House of Doors (11 page)

And if all of that was only making excuses to herself, at least she didn't have to admit it, even to herself. She held it ready in her mind, ready on her tongue in case of meeting anyone, and slipped out of the room. Left the light on and the door ajar, so that she could find her way back; took Judith's torch, so that she could find her way through the rest of the house. Or at least see where she was going, which wasn't quite the same thing.

Stole downstairs as quietly as she might, wishing for carpets on these bare treads or else for lighter shoes. Down one flight and another, using the torch in flashes and no more, mostly trusting for guidance to her hand on the wall and the sounds that drew her. Men's voices, footsteps, the creaks and scrapes of furniture in use. The chink of crockery, the tap of silver against china.
Sugar in your tea, Major Black?

Here was the hallway, and she didn't need the torch; the light was on. The voices lay on the further side of that tall door that led through to the ballroom, Major Black's domain. She had always known that, there had never been any question of it in her head. In daylight she had met the other face of Morwood; in darkness, of course it would be his. Even his name was an omen.

Even so, she was determined. She walked up to the door, and as her hand reached to the handle it swung open, and here came Flying Officer Tolchard, awkward with his one good hand working the door and an empty milk-jug cradled in the other elbow. Doubly awkward as his eyes met hers, as he made a sudden hushing gesture,
don't give yourself away.

She had done nothing wrong, she was clad decently in dressing gown and virtue. And yet she stood entirely still, saying nothing, letting him close that difficult door behind him, allowing him to shut her out. Again.

Himself, he was clad in black, as all those men below had been. It was some kind of exercise, and
haven't you done enough?
but the question was impossible so long as he was young and breathing, so long as the war went on. What in the world he would do afterwards, she couldn't imagine. She imagined that he gave it no thought at all. The war it was that kept him going, him and his brothers in arms.

He pulled a knit cap from his hair, which might mean anything or nothing but she chose to read it as an atavistic gesture, a charming little schoolboy moment, taking his cap off to a lady. The sideways duck of his head was incontrovertible: a message, an invitation, an instruction.
Come with me. Quietly, now.
She allowed that too after only a moment's hesitation, only just long enough to pluck the jug from his elbow and carry it herself.

Across the hall and down another flight of stairs, she hadn't been this way before, and here was the kitchen. Subterranean, in the tradition of great houses, with a mean run of windows high along one wall. Probably they looked out into a railed area of brick, sunk down behind the house. She hadn't seen it, because she had always been falling or fumbling or staring skyward. Besides, those windows were all dutifully masked. No hint of light could have slipped out to nudge at her attention.

There was a lot of light, even at this time of night. This time of morning, she supposed, and of course the kitchen would be awake. Country house or hospital or barracks, whatever this was it would make an early start on the day, which required the kitchen to make an earlier one. Night manoeuvres might mean the kitchen never got to bed at all.

The kitchen, or the cook. He couldn't actually be sole proprietor, she didn't know how the military organized their kitchens but there must be a squad of cooks and undercooks and orderlies. Still, he was here alone for now, and Tolchard called him Cook as though he were the only one, or the only one who counted. Aesculapius had done the same thing, she remembered. So had Colonel Treadgold. The colonel had called him a genius, indeed.

She had herself blessed his spirit, the unknown essence of the man, absorbing soup.

Now here he was, kneading great ramparts of dough on a table that might have served for a ship's deck. He was thinner than she might have looked for, a man in his middle years but somehow not in uniform, no hint of khaki beneath his whites.

Thin but strong in that stubborn enduring way, the kind who would work and work. He looked like he could knead his dough all day, and she knew how much work that was. Tolchard at her side was saying, ‘Cook, could you find a wet and a wad for one soul who's been up too long and another who's up too early?'

‘Your tea's waiting for you upstairs.' It was meant to be repressive, perhaps, to chase them out of his domain, but she wasn't convinced. His voice had a hint of indulgence in it already.

