Teresa Caffrey held the door open for the young man because he was her boss.
‘Thank you,’ he said in recognition of the gesture.
Raymond Porter was thirty-two, a hot shot fresh from the world of investment banking, and he was the new managing director of Grovecare Ltd, a group of nursing homes. Today he was touring his empire for the first time.
Knockvale House, on the shores of Belfast Lough, was the showpiece of the whole organisation and it was here that Grovecare had started ten years ago. Now there were twenty five such institutions, in Northern Ireland and the Republic as well as Scotland and the Isle of Man.
Teresa was Knockvale’s nursing manager. There was a time when she would have been called matron, but the health care business had changed all that. Matrons belonged to the past. The word had a black and white sound to it, like an old Carry On film with Hattie Jacques, although most of the matrons Teresa had ever known were wiry, energetic women like herself.
Her husband had once said that there were more private nursing homes in Northern Ireland now than there were pubs. Old rectories, former schools, run-down residences once owned by minor landed gentry, they’d all been bought up and the country was littered with these places. Bloody ridiculous. But he had changed his tune when she had waved her first pay-slip in front of his nose.
She closed the door behind her.
They were on the first floor. She felt its quiet, reverential calm and wondered if Porter did. Outside there was the distant hum of traffic but, muffled by layers of insulating glass, it became nothing more than a gentle rhythm, always present, although never intruding.
‘What happens here?’ Porter inquired and she noticed he was almost whispering.
‘We have some rather special patients on this floor. People who . . .’ she smiled sensitively ‘. . . who perhaps haven’t got very long.’
He nodded. ‘I understand.’ His father had died of cancer when he was six.
‘There’s one patient – I wonder if you’d like to see her,’ she said. ‘I don’t – I wouldn’t like to intrude. I don’t want to disturb anyone.’
She smiled again. ‘Don’t worry. You won’t.’ She opened the door of a room and they stepped softly across its threshold.
In here there was a rhythm, too: the rhythm of a life. It could be heard in soft beeping sounds and observed in flickering waves on monitors attached to machines that measured its steady, never-changing progress. Even the bed itself had a rhythm, a gentle electronically controlled movement designed to keep its motionless occupant free from discomfort.
In the bed was a young woman. She lay on her side, one arm resting on top of the covers, a drip feed line attached to the back of her hand. Her long brown hair was spread out on the pillow behind her head and her face was thin and still and deathly pale because it had seen no sun or felt no wind for such a very long time.
Porter could not take his eyes off her.
‘God, she looks so – so serene,’ he said, surprised to find such a word in his vocabulary. It would sit oddly in his usual lexicon, a rare flower among expressions like ‘corporate profits growth’, ‘industry consolidation’ or ‘share buy-backs’.
‘This is our Meg,’ Teresa said with affection.
‘Meg?’
‘Meg Winter. Doctor Meg Winter to be precise.’
‘Meg Winter.’ He struggled with the name, feeling it stir something in his memory, and then it came, helped by the image before him. ‘Oh my God, of course.’ He pointed a waggling finger at the bed.
‘This is that woman.’ He said it excitedly. ‘The woman in a coma. The car crash. When that man was murdered.’
‘Yes.’
‘So she’s here?’
‘She’s been here for the best part of four years.’
‘Good God. Like that? All that time?’ Teresa nodded.
‘But is there nothing – I mean if there’s no hope – can’t you just . . .’
‘Let her die, you mean?’
‘Well – I didn’t intend—’
‘No, it’s a valid question, all right. Don’t think it hasn’t been discussed.’ She sighed. ‘Meg’s a very unusual case. In the – accident – she was very badly injured, of course. Both legs broken. A hip as well. But fortunately no internal injuries. Her face was severely cut by metal and glass but there’s been no lasting physical effect save for this.’
She walked towards the bed. There were birthday cards on a table beside it; a vase of pink carnations that had seen better days. Porter followed uncertainly, looking where Teresa was pointing. The young woman’s right eyebrow had been broken in two by a scar which ran through it.
‘She was lucky she didn’t lose an eye,’ she said, then shrugged. ‘But of course what else has she lost?’
The question had no answer. Porter stared at the sleeping figure. She looked so peaceful. ‘There’s brain damage, I suppose.’
