The streets were dark and almost deserted though it was barely ten o’clock. But the lights of Bevham General Hospital blazed out and as Simon Serrailler turned into the slip road an ambulance overtook him, siren wailing, speeding towards A & E.
He had always liked working at night, liked it from his first days as a uniformed constable on the beat, liked it now on the few occasions when he had to take charge of a night-time operation. He was fired up by the sense of emergency, the way everything was intensified, every movement and word seemed significant, as well as the strange closeness engendered by the knowledge that they were people working on important and sometimes dangerous jobs, while the rest of the world slept.
He got out of his car in the half-empty car park and looked at the great slab of hospital building, nine storeys high and with various lower blocks at angles to it.
Venice was light years away, yet for a second he had a flash picture of the cemetery at San Michele as it had been in the cool light of that Sunday morning, of the ribbons of gravel path and the pale, still, grieving statues. There, as here at the hospital now, so much emotion was somehow held, packed into every crevice, so that you breathed and felt and smelled it.
He walked in through the glass doors. By day, the hospital foyers were more like the concourse of an airport, with a mall of small shops and a constant passage of people. Bevham General was a teaching hospital, centre of excellence for several specialties, with a huge number of staff and patients. Now, when outpatient areas and offices were dark, the real hospital atmosphere crept back into the quiet corridors. Lights behind ward doors, the screech of a trolley wheel, a low voice, the rattle of cubicle curtains … Simon walked slowly towards ITU, and the atmosphere, the sense of life and death together, pressed in on him, raising his pulse.
‘Chief Inspector?’
He smiled. One of the few people here who knew him professionally happened to be the sister on duty.
The ward was settling for the night. Screens were drawn round one or two beds, lights on in a side ward. In the back ground, the faint bleep and hum of electronic monitors. Death seemed very close, as if it hovered in the shadows or behind a curtain, its hand on the door.
‘She’s in a side room.’ Sister Blake led him down through the ward.
A doctor, shirtsleeves rolled up, stethoscope dangling, came out of a cubicle and shot off, checking his pager as he went.
‘They get younger.’
Sister Blake glanced round. ‘Down to about sixteen I’d say.’ She stopped. ‘Your sister is in here … it’s quiet. Dr Serrailler has been with her most of the day.’
‘What’s the outlook?’
‘People in your sister’s condition are prone to develop chest infections … well, you know that, she’s had them often enough. All the physio in the world can’t make up for the lack of essential movement.’
Martha had never walked. She had the brain of a baby and virtually no motor function. She had never talked, though she made babbling and cooing noises, never gained any control over her body. She had been in bed, in chairs and wheelchairs, her head propped up on a frame for the whole of her life. When she was a small child, they had taken it in turns to carry her, but her weight had always been leaden and none of them had been able to manage her beyond her third year.
‘That’s the ward phone and there’s no one on the desk … understaffed as usual. I’ll be there if you want anything.’
‘Thanks, Sister.’
Simon opened the door of Room C.
It was the smell that hit him first – the smell of sickness he had always loathed; but the sight of his sister in the high, narrow, uncomfortable looking bed cut to his heart. The monitors to which she was attached by various wires and leads flickered, the clear bag of fluid hanging from its stand bubbled silently now and then as it was fed, drip by drip, into the vein in her arm.
But when he went closer to the bed and looked down at her, the machinery became invisible, irrelevant. Simon saw the sister he had always seen. Martha. Brain-damaged, inert, pale, heavy, a dribble coming from the corner of her slightly open mouth. Martha. Who knew what she had ever registered about her life, the world, her surroundings, the people who cared for her, the family who loved her? No one had ever really been able to communicate with her. Her awareness and understanding were less than those of a pet.
And yet … there had been something of the life spark within her to which Simon had responded from the beginning, and which was deeper and greater than compassion or even a sense of simple kinship with someone of his own flesh and blood. Before she had gone to live in Ivy Lodge, he had often taken her out to the garden, or strapped her into his car and driven her for miles, sure that she enjoyed looking out of the window; he had pushed her chair around the streets to divert her. He had always talked to her. She had certainly known his voice, though she could have had no idea of the meaning of the sounds that voice made. Later, when he had gone to see her in the home, he had been aware of an intent stillness that came over her as soon as she heard him speak.
He loved her, with the strange, pure love which can receive no recognition or response and demands neither.
Her hair had been brushed and lay loosely round her head on the high pillow. There was no real character or definition in her face; time seemed to have passed over it leaving it quite unaffected. But Martha’s hair, which had always been kept short so as to be more manageable for her carers, had recently been allowed to grow, and shone in the light of the overhead lamp, the same white-blonde colour as his own.
Simon pulled the chair out, sat down and took her hand.
‘Hello, sweetheart. I’m here.’
He looked at her face, waited for that change in her breathing, the flicker of her eyelids, which would indicate that she knew, heard him, sensed him, and was comforted, reassured.
The green and white fluorescent lines of the monitor flowed on, making small regular wavelets, across the screen.
Her breaths were shallow as they passed rustily in and out of her lungs.
‘I’ve been in Italy, drawing … lots of faces. People in cafés, people riding on the vaporetto. Venetian faces. They’re the same faces you can see in the great paintings from five hundred years ago, it’s a face that doesn’t change, only the clothes are modern. I sit in cafés and drink coffee or Campari and just look at the faces. No one minds.’
He talked on but her expression did not change, her eyes did not open. She was somewhere further away, deeper down and more out of reach than she had ever been.
He stayed for an hour, his hand over hers, taking to her quietly as if he were soothing a frightened infant.
He heard a trolley being pushed down the ward. Someone called out. An immense tiredness came over him so that for a moment he almost put his head down on the bed beside Martha so that he could sleep.
The bump of the door brought him up.
‘Si.’
His brother-in-law, Cat’s husband Chris Deerbon, slipped into the room. ‘I thought you might need this.’ He held out a poly styrene cup of tea. ‘Cat said you’d got here.’
‘She doesn’t look good.’
‘No.’
Simon stood up to stretch his back which always ached if he sat down for long. He was six feet four.
Chris touched Martha’s forehead, and glanced at the monitors.
‘What do you think?’
Chris shrugged. ‘Hard to know. She’s had this all before but there’s an awful lot against her.’
‘Everything.’
‘It’s not much of a life.’
‘Can we be sure?’
‘I think so,’ Chris said gently.
They stood looking down at Martha until Simon finished his tea and threw the cup across into the bin.
‘That’ll see me home. Thanks, Chris. I’m bushed.’
They left together. At the door Simon looked round. There had been nothing since he had arrived, no flicker, no indication, apart from the rusty breathing and the steady blip of the monitor, that the body on the bed was a living young woman. He went back, bent over Martha and kissed her face. The skin was damp and slightly downy, like the skin of a newborn baby.
Simon thought he would not see her alive again.