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 . . .’
He was, she thought, just talking. Not from nerves, or not his own. In anticipation, rather, trying to grind her edges down, to leave her a little numb from the simple constant flow of words, the soft weight of his voice like a cushion between her and what he meant to show her.
It was a kindness, no doubt, but quite unnecessary. She knew what she at least was here for. She knew her job, and she was good at it. There was nothing in nursing that could make her blench. She was no silly probationer, to scream at the sight of maggots in a wound, or a skin sloughing off with its dressing, or . . .
It was just as well she felt herself prepared. Her own pride lent her a stiffness, a rod in the spine that carried her – just – from room to room in Colonel Treadgold’s wake. Every step she took, every conscious turn of her head, every nod and every word stood as a reminder to herself that she could do this, see, here she was doing it, step and turn and speak. So of course she could do it again, why not? Again and again, a step, a word, another glance. Another horror, laid out like a specimen and to be treated the same, just a specimen. Don’t think of him as a person, as a boy, no. No. Don’t think of Peter, oh no, not at all.
That should have been easy, really. After all, Peter had never made it this far, to visible damage and a hospital bed.
But he had been with her all day, all unannounced; and none of these boys was him but he might have been any of them, if he’d only had the patience and the nerve.
She seemed to see him everywhere. Not this time in knots of ancient wood or the broken silver backing to a mirror, no. Still inside her giddy head, alas – but at least she was looking at flesh-and-blood young men, and knew it. And knew that she was only drawing inferences, drawing Peter’s lines on their abused bodies. This wasn’t madness or illusion or deceit, only a terrible regret: I have lost my man, he is dead, when he might have been like you. I should have preferred that, but it was his choice in the end.
Here were men in the raw, Treadgold’s material, untouched as yet by his subtle knife. Men with disfigured faces and twisted limbs, ruined once under fire and then again by nature as she strained to make good what was far beyond her healing. Ruth knew. Her eyes were brutally experienced, and half of what they saw in bed after bed – the worst distortions, the extremities of pain – was what happened after the bullets, after the shrapnel, after the fire. When bone tried to knit to bone, whatever shattered bone there was; when muscle lost its memory, flesh forgot its purpose, skin grew over any open wound it could and battlefield medics were glad to see it happen, called it recovery, signed off their patients and passed them up the line.
To Treadgold and men like him, whose first work would be to undo that rough impatient healing. Cut through fresh skin and muscle tissue, break new-knit bone apart. She knew. She’d seen it in her own wards, again and again. Civilian bodies healed themselves as well as military ones, or as badly. She’d seen joints dislocated by their own ill-laid muscles working against them; she’d heard men scream with pain when they tried to walk or lift a weight, when their skeletons betrayed them.
She thought she’d seen it all – but these were only the new intake, candidates for surgery and treatment.
Here was another room, nothing in the corridor to distinguish it from its neighbours. A typewritten sheet was pinned to one panel of the door, listing the names and ranks of its occupants. By their bed numbers, Ruth noticed with a private smile. Where are you, then, Bed Thirty-Four? Not this corridor, I’m guessing.
Inside, four beds, drawn up two and two on either side of the windows. Not patients fit to wander, these, not up for tea, for beer and a sing-song. Each bed was occupied. An uncanny silence hung in the little ward, nothing to do with this sudden incursion of a senior officer; there had been no noise coming through the door, and there was none of that sense of sound swallowed, the abrupt hush of a dormitory almost caught in sin. These men lay wrapped rather in their own silence, trapped in stillness, rapt.
One, the nearest, had his arm flung up across his eyes. Not a gesture against the light: the shutters were closed, and only a single dull bulb burned to light the nurses their way from bed to bed. It took Ruth a little time, a little too long to see how a tube of flesh grew like something alien and strange from the inside of this man’s elbow, reaching out and down to engulf his cheek. His arm was tied in place with bandages, but actually it was his own flesh that bonded it.
‘All well, Johnson?’ The colonel’s voice was hushed in deference to the gloom of the room or the possibility of other patients’ sleeping, or else simply by professional practice. Even a whisper had impetus, though, with that much mass behind it and that much sheer intent. Colonel Treadgold was a rock, a mountain, rooted deep in the earth’s crust. He murmured, and everyone stirred. Ruth hoped never to hear him shout.
‘Tickety-boo, sir.’ The patient – she should probably stop thinking of them as boys, but it was almost irresistible; in tousled hair and pyjamas they looked younger yet, mere children – peeped up from beneath his bent arm. He might have been smiling. It was almost impossibly hard to tell, in the weave of shadow and surgery.
‘Not too uncomfortable, the arm?’
‘Hideous, sir,’ but he seemed strangely cheerful about it.
‘Still cramping up, is it?’
‘Yes, sir. But the nurses give me a massage when it’s bad.’ Ruth wasn’t sure, but that might have been a wink.
