House of Doors

by Chaz Brenchley

  If she was holding her breath, she wasn’t going to admit it. Not to him, and not to herself either.

  If she was baffled by him, well. So she should be. She was utterly baffled by herself tonight.

  Almost utterly.

  Here, now, where he stopped, here was no door at all. A stretch of wainscot wall, no more, opposite another mean little window.

  Until he slipped his hand free of hers, reached out and pressed the planking, and she saw it swing back into a greater darkness. A door after all, on hinges hidden in gaps between the boards; and then a light, quite startling, as he pressed a switch.

  In, then, in, if that’s where we’re going; quick, before someone rouses. Her hands chivvied him through, and she followed. Learning to duck as she went because he did, because the door was cut low and the ceiling beyond was lower, the drop of the roof, but here were stairs leading steeply down.

  She pushed the door hastily closed behind them, to block in the light. She was more than grateful for it – these stairs were difficult despite it, difficult for her and surely more so for him ahead – but it could betray them as easily as it helped them. She thought that was the nature of the world, that the gifts it offered were always a betrayal of something that had come before.

  She followed his shadow down, and around a twisting corner and down again. They passed another door on to another floor, and he ignored it. Down to the ground, then, all the way; and here he did open a door, and here they were coming out behind the grander sweep of the East Staircase.

  ‘Stop, Michael, wait a moment . . .’ He had misbuttoned his shirt. Before they left the privacy and the light of that hidden stair, she straightened it for him. And tucked it in like a nanny, and took advantage of the moment to kiss him like a sister, on the cheek. ‘Now you’ll do. Will I do?’

  ‘You’ll do grandly,’ he assured her. Hand on her hip, until she batted it away.

  ‘Not now. You have to be good now. My reputation is in your hands,’ not her body any more. She needed to be sure he understood that. ‘But – Michael, what is this? I know every great house needs its secret passages, but still. Stairs behind stairs?’

  ‘Servants’ ways,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t want to meet the housemaid on the family stairs, now would you? There’s a whole network of passages like this. Not quite secret, but not much used.’

  ‘Except by you, apparently.’ No surprise there. ‘And presumably those like you, your brother officers, your brother patients, sneaking hither and yon when you’re meant to be in your beds?’

  ‘It’s known to exist,’ he confessed cheerfully. ‘We might have explored it, a little,’ meaning that they had mapped its extent entirely, and knew far more about it than anyone who worked here. ‘I mean, you know. We’re not really patients. Not bed-bound, often. Not sick. Though I’d like to be bed-bound with you more often. Bound for your bed.’ His new face wasn’t good at showing subtle emotions – humour, anticipation – but his eyes made up for that. His eyes sparked with them.

  That way danger lay. She had to force herself to focus on his features, not to be seduced by youth and yearning and the tumultuous thrill of achievement. That was her, his achievement: her body, her self. She had been achieved. She wasn’t quite sure how she felt about that.

  This, though, she was quite sure about this. ‘Michael, you shouldn’t expect that. You mustn’t.’ They were walking through the ballroom, Major Black’s territory; thank goodness he had opted not to switch on the lights. One swift courtesy, more than nice manners: a delicacy, a degree of tact she wouldn’t have expected. She’d have thought him too young. Perhaps he didn’t know where the switches were, any more than she did.

  Deliberate or otherwise, this darkness meant that she needn’t look at his face, watch his eyes, measure his disappointment. The depths of her betrayal.

  She had promised him nothing. It wasn’t a betrayal. That was absurd. But he would see it so: a door opened, and then slammed shut. In his face. He could hardly do otherwise.

  In the dark, her feet stumbled over something, she didn’t like to think what. By instinct or training, his or hers, she was the right side of him, his good side; his arm found her elbow, even in the dark.

  Apparently he’d lost his tongue, or she had stolen it from him. He didn’t even say careful! the way she thought he would have done two minutes back, laughing at her, pleased to be able to shield her from little consequences.

