House of Doors (27 page)

Something must be showing in her own face, because he was trying to frown, not making a very good job of it. ‘What? What are you thinking?'

Actually, I'm thinking about kissing you
– and she seemed to have shed more than her professional detachment and all her good resolutions, she had shed her inhibitions too, because she heard herself repeat the words aloud. ‘Actually, I'm thinking about kissing you. But it doesn't seem fair to lead you on, when there's nowhere I can safely take you. Never start anything you're not prepared to finish, my father used to say, and—'

And she was babbling, perhaps, and perhaps it was just as well that he stopped her. By starting something, by kissing her, which wasn't fair at all. And – when he would allow her – she drew a breath to say so, and was sweetly and blessedly forestalled.

‘Silly,' he said again. ‘We don't have to go anywhere, your room or mine. If we just turn these lights off.' And he suited the action to the word, leading her by the hand to do it and letting go only for the moment, finding her again in the near dark and dropping his voice like a conspirator, like a veil over the event. ‘Nobody's going to do what I did, see it from below and wonder, come up to find out what's going on. Safe as houses, we'll be. No one even remembers all this is up here.'

No house was safe in these days. She thought this house unsafe in any way, any meaning of the word. Him too, he was perilously unsafe. He was tugging her back down that strip of carpet, out of the first dormitory and into the second, where the heaps of bundles turned out – unsurprisingly, she supposed – to be blankets and pillows, tied up in sheets.

He unrolled a mattress and laid it on a bed frame, giving himself away entirely, conventional boy with no imagination. The darkness hid her smile. Working by touch, she assembled a nest of bedding. Sheets were too much trouble, but pillows and blankets went more or less where they ought to go, soft enough and formal enough to make them both comfortable.

Then, while she helped him with his clothing, ‘Michael, what is all this? So many beds, what for?'

‘Oh, the owner turned the place into a school for a while, after the last war. I don't think it lasted. We didn't have to kick the kiddies out, they were long gone before the ministry requisitioned it this time around. I'm not at all sure about these blankets. Can you smell mildew?'

‘Certainly not. I'm a nurse; I don't even know what mildew is, just something nasty I heard about. It doesn't dare come anywhere near me or my patients, I wouldn't allow it. Now lie down and be quiet. Be
very
quiet.' They had closed what doors they could, between them and the restless house. Even so, she felt vulnerable in this wide dormitory. Almost like making love in the open, where someone might chance along at any minute.

Vulnerable and excited, young again. And not falling. A hand to hold her, a body to grip, a firm surface beneath them both. Somewhere to begin.

TWELVE

O
  
let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven.

She thought she was in danger of it, twice over.

Once because she had decided – coolly, rationally, intellectually – that she had to believe this house was haunted, which was a definition of stone-cold raving madness if ever she had heard one. And once again because she was doing the one thing they were most warned against, from the first days of basic training. She rather thought she might be falling in love with a patient. Most certainly, she was having an affair with him.

She'd expected to find herself the strong one, fending him off, sending him away. Bed Thirty-Four, and no nonsense. Instead, their trysts in the attic had become regular, almost commonplace, except that they burned in her heart and mind like a lodestar, the way she turned instinctively for comfort and guidance and security. Their hasty nest was a fixture now, a bed made up.

Perhaps it was greed more than instinct. At times, replete with self-disgust, she tried to think so, but could never manage it, quite. Not even Peter could drive her to that dishonesty.

He did try: picking at her guilt-ridden soul like fingernails picking at a scab, nibbling at confidence and composure, haunting the ill-glimpsed edges of her awareness. Always somewhere close at hand, in the glass of a door or a spill of water on a threshold, lurking in an archway in the dark. Always wanting to suck her down like quicksand, like a whirlpool, a Charybdis in her head.

That was where he truly lurked, though, in her head, not in the house around her. She had the measure of him now. Michael helped, all unwitting – just thinking of Michael helped: he was in her head too, and all elbows when she wanted him to be so – but mostly she could manage Peter by herself. As she always had, really.

