House of Doors (12 page)

There was a deliberate little noise at her elbow: the cook, bringing her another cup of tea. She nodded her thanks, then frowned, remembered that she was not herself under a burden of silence, and said, ‘What does he want all that sugar for?' Half a stone was too much, a nonsense too far. And sugar was rationed, precious, not to be used lightly even here, where there were real eggs and butter for the asking.

‘Improvised hand grenades,' the cook said softly. ‘He takes all the bottles in the house and fills them with petrol and sugar and soap flakes, stuffs their mouths with rags for a wick and sends the men out into the woods to see how far they can lob one. The colonel won't have them in the courtyard.'

‘The colonel lets them shoot off rifles in the house.'

‘Yes. It's one of the compromises they came to.'

It probably didn't seem so much, she thought, a little wildly, after that first great compromise.
I'll patch these boys together and do what I can to make them presentable, give them new faces and hands that almost work; then you can send them off to Germany as saboteurs, assassins, what you will.
After that, what did it matter if there were a few bullet holes in the plasterwork?

‘Doesn't the owner mind?'

‘Mind? No, he says he doesn't mind. So long as they can find a use for the place. I  . . . don't believe he loves D'Espérance, but he would like to see it useful.'

She didn't see how anyone could love it. Too big, too ugly, all manner of wrong. But still: a house, and a history. A story to be told. This latest chapter she thought another kind of wrong. Done to the house, not by it.

Still. A house ill made, ill treated; it made a fit breeding ground for something more wrong yet, or she thought so.

‘It's a suicide mission,' she said bluntly.
Heroism isn't meant to happen this way
, but of course Tolchard would snatch at it, he and all his kind. Nature or nurture, young men will be snatching. Offer them a glimpse of glory, they will always want a handful.

‘Many suicide missions,' the cook said, topping up his own great tin mug of tea. ‘But yes, largely. Without the name, perhaps, but very few of them expect to make it home again when once they're sent away. They've all lived with that same expectation, of course. For months now, for years some of them. Every time they took off, they felt the hand of death on their shoulder.'

‘They didn't seek it out. Shake hands with death, make a friend of him.'

‘Perhaps not, but can you blame them? Now?'

Of course not. Young and strong and healthy, in love with life, they had nevertheless hurled themselves into the air day after day in machines of wood and wire, in the frenzy of war, in the teeth of terror. Hurt and broken, marked for life and all their beauties ruined, why on earth would they hesitate now?

It was like asking
what do they have to live for?
And there ought to be many answers to that, and she could list them all and believe none of them, just as the boys most likely could and did themselves, on their own accounts.

She was afraid that they would have understood Peter better than she did herself.

And still, still it was a wrongness, just one more, and she was here to perpetuate it. To make them better soldiers, fitter sooner.

Perhaps that was just war, in its inevitable wrongness. But the tea tasted foul suddenly, all mud on her tongue. A soldier's brew, not for her. She said, ‘Were you in the last lot?'

‘No,' he said, ‘I was just too young.' She heard
just too late
, and a world of regret. Perhaps that was her imagination. But he was a man, he had been young, no doubt he would have been snatching.

Tired of them all, she stood and carried her plate and cup to join a pile of crockery by the sink. ‘Thank you, Cook. I'll take myself out from under your feet now.'

It was an opportunity, the opening to a game of platitudes and manners, and he let it by. Just a smile and a nod, and he had turned away already.

Too young for the last lot,
she thought,
he must still be young enough for this lot. Barely forty yet.
And yet, not in uniform beneath his proper whites; no kind of soldier, with his hair that long on his neck. Probably that would be another question better left unasked.

With time on her hands and the sun just rising, another dawn reluctantly seen in, Ruth swapped her shoes and went walking in the grounds. Not far and not fast, purposeless, adrift: only cherishing the little things, immediacy. The crunch of gravel beneath her heels and the bite of chill against her skin, these last minutes of solitude before the house woke and her day began again. One day and then one more, and more in brisk succession. Terminable days, endurable, with an end in sight. She could do this.

She must do this. She had no choices now, or none that she was prepared to countenance.

Six months.