  One of them had to say something. That would be her, then. ‘You must see, we can’t make a habit of it. Word would get out, somebody would see. Hospitals are havens for gossip . . .’ It was therapy, not romance. This isn’t a love affair. Really, not.

  He could still find nothing to say. Somehow he could find his way like a cat in the dark, to the far door of the ballroom; she let him steer her, that firm, unhappy grip on her elbow, out into the main hall with its swooping stairs. The broken skylight had been masked with canvas but not well, not well enough. It must spill light, it must shine like a beacon to any bomber that ever came this far, when the lights were on down here. For now it let light in, enough for her to see where she was walking. Over black and white tiles, watching her feet. Avoiding his face.

  ‘How often would we be lucky enough to do this, to get you safe away? Even now, at this hour, there must be people about. We’ve been lucky –’ and she was whispering as they walked the long corridor of store rooms and lecture rooms, where the major and his cohorts taught their dark arts – ‘and we can’t count on that again. The cook, the night staff, orderlies on fatigues, we could run into anyone . . .’

  And just as she said that, too loud, a door opened and light spilled out around a silhouette and here was someone and they were apparently not lucky after all.

  She had forgotten about Peter.

  Until this moment, in the urgency of trying to explain, she had forgotten quite about Peter. It might have been the first time since she lost him; it surely was the first time since she came into this house.

  Her first thought now was, at least it isn’t Peter . . .

  And of course it wasn’t. Of course not.

  He was smaller, this man peering out at them with light at his back. Older and smaller. And bent of back, bent of leg, and balding . . .

  ‘Herr Braun!’ Relief made her shrill, so that she flinched almost from the sound of her own voice as it carried up and down.

  She wasn’t sure how relieved she ought to be. What could he have heard, how much? And how much deduced, from what he heard? Perhaps it was only the sound of footsteps that brought him out, or the sound of voices. One voice, at least, her voice.

  Michael still wasn’t saying anything. He had lost his manners, seemingly, along with the power of speech.

  His hand was still on her elbow. He showed no signs of letting go; she couldn’t think how to detach him, without being even more obvious than she was already. Two people together in hasty dress, in the desperately early hours, without the excuse of duty. Never mind what Herr Braun had overheard, it could make no conceivable difference. Everything he saw amounted to a confession.

  Nothing in him amounted to an accusation. He blinked at them, and smiled, and said, ‘It’s very early. Would you like a cup of tea? I have a kettle.’

  And somehow she seemed to have said yes. It must have been her, because Michael still wasn’t speaking; and it must have happened, because here they were being ushered through the door by this unlikely man into a tailor’s workroom, apparently. Patterns and fabrics, panels cut and laid out on long tables. Uniform serge and plain white cambric, good for men’s shirts.

  He had pins in the lapel of his tunic, she saw.

  ‘Herr Braun, you’re a tailor?’

  ‘Indeed I am.’

  ‘I thought you were a linguist. Or a gardener.’

  He shrugged. ‘Both of those, at need. But this too, this first. I always was a tailor; the rest came later.’

  No doubt his kettle was meant to give him steam for pressing clot
h, not water for making tea. It wasn’t only people who doubled up in times of crisis.

  That explained his bandy legs, she thought. There were no chairs in the room; no doubt he sat cross-legged on his table, traditional to the last.

  ‘It’s very early . . .’

  Hadn’t he just said exactly that? No matter. If they meant different things by it, no matter for that either. She couldn’t stop him drawing conclusions. The only question was what he would do about them. If anything.

  ‘Yes,’ he said equably. ‘Too early for the garden. I sleep very little, so . . .’

  ‘Most people would read a book,’ she murmured. And then thought that probably wasn’t true, most people would just stay in bed; and then she blushed, and hated the light that let these two men see it.

  She shouldn’t be a conspirator, she shouldn’t try to keep secrets if she was going to give them away so blatantly, so soon.

  Having discovered them, Herr Braun seemed determined to spare them, or at least to spare their blushes. Hers. He said, ‘The good major needed someone who had worked in Berlin, on gentlemen’s clothing before the war. Officers’ clothing. We do things a little differently, you see. It was important that the stitching be correct, the cut of the lapels and the way we fix our buttons. Any little detail might matter. So he came to the internment camp, and found me. This is my, my . . .’

