House of Doors (8 page)

Even so, Ruth wasn't about to erupt through the hatchway like an avenging angel, justified or otherwise. Not if the man out there was uncertain in his balance. She was horribly aware of all that glass, and the plunge beneath.

Swiftly up the ladder, then, but slowing at the top. She could hear the colonel at her back, beneath her, hauling himself up that last turn, breathing hard. So was she, though, breathing hard: which gave her an excuse the other way, to pause at the head of the ladder, just her head pushing up through the hatchway into open air. She could look like she was blown, no more than that, while she looked about, and—

Ah. There he was, and yes, well stowed for a man with vertigo. It was stupid, of course, being a man with vertigo, being on a rooftop at all. But young men could be stupid, and young airmen more than most. They seemed addicted to risk. If warfare didn't or wouldn't put their lives in danger, they'd seek it out elsewhere. Peter had been a test pilot when she first met him. War was almost a substitute for that, she had thought sometimes, not quite up to the mark.

If you'd been through war and come out scathed – and come out with vertigo, which was odd in itself for an airman, surely something deeply significant, something to ask Aesculapius about – then of course you'd want to sit on the roof and fly kites. Even if you needed a boost from your mates to get you there, and would be stuck where you were if they abandoned you.

Stuck where he was, he was still flying kites. A kite, at least. Probably he used to call his aeroplane a kite, back when. Now he was a man like any other here, bad face and bad hands, barely able to hold a string between them. But he sat against a convenient chimney stack with his legs spread out across the leads of the roof, and he played tug-and-come-again with both hands on his kite string, and seemed quite happy at it although his face was hard to read.

Until Colonel Treadgold coughed heavily, significantly, on the landing below her. Too much the gentleman to be discourteous, to start up the ladder before she was safely off it – or simply too much of a man, not trusting his weight and hers to the same frail risers – and far too much the gentleman to hurry her up directly, he fell back on the audible nudge. Which was audible to kite-flying Dumpty as well as herself, because so much body of course had power and resonance beyond his reckoning.

Which brought Dumpty's head flying round to find the source, and finding her. And scrambling to his feet any old how, despite injuries and vertigo and all; and letting go his kite string in the process, and realizing a moment too late and making a despairing grab at it anyway; and his eyes and hers following the kite as it soared away beyond reach, beyond limit, bizarrely into the midst of a flock of starlings wheeling towards their evening roost.

That frantic snatch had overtoppled him, so that his arms were wheeling for a balance no longer there. The fatal suck of the skylight hung below him, black-coated but still glass in all its fragility, all its threat. Ruth could see it happen in her mind's eye, how he would fall and fall through in a terrible shatter, how he would fall and fall.

He was falling already, except that she was there. Drawn by his need and her duty, impelled by the colonel from below, she felt almost translated from the hatchway to the rooftop all at once. Just in time, her experienced arms caught hold of him, loaned him the balance he lacked. It's a nurse's knack, to keep a heavy man on his feet at need.

His head lifted to find her, perhaps to thank her. She couldn't tell, he never came that far. For a moment his eyes looked over her shoulder, to where she could hear the colonel puffing through the hatchway. Then they clouded abruptly, as though a storm had rolled into his skull. His body lost that grateful cling and he slumped utterly in her arms and now she really couldn't hold him but she wouldn't let go, so that they were both teetering on the edge of calamity, that long drop calling to her. Just a tumble, a shatter she'd never feel, and there would be Peter waiting for her; and wasn't that better than a bullet  . . .?

Apparently it wasn't allowed her, even now. She could feel herself, both of them going, the dead weight of the body in her arms and the living struggling body that was herself not giving up, not even now, but going anyway – and then suddenly there was a third beside them and a strong grip on her shoulder, something to lean on, solidity.

And that was the colonel, and she might have sagged in his arms if she hadn't had a sagging body in her own and his voice in her ear, ‘Steady, now. Just lay the man down. Do you need help?'

‘No, no,' she gasped, meaning
yes, yes, don't let go  . . .
But he took her at her word, and apparently she was right, or he was. He could let her go and she wouldn't fall, not now.

