House of Doors (18 page)

Well, why not? If he was going to give his life anyway in a month or two months or half a year –
throw his life away
was how she thought of it, but this was wartime; she was perhaps insufficiently patriotic and not at all male enough – then why not give him what he wanted now?
The tools to do the job
the major would call it, perhaps.

Never mind that it was most uncertain whether Michael would actually be sent on any mission. He wasn't head of any list, except in his own stubborn head. It would be Major Black's call as much as Major Dorian's. Aesculapius was only covering all the possibilities. Playing Boy Scout with a young man's life, making sure he was prepared.

Ruth could hate Major Dorian sometimes. It really was all too easy.

This, now, this would be hard. Except that he was a sensible young man, accustomed to trouble. He wouldn't fuss over what he could not have. He certainly wouldn't expect her to produce Major Dorian out of the air. Nor to sit up all night holding his hand while he sweated through whatever came, his private hell. He was of that class and generation that did turn to women, had likely done it all his life – nanny or housekeeper, she would still guess, rather than mother – but was too well trained to take them for granted. He'd drink his cocoa and be politely grateful, say goodnight as soon as his mug was empty, leave her and go – where? Back to his ward, to his bed? Perhaps, but Dusty's empty bed would hang in the corner of his eye all night, like an accusation. He might have somewhere else, a place of solitude if not safety, some dark hole in this pitiless house where he could crouch and set his teeth and suffer alone.

No. Not while she had any say in the matter. Certainly not so long as she had him here, sitting on her bed. For the moment he was trapped by hot cocoa and good breeding. Later – well. She needed another way to snare him. It would be no use marching him back to bed and tucking him in. An easy, superficial reassurance wouldn't do it either.

Well, then. If nothing easy would avail, she would do what was harder.

And not spare him, either. If he was stubbornly determined to sweat, he could do it under her eye. Under her whip, if that was what it took to keep him here. The lash of her tongue, wielded all unkindly: he wouldn't run away from that. Too stubborn for his own good, this boy.

She said, ‘Why has tonight upset you so?'

He would be staring, she thought – deliberately so, to make his point, little boy with his eyes stretched in disbelief – if his eyes would only allow it. The colonel's handiwork was efficient, but not that artful. Those heavy awkward lids –
cut from your underarms, Bed Thirty-Four, I know far too much about how you're put together
– wouldn't open wide enough to give him the expression he was yearning for.

He said, ‘Dusty, what happened to him  . . . He's maimed for life now, not even the colonel could fix that hand. The colonel's not even trying. Of course I'm upset, we all are.'

‘Of course. But let me be brutal, Michael. You're all more or less maimed for life, regardless of the colonel's wizardry. Miller's not the only one to lose his hand.' She carefully wasn't looking at his own, useless in his lap there, but it lay between them none the less. An unspoken truth, an artefact of war. ‘And' –
being brutal
– ‘if Miller is out of the picture, that moves everyone below him one rung up the ladder, doesn't it? Brings you one step closer to what you all seem to want so much, an actual mission overseas?'
Including you, young man. I know how low you stand, on that wretched ladder.

Hard to be sure if he wanted to flush or turn pale. The patchwork skin on his cheeks was livid only at the seams, along the lines of his scars. ‘I–I suppose so, yes.'

‘And you've been sleeping well enough recently, you haven't needed Major Dorian's medication or you'd have it to hand, or else the night nurse would. It's not the normal commerce of this hospital, to have patients trudging from one wing to another in search of a lost psychiatrist. So tell me truly, Michael, what's on your mind? What spectre's haunting you so thoroughly that you need a special dose to see you through tonight?'

Empty-handed, he would have fiddled she thought with the tasselled cord of his dressing gown. Two-handed, he might have turned and turned his mug between his restless fingers. As it was, as
he
was, he sat painfully still, gazing down into the steam of it; and then lifted his head and met her eye to eye and said, ‘It's the fear, you see. If it can happen to Dusty, it can happen to any of us. We train with live ammo every day, and none of us is as handy as we used to be. We're all awkward sometimes. Things get dropped. Things that go bang, sometimes. It's that easy, that's the message of tonight. One clumsy moment, and all that we're working for is gone. Or just held up, put back, months more in hospital before we can be patched together again. Any of us can do that to ourselves, at any time  . . .'