‘You would think, wouldn’t you? She may have suffered what’s known as a diffuse axonal injury, which is very often the cause of long-standing coma after a head injury. That means there’s microscopic damage to the nerve cells. They become sheared, get torn off, but no amount of neurological examination has been able to determine that for certain in Meg’s case. They’ve also scanned the cerebral cortex but found nothing that might in any way sustain such profound coma.’
‘They?’ Porter asked.
‘Specialists of various kinds. Consultants. Neurosurgeons.’
‘Expensive.’ The care here alone could cost up to a thousand pounds a week.
‘Her father has money.’
‘So what’s the prognosis? Is that the right word?’
She smiled. ‘It is and there isn’t one. Basically, no one knows why she’s like this. Perhaps deep inside her brain, within what are known as the medial parts of the temporal lobes, there’s something which no one has been able to see. But without her being conscious, there’s no way of using modern technology, like PET scanning, positron emission tomography, as it’s called, which is used in order to examine the brain at work. So – here she lies. The sleeping beauty.’
‘You seem to know a lot about this.’
‘I’ve taken a bit of an interest. Books. The internet. She fascinates me. Have you any children?’
‘I’m not married.’
‘I have a daughter. She was very ill once. Might have died. It comes back to me sometimes.’
They did not speak for a moment. Then she closed the door on the memory, guilty at having opened it, wondering if he would think she wasn’t professional or tough enough. She felt guilty, too, because they were standing here discussing Meg as if she was some kind of specimen, a freak. She hadn’t meant to do that.
‘We’ll leave her,’ she said. ‘Best get on.’
She ushered him out of the room and closed the door gently behind them. ‘We’re keeping her here for as long as her parents want us to. But one of these days they’re going to have to decide to take her home. We give her basic nursing care because that’s all she needs. To all intents and purposes, she’s a healthy young woman, functioning normally. It’s just that she won’t wake up.’
‘So she’s not going to die?’
‘Oh, we’re all going to die, Mr Porter.’
He shot her a glance that reminded her not to treat him like an idiot so she said: ‘No, not unless she develops a serious illness or there’s something unforeseen.’
‘Like what?’ he asked.
This time it was her turn to give a look. It puzzled him for a second and then he realised what he had said. ‘Sorry. Stupid of me.’
She smiled benignly. ‘Now is there anything in particular that you’d like to see?’
She came back to the room half an hour later, after she had seen him off in his new navy blue BMW which came with the job.
Nothing had changed. There was the same stillness that you could practically touch with your fingers.
She tucked the covers in at the bottom of the bed, even though Meg had not moved since the last time she did it and would not do so between now and the next time.
Sharp January sunlight was coming through the window. She looked out at the broad sweep of the lough. The hospital gardens, privacy ensured by high hedges and mature trees, led almost to the water’s edge. Far on her right she could see the shipyard cranes and the city’s rapidly developing waterfront skyline. On this side of the shore, to the left, was the crusty shape of Carrickfergus Castle and somewhere out there, just a short sea journey away, was the west coast of Scotland.
The view was magnificent but the woman in the bed had never seen it, not in all the three and a half years she had been here, which was longer than Teresa’s own tenure.
But then, few of the other patients were in a position to appreciate what they saw. It was, she thought in her bleaker moments, nothing more than a glorified hospice for the well-to-do. God’s waiting room. That was another one of her husband’s phrases.
Teresa lowered the blinds to soften the glare and wondered how she would feel if it was her own daughter lying there.
She had two children, a boy and a girl, but it was Emer to whom her mind turned now, just as it had when Porter was here. At the age of eight, the girl had developed a severe viral flu that had teetered on the edge of meningitis. She had been taken to hospital, where Teresa and her husband had spent three anxious nights watching and waiting and holding hands at her bedside.
Even now, with all that in the past and Emer safe and healthy and, at fifteen, a vigorous member of her school’s swimming team, Teresa found the memory hard. Being in this room always brought it back. She had glimpsed the spectre of her daughter’s death yet in the end it had not happened. The child had been spared and, please God, she had a long, full and active life ahead of her.
What would it be like to see your daughter like this every day?
She looked at the young woman. Her body was here but where was her spirit, her soul? Was it with her in this room or had it left her a long time ago?
