House of Doors (4 page)

So, no. Let it stand, for now. She'd find her answer from the other nurses. She took a step towards the rear of the car, but he blocked her. ‘Never mind your case, one of us will take that up for you later.'

‘No, no, I should—'

‘What you should do,' he said firmly, taking her arm in his, ‘is come with me to meet the old man. Report in. Salute and so forth. Do nurses salute? I don't know, but I'm sure you must  . . .'

He was talking nonsense but his intent was nothing but practical, as he led her up two steps to the door. She went along because again she didn't have the option.

It was a plain plank door, unpainted and possibly as old as the house it inhabited. Not iron-bound or studded, nothing grand. This was a servants' way to come and go. Servants and children, perhaps, visiting the kitchens on a detour between nursery and stable. Not for family in the proper sense, not when they were being proper. These days perhaps it was a door for staff, and not perhaps for patients.

There was no handle and no escutcheon, only a keyhole deeply recessed, a cavity she could have slid three fingers into, three with ease. She wondered briefly how Tolchard meant to open it, with his one good hand so solidly clasping her elbow; then she saw the scuff marks and streaks of mud that adorned its lower planking and knew, even before he lifted his foot to kick it wide.

That seemed disrespectful, both to the door and to the house it guarded. She lifted her gaze, not wanting to watch. Lifted her chin too, stubborn in the face of defeat, fighting back a wave of dull exhaustion with the world.
Six more months, just six months. My promise and no more.

She couldn't remember now why she'd ever made that promise. All she could see in front of her was the door, a flat barrier, dark and unpromising, unadorned. It seemed appropriate.

Then her eyes found forms within the ancient wood: a knot here, a whorl of grain there, a scar from some injury long ago. They looked almost like eyes and a mouth; that was almost a face beneath the varnish of centuries.

It was a face, of course. It was Peter's face, emerging from the wood just at her own height as it properly ought to be, she was tall for a woman and he not for a man.

His face, wreathed in the smoke of his disaster, screaming.

Tolchard kicked the door open and she saw Peter fall away from her, falling and falling.

Tolchard stepped forward and took her with him, and she felt herself follow Peter, falling and falling.

TWO

‘
W
ell,' a voice said, ‘I've known young women come fainting across my threshold before this, but I don't expect to find it in my nurses.'

She had, of course, expected Aesculapius.

This was someone else altogether. A burly man, balding, with a luxuriant silver moustache to compensate. His voice rumbled like a cannonball in a barrel; his hands were huge and unexpectedly subtle. She could feel the strength in them as he lifted her up, the delicacy with which he checked her pulse.

‘Feeling better?'

‘Ye–yes  . . .'

He eased her back against something firm but yielding, the rising arm of a couch. She blinked a little dizzily, and lifted her head from its seductive solidity. It smelled of comforts, leather and tobacco. She could see the dark deep-buttoned back of it stretching away, her own body laid out along its length. Her shoes were missing. No doubt she should say
where am I?
or
what happened?
, in her new unexpected role as a fainting female. But she knew exactly what had happened. She was quite clear about that, she remembered it distinctly. The door  . . .

No. She wouldn't think about the door. Better to focus on the professional shame of this moment; better yet to distract both herself and her interlocutor. She turned to look about her, and there
was
Aesculapius. Not the man, the bust. Set now in an alcove that might have been designed for him, where she might have assumed he'd stood for a century or more if she hadn't seen him being carried about London just a week ago.

Nothing else in this room suited it half so well. She couldn't guess, quite, what its proper purpose had been, before. Perhaps one would need to have grown up in those circles, to see a room with all its proper furniture stripped out and still tell at a glance the butler's pantry from the housekeeper's room from the nursery toy-store. Ruth's parents had been well-to-do, but never quite part of the country-house set.

Peter might have known – but actually she thought perhaps one would need to have grown up in this particular house, to know this particular room. Plain white wainscoting, with the plaster painted institution green above. That told her nothing. Nor did the off-square shape of it, nor the window that lacked a sill, nor that curious solitary niche in the wall. There were cupboards hidden behind the wainscot, she could see keyholes and fine brass hinges, but again those had nothing to say about what they were designed to hold.