Which Tolchard had clearly spotted too, or else simply expected, depended on, taken for granted as he had done all his life. Unintimidated, he was drawing out a chair for her at the other end of the table, out of the cook's way, a grandstand view of the heart of the matter; he was saying, ‘I can't take Sister Taylor among the men, she'd be appalled.'

‘Young man,' it was her turn to be repressive, ‘I am quite able to go among the men without your escort. It is, in fact, my job. And I've been doing it long enough –' and under conditions appalling enough, though she wasn't going to say so – ‘that nothing you men could say or do is likely to appal me.'

‘Well, no,' he confessed, disarming as ever, ‘what I meant of course is that they'd be appalled to find a woman suddenly among them when they want to be all coarse and expletive, like proper soldiers. The major gave us a hard time out there tonight, and they need to let off steam. You'd make them swallow it instead. It doesn't do any good, swallowing steam.'

He would know, he and his cohorts. Even if he meant it metaphorically, the actual image rose up, in her head and she thought his own. He blinked, at least, that awkward conscious gesture that ought simply to be self-conscious; and carried on regardless, because that was what he did. ‘Be an angel, Cook, let us squat down here with you for half an hour. Then Sister will be on duty and I'll be off, and we'll both be out of your hair before your people come in for the day.'

In honesty, they were already squatting. Her traitorous legs had sat her in that chair, and he had perched himself cheerfully on the table edge beside.

In honesty, the cook was already making allowance and more, pulling off a couple of handfuls of dough and working them into neat little twists. Setting those on a baking tray and brushing them with egg – real egg! – and scattering sugar over, snatching up a dish towel and releasing a furnace-blast of superheated air as he opened a door on the vast range and slid the tray inside.

Everything was out of scale down here, Ruth thought. Or else it was their own fault, they weren't big enough to match their surroundings. The cook played within his kitchen like a child. It should have been a pastiche, like a one-man orchestra, where the joke is the only achievement. But he filled a tiny-seeming pot from an enormous kettle that steamed perpetually on the stove top, and it poured out good thick army tea. There was fresh milk and sugar, and ten minutes later there were those twists, finger-scorching hot and steamily delicious, with butter and plum jam if the bread itself wasn't enough. For her, it was. For Tolchard, of course, not. He expected miracles, and would always want to add sweetness.

Sweetness and wisdom, in that odd combination beloved of the young. They ate, they drank, he talked. He took her silence for the interrogation that it was, the open invitation to explain. Why he had been sidling through the dark on night exercises, he and his companions; why Major Black could seem to outrank the colonel in his calls upon the house and its facilities, its men.

Why everyone had been leaving it to everyone else to explain this to her, until here, now, a not-quite-private conversation in a kitchen corner, at the end of his day and the start of hers.

‘It's hard,' he said, and she was astonished that he might find anything hard, except the need to admit it that he did. ‘Heroism isn't meant to happen this way. It's supposed to be spontaneous and, and individual, that lone impulse to courage. Not calculated, worked for, trained in.'

‘And is that what the major's doing, training you to be heroes?'

‘Yes, that's right. He is.'

We thought you were already, you young pilots. How much more is he asking of you, how much more do you have to give?

She did have to say that in the end, as it happened, just to get him moving again when he seemed to have stalled. ‘To us, you know, you are heroes. You saved the country. Churchill himself said so.'

He shook his head. ‘It  . . . doesn't seem enough, you know? To us. A few weeks, a few months maybe for the lucky ones if that's what you call luck. Watching our friends die, not quite dying ourselves but coming close, near as damn it, leaving ourselves like this –' a gesture of his good hand at everything that was not good, his other hand, his face – ‘and what now, we just sit back and wear our courage on our faces – that's a quotation, I think, I can't remember who but it's all too horribly apt – and let others go off to fight the rest of the war?'

‘Yes,' she said, vainly, hopelessly. ‘
Yes.
'

‘No,' he said. ‘Not that. We can't. We don't  . . . we don't know how to live with ourselves.'

