House of Doors (16 page)

She knew she was unbalanced. She was starting to wonder again if she was sane.

Logically, it should be Aesculapius she turned to. If anyone. She was an Englishwoman in wartime; she ought properly to stiffen her spine, stiffen her upper lip and carry on uncomplainingly. Be her own cliché. That, or talk to the unit psychiatrist who was so conveniently to hand.

But here was Colonel Treadgold, large and avuncular and leading her away, astray, up to his own office. It was as though he knew that she was troubled by something more than tonight's horror in the stables. Or else it was recruitment, inducement, an offer of the colonel's shilling.

Or neither of those, just the simple chance of a drink and a chat with her new commanding officer, at a time when they were both tired and restless, underemployed, and neither of them could hope to go to bed.

Perhaps she should just take this at face value. But his face was half hidden, and so she thought were his motives. And her own, those too. Nothing was simple or clear; nothing could be honest between them, quite, so long as she saw spies in the shrubbery and ghosts in the water.

Of course, there actually were spies in the shrubbery. Spies in training, at least, their own spies and saboteurs. Assassins. Hiding behind the faces that he made for them, faces that didn't need hiding because they could give nothing away.

As for ghosts, well. The ghosts were her own. One ghost, solitary and private. Except that he seemed to have reached out beyond her to touch another, a stranger, more cruelly than ever he would touch her.

The colonel's office occupied a corner of the first floor, where the staff wing turned back from the frontage of the house. It might have been a charming room in peacetime, in daylight, if one could be charmed by views of moor and woodland. Herself, Ruth thought the moors too bleak and the woods too menacing, but she knew herself to be Home Counties through and through; she liked her landscapes gentle and tended, tamed.

Behind its shutters and blackout curtains, given over to military use – and he was still a soldier as well as a surgeon,
Colonel
Treadgold, she ought not to forget that – what might have been a lady's drawing room had become a haven for a man beset, or so she thought. There were ramparts of paper everywhere, stacked high on desk and dresser and the floor too, laid out in a labyrinth that needed care to step through. If there were any kind of order to it, that could only be in his head. Perhaps it all made sense to him, perhaps he had built these walls as a stronghold sure against chaos, a mighty fortress,
ein feste Burg
as Luther's hymn would have it. Perhaps. She thought it looked more like desperate defences, a city besieged.

‘I think you need a batman,' she said mildly. ‘Or a secretary.'

‘Already got 'em, thank you kindly. One of each. I won't let 'em in here. Sit you down, sit, sit.'

He swept up a pile of official-looking buff folders from a chair, cast about for a moment like a man adrift and then deposited them on another teetering pile that was building resolutely in the fireplace. Ruth sat obediently, pondering on the wisdom of having people in your service and not allowing them to do their jobs.

Still. Within those threatening drifts of paperwork, he had made himself a nest that was comfortable enough. Man-comforts: she could recognize those. Smells of smoke and leather, soft cushions and abandoned books, a disreputable pair of slippers on the cold hearth. Really, she thought, there ought to be a dog. An elderly retired spaniel to look up and thump its docked tail at his entrance, to rest its chin on his slippered foot, to sigh heavily and grunt a little in its sleep.

The colonel was behind his desk, bending, grunting himself a little as he straightened. He had a bottle in each hand, retrieved from a crate invisible to her; and could hold both easily in one hand, neck and neck, allowing him to scoop up two tankards with the other as he came across to join her.

One of the tankards was pewter, one glass. He peered at that one suspiciously, gave it a wipe with his handkerchief, said, ‘Well. That's as clean as it's going to be. Do you mind?'

‘Not in the least,' she assured him. Which was true, entirely. His handkerchief at least was clean, she had seen him shake it from its ironed folds; and Peter had taught her long ago not to be too fussy, just as she had been teaching him to be tidier than his wont.

She didn't think she would try to teach the colonel. She thought he was beyond her measure.

