There was a strip of carpet beneath her feet, something dark and woven and hard-wearing, fraying at the edges, meant for the kind of use it had all too clearly seen. It felt like a path laid down for her exactly, drawing her irresistibly on.
Along to the end, to a door. She really shouldn’t be spilling all this light. Light was precious, it seemed sometimes, and rationed, and in need of saving.
And yet. Her fingers reached and closed around the handle, almost without volition on her part. She turned her wrist and tugged, pulling the door open.
Beyond was just such another long dormitory, with her own long shadow stretching down the aisle. Dark shapes of beds on either side, heaped up with stuff. She couldn’t quite see what, only that it seemed softer in outline and less angular, bundles rather than boxes. Furnishings, perhaps, rather than furniture.
If there was a light switch here, she couldn’t find it. Perhaps there would be another flight of stairs at the further end, and the switch there where it would be most use. She had light enough to walk on and see – or grope, at least, walk on and grope – although she really oughtn’t. She ought to be turning back, redeeming herself, turning lights off rather than making things worse, laying down this bright beacon for Hitler’s bombers to cluster to.
Was she still hoping for that bomb to seek her out? Still praying for that bullet?
Oddly, she didn’t think so, quite. Not here, at least, not now. She had never been callous enough to want to take others with her. Not even Major Black. Or Major Dorian. He might be worse. Black at least was a professional soldier. Aesculapius was a professional mind-muddler, playing chess with people’s lives. Twisting their emotions and laying their bodies in the way of danger. Worse, sending them off with certainty to uncertain but probably cruel endings. Sometimes she despised the man, but she still wouldn’t willingly call down a bomb on his head.
She really ought to turn off those revealing lights.
The odds were remote, though, that a bomber would ever find its way to this remotest setting. Let alone tonight, this hour tonight, when she happened to be letting light leak out. This wasn’t London, or anything like it. She ought to be safe, and so ought everyone.
Her own motives were still mysterious to her, but she did seem to want to go all the way. To walk step by step into her own shadow, as if that silhouette were a pathfinder, a beacon in reverse, a guide into darkness.
She hadn’t stepped beyond the light yet, her shadow still fell framed entirely within the outline of the doorway; but she felt less sure of her footing suddenly, and looked down.
And oddly couldn’t see her feet, they seemed lost within a rising fog, a cloud that swirled about her, grey in the shadows and white where the light fell upon it.
She might have screamed, but that she had no breath to do it with.
No breath and no bearings, as the fog engulfed her utterly. She couldn’t feel the floor any more beneath her, that convenient textured carpet seemed to have melted away; she wasn’t sure which way was up, she seemed just to be falling and falling, oh, Peter . . .
He could find her anywhere, at any time. Of course he would find her here. Or she would reach to him, or the house would do its best to bring the two of them together.
Well. That could work. She could just fall and fall. She could let herself do that, sooner than wait for that problematic bomb or go on to seek a bullet.
Eventually, someone was sure to notice the lights up here. They’d come to investigate, and most likely find her dead, she thought. Fallen to the floor, and never mind if her ghost just went on falling.
They could go hand in hand, she thought, herself and Peter. Fall forever, together forever.
She could sense him, she thought, in the fog beside her. In this cloud. Perhaps they’d fall through into sunlight, sooner or later.
Perhaps she needed to reach out, to find his hand.
Perhaps he needed her to do that.
And yet, she wasn’t doing it. Not reaching.
Drawing her arms in, rather, as if she wanted to fall faster. Making fists of her fingers. Stubborn as all-get-out, her old nanny used to say.
Really she only wanted to feel the bite of her nails against her palms. Something to focus on in the fog, the touch of something real – and an absolute guarantee that no one and nothing could take her hand.
Sorry, Peter.
She wouldn’t do it. Not like this. She would choose her own future. If death was her choice – and she did still insist on her right to choose it, coldly and rationally – then she would chase after it when and where she chose to. And doing something useful, that too. Mending what was broken, until such time as she broke in her turn.
