‘Yes. That is the question, isn’t it?’
He was enjoying himself, she realized, stretching out the moment for the simple pleasure of it. Wanting to watch her squirm on the hook of his hesitation. Pretending to be indecisive, just to drag it out longer.
All unknowing, he had perhaps never stood in so much danger. Never been closer to the edge. She trembled with the desire to push him over. Oh, Peter, are you there? But no, not for this. Not for her own petty temper. Not quite. She had her pride, as well as her principles. She would defend herself, yes, and Michael too – but not take simple vengeance, even on a cruel man.
She said nothing, then, waiting for him to convict himself. Soon enough, surely, he would say something that was not only unforgivable but irrecoverable. Of course I must tell the colonel, and my own authorities. Something like that. Then – for Michael’s sake, more than her own – she would have to strike. He was sure to do it. Safe to. Even knowing that something uncanny had happened to his men, right here. He couldn’t help himself. There was nothing in him that would allow him to wonder if perhaps she had been responsible for that. Despite what he’d been told, despite the obvious coincidences. One young woman, what could she do? What could she achieve, to threaten him? It wouldn’t cross his mind. No, he would gloat at her from his high moral ground, his unimpeachable authority, and he would say something that she could not endure, and then she would have him. Yes. Oh, Peter. Be ready . . .
He said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman, do you really think you matter that much, that I’d be slavering to expose your sordid little affaire? I’m only interested at all because you’re a distraction to one of my men.’
‘I won’t let him go,’ she said, meaning I won’t let you take him.
‘Oh? And how do you imagine you might stop him? The King’s shilling, and all of that. He’s a man in uniform, in time of war.’
‘Whatever he owed this country, he’s paid back already. With interest.’
‘Oh, he’s a hero. Indeed he is. This is the thing with heroes, that they don’t stop. They don’t know how to stop. Stopping is . . . unheroic. You couldn’t stop him if you tried. Which is why I don’t need to stop you trying.’
An awful thought rose in her mind, like some creature rising in dark water. ‘What . . . what have you done with him?’
The major laughed briefly. ‘I sent him cross-country on a paperchase, hare and hounds; he’s the hare, with half the strength baying at his heels. Oh dear, did you think I’d had him posted? Shipped out early, to protect him from your influence? Again, Sister Taylor, you’re not that important. I don’t need to send him away until I’m ready. I don’t need to hold this –’ a gesture that encompassed their bed and the shadows and herself all at once – ‘over your head like a threat, because you are no threat to me. I don’t countenance threats.’
She couldn’t quite work out whether that was a warning after all, a threat even. He was hard to read in the dark, in his overweening confidence. I could trip you, Major Black; I could make you fall and fall – only she didn’t think she could in fact, not now. Not if he meant no harm, if he was only laughing at her.
No harm except the one great harm, of course, and that would come if he wanted it to, if he chose to make it so. But she couldn’t destroy him for that either. Not for serving his country, the best way he knew. She had done the same thing, after all. Dressed herself in uniform and sent her man to fight. It was what people did. Men, officers did it on a larger scale, that was all. Women did the same thing individually, personally. Once, twice and again.
Oh, Michael . . .
She still wanted to frustrate the major; she still dared to hope that she could. Hope was what she had, so she clung to it.
Michael was what she wanted. She would have clung to him, only she couldn’t come near him suddenly, or else he wouldn’t come near her. They were used to leaving signals for each other, I can be in the attics after elevenses or else I cannot, a book left lying heedlessly this way on a sideboard, or else that way on a chair. She didn’t know how to interpret the book’s abrupt absence. Nor Michael’s, from the piano and the dining hall and the sacred Friday dance.
That last, at least, she could ask about.
‘Judith, where in the world is Bed Thirty-Four? How can he not be here?’
‘That imp? Oh, I expect Major Black has him out somewhere, purging his native indolence. Luxurious little beast, that one. But the major’s been sweating them hard, all his favourites. All the likely lads, and some of the less likely too, like your sweet Michael. I think something’s due to happen, any day now.’
