House of Doors (7 page)

‘No.' In honesty, she was afraid of very little now. Except her dreams, some nights, perhaps. There might have been a reason why she didn't stretch out on a bench at Darlington station and try to sleep.

Here she seemed to have waking dreams; Peter was everywhere.

Well, but what did she expect, coming to a hospital full of pilots?

They didn't tell me  . . .

No, because something here was top secret, something more than a hospital full of pilots. Aesculapius must have known, she thought, how Peter died, he must have seen her file. He must have known how she would feel coming here, or what else was a psychiatrist for, what use was he?

He must, surely, have known; and yet he had approved her anyway.

Ruthless. It had been her first impression, and she saw no cause to change it now.

Ruthless, but  . . .

Ruthless but careful, that would do for now. He would use whatever came to hand, use it and use it but not – she thought – damage what he might need later. A man who looked after his tools. He said, ‘They tell me that you fainted on the doorstep.'

As I stepped across your threshold, Aesculapius. Make of that what you will.
She herself wanted to make nothing of it, she wanted it to mean nothing that she had seen Peter in the door's wood, falling.

Of course they had told him, though. She had been carried to his own office, laid out on his couch. Perhaps he thought that she belonged there. One more patient to be analysed, one more skull to examine from the inside.

She said, ‘Yes. I'm sorry, it was stupid of me. No food in far too long, and a wakeful night. Not even nurses can run forever without refuelling. As Matron has been reminding me,' with a firm turn of her head to draw in that redoubtable woman, and a forkful of cake to busy herself with.

‘Hmm,' he said, utterly unfooled. Unpersuaded. ‘Well, if it happens again – despite Cook's generosity, which is unbounded, and Matron's watchfulness, which is legendary – come to see me. Don't try to carry on regardless. The work here will take it out of you in any case, as much as you have to give. If you start with something missing, you'll end up taking harm, and I won't have that.'

‘I'm perfectly all right,' she said. And then, a little belatedly, ‘Sir.'

‘To be sure,' he said. And then, after a wicked pause that just matched hers, ‘Oh, to be so sure  . . .'

He left her feeling small and young, diminished. It wasn't fair – it wasn't kind, no – when she had worked so hard to be the other thing, mature. Complete. Done with the world now, ready to move on.

Unexpectedly done with her plate too. She'd been afraid that the gingerbread would sit like lead in her stomach if she managed to swallow it at all, but she had seldom been more wrong. It melted somehow on the tongue and filled her with a warm benevolence, a sense of well-being that was almost frightening, it was so utterly unfamiliar.

She looked to Matron for consent to leave the table, and saw a looming figure behind her, Colonel Treadgold. His the voice she might have missed from the sing-song around the piano, if she'd only been paying attention and thinking straight. His bluff manner and mustachioed splendour made him a natural, surely. A bass baritone, most likely, laying down the path that the lighter tenors walked. And quaffing beer – no, cider, he was a cider man, but quaffing with the best, surely  . . .

No, again. Something else to remember: he was on duty. So was she, now. Ward round, and he was here to collect her.

‘Ordinarily,' he said, ‘staff cross the courtyard from one wing to the other, coming on and off duty. Rain or shine. Tonight you have a special dispensation; you're with me, and so we may trespass in Major Black's domain. Besides –' in a pantomime whisper – ‘he isn't here just now, he's stood his team down till tonight, so the coast should be clear.'

‘Colonel  . . .'

‘Hmm?'

‘Who
is
Major Black?'
And what's he up to, and why do you all tiptoe around him, why does he get first claim on anything? This is a hospital, and you're senior surgeon. And a colonel. You outrank him every way you can.

‘Ah, you'll meet the major soon enough. Let that happen in its own good time.'
No need to dash to damnation
, he seemed to be saying. Which was no answer at all, and only left her the more frustrated.

Which he knew, of course. She thought the moustache was hiding a smile as he opened a tall door and ushered her through.

