House of Doors (32 page)

Still, there were reasons of pride not to use these passages.
We are nurses, not servants. We have no cause to hide.
And there were reasons of practicality too, because the passages were narrow and cramped and awkward, not really fit for hurry nor for carrying awkward trays even though that was of course what they were meant for. Servants in former times couldn't protest, but nurses these days certainly could. The taller bulkier orderlies would mutiny if anyone tried to force them out of the broad corridors that their seniors and superiors used. They didn't mind stepping aside, they were all trained to salute, but that was respect enough.

So, no. Secret or not, the servants' passages went largely unused. Which left them open for Ruth in her privacy, convenient in her urgency. She could slip out of sight here on the first floor and find her way unseen, unworried, through squeezes and up tight runs of steps so steep they were almost ladders, all the way to the attic floor. She felt like a mouse living within walls, scurrying about on errands utterly unconnected to the world beyond: as she was, as they both were when they came up here. This was a place apart, a space held between two hearts, inaccessible to strangers. Small wonder if the ways that brought them here were just as narrow, just as private, just as dark.

She almost didn't trouble with lights any more. Soon enough she'd be able to find her way by fingers' touch along the walls. Or by smell, like a mouse. By whisker-twitch. If she were a man she might grow whiskers, just to see what they told her in the dark. Peter had tried a moustache once: not for long, only until she'd laughed at him. He hated that, poor dear, but it was no use. Whatever he'd been trying to achieve, an aggregation of fluff on his upper lip wasn't the way to do it, and so she'd told him.

The colonel, now, his magnificent facial hair would find him his way along these passages with no trouble – but she didn't want to think about the colonel just now. There was rather a lot, indeed, that she didn't want to think about. Michael was the perfect remedy, sufficient unto himself, enough to fill her mind even when he wasn't gratifying her body. Today, at this hour, she only wanted to be with him. To rest her head against his shoulder and feel encompassed as his arm closed about her, to hear his voice lightly muffled by her hair, to see glimpses of the pure soul that underlay the man within the boy. Crystal and iron, green growing things and sweet water, all of England under one skin. One skin that would blush terribly if she said anything so difficult, so of course she wouldn't. Think it, though, she could do that. England was no mind-reader: too gauche for that. Too young. Not like Aesculapius.
Nothing
like Aesculapius. That was something to be thankful for.

Here the steep stair ended, here was the door into the dormitory. She stepped out knowing already what she would find, by that strange other sense that lovers develop that is not quite telepathy and not quite foreknowledge, only an utter certainty. No lights on and the blackout still in place, because who would ever lift it now that they had so scrupulously shielded all the windows from the world outside? So it was all shadows in here even at this height of the day, and yet she knew before she looked that she would see him standing at the foot of their bed, their nest, waiting for her. Just a line of darkness in the softer dark, not even an outline, only an impressionistic dash, and utterly still and silent too, and yet  . . .

And yet she knew that he would be there. And in the first moment of her looking, she knew that he was not Michael. No.

No.

And her world came crashing down, her little private construct, as the world beyond flooded in through inadequate defences, a tidal wave, destruction.

‘Well, well. You, is it? Of course it's you. I should never have believed that farrago you fed us before. You're a quick worker, Sister, I'll say that for you.'

‘Please don't.' She didn't want him to speak at all. His voice could only soil things further. Like a slick of engine grease laid down over ruin.
Please don't, sir,
she should probably say, because he was, of course, Major Black. There seemed small point now in the niceties, though, and she really couldn't be bothered.

She expected him suddenly to knock a light on, to expose her in her shame. That was what men did, she understood. Throw a cold clear light on what should always have stayed subdued, wrapped in the shadow of its nurture.

She had her own gift that she could weave in shadows, up here especially, where she had done it before at need. Her own man, a moment of clarity in her dizzy head, a point of light like a glimpse through a distant doorway. Falling and falling. A weapon falling straight into her hand.