He set everything he carried somehow on the mantelpiece, though it was crammed already with books and tobacco pots, a pipe rack, ashtrays and matches and figurines that must surely be a hangover from the house's proper owner, a residue not packed away.

He had retrieved his jacket from her shoulders as they came indoors. ‘No need to give the gossips more to talk about, eh? They'll be busy enough already.' Now he rummaged in a pocket to produce a penknife that he might have carried since he was a boy, the ivory handle was so worn and grubby. The blade looked keen enough, though, and dealt efficiently with the bottle tops.

Amber liquid gurgled and frothed within the dimpled glass. He passed her drink to her, as the room filled with the heady scent of apples in ferment; poured the other and drank himself, and sighed like that absent spaniel, and wiped his moustache with his handkerchief, and leaned against the mantelpiece and waited.

It was the waiting that was wicked. Learned behaviour, she was sure: all Aesculapius.

She capitulated quickly. ‘What do you think happened tonight, sir?'

‘An accident, of course. Major Black plays his war games with live ammo; of course there must be accidents. The man was careless, or else there was a fault in the device, the grenade or whatever he was playing with. Mistakes happen. And they cost us dear, every time. They've cost that poor young man his hand, and likely his hopes of going overseas. If he can't work a parachute – or a garrotte –' added with a twist of the lips, an expression of absolute distaste coupled with ruthless recognition of the facts – ‘then I don't see how he can be used effectively. Or put in place to be used at all. It's not my decision to make, but this might be a blessing. I don't suppose he'd see it that way, they're all mad keen to go. But I might actually get to rebuild a man for civilian life, rather than as a weapon of war.'

Actually she thought any number of his patients would not be useful to Major Black, but of course it wouldn't be those who preyed on his mind. It was a human thing, to dwell on loss and sacrifice; she knew. Who better?

If it took two hands to manage a parachute, and managing a parachute was a prerequisite for being sent on a mission, she thought she could give a name to one more young man doomed to disappointment in the end, however much he practised silence and wore his scars like a hero.

That was a relief to her, much more personal than the colonel's, sharper and more surprising.

Never mind. Not what she was here for. She could think about that later.

She was here at the colonel's invitation. She wasn't quite sure what he'd had in mind, though no doubt he meant to grill her about something. That, or simply to seal her to his own camp, not realizing that she was there already by conviction and temperament and experience too. It seemed a brutal thing to her, that men who had given so much already should be expected or allowed to hurl their lives away like grenades flung in the teeth of the enemy. Never mind that they were all volunteers. No doubt they thought they would go out in one bright, eternal, glorious flame, that ending they had somehow not quite achieved in their crashed planes, tragic heroes, romantic to the last.

Never mind that they were all of them desperate, damaged beyond bearing, however glib they seemed.

Never mind that she understood them so exactly, that she herself had been seeking a posting overseas and a swift eclipsing death.

None of that mattered. Even the war's need couldn't matter, against the cold reality of what was happening here.

She could say all of that to him, and it was very likely what he had hoped to hear, what he had fetched her for. They could be campaigners in some way, working together to mitigate the worst of Major Black, to save one patient and then another. Find ways to keep them or ways to transfer them, anything to keep them out of the major's hands, not given to his project.

Still not what she was here for. Whatever the colonel thought.

She took a breath, took a sip – cool and crisp like an apple from the cellar, tangy and sharp like an apple kept too long, gone too far – and took the plunge. Said, ‘Colonel, do you believe in ghosts?'

That stymied him. It sat exactly between him and his purpose, unexpected and unavoidable. He stood quite still for a moment, then reached for tobacco and a pipe. Just for something to do with his hands, she thought. While he thought, while he tried to fit her question to his understanding.

He said, ‘No. No, I don't believe I do. If you asked Major Dorian, I expect he would say that he believed in the power of faith or some such, but I'm not that clever. I've spent a lot of years with my fingers inside men's bodies, and I've never found any sign of a soul. Or any other kind of spirit either. I know how bodies work, and I don't see how anything could survive once they stop working.'

