House of Doors Read Online Free PDF

rising arm of a couch. She blinked a little dizzily, and lifted her head from its seductive solidity. It smelled of comforts, leather and tobacco. She could see the dark deep-buttoned back of it stretching away, her own body laid out along its length. Her shoes were missing. No doubt she should say where am I? or what happened? , in her new unexpected role as a fainting female. But she knew exactly what had happened. She was quite clear about that, she remembered it distinctly. The door  . . .
    No. She wouldn’t think about the door. Better to focus on the professional shame of this moment; better yet to distract both herself and her interlocutor. She turned to look about her, and there was Aesculapius. Not the man, the bust. Set now in an alcove that might have been designed for him, where she might have assumed he’d stood for a century or more if she hadn’t seen him being carried about London just a week ago.
    Nothing else in this room suited it half so well. She couldn’t guess, quite, what its proper purpose had been, before. Perhaps one would need to have grown up in those circles, to see a room with all its proper furniture stripped out and still tell at a glance the butler’s pantry from the housekeeper’s room from the nursery toy-store. Ruth’s parents had been well-to-do, but never quite part of the country-house set.
    Peter might have known – but actually she thought perhaps one would need to have grown up in this particular house, to know this particular room. Plain white wainscoting, with the plaster painted institution green above. That told her nothing. Nor did the off-square shape of it, nor the window that lacked a sill, nor that curious solitary niche in the wall. There were cupboards hidden behind the wainscot, she could see keyholes and fine brass hinges, but again those had nothing to say about what they were designed to hold.
    Whatever its original use, the room had been taken over by a man with a whimsical practicality. This couch had surely been salvaged from somewhere else in the house. That desk likewise, a massive Victorian edifice with a bank of drawers in each pedestal. At this moment, the desktop was bare but for a stopped clock, a stiff-backed lamp and an elderly teddy bear who leaned against it, much as a drunk might lean against a street light.
    The shelving on either side of the desk was new and utilitarian, burdened with books and files in that kind of tumbled disorder that speaks of constant use. The floor was uncarpeted, the window rather shockingly uncurtained. It was a sign of how war retrained the mind, Ruth supposed a little ruefully, that she could come round from a faint and gaze around an unfamiliar room and find herself thinking of the blackout.
    If that was what it took to keep herself from thinking about the faint, about the door, about Peter – well.
    Perhaps she should ask about the blackout. This might be remote country and far from any ARP wardens, but the law was still the law. Planes get lost, lights attract bombs; this was a military establishment. And more than a home for convalescent pilots, there seemed no doubt about that.
    Good, more things to think about. To ask about, perhaps, if only to earn a snub in response. She was here to nurse, after all, not to interrogate senior officers about their other occupations.
    Aesculapius watched from his alcove. Benignly, she thought. She wanted to think.
    She was sure she knew whose office this was. Not this man’s who sat above her now, in the chair he’d drawn over from the desk. Who watched her with a less benign eye, perhaps.
    Whose moustache twitched hypnotically as he spoke, but best not to focus on that or she’d get the giggles and find herself in disgrace on her first day. More disgrace than she was in already.
    â€˜Want to tell me what happened?’
    No. Aloud, she said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, it’s my own stupid fault. I can’t remember the last