Silence for the Dead Page 8

  “Falling down?”

  “I mean it,” he said. “I’ve been in there and it’s a mess. There are parts of the ceiling coming loose. The last thing we need is a nurse breaking her neck in the west wing. Then we’d be really understaffed.”

  I thought perhaps he was joking, but he kept his face utterly straight and I couldn’t tell. “Thank you. For the warning.”

  “Hodgkins is wandering off again.” Paulus trotted off after the short man with no memory, who was as lost as a sheep.

  “He’s right—he’s right, you know,” said a voice behind me.

  I whirled. “Archie!”

  He looked abashed at the greeting, waved a hand briefly at his surroundings. “Matron said—Matron said I could.”

  “I’m glad.” He was so pale he nearly glowed in the sunlight, which showed in painful relief how very thin he was, how his uniform hung off him. He was sitting in the grass, propped on his hands behind him, his feet together and his bony knees poking upward. When he sat like that, leaning on his hands, he didn’t shake; he looked like a sick man, but one who might sit in the sunlight and recover.

  “The west—the west wing,” he said, as I grabbed my skirts and kneeled next to him. “You forget my palatial suite—my palatial suite is closest to it. Paulus is—correct. Don’t go there.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I said. “I’ve enough to do, thank you very much.”

  “It’s the—the damp. It’s very bad. Much of it—is rotting.”

  I looked over at the west wing, with its bare, darkened windows. It curved out over the landscape, away from us. “Why there, and not the rest of the house?”

  He only shrugged and looked away.

  I brushed my palms together and pointed to an especially large set of windows, winking sunlight back at us. “I wonder what those windows are. It must be a large room.”

  Archie still said nothing. I’d noticed that, as talking was difficult, he often just liked to listen as I kept the conversation going alone. But this was different. His previous good mood seemed to have suddenly fallen away and he seemed almost sullen.

  I kept trying. “I’m going to hazard a guess,” I said. “I think it’s a ballroom. That sounds like something rich people would have. I can’t imagine being so rich. Living grand like that.” He still said nothing, but he was listening, so I continued. “That room there,” I said, pointing to a set of windows at the very end of the west wing of the house, culminating in a door to the outside. “I think that room is—”

  “That’s the library,” said Archie. His voice was curiously flat.

  I turned to him, but he was still looking away. He had only tilted his head, looking at me from the corner of his eye. “All right,” I said, stepping carefully around this volatile mood. “How do you know? I thought the west wing was closed off.”

  “Not the li—not the—” He swallowed. “Not the library.”

  I frowned. “So the patients go in there?”

  “No.”

  What was he getting at? I glanced at the library again, but it sat silent. None of the patients, not even wandering Tom Hodgkins, had gone anywhere near that lonely door. I opened my mouth to speak again, but Archie swiveled toward me now. The sullen mood was gone.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “when I’m out here, I imagine—I imagine going that way.” He lifted a hand and pointed, shaking, in the direction of the woods. “I imagine there’s a pub just past those trees. And I go in and—I go in and order bangers and mash and beer.” He smiled at the thought, then looked at me and tapped his temple wryly with a trembling finger.

  I sat fully on the ground and pulled my knees up, hugging them. “What’s over there?” I asked Archie, pointing in a different direction, toward a sloping hill.

  “The thea—the theater,” he said promptly. “It’s a—a comedy. Very—very good.” He smiled at me again. “Don’t worry. I won’t go. There’s nowhere to go—nowhere to go, is there? Not really. It’s why they don’t bother with fences. We could walk away, but we have no—we have no money, and no one will help a man wearing one—wearing one of these shirts. We all know it. You’ll find us—find us very well behaved today, by the way. The doctors come tomorrow and we—and we have to be well.”

  I thought this over and frowned at him. “Be well for the doctors? Archie, I don’t understand.”

  He shook his head once, and for a moment his contented expression fell away again and something very bleak, very sad, replaced it. “That’s because—that’s because you’re not a patient here.”

