Vulnerable and excited, young again. And not falling. A hand to hold her, a body to grip, a firm surface beneath them both. Somewhere to begin.
TWELVE
O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.
She thought she was in danger of it, twice over.
Once because she had decided – coolly, rationally, intellectually – that she had to believe this house was haunted, which was a definition of stone-cold raving madness if ever she had heard one. And once again because she was doing the one thing they were most warned against, from the first days of basic training. She rather thought she might be falling in love with a patient. Most certainly, she was having an affair with him.
She’d expected to find herself the strong one, fending him off, sending him away. Bed Thirty-Four, and no nonsense. Instead, their trysts in the attic had become regular, almost commonplace, except that they burned in her heart and mind like a lodestar, the way she turned instinctively for comfort and guidance and security. Their hasty nest was a fixture now, a bed made up.
Perhaps it was greed more than instinct. At times, replete with self-disgust, she tried to think so, but could never manage it, quite. Not even Peter could drive her to that dishonesty.
He did try: picking at her guilt-ridden soul like fingernails picking at a scab, nibbling at confidence and composure, haunting the ill-glimpsed edges of her awareness. Always somewhere close at hand, in the glass of a door or a spill of water on a threshold, lurking in an archway in the dark. Always wanting to suck her down like quicksand, like a whirlpool, a Charybdis in her head.
That was where he truly lurked, though, in her head, not in the house around her. She had the measure of him now. Michael helped, all unwitting – just thinking of Michael helped: he was in her head too, and all elbows when she wanted him to be so – but mostly she could manage Peter by herself. As she always had, really.
And her duties, her patients, she could manage those. On a good day she could even manage to be sociable. There wasn’t so much singing now and the beer drinking was more intense, even a little desperate, but these boys had learned already to cloak their fear with a brittle brightness. There was still laughter at her table, still rampant foolery and practical jokes that she was obliged to frown upon. And afterwards she could have a quieter time with Judith in one room or another, with perhaps one or more of the other nurses on her floor. She could remember their names and their situations, talk about family and before-the-war. Nobody wanted to talk about after-the-war, because looking ahead meant looking into that space where Major Black waited, to send their boys away.
More and more, she thought of him as an executioner. A slow hangman, relentless and inevitable, not to be evaded.
Perhaps that was true of any officer in wartime who sent men to their deaths. What choice did he have? She should as readily blame Colonel Treadgold, who patched men up to make the major’s missions possible.
She was so torn sometimes, she thought it might just be easier to run mad. In fact, though, she was holding herself together remarkably well. She thought so, at least. Certainly better than some. You did what had to be done, and for a nurse there was always something next to do. It was harder on the patients, who were mostly not too sick and nowhere near busy enough. Young men should be good at being idle, but these had lost the art of it, all unexpectedly. They did their best, and knew the cracks were showing. Too harsh a laugh, a sudden flare of temper, a solitary figure hunched in silence flinging a fives ball against a wall, over and over. Too long spent sitting by Flight Lieutenant Barker’s hushed bedside, or else not long enough, blatant avoidance: either one spoke volumes.
Flight Lieutenant Barker . . . didn’t die. He didn’t die, and didn’t die. That in itself spoke volumes for his stubbornness and the colonel’s skill in surgery, the nurses’ care. If there were those who felt that perhaps he ought to die, for all their sakes and his own above all, they weren’t saying. They were letting their silence speak for them; that, and the endless bouncing ball.
There was little enough that Ruth could do, beyond watching over her own long corridor of cases. Half of them were still immobile, less troubled because they had not seen. She did her best not to let them listen either, not to let the walking wounded gather around the beds of those not so lucky. Or else they were luckier, but either way. It was a hopeless struggle and she tried anyway, chivvying patients back to their own beds or away to the recreation rooms or physiotherapy or even Major Black’s classes, because any distraction just now had to be better than none.
