Up to his room again, then, and no sign of Aesculapius now. Something to be glad of. Someone had lit a fire in the grate; that was a blessing too. For the comfort of it, more than simple warmth; for the colonel, more than Ruth herself. He slumped into a chair looking ten years older, his ebullient moustache suddenly a giveaway rather than a disguise.
‘Sit, sit,’ he said, wafting a hand towards the other chair, patting the air as though to pat her into it. Then, recovering himself a little, drawing himself up as if half inclined to rise, the training of a gentleman just a little late to kick in, ‘I do beg your pardon, I just felt it, all of a rush there . . .’
‘Nonsense,’ she murmured meaninglessly, sitting down. ‘We’re all tired, I think. That . . . was slow work.’ Slow and terrible, and the pace of it not the worst of it, not by a long chalk.
‘It was. Slow and fiddly. What I’m good at, by and large. But that, well. That’s overdone me, I don’t mind admitting. And left me with a headache.’
‘Do you have any aspirin? I’ve none with me, I’m afraid. I usually carry a bottle when I’m on the ward, but—’
‘No, no. Not to worry. It’ll pass.’ He frowned into the fire, then stirred himself abruptly. ‘Time for a beverage, I do believe. That’ll pick me up. Can I tempt you, Sister Taylor?’
‘Thank you, no. Too early for me, and I’m still on duty.’
‘Of course. Well, if you’ll excuse me . . .’
Cider, frothing into a tankard. In honesty, she thought it was probably a little early for him too; and as senior surgeon and commanding officer he was always on duty, or at least on call. Still, a single bottle would do him no harm, and possibly a power of good. Aesculapius would approve, she was sure. Men were great believers in the restorative power of a swift drink.
Herself, she was more inclined to look for food. Come to think, she hadn’t eaten for . . . how long? A while. A long while. She would dearly love just half an hour down in the kitchens with Cook. Or a tray, only a tray by herself, that would do.
She was caught here, though, for the duration. Until the colonel dismissed her. He had fallen back on gazing into the fire, weary and wordless. Froth on his moustache.
Looking to perk him up, she said, ‘This’ll finish Major Black’s . . . endeavour, won’t it? They’ll shut him down now, surely.’ Shut him down and save all those boys, stop them throwing their lives away. Save Michael.
It was a horror, but it brought a blessing too.
‘Not they,’ the colonel said. ‘Not yet. One inexplicable event? That’s not enough.’
‘It’ll look like sabotage, to Whitehall. A fifth columnist in the house. More than one, maybe. They’ll have to investigate, and they can’t send anyone abroad until they’re sure of them all. It means a delay at least.’ If you weight your report properly, and not let the bias show. I could help you with that, perhaps. ‘And it’s not the first inexplicable event. Flight Lieutenant Barker . . .’
‘Yes. He counts against me, though. One for the other side. It may have saved his life, even at appalling cost, but it won’t save the others. If anything it encourages the others, if they think my work may fall apart. Their faces, fall apart . . .’
‘It might encourage the men,’ she said slowly, ‘I can see that, but not Whitehall. Not if you play it well. Leave them worrying that a man, any man, all the men might go through that same . . . disintegration . . . before they’ve done what they went to do, might find themselves in German hospitals giving up all our secrets . . .’
‘Mmm. Mm-hmm.’ That was neither agreement nor the other thing, just the noises of a man mulling things over, staring into flames. Ruth found herself doing the same, albeit without the noises. Fire was hypnotic, though she wondered if Michael would find it so, or any of his brother officers. Brother patients. Their memories and experiences of it were different, and so might their feelings be.
Peter had always been afraid of fire, of burning to death in his plane. He’d seen a fellow pilot die that way after a training accident, running across the landing field ablaze. It haunted his dreams ever after, and stoked his anxieties. Sometimes she drew comfort from the thought that perhaps he didn’t actually choose to die. Perhaps he wasn’t thinking that clearly. Perhaps it was only the fire and his terror, and the wind of his falling that put the fire out, and his not wanting to pull the ripcord because the parachute would slow him down and then the fire would erupt again and he would come down burning.
