Love Song

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Mums might wake up?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  ‘Because people don’t, do they, after such a long time, people don’t wake up, do they?’

  ‘Yes they do,’ Rose put in. ‘I was reading about just such a case, only the other day. After a year, this woman woke up and spoke to her family. One boy woke up and was perfectly all right after a terrible car accident and after everyone had given up on him. He woke up.’

  ‘That’s it, then.’ Melinda looked Jack straight in the face for the first time since they had arrived. ‘We have decided, Jack. We’ll leave Mums as she is.’

  Inwardly Jack sighed with relief. Yet he said nothing of the little squeeze of his hand that he had been convinced he had felt, not wanting to raise their hopes. He just prayed that he was right.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Before she left for London once more Rose, brought in by Jack, had visited her mother alone, no longer frightened to be with her, and taking with her a bunch of freesias. As she went into the room she realized that she was actually on tiptoe, creeping towards the bed, really afraid of disturbing her, which was truly pathetic.

  Meanwhile, as Rose visited Hope, Jack was down the corridor talking with a specialist. Someone called Marcus whom, he told Rose on the drive in, he had known years before and had, in light of the girls’ decision, brought in for another opinion on Hope’s case.

  Rose carefully placed the freesias in a vase beside Hope’s head. They looked too small and too few for the vase which the nurse had found for her, but they smelt nice.

  ‘Guess what, Mums? I’ve got an audition to RADA at last, next week,’ she told her mother, speaking in a perfectly normal tone. ‘Isn’t that great?’ she went on, feeling for her mother’s hand. ‘I’m supposed to be doing a short piece from Saint Joan, and also a little bit of Gwendolyn from The Importance of Being Ernest, a complete contrast. So that should be pretty nerve-racking for a start. Then. Well, then the following week I have another audition but this time for LAMDA, oh and Guildford, I thought I’d try for that too, just for starters.’

  As Rose was telling her mother all this, Marcus was saying to Jack, ‘She hasn’t got a chance, Jack. Sorry.’

  ‘No chance of what, Marcus?’

  ‘No chance of anything, Jack. Hope is technically dead already.’

  ‘No, Marcus,’ Jack said, in warning. ‘No, don’t say that. You don’t know. You think you know, that’s quite different.’

  ‘Jack. As I understand it there is no hope. Really. I am the second second opinion you have brought in – and believe me, if I could I would have it quite otherwise, but I can only look at the facts as presented, and there they are.’

  ‘I won’t accept it.’

  ‘You don’t want me to fill you with false hopes, old friend, now do you?’

  ‘Define no chance. Give it a definition.’

  ‘All right. Before MRI came along I’d have said you were right. CAT scans, you see, they couldn’t differentiate properly between the white and the grey matter in the brain, but they’re as clear as daylight with MRI. It shows damage graphically, Jack, and completely distinctly. As I said, that was a big one, and people don’t recover from those.’

  ‘So far.’

  ‘It just isn’t humanly possible, Jack. With that amount of brain damage even the smallest, tiniest logical thought is impossible.’

  Jack did not reply. He would not believe it.

  ‘Hope is brain-dead, Jack. And I am very much afraid that she always will be.’

  ‘But you don’t know.’

  ‘No, Jack, I don’t know. I agree. I am not God.’

  Jack paused and then, flippantly, he asked Marcus, ‘Do you know the difference between God and a doctor?’

  ‘Yes – God doesn’t think he’s a doctor. But don’t you see, Jack? There is no point in all of you continuing in this agony?’

  ‘That is such a lovely smell, Rose, not that I can actually smell anything, but I can imagine! I can imagine what your flowers smell like and that imagining is stronger than you could believe possible. Thank you for bringing them in for me, and putting them so close by me. They say blind people have deeper senses and although I am not blind, because I can see inside my shell of silver-green, yet I have learned to feel more with my spirit. My spirit has heightened senses, senses that can only be felt and not described, so beautiful are the sensations, so strong the feelings.’

