The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill Read Free Book Online

long and low and grey-stoned in its fold of paddocks, loved the two fat ponies leaning over the hedge as he went by, loved the chicken run and the garden which was never immaculate or well weeded but always more welcoming than his mother’sprize-winning designer half-acre, loved the hugger-mugger of a porch, full of wellington boots and milk bottles, loved the warmth and the tumble of his nephew and niece and the cat on the old sofa beside the Aga, loved the cheerfulness and urgent medical conversations between his sister and brother-in-law. Loved the happiness the place gave off, the smell and noise and love of family life.
    Hepulled in beside his mother’s car. The rain had lessened. Simon stood for a moment looking at the lights of the farmhouse streaming out. From somewhere inside he heard the children shout with laughter.
    Is this what’s wrong? The question came back to him for the thousandth time since the death of Freya. She might have been inside a house like this one waiting for him, there might have been hischildren …
    A twist of pain. Yet he could not always remember what she had looked like. They had had dinner together. She had had a drink in his flat. There had been …
    What, precisely? Precisely nothing.
    Easy to regret nothing.
    He walked across the gravel and opened the porch door. The smell of roasting chicken wafted out.
    ‘Hi.’
    His sister Cat, moon-faced in pregnancy, huge-bellied, cameout of the kitchen to meet him. Simon thought suddenly, this is why there was nothing. Freya was not Cat. Nobody is Cat. Nobody else can ever be Cat.
    ‘Uncle Simon, Uncle Simon, I’ve got a gerbil, it’s called Ron Weasley, come and look.’
    He would stay the night. Now, he wore a tracksuit belonging to his brother-in-law. He sat at the kitchen table next to his mother, the remains of an apple andblackberry crumble and a second bottle of wine in front of them, Chris at the stove watching the coffee percolate.
    ‘I wanted you all here,’ Meriel Serrailler said. She sat very still, very straight. Tight-lipped , Cat had said. But there had been a tightness about his mother ever since Simon could remember, a smiling, alabaster, beautifully coiffed tightness.
    ‘What about Dad?’
    ‘I told you, he’sat a Masonic.’
    ‘He ought to be here, he has a right to say … whatever he wants to.’
    Chris Deerbon brought the coffee to the table. ‘Let’s talk about it now.’ He put his hand briefly on Cat’s shoulder. ‘I know more or less what Richard thinks anyway. I talked to him at the hospital.’
    Cat turned to look up at him. ‘What? You didn’t tell me that.’
    ‘I know.’
    His voice alone soothed and reassuredher, Simon could see it. His sister was lucky. It was a lucky marriage.
    ‘He talked to you when he doesn’t talk to me then,’ Meriel Serrailler said quietly.
    ‘Well, of course. It’s easier, isn’t it? You know that. I’m involved but I’m not Richard’s son and I am another doctor. Don’t worry about it.’
    Meriel looked at him steadily. ‘I don’t,’ she said, ‘I’m past that.’
    Simon could not speak. Hesat across a table from a panel of doctors. They had a different point of view, no matter that the person they were discussing was their daughter, sister, sister-in-law. They had a detachment he could not find.
    ‘She is probably going to die,’ Meriel said and now her voice had changed, it was the senior consultant’s voice, the clear firm tone of the sympathetic but uninvolved practitioner. ‘Shehas been very weakened by this bout and it is not just her lungs that can’t go on throwing off pneumonia, her whole immune system is exhausted and herheart tracings are poor. But we thought she would be dead forty-eight hours ago … more … and she is not. It’s time to look at her treatment.’
    ‘They seem to know what they’re doing,’ Simon said. But he knew what he said was not relevant, not thebusiness they were supposed to be addressing now.
    ‘Of course.