House of Doors (22 page)

On a day like this, crisp and clear, she would not have begrudged a longer walk. She and Peter used to walk sometimes for the pleasure of it, along the canal towpath with the moorhens and the mallards and the great black gates at every lock. Or else they'd motor up into the hills and leave the car at an inn, beg for sandwiches and bottled lemonade, walk all day never knowing quite where they were or how to get back, only that they were with each other and so they'd find a way.

It was different now. She had to find her own way.

Still, there was pleasure, albeit a different pleasure, in walking alone. Independence could prove its own reward, in time. If she had time.

In the meantime, she had this: the stillness of the valley to stand in stark contrast to her memories, her recent life, her London in all its noise and chaos. Here she walked under an empty sky – and was that irony, she wondered, with these downed pilots all about her? Or was it just the brand of their honour, the record of their achievement, the very thing they had fought and fallen for? – and it was the silence that seized her deeply. Her own footsteps were the loudest thing she heard, crunching on gravel paths and skittering on stone-edged steps as she went down from the house, down and further down.

Here was where she had met Herr Braun that first time, in the fog: where she had stalled and turned back. Today she went on, further down, all the way. Past beds of cabbage and beetroot and broccoli, tall bare canes in pyramids and scaffolds for the peas and beans of summer, looking in vain for flowers or fancies. Nothing so frivolous in this bleak landscape, in this bleak time. She'd never seen a garden look so earnest, or so grim.

Here at last was the lake, though it wasn't truly quite that grand. Probably it had been a fish stew once, before some ambitious owner had it incorporated into his formal garden, the corners squared off and the length dug out to balance the house above. Perhaps there were fish in there still, below that dark reflective surface. If not, perhaps there ought to be. If the lawns and flower beds could be dug up and turned over to vegetables, surely the lake could be stocked with fish. Perhaps she should mention it to Cook. Or to the colonel.

Perhaps she shouldn't stand musing above black mirror-water. She hadn't been lucky with mirrors here. She might look down to see a figure grow and grow beneath her feet, a man falling, falling from an empty sky.

Keeping her head up and not at all looking at the water, she walked the stiff straight fringes of the lake, as there was no bridge across. She could already see where she was going. It looked more like an observatory than a bathhouse, a folly of some kind, a stone building with a domed roof standing alone against an encroaching wall of trees. Really, she was surprised that none of these military men had thought to build a bridge. Perhaps she should mention that to Major Black; he could make a night exercise of it.
Build me a miracle, a bridge before morning  . . .

Perhaps she should just mind her own business, and keep well out of Major Black's way. She thought that was a better idea.

Here at the short side of the rectangular lake was the back road that had brought her in. No traffic on it this morning and no one working in the grounds that she could see, no interns in their overalls bent among the cabbages. With the house behind and above her, out of sight and out of hearing; with the light-swallowing, sound-swallowing woods ahead and above; with nothing moving in the sky or on the road or anywhere about, she might have been utterly alone. How long, since that had been true? Years, long years. Before Peter put his ring on her finger.
You're never alone in a good marriage.
Even in his absence, she'd never felt alone.

And still didn't, if she was afraid to look at the surface of a pond. If what she feared was the sight of him plummeting to find her.

No, that was folly. But she still kept her chin raised and her eyes averted, looking where she was going, to this wholly other kind of folly, some rich man's extravagance from long ago.

It stood on a bank of grass that lay between the woods and the water. With no formal path laid down, the patients had been their own pathfinders. The constant tread of their feet had laid a clear line along the lake's edge and directly to the bathhouse door, where it faced the water across half a dozen flagstones.

Where that makeshift path met the stone steps of the bathhouse, Ruth paused. She looked across and up at the house, where it lay in a fall of thin sunlight, and felt it staring back at her. Not quite antagonistic – in honesty, she thought it didn't care – but certainly judgemental.
This is what you brought here; this is who you are.
A woman whose sunlight was eclipsed by falling men.

