But. Not in other people’s heads. Not where he could cause them harm.
She thought obscurely that it might be her fault. Must be. Possibly.
How and why? Those were the obvious questions: unasked, impossible. The colonel would send her to Aesculapius. That man would peer interestedly inside her, make a project of her, not allow her to interfere with his other more important scheming.
And meanwhile a man would still be lying in a bed somewhere – here or elsewhere, they might take him away, a failed conspirator, his papers marked as his body was – with new damage, a lifetime of change and difficulty ahead. And Peter still in his mind, perhaps, still falling.
Responsible.
He hated responsibility, always had.
She carried it for him, when she could.
Tonight she wanted to accuse herself, she wanted to scream at him, she wanted to be sane and see that none of this was true. All at once, these things, she wanted them all. And could have none except perhaps the first of them, a bitter madness, this is all my fault. And almost opened her mouth to confess it, except that there was cider in her glass and that was easier, gulp and swallow and wrap her fingers around the mug like a man, cherish the thick glass of it and see, not shaking at all, her hands, no. Doing their job, gripping tight. Like her thoughts, tight and strong and secure . . .
Bless him, the colonel didn’t say why do you ask? It was the obvious next step, and he avoided it magnificently.
‘I think this house would give anyone the vapours, mark you. Even without the blackout and the groans of the wounded and Major Black’s favourites scuttling about in the shadows, practising unspeakable acts. It’s why I won’t take probationers here. One reason why. I’m not sure the security bods would allow it anyway, but the last thing I need is silly girls shrieking and fainting in coils because they heard a floorboard creak or the draught brought a cobweb down in their hair.’
Was that meant as a warning, don’t get hysterical or you’ll be out of here? She wasn’t sure. He seemed too bluff to be indirect, but perhaps he meant it as a compliment, I don’t need to be blunt with you. Perhaps.
She said, ‘The house is very atmospheric, certainly, but I think atmosphere is what you make of it, for good or otherwise.’ It was in her head, she was saying. Emphatically. She knew that. And good lord, this house was full of pilots, crashed-out pilots, sky jockeys who had taken a throw. Small wonder if one of them babbled about falling when he was in shock, in extremis. She held no lien on that particular nightmare, here or anywhere.
Tight, strong, secure. Yes.
Comfortably in agreement, then, they could move on. Marching in step, and no need for any further confessional. Not from her, at least. He said, ‘Does it trouble you, what Major Black gets up to with my men?’ But that was his own confession in a thin disguise, it troubles me, and an invitation to step inside his tent. Now that she was firmly in his camp.
She said, ‘It seems . . . a terrible waste, to me. Of your work, and their lives.’ Tolchard seemed to be foremost in her mind, as though all the men wore one face, and it was his. That was odd, because she’d gathered that he was almost least likely to be sent, however much he agitated to go.
‘War is wasteful, by definition. And doctors like me have always been called on to patch up the wounded and send them back to the front.’
‘Yes, but not like this.’ He was playing devil’s advocate, she recognized that, and not in the least trying to win the argument. Only laying it out, other men’s words repeated, to find how she replied. ‘Not men who have given so much already. And not to send them on missions they can’t hope to survive.’ And at last, bluntly, ‘We don’t encourage suicide. Not in this country.’
He smiled like a man who has lost a chess game to his own bright student, though he’d played as well as he might; and wiped froth from his moustache and said, ‘And yet, you know, we do. Of course we do. Men have always gone – been sent – on suicide missions. Just, never on this scale, and never quite this ruthlessly. This is . . . industrial. And they’ve tied me in as more than a conspirator, I’m an investor. I hate that.’
It was all about responsibility, she saw. It always was, with men. They did dread it so. Especially where they could sit safe themselves and send others to their distant deaths. It wasn’t wastage that upset him, nor senselessness. He did see sense in what they did here, and what it would mean after. He just felt responsible. Rebuilding his patients in order to make them better killers, more efficient suicides, of course he would hate that. Anyone must, if they had the least trace of sensitivity in them. If they had a soul.
