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. He 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.