Not like this, just falling and falling. Even with Peter, she would not. That was a choice he had made, that she . . . detested, actually.
Yes.
So. The bite of her fingernails into her own skin, and her teeth chewing on her lip, that too. Another sharp pain to hold her attention, to keep her fixed within her body here, and not falling after all.
Not falling for it, not being sucked into the illusion. This was a game the house played, she thought, and the weak would tumble headlong into it and make it real. Allow it to be real, let it happen. Let it swallow them.
Not her. She was nobody’s mouthful.
Her eyes were closed; that made things easier. She reached out inside her body, to the limits of her skin, and of course she wasn’t falling. No. Where was the rushing, where was the wind? She was quite still, and standing upright. There would be floor beneath her feet. There must be. The slight give, the slight springiness of that tough carpeting; she could almost feel it.
She could feel it.
She could open her eyes at any moment, and find herself standing just where she had been, just in the doorway between light and darkness, between one dormitory and the next.
She could, she could do that. She could open her eyes.
Yes.
And did, eventually, though it seemed to take forever. She was, perhaps, more afraid than she’d admit. Afraid of herself, not of the house, and certainly not of Peter. If she fell into catastrophe here, it would be the strength of her own will that dragged her down, neither the hand of her dead lover nor the creaking floorboards and malign intent of a house that harboured mystery at its core.
Actually, she thought the house was neutral, and Peter might all too easily miss her in the fog.
Even so, it took her a long time to open her eyes. Shamefully long.
Still. At last, she looked.
No fog before her eyes; only the long stretch of the dormitory, as it ought to be, awkward with shadow in the difficult light.
Good, then.
She looked down at her feet.
No fog. Just her own feet in her own slippers, standing in her own shadow on the carpet.
She lifted her head, in surging wordless relief—
And saw two shadows within the bright frame of the doorway, where it stretched away across the floor.
Two.
One, she knew, was hers. One was larger, broader. Masculine.
Oh. Peter . . .?
It had taken her forever to open her eyes. She would take longer to turn round, to find his face.
She couldn’t actually move at all, it seemed. Nor speak.
The long peril of that moment hung suspended, timeless and undecided. If I never move, he never can. It needs me to confirm him, a gesture of belief to make him real. And I can’t. This is like the fog, the two of us forever pent on the crux of movement, in the perfect moment of its stillness.
Only that it was worse than the fog, because it needed her to do something either way, to save them or to damn them both, and she could not. Not even dig her nails into her palms, not even that.
Only then she didn’t need to, because he spoke to her.
She knew his voice intimately, and had never expected to hear it like this, in such a moment; and he said,
‘I suppose I ough
t to boom something sepulchral at this point, and scare you out of your girlish wits, but – well, I don’t believe you scare that easily, and I don’t really have the voice for booming, not any more. Besides, I think that kind of practical joke is just plain bad manners, when you come right down to it.’
She still took an age to turn around. He didn’t think she scared that easily, so absolutely she did not want him to see – or feel! – the tremble he had left in her fingers. Nor hear it in her own voice, that same tremor. So she stood staring at his silhouette for that extra time, until she wasn’t physically shaking any more; until she could turn safely, and take a step forward, and come up hard against his waiting willing body, and speak his name.
‘Michael . . .’
Her hands seemed to clench themselves in the thick stuff of his dressing gown. He was smiling, pleased with her and delighted with himself. His good arm had wrapped itself already around her waist, and she rather thought he was sniffing her hair as if he had a right to.
She ought to puncture that self-satisfied mood of his. Truly, she ought to. She tried for a frown and couldn’t quite achieve it, but did manage to say, ‘What in the world are you doing here?’ Sneaking up on a girl that way she might have said, and didn’t.
