House of Doors (13 page)

Here, though, she could be more than that. More than she was before. Since the Blitz began, half the wards she worked on had filled with burns and blast injuries, she was used to those; but they seemed crude and clumsy now, rough copies of these airmen's hurts.

If the damage she saw here was more refined, more focused, the agony more intense, then so too was the treatment. Sulfa drugs were commonplace, but Colonel Treadgold was the opposite of that.

All they had really known, all they had had in London for the treating of burns was tannic acid. When the hospital pharmacy was hit in a raid and they didn't even have that, they'd brewed and cooled strong tea to use as a substitute. Privately, Ruth thought that all the tea did was dye the skin, while all the acid did was tan it into leather. Dry, to be sure, no longer seeping, but curiously orange in colour, tough as boots.
Soled and heeled
, the girls used to say in the canteen, joking for their own comfort when they could do nothing more for the patient's.

Colonel Treadgold's regime was inventive, drastic, meticulous. Ruth had never seen, never heard of anything like it. Saline baths and surgery, skin grafts and more radical rebuilding, clamped hands cut apart and remade to work again.

‘Eyes are the first thing,' the colonel grunted, taking her into the operating theatre, one more door. ‘Faces and hands these fly boys lose, it's their speciality. They're supposed to wear gloves and goggles, but of course they won't. So, faces and hands. Given time and practice we can make them presentable again, even if they'll never be pretty; given time and practice we can give them hands that work, more or less. But they all lose their eyelids, and we can't take time over those or they'll lose their eyes too, and there's nothing we can do about that. My list of failures is a list of blind men. They haunt me, every one.'

The patient on the table would haunt Ruth, she thought. Tough as she was, inured as she thought herself.
Face and hands
, yes. She had helped prepare him for surgery, and the rest of his body was more or less unmarked. Nineteen years old, fit and healthy from the neck down and the wrists up – and his hands were a blackened ruin, cooked flesh, and his face was gone. No nose, no eyelids, no lips. Unconscious, he glared up at them like madness showing its teeth.

I am like Webster
, she thought,
I see the skull beneath the skin.

And much obsessed by death, yes. That too.

Unperturbed, the colonel lectured as he cut, as he sewed.

‘We use skin from the underarm, where there's no hair. Wouldn't want hairy eyelids. For all sorts of reasons, and you girls are the least of them. Ideally, of course, we'd want to find clean skin and then a line of hair that could double up for lashes. Too much to ask, the human body isn't so obliging. Lashes are unique. My boys just have to get along without 'em.'

It had been a while since Ruth had served as a theatre nurse, but she hadn't forgotten the knack. Listen to his voice but pay attention to his hands, watch them at their work, think ahead. Think what she would want if she were him, doing that. Be ready with scalpels and clamps, with sutures, with dressings. Be ready to wipe blood from the patient, sweat from him. Don't let your mind wander, don't let him pull ahead or you'll be forever running to catch up.

Don't let yourself be distracted by the gruesome things he's up to. You've seen worse.

Think ahead, get ahead if you can. Wait till he steps back and then dive in there yourself, wipe the patient's dreadful exposed eyeballs with gelatin to keep them moist, don't wait to be told. It's hot under the surgery lamps, they'll be drying out swiftly now that the dressing's off.

Take his wordless grunt for approbation and get out of his way.

Above all don't reply, don't distract him. Don't speak at all unless you have to. He's as aware of you as he wants to be, he's giving you as much attention as he chooses; work with that.

If he's a talker, he's probably only talking to himself in any case.

If he doesn't notice you at all from beginning to end, then you've done a good job. If you're lucky, he'll notice that.

One more soiled dressing in the bin for laundry. Ruth washed her hands, fetched another pile of clean, stood ready.

This might have been a still room or a pantry, she thought, or perhaps a larder for hanging game: a cool square room tiled in white, floor and walls together, with a working counter and a butler's sink along one side. It wasn't quite right for an operating theatre, perhaps, but it wasn't quite wrong either. Easy to clean, at least superficially, though many of the tiles were cracked and would need hard scrubbing.

