House of Doors
Page 12
It was hard to make assessments in the dark, but this wasn’t the first time. There had been bombs and bodies in the London streets, catching her unawares, never quite off duty.
She might have sent for a lamp, but there really was no need. Firelight was good enough. ‘Fetch blankets,’ she said, ‘and a stretcher party. No – send them, don’t bring them. When they’re on their way, find Matron. Tell her we’ll need the theatre, and a surgeon ready. Go.’
There was actually a blanket already, that she’d tossed back to make her inspection. A horse blanket, she rather thought. That didn’t matter, but it was sodden with blood, which mattered rather a lot. Her patient had lost a hand, newly and entirely. The heat of the blast that took it had cauterized the stump of his wrist somewhat, but not enough.
‘What do you need, Sister?’ A voice above her, another man being sensible, seeing a need. She could bless the military mind.
‘Your tie,’ she said shortly. And then, as she fashioned a swift and ruthless tourniquet, ‘And your jacket.’ Anything to keep her patient warm, until the stretcher came. In the dark on rough brick she couldn’t tell how much blood he’d lost in the yard here, never mind how much before that in the stable. He was deep in shock and deeply, deeply cold. She’d sacrifice her own jacket too, if she were wearing one, if the stretcher party didn’t show soon. All she had was the cape of her uniform, short and impractical and suddenly infuriating. What was the point of the wretched thing, if it was no use in an emergency? She might send this accommodating man for more horse blankets, and perhaps a rein or a bridle strap, a length of leather to make a better tourniquet. But she shouldn’t need any of that, the house was right there, how long could it take to find a couple of orderlies and a stretcher? In a hospital?
Astonishingly, he was trying to speak, her patient. She had thought him sunk too far, perhaps too far to recover, even, though she would do everything she could in any case. But here he was, half pushing himself up on the one elbow, staring at her with wide, appalled eyes, working his mouth dreadfully.
His face had that almost-accustomed hollow where a nose should have, must once have been. She couldn’t tell how harmed his voice had been before smoke and shock and pain got into it, but it was a reedy scratch now, barely comprehensible.
And yet he was trying so hard, it seemed so important. She read his lips by firelight as much as heard his words. Perhaps more.
Either way. He said, ‘I was falling, falling . . . I couldn’t stop falling.’
And he seemed so scared at the memory, and it drove a bitter nail through her bones.
Oh, Peter . . .
SIX
Men came, with a stretcher and blankets and Matron too, organized and decisive. There was nothing now for Ruth to do. Not needed in surgery, not wanted at the stable – where Major Black had arrived to take charge of the firefighting, organized and decisive and coldly, blisteringly furious – she walked out slowly through the carriage arch, feeling for every step, her head swimming with smoke and dark and aftershock.
And shock itself, shock too, the true thing. Visions of her own sorrow – which she had thought private, secret, not for sharing – suddenly reaching out to snare others, to bring them to destruction.
To hurt them, worse than ever it had yet hurt her.
She was, apparently, shivering. She only realized that because of the way she was walking, hunched over with her arms wrapped around herself, soft fabric beneath her palms and chill shuddering flesh, her own flesh under that.
‘Here.’
A weight on her shoulders, a sense of warmth, smells of tobacco and, yes, bay rum; a man’s jacket, it should have been Peter’s and if ever she was to be confused or transported now would be the time and yet she was entirely clear for once, lifting her head and looking around and finding Colonel Treadgold in his shirtsleeves.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t . . .’
‘Nor should you,’ he said, mock-sternly, frowning above that absurd moustache. ‘Where’s your cape, Sister Taylor?’
She glanced back over her shoulder, perhaps a little wildly. She had apparently slipped it off after all, though she didn’t remember. It must be back there in the blood and the smoke and the pumped water, under all those loud men’s clumsy feet, unless it had been whisked away on the stretcher, still inadequately trying to cover that poor man in his pain.