  ‘I do hope you can smell these, Mums,’ Rose went on, still holding Hope’s hand in hers. ‘Because these are special. They’re from Mr Parsons – you remember Aunt Rosabel’s gardener from Hatcombe? He grows them in his greenhouse, and he brought me a bunch for you just as I was leaving Keeper’s. He wanted you to have them most particularly. He’s so kind and gentle. And such a good gardener. But you know that. Here. I am just going to hold them very carefully under your nose, now. There. I know you can’t smell, but you might be able to sense them, mightn’t you?’

  As she placed the flowers beside her mother Rose sang softly to her, ‘Ah but I should never think of spring, for that should surely break my heart in two.’

  ‘It is so lovely to hear you sing again, Rose. You were singing even before you danced. I loved to hear you. Most especially in the early morning.’

  Marcus’s eyes were full of compassion for Jack, but his voice remained firm. ‘So finally, those patients who are found to have this amount of damage – their life support systems are closed down.’

  ‘You mean they are killed.’

  Marcus shook his head. ‘You cannot kill something which is not alive, Jack. Life support systems create false life. They do that so that we – the doctors and so-called experts – may be sure that all proper and natural life is dead. Life support systems create life where there is, if you will, already death. They make a patient breathe mechanically. Shut the ventilator off and there is no message from the brain to tell the lungs and the heart to work, so the patient is already dead. When we turn off the ventilators, we are killing an electrical circuit, not a person. We are stopping a machine, not a life. The people the law tells us we may do this to are already dead and gone. They are only being kept alive artificially.’

  ‘Sure,’ Jack nodded, agreeing. ‘But that is, I maintain, only as far as you know. You see, I, on the other hand, I know that Hope is still in there, I know that she is still not brain-dead. Don’t ask me how, but I know.’

  ‘Shall we begin again, Jack?’ Marcus nodded to him, and they both sat down, as if they had been jousting but had now decided to talk as friends instead. ‘Perhaps it might help you if I explained where I think we are at, as it were. The medical profession bases the criteria for diagnosing what is known as brain death on the determination of the irreversible damage to the brain. We also look for persistent deep coma, an inability to breathe independently if the patient is taken off the ventilator, and the absence of what is known as brainstem function. This can be assessed by ascertaining whether or not the pupils react to light, whether or not the patient responds to painful stimuli – such as a needle being inserted into a limb, or the touching of the naked surface of the eye to see if there is any sign of involuntary blinking. The responses to these tests give us clear evidence as to whether or not the brain is alive or dead. Now, while an EEG is not really required—’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘An electroencephalogram. An EEG records the tiny electrical impulses produced by activity in the brain. And as I say, this is not a requirement, but it can confirm or deny the results of the other described tests. Provided the results of all the tests are scrupulously monitored there is no chance at all of a wrong conclusion being reached. All that is then required is to gain the necessary assents. That is the procedure.’

  ‘And her daughters will not, at this stage, give those assents. I have asked them, we all talked – they are quite firm in their opinion that we should not, as yet, do anything, not yet. And while I have no status as far as Hope is concerned I am very glad th
at is how they feel. Naturally. Very glad,’ he ended abruptly.

  ‘Very well, then we must proceed as we are. Comas are very unpredictable. However, for all your sakes, I would advise a set period of time to be agreed upon with the team here. Perhaps a month might be reasonable? During this time Hope will be monitored quite closely, always remembering that the brain is a vast unknown subject, and we can nurse a hope that somewhere there may well be another part of the brain that is still alive and working.’

  ‘I thought of playing her favourite sorts of music to her. She loves Strauss, and Chopin, and Verdi, of course – Puccini, naturally. I thought that might be a good idea.’

  ‘Excellent,’ Marcus agreed. He smiled at his childhood friend while inside he sighed for the heartbreak he could see in store for him.