The equipment was probably standard field issue. Lamps on stands, steel tables. Cables fetching in the electricity, through a high window unhygienically ajar. She was a little surprised that it was all so temporary-seeming; but then, she supposed this whole operation must be temporary. A few hopeful strikes, and the Germans would catch on soon enough. Missions would fail, visible ruin would no longer be a passport into trust. The colonel would return no doubt to a regular hospital, and take his patients with him. What had been hush-hush would become celebrated, the surgeon's magic fingers restoring health and function if not quite youthful beauty to a devastated generation. Major Black would stay, perhaps, to train fitter men for other purposes, and not need an operating theatre. Aesculapius would do whatever Aesculapius did, but he'd do it somewhere else.

She was drifting; it really had been too long. Fortunately her hands were keeping up, where her head was wandering off. Colonel Treadgold reached out, palm up, and she slapped the handle of a scalpel into it without thought, without needing to think.

It would be all too easy – no, it
was
all too easy to look for glimpses of Peter in all this polished reflective steel. Distorted figures twisted in and out of view at every movement. Was that her own face caught in the scalpel's blade, or was it another's? Was he screaming, was he falling forever into the endless distance of that flat surface? Or was this him on the table, come to ground at last and cruelly disguised, his face ripped quite away?

Nonsense. The patient's name was Jones, Brendan Jones. He was a navigator, caught in an explosion when his Wellington crashed on landing. Most patients here, she was learning, had met their catastrophes on British airfields, either taking off or landing or caught by German raiders on the ground. Few fitted the picture in her head, the lone ace baling out of his blazing Spit, tumbling to earth with his parachute aflame. Those days were gone, perhaps. Not Tolchard – of course! – but most of these boys came from bombers. If too many of them were pilots, that was because the damn fools ordered their crews to jump and then tried to land a burning or broken plane single-handed, made a mess of it and half incinerated themselves in the wreckage.

‘He'll do, for now. Wheel him back to the ward, lads. Nurse, you tidy up in here; this is my last for the day. Harry, will you come?'

He had, she thought, forgotten her name entirely. Name and rank both, washed out by blood and weariness. This work honed him like a blade till there was nothing left but skill and focus, a fine concentration and a delicate touch. He slouched off now, heads together with the anaesthetist, both confident in what they'd done, shedding care like a coat as they went. They would hole up in some den and be men together, drink whisky, smoke a cigar or a pipe perhaps and talk not at all about the day. By the time anyone saw them again it would be cider for the colonel, his beloved eccentricity, and his eyes would sparkle with bonhomie above the spruce restoration of his moustache, wilting now after a day's confinement behind a surgical mask. She knew. Peter had been just the same. Even in peacetime he would wear himself to exhaustion, hurling some new crate about the sky and then debriefing after, spending hours longer in discussion with designers and engineers, how to make the thing fly faster, higher, further than before. Then he'd go to the pub with a few chosen friends, sooner than come home to her. By the time she saw him he'd be cheerfully soused and ready for bed, ready to do it all again next day.

War had shattered many things, ultimately everything, but still she saw that same pattern repeat again and again, wherever men clustered together with purpose.

Orderlies took Flying Officer Jones away. One would have stayed to help her with the clean-up, but she chased him off. No better way to learn the layout of a theatre – and the preferences of its master – than by cleaning it. A thorough disinfection must wait till the morning, and hopefully other hands than hers, but she'd leave the room sparkling if she could. One last effort and then her bed and blessed sleep. Dreamless, if she had any luck at all.

She mopped and sponged, she filled and emptied buckets, tipping them into the sink for lack of a drain in the floor. Wet white walls were a satisfaction; water was grey-pink as it swirled and gurgled against cracked off-white earthenware, the broad oblong of the butler's sink. If there was a word for that colour, she didn't know it. She knew the colour itself, though, all too well. It was the colour that people went, people like herself, at their absolute ends. The end of their tethers, the end of their lives. Exhaustion could turn a healthy English rose complexion to this sick and chalky wash. So could imminent death.