She said, ‘Not a willing investor, surely. Obedient, as we all are to the occasion, but not willing. That must count for something. If you want to reckon the responsibility –’ though I do think you’d be better off not – ‘then you have to look to Major Black first, surely? To him and Major Dorian.’ Because she didn’t at all see why Aesculapius should duck it. Sometimes it felt to her as though they were all tools of Aesculapius, pieces that he moved about.
‘Perhaps – but without my work, they’d have no raw material. No men to train or send off on missions. Most of these lads would survive, perhaps, but they wouldn’t be able to function. They wouldn’t be able to throw their lives away –’ and suddenly he looked spaniel-sad, a kind man pushed into an unwelcome cruelty – ‘be that for king and country or otherwise, without my help to make them fit again. To give them hands, by and large. A face is neither here nor there, but hands, yes. I give hands to saboteurs, assassins. Suicides. I wouldn’t mind,’ he cried suddenly, though that was blatantly untrue, ‘but Dorian catches them at their weakest. It’s his stock-in-trade. Of course any young man thinks his life is over, coming round in a hospital bed with his face and hands gone west and all the nice girls flinching when he tries to smile. If he had a gun he’d shoot himself there and then, if he only had fingers that worked. Any man would. Have a plausible fellow loom up at your bedside then and talk about one last service to your country, the chance to strike at the heart of the Nazi machine; of course you’ll see it as an honourable way out, hitting back at the enemy and dying in the process, a medal and a hero’s grave and no need actually to live with what’s been done to you.
‘And then he’s sent here and I give him back a body he can work with. A face, too. I can’t give them back their beauty, but . . . Well. Something they can work with. If I only had the time. They do see that, some of them, they see the possibilities. But by then they’re committed, of course, and they won’t back down. That’s what’s so devilish clever. It’s their sense of honour that gets them, coming and going. Suicide is a disgrace, perhaps, but so is cowardice; and dying in the line of fire, in the course of duty, in time of war, that’s another thing altogether. It’s the opposite of disgrace, it’s nobility. Even where death is certain. Especially where death is certain.’
He was a large and florid man, but his voice was quiet when he talked of this, his gestures small and tight to the body. That wasn’t discretion, Ruth thought; it was pain. This was the true colonel, stripping himself raw in front of her.
She said, ‘Still. What you do here, what you learn, you can put that to use elsewhere, and afterwards.’ On men not doomed already. Yes, and women too, and children. ‘This . . . opportunity can’t last. The Germans will realize the ruse, and grow more watchful of injured men.’
‘Yes. They will distrust their own heroes. That’s a consideration too, of course. Another blow for our side. And as soon as it happens – no, as soon as we know it’s happening, which will be a little lag of the event – then we’ll stop sending these lads. I hope we will. I’ll insist on it. And as you say, I will have learned more, and can put it into practice. Somewhere else, I won’t stay here,’ he added with a glance around his quarters, the hint of a shudder. ‘I won’t ask for a posting, I’ll move my whole hospital. Somewhere closer to the airfields. The ministry will oblige me, I make no doubt. I’ve earned credit enough, these la
st months. But still. Between now and then . . .’
Yes. There would be more months to endure, before that day. Men to heal, men to train, men to send away.
Not Tolchard. She felt suddenly, oddly determined on that. One way or another, she would make sure that boy stayed here. Despite his own best efforts. And as many others as she could keep. She tipped her glass towards the colonel in a mute toast, and saw his rise in response. It was a pact, then, all unspoken. They would do everything possible between them to frustrate Major Black. Yes, and Major Dorian.
Did that make them traitors, working against their own country’s interests?
Perhaps it did. She felt she could live with it, if so. There would be no wilful sabotage, no treasonous acts. Just a quiet determination that the life of a man was worth more than a bullet, more than a bomb. Their patients here were not mere ammunition for the war’s pursuit. Some, no doubt, must be eaten by the machine of it, already set up and running. But not all of them, no.
Not Tolchard.
There seemed to be nothing more to say. She finished her cider and handed back her glass, wondered for a moment if she ought to salute. Or shake hands on the deal, or . . .
