‘I say, I really am most terribly sorry.’
Of course he was, he was still a boy behind that dreadful face. Soaking up guilt like a sponge, as he would soak up any feeling else that came his way. She knew.
He didn’t, of course. He was a boy; he had no notion of himself as the watching world might see him. Only what he saw in the mirror, that face and the constant need to outclass it, to be better than that. All ego, and all suffering, and all shame. She smiled to take the sting out of her words even before she said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. If I didn’t know myself that I was hungry, how should I expect you to divine it?’
‘No, but I might have thought. Damn it, such a dreadful journey, and of course you wouldn’t have found anything to eat on the way. Never mind being stuck overnight. You told me that, and . . .’
She couldn’t console him, only distract him. ‘I suppose this is the servants’ wing, then,’ as he led her up steep and narrow stairs, uncarpeted.
‘I’m afraid so, yes.’ That should have been tossed casually back over his shoulder with a quirky smile, a laughing glance, the flick of a floppy blond fringe. Another world. He kept his face turned forward, into the shadow of the stairwell. He was most sensitive, she realized, when they were alone. Young man, do you have no sisters?
She might guess the answer to that – Mummy’s white-haired boy, the one and only, spectacularly spoiled beneath his veneer of charm; spoiled on the outside now, and who knew what that might do? – but she couldn’t ask, of course. Not directly, at least. For the moment, she didn’t need to. He was seizing the chance she’d offered and running ahead with it, distracting himself.
‘What used to be the servants’ and the family wings, they’re staff and patients now. In that order. I’m afraid we do better than you. Our rooms are luxurious in comparison,’ whereas here was hers: down a bare corridor, sisal matting underfoot, one door among half a dozen. At least she had it to herself, which was relief of the basest sort, a foundation to build upon. A single iron-framed bed, made up with military conformity and military blankets; a bedside locker, a toilet table and a chest of drawers all squeezed together where there was barely room for two out of the three. She would have to sidle in and out.
She didn’t mind that. She didn’t mind anything much, this whole adventure was just distraction for her – though she was trying not to wonder about the bathrooms. Old country houses were notorious for their lack of plumbing. She had visions of a pump in the scullery, shuddering morning scrubs with a queue behind her, hard soap and hard towels and hard bitter water.
‘We’re the Other Ranks, you mean, while you’re the officers?’
‘Something like that. Although you nurses count as officers, you know. And of course the doctors are all this side, even the old man; and actually not all of us patients are officer rank, officially. We have sergeant pilots too, and a few I’m not sure about at all.’
He was floundering, a little. She could be kind, she could move him on. ‘So if this is the staff wing and the other across the courtyard there is the patients’ –’ with a nod out through her high mean window, no far views for her – ‘what happens in the main house in between?’
‘Oh. Ah. I, um, I can’t tell you that.’
‘Not even yet? Now that I’m actually here?’
‘You’ll have to ask the old man. Or, well, just keep your ears open. You’ll pick it up.’
Was that shame again? Something was keeping him averted: from her, or from the truth. From confession. Something he didn’t want to say.
Goodness. Well, as he said, she would find out soon enough. Directly or otherwise. And for now: ‘You get your head down,’ he said, like a little boy instructing his nanny. ‘Doctor’s orders. You’ll feel better for a sleep.’
Damn him, it was true. She chivvied him out – she only needed to sit on the unyielding bed and slip her shoes off again and he was gone, and yes, he could still blush – and submitted to the solitude, the silence, the great weight of the turning world. Lifted her legs on to those harsh khaki blankets, laid her head down on rough laundered linen and barely had time to wonder one more question – why was everything here so resolutely Army, when it was called RAF Morwood and devoted to the aftercare of pilots? – before discovering that in fact her body had greater weight than all the world together, was dragging her down and down . . .
‘Well. You’ll feel better for that, I make no doubt.’
The voice was firm, as unyielding as the mattress beneath her; its owner was in her room. Her private room, but of course nothing was truly private any more. Except what she kept in her head, her secret determinations. Six more months.
The invader was a short, stocky woman, dressed in darkest blue. Ruth opened her mouth to protest as she clicked the light on, closed it abruptly as her eyes focused. The cap and veil of a nurse; the insignia of a matron. This was Ruth’s own most senior officer. She dragged herself to her feet, and almost saluted. Almost thought she ought to.
‘How . . . how long have I been sleeping?’
‘Long enough. It’s time for tea.’
That wasn’t tea she’d brought, though. A broad enamel bowl, rather, and a ewer of steaming water. A bar of soap, a towel.
‘Have a wash, and bring yourself downstairs. Just follow the noise, you’ll find us.’
‘Oh. Ah, do I have time to change . . .?’ She felt suddenly that everything on her body had been there for too long.
‘Yes, of course. The longer you take, mind, the later you’ll be.’ And the more chance everyone will have to stare at you, when you come – that went without saying. She knew institutions of old.
‘I’ll be quick. Uh, Matron . . .?’
‘Well?’
‘Thank you for bringing these yourself. You didn’t need to do that.’