So did she, and nor did she; and yet, and yet.

She had thought Peter was all in her head, her own head. The man in the stable, though, he had been falling and falling. Whatever he did that was wrong – snatching at something or dropping something, cutting the wrong wire or letting a tool slip at the wrong moment, striking a spark perhaps where it was most foolish – whatever he did, it wasn't that which haunted him as he lay deep in pain and shock in the yard there, waiting for rescue. He had lost his hand and maybe more, he might have been dying, he might certainly have thought he was dying; and,
I was falling, falling  . . . I couldn't stop falling.

It was her nightmare, her waking horror, the vision that had possessed her ever since she came to this house.

It was her husband, watching his death rise up to greet him. Tumbling coldly into its arms.

Carrying her with him, down and down, again and again.

What in the world – or out of it, in the afterworld, in no world that made any sense to her – but what was he doing in another man's mind?

Falling and falling
, yes, she knew that. He would have said that, for the smile of it, when he was alive. In her head, he still could. He could comment wryly on his own death, and her haunting too. But in her head was where all that should stay. Where he should stay. She almost didn't mind, could almost welcome him. This last vestige. But  . . .

But. Not in other people's heads. Not where he could cause them harm.

She thought obscurely that it might be her fault. Must be. Possibly.

How and why? Those were the obvious questions: unasked, impossible. The colonel would send her to Aesculapius. That man would peer interestedly inside her, make a project of her, not allow her to interfere with his other more important scheming.

And meanwhile a man would still be lying in a bed somewhere – here or elsewhere, they might take him away, a failed conspirator, his papers marked as his body was – with new damage, a lifetime of change and difficulty ahead. And Peter still in his mind, perhaps, still falling.

Responsible.

He hated responsibility, always had.

She carried it for him, when she could.

Tonight she wanted to accuse herself, she wanted to scream at him, she wanted to be sane and see that none of this was true. All at once, these things, she wanted them all. And could have none except perhaps the first of them, a bitter madness,
this is all my fault
. And almost opened her mouth to confess it, except that there was cider in her glass and that was easier, gulp and swallow and wrap her fingers around the mug like a man, cherish the thick glass of it and see, not shaking at all, her hands, no. Doing their job, gripping tight. Like her thoughts, tight and strong and secure  . . .

Bless him, the colonel didn't say
why do you ask?
It was the obvious next step, and he avoided it magnificently.

‘I think this house would give anyone the vapours, mark you. Even without the blackout and the groans of the wounded and Major Black's favourites scuttling about in the shadows, practising unspeakable acts. It's why I won't take probationers here. One reason why. I'm not sure the security bods would allow it anyway, but the last thing I need is silly girls shrieking and fainting in coils because they heard a floorboard creak or the draught brought a cobweb down in their hair.'

Was that meant as a warning,
don't get hysterical or you'll be out of here
? She wasn't sure. He seemed too bluff to be indirect, but perhaps he meant it as a compliment,
I don't need to be blunt with you.
Perhaps.

She said, ‘The house is very atmospheric, certainly, but I think atmosphere is what you make of it, for good or otherwise.' It was in her head, she was saying. Emphatically. She knew that. And good lord, this house was full of pilots, crashed-out pilots, sky jockeys who had taken a throw. Small wonder if one of them babbled about falling when he was in shock,
in extremis
. She held no lien on that particular nightmare, here or anywhere.

Tight, strong, secure. Yes.

Comfortably in agreement, then, they could move on. Marching in step, and no need for any further confessional. Not from her, at least. He said, ‘Does it trouble you, what Major Black gets up to with my men?' But that was his own confession in a thin disguise,
it troubles me
, and an invitation to step inside his tent. Now that she was firmly in his camp.

She said, ‘It seems  . . . a terrible waste, to me. Of your work, and their lives.' Tolchard seemed to be foremost in her mind, as though all the men wore one face, and it was his. That was odd, because she'd gathered that he was almost least likely to be sent, however much he agitated to go.