Now she'd touched the truth of him, she knew. But she still didn't understand it. Not by a distance.

She said, ‘Explain this to me. What is it that's so dreadfully urgent, what makes you so mad keen to get over there?'

His turn now, not to be understanding her. ‘Well, it's the war.'

‘The war's not going to be over, Michael. Not any time soon.'

‘Our part in it is. This whole project is, well, not one strike only, but a few rapid punches. Only some of us can go. The Nazis will catch on soon enough. We go now, soon, in the first wave, or we don't go. The chances are there won't be a second.'

‘And you're frightened of missing it. I see.' He reminded her suddenly of her father. After a moment's thought, she told him that. ‘He joined up in 'fourteen, right at the start. He says he was terrified of its being all over by Christmas, of his not having the time to reach the front. He was in the trenches for four years, he saw all his friends killed and most of his men, he came out of it – well, I won't say ruined, but damaged, yes. Maimed, if you like. In his mind, I mean, from confronting the truth of it, what war was really like, as against what he'd been told.'

He seemed almost to be smiling, though it was hard to be certain. She heard her own voice die away, as she saw what little impact her words were having. He spelled it out, unnecessarily, brutal in his turn. ‘Sister Taylor. Really truly, that's not a revelation that I need. I've seen the truth of war, I've seen the worst of it. Seen it and felt it,' his one hand showing her, gesturing dangerously with his half-drunk cup: his face, his other hand. Had she forgotten?

‘I hadn't forgotten that,' though in fact she almost had, and she blushed at the lie of it. He might choose to see that as a compliment. He was what he was, more than the sum of his injuries, and she still found him worthwhile. Worth her time, even in the dead dark, the chill hours of the morning. ‘I'm sorry, I expressed myself badly. What I mean is, it's not his naivety you remind me of, just his hurry to immolate himself.'

‘For his country's good.' That was flung back at her like a flag waved in the face of the enemy. Scorn and defiance, but she was ready for it.

‘Who was it who said that patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel?'

‘Samuel Johnson –' of course he'd know that, he was all too well brought-up, this boy – ‘but—'

‘But nothing, young man. You don't get to flourish me down that way. You said it yourself, you've seen the worst that war can do. Face to face, and altogether too close. You shouldn't expect to go back again for a second look. There's no need.'

‘I've done my bit, you mean?'

‘Yes. Yes, that is what I mean. You've done more than enough. There will always be other volunteers, new men.'

‘No one quite like me,' he asserted.

‘Well, no, but enough who are like enough. Enough like you. Again, you've said it yourself. There are plenty here, ahead of you on the ladder. Too many for your comfort, you're afraid they'll squeeze you out. But if the mission's all that matters, let them go. They're ahead of you for a reason, they're better equipped,'
two hands and a less ready tongue, a voice that won't give them away.

He said nothing. She had pushed him finally to the wall he didn't want to breach. Determinedly, she pushed him over. ‘You know this, Michael. You know it all. And you're still desperate to go. Or is that it, truly? Isn't it rather that you're desperately afraid to stay?'

Again he made that stubborn gesture, lifting his head to meet her gaze. Now it was more effortful, and his eyes wanted to flick away but he wouldn't let them. He'd had fire in him before. Now it was ashes, and she was sorry.

He said, ‘What do I have to stay for? Crippled and disfigured, what kind of life is that? Listen to your own words.
Face to face,
you said,
too close.
Only it won't be wartime, and it won't ever be over. I'll always be too close, and my face will always look like this. Would you want to spend a lifetime watching people stare and shy away?'

So that was it. She supposed it had to be. She'd let him fool her at the start, or at least allowed herself to feel fooled –
please, you mustn't mind my face. I don't, so why should you?
– but at heart he was still a boy, still utterly exposed. Almost literally so, the skull beneath the skin. You couldn't help but see it, looking at the crude mask that covered it.

