‘Kids,’ said Tavanter, like a mantra.
6
Laura, the immobile victim of locked-in syndrome for nearly two years, had moved. When Dryden arrived they took him into a consulting room and gave him a cup of tea in a pea-green cup. The consultant neurologist, Mr Horatio Bloom, had a face like a horse, and an incessant insincere smile.
‘Your wife,’ he said, beaming with self-satisfaction.
‘My wife,’ said Dryden, sipping from the pea-green teacup.
Bloom stiffened. They disliked each other. Bloom was not used to insubordination. Dryden was struggling with some complex emotions – not all of them uplifting.
‘Since, er’ – here Bloom referred to his notes – ‘since Laura’s accident your wife has not moved at all, complete paralysis. Obviously the internal organs have been operating but all muscle movement, including that associated with deep sleep, has been absent. Today she moved. I think we should be encouraged, Mr Dryden.’
Dryden sipped. He wanted her back, of course. But he wanted her back as she had been. What he did not want was a painful and tortuous recovery which left him caring for a mumbling shell with a disintegrating personality: a human being by name only, demanding attention but giving nothing in return.
‘And nobody could have moved her?’ Dryden asked.
Bloom readjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. ‘Mr Dryden. The nurses and staff here at the Tower are acutely aware of the importance of your wife’s posture. She is moved regularly to avoid bed sores and circulation problems but these alterations are logged with the charge nurse on duty.’
Dryden didn’t really know why he asked the next question. ‘Is that charge nurse ever Gaynor Stubbs?’
Bloom’s eyes flickered over the notes before him: he coughed and avoided a direct answer. ‘Your wife was checked by the physiotherapist at 5 p.m. today. She did undertake some work with her arms and neck, which she recorded when she returned to the nurses’ station. When she checked again at 5.45 p.m. your wife’s body was very nearly out of the bed, she had turned over on her right side and one arm was hanging outside the bed.’
‘No one else could have got into the room?’
Bloom clasped his hands tightly as though restraining temper. ‘All visitors must sign the book and there are security cameras, as you know, in the main corridors.’
Dryden thought of the open window: and beyond, the spreading darkness of the monkey-puzzle tree.
‘Can I see her?’
Bloom led the way. A nurse was reading beside Laura’s bed. Bloom tapped a pen against the VDU screen: ‘The level of brain activity is slightly higher – perhaps five per cent more than normal at this time of the day compared to the average over the last two years.’
Dryden sat and took up Laura’s hand. If she’d turned to the right, as the physiotherapist’s evidence implied, she would have been reaching for the pictures on the bedside table. He felt a stab of hope.
‘What next?’ But he knew the answer, loathed its Kip-lingesque preachiness.
‘We wait and watch, Mr Dryden. Time…’
‘… is the great healer,’ finished Dryden.
‘We shall, with your permission, install some monitoring equipment so that we can pick up any movements and record them. Then we can work on the limbs that seem to be most active.’ Bloom took Dryden’s indifference to this request as the signal to leave.
Dryden leant in close to Laura’s face: as close as he’d been in two years – but not quite touching. His lips were almost on hers: he spoke to them. ‘I wonder,’ he said, aloud.
He walked to the window and tried to lift the sash. It moved smoothly letting a sudden cold blast into the stuffy room. Out in the dusk the monkey-puzzle tree glittered with frost.
Dryden poured two fresh glasses of wine. He replaced the bread and some of the fruit, turned the lights off and sat looking out into the gardens. Beyond the high wall he imagined Humph waiting in the cab.
‘Humph sends his love.’ His voice was too soft and the sentiment came out half-hearted and limp. He turned to the bed in apology and repeated himself. ‘You’ll meet him one day – you’ll like him. There’s a lot to like.’
There was a knock at the door and DS Stubbs’s head appeared. He still looked crisp and neat at the end of a fifteen-hour day.
‘Sorry. I have to scoot. Could we meet now?’
Despite Laura’s immobility it was unthinkable that they would use the room for a private chat – an inexcusable admission that she was more an object than a silent witness.
They slipped down the corridor to the hospital’s heated pool. There was no one swimming in the cool Radox-green water. A cluster of plastic chairs was arranged on the pool-side beside an automatic drinks machine. Dryden paid for coffees. The pool glowed with underwater lighting. They sat for a moment in the dappled light, the only sound the faint hum of the electric pumps, which creased the surface with miniature waves of vibration.