Or neither of those, apparently. He nodded and turned his shoulder to her, fussing silently with his pipe. Embarrassed, perhaps, or anxious, or overweeningly discreet.
She bade him a swift, soft goodnight and let herself out. Closed the door behind her, took a slightly tremulous breath and didn’t quite know what to do with herself now.
Looked up and down the corridor – and, like a summoned ghost, like a figure caught by light and drawn by light, drawn out of light, there was a silhouette that moved strangely, that woke strange feelings in her.
Her mouth opened, of its own accord. She almost said, ‘Peter?’
In fact, what she said was, ‘Michael?’
SEVEN
And blushed, almost stammered before she caught herself; didn’t want to give him that much leeway but corrected herself anyway, said, ‘Flying Officer Tolchard, I mean. Bed Thirty-Four. Why aren’t you in it?’
‘What,’ he said, ‘in all this excitement?’
‘The excitement’s over.’ And he was dressed for bed: pyjamas and dressing gown, a pair of Turkish slippers on his feet. He must have made that same calculation for himself, and then – what? Something happened. It was too soon to plead I couldn’t sleep. Even for a child, this would be too soon. He did have that air of little-boy-lost, and at another time she thought he would know that, and use it shamelessly. If he was acting now, he was doing it the other way around, trying to convince her there was really nothing wrong. Reaching for his charm, and not quite finding it; falling back on his wicked reputation, and falling short. No need to tell him that. He looked wretched enough already.
Her turn to act, then. Clipping down the corridor at a rate of knots, tucking her arm through his and turning him for all the world as though she meant to herd him back to his room and tuck him into bed like the nanny she was not with the wilful boy that he was striving to seem.
‘And what are you doing up here, in any case?’ This was the wrong floor, in the wrong wing. He wouldn’t have come the staff’s way, across the yard. He must have come all through Major Black’s domain in this state. He’d know where the light switches were, but even so that would be a long walk, a solitary shuffle in those unlikely slippers. He might take it on an impulse, but not pointlessly. Not on his own, on such a night.
‘I was . . . looking for someone.’
‘Colonel Treadgold? He’s in his office, I’ve just—’
‘No. Not the colonel.’ Not at all the colonel, his tone said, absolutely not.
Which might mean he had an illicit liaison with a nurse or an orderly – but no, not a liaison, or she wouldn’t have found him so adrift. If he was only hoping for kindred spirits, he would have found them closer, in the patients’ wing. Major Black would still be out in the stables, trying to diagnose what had gone so badly amiss with his exercise.
She made a reasoned guess, then. ‘Major Dorian.’
‘Yes.’ It came out like a confession of shame, all reluctance. ‘He’s not downstairs, and I, I don’t know where his bedroom is . . .’
Neither did Ruth. She knew his office, but presumably the man didn’t sleep on his couch.
‘Well. Failing him, you’ll have to make do with me.’ The nurse instead of the psychiatrist, the ward sister in lieu of the major, the woman and not the man. She didn’t know which substitution it was that made him falter, but she was having none of that. A firm hand on his elbow – on his good elbow, the arm that worked – and he had no choice.
At this point, neither did she. She couldn’t frogmarch him all the way back to his proper corridor, to the certain noise and curiosity of a dozen other wakeful men. She couldn’t try doors at random until she found one that would open into somewhere appropriate.
She took him up to her own room.
It was almost certainly against regulations; but no one had explained what the regulations were in a hospital that was also an assassins’ training ground, where patients spent half the night out of their beds conducting exercises with live ammunition. And he might not be ill exactly but he was still a patient, and he clearly needed something, and this was the best she had to offer.
Justifying wildly, secretly in her head, she sat him on her bed and slipped out again. Tapped on a panel two doors down, heard no answer, deduced that Judith was either on night duty or else helping out in surgery – and opened the door, slipped through, stole all the makings for cocoa. Pan and electric ring, mugs and milk and all, she loaded a convenient tray and carried it back to her room.
Tolchard startled to his feet, reached to take the tray from her, remembered or discovered anew that he couldn’t quite do that and flushed at his failure.