Whatever its original use, the room had been taken over by a man with a whimsical practicality. This couch had surely been salvaged from somewhere else in the house. That desk likewise, a massive Victorian edifice with a bank of drawers in each pedestal. At this moment, the desktop was bare but for a stopped clock, a stiff-backed lamp and an elderly teddy bear who leaned against it, much as a drunk might lean against a street light.

The shelving on either side of the desk was new and utilitarian, burdened with books and files in that kind of tumbled disorder that speaks of constant use. The floor was uncarpeted, the window rather shockingly uncurtained. It was a sign of how war retrained the mind, Ruth supposed a little ruefully, that she could come round from a faint and gaze around an unfamiliar room and find herself thinking of the blackout.

If that was what it took to keep herself from thinking about the faint, about the door, about Peter – well.

Perhaps she should ask about the blackout. This might be remote country and far from any ARP wardens, but the law was still the law. Planes get lost, lights attract bombs; this was a military establishment. And more than a home for convalescent pilots, there seemed no doubt about that.

Good, more things to think about. To ask about, perhaps, if only to earn a snub in response. She was here to nurse, after all, not to interrogate senior officers about their other occupations.

Aesculapius watched from his alcove. Benignly, she thought. She wanted to think.

She was sure she knew whose office this was. Not this man's who sat above her now, in the chair he'd drawn over from the desk. Who watched her with a less benign eye, perhaps.

Whose moustache twitched hypnotically as he spoke, but best not to focus on that or she'd get the giggles and find herself in disgrace on her first day. More disgrace than she was in already.

‘Want to tell me what happened?'

No.
Aloud, she said, ‘I'm sorry, sir, it's my own stupid fault. I can't remember the last time I slept properly, and I haven't eaten since  . . . oh, sometime yesterday. I should have thought to bring something, sandwiches, something. But I haven't been thinking any too clearly in recent days, it's all been such a rush to get here. Spending the night on Darlington station must just have been the last straw. I didn't try to sleep, I'm afraid. And then the motor made me feel sick, a little, and stepping out – well, I came over all dizzy,'
and the rest you know.

That should do.

‘Hmm. Nothing to do with young Tolchard's looks, then?'

‘Oh.' In honesty, it hadn't even occurred to her – but of course he would think that. Wonder about it, at least. ‘Good lord, sir, no. If a damaged face could make me pass out, I wouldn't have worked through the Blitz. I've seen worse than Flying Officer Tolchard. And no one so well patched up, either  . . .'

He snorted. ‘Flattery cuts no ice with me, young woman,' but she thought he was pleased none the less. Pleased that he needn't send her back, at least, as unfit for his purposes.

‘Of course not, sir – but I look forward to watching you at work. Assisting in theatre, if I'm allowed to.' And then, determinedly bright and sitting up, ‘Is this your office?'

‘Not mine, no. M'colleague's, Major Dorian. Trick cyclist. You met him. He's not here today, but this was the best place to bring you. Otherwise it was treat you where you lay. Couldn't take you into one of the wards, let the men see their new ward sister flat on her back. Bad enough that those boys who fetched you saw you go. I've sworn them to secrecy and they'll keep their word, it won't be all over the hospital, but even so  . . .'

‘It will, you know.'

‘Beg pardon?'

‘It will be all over the hospital. By now, most likely. By lights-out, most certainly.'

‘No, no. They gave their word.'

‘And they'll keep it, I know – but even so. Did you carry me in here yourself?'

‘Yes, I did. That Tolchard boy fetched me at a run, and  . . .'

‘And then you sent him off to, where, to the kitchens to fetch a glass of water or a cup of hot sweet tea, while you carried me however far this is from the back door? So the kitchen staff know that something's afoot, and so does any nurse who saw us in the corridor, and any orderly who was plying a mop in the vicinity. And this is a
hospital
, which is worse than boarding school for simple gossip. No one has literally anything better to do here than talk about other people.'