‘No, of course not.’ She could have sent anyone with washing water and a summons. ‘I wanted to introduce myself. I’m Elizabeth Ingliss, matron here at D’Espérance, and that’s probably the last time you’ll hear my – why are you staring like that?’
‘I beg your pardon, Matron, but what did you just say?’
‘Oh – D’Espérance? I don’t suppose it’s the last time you’ll hear that. It’s the old name for the house. No one here uses it officially, but Cook always does, and so of course do the locals. I think the change of name is meant to be more secure,’ but she clearly wasn’t convinced.
I don’t understand, why does it need to be secure? What are you protecting here? Ruth did actually take a breath to ask, but habits of secrecy were too ingrained, questions were impossible. That was Peter’s influence again. Of course it was, everything was Peter. They were one flesh, indivisible, death not enough to part them; and she was all the flesh he had now, so naturally whatever she did would be coloured by his choices.
She let the words die in her throat, and earned herself a little nod from Matron. Was she really so obvious, were her thought processes written so clearly on her face? Did that mean that Peter shone through her, those times that she so clearly heard his voice . . .?
There was no telling, and still no way to ask. Matron left. Ruth poured water into the bowl, stripped off her blouse and rinsed grime from her face, wishing only that she might shift her weary resignation as easily.
The clouded water showed her nothing as it stilled. No reflection. There was nothing to be learned in any case, of course, no art to read a woman’s future in her face. Peter had taught her not to believe in omens; she tried to cling to that. She did try. It was just . . . unfortunate . . . that earlier lessons lay deeper, at the heart of her. And that his own death had been so ominous, trying to teach her other lessons yet.
Teacher, instruct thyself. But he had done that, of course, he had lived and died believing in the physical world, whatever he could determine and measure and control; and in the idea of England, more than just geography; and in her. More than anything, she thought, he had believed in her. More than grateful, almost desperate, he had c
lung to her even in the hollow fragile peace, restless and uncertain, struggling to find or make something solid and dependable in a time of shift.
They had struggled together, built it together, a marriage that could endure. And then the war came, as it must; and then more than ever he had needed her, and she had been his rock. So busy doing that, perhaps neither one of them had noticed actually how much she had needed him.
All her presentiments, all her anxieties were natural, of course, in a young wife in wartime. Proven right too, but there was nothing unusual in that either. Young men do die, and their widows will look back and see those deaths foreshadowed. And feel guilty, blame themselves. If only they had said this or not done that, not let him go at the last, everything would have been different and some other man, some other woman’s husband would have died in his place, and that would have been better, yes.
She couldn’t live without him, there wasn’t any point. She couldn’t live with herself, it was too distasteful.
She couldn’t see anything in the water. There was nothing to be seen.
She straightened, and turned away.
For a wonder, there was a glass in the room. Hung of course in the darkest corner, small and square, the mirrored door of a little cabinet. Hung of course too low for her, but no matter, she could stoop. And she need only make herself presentable, pull a comb through her hair and be sure her cap was straight.
Just a glance, no more. It wasn’t as though she cared, only that Matron was safe to be a stickler for neatness. That was laid down in regulations, that all matrons must be tartars.
So, a stoop and a squint, leaning one-handed on the chest of drawers with her other hand reaching already for her toilet bag to rootle out her comb, and—
And that wasn’t her face peering out from the shadows, no.
Blessedly, not Peter’s either. Just for a moment the world had faltered again, she’d been afraid.
Not a face at all, nothing peering. She saw a blankness, a pale blur, and thought the mirror somehow fundamentally broken, its silver fogged, as unreflective as the wash-water.
Until she understood that it was turning, that pallid wash of light. It was not quite featureless, and she could see it spin within the glass. Spin and rise, as though it reached to engulf her.
Or no, she must be spinning as she fell because now she was falling into it. Even standing entirely still in her room here, she could feel the sudden chill, the damp as it soaked her through and through. She could feel the sick giddy spinning, even while she felt the utter solidity of the furniture beneath her hands, the floor beneath her feet.
And now she had fallen entirely through the cloud and there was the land below her, the patchwork fields of England that he loved even as he plunged towards them, and she could feel the weight of the parachute on his back and the stubborn treachery in his hand as it didn’t and didn’t and didn’t pull the ripcord, as he fell and fell and . . .
I am not going to faint.
Not going to.
Not.
Not again. She was oddly determined about that, even as her own world spun dizzily about her, as her gaze was drawn down and down into that sucking well. She was not going to faint again. That was all that mattered.
Almost all.
She might die, she thought. She might be found dead. That wouldn’t matter, except that it would be a bewilderment – her bones all broken, as though she had smashed to ground from miles high, just here in her own room beneath a plastered ceiling – and she really didn’t want to attract any attention to herself. It wasn’t about her, really not. Only the impossibility of living on, the dreadful dragging weight of it day after day after—
Not going to, and so she didn’t faint.
Neither did she die.
Gradually, the fixedness of furniture and floor drew her back into her own body. Her swirling mind rediscovered rootedness, that sense of presence, here I am. With that came who I am, not Peter, and so not falling, no.
The mirror . . . failed. Today. No promises for tomorrow. But today she stood firm and was strong, and that spinning chaos faded and was blank again, and then was nothing but ill-silvered glass and she could just see her own face in it, if she stooped and peered.