And her duties, her patients, she could manage those. On a good day she could even manage to be sociable. There wasn't so much singing now and the beer drinking was more intense, even a little desperate, but these boys had learned already to cloak their fear with a brittle brightness. There was still laughter at her table, still rampant foolery and practical jokes that she was obliged to frown upon. And afterwards she could have a quieter time with Judith in one room or another, with perhaps one or more of the other nurses on her floor. She could remember their names and their situations, talk about family and before-the-war. Nobody wanted to talk about after-the-war, because looking ahead meant looking into that space where Major Black waited, to send their boys away.

More and more, she thought of him as an executioner. A slow hangman, relentless and inevitable, not to be evaded.

Perhaps that was true of any officer in wartime who sent men to their deaths. What choice did he have? She should as readily blame Colonel Treadgold, who patched men up to make the major's missions possible.

She was so torn sometimes, she thought it might just be easier to run mad. In fact, though, she was holding herself together remarkably well. She thought so, at least. Certainly better than some. You did what had to be done, and for a nurse there was always something next to do. It was harder on the patients, who were mostly not too sick and nowhere near busy enough. Young men should be good at being idle, but these had lost the art of it, all unexpectedly. They did their best, and knew the cracks were showing. Too harsh a laugh, a sudden flare of temper, a solitary figure hunched in silence flinging a fives ball against a wall, over and over. Too long spent sitting by Flight Lieutenant Barker's hushed bedside, or else not long enough, blatant avoidance: either one spoke volumes.

Flight Lieutenant Barker  . . . didn't die. He didn't die, and didn't die. That in itself spoke volumes for his stubbornness and the colonel's skill in surgery, the nurses' care. If there were those who felt that perhaps he ought to die, for all their sakes and his own above all, they weren't saying. They were letting their silence speak for them; that, and the endless bouncing ball.

There was little enough that Ruth could do, beyond watching over her own long corridor of cases. Half of them were still immobile, less troubled because they had not seen. She did her best not to let them listen either, not to let the walking wounded gather around the beds of those not so lucky. Or else they were luckier, but either way. It was a hopeless struggle and she tried anyway, chivvying patients back to their own beds or away to the recreation rooms or physiotherapy or even Major Black's classes, because any distraction just now had to be better than none.

For herself, too.
Any distraction is better than none
, and sometimes she tried to tell herself that was all Michael was. Just a distraction for the night hours, when her body had no work and her mind spun off above the abyss, where it might fall and fall forever. Michael gave her something to cling to, in the crudest possible sense. She should be content with that. She should insist on it, indeed, not let herself imagine that he might be anything more.

Or, of course, she should not do this at all. Not slip out of her room at dead of night in slippers and pyjamas – Peter's pyjamas, these had been, before she adopted them for practicality and warmth and mostly comfort, all manner of comfort since his death, clothes that had shaped themselves to his body, just as she had herself – with Judith's heavy torch in her hand, as much light as she needed.

Not whisper to the end of the corridor and up the stairs, throwing a beam ahead of her like a searchlight. Like a child playing ack-ack, picking out Heinkels for the guns to shoot down. Except that a child playing ack-ack would be noisy, noisy above all, and she was silent as she could manage. And good, too, trying not to let her light betray her to the skies. A child wouldn't think, but once she was up the stairs Ruth kept her torch trained just before her feet. She could almost turn it off and trust to touch, to the guiding feel of the carpet beneath her slipper soles; but she didn't like that sudden rush of darkness after the light went out, before her eyes adjusted. Especially out here in the middle of the dormitory, with no wall to brush her fingers along to give her balance and assurance, to let her know she wasn't falling.