She lowered the unconscious airman to the leads, just by the curve of the glass there but safely so. She felt most extraordinarily safe herself, crouched beside the great trunks of the colonel's legs. They were like pillars between her and the fall. She could put that from her mind and do what she was meant to, nurse the sick.

Loosen the airman's collar, check his breathing, try to bring him round. Vertigo, was it, that made him faint? Well—

Something struck her head, and tangled in her cap.

She didn't scream, it was too strange for screaming, but she sat back on her heels and reached up. And touched stiff spikiness and warm softness both at once, and felt the flutter of life in it; and snatched her hand away and almost did scream then, only not with the colonel standing there. And would have reached back determinedly to pluck the thing out regardless, except that just then there was a shadow on the gray matt of the leads beside her, a dot that grew startlingly. She barely had time to glance up before here it came, a bird, a starling falling out of the sky.

Falling, or plunging. Hurtling. It seemed to come down faster than it should. And hit its own shadow hard, hit the leads and broke in some way, horribly, and barely moved again.

And here came another, and another, hitting the roof to left and right, dying or dead already. She risked one more glance upward and nearly lost an eye, barely had time to bat the thing away from her face. It fell like something dead already, but so fast  . . .

And the sky was dark above it, dark with birds; and she barely had time to duck down again and cover her head before they hit like hail all about her.

She heard the colonel swear, then heard his bellow: ‘You men! I need you, two of you up here, two at least  . . .'

They would be for her patient, to carry him down out of this. For the moment she could crouch over him on all fours, feeling the impact of the birds on the arch of her back like thrown snowballs, stinging hard. Soon enough there were new voices, raised and roughened with shock, emitting strange oaths. That must be the kite flyers come to the rescue, wading through dead birds as they came. And then, ‘All right, Sister, we'll take him now, if you'll just  . . .'

She crawled backwards to be out of the way, and came up against the chimney stack and that was welcome, something almost shelter. She could huddle against that and peep through her fingers to see them hoist their unconscious colleague and bear him away, manhandle him down through the hatchway while they tried to shield themselves and each other against the rain that kept on coming, the constant fall of birds.

The colonel had pulled his jacket up over his head, for what protection that could offer him. Now he came pacing over, almost like a bird himself, like a heron spreading its wings to cast a shadow over water: except for the sheer bulk of him, nothing bird-like in those legs.

‘Come now, Sister. Your turn, let's have you out of this.'

‘Colonel, what—?'

‘I don't know. Some freak electrical discharge? Ask the boffins. I swear some of these birds are
smoking
. I'd say lightning, but there's been none. Come
on
 . . .!'

He took her under his wing, as literally as he could manage, and they stumbled through birds ankle-deep as far as the hatchway. Still bombarded all the way, more and more birds plummeting helplessly, thrown down. Once she was on the ladder his bulk above her served as protection, and there was no courteous nonsense in him now, no waiting. She had to move fast to avoid his big feet coming down on her fingers on the rungs.

There was a scatter of birds on the landing too, those that had fallen through the open hatch. Only a scatter, though, and she could ignore them all, except the one that wasn't quite dead yet, that hauled itself over floorboards at her feet. There was something infinitely creepy about that, and she couldn't keep from backing away. She should go with her patient, but the men were well ahead of her, a turn and a half down the broad wind of the stairs. It was only polite to wait for the colonel to come to ground, before she went down with him.

He fussed for a moment on the ladder, pulling the hatch closed, shutting out that storm of birds, and then huffed his way to the bottom. And looked at her, saw where she was and what she was doing – and somehow that great foot of his just happened to come down blindly, firmly on the crawling bird.

Ruth shuddered, and lifted her eyes to find him as bereft of words as she was. Overhead, they could still hear the impact of bone and feather striking on the great glass skylight.

Afterwards, she wondered if perhaps they shared a telepathic moment, she and the colonel. Some transient touch of foreknowledge, that had them both finding each other by eye and then moving together, still speechless but backing away from the open well, his arm sheltering her again as they huddled against the wall as that shatter came at last, and—

Oh, Peter  . . .

