The Evening Chorus (16 page)

T
HAT NIGHT
she lies in her bed listening to the wind howl outside the cottage. It seems to rise from the ocean and tear across the fields, like a wild animal. There are no trees around the stone building. It is the tallest thing in the landscape, and so the wind wants to destroy it, circles it wildly, trying to pull it apart.

The windows leak air around their frames, and the breeze inside her bedroom is strong enough to ruffle Enid’s hair, which is spread out on her pillow. She feels she is on the topmast of a ship, being blown apart in a gale. The little cottage seems to belong more to the Atlantic than to the land it sits on. She imagines it pitching about on a stormy sea, heading out on the choppy waters for the coast of Ireland.

The noise of the wind at first keeps her awake, then puts her to sleep, and finally wakes her again. The moaning grows so loud that Enid, slowly coming to consciousness, realizes it is not the wind at all.

She opens James’s door without knocking.

“James?” He is curled up in a ball on his mattress. His covers are stripped off and strewn on the floor. He is rocking and holding his knees, rocking and moaning. She can’t tell if he’s asleep or awake.

“James?” Enid walks over and gingerly lays a hand on his shoulder.

He twitches awake and sits bolt upright.

“It’s all right. I’m here. It’s all right.” Enid rubs his arm, his back. He’s shaking, and his thick flannel pajamas are soaked with sweat. “Did you have a nightmare? Do you want to talk about it?”

“Best not,” says James, his voice a hoarse whisper.

It’s colder in James’s room than it is in hers. His room fronts onto the cliffs, is directly in the path of the ocean wind.

“Well, let’s get you into some dry clothes, then. Do you have other pajamas?”

James nods.

“Which drawer?” Enid walks over to the small bureau that stands under the window. She lights the candle on top.

“Middle,” says James. “Eenie, how about fetching me a drink?”

“Water?” Enid comes back with the pajamas.

“Whisky.”

Enid gets James his drink while he changes into the dry pajamas. She has no idea how or where he does laundry, but she bundles his wet pajamas up efficiently and puts them out on the landing for now.

She sits on the bed beside her brother while he finishes his drink.

“I’m sorry for talking so much about Rose,” she says.

“It’s not Rose,” says James.

“What is it, then?”

“Fetch me another?” James holds out his empty glass to her, and Enid reluctantly takes it, goes back downstairs, and returns with a second tumbler of Scotch for him. His drinking has certainly increased since the last time she was with him.

He takes a sip, then another, cradling the glass in both of his hands. He’s tucked up in bed now, looking like an invalid. Enid remembers that when they were children, they would get all the same illnesses, but James would always get much sicker than she would, lingering about in bed days after she was already better and playing outdoors again.

“It’s the camp, I suppose,” he says after a while.

“I thought you said the camp was tolerable and the Germans didn’t treat you that badly.”

“That’s mostly true. I could concentrate on my study of the redstarts and block out everything else in the first camp. The second one, too, had birds to watch, although it was more crowded.” He pauses. “It’s the terror of being locked up, I suppose—of not knowing what is going to happen next. At the time I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s how it comes back to me now.” He pauses again, takes another drink. “A young man from my bunkhouse was shot while escaping. He was no more than a boy. Another of the men was shot right in front of me. Carmichael. He’d been whistling and his lips were still pursed when he fell. His eyes looked so surprised. Bits of his brain splattered my shirt. That’s how close I was to him.”

“That’s awful.”

“Right after that I was taken from the camp to be shot, or at least that’s what I thought.” James drains the last of the whisky. “But I was removed from the camp by the Kommandant so he could show me a flock of cedar waxwings. It was an act of friendship, but I misread it. And now it crawls back to me in the middle of the night—the certainty that I was going to die, the feeling of a fear so overwhelming that I can’t seem to get out of its way when it comes for me. And the surprised face of Carmichael as he fell dead in his garden. And the poor murdered body of Ian Davis. And then, of course, there’s Rose.”

“I knew it had to do with Rose.”

“That day I thought I was to be killed, I never loved her more. And she was already with Toby Halliday then.” James laughs. “I suppose if it gets too bad, it’s only a hundred and eighty-seven steps to the edge of the cliff.”