‘No doubt they do. And no doubt it’s worst when the nearest nurse is pretty, eh? And not so bad when he’s a big gruff orderly? You don’t fool me, my lad. Nor anyone else. This is Sister Taylor, who’ll have charge of this corridor from tomorrow. I’d put her wise to the worst of your tricks, only I won’t need to. She’s as sharp as they come, she’ll see straight through you. And your cronies, too.’
While he talked, those fat nimble fingers of his were touching, assessing graft and skin and stitches: like a blind man reading Braille, she thought, learning everything he needed from his fingertips.
‘Sister,’ the young man said, ‘I’ve been meaning to bring this up, you’re obviously the person I should complain to. On behalf of us all, it’s not just me: but they have a barrel of beer in the corridor upstairs, and we don’t. That’s just so transparently unfair, I don’t even need to argue it, do I? There’d be no better way for you to start your new regime, than to fight our corner on this. You’d have the whole corridor behind you.’
There was mischief in his eyes, but no malice. He didn’t expect to win; she wasn’t even sure that he wanted to. It was the game they were all engaged in, playing up to the colonel’s expectations, the naughty boy and the indulgent master, with her the strict nanny caught between.
Well, she could do that. She wasn’t above obliging with a stern touch now and then. Especially now, when she needed to prove to herself at least that all young men were not the same young man, not hers, not Peter.
‘Oh, and do you imagine that my nurses have nothing better to do than chase up and down the corridor all day to fetch you jugs of ale? You can have your beer when you’re fit to go and fetch it – which means when the colonel gives you leave to leave your bed, and not before. No sneaking out to join your friends on the floor above, and no inviting them down to party in here so long as they bring a j
ug. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes, Sister.’
He seemed not at all subdued. Colonel Treadgold whiffled into his moustache, and seemed content. Honour satisfied all round, she thought. Parts played, territories established. Move on.
Next bed, a man who would absolutely not be sneaking out of bed, because his legs were bound together, the skin of one calf being encouraged to grow over the raw flesh of the other.
Introduction, examination, banter; the mixture as before. She must be careful to learn their names and histories, these indistinguishable boys. It mattered, she knew, to the patients, that their nurses remember who they were.
Next bed. A man whose face was being rebuilt, feature by feature. His nose sculpted from a shard of his own shin bone, his jaw a jigsaw with nothing yet to cover it. Cheeks to come.
Next bed . . .
And so on and on, all the length of the corridor. Men with no faces, with no voices, with no hands. Other injuries too, but faces, voices, hands seemed to predominate. Perhaps because those were a pilot’s most vulnerable features, least well defended, quickest and easiest to burn. Or because they were how he met the world and how the world best knew him, what Ruth or anyone first noticed, so the harm done there seemed that much greater, it lingered in her mind and drove out all hurts else.
Or else there was another reason, why patients predominantly hurt in face and hands should be sent here. To Colonel Treadgold, or else to Major Black.
‘You think I’ve given you a hard row to hoe,’ the colonel said, as perceptive as he could be gentle, ‘the surgical ward, men in their extremity. Well, it’s true – but only because all rows are hard work here. You’re better off with the surgical cases than the convalescents. At least you know that they’ll stay where you put them, by and large. And you don’t have to deal so much with the Galloping Majors, trying to hurry your patients away from you before anyone’s ready for it. And you have the best of the nursing staff and the orderlies to help you. Come with me now, and I’ll introduce you.’
That wasn’t fair, to put her through the wringer first and then expect her to do the polite, shake hands and remember names, faces, duties.
No doubt it was deliberate, though. He would have his reasons. Or else they would be Major Dorian’s reasons, some devious plot on his part to make some oblique point, to chivvy her obscurely into some desired response. She did think the shadow of Aesculapius hung over all the hospital, much as her own loss hung so precipitately over her. It was only hope and a kind of determined professional wartime optimism that let her assume that his was a more benevolent watchfulness, that something good underlay all his machinations.
She smiled and shook every hand, repeated every name, struggled through minimal conversations until she could seize the first blessed cue that offered, make a sleepless night into an excuse, apologize, retreat.
Not back through Major Black’s terrain this time. She found her own way, alone at last and utterly thankful for it, across the courtyard in the dark. Wasn’t country dark supposed to be impenetrable? She’d grown up under city lights, with rarely a glimpse of stars. In recent months even the blackout hadn’t helped, with the East End aflame night after night. Here in this remoteness, where she might have looked for night like a blanket, the Milky Way slashed across the sky like a myth realized, a canyon inverted, a rip in the heavens, needing small help from the tardy moon to spill light enough to see by. It was almost bright enough to throw shadows before her feet.
It was plenty bright enough to distract her, to let her dizzy mind focus on this alien cast of light and how it guided her feet across an alien ground
She was already stepping up, reaching out to its solidity, before she remembered about the door.
Peter’s face rising out of the wood, himself falling into it.
Herself, falling and falling.
It’s just a door.
