the fields, and although she knows she should open James’s letter—her mother’s comments have made her feel guilty about not opening it—she instead lies with the dog on the floor of the sitting room and reads a book.

She wakes up two hours later, the book tipped off her chest and pointing towards the floor like a boat going under the waves. The wind rattles the glass panes at the front of the parlour. Rose gets up, a little stiffly, and goes into the kitchen.

She makes some toast and potted meat, then stands at the open back door, looking out at the tangle of greenery in her vegetable garden, and beyond that to the wood and wire of the chicken coop.