House of Doors Read online

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry. Sister Taylor, I suppose you’ll be, once you’re settled and togged up. I like that better, I like to call pretty girls Sister . . .’

  He was, of course, just talking to cover the double awkwardness, his and hers.

  She couldn’t offer to shake hands unless she did it leftwards, as she used to with the Girl Guides, long and long ago. That might be awkward too, unless he’d been a Scout himself. She opted for sternness instead, the widow scolding the insouciant boy. ‘You really shouldn’t talk nonsense. And yes, you should call me Sister, but not till I’m on duty. What should I call you? Flying Officer . . .?’

  ‘Oh, Tolchard is my name, Michael Tolchard, but no one uses it. The fellows mostly call me Infant, but to the nurses I’m Bed Thirty-Four.’ And then, heartbreakingly, ‘Please, you mustn’t mind my face. I don’t, so why should you?’

  He must have been endearing once, with all the attractions of youth and charm and very likely money too. Blond, she was guessing, though the evidence was sparse: no eyebrows to speak of, and his hair hidden under that cap. Pale hairs on the back of his left hand, as he reached to take her case.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said sharply. ‘I can manage perfectly well.’

  ‘So can I,’ he said. And did, lifting the case and turning back towards the car, perhaps deliberately giving her a moment longer to recover. Very well. Nice manners, and she would take advantage of them. She could curse Aesculapius for not telling her more, not warning her of this at least. Two minutes in Michael Tolchard’s company and she already knew far more about her new job, but she would rather have been prepared.

  Be Prepared – that was the Girl Guides again. Some things clung. Perhaps she should have shaken his hand after all. Why did this boy make her feel so young, when in truth she was so very, very much older than him? Not only in years. Marriage and widowhood had accumulated layers of experience, enough to leave her drearily tired of life.

  Tired until now. Now she was just exhausted, after a long wakeful night on a platform bench. Exhausted enough to make her foolish and gauche and over-thinking everything.

  Michael Tolchard. Infant. Bed Thirty-Four. Very well. He was a patient, no more than that. Flying Officer Tolchard: a fighter pilot, surely, Spits or Hurricanes. She couldn’t see him in a bomber crew. He’d have wanted the solo glory of a fighter, devil-may-care.

  Wanted it and got it, of course. Gilded youth, he probably got everything he wanted. Until he chased one Messerschmitt too many, strayed too far from the squadron, took on a fight he couldn’t hope to win. And so the dreadful screaming plunge to earth, the struggle with the cockpit canopy, at last the blessed tumble free and the snap of the ’chute to arrest his fall and perhaps for a moment he thought the nightmare was over. Until he realized that the smoke and the heat had come with him, came from him, his clothes and hair still afire.

  Perhaps he tried to beat the flames out with his hand. His right hand, of course, the good one. That was not much more than a claw now. Not useful to him. He had to put her case down to open the boot left-handed, before he could lift the case again and swing it in.

  ‘Oh, just put it on the back seat,’ she protested, too late. Surely he didn’t mean to play chauffeur and make her ride behind him?

  His eyes flashed a smile at her, across his shoulder. He had good eyes despite the swollen horror of the lids above, still showing the marks of their stitches. He had probably learned, probably had to learn not to try to smile any other way. It was a surprise to her – in this hour of surprises, but at least this was a professional surprise – that he could talk so clearly, with such a brutal slashing mockery of a mouth. His voice was damaged, to be sure, and that would be from smoke and flame inhaled as he struggled to breathe in the blazing fury of his plane, as he struggled to escape; but the sounds were clear despite the scarred throat behind them and the stiff clumsy semblance of lips he had to shape them with.

  He said, ‘I would, but we’re picking up a couple more fellows on the way home. I hope you don’t mind?’

  ‘Not at all. Of course not. In truth, I never expected to be met. When I missed the train last night . . .’