And if not now – she thought, and he knew – they never would. If not in this world, then where? What would they do, when the war was taken from them?

Apparently they didn't want to think about that. Or else they had thought about it, and had turned convulsively away from the prospect.

Had turned back to the war. To Major Black.

Which meant running around doing exercises in the dark, apparently. Airmen who couldn't fly, they'd need a new objective. But if they couldn't fly, neither could they fight. Surely? One-handed or claw-handed, twisted all out of shape, they couldn't fit the military machine any more, they weren't apt parts.

There was something they could do, and he didn't want to say it. She didn't want to hear it. She was trembling already on the brink of understanding, one step short.

There were German uniforms upstairs. Luftwaffe uniforms, she realized suddenly, a dawning light that only added to the fog of mystery. They were training like soldiers and dressing up like the airmen they could no longer be, the enemy airmen they never were, and  . . .

And whether this was confession or interrogation or neither quite of those, it was interrupted. Not by the cook, who was busy weighing his dough-mountain into slabs, working those one in each hand into perfect coherent ovoids, tossing them into loaf tins and lining them up along the back of the range. She wanted to watch him at work, such useful work; there was something infinitely restful about it, seeing raw stuff made into meals.

Better that than watch Tolchard writhe on the hook of his great secret.

Far better that than hear footsteps on the stairs behind her, lift her head and turn around and see another figure dressed as the boy was beside her, only that this was a man in every way that mattered: brisk and neat and confident, quietly compelling.

Compelling Tolchard to his feet just with a glance.

Extending that to take in her too, the two of them together.

Cocking an eyebrow and smiling without humour and saying, ‘Excuse me, Sister, I rather need my man back. And you, lad, silent exercise, for the rest of the day. You know you need the practice.'

Tolchard opened his mouth, perhaps just to acknowledge the order,
yes sir
– and swallowed it like a good soldier, saluted without a word, glanced sideways at her with no more than the hint of a rueful shrug.

Well, but Ruth was not subject to this discipline. She had her own place here, and she meant to assert it. She wasn't to be cowed by military manners.

She said, ‘Excuse
me
, but – Major Black, is it?'

‘It is.'

I do not like thee, Major Black
. She had known that already. It was almost inherent. Whatever there was that she didn't understand yet, this much was clear, that he took broken boys – her patients, barely mended – and flung them back into the hurly of war, and no, she would never be inclined to like that in a man. Even where she might acknowledge its necessity. Which was, she thought, not here.

She seemed to be standing up, though she hadn't quite meant to do that. No matter.

She said, ‘Is that  . . . meant for a punishment, your putting him under silence? A punishment for speaking to me?'

‘No, Sister, not at all. Not even a discouragement. I train men to kill, not to exhibit nice manners. Except where nice manners will bring them closer to their targets, that is. No, but men like Tolchard, with a voice that works and a habit of using it? They need to learn not to do that, or they'll give themselves away. So: they all have silent days, you'll find. And it's nothing to do with you. Cook, he seems to have forgotten it, but I sent Tolchard down for more milk and half a stone of sugar  . . .'

A minute later he was leaving, with his jug and his sugar and his errant boy in tow. Ruth found herself still on her feet, almost put under silence herself by the sheer impact of the man. She subsided slowly into her chair, chased breadcrumbs around her plate with a mute forefinger, felt her head reeling with ideas that she really didn't want to consider.

She had it all now, she thought, more or less. German uniforms, and wounded men – visibly, extravagantly wounded men, badged with their honour – and learning to kill in their new conformations, hand to hand, the ways they never had. Exercising in the dark, acquiring what new skills they could in what time they were allowed. Learning not to speak, not to give themselves away.

There must be as many ruined airmen in Germany as there were here. There too they would be heroes, giving their youth and health and beauty to the Reich. A brutally scarred face and a Luftwaffe uniform would almost be a pass in themselves; no official would look too closely or ask too many questions. A scarred voice-box would be excuse enough for a lack of fluency in the language, or indeed the absence of any language at all.