House of Doors (3 page)

‘Oh, I like beer well enough,' though it hadn't figured largely in her life, nor in her expectations. Nor at all in any hospital she knew.
Start again, Ruth Taylor. With a cleaner slate this time.

The cider bearers were taking their time. One walked with a curious stiff gait, from the hips, unbendingly; the other needed both hands on the crate, and had to shuffle sideways as they came.

‘Should we ask if we can help, perhaps?'

‘No, no. Absolutely not. We only get an exeat for tasks we swear blue that we can do. It's really important, you'll find, to let us do them.'

‘You mean they'd be humiliated by the offer.'

‘Utterly. Brutally. They're fine as they are. Doing well.'

‘Well, then. As we have a little time to wait, why don't you tell me something about RAF Morwood?'

‘Well, I could do. That name's a fiction, for a start.'

‘It is?' It was the destination marked on all her papers: blandly uninformative, not in any gazetteer she could find.

‘Utterly. It must have been designed to confuse the enemy, if any enemy comes sniffing after us. I suppose they're bound to, sooner or later. When they do, they'll be looking for an airfield and find a big house; and then they'll find that the house is just a convalescent home for badly injured aircrew, with a genius surgeon attached. As witness.'

As witness himself, he meant, and his two friends who were even now heaving their burden on to the back seat. Introductions followed, while they squeezed themselves in on either side. Donald Carter-Fleck – dragged from a crashed plane with a shattered pelvis and largely rebuilt from the waist down, as he told it, still learning to walk again – and Rupert Ronson, whose hands were savagely twisted in towards his wrists. ‘My fingers look like boiled prawns,' he said, examining them ruefully. ‘The Infant's my dry run, you see, my stand-in. The old man is practising on him, and once he gets that hand right, he'll work on mine. I wish he'd hurry up, to be frank.'

‘Patience, Methuselah.' Tolchard might perhaps be a year younger than Ronson. ‘Never rush a doctor, a sapper or a  . . . whoops. Beg pardon, Sister.'

‘Don't worry. Infant,' using the absurd nickname deliberately, to let him hear the truth of it. From his point of view, she likely seemed very old indeed: married and widowed both, two stages ahead of himself. She wanted to keep that distance. ‘Anything you've heard, I've heard worse.'

In fact the versions she'd heard had been different, and none of them had started with a doctor. The sapper was common to them all; Royal Engineers dealt with bomb disposal. The third element, the one he'd elided: the politest version she knew had a good-time girl in there, but they were all variations on a whore. Which she could probably say in mixed company with a deal more comfort than he could, and a deal more experience too. She'd treated some so often they were almost friends. She doubted he'd ever actually encountered one, beyond the occasional shouted exchange in the West End when he was out with his brother officers. In the old days, before his catastrophe. He wouldn't do that now.

She didn't want to be cruel, but if he ever grew too outrageous, she might accuse him with his own virginity, in front of his brother officers. Just to quiet him, and to see if his patched-up face could still blush.

Quiet in the car meant that she had a minute or two to pay attention to the world beyond. That long aristocratic black bonnet thrust between high banks and stone walls as they climbed, erupting at last onto open moorland. Sheep scattered across the road ahead, then abandoned it altogether as Tolchard played out another intricate rhythm with the unsubtle blast of his horn. He had been musical once, perhaps. She supposed he still would be, talent didn't burn away. But he'd have no singing voice left in him, and one-handed instruments were few. Perhaps he could learn to play bugle or cornet, trombone even, if he only had the lips to make an embouchure. After another surgery, perhaps. They couldn't mean to leave him as he was, surely, with that oddly articulate savage gash of a mouth.

‘I tell you what's odd,' said Ronson from the back, ‘these sheep – have you noticed how they never come over to our side of the hill? There's nothing to stop them, but they won't come.'

It was probably just as well. These restless young men would only use them for polo ponies, or some other outrage. Ruth was on the very verge of saying so when she was forestalled.

