The Pure in Heart by Susan Hill Read Free Book Online Page A

The point is … how long will it take her to die? A day? A week? The longer they pour antibiotics into her, and fluids and salbutamol, the longer it will drag on.’
    ‘You want them to withhold treatment?’ Cat reached out and poured herself a glass of water from the jug in front of her. She sounded as weary as she looked. ‘I haven’t seenher this week so it’s hard to voice an opinion. You have, Chris.’
    ‘It’s difficult.’
    ‘No,’ Meriel Serrailler said, ‘it is not. It is actually rather straightforward. She has no quality of life now and none to look forward to.’
    ‘You can’t say that. How can you possibly say that, how can you know?’ Simon clenched his fists, willing himself to speak calmly.
    ‘You’re not a doctor.’
    ‘What the hellhas that got to do with it?’
    ‘Si …’
    ‘You have no professional basis from which to assess her condition.’
    ‘No, I just have a human one.’
    ‘And doesn’t that tell you she has no quality of life? It’s perfectly obvious.’
    ‘No, it is not. We don’t know what’s in her mind, we don’t know how she feels, she thinks.’
    ‘She thinks nothing. She has no power of conscious thought.’
    ‘That cannot possiblybe true.’
    ‘Why?’
    Cat burst into tears. ‘Stop’ she said, ‘I can’t bear this, I don’t want this sort of argument in my house …’
    Chris got up and went to her.
    ‘It’s clear no one is capable of a rational discussion about this at the moment,’ Meriel Serrailler said. She got up, calmly took her coffee cup across to the dishwasher and loaded it in. ‘It wasn’t sensible of me to expect it. I apologise.’

    ‘What are you going to do?’
    Meriel looked at her son. ‘Go home.’
    ‘You haven’t any right to make decisions about Martha, you know that.’
    ‘I know perfectly well what my rights are, Simon.’
    ‘For God’s sake.’ Cat held on to Chris’s hand, tears pouring down her face.
    ‘You should go to bed, darling,’ her mother said.
    ‘Don’t speak to me like that, I’m not a small child.’
    Meriel bent over and kissedCat’s head. ‘No, you’re pregnant. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’
    The telephone rang as she picked up her bag. Chris gestured to Simon who sat nearest to it.
    ‘Who’s that?’
    ‘Simon.’
    ‘Yes. Is your mother there?’ Richard Serrailler, curt as ever.
    ‘She’s just leaving for home. Do you want to speak to her?’
    ‘Tell her Keats just rang from BG.’
    ‘About Martha?’ Simon felt the sudden silent tensionin the room behind him.
    ‘Yes. She’s rallied. She’s conscious. I’m going over there now.’
    ‘I’ll tell them.’
    Simon set the receiver down and looked round. He wanted to laugh. Dance. Crow with triumph.
    He saw his sister’s face, tear-stained, swollen, hollow-eyed.
    ‘Apparently Martha is rather better,’ he said gently.
    When he walked on to the ward again forty minutes later he was on his own.His mother had said she could not face the hospital again, Cat was exhausted.
    ‘There’s no need for you to go,’ Meriel Serrailler had said. ‘No need for any of us now. Your father’s there.’
    ‘I’d like to see her.’
    He had assumed that his father would have left. A meeting with him at Martha’s bedside was not what he wanted but when he walked into the room, Richard Serrailler was still there, sittingin the chair beside Martha’s bed reading her chart.
    ‘Your mother not coming?’
    No greeting, Simon thought. I might as well be invisible.
    ‘She’s coming in tomorrow morning.’
    He looked down at his sister. Her colour was better, with a faint flush of pink about her cheeks.
    ‘What happened?’
    His father handed him the chart.
    ‘She has, as Devereux put it, the constitution of an ox. The new antibioticskicked in, she began to surface … opened her eyes an hour ago. Stats are encouraging.’
    ‘I suppose there could be a setback?’
    ‘Could. Unlikely. Once she’s over the crisis she generally hauls herself