  He shrugged. ‘Happens all the time. Or else the bally thing’s cancelled, and people are stranded anyway. If we’re expecting a person and they don’t show up, someone always comes down to meet the milk train. Couldn’t leave you to walk, we’re in the next valley. There’s no other way to get there, no bus, and it’s a dreadful trek with luggage. And if a car’s coming in early, there’s always someone wanting a lift for this or that, so I get to play bus driver. It’s usually me.’ He opened the passenger door for her, saw her settled, walked around the long sleek bonnet to the driver’s side. ‘The car’s rigged for me, d’you see? What with the hand and so forth. Deuced clever, but it’s awkward for anyone who doesn’t know the system. Easier to drive with one hand than two, actually. And I can make myself understood, at least, better than some of the chaps. Though I do still scare the horses. And the nurses,’ he added with a sidelong glance.

  ‘Oh no, young man,’ Ruth said, ‘you don’t scare me. Startled me, I confess it, I wasn’t expecting . . .’

  ‘Frankenstein’s monster? All sewn together, out of dribs and drabs?’

  ‘You’re no monster.’ Though very possibly he had been as a child. Spoiled rotten, she speculated, his mother’s own precious white-haired boy; redeemed perhaps by that charm that clings to the fortunate, and ultimately saved by war, by the need for sacrifice. He had given too much, she thought. And wondered what his mother thought of him now. Whether she came to visit, or only wrote.

  Ruth scolded herself for leaping to conclusions in all directions at once. She took a grip internally, and scolded him aloud. ‘As I said, it was the car I wasn’t expecting. Don’t take everything personally, you can’t afford it and neither can I. You’re not the only patient in the hospital. In fact, you don’t seem much in need of a hospital bed at all.’

  ‘The nurses do complain I’m never in it. I’m down for more ops, though, so I take advantage while I can. I’m a sort of guinea pig, do you see? What with the face and the hand, Colonel Treadgold gets to try all sorts of new techniques on me. I’m his lucky mascot; everything works, everything takes. It’s a bit of a bind, to be honest.’

  ‘Oh? How’s that?’

  He only shook his head. Perhaps driving took more concentration now than the carefree skills of yore. She let the question by – for now – and watched with a species of wonder how he worked the heavy car. The gearstick had been removed entirely; there was only a handbrake between the two front seats. She could hear the car’s motor growl and shift from one gear to another, none the less. At last she understood that he was achieving that with a kind of wand that emerged from the steering column, that he could knock up or down with the same hand that held the wheel while his feet danced between the pedals. She couldn’t begin to imagine how much work and thought must have gone into this car, rebuilding it from the engine outward. Peter would have known immediately, instinctively – but she didn’t want to think about Peter. Particularly she didn’t want to start this new job with her mind focused on the past, past losses, the only loss that could ever matter. It would seem dishonest. She had promised six months, after all.

  The car nosed its way through narrow streets to a cobbled marketplace. Tolchard sounded the opening bars of a tarantella on the horn, and two figures appeared from the doorway of a small hotel. They carried a crate between them; she wondered if she was being made the excuse for a smuggling expedition, contraband beer fetched in under the cloak of fetching her. Did she need to play strict Sister Taylor before she’d even reported for duty?

  Apparently not. Tolchard was too sharp for his own good, or else her face was too revealing. He said, ‘That’ll keep the old man happy. The colonel’s Devon-born, and he does miss his cider. Mrs Melcher has it shipped up specially. He’ll offer you a glass tonight, but do say no. Unless you can’t stomach beer under an
y circumstances, I mean.’

  ‘Oh, I like beer well enough,’ though it hadn’t figured largely in her life, nor in her expectations. Nor at all in any hospital she knew. Start again, Ruth Taylor. With a cleaner slate this time.

  The cider bearers were taking their time. One walked with a curious stiff gait, from the hips, unbendingly; the other needed both hands on the crate, and had to shuffle sideways as they came.

  ‘Should we ask if we can help, perhaps?’

  ‘No, no. Absolutely not. We only get an exeat for tasks we swear blue that we can do. It’s really important, you’ll find, to let us do them.’

  ‘You mean they’d be humiliated by the offer.’

  ‘Utterly. Brutally. They’re fine as they are. Doing well.’

  ‘Well, then. As we have a little time to wait, why don’t you tell me something about RAF Morwood?’

