The Pure in Heart (6 page)

‘Uncle Simon, Uncle Simon, I’ve got a gerbil, it’s called Ron Weasley, come and look.’

He would stay the night. Now, he wore a tracksuit belonging to his brother-in-law. He sat at the kitchen table next to his mother, the remains of an apple and
blackberry crumble and a second bottle of wine in front of them, Chris at the stove watching the coffee percolate.

‘I wanted you all here,’ Meriel Serrailler said. She sat very still, very straight.
Tight-lipped
, Cat had said. But there had been a tightness about his mother ever since Simon could remember, a smiling, alabaster, beautifully coiffed tightness.

‘What about Dad?’

‘I told you, he’s
at a Masonic.’

‘He ought to be here, he has a right to say … whatever he wants to.’

Chris Deerbon brought the coffee to the table. ‘Let’s talk about it now.’ He put his hand briefly on Cat’s shoulder. ‘I know more or less what Richard thinks anyway. I talked to him at the hospital.’

Cat turned to look up at him. ‘What? You didn’t tell me that.’

‘I know.’

His voice alone soothed and reassured
her, Simon could see it. His sister was lucky. It was a lucky marriage.

‘He talked to you when he doesn’t talk to me then,’ Meriel Serrailler said quietly.

‘Well, of course. It’s easier, isn’t it? You know that. I’m involved but I’m not Richard’s son and I am another doctor. Don’t worry about it.’

Meriel looked at him steadily. ‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘I’m past that.’

Simon could not speak. He
sat across a table from a panel of doctors. They had a different point of view, no matter that the person they were discussing was their daughter, sister, sister-in-law. They had a detachment he could not find.

‘She is probably going to die,’ Meriel said and now her voice had changed, it was the senior consultant’s voice, the clear firm tone of the sympathetic but uninvolved practitioner. ‘She
has been very weakened by this bout and it is not just her lungs that can’t go on throwing off pneumonia, her whole immune system is exhausted and her
heart tracings are poor. But we thought she would be dead forty-eight hours ago … more … and she is not. It’s time to look at her treatment.’

‘They seem to know what they’re doing,’ Simon said. But he knew what he said was not relevant, not the
business they were supposed to be addressing now.

‘Of course. The point is … how long will it take her to die? A day? A week? The longer they pour antibiotics into her, and fluids and salbutamol, the longer it will drag on.’

‘You want them to withhold treatment?’ Cat reached out and poured herself a glass of water from the jug in front of her. She sounded as weary as she looked. ‘I haven’t seen
her this week so it’s hard to voice an opinion. You have, Chris.’

‘It’s difficult.’

‘No,’ Meriel Serrailler said, ‘it is not. It is actually rather straightforward. She has no quality of life now and none to look forward to.’

‘You can’t say that. How can you possibly say that, how can you know?’ Simon clenched his fists, willing himself to speak calmly.

‘You’re not a doctor.’

‘What the hell
has that got to do with it?’

‘Si …’

‘You have no professional basis from which to assess her condition.’

‘No, I just have a human one.’

‘And doesn’t that tell you she has no quality of life? It’s perfectly obvious.’

‘No, it is not. We don’t know what’s in her mind, we don’t know how she feels, she thinks.’

‘She thinks nothing. She has no power of conscious thought.’

‘That cannot possibly
be true.’

‘Why?’

Cat burst into tears. ‘Stop’ she said, ‘I can’t bear this, I don’t want this sort of argument in my house …’

Chris got up and went to her.

‘It’s clear no one is capable of a rational discussion about this at the moment,’ Meriel Serrailler said. She got up, calmly took her coffee cup across to the dishwasher and loaded it in. ‘It wasn’t sensible of me to expect it. I apologise.’

‘What are you going to do?’

Meriel looked at her son. ‘Go home.’

‘You haven’t any right to make decisions about Martha, you know that.’

‘I know perfectly well what my rights are, Simon.’

‘For God’s sake.’ Cat held on to Chris’s hand, tears pouring down her face.

‘You should go to bed, darling,’ her mother said.

‘Don’t speak to me like that, I’m not a small child.’

