The Evening Chorus (20 page)

“They’re all bitches,” says Gregory, bending down to pick one up and let it lick his face. “There were seven pups altogether. The others have gone.”

“They’re adorable.”

“I’m going to keep one for myself, but the rest need to find homes. Soon. They’re getting too old to leave contained, and they wreak havoc in the barn if I let them out. Yesterday they knocked over the milking pail and drank all the milk.” Gregory hands the puppy he’s been holding to Rose. “Wouldn’t you reconsider, Mrs. Hunter?”

“I can’t,” says Rose, but she tucks the puppy under her chin, inhaling the sweet puppy smell on the top of its head. “And I’m not Mrs. Hunter anymore.”

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“No, no. James didn’t die,” says Rose. “I divorced him. He was a prisoner in Germany for the entire war, and I didn’t wait for him to return. Now I live with my mother because I can’t afford to be on my own. She despises dogs and won’t allow them in the house. Poor Harris had to spend her last years out of doors. I couldn’t do that to another dog.” She hands the puppy back to Gregory. “I’m sorry.” She feels a little emotional at having said so much, blames it on the wriggling high spirits of the puppies shaking something loose in her.

Gregory places the puppy gently on the floor of the horse stall. He straightens up, touches Rose lightly on the shoulder. “Come in and say hello to Dad,” he says. “He would like the chance to see you while you’re here.”

R
OSE WALKS
back across the forest. It’s a dull day, the clouds low and threatening, wind bending the grasses. She bought some eggs from the Spencers, but it is not the same as having been to the shops in the village, and she will no doubt be caught out in her lie. It is so strange to be thrust backwards in her life, back to when she was a child, trying to hide what she was doing from her mother’s critical bullying.

There’s a movement up ahead in the bracken. A fox, standing still and sniffing the air in the direction of Rose’s approach. She stops and they regard each other.

And then, out of the sky a bird appears, shrieking above her head. Rose is used to gulls, blown inland from the sea and wheeling across the heath. But there is something in the shape of this bird that is wrong. Its body is slender as a dart. Its beak is bright orange. And its behaviour is not exactly gull-like. True, it is as angry as any gull, but usually a gull’s anger is not attached to anyone, but rather is just a general complaint—at finding itself too far inland, at realizing it has to fight the wind to get back to the shore and any hope of food. Gulls are irritable, squawking to voice that irritation to everything around them.

But this bird is directly upset with Rose. It dives towards her, stalls just feet from her head, back-paddling up into the sky, wings and tail spread, screaming. At first Rose thinks the fox has disturbed it, but the bird takes no notice of the fox. All its attention is focused on Rose. She wonders if she has wandered near its nest, but gulls are shorebirds. They won’t have a nest out in the middle of an open field. They make their nests on the ledges of cliffs or on rocky islands offshore, where they will be free from predators. She knows this much from having been briefly married to someone who liked to study birds.

The bird dives at Rose once more, pulls back just in the nick of time, dives at her again. She covers her head with her arms, dropping the box of eggs in the process. The fox, unconcerned with the attack by the bird, sits on its haunches twenty yards ahead, waiting for Rose to move off so it can have at the broken eggs.

The bird is so angry, but Rose can’t think what she has done to merit this anger. She stumbles across the field with the bird diving repeatedly at her head, only circling up and away once she reaches the road.

Back at the house she looks it up in the bird guide, a present to her father from James. It seems to be an Arctic tern—a bird that migrates between the Arctic and Antarctic, a distance travelled of over twenty thousand miles each year. It has the farthest migration of any bird; the Arctic tern essentially lives in the air.

Suddenly the behaviour of the bird makes sense to Rose. It might have no real experience of people, flying between such remote locations that when it does touch down, it does so in empty landscapes. It could be that she was the first human the bird had ever seen, and while it could recognize the fox as being from its world, clearly Rose was not seen as a creature of the earth. There is nothing natural about a human being, thinks Rose, even though we pretend, all the time, that this isn’t the case at all.