Horse noises, horse smells from the stable block couldn't distract her yet. She was saving that for a time of greater need. It was sure to come, some day when she was desperate to lose herself; when she would relish nothing more than the chance to overlay recent cruel history with older memories, old pleasures resurgent. An earlier edition, Ruth Elverson.

Ruthie Elverson. They used to call her Ruthie. No one did that any more. When did that stop, when did it change?

When she married, of course. When everything stopped and started again, all new; before  . . .

Before. Yes. When I had a life, a husband that I loved. Before I lost him.

She shook her head, she raised her head and stepped out determinedly, suddenly weary of this self-reproach. She had had a life, a good life, and had lost it; it was not her fault. These things happen, especially in wartime. There were many in her situation. Most of them blamed Hitler. Some would bring it closer to home, to the generals and politicians of their own side, the men who made the bad choices that saw other men get killed. Not many brought it closer yet, to their own men,
that idiot, standing right in the way of a bullet, when his mates on either side of him were fine  . . .

Ruth could blame Peter, very easily, if she weren't so entirely busy blaming herself. Perhaps that was why she did it, not to allow herself the room to blame him instead. It was better to be guilty than accusing. She could live with it; he didn't have to.

Still. Accusing herself was morbid, dwelling in the accusation was worse. Unhealthy, self-defeating, inutile. Making herself useful was her last resort; making herself ill would be a last betrayal. This place was tailor-made for Sister Taylor, in her extremity: good food, country air, all the work she could wish for. Someone else to accuse.
I do not like thee, Major Black.

So. Head up, step out. Step away from misery. Not to leave it behind, but not to wrap herself in it either. Not to allow herself so much indulgence. Brisk and brutal sister, as impatient with herself as with her patients. She could do that. Yes.

A paved terrace ran all the length of the house, behind a low stone balustrade. Steps led down into the layered gardens, all the way down to the lake. She might go that far, she had the time. There was an unappealing mist above the water, but the sun would see to that soon enough, and her other choice was to patrol the rows of vegetables on the terraces between, where lawns and flower beds had been virtuously dug under. She could pass the cabbages in review, practise her strictness on the radishes, inspect the leeks for grubbiness  . . .

She could, apparently, make an idiot of herself, but only in her head. Blessedly she hadn't paraded any of that nonsense aloud. There was nothing for a rising stranger to catch hold of as he loomed up from the soil at her side.

Just for a moment, she believed that literally, absolutely. She thought he was a spirit of earth, compounded of root and rock and tilth together.

Then she saw the mud in the creases of his face, or rather his face beneath its mud. Dark curling hair, too long, and brown fatigues without insignia. Mud on his hands, mud on his boots.

‘In this light,' he said, ‘it's easier to hoe with my fingers. The little lettuces have a better chance.' And then, ‘Good morning.' He said that too, belatedly. ‘I hope I did not startle you too badly?'

‘No, no,' she said, lying absolutely. Recovering herself, finding just how much there was to recover, how far she'd startled, how clearly he must have seen. No matter.
Brisk and brutal.
‘Wouldn't it be easier yet to wait for better light?'

‘It would, but I have other duties all the day. I give German lessons to the gentlemen.'

His English was almost perfect, but strongly marked. Could he be a prisoner of war? Luftwaffe, perhaps, shot down and lucky, parachute and capture. There had been small opportunity else for prisoners on this side of the Channel, this side of the war. But it would be a breach of the conventions, she was almost certain, to make a prisoner work this way. And why would he aid the enemy?

Besides, this man's face was all too classically Jewish. He might have modelled for a cartoon, or for Disraeli. He must be a refugee, a civilian, a volunteer.

‘My name is Lothar Braun,' he said. ‘I apologize, I am too dirty to shake your hand; but perhaps you would not like that anyway.'

‘Oh, nonsense. Why in the world should I dislike it? Good manners are not the exclusive preserve of the English.'

‘Perhaps. But I am German, and you are at war with my people.'

‘Not with yours, I think, Mr Braun.'