He blinked, slowly, as he thought about it. Then he said, ‘Well, I didn't see an orderly. That means nothing. You're quite right, of course. There may have been faces in doorways, and scurrying footsteps. You'll just have to deal with it, as best you can. Come!'

That last was not to Ruth. Rather it was bellowed at the door, in response to a hammered tattoo.

It was, of course, Flying Officer Tolchard. With reinforcements, because he couldn't both knock and carry.

In this same house, in another world – before the war, that was – his drafted assistant would have been a housemaid, no doubt, or a kitchen maid. Perhaps the chance would come again. In the meantime, in this world, she wore another kind of uniform and would no doubt have saluted if she hadn't had both hands full of tray.

‘I did ask for brandy, sir,' Tolchard was explaining, a little incoherently, trying to justify himself and his companion.

‘I sent you for water,' the colonel observed, quite mildly.

‘Yes, sir. I, ah, amended your suggestion.' Of course he did: young man with a reputation and no experience, dismissing water out of hand, wanting to do better by her. Fainting females required brandy, everyone knew that. Brandy or smelling salts, and only virgin aunts carried those. He wouldn't even know what they were. ‘But Cook interrogated me – you should give that man to Major Black, sir, he's a natural – and then he wouldn't give me any brandy. He sent soup.'

‘So I see.'

So did Ruth see. Indeed, she couldn't see anything else, couldn't take her eyes from the covered bowl. Wisps of steam escaped the tin lid, filling the room with a savoury aroma, flooding her mouth with saliva. She hadn't been hungry, all night or all this morning; she had barely had an appetite for months, indeed, not since Peter  . . .

Not since Peter. That was an absolute division, and it was still a surprise sometimes that the rest of the world didn't acknowledge it, didn't seem quite to understand quite what had been lost that day.

She was hungry now. Ravenous, apparently. The ATS girl was monstrously slow, deliberately tormenting her, laying the tray on the desk out of reach while she fetched a little side-table to the couch here, while she set a place with spoon and knife and napkin. Lifting lids aside to reveal first a plate of bread with a knob of butter, real country butter on the side; and then at last the bowl, the soup, brought to her.

It was just a broth, beef broth with vegetables and little dumplings floated in it. It might have been the most delicious meal she'd ever confronted. She barely paused to murmur an apology to the two men standing above her, ‘I'm sorry, I hope you don't mind if I—' and then she did, she started whether they minded or not.

She was, dimly, aware of a conversation above her head.

‘The man's a genius.'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Did you actually tell him that she hadn't apparently eaten for two days?'

‘No, sir. I didn't know. I suppose I should have thought, but  . . .'

‘Not paid to think, eh, Tolchard?'

‘No, sir.'

‘No, nor I. Just as well, in the circs. Nor Cook, of course, officially. Perhaps he knows these things by instinct.'

‘Perhaps so, sir. Though I believe I did mention that she'd been all night on the platform, waiting for the milk train. I suppose one could deduce  . . .'

‘Yes. If one's mind moved that way. Better soup than brandy, one might think.'

They sounded curiously satisfied, for two men who had conspicuously failed to think any such thing. Ruth didn't care. She had soup. And bread and butter, but mostly soup. Soup was a miracle, all unheralded: working from the inside out, spreading a sense of well-being through all her tissues, warmth in her belly and comfort in her bones even before it made its insidious healthful way to her headspace. There would be no more visions of Peter's face in woodgrain, no. No more Marley-like visitations. No more passing out as she passed over a threshold. This was a regular hospital in a regular house and all it offered her was work. Work and soup. She would be grateful for that, for both of those. Work at a distance from all that had gone so sour down south, soup at a distance from any ration book.

She supposed she should hand over her ration book to someone, at least for the gesture of it. And her other papers, the orders that had brought her here. That should have been first business on arrival. Ready now – and not going to wipe this last crust of bread around the bowl, no, not under two cynical, amused pairs of eyes – she straightened and set down her spoon, moved the table a little to one side to demonstrate how fit she was for work now, lifted her head to meet the colonel's smile and his strict instruction.