‘Well, never mind,’ the colonel said. ‘It was a foolish garment anyway. We don’t use them here, you will have noticed that. See the quartermaster in the morning, he’ll kit you out with our own togs. Which are designed, so Matron informs me, for comfort and practicality and nothing more. Meanwhile, are you feeling as pointless as I am? Set adrift, nothing to do, neither use nor ornament?’
She had apparently been bereft of the power of speech. All she could do was goggle at him.
‘It’s one of the privileges of rank,’ he confided, ‘to stand back and let your juniors take over. Come you in with me, we’ll have a noggin and let all this pass by. It’ll do them good to run around and shout a lot.’
‘Shouldn’t you be . . . Won’t they need you in theatre? Sir?’ Ah, there was her voice now. Thick and awkward, full of blood and smoke. And impertinence, that too. She needed to cough, and hoped he might take that for apology.
‘No, no. Not for simple butchery. Nothing I can do that Captain Felton can’t. Matron’s got her eye on him, in any case. She’ll see that all’s done for the best. My best move right now is to keep out of his way and hers. Your best move, too. It’s our solemn duty to be both available and unnecessary. So long as people know where to look for us, we should be safe; and someone’s sure to notice. As you told me yourself, this is a hospital. Someone always notices. I couldn’t be private if I wanted to, so I don’t even try.’
Deliberately or otherwise, he was making it sound quite solitary, this life he led. The loneliness of command. It was a cliché, she supposed, but that didn’t make it untrue. That there were other officers – Aesculapius, Major Black – who seemed to take precedence despite their rank, who mattered more here despite the colonel’s achievements: that could only underline his isolation. Above them all and a little cut off, not quite able to make the decisions that would matter most. Tonight was emblematic, almost. He was the finest surgeon in the hospital, he was the senior officer, and all of that required him to stand aside and let others do what was needed. What he himself was all too obviously itching to do.
She could feel sorry for him, all too easily. If that wasn’t another impertinence.
If it wasn’t what he wanted her to do. He might be just as manipulative as Major Dorian, in his different way. A big woofly moustache and an eccentric taste for cider didn’t make him a fool outside his own competence. She might do well to remember that.
Still, she didn’t mind being manipulated if he was looking for allies. She was on his side in any case. Assuming that there actually were two camps here, his and Major Black’s: the ward and the training ground, the home front and the war, recovery and redeployment. Healing and killing. She knew where she stood.
There, at least, she did. On that safe ground. Otherwise she felt wretchedly, sickeningly at sea. Her mind was off-kilter, veering wildly, like a compass in a storm. Except that it kept coming back – like a compass in a storm – to point the same way, to the one thing, Peter . . .
She knew she was unbalanced. She was starting to wonder again if she was sane.
Logically, it should be Aesculapius she turned to. If anyone. She was an Englishwoman in wartime; she ought properly to stiffen her spine, stiffen her upper lip and carry on uncomplainingly. Be her own cliché. That, or talk to the unit psychiatrist who was so conveniently to hand.
But here was Colonel Treadgold, large and avuncular and leading her away, astray, up to his own office. It was as though he knew that she was troubled by something more than tonight’s horror in the stables. Or else it was recruitment, inducement, an offer of the colonel’s shilling.
Perhaps she should just take this at face value. But his face was half hidden, and so she thought were his motives. And her own, those too. Nothing was simple or clear; nothing could be honest between them, quite, so long as she saw spies in the shrubbery and ghosts in the water.
Of course, there actually were spies in the shrubbery. Spies in training, at least, their own spies and saboteurs. Assassins. Hiding behind the faces that he made for them, faces that didn’t need hiding because they could give nothing away.
As for ghosts, well. The ghosts were her own. One ghost, solitary and private. Except that he seemed to have reached out beyond her to touch another, a stranger, more cruelly than ever he would touch her.
