House of Doors (25 page)

Still living when they got him into theatre, he was still living when the last of the stitches went in; still living when they installed him in a room of his own, with a nurse of his own and a guard quite useless at the door. Unconscious, but that was probably a blessing; still living, which quite possibly was not.

Weary beyond measure and strained beyond exhaustion, probably the colonel should have retired to his room, to his cider and his solitude. Instead he came down to join staff and patients at tea.

Tonight there was no sing-song at the piano, no queue for beer. Even young men can be sensitive, even en masse.

They wanted to talk, of course, but quietly and among themselves. Ruth supposed that the beer barrels upstairs might be seeing some custom, but that would be for comfort. Nobody would be rowdy tonight, and for once no one wanted to sit among the staff. They'd rather whisper in corners and hear nothing and not ask the professionals, not know.
Is my face going to fall apart, like Barker's  . . .?

No one knew. But here was the colonel, and he wanted to talk: and not about Barker and not about the surgery, the calamity, what could have gone wrong with the treatment, no.

He wanted to talk about Major Black and how wrong he was to be sending men off on one-way missions, to die for the war effort. Encouraging them to volunteer, snaring vulnerable minds when they were weakest, when they were in despair.

‘He trains them to kill themselves, you know, in the last resort, if that's the only way to reach their target. Blow themselves up with their man. It's an inculcated hopelessness, when everything I do is about hope for the future, it's the very opposite  . . .'

It was; and Ruth sympathized with him all down the line, and so she thought did half the staff or more. Many more, perhaps. This was the argument she'd overheard, played out in public now. Nobody could want to see their patients off to an inevitable end after so long spent rebuilding them, body and soul.

And yet, and yet. There was a war, and the major didn't become wrong because his methods were wrong, because young men would die in the pursuit of them. Young men always did die in war, that was how the thing happened. And if they could die with purpose, striking deep into the heart of the Nazi command, there had to be a value in that; and if they had been persuaded that their lives had no value else, well, that was very wrong, but it was surely their privilege to believe it. It was a privilege that Ruth claimed for herself, with far less reason.

And it would do him no good anyway, agitating amongst the staff. They could all line up behind him and change nothing, achieve nothing. All they had was what they did, which was to make the patients comfortable and help them heal faster; and all that did was send them sooner into Major Black's hands.

Major Black's and Major Dorian's. She didn't forget Aesculapius, even when he wasn't much in evidence. The trick couldn't be worked, she was already sure, without his active participation. Health and vigour could restore hope in young bodies, never mind what their faces looked like. He must be working to counteract that, or to redirect it: to teach them that hope lay in their enemy's defeat, before or more than in themselves. That some things mattered more than life itself.

It was a hard case to argue against, subtle and insidious. Subtle and insidious and true, that too. She knew.

So, yes, the staff might side with the colonel, but even they could see the merits of the major's project. No one wanted to send their sons off to fight, but everybody did it in the end.

The colonel could argue and agitate as much as he cared to. It was an argument he lost and lost and lost again, and Major Black wasn't even arguing. He didn't need to. The men had given their word, and that would have been argument enough; none was going to back down under his comrades' eyes. Besides, if the hope that Colonel Treadgold peddled was liable to come apart without warning, if their new faces couldn't be depended on, then what in the world did they have to live for, beyond the chance to strike back at the war machine that had done this to them in the first place?

A blaze of glory and a sweet release. It was all the more seductive, in the light of Barker's collapse. That was so clear in the days that followed, Ruth began to wonder if Major Black hadn't initiated the disaster after all, it worked so well on his behalf. He had lost one man he might have used, but cemented all the others in his service. He was ruthless enough to do that, she had no doubt.

But he was practical enough, surely, to know that it wasn't necessary. It never had been, never would have been. His volunteers were committed already; they didn't need horror to whip them on. Even if Major Black could conceivably have sat down thinking that he might, thinking that he could use the spirit of this house to such savage effect. If he could have understood a way to do that  . . .

Oh, it was all too strange and terrible. Like everyone else, she wanted not to think about it. Like everyone else, she was finding that too hard.

Like, perhaps, everyone else – like others, certainly – she couldn't sleep any more easily than she could forget, or turn her mind aside, or  . . .

This house never had been safe for a nocturnal wanderer, with Major Black's black-clad trainees likely to emerge from the shadows at any moment. These days – these nights – with so many of the staff too restless to sleep and so up and about when they should have been abed, the creak of foot on floorboard was almost constant in the corridors.

Ruth lay wide awake in the little privacy of her little room, listening to all the sounds of the house and trying to reconstruct all the movements of its people. And then realized what she was doing, deemed it futile and flung back her blankets, sat upright and thrust her feet almost angrily into her ready slippers.

There was no point pretending that she might sleep if she only lingered long enough in bed. No point either lurking in here, in hopes of evading a random encounter outside. She didn't want water; a trip to the bathroom would just prove another way to hide. She didn't really know what she did want, only that it involved being somewhere other than here, doing something other than this.

If Judith happened to hear her go and wanted company, if she put her head outside her door and asked Ruth in – well, cocoa and a chat wasn't what she was looking for herself, but she could endure it. Perhaps better than that: it might even prove to be what she needed, all unknowing. Stranger things had happened, than that a milky drink and a quiet conversation with a friend should prove the answer to a sleepless night.

Even so, Ruth opened and closed her door with a palm across the latch to silence it, and stepped down the corridor as lightly as she could manage, and it was nothing but relief when she reached the stairs uninterrupted.

Down below was dangerous territory in darkness, Major Black's. The kitchen was further, deeper down; and in this dead of night, not even Cook could be expected or sensibly looked for.

