The Pure in Heart (29 page)

She took a couple of sudden deep breaths.

‘You all right?’

If she could get up and go back to the kitchen and be alone there for a few moments, then she would be calm and no longer
afraid of what she was about to do. Or else she would not do it. She would carry on. Nothing would be said. When she came back everything would be normal again, the white-faced clock quite familiar, the green wallpaper still. She could not get up. She could not even lift her cup. If she did she would spill the tea everywhere, her hands would shake so violently.

‘Ron Oldham’s dead by the way.
Announced it at the lodge tonight. Another.’ He reached forward to refill his cup. ‘All dropping off their perches. Time of year.’ He looked at her sharply again. ‘Hadn’t you better go to bed?’

She felt frozen, her limbs locked together, the muscles of her mouth, her neck, her face, paralysed. This is what it must be like to have a stroke, she thought, to think and know what you want to say,
should say, but unable to speak or move. To have to wait for someone to help you. Lift you. Speak for you. Feed you. Undress you. As she had done.

The clock struck the quarter-hour. It had a pretty chime, she thought. Delicate. The room seemed to be humming faintly, as if invisible wires were being plucked. It was a beautiful sound.

There was a sour taste in her mouth. Her throat had a lump
of congealed greasy matter embedded in the centre which she could neither swallow nor expel.

Richard Serrailler sipped his tea. His collar was disarranged at the back. He had been to his Masonic lodge where they played their silly dressing-up games and no one ever laughed, or that was what she had always believed, for if they could laugh they would see themselves and laugh until they were sick.
He had tried to persuade Simon and Chris to have their names put forward. They had laughed, both of them, laughed until they shook. She wondered if Freemasonry would survive for many more years.

Quite suddenly, the humming in the room ceased and the lump in her throat dissolved. She felt perfectly calm.

‘I have to tell you something,’ Meriel said.

He did not reply but his eyes remained steady
on her face.

‘What do you think about Martha now?’

He set down his cup. ‘Think about her?’

‘Do you think about her?’

‘Do you?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘And what do you think?’

She had not meant to allow him to become the inquisitor but he twisted things around and now she was on trial. She was unsurprised.

‘I think … that twenty-six years was a long time for things to be as they were.’

‘For us?’

‘For us. All of us. But for her most of all.’

‘How could you know that?’

‘I couldn’t. No one could. But the burden of existence … even of consciousness … must have been almost insupportable for her.’

‘We will not know.’

‘No.’

‘When you asked me what I thought …’

‘Perhaps I meant … feel. What do you feel now?’

He was sitting staring down at the cup and saucer in front of him on the low table,
his head bowed, hands joined between his knees. She tried to remember what he had looked like when he was
Simon’s age … and younger than Simon, but they were physically so different, apart from a dismissive gesture they shared, as well as the way each had of shutting himself off, that it was difficult. They had both been handsome – Simon still was.

Richard? Was he handsome now? His face had for
so long worn the mask of sarcasm and disapproval that it had changed him for good. Had he ever been a gentle man? With Martha. Yes, and with Cat as a small child too. Never with the boys, and especially never with Simon.

‘I feel anguish,’ Richard Serrailler said. ‘I feel bitter regret and a bitter bitter helplessness. What do we do?’ He raised his head and she saw that his eyes were bright with
tears. ‘What do we do now, in medicine, with our relentless desire to maintain and prolong life at any cost? Why do we insist that any life at all, any sign of breath and consciousness, has to be the best and to be striven for? Why can we no longer let old people go when they should? What did we call pneumonia when we trained? The old man’s friend. Not now. There is no such thing now. Pneumonia
should have been her friend years ago.’

Stop, she said to herself, stop now. Turn the conversation round, or away, get up, leave the room, go to bed. There is no need for this. Stop now. You have to go on bearing it alone. You cannot do this.

‘There is something I must tell you,’ she said.

The silence in the room was so great she wondered if they had both stopped breathing. Richard waited.
A hundred years went by.

