The Pure in Heart (15 page)

‘You said.’

‘Then I remembered this.’

‘It’s not enough to bring him in but it’s enough to pay him another visit.’

‘What, now?’

‘No, no, leave it till first thing. It’s not enough to go hammering on doors in the middle of the night.’

‘OK.’ Nathan sounded disappointed.

Cat was standing by the Aga waiting for the kettle to boil.

‘Sorry.’

‘No, I shouldn’t go to sleep like that, I get cramp. Tea?’

‘No. I’ll take over from you on the sofa. You go up.’

‘The spare bed’s made up. You won’t sleep properly down here. Take a bit of your own advice.’

Simon stood up and stretched.

‘What were you doing?’

‘Drawing you and Mephisto.’

Cat smiled.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Weary. I just want to have a baby.’

‘Chris is a long time out.’

‘We need that locum. He can’t do this, on call most nights, and it’s been hellishly busy.’

‘No one yet?’

‘The person he interviewed didn’t want it after all. He heard about some woman today who might be interested … came back from two years in New Zealand and thinks she might like to be in this area but wants to test the water.
Don’t know any more yet. Let’s pray.’

‘I thought everyone wanted to be a GP.’

‘Oh, they used to. Times have changed.’

‘I’ll go up … if I get called in to the station, I’ll try not to make a racket.’

‘You never do. Anyway, I’m used to Chris getting up, Sam coming into our bed with his nightmares. His head’s full of David Angus. I can’t deal with it easily, Si … I lie to him and he knows I’m
lying. They talk about it at school, Chris says he hurls himself into the car and locks the door. He wouldn’t go with the Simpkinses yesterday, Chris had to take him there to tea.’

Simon went over and put his arms round her.

‘I can’t stop thinking about that little boy.’

‘I know.’

‘How do you deal with it?’

‘Cat, you have children who die of cancer, and young patients killed in stupid accidents
and babies who get meningitis. Deal with this in the same way.’

‘This is worse.’

‘Maybe.’ Simon went towards the door, rubbing his hand over his blond hair in the gesture Cat knew so well and which he had always made when he was exhausted, or over-anxious, troubled by his work or by something within himself about which he would not talk.

She put out the kitchen lights. On the sofa, the cat
Mephisto stretched out a paw, kneaded the air with his claws, and burrowed back into sleep.

The parrot Shirley Sapcote’s great-aunt left her had been called Churchill but Shirley had changed its name to Elvis the day it arrived. She had tried to teach it to say ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ instead of ‘Never surrender’, but only succeeded in confusing it so much that it was now mostly silent apart from occasionally making the noise of a train going through a tunnel. It sat in its cage on
the small table under the window, staring at her balefully, its sulky silence worse than its voice.

The bungalow was one of six built in a single redbrick block at the back of Ivy Lodge. Shirley had not been able to believe her luck when the job she so much enjoyed provided her with a clean, new, comfortable place to live, after years in frowsty bedsits and cheap flatlets in badly converted houses
near the canal. The block had been built on a piece of land behind the nursing home where a row of condemned Airey prefabs had once stood and proved a godsend to the owners in helping them to find and keep staff. Not many stayed as long as Shirley
though. She thought she would never move until she retired and even then maybe …

There were some trees at the back. She could lie in bed and watch
squirrels run up and down the trunks and leap across from one to the other like circus acrobats and at night she could listen to the owls.

She had not wanted the parrot but as her great-aunt had also left her two thousand pounds and a Crown Derby tea service, her conscience would not have allowed her to reject him or give him away. This morning he looked cross-eyed and hunched himself into his
grey feathers.

‘
You ain’t nothing but a hound dog
,’ Shirley sang at him, ‘
cryin’all the time
. OK, buster, that’s your lot. See you later.’ She shoved a piece of apple in between the bars, half drew the curtains because it was something her mother had always done, and went out. Some people might not like living on top of the job but she found it restful to walk across a nice stretch of grass and
into the building opposite without having the hassle of catching buses or starting cars, without even having to put on a coat half the year.

Shirley was forty-one. She liked her work, she liked her flat, she went line dancing twice a week and ballroom dancing every Saturday and on Sunday she sang in the gospel choir at the Redeemer Church, the only white person there. She was a happy woman.