Your sweet Michael. Had she too noticed something, had she worked it out? If so, she wasn’t saying. Wasn’t even dropping a wink in solidarity. But then, Judith was a company girl. Hook, line and sinker. Perhaps she thought that any boy about to sacrifice his life for the greater good was entitled to a little fling before he went, no questions asked.
Perhaps she thought that’s what the women were here for, to supply a degree of comfort to the troops. The condemned man’s last meal, his last cigarette. His last night of pleasure, the soft playground of a woman’s body.
Perhaps she was right. In Major Black’s mind, at least, if not the colonel’s. That might be an explanation, why he wasn’t pursuing Ruth further: if he thought she was only doing what she had been fetched here to do, what lay out of reach of the orderlies. A war widow, still attractive and experienced with it; who better? At least she’d be practical, they could depend on her not to throw a fit at the first suggestion . . .
She was sure that some such thought had crossed Aesculapius’ mind, at least. Whether or not the major thought that way.
Even if he did, even if he took it for granted and assumed that she did too: even that didn’t explain his choosing not to threaten her. He wouldn’t make empty threats, of course, but he didn’t need to. Hospitals were full of widows fetching bedpans. She could be replaced in a week if he had made the other choice, to expose her.
She must really be as he had said, negligible. Of no account, no interest.
Something in her roused at that, stiff with determination to prove him wrong.
It wouldn’t be easy, if she couldn’t come near Michael. He wasn’t the only one missing from the dance that night; she wasn’t the only nurse looking about her, trying to spot a favourite, failing.
At breakfast next morning, there was a litany of not-quite-complaints. ‘The squadron leader wasn’t in his bed last night, neither the one they all call Prosser, although that’s not his name. They came in filthy, absolutely filthy at first light, along with half a dozen others who are not, I am pleased to say, on my corridor, not my responsibility. Those two used half my bathwater between them, and they’re still not what I would call clean. I’d have sent them back out to the bathhouse if I’d had fair warning, sooner than let them carry all their muck onto my ward. If they hadn’t looked so done-up, poor dears. They could barely keep their eyes open. I’m sure Prosser was asleep in the water, half submerged, like a whale.’
‘Mine were no better. Half the forest under their fingernails, those that have ’em. And who is it who has to clean young Master Tolchard’s nails for him, because of course his own right hand can’t do it? Muggins here, that’s who . . .’
Ruth was absurdly jealous, and tried to swallow it down, tried to be curious instead with all the other girls. What were they up to, these boys of theirs who were not quite patients, a little less like patients every day?
The answer emerged, little by little, from the wood. Trunk by trunk. They had been finding and felling trees: in the dark, because no doubt that was good for them, for their training, a useful skill for saboteurs. Now, by daylight, washed and fed and rested, they were getting grubby again. They had stripped off bark and branches, with hatchets and saws and apparently their fingers, either last night or this morning. What they had left were long bare poles, tolerably straight and tolerably clean. They might have served to carry tel
egraph wires, if the GPO were less fussy.
As it was – well. Six or eight men carried each trunk out of the wood and down to the lakeside. They made a stack there and then set about digging a hole, it might have been a grave, man-deep. It took all of them all day, working in shifts, their various handicaps rendering them not good with spades and picks. They came in muddy, almost mired, exhausted again; grumbling that the ground by the lake was too wet for a proper saw-pit, they should have split the timber where it fell. Too late now.
‘Well, you’ll know for next time,’ someone said brightly, into what became a lengthening silence. Not even the men quite knew what they were doing this for, to judge by their cryptic bafflement. But one thing was for certain in everybody’s mind, that there would be no next time. This was a last hurrah, exercise and training and examination all in one. From how they performed under Major Black’s eye in these days, he would choose the men for his missions.
The splitting and sawing, the shaving of planks was more test than necessity: as came clear next day, when trucks rolled in heavy-laden with great baulks of seasoned timber. More men, too: REME sappers, fit for digging post-holes and rigging A-frame cranes and raising the first pillars of an open framework.