‘Derek Wix believed that the last chest infection and pneumonia had exacerbated the congenital heart weakness,’ she said at last. ‘He gave heart failure as the cause of death.’ She waited. Nothing. He did not react. ‘Which of course it was. I caused her heart to stop. I killed her.’

She wanted him to help her but knew that he would not, that she was alone in having to
get to the end of this and that she must tell him everything, there must be no detail which he did not know. Her throat was dry but she could not move to pour herself a drink, not until it was over.

‘She was asleep. I went to see her late that night – after ten. I went to choir practice and then I drove to Ivy Lodge. The room was very peaceful. She was peaceful. She had no idea I was there. I
gave her an injection of potassium. Her heart stopped at once of course but it was as if she just went on sleeping. I kissed her and sat with her for a moment, and I said goodbye to her. Then I drove home.’

She felt all the breath go out of her body, leaving her weak, but with all tension and anxiety gone too. She was shaking, every part of her was shaking.

‘There is nothing more to tell you,
Richard,’ she said.

Afterwards she could not have said how long the silence went on for. She rested her head back on the chair and closed her eyes. Behind them, she saw Martha, peacefully sleeping.

Some time later, Richard got up, went to the cabinet and poured whisky into two glasses. He handed one to her without speaking. Fearfully then she looked up at his face. It was set and slightly flushed.
He did not meet her eye.

In the end, when he did speak, his voice was strange, as if he had half choked and was recovering, or as if he were forcing back tears. ‘I find it hard to believe you have done this.’

‘I have done it.’

‘You bore her and gave birth to her.’

‘I think that was why. Finally. I loved her.’

‘Did you?’

They looked at one another for a second then.

‘Of course I loved her.
How could you have ever doubted it? I loved her as you did.’

‘Oh yes.’ He sipped his whisky.

‘You know, barely a day went past when I didn’t think of it.’

‘Of killing her?’

She flinched, but said, ‘Please do not tell me it never occurred to you too. Every time she had another chest infection, another bout of pneumonia, you said she should die now.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this so very different?’

‘If
you mean, is the end result the same …’

‘I mean … you wished that she would die. I wished it. But she didn’t die and so I took her life. And she knew nothing at all, and she is – free. Whatever that means, yes, she is free. I freed her.
She was locked in a terrible prison and I released her. That’s the only way I can see it.’

‘You feel no guilt? Have you simply put it to the back of your mind?’

‘It has been at the front of my mind every minute since. But I feel no guilt. No, none.’

‘I could never …’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘My God, do you think I could commit murder?’

Murder. The word sounded peculiar in the room, like a word in a foreign tongue which did not belong with the rest. It did not frighten her or alarm her. She simply did not understand it and then, after a moment, rejected
it as irrelevant.

‘It is not murder … whatever you call it, it is not that.’

‘Killing.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why mince words?’

‘They’re important.’

‘Our daughter was important.’

He had finished his whisky. She had not touched hers. He was slipping the empty glass about and about through his fingers. Then he got up. He came over to her, put his hand on her shoulder.

‘I know. And now one of us must tell
Simon.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Because he is Simon or because he is the police?’

‘Both. He felt closer to her than any of us. That strange way he had of talking to her, singing to her, when he was a boy, do you remember? The
times he went to sit with her … it would devastate him.’

‘Nevertheless, he is the police.’

‘You think I have to tell them? Bring all that down on our heads?’

‘Your head.’

‘I don’t mean bring shame and disgrace, and besides, no one would react in that way, no one. I mean a prosecution and a trial, the newspapers, and for what? “Another doctor in mercy killing” … It happens all the time, you and I know that. Every doctor knows it.’

‘We used to be trusted. Not any more. Doctors are suspected … since Shipman and the cases in Holland.’

‘All the more reason. But I
didn’t do what I did as a doctor. I sent her to her peaceful end because I was her mother. If being a doctor gave me the knowledge of the right way – that’s incidental.’

‘You won’t rest easily until you tell someone.’

