House of Doors (23 page)

‘When these have dried off,' she said, laying the tray of dressings down in a corner, already starting to sweat herself in the fierce heat, ‘toss them into the fire, would you?' They reused what they could, but these were beyond salvage.

‘No need to wait, miss. A little wet'll do no harm in that there fire.' And he scooped up the dressings on the blade of his shovel – neatly done, practised – and hurled them into the orange glow. She barely heard a hiss come back, barely saw a puff of steam erupt.

She thanked him, then, and lingered a little to learn his name and rank and other duties. She wanted to know everything about everybody. Also she wanted to give the men above some time without her. Let them relax in her absence, and perhaps they could stay that way when she went up again. When they bantered despite her presence rather than behind her back, then she'd feel that she had won her place.

She stayed longer than she should have done, longer surely than the stoker wanted her to. He'd have been far happier heaving coal alone, than holding conversation with an officer.
Peter, I'm an officer now, we could salute each other
– the thought could make her smile, almost, sometimes.

But at last she did leave that searing basement and make her way slowly up the stairs again. She was thinking that if the men had settled down to chaff each other as they were used to do, perhaps she'd slip up into the gallery until the colonel came and they were ready for their new dressings. Keep out of their way, out of sight and hopefully out of mind, let them get on in their own way without giving her a thought.

But as she came up into the light, she heard voices that were not her patients', and not in the echo chamber of the bathhouse.

It was the anger she heard in them which made her pause. The stairway came up just by the door; that stood open again, or half open, held by one man's arm. She could see his figure silhouetted against the light. Not see his face, and she'd never heard him so transformed by fury, but even so. She knew the colonel by his bulk, and by his voice.

She wasn't so sure who he was speaking to, because they were standing on the steps outside. She had no view of the other man and only an oblique shadow of his voice, muffled by the colonel.

Still, from context, it had to be Major Black.

Surely, it had to be. She couldn't imagine the phlegmatic colonel being this angry at anyone else.

‘You'll be telling me next that you want to use the men while they still have a pedicle, before they begin to be finished with surgery.'

‘Absolutely I'll use them with their pedicles, if they can only handle a parachute. Who's going to challenge a man whose nose is a tube sewn into his shoulder? That's ideal for my purposes.'

‘Oh, for God's sake, man! Have you no thought for the men at all, beyond their usefulness as an artefact of war?'

‘No, I don't. This
is
a war, Colonel, and they are all officers. Volunteers. Injury does not excuse them. In the last war, they would have been patched up and sent back to the front, scars and all. No one would have thought twice about their damn scars. In this war, if we can use the scars to our advantage, that's all to the good. The more damaged they are the better as far as I'm concerned, if they can only function.'

‘Would you have me dress up healthy men with surgical damage, just to distract the enemy? Disguise them with operations, cut their faces apart so that no one will look them in the eye, amputate the first joint of every finger so their prints can't be used against them?'

‘Do you know, that's really rather a good idea. I'll take that up with SOE at our next meeting. Colonel, thank you. I believe you're beginning to get the hang of this at last.'

‘Good God, man! You disgust me. Do you have no limits, no moral standards at all?'

‘No, none. Morals are a luxury we can't afford. Backs to the wall, Treadgold. These are desperate times  . . .'

There was more, of course. There was always more. Ruth couldn't hope to slip out of the stairwell without being spotted, so long as he was holding the door open that way. She stayed where she was, trapped and trying not to listen. All her sympathies were with the colonel – except that some cold, distant part of her, perhaps the bitter heart of her did acknowledge the major's argument – but he was losing all down the line, losing and losing. Rhetorical questions were always a mistake, she thought. Always a weakness. She'd learned that in debates at school, so long ago. Marriage had only underlined the lesson. Those times that she and Peter fought, he would fall into that same trap, always asking questions. Which left the initiative with her, to startle him with answers and so drive home her point.

