The Evening Chorus (12 page)

These are roughly the hours she kept when she was working at the agency, and it is comforting to fall back into this routine, to lean on work, any work, as though it is something solid and will hold her up.

The minutiae of Ashdown Forest are more interesting than she first assumed. Each little flower has a history and cultural references, is a superstition or cure for something. Everything is its own world, and if Enid stays there, in these worlds, she won’t have to break the surface of the large, terrifying world she actually lives in.

In the evenings, Enid spreads out her specimens on the kitchen table, and she identifies them with the help of her reference books. She’s not sure what she will do with her account when it is finished, but she has a vague idea that she might send it to James in Germany. He would appreciate her attempt at writing a natural history. He might like to be so precisely reminded of home, to read about the grasses and the deer and the birds up on the forest and imagine himself there again.

“Don’t tell me you’re still at it,” says Rose when she comes home that evening to find Enid thumbing through her wildflower guide.

“Come here,” says Enid. She brandishes a stalk for Rose to see. “A heath spotted-orchid. Look at how perfect these tiny petals are.”

Rose regards the tiny flower that Enid holds out to her. “Beautiful,” she says.

“But you don’t mean that.” Enid retracts the orchid.

Rose puts her basket down on the worktop. “I was able to get a couple of chops,” she says. “I’m going to make us a nice supper tonight.”

“I’m not your damned dog,” says Enid. “You can’t coax me back to favour with food.”

Rose laughs. “Can’t I?”

“Well, you can’t immediately coax me back.”

Enid moves her natural history samples to one end of the table and sets out the cutlery and plates on the other.

“I made an apple crisp for pudding,” says Rose.

“You have splashed out. What’s the occasion?”

“No occasion. I’m just . . .” Rose wants to say “happy,” but she’s worried that Enid will wonder how she can be happy when James is still being held prisoner. “Happy to do it.”

“Well, I’m certainly happy to eat it.”

Rose puts the chops in a pan under the grill.

“Shall we have a drink?” she asks. “There’s a half-finished bottle of plonk under the sink.”

“I’ll do the honours.” Enid takes down two glasses from the cupboard, pours the dregs of the red wine into the glasses, and hands one to Rose. “Here’s looking up your old address,” she says. They clink.

“I think candles would be nice,” says Rose. She hurries into the sitting room and comes back with a pair of white candles in silver candlesticks. She puts them in the centre of the table, lighting the wicks with the box of matches she keeps on the back of the cooker. “They were a wedding present,” she says. “I think we only ever used them once.”

Rose remembers that supper. She had made a cauliflower cheese for James. It was one of the first times she had cooked for him, one of their first meals together as a married couple. She had thought the candles would be a nice touch, romantic, but James had complained that he couldn’t see his food and blew them out. After that she put them on top of the bookcase and never brought them out again.

“Very nice,” says Enid. “Candles make a meal more festive, don’t you think?”

“I do.”

They eat the chops and mash and peas. Their forks click against the plates. There’s the sound of the tap dripping into the sink.

Rose clears and brings the pudding.

“It’s very good,” says Enid.

“It’s nice to have someone to cook for again,” says Rose. “Did you cook much for yourself in London?”

“Mostly I ate in pubs. I often worked late.” Enid catches Rose’s look. “No, I honestly did often work late. It’s the nature of that sort of business. Lots of deadlines and last-minute scrambles.”

“Do you miss it?”

“I try not to think about it, because one thing leads to another and . . . well, it’s best if I don’t follow that path.” Enid scrapes her plate to get the last of the apple crisp. “And besides, now I have the flora and fauna of the Ashdown Forest to keep me occupied.”

“Do you really find that interesting?” asks Rose. “Because honestly, I can’t see the appeal.”

“I really do.”

Enid pulls her specimens towards her. “Let me show you what I found today.”

Rose stands up. “I should really do the washing-up.” But she can see the flash of hurt in her sister-in-law’s eyes, so she sits back down again. “Or the washing-up can wait,” she says. “And you can show me what you’ve discovered and I can pretend to be interested.”