So no, she kept the torch switched on, its pool of light at her feet as she did all these things she should not do. That was enough. Her body knew where to go and what awaited; she needn't peer ahead. Michael was always there before her, as much undressed and ready as he could manage. After so long as a patient, in others' hands, dependent, he was impatient now: impatient with himself above all, with his own limits and inabilities.

She had some hopes of teaching him better. She was teaching him so much already. She felt like a figure from boarding-school mythology, every adolescent's dream, conjured in whispers after lights out: an older woman but not too old, wise in the ways of the flesh, the tragic widow willing – nay, eager! – to share her body and her experience. She could accuse herself of being a cliché or worse, the classic predatory female, stepping fresh from the pages of many a lurid melodrama. Or she could accuse herself the other way, of being desperate and needy, clutching at whatever passing fancy offered. Taking frenzied advantage of Michael in his vulnerability, pampering his ego to her own weak and selfish ends.

She might not actually believe either accusation, but they'd be hard to evade or defend against, if any word of this leaked out.
This is a hospital
– it was an article of faith with her, that secrets were impossible within this fevered isolation. And yet, she couldn't stop. A dozen times a day she thought she ought to call an end to it, before it brought disaster down on her head. A dozen times a day, she wished that Michael were mature enough to see that and call an end to it himself, because she couldn't.

She might find comfort in that, if she tried. If she tried hard. She could see it as a measure of what mattered, how deeply he was embedded in her heart. How this was more than a cold or a cruel fling, more than a frantic grab for comfort. She saw the dangers and risked them all, because of him: because of who he was, and what he might become. What he was already, a treasure held in cupped hands. Her challenge was not to hold too tight and not too loosely: neither to squeeze the life out of him, nor to let him slip away.

Her torch made a path of light through the darkness, a circle before her feet. That was it, she had to watch her feet. It was like a bubble within the glass, a closer isolation. If she could only keep the two of them within that bubble and let nothing leak into the dark, then perhaps  . . .

Step by step, day by day. Night by night. She did worry that she was walking towards a precipice, but she didn't seem able to stop walking, nor to turn aside.

One step after another. Ruth watched her feet, didn't lift her head. Didn't try to peer forwards, into the dark.

Felt a hand close suddenly over her mouth, heard a grunt of satisfaction by her ear. ‘Here's one for the knife. One slash, no more trouble.'

She should perhaps have been more scared than she was. The surge in her blood was more despair than terror. She had dreaded discovery, and here it was. Her mind was bewildered by the man's words. Even so, she knew a threat when she heard it.

Her body was reacting already, before her brain could catch up. Every sense in her revolted at being handled so casually, so contemptuously, by a stranger. There were only two men she had ever licensed to come this close. One of them was somewhere ahead of her in the shadows, in the same danger –
one for the knife
– while the other  . . .

Well, Peter might be dead, but he hadn't gone away. And not everything he'd left her with was sorrow, bruises on her soul. Peter had worried about her walking London streets after dark. Once the war started and the blackout came, he had worried enough to do something about it.

Here, I picked this up in basic training, let me show you. Here's how to break a man's grip, if he grabs you from behind; here's how, if he comes at you from the front  . . .

So Peter had basically trained her. And so, now, she turned not against that grip but unexpectedly into it, twisting around to face her assailant, almost nose to nose.

Lifting her arm as she did so, that heavy torch suddenly a weapon,
use anything you have to hand.

With room and time to swing, she might have killed him. The torch was that solid, her impulse that ferocious. To save herself or to save Michael, she wasn't entirely clear which.

She was too close to do it handily, though, that long-armed sportsman's swing; and too rushed to step away, once she'd broken free.

Too surprised at herself, in honesty. She had taken Peter's instructions to heart and practised assiduously, but for his sake more than hers, to ease his anxious mind. She'd never expected to need any of these moves, or, if she needed them, never expected to find that she could actually use them, or that they would actually work.

This one seemed to have worked too easily, and so she was too slow. Too slow and too close, and still in a killing mood. She slammed the handle of that long torch upward, clean into her assailant's face.