Perhaps.
It was a pity, to lose a love of fire. So pretty it was. Even in this strange, ugly house, where ugly things went on. Incomprehensible things, hauntings.
She watched figures, dancing in the flames. Stretching, reaching, joining and combining . . .
Oh.
After a minute, she said, ‘Do you . . . Have you heard any other tales, about strange goings-on in the house here?’
He stirred, shrugged. ‘Any old house must always have its stories. Human beings and architecture: between them, they breed fantasy. Boys, especially. Put a group of boys into a building and let them romance, let them talk after lights out, let them run around in the dark – of course they’ll weave tall stories about hobgoblins and spooks. Of course they will.’
‘Yes, of course.’ But what’s your story, Colonel Treadgold? Do you actually know what you’re doing?
Right now he wasn’t doing anything. Just sitting with his hands curled around his tankard, no longer playing mentally with the flames. She thought it had been subconscious, or nearly so, but she was absolutely clear in her own mind; it was no fantasy. She had seen shapes in the fire, artificial, manufactured. Not her work, not Peter. He was afraid of flame, and would never think to play with it.
‘Let’s change the subject,’ she said. ‘Where do you come from, Colonel?’
‘Me? I’m a Devon man. Squire’s son,’ he said, and she could bless the legacy afforded such a start in life, such rank: good English manners, beaten into him at public school before the army drilled them deeper. He wouldn’t leave a woman struggling under a burden of conversation. He’d shoulder his share, and follow where she led him. ‘Little place on the edge of the moors. Do you know the county at all?’
‘We had our honeymoon at Moretonhampstead.’
‘Ah!’ He brightened visibly, as though clouds had been blown from the face of the moon. And then it was easy, almost: firelight and soft voices, nostalgia and storytelling. Talk of the moors, the Hound of the Baskervilles, strange apparitions, noises in the night.
‘Worst thing I ever saw,’ he said, ‘wasn’t a ghoulie, nothing supernatural. It only sounds like it.’
‘Worse than Barker, worse than poor Herr Braun?’ She wasn’t interrupting; he had lapsed into a meditative silence. She wanted to keep him going, and to keep bringing him back to D’Espérance. Everything connected. She was sure of that. It was only a case of digging out the links.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘Worse for me. I was a boy, you see, fifteen. At that age, a thing goes deep. And this, this thing . . .’
‘What did you see, Colonel?’
‘I saw a man on fire, astride a blazing horse. . . . You see? It ought to be a ghost story, but it’s not. He was my father, and we had a fire in the stables. He was trying to save his best mare, riding her out through the flames; but he was too late, the beast was too much afraid, it took too long . . . All his clothes were alight when they came plunging through the smoke, straight at me. I’ve never forgotten it.’
No, of course he hadn’t forgotten it. How could he? The memory would sit in his head like a burning coal, all his life long smouldering. And now he had brought it here.
‘And now you work with burns victims,’ she said gently, obviously.
‘Yes. Even before the war, this was my work. I saw him, you see. After he fell, I put the fires out, I sat with him. I went with him to the cottage hospital. He was still alive, but there was nothing they could do: not then, not there. Now, here, I could save him, but not then. Not th
ere. So I watched for three days at his bedside, I saw how the burns developed, I saw what the doctors did for him and how useless it all was. I saw him die . . . I still do see him, here and there. Here, sometimes, in the house. A figure of smoke in a doorway. It’s foolish, but I don’t much like going into the stable yard.’
‘Not foolish at all,’ Ruth said. It all made a grim kind of sense to her – Peter is all fog, all falling; you, your father is all flame – except that she still didn’t have an answer to the last question in her head. Do you know what you’re doing?