No suggestion of servants' quarters now, suddenly everything had changed scale. She stepped into darkness and couldn't sense walls or ceiling, anything, until he touched a light switch by the door.

‘Oh. Goodness  . . .'

Electric chandeliers glowed into life, high overhead.

Shuttered and stripped, silent and empty of life, this was still a magnificent space. The wide parquet floor was sprung beneath her feet; every window bay held an upholstered seat beneath the barred shutters; above the chandeliers, the ceiling was an arch of glory, a masterpiece of plasterwork and colour.

‘It's a ballroom, surely?'

‘It was a ballroom, of course. Not for a while now, not for a long time. It wasn't we who killed the dancing. Perhaps it will be a ballroom again, but that is out of my stars. For now – well, as you see.'

Major Black's domain.
Yes. She saw, and didn't quite understand what she was seeing. Trestle tables collapsed and set aside against the long wall, they might be used for anything. Stacked chairs explained themselves. The gouges in the floor, the ruined varnish – well, heedless military occupation, of course they wouldn't trouble with the varnish, any more than they trimmed the hedges.

Ammunition boxes, stacked beside the chairs. Again, they might hold anything. She didn't want to think of this beautiful room being used as a rifle range. The sandbags piled up against the far end, though – and the sand that had spilled out of them, all across the floor there – did make her wonder. Did make her sniff the air, and frown, and, ‘Surely they don't  . . .?'

‘Oh, they do. Indoors, outdoors. Popguns and worse. Night and day. You'll grow used to having your sleep disturbed. Oh, but you've been in London, of course. You'll be used to that already.'

I'm a nurse, Colonel dear. I have been a wife in wartime. I am very, very used to that already.
It wasn't only shooting that went on in here. There were tailors' dummies marked with arrows that had little or nothing to do with tailoring.
Punch here
, she guessed,
to disable, here to silence, here to kill
. There were man-sized silhouettes painted on the walls and pierced with many gashes in the plaster: St Sebastian in effigy, except that she thought that the damage probably had more to do with flung knives than arrows.

She did wonder what the owner of the house might have to say about such wanton vandalism, when he reclaimed it after the war. Assuming that he did so, assuming that he survived and England too, that it wouldn't be the Nazis who were next to requisition his property.

She followed the colonel from one room to the next, and found herself apparently in a world that contravened her own assumptions, that tracked her own thoughts. Here were Nazi uniforms racked and ready, for when those invaders came.

If that was the ballroom they had just traversed, this must be the supper room, smaller and less stately, still grand. Repurposed now as a robing room for German officers: regular army grey and SS black, summer and winter weights, overcoats in wool and leather, boots on shelves and a library in Gothic black letter print to browse through while they waited for a fitting.

They did, all too obviously, wait here for a fitting. There were chairs and footstools, coffee tables, signs of use. Shoehorns on long handles – boot horns, she supposed. Tailor's chalk and pincushions.

Ruth blinked, and realized it had been a while since she'd done that.

Realized she'd been standing, staring, quite a while now.

Lifted her eyes to his, ready to apologize; saw his smile, his quick shake of the head.

‘Don't worry,' he said, ‘and don't ask. Mum's the word, yes?'

She nodded mutely, followed obediently.

Out of the supper room, and here was another, grander hallway. Here was the front door at last, with its two leaves and heavy bolts; here was the main stairway, dividing overhead and sweeping down in two mirror-image curves that met again in the last flight. Like a swan's wings, she thought, grace and power embodied in a line.

Here was a racket, all unexpected, footsteps thundering overhead and voices raised in an incoherent whooping.

Here was something stranger, a shadow that flickered in and out of vision as she lifted her eyes, a shadow that seemed to turn and tumble in that great open space overhead, between the light and her,
oh, Peter  . . .

She might have thought he was coming down to find her, only that he wouldn't make so much damn noise about it.

It was hardly possible to be sure of anything, but she was sure of this at least, that he wouldn't have screamed as he fell. Not her Peter. As long as he wasn't burning, as long as the fall had put the fires out.