  Jack began again, ‘Hope had a book, you know, about this kind of thing, or rather based on this sort of thing, you know, the brain? She told me all about it once, she told me that if you coloured the little bit of our brains that we use and then saw how very little it was, we would be ashamed. While if we could learn to use just twenty per cent more, just think what a brilliant world we would have.’

  ‘Maybe we will?’

  Jack smiled briefly. ‘Yes, maybe we will. Before our sun burns out in four or five billion years, maybe we will have learned to love each other, cure each other, even understand each other.’

  ‘And even then we may only be using a half of that old grey matter. Just think of that, Jack.’

  ‘I do, Marcus, all the time.’

  Before he left the hospital, and after Rose had left her room, Jack went to see Hope for himself.

  ‘It’s OK, darling,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘I will not let them do it to you, you understand? You just keep fighting on, dearest soul, and I shall see you back here in a couple of hours, after I’ve taken Rose to the station. After I’ve seen her onto the train. She’s a good girl, by the way, they all are. They’re going to come through for you, and you’re going to have to come through for them, and for me. For us. Now. Don’t move! I won’t be long, and when I come back it will be with music for you. Things you really like. I’ve made a tape.’

  Yet again, and his own heart nearly stopped, Jack could have sworn that he felt a slight movement from one of Hope’s fingers, but as he drove Rose to the station he said nothing to her, not wanting to raise her hopes, and knowing, in his heart of hearts, that he could well have been mistaken.

  It was no good denying it, least of all for Rose to deny it, once more, as she saw London’s soot and London’s grime creeping towards her at the end of her journey, she could have cheered. Here it all was again, and grimy and sooty and sweaty as it was, she loved every little bit of it.

  As it happened, once on the Underground, she found she had to stand all the way to her stop, so to take her mind off this she found herself thinking of all the problems that she had left behind at Keeper’s Cottage, and wondering once more at Melinda’s ability to cope with them. She was thankful that it was not her having to deal with them all, and immediately felt selfish. Still, since there was no way that she would want to go back to live in Wiltshire again, there was no way that she could help Mel.

  Moving to Hatcombe had seemed to be the start of all their problems. Indeed, as she looked back at all the disasters it would seem that more than anything the move to Wiltshire had proved fatal for all of them. As she swayed on her strap and tried to avoid a very respectable-looking City gent’s hot hands, Rose found herself thinking of the old days at West Dean and remembering how her parents had seemed to be so happy there. She stared at the darkness of the tunnel they were going through, remembering them dancing in the kitchen, laughing together. All that had gone when they moved to Wiltshire.

  She frowned. She had to snap out of the habit of looking back. Instead she looked forward – dreading the inevitable mound of laundry that she would be facing when she got back to Saintly Street.

  But having inspected the kitchen for notes from Hugh Reilly as to what chores she should or should not be doing, and having found no ironing, a miracle in itself, she found herself instead passing a new face on the stairs.

  They smiled, Rose with her usual assumed confidence, he with a sort of shy diffidence.

  ‘Hallo?’

  She had already well passed him, her room being right at the top of the house. ‘Rose Merriott!’ She waved to him, from above him now, not wanting to stop running up the stairs because it was part of one of her many breathing exercises, running to her room while quietly making ‘humma, humma’ noises to herself to help improve her diaphragm and make it stronger.

  ‘Charles Felbrigg.’

  ‘Of Felbrigg Hall?’ Rose asked facetiously and immediately regretted it because it was obvious, from the faint sigh that he gave, and the slightly resigned way he stared up at her, that he was well used to this reaction when he introduced himself. ‘Oh, God, I am sorry. Come up and have a tisane with me later, and I’ll say sorry a great many more times to make up for being so crass.’

  ‘I would love to take a tisane with you,’ he said simply.

  Rose stared down at him briefly. She was just so glad to be back in London, not to be facing all those problems that everyone at the Mill House and Keeper’s were facing, and yes – not to be sitting beside her mother willing her to be back with them the way she was. Perhaps it was the depth of her relief to be somewhere else that made her realize something else too. Something lyrical and marvellous, and that was that Charles Felbrigg, not of the Hall, was beautiful.