Meriel bent over and kissed
Cat’s head. ‘No, you’re pregnant. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

The telephone rang as she picked up her bag. Chris gestured to Simon who sat nearest to it.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Simon.’

‘Yes. Is your mother there?’ Richard Serrailler, curt as ever.

‘She’s just leaving for home. Do you want to speak to her?’

‘Tell her Keats just rang from BG.’

‘About Martha?’ Simon felt the sudden silent tension
in the room behind him.

‘Yes. She’s rallied. She’s conscious. I’m going over there now.’

‘I’ll tell them.’

Simon set the receiver down and looked round. He wanted to laugh. Dance. Crow with triumph.

He saw his sister’s face, tear-stained, swollen, hollow-eyed.

‘Apparently Martha is rather better,’ he said gently.

When he walked on to the ward again forty minutes later he was on his own.
His mother had said she could not face the hospital again, Cat was exhausted.

‘There’s no need for you to go,’ Meriel Serrailler had said. ‘No need for any of us now. Your father’s there.’

‘I’d like to see her.’

He had assumed that his father would have left. A meeting with him at Martha’s bedside was not what he wanted but when he walked into the room, Richard Serrailler was still there, sitting
in the chair beside Martha’s bed reading her chart.

‘Your mother not coming?’

No greeting, Simon thought. I might as well be invisible.

‘She’s coming in tomorrow morning.’

He looked down at his sister. Her colour was better, with a faint flush of pink about her cheeks.

‘What happened?’

His father handed him the chart.

‘She has, as Devereux put it, the constitution of an ox. The new antibiotics
kicked in, she began to surface … opened her eyes an hour ago. Stats are encouraging.’

‘I suppose there could be a setback?’

‘Could. Unlikely. Once she’s over the crisis she generally hauls herself back.’

Simon wanted to touch his sister’s hand, kiss her cheek, get her to open her eyes again but with his father there he could not. He simply stood, looking down.

‘I’m glad,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘How can you ask? She’s my sister. I love her. I don’t want her to die.’

‘Your mother thinks her quality of life is zero.’

‘I don’t agree.’

‘We bow to your superior medical knowledge then.’

‘It’s an instinct.’

‘The police work on instinct rather than facts?’

Simon Serrailler was a man who had never felt violent towards anyone in his life though he had never been squeamish about using an appropriate
degree of force in the course of his job, but he felt an uprush of anger against his father now which made him clench his fists. At moments like this he had a clear insight into the hatred and rage that led some people to violence. The difference between him and them, he knew, was the thin but infinitely strong wire of self-control.

‘When will she be well enough to go back to Ivy Lodge?’ he asked
calmly.

Richard Serrailler stood up. ‘Couple of days. They’ll need the bed.’

Simon was a foot away from him. His father was a lean, good-looking man who might have been sixty rather than seventy-one.

‘What do you feel for her?’ Simon asked him now, glancing towards Martha. He felt himself tense as if he might need to defend himself for having the nerve to put the question at all. But his father
looked at him without anger.

‘I am her father. I have loved her since the day she was born. I don’t cease to love her because I have always regretted that day. What man could? You?’

‘All of that,’ Simon said, ‘but maybe without the regret.’

‘Easy for you.’

‘
Easier
.’

‘If you were ever to be a parent, which I presume you will not, you would know. Are you walking back to your car?’

They went
together down the quiet corridors. What his father meant, what was behind his
extraordinary remark, how he judged him were questions Simon could not address now. He whited out all thought and merely walked, out of the hospital and into the car park. At his father’s car he held open the door, waited until he was seated with his belt buckled, said goodnight, and closed the door.

Two minutes later
he was on the road to Lafferton, the tail lights of his father’s BMW already almost out of sight ahead.

He wanted to go back to the farmhouse; he needed to talk to Cat, but she would have gone to bed long ago, trying to rest as best she could in these last days of her pregnancy. He felt separated from her – from all of them, a feeling which would pass once her child was born, and which in any
case was largely illusory and entirely on his side. It had happened before – when Cat had married Chris, and as she had borne Sam and Hannah.

He turned into the Cathedral Close. The wide avenue with the grass spaces on either side and the cathedral rising up above his head, the elegant buildings, pale in the lamplight which was a softer, more silver colour than those of the raw lights around
the hospital and out along the main road, the long shadows cast by the trees … he had often thought that it looked artificial at night, a film set of a place, too empty, too tidy, too carefully arranged.