‘Looking for you,’ he said, triumphant, found you. ‘I couldn’t sleep –’ well, nobody could – ‘so I thought I’d come and see if you were, you know. Awake.’ If I could slip in with you again he seemed to mean, as though he had entirely misunderstood all the things she said before. Perhaps he had. Or she had. She wasn’t exactly fending him off. ‘So I sneaked up to your room – oh, don’t worry, nobody saw me! I came like I was on a mission, through the back ways, silent as the grave – and you weren’t there. So I went in hunt of you, and saw the light was on upstairs, and tried up here, and found you.’
And was so burstingly proud of himself and his skills and his reasoning, she couldn’t burst his bubble if she’d wanted to, and actually it was the furthest thing from her mind. Or at least from her body, which was leaning quite outrageously into his. That tremble seemed to be coming back into her voice again, or into her pattern of thought, because in fact she was really, really glad that he had, and then she said so.
Or mumbled it, rather, into his woolly lapel; and felt his hand stroke her shoulder, and shivered at the touch of him, and heard him say, ‘Here, are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost. It’s a spooky old place, this, but—’
‘Michael, do you believe in ghosts?
‘Oh, what? No, silly. No, I don’t.’ And now he could relax because he had a place in his mind that he could put this, girlish fancies or some such, he would have been taught all his life that the female of the species was more credulous than the male. ‘No. I’ve been up in the best place God made, close enough to touch His face if I only leaned out of the cockpit, and I didn’t see Him there. I’ve been down in the worst hell you can imagine, and I never saw the Devil either.’
‘That wasn’t what I asked, I didn’t ask if you were religious.’
‘No, but it’s the same thing, isn’t it? It’s all about faith and susceptibility, and I don’t think you can have degrees of it, you’re either a believer or you’re not. If I don’t believe in the big stories, God and the Devil and eternal life, how can I believe in something as piddlin’ small as a human ghost?’
Sometimes she was so busy remembering how young he was, she forgot to remember how bright he was. His mind would be something else to lean on. She could do that easily, the cold clear reassurance of an English education giving shape and structure to a habit of rational thought.
Especially, he would be good to lean on here. His young, savage life could hardly have left him short of ghosts, and she knew – none better! – that he was not short of passion either. And yet here he was, resolutely unhaunted. Patronizing her a little. Managing not to mock, but she could tell that was an effort. It would be another less welcome residue of his time at school, that he would have two common forms of address: respect one way, mockery the other. Everything hierarchical, his life would always have been that way, and the RAF wouldn’t teach him differently, and nor would the hospital here.
Well, but she might try.
‘Besides,’ he was going on, arguing from the general to the specific, as no doubt he had been taught to do, ‘I grew up in a haunted house and never met the ghost. Not for lack of looking. The kitchen boy and I, we searched that place from attic to cellar, by day and night and candlelight, we were desperate to scare ourselves stupid; and the only times Harry got spooked it wasn’t actually Old Boney, it was me lending a hand, laying traps with cobwebs and bits of string. So no, no ghosts. Have you been scaring yourself up here, in all this dust and shadow? I know a good cure for that, you taught it to me . . .’
And there he was being utterly young again, utterly self-involved. Wanting what he had come looking for in hopes; what she had been so determined to deny him.
Something had melted that determination like wax, like a candle left heedlessly on the hearth. She wasn’t quite sure what had done it. The immediacy of his body, the heat in him: that was something but not enough, surely, she wasn’t that susceptible. She hoped she wasn’t. She knew women in London, at the hospital, who went from one man to the next, predatory or inconsolable, vampire or victim. She had a sudden vision of herself among that sisterhood, waving successive lovers away to the front and instantly turning to find another, in utter opposition to everything she believed and everything she used to be. War could do that, she knew, it could change a person radically; and perhaps a person ought to seek such a change. Perhaps it was her duty to the country, or to a generation of doomed lads, or . . .