The house . . . reacted differently to different people. To the strength of their own private hauntings. Hers was fresh and intimate, and all she could do was share her fear of falling, her vision of Peter’s last moments. The colonel lashed out in his frustration, and stranger things happened, worse things, irrecoverable. Flight Lieutenant Barker, Herr Braun. But was he lashing out blindly, or did he know? She thought not, surely not. It would take a cold, savage mind to see any gain in such exquisite sufferings. She thought that was just the house, taking the energy of his rage and transmuting it into cruelty, in ways that might somehow advance his cause. He barely even gave that credit, seeing disadvantage everywhere.
Even so, could he truly be quite ignorant, as well as innocent in this? She wanted to excuse him utterly, but wasn’t sure she could. Something in him must be seeing some connection – everything’s connected – even if his rational mind declined to acknowledge it.
The clock on his mantelpiece struck the hour, delicate silver chimes.
‘I must go,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry . . .’
‘No, no. Of course. Duty first. I have my own rounds to do, in any case.’
It wasn’t the needs of her ward that pulled Ruth away, it wasn’t work of any kind, though she did allow him to think it.
This was their time, hers and Michael’s: between morning surgery and lunch, an hour when they could both of them hope to slip away for a few snatched minutes. When those who were busy should be too busy to look for them, when those who were idle should be too idle.
It didn’t always work out that way, but they would always try. Always hope. Always know that if nothing else, at least the other would be thinking of them exactly now: a warm touch in the mind, a shiver at the base of the neck as though his good hand were holding her, just there.
Today was extraordinary, appalling, but still. Perhaps she was greedy, wanting more after so much. It didn’t feel like that. Rather, she wanted less. No more shock, no more horror; no more cold, intense focus; no more doubts and questions. She wanted to be still in her body, still in her head too. Still in his arms. No passion now, only contentment. Taking comfort from the quiet warmth of him, giving comfort too, giving it back. He must be as needy as she was. More, perhaps. She at least knew what had happened, and had some notion why. She at least had seen the truth of it. He would be all at sea, with nothing to go on but hospital rumour and the terrible tensions sweeping through the house.
She could be slow to start, but at least she was quick to learn. Walking along the corridor from the colonel’s office, she saw a stretch of bare painted panelling that reached from floor to ceiling, rather than stopping at waist-height like any self-respecting wainscot. Immediately she was looking for the hint of recessed hinges, any sign of a latch in the tongue-and-groove joints.
She saw what she was looking for, and paused like a conspirator to check back and forth, each way along the corridor before she worked the latch and stepped through the hidden door.
Of course it wasn’t a secret, this network of servants’ ways behind the panelling. What the patients knew, their nurses knew. And what the nurses knew, more or less the doctors knew: not so well, perhaps, not so intimately, but none the less. It was not beneath their dignity to explore a secret passage, only to be caught at it.
Still, there were reasons of pride not to use these passages. We are nurses, not servants. We have no cause to hide. And there were reasons of practicality too, because the passages were narrow and cramped and awkward, not really fit for hurry nor for carrying awkward trays even though that was of course what they were meant for. Servants in former times couldn’t protest, but nurses these days certainly could. The taller bulkier orderlies would mutiny if anyone tried to force them out of the broad corridors that their seniors and superiors used. They didn’t mind stepping aside, they were all trained to salute, but that was respect enough.
So, no. Secret or not, the servants’ passages went largely unused. Which left them open for Ruth in her privacy, convenient in her urgency. She could slip out of sight here on the first floor and find her way unseen, unworried, through squeezes and up tight runs of steps so steep they were almost ladders, all the way to the attic floor. She felt like a mouse living within walls, scurrying about on errands utterly unconnected to the world beyond: as she was, as they both were when they came up here. This was a place apart, a space held between two hearts, inaccessible to strangers. Small wonder if the ways that brought them here were just as narrow, just as private, just as dark.
She almost didn’t trouble with lights any more. Soon enough she’d be able to find her way by fingers’ touch along the walls. Or by smell, like a mouse. By whisker-twitch. If she were a man she might grow whiskers, just to see what they told her in the dark. Peter had tried a moustache once: not for long, only until she’d laughed at him. He hated that, poor dear, but it was no use. Whatever he’d been trying to achieve, an aggregation of fluff on his upper lip wasn’t the way to do it, and so she’d told him.