The early-morning shift was her favourite. She liked the atmosphere of a new day. She liked to
wake people up with a cheerful face. She liked the smell of the breakfasts cooking and the sound of the floor polisher whirring about the hall and the vacuum cleaner on the stairs.

She walked into the staffroom still singing ‘You ain’t nothing but a hound dog’.

‘They haven’t found him.’ Nev Pacey the
caretaker was sitting at the table with the morning paper in front of him.

‘Oh God bless him, poor little love. What wicked people are capable of, it defies belief.’

‘
Police say they are becoming increasingly concerned for David’s safety as time goes on
.’

‘Well, they would be. I mean, think about it, he hasn’t gone off for a toddle down the road and lost his way, has he? He hasn’t hopped on
a bus and gone to visit his gran. Those poor parents.’

‘
Mr Alan Angus, consultant neurosurgeon at Bevham General Hospital and his solicitor wife Marilyn made a highly emotional television appeal for news of their son … “We beg you, if you are holding David, just let him go. Ring the police. They’ll come to wherever you are holding him. We want him home. We just want him home
.”’

‘And they say
the Devil doesn’t stalk the earth still. He’s everywhere.’

Nev turned the paper over to the racing page.

‘Right, let’s get on … time to go and see Little Miss Sunshine and Mrs Muffet.’

Shirley had names for all the patients, something which the rest of the staff found irritating but
nevertheless found themselves falling in with, so that Mrs Eileen Day, who was slowly, slowly dying of motor
neurone disease was for some reason Mrs Muffet, and Mr Atkinson, brain-damaged after being caught in a bomb blast, was Giantkiller. Martha Serrailler was Little Miss Sunshine.

Since she had nursed her mother through multiple sclerosis, her aunt through two years of paralysis after a stroke and her only sister Hazel through breast cancer, Shirley had found that looking after the incurably ill
was a part of her life she could not conceive of being without. She was consoled by the knowledge that she was wanted and needed and that she was good at what she did, and brought something to it other than a disinterested professionalism. She brought commitment, and cheerfulness, all the benefits of lack of personal ambition, and, in the case of Martha Serrailler, love. She had loved the girl since
she had first arrived here, loved her because to Shirley there was no more reason not to love her than there would be not to love a newborn baby. Martha was a newborn baby. She had no more knowledge, no more ability or personality than one; she could do no harm, could never lie or steal or cheat, never hurt or insult; she was perfectly innocent, like a white sheet of paper. Everything she did was
innocent, every noise she made, every odd random gesture of her body. Her bodily functions were as innocent as a baby’s too. Shirley could never understand why anyone should find them any more troublesome or unpleasant to deal with.

She went up the stairs. There was a small kitchen at the end of Martha’s corridor. Shirley would get her breakfast ready, the baby cereal and the spouted drinking
cup of weak lukewarm tea, the mashed banana, the plastic spoon, the bib.

After eating, Martha would be taken out of her night clothes, washed, dried, cleaned, changed; Shirley would brush her fair hair and tie it back, showing Martha the little box of ribbons and clips and rings, letting her reach out and ‘choose’ one. Then she would wheel her out of her room, down the corridor and along to the
lift. It was a bright morning. Martha would sit in the conservatory, where the sun would warm her pale face and hands and brighten her blonde hair and the birds would come to the window feeder, which seemed to give her pleasure.

To Shirley, Martha’s being like a baby extended to her lack of a sense of time which meant that she did not grow bored and restless and dissatisfied. She simply switched
off and dropped into some twilight place inside herself, or she went to sleep. Only occasionally did she grunt and cry out, and in this, too, she was like a baby, if a meal was late or she was filling the nappy she wore. Once, she had screamed and flailed about, and it had taken Shirley and Rosa half an hour to find that her sandal had been buckled too tightly, pinching a fold of her skin into
it.

Rosa was in the kitchenette now, waiting for the kettle to boil.

‘Morning, Shirley.’

‘Good morning, darlin’, how’s things?’

