The Pure in Heart Read Free Page A

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 knewhim 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 background, 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 aframe 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 smellthat 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, theclear 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 thebed 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 ableto 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 tothe 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 stillnessthat 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