But it went with his mood. Tomorrow he would not hang about here. He knew when solitude
became dangerous for him. He needed to get stuck into work. If it was a day or two before the official
end of his leave, that was fine by him.

Andy Gunton stepped off the kerb and the car came out of nowhere, skimming his body. He lost his balance and fell into the gutter. A woman started screaming.

Traffic, Andy thought as he picked himself up, bloody cars and buses charging at you from everywhere.

The woman went on screaming and three people had come out of shops.

‘I’m a first-aider, sit down.’ She looked young enough to be
one of Michelle’s kids.

‘I’m OK,’ Andy said. ‘Just lost me balance.’

‘You could be in shock.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m not.’ He pointed to the woman who was staring at him and still screaming. ‘You want to look at her. I reckon she is.’

He brushed at his jacket as he walked quickly off and round the corner. All the same, he was shaken. He remembered this as a quiet bit of Lafferton. How could traffic
have bred like that?

There was a pub. He went in.

There were pubs enough in Lafferton and he had known a lot of them but maybe not this one. It didn’t smell of beer and tobacco, it smelled of coffee. There was a mirror running along behind the bar and a barman who looked more like a waiter in a black jacket was slamming metal coffee holders into an espresso machine.

Andy Gunton ordered a pint
of bitter.

‘We only have bottled.’ The barman rattled off a list of foreign names. Andy grabbed one as it passed.

He got a bottle. No glass. He looked round. He lifted the bottle to his mouth.

No one paid any attention to him at the bar. He went to an empty table. It was pleasant. The sun shone in on the back of his neck.

He realised that his hands were shaking, that he was breathing too fast
and his ears rang as if he had just surfaced after a dive. This place panicked him, just as the traffic had. Lafferton which he had thought at first glance looked the same, was not; little things were tripping him up, it was like living in a looking-glass world, everything slightly wrong.

Jeez. What was four years? A bloody lifetime, half his youth, but then again nothing, a blink; he didn’t
know where he was or what he was doing, he might have landed from Mars.

The probation officer had had good legs in a very short skirt. Long slinky hair tied back. A lot of eye make-up. She talked in riddles, but he was used to that. They learned another language when they
joined up, social workers, probation, briefs, whatever. Only the screws talked English.

‘Your rehabilitation programme will
really get under way once you start a job, Andy. Have you anything you are especially interested in doing?’

Fighter pilot. Brain surgeon. Formula One driver.

‘Gardening,’ he had said. ‘I did eighteen months’ horticulture.’

‘There’s a new garden centre operating at the Kingswood.’

‘Garden centre?’

‘I suppose most people do their own gardens, don’t they? I wouldn’t think there was much call
for your skills in Lafferton.’

‘It’s market gardening. It’s professional.’ He had a flash picture of the raised beds of young broad beans and early peas, the beautifully arranged sandy rows of tiny carrots. He’d learned about what hotels and restaurants wanted now; earlies, picked young, not stuff that was stringy and leathery and huge in old age. Cabbages the size of a baby’s fist not of a bride’s
bouquet.

She was sifting through the papers in the file on her desk. Was she older than him? Not much.

‘You’re living with your sister. How are you finding that, Andy?’

‘How’s she finding it more like.’

‘Do you have good relations with her? The family?’

‘OK.’

‘Well, that seems quite positive.’

‘It’s only till I get somewhere. A place. They’ve got three kids.’

‘You can put your name down
for a council flat.’

‘How long’d that be?’

‘There aren’t many for single people, I’m afraid.’

‘So where are we supposed to live then? Where d’you live?’

‘As I say, you’re lucky to have your family, your sister is obviously very supportive, that’s good. You won’t feel excluded.’

‘What from?’

‘Your parents …’ she began to sift the papers again.

‘They’re dead. Dad when I was twelve of lung
cancer, Mum after I’d been six months at Stackton and don’t say you’re sorry because you’re not, why would you be?’ He felt an anger which was like foam in his mouth waiting to froth out all over this yellow-curtained office, all over Miss Long Legs.