  I swallowed. For a long second, which seemed to stretch on forever, he’d left me. It took a moment before his expression turned back to normal, but in that moment I suddenly wondered what had happened to Archie in the war.

  “Tell me,” I said, when he had come back to me, “about this part of the country.” I gestured around us at the landscape.

  He looked at me pleasantly. “What do you know?”

  “Nothing.” My laugh was quick and held a note of bitterness. “I know the streets of London, and that’s all. I know nothing about this place.”

  And so he told me about how the hills and the trees gave way to marshes in one direction, and in the other direction, where the land sloped upward, were the rocky cliffs going down to the wild sea. How this entire section of land sloped like a piece of pie, with Portis House sliding down it. He told me about what birds nested here, and which ones migrated through. He told me how the wind blew off the frozen sea in winter, turning sleet into ice on the windows and the branches of the trees. How the bridge to the mainland was often flooded over in rainstorms, and they’d had to wait for the water to come down before getting another delivery of supplies.

  I listened, fascinated despite myself. And even as he spoke I couldn’t help letting my gaze drift upward, to the wall of the house behind us. On the second level was a distinctive window, where our final patient stayed inside, alone in his room. From here I could see the window seat. There was no one looking out at us, but the curtain moved, and I knew someone had disturbed it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I awoke to the howl of warm, damp wind against the panes of the nursery windows. I scrubbed my face and looked out over the dark marshes under lowering clouds, the lonely clumps of trees bowing, the air as dense as cotton wool with oncoming rain.

  “Hurry,” said Nina from behind me. “Get dressed or we’ll be late for inspection.”

  She was in some kind of tizzy, and she pulled off her spectacles and polished them vigorously as we hurried for the stairwell. “The doctors come today,” she explained to me. “They’ll do inspection promptly at eleven. Everything has to be cleaned and ready by then. And I do mean everything.”

  It was true. We had to wipe windows, wainscoting, the backs of chairs; we had to stack linens with mathematical precision and line up spare pillows in perfect piles. By the time the men had gone to breakfast and I’d polished each bedstead, I was already exhausted, as much by the keyed-up tension in the air as by the work.

  The men were almost eerily quiet. They had shaved with their safety razors, buttoned their shirts, tied their shoes, straightened their beltless trousers the best they could. They ate breakfast in silence, then sat at windows or on chairs in the common room, their jaws tight and their eyes drawn. Two men played a halfhearted game of checkers. Others looked blankly at nothing. We cleared the dishes with soft clicks in the dining room, loading the dumbwaiters.

  What is it? I wanted to scream. What is it? But I kept my questions to myself, watching Nina polish her glasses again, hearing Boney snap at the orderlies, her lips pressed into a line so thin they nearly disappeared.

  “It’s a good day, isn’t it?” This was Tom Hodgkins, the patient who had no recollection of the war—or of much else, for that matter. He was thirty-five-ish and pudgy, with a spreading middle and thick, doughy thighs. H
e sat in the common room and smiled at me as I wiped an end table yet one more time. “The doctors are so kind.”

  “Are they?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. We get the best care here at Portis House. Regular checkups. Concern about our well-being. We’re positively spoiled.”

  I looked at him sitting in a stripped-down room far from home, reading a newspaper three weeks old with a square very clearly blacked out from the front page—probably an article about the war—and wondered, as I sometimes did, where he thought he was. “That’s nice.”

  “Some of these men, you know—” He looked about and lowered his voice confidentially. “Some of them seem rather ill. I’ve heard that injections of a vitaminic compound can be helpful.”

  “I see.”

  “I’d ask the doctors about it, if I were you. Nurses should learn these things. One should try to excel at one’s profession, even if you are only a woman and a nurse.”

  I snapped the dust rag rather harder than necessary, shaking out the dirt. “I’ll try.”

  The doctors arrived midway through the morning and were closeted directly with Matron; we had to go back upstairs and tidy up, buttoning on our long sleeves as if we hadn’t been working for some four hours already. I was surprised to find Martha, after catching a quick nap, getting dressed and buttoning her sleeves as well. “Inspection,” she explained to me. “All the nurses must attend.”