Which Major Black understood too well, and Colonel Treadgold not at all. He knew he was losing, but he didn't know why. So he blustered and spluttered – she could imagine his moustache, all fluffed out with indignation, a distempered walrus – and it did him no good at all, in the major's eyes or his own.

Or in hers, hidden down here, wanting not to hear his defeat spelled out so boldly. She might do better for him, perhaps, if she only had the opportunity. She could argue that the men were not ready, not functional enough – but the men themselves would do their best to disprove her, so keen they were to get back to the front. Or behind the front, these lads. Madly keen to throw their lives away in desperate heroics that would see them shot as spies if they lived that long, if they didn't blow themselves up with their targets or die in a hail of bullets or  . . .

‘I say!' A voice shrill with discontent. ‘Whoever's out there, will you close that damned door, please? The draught's like a tornado in here.'

There was a great booming sound as the door slammed shut, with both the arguing men still on the outside. She didn't think the interruption would stop their arguing, but at least it meant that she could scurry up in safety, unseen, into the shadow of the narrow hallway and then through to the bathhouse proper.

The steam seemed thicker than ever. If the colonel wasn't coming in, she would have to chivvy the men out of the water and get them dry. Honestly, they were like schoolboys clinging to their beds of a morning, the way they lingered in these baths. The salt water might be doing them good, but she didn't have all day, even if they did.

There was an odd silence all about her, as though the weight of fog had finally subdued even young men's spirits, or the heat exhausted them. She ought to be glad of that, perhaps, it might make them more complaisant. But it felt ominous to her, as this thick heavy air did, this blanket of blindness.

Oh, nonsense. Again, nonsense. She was fey this morning, off-balance and disturbed.

She took a breath to call out, to order all the men out of the water; but she never made that call. Another voice cut across her own and stole all her breath away.

A scream, rather, no words in it and barely a voice at all, an animal cry. Brute pain and terror.

And as though one throat could shift an atmosphere, one butterfly flap its wings to raise a storm, the steam stirred and shifted, rose and gathered like low cloud in the dome above, like a soft repulsive ceiling so that paraffin light could show her just exactly what had happened here. What had been done, what there was to scream about.

At least she wasn't screaming.

At least he wasn't either, not now. Not after that first wrenching horror, a cry dragged deep from the bone of him, irresistible, rising appalled in outrage at the insult to his flesh.

All around her other men were surging from their baths, naked and distressed and heedless of their own half-healed hurts. Unlike her, their first impulse was to move, to act; like her, once they were up, they could find nothing to do but stare.

Just the one man lay still in his bath, half submerged.

He too had nothing to do but stare.

At himself, at what had been done to himself, to his body while he lay there lost in fog, sodden with heat and water.

All of Colonel Treadgold's surgeries and interventions lay exposed on his bare skin and deeper, where they had cut through fat and muscle and sinew to the bone beneath. All the grafts and reconstructions, all the work to save his fingers and his face. It should have shown as patchwork, seams and scars, the stamp of former hurts and fresh recovery. Not this. Never, never should he have looked like this.

When Michael was upset, his own scars showed through his skin like a jigsaw. This, though – this was like a jigsaw broken up, thrown back to pieces.

All his operations had come undone, all at once: every one of his wounds was gaping wide, all his grafts peeling off, his face disintegrating as she watched with nothing now to hold the jaw together or the rebuilt nose to the skull.

Lips fell away like obscene petals.

It was as though all the colonel's stitches had dissolved, and all the healed tissues too. She couldn't remember the man's name, that was lost too in the horror of it; but he was starting to bleed now from all those gaping injuries, and that was almost a blessing, as blood clouded the water and hid the worst of him from her sight and his own.

Almost a blessing, almost. Until she remembered, until it reminded her: open bleeding wounds and salt water, how cruel that could be.

In the long run it might help him, if anything could; but right now he was drawing a shuddering, gasping breath, ready to scream again as the pain of it pierced the shock that had gripped him till this.