She smiled. ‘Dreadful how deep they go, isn’t it, common manners? You can’t override them, just because they don’t make sense any more. You could close the door –’ shifting from the general to the particular with a subtle grace that pleased her mightily – ‘if you wouldn’t mind. I don’t believe I can manage,’ without a neat little back-heel that she would have used without a second thought if he hadn’t been standing there, feeling so obviously and utterly useless. ‘Thank you. Now sit yourself down again while I make the cocoa. Oh, and tell me why you so particularly wanted to see Major Dorian in the middle of the night.’
It would be easier, she thought, for him to talk if she wasn’t looking at him, if she didn’t seem to be paying particular attention.
Even so, he had trouble getting started. Which must be unusual for him, almost unheard of. But here he was, staring down at his hands, his tongue stumbling and falling still. Trying again, when her own patient silence became too much for him to hold out against.
‘Dusty . . . Dusty was my room-mate. One of.’
‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ and this time it was deliberate; there would be nobody else in his hospital who used his Christian name. Probably nobody closer than his mother, and where was she? ‘Who’s Dusty?’
‘Dusty Miller. The man on the table just now, having his hand cut off.’
‘Well,’ she said judiciously, because she didn’t want to think about that man at all – falling and falling – but a nurse has to do all manner of things she doesn’t particularly want to, ‘I can see how that would be unpleasant for all of you, an empty bed and your friend in pain. What did you want to see Major Dorian about?’
That was perhaps a little too direct. His eyes shied away from her, his mind from the swift answer she’d hoped for.
But then, slowly, sideways, he came back to it. ‘The major has . . . something he gives me, when I can’t sleep.’
‘The night nurse could give you a sleeping draught. No need to trouble the major.’
But that wasn’t it, of course. He shook his head. ‘Not valerian. Not what I’m after. I can’t, I’m afraid to sleep sometimes. I have dreams . . .’
So did she, sometimes. Dreadful dreams. That would be no help to him now, to tell him so. She stirred the cocoa, thinking that it too would be of little help after all if sleep was the enemy when it came, not when it kept away; and said, ‘What does Major Dorian give you, then?’
‘I don’t know. It’s . . . calming. It doesn’t stop me sleeping, but it makes me not afraid; and then if I do dream, the dreams are strange and really rather wonderful. Not at all what I’m afraid of. Only now, well, sometimes I’m even more afraid to go to sleep without it, do you see?’
Oh, she did see. She saw all too well. It sounded like tincture of opium to her, some description of laudanum. Michael would surely have needed morphine for his pain when his burns were fresh, and again no doubt after his operations. He would have grown used to it, come to depend on it. Withdrawal would give him bad nights, only made worse by his memories – and Major Dorian was calmly feeding his addiction instead of helping him to overcome it.
Well, why not? If he was going to give his life anyway in a month or two months or half a year – throw his life away was how she thought of it, but this was wartime; she was perhaps insufficiently patriotic and not at all male enough – then why not give him what he wanted now? The tools to do the job the major would call it, perhaps.
Never mind that it was most uncertain whether Michael would actually be sent on any mission. He wasn’t head of any list, except in his own stubborn head. It would be Major Black’s call as much as Major Dorian’s. Aesculapius was only covering all the possibilities. Playing Boy Scout with a young man’s life, making sure he was prepared.
Ruth could hate Major Dorian sometimes. It really was all too easy.
This, now, this would be hard. Except that he was a sensible young man, accustomed to trouble. He wouldn’t fuss over what he could not have. He certainly wouldn’t expect her to produce Major Dorian out of the air. Nor to sit up all night holding his hand while he sweated through whatever came, his private hell. He was of that class and generation that did turn to women, had likely done it all his life – nanny or housekeeper, she would still guess, rather than mother – but was too well trained to take them for granted. He’d drink his cocoa and be politely grateful, say goodnight as soon as his mug was empty, leave her and go – where? Back to his ward, to his bed? Perhaps, but Dusty’s empty bed would hang in the corner of his eye all night, like an accusation. He might have somewhere else, a place of solitude if not safety, some dark hole in this pitiless house where he could crouch and set his teeth and suffer alone.
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