No. Her eyes turned the other way, upward. A mean, steep flight of stairs led to the attic floor: unused, she had gathered, except for storage now. In another house up there would have been the servants' quarters, but not here, where the house had been built on too grand a scale and the servants had this whole wing to themselves. Used to have, in the days before wars came home to England to gut her great houses and their families too. Ruth couldn't conceive of this wing ever filling itself with staff again, once this latest war was over. She couldn't imagine how the house might live after this.

Nor, if she were honest, how it had lived before this. Too grand, yes, and too remote. Not famous and not beautiful, not worth travelling to. What family had lived here, in former times? She didn't know. D'Espérance, she had never heard of it: which said a lot in itself, because Peter had grown up on the country-house circuit and dropped names as he dropped cuff links and collar studs, which meant at random times in sundry directions but thoroughly, comprehensively. If the house had been known among his friends, she would have heard of it. As she had not, therefore it was not; and therefore – as it wasn't a house that one came to, a gathering place for the Beautiful People – she had trouble picturing what life it had known, what purpose it had served. Who had come here and why, how it had grown so large and so ugly, what impulses had driven and shaped it in the shadows of these woods and hills?

What creature, what spirit, what power had invested it with madness? But she wasn't going to think about that.

Besides, she thought it wasn't madness. Insight, perhaps.

But she wasn't going to think about that.

She was going to climb these stairs and find herself some dark space with some privacy, where nobody else would be. Where nobody else would come. Where nobody would be pacing up and down in the room next door, or tiptoeing down the passage, or  . . .

Yes.

Up.

She should have brought the torch that Judith gave her. Never mind. There might be lights above. If not, if the wiring didn't reach so far or else there were no bulbs, she could possibly find her way by moon and starlight. If not she could always retreat again, defeated. Defeat was sometimes no disgrace. And she could always come back, with the torch. Tonight, or another night.

Or of course she could come back in daylight. Why not that?

In the meantime, up she went. Smiling at herself, a little; surprised, a little, that she still had that capacity.
Keep smiling through.
In wartime, of course; in widowhood, the same. That was what you did, and never mind how false it was, how you longed for it all just to be over. How you sought the bullet or the bomb. Men weren't the only ones who could find honour in that kind of ending.

Perhaps she should just laugh at herself, laugh aloud and come back up in the morning.

Instead she went on up, of course she did, and it wasn't only her own resilience that could surprise her tonight. The house could do it too.

Tonight and any night, again and again, D'Espérance could and did surprise her.

Rooms on the floor below were small and mean-windowed, presumably because servants deserved no better and should not be encouraged to linger or to socialize. Beds were for sleeping in, long days were for work. Ruth had been tacitly assuming that whatever rooms she found up here would be smaller yet. That was the scale she was used to, the way big houses worked. The higher you went, the more the walls cramped in about you, the less light and space you were allowed. Perhaps senior servants slept below and skivvies were squeezed in above, three or four to a room, even two to a bed  . . .?

She came up expecting pinched bare corridors and grim cubbyholes, box rooms with perhaps no windows at all. It might be that all those dormers were on the corridors, to light the poor maids and bootboys their way to work and back.

But she stepped up into a sense of unexpected space and openness. There was light from both sides: not enough for glamour but plenty to show her a switch on the wall, right by her hand here.

She pressed the switch, and bulbs flickered into life. Even that was at least a little unexpected. She was probably still looking to be disappointed or turned back.

Instead, yes, she was surprised.

Storerooms
, she'd been told, and there were indeed great clutters on either side, rising islands of crates and tea chests and heavy family furniture stacked up beneath the sloping ceilings and between the window bays. But under and between those stacks were beds, plain iron-framed narrow bedsteads with wooden boards and mattresses in rolls, institutional ticking stuffed with straw or horsehair. Far too many for even a houseful of servants, enough to sleep a barracks. Perhaps that had been the plan, to billet a regiment here, before they'd found another use for the house?

It still seemed odd to find the attics so broad and light and roomy, after the strict confines of the floor below. Walls and ceilings had been whitewashed, not recently but recently enough. There were curtains at every window, a bright patterned fabric only a little faded by the sun.

Curtains, but not drawn; and not proper blackout anyway. She must be blazing the house's presence to the night. She really ought to have brought the torch. She ought to go back for it now. Or just go back, come again in daylight if she had to come at all.

And yet she wasn't shifting, neither to kill the lights nor to retreat. For a while she only stood and looked; and when she did at last start to move, she seemed to be going forward, down the centre aisle between all those beds and all the other things.

There was a strip of carpet beneath her feet, something dark and woven and hard-wearing, fraying at the edges, meant for the kind of use it had all too clearly seen. It felt like a path laid down for her exactly, drawing her irresistibly on.

Along to the end, to a door. She really shouldn't be spilling all this light. Light was precious, it seemed sometimes, and rationed, and in need of saving.

And yet. Her fingers reached and closed around the handle, almost without volition on her part. She turned her wrist and tugged, pulling the door open.

Beyond was just such another long dormitory, with her own long shadow stretching down the aisle. Dark shapes of beds on either side, heaped up with stuff. She couldn't quite see what, only that it seemed softer in outline and less angular, bundles rather than boxes. Furnishings, perhaps, rather than furniture.

If there was a light switch here, she couldn't find it. Perhaps there would be another flight of stairs at the further end, and the switch there where it would be most use. She had light enough to walk on and see – or grope, at least, walk on and grope – although she really oughtn't. She ought to be turning back, redeeming herself, turning lights off rather than making things worse, laying down this bright beacon for Hitler's bombers to cluster to.

Was she still hoping for that bomb to seek her out? Still praying for that bullet?