The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys

pitifully small parlour. Enid sits in a chair by the bookcase. It’s lumpy and uncomfortable, overstuffed. The sun at the low window is not even enough light to enable her to read the spines of the volumes beside her. She wishes that she didn’t find knitting so slappingly dull, or that she was interested in drawing. How on earth is she going to pass the weeks she’ll be forced to spend in this dreadful little hovel without going bonkers?
    Rose pokes her head into the room. “I’m off to the shops, then.”
    “Here’s my ration book.” Enid fumbles it out of her cardigan pocket, hands it over. “Could I make a request for some meat? A bit of beef, perhaps? Maybe a chop?”
    “I’ll see what I can manage.” Rose pops her head out of the room and then pops it back in again. “If the dogs want out, just let them go.”
    “Will do. Do you want some money?”
    “You can buy the next round.”
    Enid listens to the kitchen door snap shut. The dogs don’t even lift their heads at the sound. She nudges the nearest dog with her foot, and it grunts and rolls over onto its back, exposing its hairless pink belly. Upside down it looks a bit like a pig. She waits a decent interval, long enough for Rose to be well down the road, and then she gets up and goes back upstairs.
    The door to Rose’s bedroom does indeed squeak on its hinges when Enid pushes it open. She steps inside. The room is at least three times the size of the one she has been given. It has two windows—one that looks down on the front garden, and a smaller one that overlooks the side of the cottage, where the scratchy rose grows up the stone. There are the same sloping ceilings that Enid has in her room and a larger version of her bureau. On top of the bureau are a silver-backed mirror and a clothes brush. On the bedside table is a photograph of James and Rose the day they were married. The curtains are flowery and pulled back. There is a wardrobe in the corner and a small Turkish carpet on the floor beside the bed. There is barely any evidence of Rose in her own bedroom, and the only indication of James, aside from his presence in the photograph, is the heavy wooden trouser press bulwarked up against the side of the wardrobe.
    Enid stands by the bedside table and looks at her brother and his young wife on their wedding day. Ten years still seems like too large a gap in age and experience. When James married her, Rose was only twenty-two. Now she’s just twenty-three. What can she possibly know about anything? Still, in the photograph, James looks happy, his smile wide and his eyes bright. He stands on the church steps in his best suit. Rose has hold of his right arm with both of her hands, as though she can’t pull him in close enough to her that day. And Rose is beautiful. Even in the black and white of the photograph, her dark hair shines and her face is radiant.
    In the weekly letters she writes to James at the camp, Enid never mentions Rose. She wouldn’t know what to say about her. She tells her brother about London life, about what she sees on the streets or in the shop windows. She never mentions the bombings, or the scarcity of food either. She thinks it must help him to have positive news of home, to be able to imagine the flavour of the world that continues, as he remembers it, outside the cage where he is being kept. But Enid is not really sure her cheerful disregard for his circumstances is the right approach. That said, it is one he mirrors, sending her letters back that describe the birds he has seen around the camp. Sometimes he asks her to look something up about a particular bird, and she especially likes those letters because they make her feel useful.
    She did write to James and tell him that she was coming down to stay with Rose in the cottage, and he did write back to say that he thought it was a wonderful idea, and that Rose would be glad of the company.
    But Rose isn’t glad of the company. Enid can clearly see that from their