  For once, he seemed to have lost an English word. He offered the German, but that was no use to any of them.

  ‘Bailiwick.’ That was Michael, startling her, finding his voice at last if not his feet. Blurting like a schoolboy, laughing harshly, trying in his turn to blush. Again that patchwork pattern like a web across his face, as ugly as he sounded, as distressed.

  ‘Bailiwick,’ Herr Braun repeated blandly. ‘Yes. That is the word. Thank you, Mr Tolchard. Now, tea . . .’

  He not only had a kettle, he had a pot too. Not a military tin monster and not hospital issue either, not the chipped enamel of a thousand wards. Not economical earthenware. This was china, good china. Her mother-in-law had taught her something about porcelain: not enough, but a start. Enough to give her an ignorant love. The war interrupted those lessons; the last of them had been spent packing the china into tea chests, putting it away for the duration. And then Peter’s posting had come through, and now . . . Well. Now he was put away himself. For the duration.

  It was too late to take the pot from Herr Braun and turn it upside down to look for marks, but she thought she would see Meissen if she could. She wanted to cradle it suddenly, to hold in her hands something good that had come from Germany.

  There was Herr Braun himself, of course, but she wasn’t going to cradle him. Even if she’d been sure of his goodness, which she wasn’t, yet.

  She wasn’t going to cradle Michael, either. Not again. He at least she was sure of, but . . . No.

  He had to let go of her sleeve, to take the cup that Herr Braun offered.

  Proper cups, with saucers. Matching crockery, you didn’t see much of that these days: pieces that matched each other and the teapot too. Porcelain so fine it was almost transparent, pearly like the brightening sky.

  She could look safely at the bottom of the saucer.

  Yes, there it was, the Meissen mark, crossed swords. She could imagine crossing swords with this man, in a fencing match, perhaps, with rules of engagement and simply for the challenge of it. Or in a duel, formal still, a Heidelberg encounter: flashing blades and fierce purpose and someone ends up scarred.

  Or the other thing, deadly intent. Fighting to survive. He was a small man, civilized, ruthless, entirely a survivor. He brought his china from Germany, realizable assets that he hadn’t realized. She wondered what he’d had to do to keep it. What he’d been prepared to spend instead.

  And shivered, not wanting to think about such things, especially not wanting him to read them in her face. And curled her fingers around the warm bowl of the cup – Army tea, really too crude for such fine china, but you take what you can get and where would he find Earl Grey, up here in the north country, in wartime? – and tried not to think at all.

  There was suddenly no such thing as safe ground or easy conversation. If she asked about the china, that would be to ask about him, his story, how he had come from there to here with himself intact and his porcelain too. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear that. And one question notoriously leads to another, turn and turn about; and if he should ask, oh, anything about Michael and herself, anything at all . . .

  Civilized, and ruthless. She was, she thought, a little afraid of Herr Braun. Or more than a little.

  He smiled at her, as brightly as an early bird, and produced a biscuit barrel. Just a battered old tin thing, no family heirloom this; but there was treasure in it none the less. She peered in, ready to refuse anything before breakfast, and, ‘Oh – shortcake!’ She couldn’t think when she had last seen a slice of shortcake.

  It was bad to be greedy, especially in these straitened times, and she hadn’t even cleaned her teeth yet; but she seemed to have a mouthful before she knew it, the rest of the slice between her fingers and her other hand cupped beneath her chin to catch the crumbs, not to waste a soft grain of sugary pleasure. No thought of a plate.

  Herr Braun was still smiling. ‘Cook makes this only for his favoured few. Me, I use it mostly as a bribe, to make the young gentlemen speak German when they would really rather not.’ And he turned to Tolchard with the barrel still in his hands but not held out in offering. Held up as a promise, rather, withheld for now. What he offered instead was a stream of German, softer than Ruth would have anticipated because she had thought it a harsh language until this moment, but she had only ever heard it used in newsreels, at rallies, by Herr Hitler and his cohorts and his chanting multitudes. From Herr Braun’s mouth to her ears it was almost liquid.