I could make you fall from here, Major Black.
She trembled on the edge of it, poised to call Peter to save her as he had before.

‘I came up to see what had left my men so  . . . confused,' he said, quiet and deadly, ‘so off-balance that a woman armed with a torch could take them on and defeat them roundly. I found this little love-nest – you really shouldn't have made yourselves so obvious – and once I knew what to look for, it was easy to spot whom.'

Among his own men, he meant. He might have guessed about her, he must have guessed, but he had waited until now to be sure. Which meant that at least he hadn't interrogated Michael. At least she hadn't been betrayed, except by her own body and the instincts that compelled it.

Even so. It was hard to speak. He was almost courteous, waiting for her to catch her breath and her courage. She had fought his one man physically and his other more mysteriously, snatching at a power she ought not to possess; she ought surely to be ready for this, face to face and a simple battle of words.

Readier, at least. She ought surely to have expected it.

She ought to have anticipated it and put the bedding aside, cleared away any sign of occupation. Tawdry occupation, assignations. She could look at this through his eyes and feel his disgust, almost share it. She really ought to have seen this coming.

She ought this, she ought that. It was too late for regrets now; they were here.

She ought to feel stronger. He wasn't about to hit her; she was the one with the weapon, he was the one unprepared. He didn't know what she could do.

Even so. It was perilously hard to speak, harder yet to sound cool and unconcerned as she finally said, ‘Well, then. What are you going to do about it, now that you – as you say – know whom?'

‘Yes. That is the question, isn't it?'

He was enjoying himself, she realized, stretching out the moment for the simple pleasure of it. Wanting to watch her squirm on the hook of his hesitation. Pretending to be indecisive, just to drag it out longer.

All unknowing, he had perhaps never stood in so much danger. Never been closer to the edge. She trembled with the desire to push him over.
Oh, Peter, are you there?
But no, not for this. Not for her own petty temper. Not quite. She had her pride, as well as her principles. She would defend herself, yes, and Michael too – but not take simple vengeance, even on a cruel man.

She said nothing, then, waiting for him to convict himself. Soon enough, surely, he would say something that was not only unforgivable but irrecoverable.
Of course I must tell the colonel, and my own authorities.
Something like that. Then – for Michael's sake, more than her own – she would have to strike. He was sure to do it. Safe to. Even knowing that something uncanny had happened to his men, right here. He couldn't help himself. There was nothing in him that would allow him to wonder if perhaps she had been responsible for that. Despite what he'd been told, despite the obvious coincidences. One young woman, what could she do? What could she achieve, to threaten him? It wouldn't cross his mind. No, he would gloat at her from his high moral ground, his unimpeachable authority, and he would say something that she could not endure, and then she would have him. Yes.
Oh, Peter. Be ready  . . .

He said, ‘Oh, for God's sake, woman, do you really think you matter that much, that I'd be slavering to expose your sordid little
affaire
? I'm only interested at all because you're a distraction to one of my men.'

‘I won't let him go,' she said, meaning
I won't let you take him.

‘Oh? And how do you imagine you might stop him? The King's shilling, and all of that. He's a man in uniform, in time of war.'

‘Whatever he owed this country, he's paid back already. With interest.'

‘Oh, he's a hero. Indeed he is. This is the thing with heroes, that they don't stop. They don't know how to stop. Stopping is  . . . unheroic. You couldn't stop him if you tried. Which is why I don't need to stop you trying.'

An awful thought rose in her mind, like some creature rising in dark water. ‘What  . . . what have you done with him?'

The major laughed briefly. ‘I sent him cross-country on a paperchase, hare and hounds; he's the hare, with half the strength baying at his heels. Oh dear, did you think I'd had him posted? Shipped out early, to protect him from your influence? Again, Sister Taylor, you're not that important. I don't need to send him away until I'm ready. I don't need to hold this –' a gesture that encompassed their bed and the shadows and herself all at once – ‘over your head like a threat, because you are no threat to me. I don't countenance threats.'