That was in her head somewhere. Not even a thought, it was something more realized than that, more certain. Almost a voice. Her absolute understanding of the world, that doors were things of wood and craft, man-made, nothing to be afraid of.
She wasn’t afraid, no. Only hesitant, now that she’d remembered. Barely hesitant, still reaching. A casual watcher probably wouldn’t even have seen that falter in her fingers. And besides, there was no one here. No one watching. It was only in her head that she was so constantly observed. Studied. Colonel Treadgold and Aesculapius: one bluff, the other an incisor. Both with their reasons, good reasons to be watching the newcomer. Matron too, no doubt, it wasn’t all men.
It wasn’t all Peter.
Here, now, it was none of them.
Blessedly alone, she reached again and couldn’t find a handle.
Remembered that there wasn’t one, decided not to kick it the way the young men did.
Set the flat of her hand to the wood of the door, and pushed.
Just in that little moment between touch and effort – when information flowed one way and not the other, I can feel the door before the door can feel me – she thought she heard a voice call her name.
Distantly, shrieking, in a dying fall.
Too late to jerk her hand away. She was already pushing, leaning into it, moving forward as the door opened.
Moving into darkness, real darkness, stepping into it because there was no choice, she was committed. She had momentum. That was what had carried her through all her life so far, except for the sudden block of Peter’s death, that teetering halt on the edge of something terrible.
She had got herself moving again, with tremendous effort – praiseworthy effort, she thought, except that no one had seemed to notice – and never mind what she’d been moving towards.
Then Aesculapius had changed the points ahead of her, shifted her on to a new track. Complicated her metaphor and her life. It was still her own relentless pursuit that actually kept her moving, brought her here.
Momentum.
It carried her forward now, into the dark, and let the door swing shut behind her.
This, now. This was the true dark, utter dark, what she’d fancied to find in a country night.
And there behind her was the doorway that she’d fainted through. She stood in a space she’d never seen, and had no idea where the light switch was.
There was no window, or else it was masked by better blackout than she’d noticed anywhere else in the house. There did have to be a light switch. Didn’t there?
She groped behind her and was almost surprised to find the door still there, rough timbers smoothed by age, by centuries of hands. Hands that groped in the dark. She couldn’t be the first who tried to find a knob, a latch, some way to pull it open, to let that vivid starlight in.
There didn’t seem to be one.
Which was nonsense, surely. With no handle on the outside, there must be one within.
There was a keyhole, she remembered. On the outside.
In here, too, Her fumbling fingers found it, deep recessed. Inaccessible. No key.
It couldn’t be locked, it was not locked; she had just pushed it open and walked through.
It ought just to pull, then, but she couldn’t find anything to grip. It seemed as smooth on the inside as it was out there. There needed to be crosspieces, didn’t there, braces holding the planks together . . .?
Still. She couldn’t open the door.
She reached to one side of it and then the other, running her fingers over roughcast wall, feeling for that light switch.
Not finding it.
An old house electrified late, not built for it: the switch might have gone in anywhere. Very well, then. This was some kind of hallway, a lobby, a servants’ route in and out of the house. Flagstones underfoot, a chill in the air – and another door somewhere, access to the house. Closed against her, shutting out light and sound for now, but certainly there must be another door. With a knob, a handle, a way to open it. Of course. All she had to do was find it.
The alternative was to crouch in a c
orner, huddle in on herself, wait to be rescued. No. She had spent one long, uncomfortable night dwelling in her own memories, under the stars. She wouldn’t do the same again, in this pitch black. That would be unbearable. Besides, what should she say in the morning, discovered: ‘I couldn’t find my way out’?
Pathetic.
Unbearable.
Well, then.
Plasterwork under her hands, from the door frame towards what must be a corner. She could feel her way all around the walls, until she found that other door. At least she wasn’t susceptible to night fears, whatever curious tricks her mind might have been playing in her exhaustion, under the long burden of her sorrow. She didn’t believe that uncanny creatures lurked in any darkness. This was just a room that lacked a light, and she was a mature sensible woman and would find her own way out of it, and—
And now that she was standing still, utterly frozen by the shock of it, yes, she could hear his breathing in the dark, but actually it wasn’t that which had seized her first, made her understand so instantly and utterly that he was here in the room with her.
It was the smell of him, immediate and unmistakable: bay rum and wet wool and warm living flesh, the way he had come home to her time and time again, the way she had met him in their small hallway and unbuttoned his overcoat for him because his own hands were too stiff and unwieldy in the cold, still fumbling to peel off his driving gloves. Oh, she used to scold him for not stopping the ancient Austin, not putting up the hood against the weather, driving home so stupidly in the rain. But in her private treasury of moments these were precious to her, almost beyond measure. They had been precious even then, when she thought they were only a stopgap, moments of mothering him that would satisfy until they had children.
Now she reached in the dark there and found him, physical beneath her questing hands; the damp wool of his overcoat and himself inside it, standing, breathing.
Nearly, nearly she spoke his name.
House of Doors Page 7