Only the one
, she wanted to say in mitigation,
one falling man.
Except that there was another now, wasn't there? Another burning angel streaking from the sky, and never mind that Michael had fallen long before she met him. If she were morbid, she might think he was her punishment. She already felt guilty enough about Peter, and the choice he had made; appallingly guilty sometimes, at her weakest, when it seemed that everyone blamed her and everyone was right, of course it was her fault, it had to be. How else? How could a happy man, a happily married man make such a choice? He could not. What, make a widow of his wife, and a childless widow at that? Not possible, if she had made him happy. Therefore  . . .

Therefore nothing. Ruth had been through that and through that and out the other side of the shadow, long since. That didn't stop it creeping after her. And now, of course, now that she had taken another man to her bed, of course guilt was stalking her again. Whatever her reasons, whatever the circumstances. Guilt was a bully, heedless of reason, inflated with its own brute importance; it could fill her sky with airmen, all plunging to their doom.

A shadow flicked over her face and she flinched physically, flung an arm halfway up to shield herself against him as he came.

And then looked, looked up and saw a solitary crow, stark black against the pale sky. Relief was absurd and overwhelming. There were voices behind her, loud with echo and high spirits. She had duties to the owners of those voices, but she needed a moment more alone.

Stood still to watch as the crow came in to land on the bathhouse portico. Such a mess it made of that, awkward and cack-winged, any self-respecting instructor would have sent it around to try again. She thought,
birds should be more graceful
. And was answered by a single raucous call, ill-throated and ill-willed, and had to remind herself that birds, even corvids did not read minds nor understand even simple English, and were not omens of any kind, no.

It was hard to be rational when she did keep seeing Peter everywhere, when he was dead.

But she didn't believe that the crow meant anything. Truly not.

She bit her lip, straightened her spine, heaved the high door open and positively marched into the bathhouse.

She hadn't expected steam.

In honesty she hadn't thought about it much, if at all. Men with burns couldn't take heat, that was understood. On the ward her saline baths were all cool, cool to cold.

She had forgotten: these were not men with burns but men with grafts, their seared skin all cut away and the seams starting to heal.

Also, they were men, young men unsupervised. Of course they would want their baths too hot, and who would tell them otherwise? Not the orderlies who stoked the boiler, that for sure.

So she walked into steam, clouds of steam that billowed seemingly in rhythm with the voices, as though mere shouts could push the vapour to and fro.

Just a few paces in she went, just far enough for that steam to engulf her. Then she stopped, taking a minute to let her eyes adjust, her mind take stock, the men catch on to her presence.

If not an observatory and not a folly, this place might look like a temple from the outside, squat and heavy and manifest. Nothing on the inside wanted to disabuse her. The walls enclosed a space higher than it was wide, drawing that steam up and up into the hollow of the dome. It was all too easy to imagine the smoke of incense and a priest's voice rising, a congregation murmuring, perhaps a sacrifice, burnt offerings.

For a moment she thought she saw some low bulky shape shoulder through the fog, something animal and mean.

That was just imagination. Instead of strange exotic perfumes, frankincense and spikenard, what she smelled was carbolic, with perhaps a hint of drains. What she heard was no prayer to pagan gods, but rather a complaint. ‘I say, has someone left the door open? Again? There's a positive gale howling around here.'

And the steam swirled and lifted like a curtain, like a veil of scrim whisked away in a theatre, to reveal  . . .

Well, to reveal her.

Silence fell. A lone late voice cried, ‘Cave!' and someone laughed.

She said, ‘I'm afraid that was me. I'm sorry, I wasn't sure how dark it would be in here.'

That would do. In fact it was gloomy, and the open door at her back did help to fetch daylight in as well as clearing the air. There was another line of light up high, a clerestory below the dome, but that was narrow and diffused by the clouds of steam. Lower down there were soft yellow glows that she took to be paraffin lamps – indeed, she could smell those too, another acrid texture in the air – but they drew the eye more than they pierced the fog.