‘Hefted,' Carter-Fleck said, ‘that's the word. I knew a shepherd once, and he says a flock is hefted to their own land, and won't leave it. They're territorial.'

‘Like cats, you mean?'

‘Not much like cats, no. But still. If they're born on the land, they won't stray.'

‘So much for the school chaplain and all his homilies. Another metaphor bites the dust.'

The height of the moor was marked with a tumble of exposed rock that the Devonshire colonel would no doubt call a tor. Now they were coming down into the next valley, and no, there were no sheep. She was learning an unexpected respect for sheep, just on this one brief journey. If she were free to roam, she thought she'd not roam in this direction. Of course it was just the angle of the sun and the slope of the hill, the dark of the woodland below, but she felt suddenly embraced by shadow and distance, very far from town or comfort.

‘Now this is genuinely odd,' Tolchard said beside her. ‘Never mind Rupert and his curiously static sheep. If you owned this land and wanted to build yourself a stately pile, wouldn't you put it somewhere up here, up high, for the view?'

‘Yes,' she agreed. ‘I suppose I would.'

‘Quite. But you can't even see the house from here, it's hidden behind that bluff; and by the time the lane brings us around, we'll be down among the trees and seeing nothing.'

‘Just as well, really,' from Ronson. ‘In the circumstances.'

‘Well, perhaps. But whoever built it, they weren't building for these circumstances, were they? I say it's downright strange, such a grand place being built so secret.'

Ruth wanted to ask what circumstances he meant, why a convalescent hospital might need such degrees of discretion. But by definition, such a question would be unanswerable. The wary practices of wartime held it back in any case, stifled in her throat. She would learn soon enough. Anything she wasn't authorized to hear would be common knowledge in the nurses' staffroom.

Random stones on either side of the road grew less random, grew into walls; and here were the trees, ancient and overhanging, so that the way seemed to sink between them. It was fanciful surely to think that this valley was both older and colder than its neighbour, but Ruth thought it anyway. Again and again those dry walls were broken by tree roots or leaning trunks, as though they'd been built up in a slowly desperate attempt to hold back the forest. Desperate and doomed, and perhaps by now abandoned.

They drove too far, she thought, in the swallowing shadow of the trees. At last they did have to come to a gate, though. Logic demanded it, and here it was: a new gate, indeed, of welded steel and coiled wire cruelly barbed, spanning an old rutted drive. The gate seemed pointless, given the slumped condition of the walls on either side. Likewise the armed guards hurrying from their sandbagged redoubt to haul the gate aside and salute the car through.

‘This is actually the back way,' Tolchard said. ‘There's a proper gatehouse at the far end of the valley and a better road, but we all use this. No point driving all the way down, only to come all the way back again. The old coach-road used to run over there, you see, before the railway came.'

And then the town would have grown around the railway, and the road must have turned to accommodate the town, and so the house found itself facing the wrong direction. Not actually moving, but ever more remote. She supposed that would be true of dozens, maybe hundreds of great houses, that they were caught in stasis while the world shifted around them. The war might even be a blessing, perhaps, finding advantage in that isolation, bringing purpose back  . . .

Nonsense. Houses don't have purpose. Only people do that, and her own purpose was quite unaltered. These young men might have a brittle attraction and a deeper need that drew her deeply, but they were not irresistible. Nor was she irreplaceable. They would find other nurses to tease and amuse and depend on. She would serve her six promised months and be gone, once and for all, irrevocable. Yes.

She hadn't expected a sudden lake among the trees, it would have been almost the last thing she looked for, but here it was. Patently man-made, dug no doubt by a generation of navvies and fed from some high spring through a network of buried piping, it was long and straight and square-cornered, stone-lined. Above it were no more trees, only the terraced ranks of an old formal garden, given over now to vegetables between its paths and ponds and hedges.

The drive skirted one narrow side of the lake, giving her just time enough to lift her eyes up the broad flat steps of the terraces and find what stood above, darkly weathered and bleakly impressive, the house itself.

