Meanwhile the insurers paid the bills. But Dryden was under no illusions they would pay for ever. One day they would suggest a less expensive scheme of care which meant he would have to raid their savings, and then his in-laws’, to pay the bills. His guilt over using the private sector was mitigated by the knowledge that the NHS was hardly designed for long-term care, and every bed was needed, while every penny he and Laura spent reduced the undoubted wealth of the shareholders of the insurance company. The NHS would have long ago suggested Laura spent time ‘at home’ – whatever that meant. If he were feeling domestically minded he might spend twenty minutes a day on board his floating home outside his bunk bed. If home was any four walls around the person you loved, then home was Laura’s room in The Tower.
Dryden finished the second bottle and got out of the cab without a word. Humph settled back into what he fondly imagined was his ‘thinking’ posture – head back, hands held across his stomach, shoes off.
‘Good evening,’ said a voice in perfectly modulated Polish.
Humph repeated the phrase and fell instantly to sleep.
Dryden skipped through the automatic sliding doors of The Tower, enlivened by the alcohol, and smiled at the nurse on reception who looked up briefly, tried a professional smile which only got half done, and went back to her magazine.
Laura’s room was on the ground floor, overlooking The Tower’s extensive grounds. He always knocked, respecting her privacy, as did the nursing staff and doctors. She was propped up in bed, her auburn hair splayed across the pillow so perfectly that Dryden knew one of the nurses had done it, a tiny act of kindness which always made him want to weep. Medical equipment in the room was discreet but hi-tech. A batch of gaily coloured feeding tubes and waste pipes were attached to her left arm, ferrying in and out the nutrition she needed and the poisons which would kill her if they stayed in her bloodstream. Her face was obscured by the TV monitor of the COMPASS, a device which allowed her to communicate when she drifted, periodically, out of unconsciousness. A transparent air tube was snagged into her mouth allowing her to suck and blow commands to the computer, and to the screen which displayed a letter grid.
ABCD
EFGH
IJKLMN
OPQRST
UVWXYZ
Laura had become adept at moving the cursor over the letters using the air pipe to spell out sentences which the COMPASS was able to print out. Her emergence from the deep coma which had engulfed her after the crash had been glaciaclass="underline" five years of minor victories, heartbreaking setbacks and the occasional flash of pin-sharp consciousness.
The COMPASS provided a portal to the wider world. Using simple commands she could connect, via a broadband link, to the internet and send e-mails. Her messages were often disjointed and patchy but Dryden had written several introductory paragraphs for her which she could copy and use – explaining her circumstances and asking indulgence for any errors, misspellings or lapses in logic. A wireless network mobile phone attached to the computer allowed her to text messages as well – a medium she loved. She could also activate CDs and DVDs. Laura’s eye movement was erratic so the computer screen had to remain about three feet in front of her face during daytime hours – at night it was withdrawn on a flexible arm and the nurses laid her down, an arrangement she said she found restful, even if she didn’t remember sleeping.
Dryden entered the room and listened: silence, except for the tiny whistle of her breath and the faint gurgle of the feeding tubes. Through the french windows Dryden watched as the moon lit the formal gardens, gilding a huge monkey puzzle tree which stood in the centre of the carefully manicured lawns. The last of the daytime mist hung by the walls, seeping away into the damp earth. The daily smogs were inevitably followed by these preternaturally clear nights, as though the moon wished to reclaim the light lost by the sun.
Laura was asleep. Her eyes were closed and the printout from the COMPASS screen held a letter she had been writing to her parents at their retirement home outside Lucca. The machine added timings to the pages, the last having been printed almost three hours earlier. Sometimes Laura would remain silent for days, increasing anxiety that she had slipped back into the deeper state of LIS from which she had emerged so slowly.
Dryden sat, trying to ignore the thought which had entered his brain like a maggot, the thought that he preferred it when Laura was silent.
‘Laura,’ he said out loud, to ward off the thought, and touched her arm. It felt cold and unyielding, but he fought the inclination to recoil.
He considered his wife’s immobile face, captivated by the childish notion that he could change the past and return to life as it had been in those seconds before the headlights of the oncoming car had forced them off the road, down the bank and under the water. He wanted Laura back as Laura had been, not a life spent sitting dutifully by a hospital bed. And if he felt like this, how did she feel? Able only to breathe, swallow and move the tip of the right-hand index finger and her eyes. But for her there was escape, into the world of unconsciousness where he could never follow. For Dryden there was only one world, and at its centre was a hospital bed, and his wife.
The COMPASS clattered into life and made him start. He looked at Laura’s eyes and they were open already, focused on the PC screen, but slipping slightly, as if the effort could not be sustained.
‘HI. DAY?’
They were beginning to develop their own shorthand, saving Laura the effort of operating the suction control. The sharp question was a good omen, a signal that tonight she was with him, a visitor to his world.
He bent forward, caressed her head and kissed her hair lightly, remembering through the touch why he loved her. ‘OK. No, very good. A body – they found it under the old PoW camp on the edge of town – I told you the archaeologists are digging there. Looks like this guy got caught when the tunnel fell in. Poor bastard – he had a gunshot wound in the head. No one seems to care anyway. I thought I’d find out who he was.’
Beside Laura’s bed stood a corked bottle of Italian wine – Frascati – and a packet of Greek cigarettes. Dryden took out a wrapped parcel from his overcoat pocket and placed the rest of the focaccia beside the wine. Laura loved the smell of food and drink which had surrounded her in childhood. The cigarettes reminded them both of their honeymoon. Dryden poured himself some wine and waited for Laura’s response: sometimes it was immediate, sometimes he had to repeat himself. The doctors said that her hearing was intermittent when conscious.
The computer printer clattered. ‘MY FEFT.’
He sat on the edge of the bed and reaching under the single linen sheet found her right foot and began to massage it under the arch.
The COMPASS shuddered as she spelt out a sentence laboriously: ‘I WROTE TO DAD ABOUT COMINH. I SAID WAIT TIL SUMMER. OTHERWISE A WASTE ZES?’
‘Yes,’ said Dryden. He’d met Laura in the north London café in which she had been brought up. Her father was a diminutive Neapolitan with a genius for preparing fresh food, her mother, bowed down by a lifetime of kitchen work, oddly silent. They’d finally retired to a house overlooking Lucca in the hills above the industrial valley in which the railway line ran to Florence. In their e-mails they described the work on the house, preparing a room for Laura, complete with the medical technology she needed.