That was something else to be thankful for, perversely. It broke her out of her own shocked trance, gave her something to do. Something she could achieve.

‘You, and you.' Pointing, picking, snapping orders. This at least was manageable. Somewhere to stand. ‘Help him out of there. Gently! He needs  . . . he needs not to be sitting in hot salt water.' In honesty she didn't know what he needed, except that he needed this not to have happened; but that was a beginning. ‘You and you, fetch cold fresh water and wash him down. You, run him another bath. Nothing but cold. That'll stop the bleeding.' Well, it might. If anything could, if he didn't bleed out entirely. And again they wouldn't have to stare at his body so roughly engineered, so brutally exposed.

That was all the men busy for the moment.

That freed her to do the one other thing she could think of.

She ran back to the door and hauled it open, stepped out into the chill air and screamed at last herself, screamed for the colonel.

TEN

H
e was still in sight, storming along the lakeside. No sign of Major Black.

Her shrill cry reached him, better than any man's bellow would have done. He stopped, he turned; she waved wildly to draw him back. Kept on waving until he broke into a lumbering run.

Then she went back inside, to do what she could. To be a nurse in crisis. Not to think.

Thinking came later, as it had to. When that poor disintegrating man – Flight Lieutenant Barker, his name had come back to her at last; his room-mates called him Bunky – had been pieced together as best as they were able; when he'd been carried away to theatre by a stretcher party accompanied by the bewildered, anxious colonel; when they'd been followed by a chain of half-dressed patients no less bewildered and no less anxious, worrying inevitably about their own grafts and surgeries, wondering when or whether they might suddenly fall apart themselves. When she found herself abruptly and unexpectedly alone in that overbearing bathhouse and didn't break, didn't flee the building. Went up instead: climbed the winding iron spiral that stood like an inverse to the cellar stairs, like a mirror image in every dimension that there was.

Up to the gallery, though the steam still hung there like a cloud caught napping. She wanted to stand in that loss of fog, not see her feet let alone the world beneath her. It seemed too thick for bathroom mist, even – or especially – a bathroom on this scale, eight steaming baths could never fill such a dome and the open space beneath it. And yet, here it was and here she stood, with her own feet lost to her, gripping the gallery rail because she had nothing else to fix her and she might otherwise have been falling. Falling and falling, and—

Oh, Peter.

He would not have done this. Surely, he would not? Neither the man she knew nor the ghost she kept seeing, the presence that she felt. She was beginning, reluctantly, to believe in him. So perhaps he could have done this – but he would not. No.

Even if he could, he would never want to. Not harm a stranger, for whatever strange point he might want to be making. His message, his mission was to her. If he were here at all, in any form at all.

So. She needn't feel guilty, nor responsible. Not for this.

Puzzled, then, and frightened, and more than a little desperate, she found the fog no use to her; and went in search of something better.

The mind of Aesculapius, she might have fled to that. Or the cold brute logic of Herr Braun the tailor, the survivor.

In fact she found herself in the subterranean kitchen, begging time and tea from Cook.

Wanting to.

It was the first time she'd been down here in the middle of the day. Of course it was busy, with lunches to dish up for the whole hospital, patients and medicos and administration too. And the men on guard duty at the gates, and very likely others she hadn't seen yet. Any large organization runs on its back-room people, every big house depends on its staff, maids and janitors and stable boys.

And yet she'd come down here in chase of a memory, the peace of the very early morning, a quiet corner to sit in and one man to watch at work.

She was an idiot.

She stood in the doorway and barely watched the frenzy, didn't even try to pick out the man at the heart of it, Cook in his kingdom, in his time. She might have closed her eyes and still known everything she needed to: from the smells of it, from the dense hot heavy air, above all from the sounds that battered at her, all the noise of a working kitchen at its climax. Metal on metal in a hundred variations, the hiss of gas and the rush of bodies and the voices, voices over all, each pitched louder than the last as every man struggled to be heard.