‘I have told you.’

‘I wish you hadn’t,’ Richard Serrailler shouted out, and as he shouted, tears of anguish and rage exploded from him in a torrent. ‘I wish to God I didn’t know.’

She slept at once and dreamlessly but woke in fear, her heart hammering through her eardrums, sweat running down between her breasts. In his own bed Richard was turned away from her, on his side.

After a moment, she got up quietly, went to the bathroom and took a warm shower. She hesitated on the landing but in the end went back to the bedroom. Richard had not stirred. She drew the curtain slightly.
It was calm with a bright three-quarter moon, catching the first blossom on the pear trees, making it ghostly. She pulled the basket chair from her dressing table and sat, looking out on to the garden. She never saw any of this, Meriel thought, not any of it, neither the house nor the garden, nor the country around. It should have been her home but it never was.

She remembered Martha’s birth.
Through her pregnancy she had known that something was wrong and once tried to tell her husband, who had dismissed her imaginings, pointing out that she was perfectly fit and well and had had her first children more easily than any woman carrying triplets had a right to do. She had heard him, and still known. When, years afterwards, she told Cat, her daughter had been unsurprised. ‘Of course, it
happens. You knew. You were right.’

But the sight of the child had still been shocking. She had lain, flabby and inert, her head too large, her skin pale and clammy. They had worked to make her breathe and they should not have done so, any more than all the doctors over the years should have worked to save her from mumps and German measles, chest infections and otitis media and every other attempt
by God or nature to end her life.

It had been left to her instead.

She had not simply ‘withheld treatment’. If the elderly had DNR posted above their beds, why not the ones like Martha?

She had taken life. Was it murder? She did not know. But there was no ambiguity about the word ‘kill’.

Her head was clear, her mind calm. She felt rested. The sight of the moonlit garden came to her as a balm.
What she had done she would do again. She knew that. She could accept herself now.

She started to remake her bed and smooth the pillows. A sliver of moonlight was falling on the pale blue carpet through the chink she had left in the curtains.

Abruptly, surfacing as if from deep beneath the sea, Richard woke, sat up, said her name.

‘It’s all right. Go back to sleep.’

He stared at her. ‘Do you
remember what you told me?’

‘Darling, you’re not awake … it’s three o’clock.’

‘You told me you had murdered Martha.’

‘I didn’t use that word.’

He lay back on the pillows and turned his head slightly so that he could not see her.

‘Richard …’

‘You must go to the police.’

‘No,’ she said.

‘Someone must.’

‘Will you?’

He did not reply. The moon went behind a cloud. Meriel waited, lying on
her back as he was on his.
Like effigies on one of the tombs in the cathedral. She saw them so – cold, grey and silent in death.

In the end, still waiting for him to answer her, she slept like that, hands at her sides, and the moon slipped out and silvered the room again and the space between the two beds was the width of the world.

It was the smell of the place. Andy Gunton sat on the bench in a cell at Lafferton Police Station and smelled it. Police stations. Courts. And after that prisons. They smelled. They each smelled different but you knew them with your eyes shut and as he sat down he had felt anger and shame and recollection and self-loathing crash over him, wave after wave. It was four o’clock. They had
put a plastic beaker of tea down in front of him and left him and even the way the constable set the drink down told him something about how he was seen.

He put his head down on his arms. You blew it, he said. You blew it. You stupid fuckin’ idiot. What did you expect, working for Lee Carter, where did you think you were going to finish up except here? He hated and despised himself to the extent
that if he could have seen a way he would have killed himself. He’d spent five years inside and learned nothing then?

He saw how it happened, over and over again, and there was nobody he was going to blame. He’d
had no time for the ones that kept coming back until the only thing they knew was prison but he’d turned into one of them without seeing it coming.

He wanted to cry. He did cry for a
moment which only made him loathe himself more. Michelle would throw him out. He could see how you ended up homeless as well. How people got to sleeping in shop doorways. Better inside. Three meals and a halfway decent bed. Better that.