“Don’t say that.” A pause. “Why have you counted them?”

Her brother doesn’t reply.

Enid takes the glass from his hands, sets it on the floor to try to make him forget about asking for another drink.

“I wish you would come back with me to the city,” she says.

“I don’t like the city. It’s too big and noisy. There are no birds there.”

“What about transferring to an observatory in a bigger community?”

“Perhaps.” James folds his hands across his chest. “But not until I’ve finished my book on the ocean birds.”

“How far along are you?”

“Halfway through.”

“Finish it quickly, then, James.” Enid squeezes his hand. “Please. I worry about you out here. It’s not good for you to be so alone.”

“I will finish it quickly. I will. I promise.” He sounds like the little boy he used to be. Jimmy, telling her stories on his back under the low West Country sky, or trussed up in bed recovering from measles, carefully studying the black-and-white photos in his pocket guide to British birds.

O
N
E
NID’S
last day with her brother, she wakes up early and washes out James’s pajamas at the pump in the yard, pegging them onto a sagging piece of rope running from the corner of the cottage to the roof of the earth closet. The pajamas flap about like flags in the wind for half an hour and then dry stiff as cardboard.

“Can I take you shopping today?” Enid asks James when he comes downstairs later that morning. “You have virtually nothing in your larder, and I’d like to see you well provisioned before I leave. I’d like to buy you at least one bloody saucepan. And a kettle.”

“It’s a walk and a bus ride to the shops,” says James.

“I don’t mind.”

James grumbles about the time away from his shearwaters, but he actually seems glad when Enid marches him through the shops of the neighbouring village, buying him eggs, cheese, vegetables, a bit of bacon, a small joint of beef, some apples.

“I don’t want you to starve,” she says. “Because it seems to me that you are starving.”

“It’s hard to bother with food,” admits James, “when the shops are so far away.”

“Well, we’ll get you some tins as well then, shall we? But promise me you’ll throw them out when they’re empty.”

Enid is all business, and in his long experience of her in this mode, James knows better than to argue. He slouches meekly behind his older sister, carrying the shopping and protesting less and less when she takes out her purse to pay for the items she’s buying him.

On the walk back to the cottage, the sun actually comes out for an hour or so and the sombre scrubby fields bask golden in the sudden light.

“It’s beautiful,” says Enid when the sun transforms the landscape from unruly to hospitable. “I can see why you like it here.”

“You’re never tempted by the country?” James walks beside her, eating an apple, ambling slowly along, not racing ahead as he had on the day she arrived. He’s more relaxed, thinks Enid, and she’s pleased with that thought. “You used to like living on the farm.”

“I was a child then. Childhood is always romantic, no matter where one spends it.” Enid moves her hair out of her eyes. “I did like those weeks I spent in your cottage with Rose,” she says. “But no. The countryside doesn’t offer what the city does.”

“And what exactly does the city offer?”

“People, James. People.”

“Ah.” He takes a bite of his apple. “People are overrated, Eenie. The five years I spent locked up with two thousand men on a few acres of earth was enough humanity to last a lifetime.”

There’s a movement over the field and they both glimpse it at the same time. A white horse running along the horizon, fast and furious and alone. There is no one leading or trailing it.

“Wild horse,” says Enid.

“No such thing here,” says James. “It must have escaped from somewhere.”

The horse is coming closer to them; it will cross the path they are on a few hundred feet ahead of them.

When it does cross in front of them, they can see that its mane and tail are stuck with burrs and there are several long, bloody scratches scoring its flanks.

“See?” says James. “It must have caught itself on a wire fence when it was pushing through or jumping over.”

“Those are bramble scratches,” says Enid. “And look how tangled the mane is. That’s definitely a wild horse.”

“It can’t be.”

“But it is.”

The horse thunders away from them, through the field to the left of the path they are on. It’s running hard, as though it is being pursued, even though there’s no one running after it.

“It’s scared,” says James.

“No, it’s free,” says Enid.