M
RS
. S
TUART
hasn’t returned home. Rose heard from a neighbour that she’s still in hospital, recovering from her stroke. It’s unsettling for Rose to be out on patrol and see Mrs. Stuart’s pitch-black house in perfect accordance with the rules of the blackout. It seems wrong for there to be no brightly lit front room shining like a beacon at the top of the road. The rule-breakers are more interesting than the conformers, thinks Rose as she walks past Mrs. Stuart’s shadowed house. And you miss the rule-breakers when they’re gone.

It is as though everyone has finally understood what is required of them during the blackout, or perhaps with the absence of Mrs. Stuart’s bad example, there is nothing to lead anyone else astray. Whatever the reason, for the first night since she became an ARP warden, Rose doesn’t have to give a caution. It makes her rounds much shorter than normal. She heads home and, coming up the path to the edge of the forest, laughs out loud when she sees her own cottage glowing with light.

Enid must be absorbed in her nature cataloguing and has forgotten to draw the curtains.

Rose stands in the front garden of her cottage and looks into her sitting room, where Enid lounges on the chesterfield reading a book, her feet pulled up under her. There’s a lamp on beside her and another on across the room. Even the electric light in the hallway is blazing.

When she marries Toby, Rose will offer the cottage to Enid. It would be nice for James to come home to someone. It would be nice for the cottage to be lived in. It suits Enid. She looks like she belongs there.

The thought of James makes Rose nervous. She has written to him asking for a divorce, but she hasn’t heard back yet. She dreads that letter, and yet there will also be relief in it. She won’t have to sneak around anymore. She won’t have to pretend. Well, she’ll still have to pretend to her parents, but not so much to everyone else.

Enid gets up, switches off the lamp. She’s on her way up to bed. There’s a looseness to how she moves when she’s alone that catches at Rose, makes her breath stop for a moment in her throat. What is it?

It’s James. Seeing Enid walk across the room has reminded Rose of James. Their manner is the same. And for the first time since he’s been gone, she feels him back and it unnerves her.

T
HAT NIGHT
there’s a storm. Enid wakes up to a crash outside the cottage, meets Rose on the landing carrying a torch.

“The electric’s gone out,” says Rose. “I think a tree might have come down.”

The dog shoots past Enid on the staircase, almost knocking her over on her way downstairs.

“Don’t let Harris out,” Rose warns as they pull on rubber boots at the front door. “She’ll bolt in a storm. I made the mistake of letting her out once, and she was gone for three days.”

Harris, who seems to have forgotten this memory and her fear of storms, pushes eagerly against their legs when they open the door, and Enid has to knee the dog back inside the hallway and then quickly slam the door to stop her from escaping.

Outside, the wind swirls the tops of the trees and tangles Enid’s nightie around her legs. The weak lick of torchlight doesn’t reach as far as the gate. Beyond it, the night swells and rages, invisible and noisy.

“I can’t see a damned thing,” says Enid.

Rose swings the useless torch up towards the roof of the cottage, but the light won’t extend that far. “Shall we walk around the house?” she suggests. “You could go one direction, and I will go the other. Just to see if there’s a tree fallen on the roof.”

Enid takes the left side of the building, starting at the sitting-room window and working her way slowly around to the kitchen door. She keeps one hand on the stone wall, not daring to lose contact with the building as she stumbles through the old flower beds and bits of rubble that border Sycamore Cottage.

Often in London, if she was out after the blackout, Enid would have to negotiate her way through the streets in a similar fashion, trailing her fingers along the iron railings of the park or bumping along the low stone wall outside the terrace of flats on her road. There was always a mix of thrill and terror in this blind fumbling towards home, and when Enid meets Rose at the back of the cottage, she is suddenly flooded with relief.

“Did you see anything?” asks Rose.

“Nothing.”

“Must have come down in the lane, then.” Rose puts a hand on Enid’s arm and can feel how cold her skin is. “Let’s go back in,” she says. “I’ll make some cocoa to warm us up.”

R
OSE WAKES
up early. The sun has not yet risen. She lies in the darkness for a few moments, and then she reaches over and switches on her bedside lamp to see if the electricity is back on. The light haloes out into the room, falling most strongly on the photograph of her and James that stands beside the lamp on the night table.