Just for that moment it lay in her gaze entire, all the height and the stretch of it, three storeys of old stone with attics over, and all its proportions wrong. The portico was minimal against the extravagant length of the house, the door it sheltered too tall, the windows all too small.

Then it was lost behind hedges as the drive took them up beside the gardens. She could see the house only sidewise and in glimpses, in the gaps. Knowing the military mind as she did, she was a little surprised that no one had troubled to trim the hedging; it would be a useful way to use up youthful energies and the heavy hang of time. The system that had men all across the empire whitewashing stones to line parade grounds should never blink at a little topiary.

Perhaps the CO here thought that fetching in his cider counted for more. But that was only one trip for one carload, an hour out of a day. There were people at work in the gardens, the orderly rows of greenstuff testified to that and she'd glimpsed uniforms through the rampant shadows of the hedge. And with patients as ambulatory as these, then surely  . . .?

Well. She'd find out. And it wasn't for her to be finding make-work or occupational therapy for bored convalescents.

Unless it was, of course. Unless that did indeed form an aspect of her job. She'd find out. For now she could only speculate. And here they were running past the east wing of the house, more of those small windows in a broad flat fascia unrelieved by Georgian balance or Victorian extravagance. She couldn't imagine what had happened in the owner's head, or the architect's. Nor how later minds and hands had ever made this place, ever
thought
to make it into a hospital.

Well.

The drive turned around the great bulk of the house, and behind was a courtyard framed by that long front elevation and two matching wings. The rear of the house was no more ornate;
just as brutal
, she wanted to say. In these parts perhaps they'd call it blunt, or honest. She thought it incomprehensible. Whoever built the house must have had money in quantity, surely enough for a little indulgence, a little decoration somewhere.

A separate stable block made the fourth side of the courtyard. That at least looked traditional: brick with stone facings, an archway through to the cobbled yard, a clock tower above. Whether there would be horses in there now, Ruth couldn't guess. She rather hoped there were. Airmen and cavalry were joined almost seamlessly in her mind, like squires and the hunt. These boys were all public school and old families. Horses must have been an intimate part of their childhoods, as they were of her own. She thought it would do them good to ride, those who could manage it.

Besides, she'd be glad of the chance herself, now and then. It had been too long.

But the courtyard here was full of motors, from Army lorries to tractors to motorcycles and an ambulance. Perhaps the stables were too. Horses might be seen as an extravagance; no room for them in wartime, unless they pulled a cart. If she thought them therapeutic, that might only be her own soul's yearning to go back, because she couldn't go on.

She might be alone. As alone as she felt, in this as in all things, abandoned, bereft. Betrayed.

Tolchard parked the car with a flourish of gravel, hard by a door into this near wing. Gazing at it, for a moment Ruth was simply lost to her own body. She sat where she was, quite still, because there was nothing more that she could do.

Not fear, not dread. Not acceptance. Some deeper feeling inhabited her, and she could not move against it until her young driver had made his cheerfully noisy way all around the car, opening doors for his friends on either side, finally reaching hers and holding that wide, bowing low like a footman, his appalling face glimmering with humour as he rose.

‘Welcome to Morwood, Sister Taylor.'

He gave her the cue, and she found that she could act on it. Because she had to, therefore she could: step out of the car, straighten her back, square her shoulders and confront this new dispensation. A new job, no more. It was never as bad as a new school, and would be over sooner. It was nothing like as important as a marriage – for example – although that had ended far too soon,
oh, Peter  . . .

‘Thank you.' She didn't know what to call him, quite. His nickname was for his friends, his surname was for his superiors, his rank would be absurd. His bed number – well, if that was truly the custom here, she could fall in with it, but not yet. Not until she knew everyone else's number too. For now she elided the difficulty with a smile.

He knew, she thought. And did nothing to help her out, because he was young and wicked, amused, a boy: hurt in adult games too hard for him, but still a boy beneath.

Besides, if he offered a solution it would be a callous one.
Call me Mikey, as my mother does.
She was no one's mother, and never would be now. And he wouldn't know, wouldn't think, wouldn't understand the hurt. Being a boy, and so forth.