Rosa sighed. Rosa so often sighed as a prelude to any response or remark that Shirley took no notice, though she had once said that Rosa was like the boy who cried wolf and when she had something to sigh about no one would ask her what was wrong.

‘Can’t wake up this
morning and Arthur’s wet his bed again.’

‘So what’s new?’ Shirley bent to the fridge to get out the fresh milk.

‘They heard anything about that little boy yet?’

‘Not when I listened at half past five they hadn’t.’

‘If they catch him …’

‘Or her …’

‘No woman would take a little boy from his parents like that, no way.’

‘Myra Hindley?’

‘That was years ago.’

‘Human nature don’t change.’

‘I’d like them hung at a public hanging like they had in history. I’d pay to go, I would.’

Shirley spooned Ready Brek into a plastic non-tip bowl.

‘They said her brother was in charge.’

‘Yeah, well, he’s the top man at Lafferton, he would be.’

‘Do you think he’s handsome?’

‘Mr Serrailler? Never thought about it.’

‘Course you have.’

‘All right then, I have … yeah, only his hair’s too fair
for a man. Looks lovely on Martha though.’

‘Sad that.’

‘Why?’

‘If she was normal, it’d be really attractive.’

‘Rosa, you haven’t got to say that sort of thing, not in here and not anywhere.’

‘True though.’

‘Move over, let me get at the fridge. They didn’t mean this kitchen for two.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, I do feel sorry for her, poor girl.’

‘You needn’t. I think she’s happy.’

‘How can
you know that? Don’t be daft.’

‘I just know. Like a baby’s happy. Well, she doesn’t know any different … like a baby. If she’d been … like us …’

‘Normal.’

‘If she’d had an accident or what, like Arthur, then she might remember … but what you don’t have …’

‘… you don’t miss. Really, what would have been kindest would have been for her to have died of that last go of pneumonia.’

‘That’s a terrible
thing to say.’

‘No, it isn’t, it’s the truth and you know it. She’d have just drifted off and never known and that would have been that. She can’t get better, she’ll grow old like this.’

‘So?’

‘So where’s the point? You believe in God and heaven and that, so wouldn’t you say that’d be better for her? Certainly be better for her poor family anyway.’

‘They’re OK … they can afford for her to
be looked after properly here. They come and see her … Dr Serrailler was here again last night wasn’t he, I saw in the book, and Simon, until all this little boy business … and Dr Deerbon’ll come only she’s having a baby any minute, maybe had it … they don’t ignore her, they haven’t just dumped her.’

‘That’s true. Like Arthur’s wife.’

‘And son and daughter.’

‘Right. If I had my way –’

‘You’d
have a public hanging. OK, let’s go. Bloodthirsty little thing you are, Rosa Murphy.’

Rosa chuckled.

‘Morning, my darling. How’s my Little Miss Sunshine this morning?’

Shirley often wondered if Martha moved at all in the night. Every morning, she was lying on her right side, looking towards the door, her eyes open. She lay like it now and made her little murmur, of recognition and, Shirley
always thought, pleasure. Shirley bent over and kissed her forehead and pushed her hair back from where it had fallen over her face.

Martha smelled of warmth and dirty nappy.

Shirley looked down into her eyes. The eyes looked back, but what was
there
, she wondered,
thinking of what Rosa had said, what was really behind them? It worried her that any day anything could happen to Martha, and she
would have no say in it at all. They could take her from here, have her at home, send her somewhere else, give her to strangers, and she would lie as she lay now, she would eat and drink messily, fill her nappies, make her noises, flail her arms. Look up into the face of anyone, with that unfathomable blue-eyed stare.

‘Poor Little Miss Sunshine,’ Shirley said softly. Maybe Rosa was right. If
she’d simply gone to sleep quietly in the hospital, overcome by the infection, if her lungs had given out, wouldn’t that have been the best for her? It would happen one day. She’d been at death’s door two or three times. What was the point of her getting better?

She stood upright quickly, shocked at herself, shaken by her own thoughts.

‘Lord Jesus Saviour, forgive me my sin and bless this girl.
Lord Jesus Saviour, touch me with your love.’

Martha lifted her arm and twisted her hand about, and her eyes followed the movement and she smiled.

‘All right then, my darling, you’re off to see the birds.’