T
HERE ARE
a lot of rules for Rose, living in her mother’s house. She is sure there are more restrictions than the first time she lived here, but she has no choice except to obey.

Bathing is allowed only once a week, and only at night, never in the afternoon. All lights must be out by ten o’clock. If Rose is reading and a light shows under her door, her mother will rap on the door from the hallway until the light is switched off. No music from the wireless, and no singing. Listening to the evening news is permitted, but the wireless is turned off after the broadcast is over. No mud in the house. No eating between meals. No tears.

The list goes on and on. Rose can’t even remember all the rules, but she’s learned to fit herself into the spaces around them. At night, if she can’t sleep, she opens her window wide and sits on the sill, her legs dangling down over the bricks. She likes the feel of the night air on her skin, the soft sound of the owls in the pines at the back of the garden. For her weekly bath, she fills the tub right up to the brim and stays in it for as long as possible. She never sings in the house, but she sings outside, at full volume, when she is crossing the heath. She cries all the time.

Tonight Rose begs off listening to the news with her mother, saying that she has to write a letter to an old friend, and she goes to her bedroom and closes the door.

There is no letter. There are no friends. Rose lost touch with most of her schoolmates when she married James. And afterwards . . . well, even though she and Toby were careful, it seems the story of their affair had leaked out somehow, and by the time Rose divorced, the sentiment against her was such that it would have been hard to make a friend of anyone in the village.

Mostly she doesn’t care. Mostly she would just prefer to have Harris back, to have dog company over human company.

But tonight, sitting in her room, watching the sky darken slowly outside her window, she thinks of Gregory Spencer, of his kindness at not commenting on her confession, of his easy manner, and she wishes she could go and see him again. But there is no reason to go back to the farm. She can’t have a dog, and it would be painful to see the puppies again and know that she couldn’t tuck one under her arm and bring it home with her.

Rose goes over to the window and opens it, leans her body across the sill, looking down into the back garden. She used to do this as a child, calling out to her father while he raked the leaves or dug the beds. He would always stop what he was doing and wave to her, sometimes doffing his cap in her direction.

She misses her father, misses the alliance she shared with him against Constance, but she also doesn’t blame him for dying, and she always knew he would go first. His bluff and banter was no match for the steely freight of his wife. The strong don’t necessarily survive, but the mean invariably do.

He would have been interested in the Arctic tern over the heath today. He would have laughed at the outrage of the bird on encountering a person for the first time. Frederick, like his daughter, made no secret of preferring the natural world to the human one.

There was a lot of her father in Toby, thinks Rose. They were similarly easygoing. And now they are similarly dead. She hauls her body back over the sill and closes the window.

H
E COMES
to the front door in the morning, after breakfast, when Constance is upstairs dressing for her biweekly bridge game with the retired colonel, his wife, and her widowed sister. Rose is in the kitchen doing the washing-up. The window above the sink faces out onto the front garden, so she sees him coming up the path and intercepts him before he has a chance to knock on the door and alert Constance.

Rose steers Gregory back down the path, through the gate, and out onto the road in front of the house.

“Sorry,” she says, “but my mother will come down if she sees you.”

“And that would be bad?”

“Terrible.” Rose manoeuvres Gregory behind the big yew hedge that borders the garden, where she knows they can’t be spotted from the house. “My mother is not like your father. She’s not a nice person.”

Yesterday, old Mr. Spencer had made Rose switch chairs with him in the parlour so that she could enjoy the view out the window over the fields while she sipped her tea.

Gregory takes off his cap. Rose can see that his hands have been scrubbed clean. The dirt that was under his nails yesterday is gone.

“I came to say two things to you,” he says, looking her square in the eyes. “The first is that I was engaged to be married when I left to fight overseas, but my girl didn’t wait for me to come back. She left me while I was away, sent a letter to me in Africa to say that she was breaking off the engagement.”