  We lined up in the corridor outside the kitchen, all of us nurses and most of the orderlies; two orderlies had been excused to oversee the patients’ exercise. The orderlies had put on fresh canvas whites, and we all stood awkwardly, trying not to cough or shuffle our feet as Matron brought the doctors by.

  There was a taller, older doctor and a shorter, younger one; the taller one was called Dr. Thornton and the shorter one was called Dr. Oliver. They wore somber wool suits. Thornton was fortyish and distinguished, with gray at his temples; Oliver was the acolyte, with a tall forehead and sweat dripping discreetly down his neck. They walked slowly down the line as Matron looked on, peering at us. I’d never seen a doctor of mental patients before, and I wondered what they were like. Dr. Thornton smelled of stale menthol and Dr. Oliver smelled of damp starch. My back hurt and I needed to go to the lav.

  “The staff seems in order,” Dr. Thornton said at last. “Mrs. Hilder, you are pleased with their performance?”

  I glanced warily at Matron, but she wasn’t looking at me. She had never spoken to me about the incident with Jack Yates, and I was waiting for discipline to fall like a guillotine.

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Matron.

  “Jolly good.” He turned to her. “Dr. Oliver and I would like to try something different today. We normally luncheon privately with you, but today we’d like to join the rest of the nurses.”

  From the corner of my eye I saw Boney jerk with surprise.

  “Of course, Doctor,” said Matron. “Let us set the table for extra places and we’ll be ready.”

  “Thank you.”

  We nurses were so run off our feet we almost never took luncheon; we merely grabbed a few bites of food between tasks. But this day we had to set the kitchen table with two extra plates.

  “We’re here really as observers,” said Dr. Thornton as he pulled up his chair. “A suggestion of Mr. Deighton’s. You mustn’t pay us any mind.”

  “We’re happy to have you, if I may say so, Doctor,” said Boney with shining eyes.

  “Thank you, Nurse.”

  We sat, awkwardly rubbing elbows, and served our meal. I tried to take Dr. Thornton’s measure, as I always took the measure of men who had the authority to sack me. A tyrant, a bully, a lecher? Did a doctor of minds, instead of bodies, have some kind of all-knowing ability to read thoughts? Perhaps he did, in order to heal patients. All I could see was that he was younger than our oldest patient, Mr. MacInnes—who had been an orderly in a casualty clearing station and had come home from Vimy with shell shock—and that he ate ravenously.

  I slowly came out of my woolgathering to discover that they were discussing Patient Sixteen. Dr. Thornton was frowning.

  “I don’t like this,” he said. “Can he not be dissuaded?”

  “I don’t believe so, Doctor,” Matron replied. “I spoke to him this morning, and he was quite insistent that he wanted to join this afternoon’s sessions.”

  “But he’s never done so before.” Dr. Oliver was amazed. “He’s always seen us privately. Why join the group sessions? Why now?”

  “I can’t say,” said Matron. “He told me only he thought he was ready.”

  “I don’t like this,” Dr. Thornton said again. “It will disrupt the other patients. And he’ll be seen by orderlies and other staff without clearance. This is expressly against Mr. Deighton’s orders. The situation with Patient Sixteen is supposed to be contained.”

  He glared at Matron as he said this, as if this were her doing. I glanced at the other nurses. They were sitting silently, as if taking in a tennis match. Nina, of course, was eating her lunch.

  “That isn’t all, I’m afraid,” Matron said. “He’s also asking permission to exercise out of doors.”

  “With the others?” Dr. Thornton was horrified.

  “No,” Matron replied. “He says he would like to go running alone at dawn every day. He says he’s beginning to feel the lack of activity in his room. He says he thinks the exercise may be beneficial to him.”

  What are you playing at, Jack Yates? It was the first thought through my mind, and immediately I silenced it. Perhaps the request was a sincere one. Why did I doubt it?