The colonel, now, his magnificent facial hair would find him his way along these passages with no trouble – but she didn’t want to think about the colonel just now. There was rather a lot, indeed, that she didn’t want to think about. Michael was the perfect remedy, sufficient unto himself, enough to fill her mind even when he wasn’t gratifying her body. Today, at this hour, she only wanted to be with him. To rest her head against his shoulder and feel encompassed as his arm closed about her, to hear his voice lightly muffled by her hair, to see glimpses of the pure soul that underlay the man within the boy. Crystal and iron, green growing things and sweet water, all of England under one skin. One skin that would blush terribly if she said anything so difficult, so of course she wouldn’t. Think it, though, she could do that. England was no mind-reader: too gauche for that. Too young. Not like Aesculapius. Nothing like Aesculapius. That was something to be thankful for.
Here the steep stair ended, here was the door into the dormitory. She stepped out knowing already what she would find, by that strange other sense that lovers develop that is not quite telepathy and not quite foreknowledge, only an utter certainty. No lights on and the blackout still in place, because who would ever lift it now that they had so scrupulously shielded all the windows from the world outside? So it was all shadows in here even at this height of the day, and yet she knew before she looked that she would see him standing at the foot of their bed, their nest, waiting for her. Just a line of darkness in the softer dark, not even an outline, only an impressionistic dash, and utterly still and silent too, and yet . . .
And yet she knew that he would be there. And in the first moment of her looking, she knew that he was not Michael. No.
No.
And her world came crashing down, her little private construct, as the world beyond flooded in through inadequate defences, a tidal wave, destruction.
‘Well, well. You, is it? Of course it’s you. I should never have believed that farrago you fed us before. You’re a quick worker, Sister, I’ll say that for you.’
‘Please don’t.’ She didn’t want him to speak at all. His voice could only soil things further. Like a slick of engine grease laid down over ruin. Please don’t, sir, she should probably say, because he was, of course, Major Black. There seemed small point now in the niceties, though, and she really couldn’t be bothered.
She expected him suddenly to knock a light on, to expose her in her shame. That was what men did
, she understood. Throw a cold clear light on what should always have stayed subdued, wrapped in the shadow of its nurture.
She had her own gift that she could weave in shadows, up here especially, where she had done it before at need. Her own man, a moment of clarity in her dizzy head, a point of light like a glimpse through a distant doorway. Falling and falling. A weapon falling straight into her hand.
I could make you fall from here, Major Black. She trembled on the edge of it, poised to call Peter to save her as he had before.
‘I came up to see what had left my men so . . . confused,’ he said, quiet and deadly, ‘so off-balance that a woman armed with a torch could take them on and defeat them roundly. I found this little love-nest – you really shouldn’t have made yourselves so obvious – and once I knew what to look for, it was easy to spot whom.’
Among his own men, he meant. He might have guessed about her, he must have guessed, but he had waited until now to be sure. Which meant that at least he hadn’t interrogated Michael. At least she hadn’t been betrayed, except by her own body and the instincts that compelled it.
Even so. It was hard to speak. He was almost courteous, waiting for her to catch her breath and her courage. She had fought his one man physically and his other more mysteriously, snatching at a power she ought not to possess; she ought surely to be ready for this, face to face and a simple battle of words.
Readier, at least. She ought surely to have expected it.
She ought to have anticipated it and put the bedding aside, cleared away any sign of occupation. Tawdry occupation, assignations. She could look at this through his eyes and feel his disgust, almost share it. She really ought to have seen this coming.
She ought this, she ought that. It was too late for regrets now; they were here.
She ought to feel stronger. He wasn’t about to hit her; she was the one with the weapon, he was the one unprepared. He didn’t know what she could do.
Even so. It was perilously hard to speak, harder yet to sound cool and unconcerned as she finally said, ‘Well, then. What are you going to do about it, now that you – as you say – know whom?’
House of Doors Page 24