‘Well. I am Jewish, true, and some people dislike that also. But I am still a German, and that makes trouble enough over here. I am an intern, obliged to this place. For my own protection, they said; and for my safety, I am forbidden the town. My accent makes too much discomfort, they said. They mean that people will attack me, they think. For being smart, perhaps, for running away in time. So, I must plant cabbages for you, and teach your young mute men the German they will never speak. Two jobs, so I must start this early. And you?'

‘Oh, I'm just new here. Not sleeping well, my first day. I'm so sorry, I didn't introduce myself. Ruth Elverson – I'm sorry, I mean Sister Taylor. But not all our young men are mute. Some of them must be learning to speak German, not just to understand it?'

‘Some, yes. Have you met Flying Officer Tolchard? That one never stops speaking, in any language he can achieve. Unhappily, his achievement is marked by more enthusiasm than aptitude. His accent is atrocious, and his grasp of grammar is slapdash. Slapdash at the best. I might say harum-scarum,' and he frowned, all stern teacher despite the dirt he stood up in.

‘Somehow that doesn't surprise me.' They were both smiling somewhere, she thought, internally. She might be the more transparent. Relief bubbled up inside her like spring water through grass, all unexpected. ‘So may I take it that young Tolchard is not a prime candidate to be sent away on secret missions?'

A shrug was the best of her answer, the most that he could apparently give her. ‘If it were up to me, he would not be a candidate at all. I would keep him here, for the greater morale of all. From the colonel to the cook. But –' another shrug, another kind of shrug – ‘up to me it is not. I have no voice in this. I am the opposite of voice; I am a prisoner here.'

‘Oh, not a prisoner, surely?'

‘In all but name. I stay because they say I must. What else would you call this? In fact I would stay of my own will, but they make sure of it. There are guards on every road. Volunteers can walk away; I am too useful to be allowed to do so. And I may be an exile, a refugee, but I am still a German. Not trusted, and not safe.'

Ruth didn't want either part of that to be true, but of course they both were. She wanted to apologize for her country, for its people, but couldn't quite find the words. ‘My enemy's enemy may indeed be my friend,' she said instead, ‘but it's hard sometimes to be certain.'

Even her voice sounded uncertain, even to herself.

For herself, she abruptly wanted Tolchard to fail and fail, every test they gave him. She wanted to salvage, to preserve. To
keep
. Something of what she valued in men, in mankind, in England, she wanted to see it kept, not all flung into the furnace of war, and Tolchard seemed suddenly to have become a symbol of it all.

FIVE

T
he sun rose finally, decisively, striking down the valley like a weapon against fog. Ruth went in search of breakfast and her daily task, feeling obscurely as though everyone at Morwood could be measured for their degrees of ruthlessness and found excessive. She herself was ruthless at need,
professionally
ruthless; it had been a school-years' joke that carried through her training and into her years of practice. Now no one joked about it, some people valued it, she only took it for what it was, a useful attribute.

Here, though: here she was almost an amateur. Between Colonel Treadgold and Matron, patching broken men; Major Black training them to kill again and Herr Braun teaching them to infiltrate; Aesculapius doing whatever it was that he did to keep them willing to kill and die  . . . It was a conspiracy, and she was a part of it now. And, yes, ruthless. She would do what she did, and not protest. She could lose herself in it, create almost an absence of herself, be truly Ruthless.

Yes.

She could be lulled by work; she could be lulled by learning. Exercise for the body, exercise for the mind. Either was good, when she wanted to lose herself and her sorrows and her doubts. Both together were prime. Here and now, Morwood was sovereign. Never mind that it was the place and its activities that had stirred her up so; the place and its activities could do the opposite too, drain her and stretch her, give her everything she needed, long weary days and a constant chain of discovery, doors that opened onto revelation with more doors beyond, more and more.

She had nursed before her marriage, she had nursed all through the war. Nursing had become almost her notion of adulthood. It was what she did, now that she was grown up. Single or widowed, in peace or war, south and north and night and day. Here she was senior, she had a corridor to manage, nurses and orderlies beneath her. It made no difference. If a patient needed a bedpan, she would fetch it. And fetch it away again beneath a napkin, empty it and scrub it out. This was what she did. What she had always done. It helped her feel settled, secure, a part of the machinery of war. A useful, proper part.