L
ATER THAT
afternoon, James walks Enid back along the path to the bus stop so she can catch the coach that will take her to the train that will, in turn, take her back to London. He carries her suitcase as they tramp through the empty fields. There’s no horse to be seen now, no evidence that it was ever there, and James wonders if the horse was real at all. He often thinks he sees things that aren’t really there, or else the wind brings voices to his window at night. It is hard to know what to believe, but this is why he likes the birds. He watches them and writes down what they do, and by attaching himself to their purpose, he keeps himself firmly attached to his own reality.

James wishes both that Enid could stay longer and that she’d never come at all. Because now that she’s been to see him, he’ll miss her, and missing her will open up that hole in him that requires large amounts of whisky to fill. Her absence will be noticeable because her presence was welcome, and her coming to visit has made him realize how lonely he is, and this will be made worse once she leaves.

He wishes he could go to London with her and start again somehow, but he knows he can’t. He is over forty, too old to start anything again. He has his work, and most days he can cleave to that, to the rise and fall of the birds’ wings, to their strict routines, to the urgent occupancy of their small, short lives. They are predictable and comforting, and he depends on their existence for his own.

The bus puffs up the street. James hands Enid her suitcase.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he says, trying to smile.

“Don’t drink so much.” She kisses him on the cheek, squeezes his arm. “Take care of yourself, Jimmy. I’ll write to you.”

The bus pulls up in front of them and the doors shush open. Enid steps towards them, turns back.

“A letter is a good thing, you know,” she says. “Sometimes we can write what we can’t say. You could write to Rose.”

“I did that once,” he says. “It didn’t turn out so well.” She starts to say something, but he nudges her shoulder. “Go on, Eenie. Don’t hold up the driver now.”

She waves from her seat inside the bus, and though James means to turn and walk away, he ends up standing in the road, waving at the bus until it is long out of sight.

O
NCE
J
AMES
saw a redstart outside the observatory. It was a migrant, probably blown off course by a storm, and it sheltered for two days under the eaves of his bedroom, perching on the window ledge before flying away to spend the winter in Africa. He wondered if it was a descendant of one of his redstarts in Germany, if that was where it had originated. He wondered if it had memory in some part of its bodily cells of him watching the redstarts in the prison camp and this is why it had come directly there, to him.

This is why James likes birds—because they are all possibility. They make a line in the air, the invisible line of their flight, and this line can join up with other lines or lead somewhere entirely new. All you have to do is believe that the line exists and learn how to follow it.

And sometimes life will make this same invisible line for him, make him see where he came from, what he is attached to. Enid flew up out of his past, and he can follow the line of her all the way back to the farmhouse in the West Country, to the smell of animals in the barn and his mother’s bread baking in the kitchen, to that point in time when he was Jimmy Hunter, a boy who believed in the goodness and possibility of absolutely everything.

E
NID GOES STRAIGHT TO THE MAGAZINE, EVEN
though it’s early evening by the time she gets back to London.

But they’re going to press next week, and as always, there’s a mad scramble to meet the deadline. And even though it’s almost seven o’clock, all the lights are burning on the third floor of the building where the
Country Ways
offices are housed, and practically every single employee of the magazine is still hard at work.

Enid works in the art department of
Country Ways
as a paste-up artist. It is her job to receive the finished galleys from typography, wax them, and fix them to the paste-up boards so they can be photographed and made into plates, then run off on the printing press and gathered together as the pages of the magazine.
Country Ways
is a complex mix of text and advertisements, photographs and illustrations. Each of these things has to be carefully put down on the boards according to the wishes of the designer. Being a paste-up artist requires a good eye and steady hands, as the text has to go down straight and there are lots of instances—captions of photos, for example—where individual lines of type have to be carefully cut out and even more carefully laid into position. It is finicky work, but Enid likes it. There is satisfaction in getting the pages loaded up with their text and images. This is also the point at which Enid reads the magazine, never bothering with it when it is actually finished and out on the newsstands. She reads the articles as she lays them out on her drafting table in her little corner of the art department, with the window at her back that looks down onto the moving tide of people and the tops of the London buses in the streets below.