—there was a shape in all the falling glass and she thought it was him, she thought that he had come for her. Only it fell apart as it fell and no, not him: only an aggregate of dead birds and black glass, though it really had looked like a man coming down and she had every reason to scream, every reason in the world.

Nor was she the only one. Voices of shock came echoing up from below, something to hide her shame in; the colonel's arm was something to clamp on to until it became a reason to let go, to find her self-control and wield it strictly.

To pull herself erect and clip smartly down the stairs to where staff and patients were milling about, only waiting for someone – her – to take charge; to organize them in such a way that her own ignorance and newness didn't matter, sending some for brooms and bins, mops and cloths and soap and water, some to seek out tarpaulins for the roof.

When Matron came, she could hand all that over and have someone show her to the nearest cloakroom, where she could finally wash the filth from her own hands and emerge to find the colonel unexpectedly waiting for her.

‘We were interrupted,' he said, deliberately bathetic, forcing her to laugh. But he was right, of course. Every patient was a priority; ward rounds must still go ahead, whatever the excitement elsewhere. In London, they happened with the air full of cordite and dust. She brushed a feather from her uniform, suppressed a shudder, carried on. The fainted man would be in bed by now, and thoroughly doctored. Neither of them mentioned or needed to mention a flock of birds mysteriously dead.

Here was a passage with fine rooms leading off; here was something to talk about, a question she could legitimately ask, or she thought so.

‘Why not use these –' drawing rooms and dining rooms, high and wide and handsome – ‘for your wards?' Why make the nurses walk so far from their own accommodations, why walk so far himself? ‘They're large enough, surely, you could fit ten or a dozen beds in each, with lockers and cupboard-space in plenty  . . .'

‘Too large,' he said. ‘Our lads, they're better in small rooms, three or four together. No more than that, and sometimes that's too many. You'll see. Besides, Major Black has a lien on this corridor as well, for the other aspect of his mysteries. Lectures, training, tests. Interrogations.'

He shrugged, but she thought only because he'd steeled himself to do it. He was not by nature in the shrugging vein. A shrug might be dismissive, or it might be defeated; Colonel Treadgold was neither. If she could be sure of one thing, she was sure of that.

Who is Major Black, what is he, that you should try to shrug at him? Unconvincingly?

This walk had taught her one thing, given her one part of an answer: he was teaching these damaged men to fight again, with whatever weapons they could manage.

That wasn't enough, though. Not to justify all this space and all this secrecy, Nazi uniforms, guards at the gates. Not to make a Regular Army surgeon shrug as though he didn't care, as though it didn't matter what Major Black did with his boys. Whether or not he was done with them himself.

Ruth did think that might be an issue, that the colonel would not want to give his patients up. Not hand them back to the chaotic force of war, after spending so long and working so hard to make them whole again. Imperfect, marked for life, but ready for the world: just, not the world of Major Black. She thought.

She'd not yet met Major Black, and already she was lining up with the colonel in some fancied war of possession. No surprise. It already seemed obscene to her that so many people should give so much to heal the young men of this land, only to see them sent back to the bullets and shells of the front. As though they were lorries and tanks and aeroplanes, in for swift repair and swift return. It was why – one reason why – she had worked in civilian hospitals, until cold despair overwhelmed her.

It was the one great argument between herself and Peter. Even before his plane had fallen from the sky, fallen away from him, left him to fall and fall.

Another smaller hallway, another staircase, the West Stair no doubt; and the colonel took her up, only waving an arm towards the ground floor of this wing. ‘Through that doorway? My surgery, your treatment rooms, the pharmacy. If this house is a hospital at all, that's where you'll find it.' His territory, he meant; his last redoubt, she heard, against the depredations of Hitler on the one hand and Major Black on the other. War and the revival of war, and only him to hold the dreadful space between. ‘We stow the boys upstairs, purely for the staff's inconvenience. The men are fine, there's a sort of dumb-waiter affair, a paternoster that takes them up and down on stretchers or even in their beds, those who aren't on their feet yet. I'm afraid it's the stairs for us  . . .'