Not for the first time, Teresa felt her faith being tested as she stood and listened and wondered what purpose was being served by all this. Was it really God’s will?
Just do your job.
She walked over to the bedside table. There were fewer birthday cards this year. She picked them up and looked at them again.
There was the one from her and her colleagues. They had not wanted to send anything with ‘Happy Birthday’ on it. They had the same discussion every year. How could you put that? What would be happy about it?
Instead they had sent a card with doves and a heart and no message at all and on the inside they had written – ‘with love from the nursing staff.’
Teresa hoped Meg’s parents would see that it was a thought for them, too, an indication, if they needed one, that other people cared and that they were not alone.
The parents. That was another story.
There were just three other cards. One, from someone called Elizabeth, was a small original abstract watercolour, swirling shapes in purple and green, expensive, something to keep. It would go in a drawer somewhere, like last year’s.
The card had caused a bit of confusion when it had been delivered, addressed to Dr Meg Winter. A new clerical assistant had thought it was for a member of the staff. Until somebody had put him right.
What sort of a doctor were you, Teresa wondered. Where would you be now if all this hadn’t happened? Not in your job at the old Central Hospital. That closed down two years ago.
On the front of another card a Victorian painting was reproduced. In it a pale girl relaxed languidly in a flat-bottomed boat, trailing her fingers in water covered with lily pads.
Teresa looked inside. ‘With love from Dad,’ it said.
Beside the message, a tiny x signified his affection.
On the back was the name of the painting. ‘Becalmed.’ Not just any old card. Thoughtfulness and a father’s pain had gone into its choosing.
The third and final card was a big one with a drawing of a curly-headed child on a swing garlanded with buttercups and daisies. The words For a dear daughter were embossed in gold across the top. Inside there was a lilting, sugary rhyme but on the opposite page, written in ink, it said:
He that keepeth thee shall not sleep.
– Psalm 121
Below that came the message:
To my darling daughter Margaret on her 30th birthday.
From Mum.
Teresa studied the card. It was a curious mixture of soft-centred sentimentality and Biblical conviction and she wondered what that said about the woman who had sent it.
She frowned slightly. One from Mum and one from Dad.
Separate cards. Separate lives.
She put the cards back and looked at the carnations. They had stood there for a week but now the flowers were dying slowly, becoming drier and more shrivelled with each day.
Is that what will happen to you? Are you just withering away like that?
She pulled up a chair and sat down, looking into Meg’s placid face. It was as if she were hibernating, hiding inside herself. Just her and the truth of what happened that night.
Somebody had murdered that poor man. He would have lived, he would have survived the accident if someone had not smashed his skull in. Who in the name of God would do a thing like that?
She leaned forward and stroked Meg’s hair gently. It smelled sweet because they had washed it yesterday, lifting her carefully to do so, almost as if they did not want to wake her, then using the drier with its softest setting.
Her breathing was steady and calm. Teresa opened a drawer in the bedside cabinet and took out a box. It contained a soft gel and she smeared a little of it on Meg’s lips to prevent them becoming parched.
She put the box back in the drawer and stood up. An image of her own daughter once again flitted across her mind. On impulse, she stooped and kissed Meg on the cheek. Then she turned and left the room. There were other things she needed to think about, like what young Mr Porter had made of her and the way she looked after this place.
The flowers. Halfway along the corridor she remembered she had meant to take them with her and throw them out. She would remind one of the staff to take care of it.
No – she would do it herself while it was still in her head.
She turned and walked back into the room. The vase was there on the table and she lifted it.
There was something . . . something different.
It tingled on her skin. She paused and frowned, feeling an uncertainty. It was as if someone else was there with her, watching.
She looked towards the bed.
It was impossible.
Meg Winter’s eyes were open.
They had been open before, fleetingly, but not – not like this. It was as if they were studying her. Teresa stared back, held by the firmness of the young woman’s gaze and unable to move from the spot.
And then Meg blinked.
The vase slipped and smashed into fragments, the dead carnations skidding and scattering across the floor in a stream of water.
‘She’s awake!’
Teresa Caffrey, aged forty-three, mother of two, Knockvale’s senior and highest-paid nurse, a woman who thought she had seen everything, ran from the room and raced headlong down the corridor, shouting loud enough to raise the dead.