She couldn't quite work out whether that was a warning after all, a threat even. He was hard to read in the dark, in his overweening confidence.
I could trip you, Major Black; I could make you fall and fall
– only she didn't think she could in fact, not now. Not if he meant no harm, if he was only laughing at her.

No harm except the one great harm, of course, and that would come if he wanted it to, if he chose to make it so. But she couldn't destroy him for that either. Not for serving his country, the best way he knew. She had done the same thing, after all. Dressed herself in uniform and sent her man to fight. It was what people did. Men, officers did it on a larger scale, that was all. Women did the same thing individually, personally. Once, twice and again.

Oh, Michael  . . .

She still wanted to frustrate the major; she still dared to hope that she could. Hope was what she had, so she clung to it.

Michael was what she wanted. She would have clung to him, only she couldn't come near him suddenly, or else he wouldn't come near her. They were used to leaving signals for each other,
I can be in the attics after elevenses
or else
I cannot
, a book left lying heedlessly this way on a sideboard, or else that way on a chair. She didn't know how to interpret the book's abrupt absence. Nor Michael's, from the piano and the dining hall and the sacred Friday dance.

That last, at least, she could ask about.

‘Judith, where in the world is Bed Thirty-Four? How can he not be here?'

‘That imp? Oh, I expect Major Black has him out somewhere, purging his native indolence. Luxurious little beast, that one. But the major's been sweating them hard, all his favourites. All the likely lads, and some of the less likely too, like your sweet Michael. I think something's due to happen, any day now.'

Your sweet Michael
. Had she too noticed something, had she worked it out? If so, she wasn't saying. Wasn't even dropping a wink in solidarity. But then, Judith was a company girl. Hook, line and sinker. Perhaps she thought that any boy about to sacrifice his life for the greater good was entitled to a little fling before he went, no questions asked.

Perhaps she thought that's what the women were here for, to supply a degree of comfort to the troops. The condemned man's last meal, his last cigarette. His last night of pleasure, the soft playground of a woman's body.

Perhaps she was right. In Major Black's mind, at least, if not the colonel's. That might be an explanation, why he wasn't pursuing Ruth further: if he thought she was only doing what she had been fetched here to do, what lay out of reach of the orderlies. A war widow, still attractive and experienced with it; who better? At least she'd be practical, they could depend on her not to throw a fit at the first suggestion  . . .

She was sure that some such thought had crossed Aesculapius' mind, at least. Whether or not the major thought that way.

Even if he did, even if he took it for granted and assumed that she did too: even that didn't explain his choosing not to threaten her. He wouldn't make empty threats, of course, but he didn't need to. Hospitals were full of widows fetching bedpans. She could be replaced in a week if he had made the other choice, to expose her.

She must really be as he had said, negligible. Of no account, no interest.

Something in her roused at that, stiff with determination to prove him wrong.

It wouldn't be easy, if she couldn't come near Michael. He wasn't the only one missing from the dance that night; she wasn't the only nurse looking about her, trying to spot a favourite, failing.

At breakfast next morning, there was a litany of not-quite-complaints. ‘The squadron leader wasn't in his bed last night, neither the one they all call Prosser, although that's not his name. They came in filthy, absolutely filthy at first light, along with half a dozen others who are not, I am pleased to say, on my corridor, not my responsibility. Those two used half my bathwater between them, and they're still not what I would call clean. I'd have sent them back out to the bathhouse if I'd had fair warning, sooner than let them carry all their muck onto my ward. If they hadn't looked so done-up, poor dears. They could barely keep their eyes open. I'm sure Prosser was asleep in the water, half submerged, like a whale.'

‘Mine were no better. Half the forest under their fingernails, those that have 'em. And who is it who has to clean young Master Tolchard's nails for him, because of course his own right hand can't do it? Muggins here, that's who  . . .'