  ‘Well, I could do. That name’s a fiction, for a start.’

  ‘It is?’ It was the destination marked on all her papers: blandly uninformative, not in any gazetteer she could find.

  ‘Utterly. It must have been designed to confuse the enemy, if any enemy comes sniffing after us. I suppose they’re bound to, sooner or later. When they do, they’ll be looking for an airfield and find a big house; and then they’ll find that the house is just a convalescent home for badly injured aircrew, with a genius surgeon attached. As witness.’

  As witness himself, he meant, and his two friends who were even now heaving their burden on to the back seat. Introductions followed, while they squeezed themselves in on either side. Donald Carter-Fleck – dragged from a crashed plane with a shattered pelvis and largely rebuilt from the waist down, as he told it, still learning to walk again – and Rupert Ronson, whose hands were savagely twisted in towards his wrists. ‘My fingers look like boiled prawns,’ he said, examining them ruefully. ‘The Infant’s my dry run, you see, my stand-in. The old man is practising on him, and once he gets that hand right, he’ll work on mine. I wish he’d hurry up, to be frank.’

  ‘Patience, Methuselah.’ Tolchard might perhaps be a year younger than Ronson. ‘Never rush a doctor, a sapper or a . . . whoops. Beg pardon, Sister.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Infant,’ using the absurd nickname deliberately, to let him hear the truth of it. From his point of view, she likely seemed very old indeed: married and widowed both, two stages ahead of himself. She wanted to keep that distance. ‘Anything you’ve heard, I’ve heard worse.’

  In fact the versions she’d heard had been different, and none of them had started with a doctor. The sapper was common to them all; Royal Engineers dealt with bomb disposal. The third element, the one he’d elided: the politest version she knew had a good-time girl in there, but they were all variations on a whore. Which she could probably say in mixed company with a deal more comfort than he could, and a deal more experience too. She’d treated some so often they were almost friends. She doubted he’d ever actually encountered one, beyond the occasional shouted exchange in the West End when he was out with his brother officers. In the old days, before his catastrophe. He wouldn’t do that now.

  She didn’t want to be cruel, but if he ever grew too outrageous, she might accuse him with his own virginity, in front of his brother officers. Just to quiet him, and to see if his patched-up face could still blush.

  Quiet in the car meant that she had a minute or two to pay attention to the world beyond. That long aristocratic black bonnet thrust between high banks and stone walls as they climbed, erupting at last onto open moorland. Sheep scattered across the road ahead, then abandoned it altogether as Tolchard played out another intricate rhythm with the unsubtle blast of his horn. He had been musical once, perhaps. She supposed he still would be, talent didn’t burn away. But he’d have no singing voice left in him, and one-handed instruments were few. Perhaps he could learn to play bugle or cornet, trombone even, if he only had the lips to make an embouchure. After another surgery, perhaps. They couldn’t mean to leave him as he was, surely, with that oddly articulate savage gash of a mouth.

  ‘I tell you what’s odd,’ said Ronson from the back, ‘these sheep – have you noticed how they never come over to our side of the hill? There’s nothing to stop them, but they won’t come.’

  It was probably just as well. These restless young men would only use them for polo ponies, or some other outrage. Ruth was on the very verge of saying so when she was forestalled.

  ‘Hefted,’ Carter-Fleck said, ‘that’s the word. I knew a shepherd once, and he says a flock is hefted to their own land, and won’t leave it. They’re territorial.’

  ‘Like cats, you mean?’

  ‘Not much like cats, no. But still. If they’re born on the land, they won’t stray.’

  ‘So much for the school chaplain and all his homilies. Another metaphor bites the dust.’

  The height of the moor was marked with a tumble of exposed rock that the Devonshire colonel would no doubt call a tor. Now they were coming down into the next valley, and no, there were no sheep. She was learning an unexpected respect for sheep, just on this one brief journey. If she were free to roam, she thought she’d not roam in this direction. Of course it was just the angle of the sun and the slope of the hill, the dark of the woodland below, but she felt suddenly embraced by shadow and distance, very far from town or comfort.