  Not only was he beautiful, but so was his voice, light and musical and agreeable, in fact everything about him was aesthetic and pleasing, from the long slender fingers carrying his books to the curve of his mouth as he stared up at her and said ‘tisane’, as if the modulations of the word pleased him as much as just looking down at him, from her great height above him, pleased Rose.

  ‘Tisane, then. Nine-ish. Got to study, alas.’

  She continued with her ‘humma, humma, humma’ all the way up to the door of her room, whereupon she fell against it and closed her eyes. Charles Felbrigg was just so beautiful, impossibly beautiful, like a painting, like a song, like a poem.

  And he had to be a professor, looking as he did, soft-collared shirt, white, much laundered, with a silk scarf falling down either side, which actually Rose usually hated, but which looked somehow endearing on such a young man, as if he was trying to look older, for some reason.

  And then he had been wearing what had looked from above, from where she had been standing, like a sort of sleeveless cardigan, and those wide-bottomed trousers that people in old films always wore and which came in and out of fashion as regular as a battery clock. And this was all before she saw his shoes, which were the right kind of loafers, discreet, and not too highly polished.

  ‘Nine would be fine,’ she had heard him finally call as she shut her door.

  ‘Nine would be fine, nine would be fine, nine would be fine,’ she started to sing out loud, before beginning to learn yet another of Shaw’s long, long speeches, from Major Barbara this time, a speech so long that she was sure, as she took turn and turn about her room, making a fist of one hand and pounding it against the open palm of the other, and repeating, and repeating, that had she not agreed to give Charles Felbrigg a tisane she would have collapsed on her bed and fallen fast asleep.

  It was as if she was so relieved to be back in London that she could not wait to fall asleep in order to wake up again and find herself once more besieged by aeroplane noise, by the sound of cars far below, by the knowledge that there were fascinating people everywhere.

  Not finding her progress with Shaw’s speeches satisfactory, Rose put that particular play back on her shelf and plucked down Ibsen’s The Wild Duck instead.

  She had bought it, but she had never read it, and somehow as she opened the title page she had a feeling that she should have read it, because right from the moment that her eyes fell on the title page
it seemed to be speaking to her, telling her something, as if it had streaked across a night sky, or suddenly appeared and fallen, like the falling stars that she and Mellie would sometimes watch for, standing outside Keeper’s Cottage during the darkly bright nights that came around in autumn, ripping through the night sky.

  Perhaps The Wild Duck could be a play to which she could attach a star? Perhaps she could be like those very stars they had seen, brilliant, scintillating and wondrous, lighting up the stage with Ibsen’s words?

  ‘Good evening, professor.’

  He smiled in amusement, knowing at once, without being told, that she had already given him a nickname. And Rose saw, with some triumph, that she had been right, that the cardigan he had been wearing earlier under his jacket was sleeveless and made of a very fine silk cotton, very long, and, although done up correctly, had pockets, into which he now thrust his hands. But he remained by the door while smiling across at her, waiting for her to invite him in, which was rather touchingly modest.

  ‘Come in, come in.’

  She realized once he had stepped into her room, carefully shutting the door behind him, that he was very tall, but the look to his eyes even while he was smiling was strangely vague, as if he was not quite focusing on Rose, which was immediately a challenge, because Rose liked people to focus on her, at any rate when they were with her, for goodness’ sake.

  ‘I was just wondering how you run up these stairs, so often,’ he said, ‘and all the time making your yoga noise, or whatever it is.’

  This was getting better. This meant that he had noticed Rose before, perhaps because his door was ajar, or perhaps he heard her ‘humma, humma, humma’ing all the way up to the top of the house all day long, between auditions for drama schools, and laundry.

  ‘Don’t have to go to the gym, can’t afford to anyhow. And it’s not a yoga noise, it’s a breathing noise. Hugh O’Reilly gave it to me. It works, actually, you’d be surprised how much it works.’