For herself, too. Any distraction is better than none, and sometimes she tried to tell herself that was all Michael was. Just a distraction for the night hours, when her body had no work and her mind spun off above the abyss, where it might fall and fall forever. Michael gave her something to cling to, in the crudest possible sense. She should be content with that. She should insist on it, indeed, not let herself imagine that he might be anything more.
Or, of course, she should not do this at all. Not slip out of her room at dead of night in slippers and pyjamas – Peter’s pyjamas, these had been, before she adopted them for practicality and warmth and mostly comfort, all manner of comfort since his death, clothes that had shaped themselves to his body, just as she had herself – with Judith’s heavy torch in her hand, as much light as she needed.
Not whisper to the end of the corridor and up the stairs, throwing a beam ahead of her like a searchlight. Like a child playing ack-ack, picking out Heinkels for the guns to shoot down. Except that a child playing ack-ack would be noisy, noisy above all, and she was silent as she could manage. And good, too, trying not to let her light betray her to the skies. A child wouldn’t think, but once she was up the stairs Ruth kept her torch trained just before her feet. She could almost turn it off and trust to touch, to the guiding feel of the carpet beneath her slipper soles; but she didn’t like that sudden rush of darkness after the light went out, before her eyes adjusted. Especially out here in the middle of the dormitory, with no wall to brush her fingers along to give her balance and assurance, to let her know she wasn’t falling.
So no, she kept the torch switched on, its pool of light at her feet as she did all these things she should not do. That was enough. Her body knew where to go and what awaited; she needn’t peer ahead. Michael was always there before her, as much undressed and ready as he could manage. After so long as a patient, in others’ hands, dependent, he was impatient now: impatient with himself above all, with his own limits and inabilities.
She had some hopes of teaching him better. She was teaching him so much already. She felt like a figure from boarding-school mythology, every adolescent’s dream, conjured in whispers after lights out: an older woman but not too old, wise in the ways of the flesh, the tragic widow willing – nay, eager! – to share her body and her experience. She could accuse herself of being a cliché or worse, the classic predatory female, stepping fresh from the pages of many a lurid melodrama. Or she could accuse herself the other way, of being desperate and needy, clutching at whatever passing fancy offered. Taking frenzied advantage of Michael in his vulnerability, pampering his ego to her own weak and selfish ends.
She might not actually believe either accusation, but they’d be hard to evade or defend against, if any word of this leaked out. This is a hospital – it was an article of faith with her, that secrets were impossible within this fevered isolation. And yet, she couldn’t stop. A dozen times a day she thought she ought to call an end to it, before it brought disaster down on her head. A dozen times a day, she wished that Michael were mature enough to see that and call an end to it himself, because she couldn’t.
She might find comfort in that, if she tried. If she tried hard. She could see it as a measure of what mattered, how deeply he was embedded in her heart. How this was more than a cold or a cruel fling, more than a frantic grab for comfort. She saw the dangers and risked them all, because of him: because of who he was, and what he might become. What he was alr
eady, a treasure held in cupped hands. Her challenge was not to hold too tight and not too loosely: neither to squeeze the life out of him, nor to let him slip away.
Her torch made a path of light through the darkness, a circle before her feet. That was it, she had to watch her feet. It was like a bubble within the glass, a closer isolation. If she could only keep the two of them within that bubble and let nothing leak into the dark, then perhaps . . .
Step by step, day by day. Night by night. She did worry that she was walking towards a precipice, but she didn’t seem able to stop walking, nor to turn aside.
One step after another. Ruth watched her feet, didn’t lift her head. Didn’t try to peer forwards, into the dark.
Felt a hand close suddenly over her mouth, heard a grunt of satisfaction by her ear. ‘Here’s one for the knife. One slash, no more trouble.’
She should perhaps have been more scared than she was. The surge in her blood was more despair than terror. She had dreaded discovery, and here it was. Her mind was bewildered by the man’s words. Even so, she knew a threat when she heard it.