‘What are they doing?’
It was the question everyone was asking; the only question worth asking, and even that was a waste of time. Those who knew weren’t saying, or more likely weren’t asked. Only Major Black knew for sure, and for sure nobody was asking him. If he had any kind of conversation, Ruth had never seen it. If he had friends, she simply couldn’t imagine it.
The rest of them, staff and patients both, they had nothing to do but watch and speculate.
‘It’s a tower. Tower of Babel.’
‘Well, obviously it’s a tower. Or else it’s a self-supporting ladder. Jacob’s Ladder, reaching all the way up to Heaven.’
‘It’s a scaffold. They’re going to hang an effigy of Hitler.’
‘They’re going to kidnap Hitler, that’s what all this training has really been for. Then they can hang the real man.’
‘Nothing worth getting so excited over, it’s just a bridge. Some sort of pontoon bridge they’re learning to build.’
‘My dear dim thing, it goes up, don’t you see? A bridge would go over.’
‘And so it shall. How to build a bridge and not get your feet wet: build it on one bank, upwards, and then topple it. Let it fall across the water. That must be what all those ropes are for, to control its falling so that it doesn’t break itself apart when it hits the opposite bank. Or splashes down, if they haven’t quite built it high enough to reach. Why else would they be putting it up right there, right next to the lake? It’s a bridge.’
It was not, of course, a bridge. It went high, too high, higher than it need be to cross all that width of water. The engineers were sent away and Major Black’s men finished it off themselves, if finishing meant swarming up and using their hand-cut planks to make a stable platform at the top. If you could call it stable, with the planking so inherently uneven and its carpenters so ill-suited to their task, driving home the necessary nails with more enthusiasm than skill.
‘Bags me not go up it,’ Judith said firmly. ‘Even so, who called it a ladder? Betsy? You win the prize,’ a hand-knitted tea cosy that had apparently been intended for the front until it had been laughed into retirement. ‘I think it is a ladder. At least, it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere except the top of itself. If there’s a better definition of a ladder, I don’t know what that would be.’
So of course they called it Jacob’s Ladder after that; which meant that of course Major Black became Jacob. There was a pleasure in that, but still no satisfaction so long as the great scaffold tower stood in the corner of their eye all day and all night, and no one who knew would say what it was for.
For some days it stood alone, abandoned, a perilous high structure, all beams and angles, with hanging ropes rove through pulleys in some complicated fashion more suited surely to the navy, and the navy of a hundred years before.
Then all unexpectedly, Jacob himself, Major Black came into the hall at teatime, beer-time, to interrupt the sing-song; and called for attention and waited – not long! – until he had it, and then said, ‘I know you’ve all been wondering what it’s for, that great excrescence I’ve had erected by the lake. I thought it only fair to tell you now. You’ll all know tomorrow anyway, you’ll see it at work, but still. You’re entitled to hear it from me, after all your good work nursing these young men back to health and fitness. Fitness to serve.
‘What that thing is, it’s a parachute training tower. In a few days’ time I’ll be having the men jump – on ropes, it’s perfectly safe! – from both sides, so they’ll be coming down alternately on land and on water. That way I can truly judge their fitness to jump, and hence their fitness for the missions I’ve been charged with. That’s all, so you can forget your more lurid fancies, ladies. It’s just another obstacle course, only more specialized. Oh, and there’ll be no exeats for anyone this week, no leaving the base for any reason. And no locals coming in, so I’m afraid we must manage by ourselves, whatever needs doing. The gates are sealed, as of now.’
Behind Ruth, someone whistled softly under their breath. ‘The colonel won’t like that. He’s been waiting another shipment of his cider.’
The colonel, of course, would not like any of this; his cider would be the least of it. Ruth liked it even less, and was just as powerless. This was the military machine at its most efficient, its most inhumane. A shell in the breech and the mechanism all locked down, ready to fire. A hand on the trigger, the last human touch – but it was Jacob’s hand, and he was almost part of the device. Spring-loaded, dedicated, built in. He wouldn’t falter.