The colonel’s office occupied a corner of the first floor, where the staff wing turned back from the frontage of the house. It might have been a charming room in peacetime, in daylight, if one could be charmed by views of moor and woodland. Herself, Ruth thought the moors too bleak and the woods too menacing, but she knew herself to be Home Counties through and through; she liked her landscapes gentle and tended, tamed.
Behind its shutters and blackout curtains, given over to military use – and he was still a soldier as well as a surgeon, Colonel Treadgold, she ought not to forget that – what might have been a lady’s drawing room had become a haven for a man beset, or so she thought. There were ramparts of paper everywhere, stacked high on desk and dresser and the floor too, laid out in a labyrinth that needed care to step through. If there were any kind of order to it, that could only be in his head. Perhaps it all made sense to him, perhaps he had built these walls as a stronghold sure against chaos, a mighty fortress, ein feste Burg as Luther’s hymn would have it. Perhaps. She thought it looked more like desperate defences, a city besieged.
‘I think you need a batman,’ she said mildly. ‘Or a secretary.’
‘Already got ’em, thank you kindly. One of each. I won’t let ’em in here. Sit you down, sit, sit.’
He swept up a pile of official-looking buff folders from a chair, cast about for a moment like a man adrift and then deposited them on another teetering pile that was building resolutely in the fireplace. Ruth sat obediently, pondering on the wisdom of having people in your service and not allowing them to do their jobs.
Still. Within those threatening drifts of paperwork, he had made himself a nest that was comfortable enough. Man-comforts: she could recognize those. Smells of smoke and leather, soft cushions and abandoned books, a disreputable pair of slippers on the cold hearth. Really, she thought, there ought to be a dog. An elderly retired spaniel to look up and thump its docked tail at his entrance, to rest its chin on his slippered foot, to sigh heavily and grunt a little in its sleep.
The colonel was behind his desk, bending, grunting himself a little as he straightened. He had a bottle in each hand, retrieved from a crate invisible to her; and could hold both easily in one hand, neck and neck, allowing him to scoop up two tankards with the other as he came across to join her.
One of the tankards was pewter, one glass. He peered at that one suspiciously, gave it a wipe with his handkerchief, said, ‘Well. That’s as clean as it’s going to be. Do you mind?’
‘Not in the least,’ she assured him. Which was true, entirely. His handkerchief at least was clean, she had seen him shake it from its ironed folds; and Peter had taught her long ago not to be too fussy, just as she had been teaching him to be tidier than his wont.
She didn’t think she would try to teach the colonel. She thought he was beyond her measure.
He set everything he carried somehow on the mantelpiece, though it was crammed already with books and tobacco pots, a pipe rack, ashtrays and matches and figurines that must surely be a hangover from the house’s proper owner, a residue not packed away.
He had retrieved his jacket from her shoulders as they came indoors. ‘No need to give the gossips more to talk about, eh? They’ll be busy enough already.’ Now he rummaged in a pocket to produce a penknife that he might have carried since he was a boy, the ivory handle was so worn and grubby. The blade looked keen enough, though, and dealt efficiently with the bottle tops.
Amber liquid gurgled and frothed within the dimpled glass. He passed her drink to her, as the room filled with the heady scent of apples in ferment; poured the other and drank himself, and sighed like that absent spaniel, and wiped his moustache with his handkerchief, and leaned against the mantelpiece and waited.
It was the waiting that was wicked. Learned behaviour, she was sure: all Aesculapius.
She capitulated quickly. ‘What do you think happened tonight, sir?’
‘An accident, of course. Major Black plays his war games with live ammo; of course there must be accidents. The man was careless, or else there was a fault in the device, the grenade or whatever he was playing with. Mistakes happen. And they cost us dear, every time. They’ve cost that poor young man his hand, and likely his hopes of going overseas. If he can’t work a parachute – or a garrotte –’ added with a twist of the lips, an expression of absolute distaste coupled with ruthless recognition of the facts – ‘then I don’t see how he can be used effectively. Or put in place to be used at all. It’s not my decision to make, but this might be a blessing. I don’t suppose he’d see it that way, they’re all mad keen to go. But I might actually get to rebuild a man for civilian life, rather than as a weapon of war.’