Water swirled and sank and tried to carry her tired head with it, down and down. Down into the clouds, falling and falling, with nothing but a further fall beyond  . . .

No.

No. She wouldn't do this, she wouldn't let it happen. Wouldn't let it
be
. She was stronger than this,
better
than this.

She gripped the thick glazed rim of the sink with both hands, and held on grimly. Stared down into the dizzying water and clung just as avidly to what she knew, what was inarguably so.

Her name was Ruth Taylor – by her own choice, that! – and she was not plunging through clouds, not caught in a desperate and catastrophic fall. No. That had been her husband's doom, not hers. Her husband's
choice
, not to pull his ripcord, not to live. Which was something she had to live with, yes, but she didn't need to relive it. Not in her head, and certainly not in this house. That was only water, washing water. If she felt dizzy it was only from the heat of these lamps beating down at her. She needed to finish up here and switch them off, leave the room, breathe cool air awhile. A walk in the gardens, that would be the thing. No doubt there would be another curious encounter, one more ambiguous individual to be somehow wrestled into place. She could deal with that when it happened. Just as she could deal with this, she was dealing with it, here and now. Standing on the floor she had just washed, gripping the sink, gazing down the plughole as it cleared.

Lifting her head as it cleared.

Seeing the operating theatre all about her, tables and trolleys, bright metal and white walls, white linens, fierce lights. Nothing else.

Of course, nothing else. Anything else was only in her head. Perhaps she should see Aesculapius.

Perhaps not.

She wheeled the basket of bloodied dressings down the corridor to the laundry room. Before the war, they might have gone to the furnace for incineration; these days all but the most soiled would be boiled clean, soaked in carbolic acid and reused. Scrupulous hoarding. It suited the national character, perhaps, but it was a weary way of life.

She had learned something similar for herself, a way to manage work and war and grief all together. Short on sleep and chased by nightmare, at the end of a long day's work she still had reserves of energy, hoarded against need. Enough at least to smile and chat to the orderlies in the laundry room; enough to turn away from the enticing kitchen stairs and head determinedly for the dining hall. She wanted nothing more than a bite to eat in a quiet corner, and then her bed. Instead she would sit at a table with a dozen others and do the dutiful Sister Taylor, a figure of new authority making a place for herself in the hospital and the house and the hierarchy all three, linked but distinct. An hour, one more hour before she could be alone. A meal and a cup of tea, both eminently needful; that was not too much to ask of herself.

Just one hour. It was almost a promise. Cool sheets and solitude were more than a dream, achievable. Almost there. This was how you managed the war and the grief together, how you survived it: one hour at a time, one survivable thing after another. It was the whole span that was just too much to ask, the endlessness, the forever of loss and defeat and sorrow.

She crossed the courtyard, came into the high hallway and was met as ever by a blast of noise. No piano tonight, but too many voices. Far too many faces. Patients and staff, officers and men and women too, and all of them apparently staring at her.

It made her head spin once again. But if she hadn't fainted before, on her own, unobserved, she was certainly not going to faint now. Not again. She was quite in control of her body now. Her legs brought her to a table, and, ‘Is this seat taken? No? May I  . . .?'

In fact, she already had. She was sitting down, drawing in her chair; someone was reaching for her cup and pouring tea from a vast collective pot.

Here were more names to learn, more faces to memorize. Extraordinary faces, some of them: faces without noses, faces with noses like elephants' trunks, faces so wrapped in bandages it was impossible to see what kind of nose they wore.

‘Well,' she said, ‘this is like Darwin's finches in reverse.'

Blank looks, puzzlement, curiosity. A man whose nose resembled a walrus more than an elephant, or perhaps a fat sheep's tail more than that, said, ‘Sister?'

‘Every island he went to, Darwin found that birds' beaks had developed differently, according to the local conditions and the food supply. It was as though they were deliberately isolationist, birds of a feather flocking together. Birds of a beak. And yet here you are, with all your  . . . wonderful variety of noses, all clustered at the same table.' She beamed around at them, took charge of the teapot and went on because she could really do nothing else now. ‘So tell me, is this fellow feeling, or are you talking shop in the mess?'