Free The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys Page A

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