In any case, this was no haunting. This was young men on the ramp: hurtling downstairs, yelling their heads off, doing  . . . something with all that height and air, and—

Oh.

Oh, yes. Of course.

Feeling slightly foolish, she stood beside the colonel and waited while his errant charges came charging into sight and down this last long flight, still making noise enough to wake the devil, while their failed experiment clattered down to earth ahead of them.

She probably didn't feel as foolish as they did, these three boys, when at last they lifted their heads and saw Nemesis waiting for them.

‘Oh, lor',' one of them breathed, as they stumbled to a halt on the fine floor, stood almost to attention. As straight as they could, perhaps, with their various hurts on parade. The one who'd spoken was perhaps the only one who could actually speak; the others she guessed had been contributing their share of noise, but shapelessly.

Even now, she thought, they were expecting leniency. They thought it was their due.

They were probably right. The colonel raised an eyebrow, but not his voice at all. He said, ‘Gentlemen.
Strictly
necessary?' in a voice that expected the answer yes.

Expected it, and duly got it.

‘Oh yes, sir. Training, sir.'

‘
Training
, Barrows? Do enlighten me,' in that tone of voice that says
I'm looking forward to this, but you should probably not be.

‘Sir. All sorts of things you can do with a kite, sir, in the dark. The major's had us practising with them for weeks now. And then we had to go up top to fix the blackout, sir, after last week's storms, so of course we took advantage—'

‘Yes, of course you did—'

‘Of the
opportunity
, sir, to practise with the kites from the roof there. And then, well,' he sounded suddenly a little less sure of his ground but carried on regardless, ‘then it just seemed the thing to do, to see if we could make a kite fly in the stairwell here, if we could get up speed enough as we came down, and—'

And conspicuously not, but conspicuously that didn't matter any more. The colonel had lost that hint of shared amusement, any sense that they were all lads together underneath.

He said, ‘Wait. Stop. You have been flying kites, from the roof?'

‘Well, yes, sir  . . .'

‘Is anyone still up there?'

‘Yes, sir. Dumpty's there. He said he wouldn't come down with us, on account  . . .'

‘On account of the severe vertigo, I expect?' The colonel's voice had become something unexpectedly complex, dealing in justified dread as well as fury. ‘I thought there was one of you missing, and of course it must be him. So you left him up there, did you? On his own?'

‘Uh, yes, sir. He wouldn't be left behind, when we went up. But, but, he's quite comfy where he is, quite safe. And he won't try to move without us, he's not a fool  . . .'

True or not, the assertion came too late. The colonel was already on the move, brushing men aside as he headed up the stairs.

He was a big man, and determined, but not fast on his feet. Ruth could overtake him, while the men below were still wondering whether they ought to.

In honesty, she wasn't really certain why she should. But vertigo on a roof did not sound good, and the colonel thought the case serious enough to haul his bulk up flight after flight, as fast as his legs might manage it. Really, that ought to be enough. It was enough. Here she was, ahead of him. On the first floor, and going higher. The staircase not so striking now, all beauty spent; but still grander than anything she'd seen in the way of stairs so far, because this would be where the house guests strayed uphill.

Up, then, up and up. It was hard, taking stairs at a sprint. Nursing toughened the body, though, as much as the spirit. She could do this. This, at least, she could do. And look up as she went and see a circle of dark, which must have been a fabulous skylight before the war, as wide as the helix of the stairs, a complex circular frame of glass and wood meant to send daylight tumbling downward.

Now it was all dark, blackened from the outside because how would you fix a blackout from within? But there was a ladder on the topmost landing, rising to a hatchway, a door to the outside. To the roof. And that door was standing open, despite the fact that lights burned below and there was no curtaining, no screen. That would be a reason to fall on the errant patient, scathing and imperious:
don't you know about the blackout, how could you stand here and let this shine up for any passing bomber  . . .?

It was always good to have an excuse, to disguise anxiety as anger. Bash them about a bit, exhibit some righteous indignation, keep them abashed.