Her body was reacting already, before her brain could catch up. Every sense in her revolted at being handled so casually, so contemptuously, by a stranger. There were only two men she had ever licensed to come this close. One of them was somewhere ahead of her in the shadows, in the same danger – one for the knife – while the other . . .
Well, Peter might be dead, but he hadn’t gone away. And not everything he’d left her with was sorrow, bruises on her soul. Peter had worried about her walking London streets after dark. Once the war started and the blackout came, he had worried enough to do something about it.
Here, I picked this up in basic training, let me show you. Here’s how to break a man’s grip, if he grabs you from behind; here’s how, if he comes at you from the front . . .
So Peter had basically trained her. And so, now, she turned not against that grip but unexpectedly into it, twisting around to face her assailant, almost nose to nose.
Lifting her arm as she did so, that heavy torch suddenly a weapon, use anything you have to hand.
With room and time to swing, she might have killed him. The torch was that solid, her impulse that ferocious. To save herself or to save Michael, she wasn’t entirely clear which.
She was too close to do it handily, though, that long-armed sportsman’s swing; and too rushed to step away, once she’d broken free.
Too surprised at herself, in honesty. She had taken Peter’s instructions to heart and practised assiduously, but for his sake more than hers, to ease his anxious mind. She’d never expected to need any of these moves, or, if she needed them, never expected to find that she could actually use them, or that they would actually work.
This one seemed to have worked too easily, and so she was too slow. Too slow and too close, and still in a killing mood. She slammed the handle of that long torch upward, clean into her assailant’s face.
She couldn’t see him clearly, could barely see him at all with the torch beam pointed the other way: just a pale round, moonlike, distorted.
A moon that shrieked and fell away, clattering into piled furniture, all awkwardness and angles. Ruth’s breath came hard, with puzzlement riding the triumph. Who was this man, where in the world had he come from, what in the world did he mean . . .?
She was turning the torch in her hands – blessing it twice over, for the weight of it and the robustness too, that the bulb was still alive and glowing – meaning to look for answers. But the straying beam found the doorway first, and there stood Michael, half naked and bewildered, coming to help in any way he could.
Her torch was his betrayal, and he knew it. He stood exposed, framed in the doorway like a portrait of guilt, like a confession. She understood a moment too late, and snatched the beam away – too late, too late! – and felt hands close on her upper arms, hands from behind, because of course that first man hadn’t been talking to himself, of course he had a companion.
One at least, and Ruth was seized again, and this time she had no easy escape. She did try, but he was wise to every move she could fling at him in a few brief seconds of struggle. Seconds were all that she had, and she didn’t know how to use them. If she called out, if she told Michael – not by name, don’t say his name! – but if she told him to clear out then that was her confession, crystal and inarguable. This was a tryst discovered, and whoever these men might be, whatever they were about, that was her career they held in their unkindly hands. Gone with a word, herself shamed and broken, Michael desolate and alone. She knew too well what he would do.
Any moment now, he would come flying down the aisle. One-handed and unarmed, he would come anyway. And there was still a knife in the case somewhere, and she would take any last desperate chance to get them both out of this, whatever it cost.
A lens focuses the light . . . people can get burned . . . There would be ways to use it as a weapon.
She was betraying everyone tonight, it seemed; herself and Michael, now Cook too.
Now Peter.
It was easier here, perhaps, because he had already tripped her here. She couldn’t feel this carpet beneath her feet without remembering how it had not been there, how cloud had lofted her out of all touch with the world, how she had been lost entirely in mist and fuddlement.
It felt perverse, but so did all of this. She stood abruptly still, and closed her eyes. Heard her captor’s grunt of satisfaction, felt him draw breath for whatever might come next: a word to her or to his companion, a challenge to Michael, a call for the knife. It might have been anything.
She forestalled it.