He was, presumably, just what the war effort needed.
She found that – at this distance, in this state of mind – she almost couldn’t care about the war. It had been different in London, with the bombs falling all around, that sense of being absolutely under Hitler’s eye. There was none of that out here, it all felt distant and apart, no longer immediate: somehow more appalling and less significant both at once. How could the major, how could anyone send these young men off to their certain, deliberate deaths? How could the colonel, how could anyone let it happen? How could she?
How could Michael, how could any of them go . . .?
She still couldn’t come near Michael. She saw him sometimes, distantly – playing one-armed monkey on the scaffold, high, clinging with his legs and swinging all his body down as though he knew that she was watching and wanted to alarm her, teasingly, like a boy – but whenever she happened to pass close to where he ought to be, he never quite was. Not at breakfast or supper, not in the line for pills or a packed lunch or a pint, not cheering on a hectic game of rugger or fiddling with his motor in the stable yard or dozing in the unexpected sun. Not on the colonel’s list for future surgeries, although that was supposed to be his proper job, as guinea pig for others. And not her patient, of course, not on her corridor, so she really couldn’t go to his ward or ask for him directly.
At her worst, at her most desperate she even thought that she might write to him. It would be stupid, but safe, at least. The post was still reliable. And he could open a letter discreetly, read it, reply to it with no risk to either of them. She needn’t even sign it; just an R that might mean anything or nothing to anyone else. And no return address, of course. The next best thing to anonymous. Or better than that, because he would know and no one else could possibly guess.
Except that she didn’t know where this avoidance came from. Was it Major Black keeping them apart, or Michael being deliberately elusive? He had so wanted this chance to fight again, never mind that he was so ill-made and ill-prepared for it. He knew that she would do nothing but work against it, that she was hell-bent in opposition. Perhaps it was his own choice not to spend time with her, not to talk to her, not to have to listen.
Perhaps love was
not enough. Perhaps it never could be.
She didn’t know and was frightened of humiliating herself to no purpose, even repelling him further. Too much sentiment could drive a man away, especially in these circumstances, if he was already struggling with himself and his emotions.
So, no. She wouldn’t write: too absurd. And she wouldn’t lay an ambush, lurk on the stairs or by the bathroom doorway, somewhere he couldn’t hope to avoid her. That way lay catastrophe. There was nowhere he was likely to go that others wouldn’t. She would all too likely be caught by someone else, caught waiting, if they weren’t actually caught together. She wasn’t a schoolgirl any more, to stammer out excuses that were patently false. No.
She tried to lose herself in her work, in this big house, with the patients who needed her nursing and the staff who wanted her friendship. With all of that and her own curiosity, so much to learn, so much for Colonel Treadgold to teach her, then surely . . .
It was impossible. Not her fault, but patients and staff both couldn’t stop talking about the tower by the lake, the guards at the gates, the lorries that came and did not leave. She had thought they were just delivering timber and ropes and whatever else was needed to erect such a scaffold, tools she supposed and bolts and steel brackets. Now it was clear they had another purpose. One had taken away all the superfluous sappers; only the drivers remained, close-lipped and patient like their kind, waiting out these days with old newspapers and greasy packs of cards. The lorries were parked up in the stable yard, silent and expressive, ready to take Major Black and his final team of volunteers. All his chosen men, with all their baggage, too: their guns and uniforms and explosives, their knives and radios and maps, assassin’s kit or saboteur’s depending on their individual particular missions.
Somewhere not too far away would be an aerodrome or perhaps just an improvised strip in a field standing fallow, a runway shaved from the turf and marked out with oil-barrel flares, camouflage nets on poles for a hangar. It would have planes and pilots, a minor armada, waiting with that same bored driverly patience, those same papers and dog-eared cards. Flight plans and fuel at hand, last-minute briefings prepared, parachutes stacked ready.
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