Rose feels her heart sink. “I’m sorry,” she says.

“No. Don’t be. I was gone five years. That’s too long a time to wait for someone. To remain faithful to me, she would have had to stop living her life.” Gregory worries the brim of his hat between his fingers. “Why, if I loved her, would I want her to do that for me?”

“But weren’t you heartbroken?”

“For a time. Yes. But I understood and so I forgave her. I didn’t hold it against her.”

Rose can feel the tears start in her eyes, tries to blink them away. “What’s the second thing?” she asks.

Gregory Spencer smiles. He has crooked front teeth and lots of lines around his eyes that suggest he’s used to smiling.

“I wanted to say that if you’ve had a dog, then you should have another. If you’ve had a dog, then it’s hard to do without one.”

“But I can’t have a dog. I’ve already said that.”

“You can’t have a dog here. You could, however, keep the dog at my farm and come and see it whenever you want, until your situation changes and you are able to have it with you all the time.”

“But I don’t see my situation ever changing.”

“All situations change,” Gregory says. “We’ve both learned that, haven’t we?”

Rose lets the tears roll down her cheeks, doesn’t try to wipe them away. She doesn’t know what upsets her more, the kindness she’s being shown or the lack of it she’s lived with for so long. She leans in towards Gregory Spencer, buries her face in the shoulder of his coat. He puts his arms around her and gives her a squeeze.

“Come now,” he says. “No need for tears. It’s a happy occasion, not a sad one. Fetch your coat and let’s go and pick you out a new dog.”

C
HRISTOPH WALKS ACROSS THE QUADRANGLE TO
his office. His boot heels ring on the stones, the strike of each foot echoing through the courtyard.

There are three flights of stairs to climb, with a rest on each landing before continuing. At each rest he leans against the banister, looking out the small stairway window, measuring his progress by the diminishing square of stone and trees below.

It’s been almost a week since he was in his office, and there is a stack of mail for him in the mailbox near the department secretary’s desk. He takes the letters and packages, not bothering to look at them, and drops them on the edge of his desk when he gets inside his office.

Christoph removes his coat and hangs it on the rack by the door, tucks his briefcase beside the desk on the floor. He opens the shutters on the window. He sits down.

Most of the letters are unremarkable—colleagues asking for favours, publishers trying to entice him to buy a particular book—but there is one small package whose postmark is unfamiliar. He turns it over in his hands, examining the cramped script on the brown paper, the foreign stamp. Finally he slits the sealed flap with his letter opener, extracts a folded piece of paper, and reads the single page.

Dear Kommandant,

It seems strange to address you using that term, but since that is the only way I knew you, I would find another form of address even more difficult.

I pray that this letter finds you. I remember that you worked at the university in Berlin and so have sent this parcel there, hoping that, if you survived the war, you will have resumed your duties in the classics department.

I am writing to you because for years I have
thought of that day when you took me from the camp with a mixture of confusion and terror. You may remember that I believed you were removing me from the camp to be shot. But this morning, on what will be my last morning, I suddenly saw it all differently because I am no longer afraid, and I wanted to finally thank you for taking me to see the cedar waxwings. I can understand now what an extraordinary act of kindness it was, and I am grateful. Kindness should never go unacknowledged. I am enclosing the book I wrote on the redstarts that were around our camp. I hope you will see, when reading it, that I did indeed make a proper study of the birds.

The waxwings were beautiful, were they not? Chatting and busy in the tops of the pine trees. Such sleek little fellows. Such a soft, pale yellow. I wish we could go and visit them together again now that the war is well over.

Flight is not the astonishing thing. I have always thought that the miracle of birds is not that they fly, but that they touch down.

Yours truly,

James Hunter

Christoph folds the letter, puts it down on top of his desk, and slides the book from the package. It is a slim volume with a coloured illustration of a redstart on the front and the single word “Redstart” above the bird with James Hunter’s name below.