Actually she could just see her own face in motion as she twisted away, looking anywhere but there. Wanting to pull away entirely except that she needed to lean hard on both hands still, here I am. Trembling through to the bone of her, prickling with sweat all over, sick and dizzy again with the reaction.
She was late, then, in finding her way downstairs. Very late, perhaps. She wasn’t sure. Her watch had stopped, at about the same time that she fell – no, that she didn’t fall into the mirror.
She had washed again, despite the scummy water. And had put on her old uniform, for lack of a new one yet; and had barely troubled with her hair at all, determined not to look again into the glass. Perhaps no one would notice, with the wrong cap perched so blatantly atop. Perhaps they would all busy themselves with telling her how very incorrect her dress was, and what to do about it.
Follow the noise, Matron had said. In fact she followed an orderly with a trolley, but she really didn’t need to. There was rather a lot of noise.
And that was before the orderly used his trolley to nudge open the green baize door at the end of the passage. The trolley was weighted with a steaming urn, which she guessed to be reinforcements, a second round; but it wasn’t only sound that washed around the orderly to greet her, as soon as that door swung wide. There was an aroma also, instantly distinctive. Not tea.
No hospital she knew would tolerate such a racket from its staff, no matron of her acquaintance would condone it for a moment. And that was beer that she was smelling, impossible and unmistakable, a heady tang that caught her throat with memory and yearning. Beer . . .!
She would have hesitated, even in full sight on the threshold there, only the orderly just barged straight in and she seemed to be caught in his wake, to have no alternative but to follow.
In the passage, that weight of sound had overflowed her like a wave released. In the doorway it would have been a wall, that solid, it would have stopped her entirely if the trolley hadn’t broken through ahead of her.
She felt it none the less, every brick of it, every separate voice. Her head dropped just a little, her shoulders hunched, as though she were walking into a wind. One step, two steps—
Then she realized. And stopped dead, right there, two paces into the room; and straightened her spine, squared her shoulders like a soldier on parade, lifted her head and looked about her.
This was a hallway, seemingly, or should have been. An open area between the servants’ wing and what must be the main family rooms, with a stairway leading up – the East Staircase, she supposed they would call that – and doors in all directions.
They couldn’t conceivably be short of space in this enormous house, and yet they had chosen to lay this hallway with trestle tables and eat their meals here. She would have called it the staff canteen, except that some of these men were very clearly not staff. The rowdy ones, for example: some in uniform of one description or another, uniform and dressings, some in dressing gowns and slippers. Those were surely patients.
She might have called it a dining hall, then, set aside for walking wounded – and she might have been casting about already for a glimpse of Bed Thirty-Four, young Lochinvar, young Tolchard – except that some of these, men and women both, most certainly were staff. There was Matron herself, presiding at one of the tables. Presiding over dressing gowns and uniforms together, all mixed ad hoc; and some of those uniforms were nurses, some orderlies, some officers. Ruth was confused already, even before her eyes were drawn again to the rowdy congregation around the piano.
A piano, standing at the heart of all this noise. And a congregation, a singing congregation, half of them with pint mugs in their hands. Doing that thing that men do, wrapping their hands around the body of the glass rather than use the handl
e.
The other half couldn’t manage to hold theirs, by the handle or otherwise. Their drinks were lined up on the piano top, with paper straws.
Two men shared a bench at the piano. She could barely see through the packed bodies, but they weren’t playing a four-handed melody. She thought perhaps they played one hand each.
She thought she knew where Bed Thirty-Four might be found, if she cared to push her way through the crowd.
There was no question of that. Among the singing congregation, one voice in the multitude, a man in an overcoat between the dressing gowns and the blue serge: that was Aesculapius. Major Dorian, she reminded herself sternly. Already she thought he had noticed her. Indeed, he was tilting his mug towards her in a greeting, in a toast.
She ignored him magnificently, stalking over to Matron’s table to ask where she should sit.
‘Why, here today, Sister. With me,’ and the short woman reached out to touch an empty chair on her left. ‘Another day, you’ll take a table of your own; another again, you’ll move around. You’ll find us . . . not so much informal as irregular. In many ways. One day you may even join the choir,’ with a nod towards the piano, where those two invisible hands were breaking down catastrophically over Greensleeves in waltz time. ‘Today, though, I thought you’d likely have questions, and I’m your best hope of an answer.’
Meaning I want a closer look at you, young woman, I want to see what Aesculapius has sent me. Ruth wasn’t fooled for a moment.
Still, she did indeed have a flood of questions, all dammed up. Better to loose them than turn inward once again, towards that sucking void at the heart of her. Far better, so long as Major Dorian had his eye on her. Beer or no beer.
She opened her mouth, then, to ask the first of them, and—
‘No shop!’ It was a curious parrot-squawk of a cry, rather terrible, and it came from the man sitting opposite her. Half the skin of his face was drawn pale and sheer, like greasy silk, in brutal contrast to the vivid colour of the other half. She thought one eye was glass. It was as though he wore a demi-mask, as though he could be two men in one, depending which way he was facing.
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