Simon Serrailler had slept deeply and woke to the sound of the cathedral clock ringing eight. The flat, the perfect space he had created with such loving care for himself, was cool and silent, filled with the bland light of a March morning. He pulled on his dressing gown and padded into the long sitting room, curtainless and tranquil with its polished elm floor, books, piano, pictures. The light was not blinking on the telephone answering machine. No one had rung to tell him his sister was dead.
He filled the grinder with coffee beans and the filter with water. In half an hour the first cars would pull into the spaces at the front and the sound of the early arrivals at work echo up the stairs. The rest of this Georgian building had long been converted into offices for various Diocesan organisations and a couple of solicitors. Simon’s was the only residential flat. He had usually left for the station by eight and was not often home until after seven, so he rarely met anyone else – during the day the building had a life of its own, about which he knew little. It suited him, self-contained and private as he was, content in his orderly space. He relished his job, had enjoyed almost every day of his life in the police force, but his refuge here was essential to him.
Now, mug of coffee in hand, he went to three of his own drawings framed and hanging on the wall to the right of the tall windows. He had done them on his last visit to Venice and he saw at once that they were better than anything he had produced during the previous few days there. He had not worked so well for a long time, unsettled as he had been by the events of the previous year. The murder of Freya Graffham had hit him hard and not only because the death of a fellow officer was always a blow from which it was tough to recover. No, he said, and went briskly back to the kitchen for more coffee. Don’t go there, not again. He dressed in jeans and sweatshirt and took the canvas satchel he used to hold his drawing things. The offices were opening, voices came through half-open doors, kettles boiled in cubby-holes. Strange, Simon thought. The building felt different, no longer his. Strange. Strange to be wearing jeans instead of a suit on a weekday morning, strange to be here instead of overlooking a back canal in Venice. Strange and disorientating.
He drove fast out of Lafferton.
The hospital might have been a different place too. He had difficulty finding a parking space, the foyer streamed with people on their way to outpatient appointments, porters pushing wheelchairs, gangs of medical students, flower deliverers, two women setting up a charity stall. Down here the smell of antiseptic was barely detectable.
The lift was full, the wards were noisy. Somewhere, someone dropped a bucket and swore. But in Martha’s room, nothing had changed. The monitors blipped on, the fluorescent green wave lets rippled across the screens, the liquid in the plastic bag above her head drip-dripped. At first he thought that his sister looked the same but when he went closer, it seemed to Simon that the colour of her skin had darkened slightly. Her hair was damp, her eyelids tender as the soft skins of mushrooms.
He wondered, as he always did when he saw her again, how much went on in her mind, what she recognised and understood, whether she thought and if so how deeply. That she felt he was in no doubt. Her feelings had always moved him for she expressed them as a baby, crying and laughing as readily and absorbedly, ceasing as quickly, though he had never found it easy to make out what might have stimulated her emotion or whether the response was to something external or inside herself.
Her handicap so affected her features that it was hard to detect any family resemblance there but to Simon that only made her more completely, uniquely herself.
He pulled the chair up close to her bed.
He was too absorbed in his drawing to notice the door opening. He wanted to catch the spirit of his sister by freeing her, on paper, from the medical apparatus that surrounded her and as he looked at the hairs on her head, the curve of her nostril beneath the wide nose, and the eyelashes, like the hairs of a fine paintbrush on her cheek, he saw that she was beautiful, as a child is beautiful, because neither time nor experience had in any way marked her face. Drawing her eyelids with the finest pencil lines, he almost held his breath.
‘Oh, darling …’ The front of her hair glittered with raindrops. ‘Cat told me you’d come back.’
They looked at the still, oddly flattened figure on the bed.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You mustn’t be.’
‘Every time I come in through that door I feel torn in two,’ Meriel Serrailler said. ‘Afraid she will be dead. Hoping she will be dead. Praying but I don’t know who to or for what.’ She bent now and brushed her lips against Martha’s forehead.
Simon pulled the chair back for her.
‘You were drawing her.’
‘I’ve been meaning to for a long time.’
‘Poor little girl. Have the doctors been in yet?’
‘Not this morning. I spoke to Sister Blake last night. And Chris was here.’
‘It’s hopeless either way. But none of them will say so.’
He put his hand on his mother’s arm but she did not turn to him. She sounded, as she always did when she spoke about Martha, cool, detached, professional. The warmth in her voice, familiar to the rest of them, seemed absent. Simon was not deceived. He knew that she loved Martha as much as any of her children but with an entirely different kind of love.
His drawing lay on the bedcover. Meriel picked it up.
‘Strange,’ she said. ‘Beauty but no character.’ Then she turned to face him. ‘And you?’ She looked at him with disconcerting directness. Her eyes were Cat’s and Ivo’s eyes, very round, very dark, not his own blue ones. She waited, still and quite composed. Simon picked up the drawing and began to cover it with a sheet of protective film.
‘I wish your father hadn’t rung you. You needed a holiday.’
‘I’ll get another. I’m going for a cup of tea. Shall I bring you some?’
But his mother shook her head. At the door Simon glanced round and saw that she was stroking her daughter’s hair gently back from her face.