What Rose remembers of her wedding day is that there was a heat wave. Her bouquet wilted. Her dress stuck to her body.

She looks closely at the photograph, sees how firmly she’s holding on to James’s arm, how open his face looks. Why can’t she remember that part? Why can’t she remember how it felt to stand at the front of the church and Repeat after me?

Rose lays the photograph face down on the night table.

Enid is up when Rose goes downstairs. She is wearing slippers, a wool skirt, and at least two cardigans. She looks a bit like a madwoman who’s escaped from the asylum.

“The lights are back on,” says Rose. “I thought I might go out and see what the damage is.”

She takes the dog with her. There’s still the smell of rain, even though the morning is dry. There’s another smell too. Rose stops and sniffs the air. Harris, who’s disconcerted that Rose is behaving like a dog, stops and sniffs the air as well. It’s the smell of green wood, and it belongs to a massive oak that’s fallen across the laneway and squashed the garden shed of Linden Cottage. The branches of the tree are cracked and broken, the roots exposed and dripping with earth.

Rose puts her hand gently on the rough bark of the fallen tree, as though she were a nurse feeling the forehead of a sick patient.

When she gets back to the cottage, Enid comes into the hallway to meet her.

“Well?” she asks.

“An oak came down in the lane,” says Rose, shucking her boots onto the mat by the door. “I used to collect acorns from that tree when I was a child. It’s very old. My grandfather remembered it as being old—that’s how old it is. It’s so sad it’s come down.” She hands something to Enid. It’s a small twig with a couple of leaves attached. “I thought you might like this for your collection.”

Enid is touched. She doesn’t have the heart to tell Rose that she isn’t collecting mementos but is doing a much more scientific survey of the natural history in the area.

“Thank you.” She tucks the twig into the pocket of her cardigan.

“You are coming with me today, aren’t you?” asks Rose.

“Yes, of course.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

Rose is taking Enid to her parents’ house for Sunday lunch. Her sister-in-law’s presence will be a buffer to any awkward questions about James.

They set off across the heath at noon, Harris bounding along beside them. It’s a foggy day, the mist sheathing the dry grass fields, and the dog looks ghostly as she disappears and then reappears ahead of them.

It’s a good idea to bring Enid to lunch, but still Rose worries about the event and wishes she didn’t have to go, wishes she could just nip down to the Three Bells and spend the day with Toby instead.

“My mother’s difficult,” she says. “You might not like her.”

“Oh, I don’t need to like her,” says Enid. “I just need her to be a good cook.”

But Enid is appalled at Constance’s controlling manner at the dinner table. Every item that is lifted off the tablecloth has to be replaced exactly where it was taken from, and if it isn’t, Constance quickly moves out a hand to fix the error. They sit in strained silence until the courses are in the process of changing, and then Enid and Frederick bolt for the garden to have a cigarette.

Harris is out there, lying mournfully on the flagstones, her head between her paws.

“Meals aren’t really Constance’s forte,” says Frederick. He bends down to pat the dog. “She’s never been very good at enjoying herself.”

“Well, it’s hard to learn how to do, isn’t it?” says Enid. “I don’t think I’m very good at it myself.”

“But you probably don’t count the number of Brussels sprouts that each person takes and remove from their plate any that exceed the quota.”

“What is the quota?”

“Eight.”

They wander down to the back of the garden, stand by a mound of dead leaves against the fence.

“For burning,” says Frederick. “I save that chore up until I need an excuse to be out of the house for several hours.”

Why do you bother? thinks Enid. But she is used to men complaining about their wives and knows that it hardly ever translates into their leaving them. She smokes her cigarette and kicks at the pile of leaves with her foot. The smell that rises from them is loamy and sharp.

“You look like James,” says Frederick.

“When we were children, it was hard to tell us apart. I was taller than him for years.”

“What is the age difference?”

“I’m two years older.” Enid lights another cigarette off the tip of the first. She’s not ready to go back inside the house yet. She’s not sure how she’ll be able to manage the strict rules that will undoubtedly exist around the pudding and the cheese and biscuits.