  ‘Now this is genuinely odd,’ Tolchard said beside her. ‘Never mind Rupert and his curiously static sheep. If you owned this land and wanted to build yourself a stately pile, wouldn’t you put it somewhere up here, up high, for the view?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I suppose I would.’

  ‘Quite. But you can’t even see the house from here, it’s hidden behind that bluff; and by the time the lane brings us around, we’ll be down among the trees and seeing nothing.’

  ‘Just as well, really,’ from Ronson. ‘In the circumstances.’

  ‘Well, perhaps. But whoever built it, they weren’t building for these circumstances, were they? I say it’s downright strange, such a grand place being built so secret.’

  Ruth wanted to ask what circumstances he meant, why a convalescent hospital might need such degrees of discretion. But by definition, such a question would be unanswerable. The wary practices of wartime held it back in any case, stifled in her throat. She would learn soon enough. Anything she wasn’t authorized to hear would be common knowledge in the nurses’ staffroom.

  Random stones on either side of the road grew less random, grew into walls; and here were the trees, ancient and overhanging, so that the way seemed to sink between them. It was fanciful surely to think that this valley was both older and colder than its neighbour, but Ruth thought it anyway. Again and again those dry walls were broken by tree roots or leaning trunks, as though they’d been built up in a slowly desperate attempt to hold back the forest. Desperate and doomed, and perhaps by now abandoned.

  They drove too far, she thought, in the swallowing shadow of the trees. At last they did have to come to a gate, though. Logic demanded it, and here it was: a new gate, indeed, of welded steel and coiled wire cruelly barbed, spanning an old rutted drive. The gate seemed pointless, given the slumped condition of the walls on either side. Likewise the armed guards hurrying from their sandbagged redoubt to haul the gate aside and salute the car through.

  ‘This is actually the back way,’ Tolchard said. ‘There’s a proper gatehouse at the far end of the valley and a better road, but we all use this. No point driving all the way down, only to come all the way back again. The old coach-road used to run over there, you see, before the railway came.’

  And then the town would have grown around the railway, and the road must have turned to accommodate the town, and so the house found itself facing the wrong direction. Not actually moving, but ever more remote. She supposed that would be true of dozens, maybe hundreds of great houses, that they were caught in stasis while the world shifted around them. The war might even be a blessing, perhaps, finding advantage in that isolation,
bringing purpose back . . .

  Nonsense. Houses don’t have purpose. Only people do that, and her own purpose was quite unaltered. These young men might have a brittle attraction and a deeper need that drew her deeply, but they were not irresistible. Nor was she irreplaceable. They would find other nurses to tease and amuse and depend on. She would serve her six promised months and be gone, once and for all, irrevocable. Yes.

  She hadn’t expected a sudden lake among the trees, it would have been almost the last thing she looked for, but here it was. Patently man-made, dug no doubt by a generation of navvies and fed from some high spring through a network of buried piping, it was long and straight and square-cornered, stone-lined. Above it were no more trees, only the terraced ranks of an old formal garden, given over now to vegetables between its paths and ponds and hedges.

  The drive skirted one narrow side of the lake, giving her just time enough to lift her eyes up the broad flat steps of the terraces and find what stood above, darkly weathered and bleakly impressive, the house itself.

  Just for that moment it lay in her gaze entire, all the height and the stretch of it, three storeys of old stone with attics over, and all its proportions wrong. The portico was minimal against the extravagant length of the house, the door it sheltered too tall, the windows all too small.

  Then it was lost behind hedges as the drive took them up beside the gardens. She could see the house only sidewise and in glimpses, in the gaps. Knowing the military mind as she did, she was a little surprised that no one had troubled to trim the hedging; it would be a useful way to use up youthful energies and the heavy hang of time. The system that had men all across the empire whitewashing stones to line parade grounds should never blink at a little topiary.

  Perhaps the CO here thought that fetching in his cider counted for more. But that was only one trip for one carload, an hour out of a day. There were people at work in the gardens, the orderly rows of greenstuff testified to that and she’d glimpsed uniforms through the rampant shadows of the hedge. And with patients as ambulatory as these, then surely . . .?