She summoned Peter, or else just let him slip from where she had held him penned all this time, where she had been constantly fighting him back. That was how it felt, at least: that she released him – like a weapon, Cook, yes – from some dark corner.
Not me, him. He’s the one, take him . . .
Peter couldn’t know, not really.
It wasn’t Peter, even, not really. Not his conscious spirit, self-aware. Something she summoned, rather, some aspect of herself, guilty at being here alive when he was not, at choosing to survive when he had made the other choice. The house, she thought, found her weakness and exploited it mercilessly, driving in and twisting her open to the heart, as the knife does the oyster.
The house did that to her, and she – well. She could use that.
No matter if he was an expression of the house or an expression of herself, given shape by loss and shame. Peter was a weapon to her hand, and she used him shamelessly.
She flung him back, behind her, from her mind to her captor’s: him, take him.
She felt the startlement in the man who held her; felt his grip tighten momentarily, as if all solid ground had been suddenly snatched away and what else did he have to hold on to?
But she wrenched herself away, she could do that now. There was no conviction in his hold and panic starting to build in his breathing, in his voicelessness.
She could turn the torch on him, and see the black clothes that let him stalk in darkness; above the roll-neck sweater, see his face. See how his eyes stared blindly as though all they saw was a light through fog, bewildering.
There was no fog for her. She saw him clearly, and knew him immediately by his great coarse nose, bulbous and undefined. That was the colonel’s work, early work and he wouldn’t be happy with it now, only that he wasn’t allowed to go back for a second try. Not one of her patients, this. From another corridor, a senior class. One of Major Black’s favourites, ready to graduate as soon as they had the go-ahead. Ready to kill, and die in the doing of it.
Except that he was not ready for anything now, he was floundering where he stood, casting about with his hands for something, anything to grip. Moaning softly, unable even to find his voice. She knew exactly, exactly how he felt, and couldn’t bear to watch him, so she turned her torch to find the other man where he lay slumped against a bare bedstead.
&
nbsp; He was another patient, of course. She knew him too, and felt a pang at the damage done, the careful construct of his nose a swollen pulp now, oozing blood. The colonel would have a task to rebuild that again. Only, just a bloody broken nose ought not to leave him slack at her feet like that . . .
She stooped to peel back a lid, all nurse for a moment. All she saw was white in the torchlight, and for a moment she thought the fog had invaded him all too literally. It was nothing but relief to realize that his eyes had rolled up in his skull. Even so, she thought she hadn’t hit him that hard; she thought it was the fog, Peter, reaching out to both of them at once.
So she turned one more time, herself and her attention and her torch. Here was Michael standing over her, pale and confused and a little afraid. No, more than a little.
He said, ‘I don’t . . . I don’t understand.’
No more did she, but she thought he ought to. Both men were dressed alike, and she had seen him just the same.
‘What would they be doing up here, Michael – something for Major Black?’
‘What? Oh – yes. Yes, of course. He likes to give us exercises inside as well as out: sneak through the house, break into a nurse’s room and bring me her badge of rank. Don’t get caught. That sort of thing. The higher the rank, the more kudos – though I don’t think anyone’s ever risked Matron. He sets guards on the obvious doorways, so we have to be inventive. And then he sneaks around himself, and tries to catch us. It’s fun, in a way. And deathly serious, that too.’ Which of course was what made it proper fun. In their heads they were all doing it for real, in occupied France or in Berlin. ‘They must have thought he’d enrolled you as a proxy, to patrol the attics. But – Ruth, what’s happened to these two, what have you done . . .?’
That of course was the only real question, and the one she couldn’t answer, for a boy who didn’t believe in ghosts. I unleashed my dead husband on them, and now they think they’re falling. No. Not that. The house has a restless spirit, which has them in its grip. No, not that either. That was like saying, I gave them over to it. They frightened me, and I gave them over to something monstrous, and he couldn’t encompass either part of that, though it was true entirely.
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