She wondered if heroic self-sacrifice in wartime always came down to male vanity in the end.

Sometimes it's just cruel to be kind. She tried the other thing. ‘Better to die a hero than live a cripple, is that it?'

She put as much contempt into her voice as she could manage, a biting withering scorn for his weakness, but he didn't seem to be withered. He blinked in that slow deliberate learned way of his, still nothing like an instinct, and said, ‘Yes. Yes, that's it.'

‘And you're terrified you won't get the chance. You'll have an accident like Dusty did tonight, and rule yourself out. Or Major Black will decide against you, and give your place to someone else, someone fitter or less fit; or you'll just run out of time, the Germans will catch on and the project will be closed down before your turn comes round. And then you'll just have to face up to – well, to life with that face, and that hand, and all that they imply. People being shy of you, as you say. Children shrieking and running away, I expect. You probably like children, boys of your kind usually do: the way they gaze up at you with worship in their eyes, and then run off making aeroplane noises with their arms spread wide for wings. Not so much worship now, just the running away. That must be unbearable, I expect. So here you are, still hoping to escape into some glorious immolation, to go down blazing – again – and write your name in letters of fire across the history of the war; and the prospect of losing even that little hope must be terrible to you. Which is why you suddenly can't sleep without drugs, and why you've come all across the hospital in chase of them. I'm still right, am I?'

She was still trying to sound crisp and contemptuous, which was hard when she was so near tears. Little boy lost, in a world more cruel than he could cope with: he did remind her so very much of herself. It was easier for a man in some ways, but far more pitiful. She had to try to swallow down the pity, and simply let the accusation stand.

Something at least seemed to be getting through. He had to touch his tongue to those rubbery approximate lips of his, before he could even whisper ‘Yes.'

‘Oh, Michael.' She was abruptly sitting on the bed beside him, without consciously having decided to move. Sitting on his good side, taking the half-drunk mug from his hand and setting it safely out of reach before it could tip all over the blankets. ‘Other people's rudeness, their ignorance – is that really worth your life? Children can still learn to love you, it'll only take them a day to get over the way you look, and then they'll be fascinated. You're still a hero, you're a war ace; that's your own courage that you wear blazoned on your face. Like a duelling scar, but infinitely more precious. It tells everyone you meet who you are and what you did for us. You should be proud. We will be, after the war. We'll see men like you and we'll know your story before you tell it us, because it'll be the story of England and how we survived  . . .'

‘Scoundrel.' He was trying to smile again, making a worse job of it this time, barely a manufactured twitch at the corner of his mouth. She supposed it would take as much effort as blinking, or more. He'd need to be committed.

‘Well. It's mostly a lie to plead patriotism, but I think I'm allowed to celebrate it in others. We won't bruit it abroad, but we'll keep it as our dirty little secret. You can call me a patriot and I'll call you a hero, but only when we're alone.'

She gave his arm a little shake, just to underline their pact, because she did appear to be holding it. Both hands curled around his biceps, one above the other. When had that happened? She used to cling to Peter this way, close and warm. No man else, not ever. Not her father, even.

The arm was stiff, because this one elbow was braced against his knee. She thought he'd be leaning on both, staring down between his feet, only that his other arm wouldn't bend this way and wasn't reliable for leaning on. She wasn't sure she'd be allowed to hug him that side, it might hurt his
amour propre
, that damned vanity again. Or it might more simply hurt him, there might still be pain. She wasn't sure. She ought to be sure; he was her patient, after all.

Not officially, perhaps; not on her corridor. But still. She ought to know.

He'd slipped into a brown study. Best to leave him to it. Not literally, she wasn't moving from his side. She wasn't so much as shifting a finger, now that she seemed to have taken hold. This might be what he needed more than opiates, just someone to be with him. Someone he wasn't in competition with for those few precious places, seats in a plane and a perilous fall beyond. Down and down  . . .