‘No matter, Sister. But truly, the draught is a little chilly on bare wet skin.'

On grafted skin
, he might have said, to make his point the stronger. No need; she was already turning back to drag the door closed against its difficult hinges. A little loss of light would make little difference, and she had her bearings now. She knew the source of those silenced voices, and could put names to them all.

She'd been warned that the men treated this as a clubhouse. She hadn't realized till now that it had been built with that in mind, but surely so. This was such a male space, high and formal and overdone, with Victorian tiling everywhere and an ironwork gallery that could have no real purpose except to allow gentlemen to stand and smoke cigars and call down pithy comments to the bathers below.

The baths were arranged in a circle, seven or eight of them, around a central drain. She supposed she might have mistaken one of those tubs for some massive creature looming, a great pig perhaps, the mirage of movement conjured by the movement of steam, confusing her mind as much as her eyes. She supposed so.

Here by the door was a table laid out with steel trays and everything she would need, forceps and dishes, scissors and fresh dressings. On the other side, another table held clean towels in heaps.

‘What do we do, then, lads? Soak off the dressings while you're in the water there, then apply new ones once you're out and dried off?' Meaning,
I'll help with the first but you can dry yourselves, I'm not your nanny.

‘Something like that, Sister, yes. Only, the colonel usually comes to look at how we're healing, so we mostly stay in the water until then.'

‘Just as well,' she said, ‘there'd be small point in a saline bath if you only splashed and rinsed and came out of it again.' There were blocks of salt stacked up beneath the table, gleaming faintly in the moist atmosphere. She thought she could smell that too, as though the distant sea had reached a tendril of itself this far; and wondered if it was actually possible to dissolve salt into wet air, and whether it would be beneficial if you could.

And took what she needed in a kidney dish and stepped forward to the first bath. ‘Now, Johnson, let me see those hands of yours. Have you been soaking them long enough for us to try peeling that dressing off? Shout out if this is too uncomfortable – though if you can take the water that hot, I think you can take a little tugging.'

‘I like the heat, Sister,' Johnson said mildly. ‘We all do. It does sting, but it's a good stinging, if you know what I mean. It feels cleansing.'

‘And so it is, I'm sure, as long as you don't overdo it. This'll be easy for you, then. Lift that hand up to make it easy for me too, and we'll go at it nice and gently  . . .'

Around the circle she went, from one bath to another, one man to the next and the one after that. Perhaps she ought not to be doing this alone – or at all: it might be properly beneath her dignity as a ward sister – but she was glad of the chance, glad of the time she could spend here. Her corridor in the house, her ward, that was her territory; this was theirs, and it made a difference. Here there were ashtrays between the baths, and benches where a man might sit to cool down, draped in a towel or a dressing gown or nothing at all. Here a woman had to take them as she found them, at their ease, doing man things. Arguing about the war perhaps but more likely the crossword puzzle or whatever cricket scores they could discover, games in far-off Madras or Mandalay or Melbourne. Or doing boy things, perhaps, playing catch in the gallery with a bar of soap, hurling it fully across the width of the bathhouse and demanding forfeits of whoever let it fall. Or doing nothing at all, only lying and soaking and letting the time slip by as patients ought, convalescent, being no trouble to their nurses.

In fairness, they were no trouble to her today. They submitted to her ministrations and talked nicely to her and hardly at all to each other. At last, with the last dressing eased away from her last patient's red-raw back, she took pity on them and removed herself. Not from the bathhouse altogether, she wasn't finished here yet, but a tray of sodden soiled dressings made a fine excuse to explore below, down a tight and turning stair to where the ancient boiler banged and hissed in its cellar.

There was a man here too, an orderly. A stoker, she supposed they would call him overhead, if naval parlance were allowed among all their own proper jargon. Stripped to the waist and black with dust, he shovelled coal into the boiler's gape, sweated himself clean and shovelled more.