  Still incomprehensible, though. And Michael’s reply was fluent enough but sounded nothing like, sounded entirely like an English schoolboy speaking effortfully in a foreign tongue. Ignorant as she was, she would never have been fooled into thinking him a German native. She could be, should be glad of that. Major Black would never send him to imitate a Nazi officer, he had no hope of passing muster with that accent; and Herr Braun simply wouldn’t have the time to inculcate a more convincing one, even if Michael had the aptitude.

  Listening to it now, though, seeing how he struggled, she was embarrassed for him, and wanting suddenly to be somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  And remembering that she hadn’t cleaned her teeth, and feeling grimy in yesterday’s clothes, pulled on any old how in the dark; and thinking that if she was quick she could take a bath, before the morning rush filled the washrooms.

  Watching him now, seeing the strange face distort as he tried to frown over his words but didn’t quite have that right either, needing to practice it in front of a mirror, she ached for him and was angry for him and wanted to lead him out of there but couldn’t do it. He’d be better now without her, better here and better on his way back to the ward. She had no help to offer him, here or there.

  It was like the shortcake, done before she realized she was doing it. She didn’t bid goodbye to either man, she only found herself abruptly in the corridor again, the other side of the door and closing it quietly behind her.

  NINE

  ‘Sister Taylor!’

  ‘Matron?’

  ‘You’ll find your ward depleted this morning, half the beds abandoned. Your lambs haven’t gone far astray; only it’s their turn, so those who can walk have gone out for their bath.’

  ‘Excuse me, I don’t quite . . .?’ All her patients had dressings that needed changing daily. Saline baths were an innovation that the colonel swore by, to help his skin grafts take and heal; burned airmen who ditched in the sea recovered sooner. It made sense to combine the two, to use the baths to soak old dressings away and then let the patients wallow for a while.

  But there was a bathroom at the end of the corridor, still within the context
of her ward. No need for men to wander off elsewhere and make her chase them down.

  ‘Ah. I was afraid that perhaps no one would have thought to warn you. I blame the colonel –’ though she did it smilingly – ‘he’s far too lax; but the men found a bathhouse in the grounds, and all the ambulatory patients insist on using that, turn and turn about, when the colonel gives them licence. It’s a kind of club for them, I warn you. Cigarette smoke and no doubt vulgar conversation –’ though clearly not in her presence – ‘and nurses tolerated on compulsion. They’ll spend half the day there, but don’t you let them keep you. And don’t let them treat you as a servant, either. They will try; but they have orderlies to run around with towels and drinks and so forth. See to their dressings and keep your distance otherwise, is my advice.’

  ‘Thank you, Matron.’ She would most assuredly do that. And be doubly glad that Michael was not on her ward, not her responsibility. Not for her to attend him in his bath like royalty. Not that he currently had any dressings to change – and how strange, to find herself blushing at the thought of a patient’s nakedness; she hadn’t done that since she was a probationer, when she’d felt as though she spent her first six months flushed beetroot-purple – but that wouldn’t keep him from lording it among his fellows. Splashing and steaming himself like a Turk in a hammam. And, yes, taking any advantage he could, of herself and anyone else who came to hand. ‘Uh, where . . .?’

  Matron was looking at her a little curiously, as well she might. ‘Beyond the lake, just in the shadow of the wood. You’ll find it.’

  It was all manner of inconvenience, to go traipsing across the estate in pursuit of errant patients, self-indulgent boys. Indulged boys, as pampered in their convalescence as they had been in their brief careers, the exalted few, eggs for breakfast and beer at any time, even now, even in hospital . . .

  She didn’t really begrudge them the beer. It was hard to begrudge them anything, given what they had faced and what they had faced down, what they had done. She tried to be cynical about heroes as any nurse must be – and any wife too – about any man. But still, there they were. Here she was, here England was and the Nazis weren’t, because of them. That was heroism enough, surely, to justify a short walk across the grounds.