  Dr. Thornton’s eyes narrowed. “Patients taking excursions alone is expressly discouraged by Mr. Deighton.”

  “He should be refused,” Dr. Oliver agreed. “On both requests.”

  “I don’t believe he means to be disruptive,” Matron said. “His isolation, up until now, has been a voluntary one.”

  Dr. Oliver nodded. “That’s true. But if his changing his mind is going to disrupt the others, I wonder if enforced isolation may be of benefit. I believe we’re equipped for it. What do you think, Dr. Thornton?”

  Enforced isolation? What did that mean? Locking up Jack Yates? I tried to keep my alarm from showing on my face.

  “Wait, now. Wait.” Dr. Thornton held up a hand. “Dr. Oliver, in the case of any other patient, you would be correct. But this is—” He glanced around the table at us, and suddenly I was certain he had no idea which of us had clearance. “This is Patient Sixteen. His are special circumstances.”

  Dr. Oliver looked helpless.

  “Patient Sixteen’s voluntary isolation has worked well for us,” Dr. Thornton said. “But enforced isolation may not work as well with his particular neurosis. He is, as we know, a special risk.” He paused, thinking. “I do wish Mr. Deighton were here to advise. As he is not, we may have to rethink. Matron, how sane would you say the other patients are?”

  She blinked at him slowly. “They are all quite ill, Doctor.”

  He nodded. “Yes, yes. That may work. Their letters are censored before they leave the building, are they not?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Quite so. Really, the risk comes if one of these patients was to recover. And even if he did, he would have to tell of what he saw in a believable way. I don’t think such a scenario is likely.” He nodded again, satisfied that he had solved the puzzle. “Patient Sixteen will be seen with the first group, and only orderlies with clearance can attend. I do think we can manage it.”

  I glanced around the table again. Was he actually counting on the others being mad enough not to be believed? On none of the patients ever getting well? Had their entire policy been based on the hope that Jack Yates would never be well enough to leave his room, even for a minute?

  Everyone had lowered their eyes to their lunch plates, even Matron. But Dr. Oliver saw the look o
n my face, and his expression sharpened.

  “Matron,” he said, “you seem to have a new nurse on staff?”

  Dr. Thornton looked up from his chop in surprise.

  “Yes, Doctor.” Matron seemed as wary of this subject as the last. “This is Nurse Weekes.”

  “How long have you been here, Nurse Weekes?” Dr. Thornton asked me.

  It took me a moment to calculate. “This is my fifth day, sir.”

  “Your fifth day!” He turned to Dr. Oliver, almost peevish now that another problem had come up. “Did you notice this change on the staffing roster?”

  “It isn’t there, sir,” Dr. Oliver replied, mashing some peas onto his fork. “A Nurse Ravell is listed on the staffing roster.”

  “Nurse Ravell left quite suddenly,” Matron said.

  “But her replacement has been here for five days!” Dr. Thornton seemed distressed. “The staffing roster must be kept current, Matron. You know it is an important part of your duties.”

  Matron said nothing, but Boney was going red. She was as easy to read as a book. The staffing roster must obviously have been one of the jobs Matron had assigned her.

  “Now all the paperwork is suspect,” Dr. Thornton complained. “Matron, please tell me that at least the patient roster is up-to-date?”

  Matron sat straight in her chair, her shoulders squared, her glasses dangling on her chest, her blunt face unhappy to be receiving a dressing-down in front of her staff. Tell them to stuff it, I urged her, but she said only, “It is, Doctor. I do beg pardon. It will not happen again.”

  “See that it doesn’t. Nurse Weekes, what are your qualifications?”

  I swallowed my food, which was suddenly as dry as sand. “I worked at Belling Wood Hospital, sir.”

  “Jolly good,” he said, taking another helping. “Perhaps you can share with us some of their latest methods.”

  I wasn’t a practiced liar for nothing. “I could, sir, but none of those skills are needed here.”

  “True, true,” said Dr. Oliver.