Actually she thought any number of his patients would not be useful to Major Black, but of course it wouldn’t be those who preyed on his mind. It was a human thing, to dwell on loss and sacrifice; she knew. Who better?
If it took two hands to manage a parachute, and managing a parachute was a prerequisite for being sent on a mission, she thought she could give a name to one more young man doomed to disappointment in the end, however much he practised silence and wore his scars like a hero.
That was a relief to her, much more personal than the colonel’s, sharper and more surprising.
Never mind. Not what she was here for. She could think about that later.
She was here at the colonel’s invitation. She wasn’t quite sure what he’d had in mind, though no doubt he meant to grill her about something. That, or simply to seal her to his own camp, not realizing that she was there already by conviction and temperament and experience too. It seemed a brutal thing to her, that men who had given so much already should be expected or allowed to hurl their lives away like grenades flung in the teeth of the enemy. Never mind that they were all volunteers. No doubt they thought they would go out in one bright, eternal, glorious flame, that ending they had somehow not quite achieved in their crashed planes, tragic heroes, romantic to the last.
Never mind that they were all of them desperate, damaged beyond bearing, however glib they seemed.
Never mind that she understood them so exactly, that she herself had been seeking a posting overseas and a swift eclipsing death.
None of that mattered. Even the war’s need couldn’t matter, against the cold reality of what was happening here.
She could say all of that to him, and it was very likely what he had hoped to hear, what he had fetched her for. They could be campaigners in some way, working together to mitigate the worst of Major Black, to save one patient and then another. Find ways to keep them or ways to transfer them, anything to keep them out of the major’s hands, not given to his project.
Still not what she was here for. Whatever the colonel thought.
She took a breath, took a sip – cool and crisp like an apple from the cellar, tangy and sharp like an apple kept too long, gone too far – and took the plunge. Said, ‘Colonel, do you believe in ghosts?’
That stymied him. It sat exactly between him and his purpose, unexpected and unavoidable. He stood quite still for a moment, then reached for tobacco
and a pipe. Just for something to do with his hands, she thought. While he thought, while he tried to fit her question to his understanding.
He said, ‘No. No, I don’t believe I do. If you asked Major Dorian, I expect he would say that he believed in the power of faith or some such, but I’m not that clever. I’ve spent a lot of years with my fingers inside men’s bodies, and I’ve never found any sign of a soul. Or any other kind of spirit either. I know how bodies work, and I don’t see how anything could survive once they stop working.’
So did she, and nor did she; and yet, and yet.
She had thought Peter was all in her head, her own head. The man in the stable, though, he had been falling and falling. Whatever he did that was wrong – snatching at something or dropping something, cutting the wrong wire or letting a tool slip at the wrong moment, striking a spark perhaps where it was most foolish – whatever he did, it wasn’t that which haunted him as he lay deep in pain and shock in the yard there, waiting for rescue. He had lost his hand and maybe more, he might have been dying, he might certainly have thought he was dying; and, I was falling, falling . . . I couldn’t stop falling.
It was her nightmare, her waking horror, the vision that had possessed her ever since she came to this house.
It was her husband, watching his death rise up to greet him. Tumbling coldly into its arms.
Carrying her with him, down and down, again and again.
What in the world – or out of it, in the afterworld, in no world that made any sense to her – but what was he doing in another man’s mind?
Falling and falling, yes, she knew that. He would have said that, for the smile of it, when he was alive. In her head, he still could. He could comment wryly on his own death, and her haunting too. But in her head was where all that should stay. Where he should stay. She almost didn’t mind, could almost welcome him. This last vestige. But . . .