She shuddered, and felt it against his solidity like an echo bouncing off a wall.
He felt it too, and of course misunderstood it completely. ‘You really have given yourself a fright, haven’t you? Poor old girl,’ for all the world as though she were an arthritic gun dog. She had to bite hard into the dusty stuff of his dressing gown, just to bite off the giggle that would have deflated him too cruelly when he was being so mature, a friend in need. ‘Here, let me see you back to your room, come on now . . .’
Let me see you back, then let me stay. The subtext was so clear, it needed no spelling out; only a refusal, which she could manage on a quick gasp. ‘No, not there. Everyone’s still upset and nobody’s sleeping, the staff as well as patients. People come and go in the corridor all night. My neighbour’s up and about right now. I can’t afford to have you seen, coming or going. My reputation . . .’
He grunted, allowing the point. ‘Well, I can’t take you back to the ward, can I? I mean, I’d have to chase the other men out, and, you know. They’d swear not to talk, but of course they would, they couldn’t help it.’
Happily, there was no danger in the world of her going back to his ward with him. The notion was so fantastic she could lift her head at last and laugh up at him; and lose the laugh all at once as she saw how the angles and planes of his features struck strange shadows in the light. Until this moment she had forgotten that there was anything unusual in his face at all. At some point in the recent past it had just become the face of Michael Tolchard, not a medical experiment or a professional responsibility or an unusual sensual experience. It was the face that meant the man behind it: something to smile at, something to reach for.
Something must be showing in her own face, because he was trying to frown, not making a very good job of it. ‘What? What are you thinking?’
Actually, I’m thinking about kissing you – and she seemed to have shed more than her professional detachment and all her good resolutions, she had shed her inhibitions too, because she heard herself repeat the words aloud. ‘Actually, I’m thinking about kissing you. But it doesn’t seem fair to lead you on, when there’s nowhere I can safely take you. Never start anything you’re not prepared to finish, my father used to say, and—’
And she was babbling, perhaps, and perha
ps it was just as well that he stopped her. By starting something, by kissing her, which wasn’t fair at all. And – when he would allow her – she drew a breath to say so, and was sweetly and blessedly forestalled.
‘Silly,’ he said again. ‘We don’t have to go anywhere, your room or mine. If we just turn these lights off.’ And he suited the action to the word, leading her by the hand to do it and letting go only for the moment, finding her again in the near dark and dropping his voice like a conspirator, like a veil over the event. ‘Nobody’s going to do what I did, see it from below and wonder, come up to find out what’s going on. Safe as houses, we’ll be. No one even remembers all this is up here.’
No house was safe in these days. She thought this house unsafe in any way, any meaning of the word. Him too, he was perilously unsafe. He was tugging her back down that strip of carpet, out of the first dormitory and into the second, where the heaps of bundles turned out – unsurprisingly, she supposed – to be blankets and pillows, tied up in sheets.
He unrolled a mattress and laid it on a bed frame, giving himself away entirely, conventional boy with no imagination. The darkness hid her smile. Working by touch, she assembled a nest of bedding. Sheets were too much trouble, but pillows and blankets went more or less where they ought to go, soft enough and formal enough to make them both comfortable.
Then, while she helped him with his clothing, ‘Michael, what is all this? So many beds, what for?’
‘Oh, the owner turned the place into a school for a while, after the last war. I don’t think it lasted. We didn’t have to kick the kiddies out, they were long gone before the ministry requisitioned it this time around. I’m not at all sure about these blankets. Can you smell mildew?’
‘Certainly not. I’m a nurse; I don’t even know what mildew is, just something nasty I heard about. It doesn’t dare come anywhere near me or my patients, I wouldn’t allow it. Now lie down and be quiet. Be very quiet.’ They had closed what doors they could, between them and the restless house. Even so, she felt vulnerable in this wide dormitory. Almost like making love in the open, where someone might chance along at any minute.
House of Doors Page 20
