The Pure in Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

the eyelashes, like the hairs of a fine paintbrush on her cheek, he saw that she was beautiful, as a child is beautiful, because neither time nor experience had in any way marked her face. Drawing her eyelidswith the finest pencil lines, he almost held his breath.
    ‘Oh, darling …’ The front of her hair glittered with raindrops. ‘Cat told me you’d come back.’
    They looked at the still, oddly flattened figure on the bed.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘You mustn’t be.’
    ‘Every time I come in through that door I feel torn in two,’ Meriel Serrailler said. ‘Afraid she will be dead. Hoping she will be dead. Praying butI don’t know who to or for what.’ She bent now and brushed her lips against Martha’s forehead.
    Simon pulled the chair back for her.
    ‘You were drawing her.’
    ‘I’ve been meaning to for a long time.’
    ‘Poor little girl. Have the doctors been in yet?’
    ‘Not this morning. I spoke to Sister Blake last night. And Chris was here.’
    ‘It’s hopeless either way. But none of them will say so.’
    He put hishand on his mother’s arm but she did not turn to him. She sounded, as she always didwhen she spoke about Martha, cool, detached, professional. The warmth in her voice, familiar to the rest of them, seemed absent. Simon was not deceived. He knew that she loved Martha as much as any of her children but with an entirely different kind of love.
    His drawing lay on the bedcover. Meriel picked it up.

    ‘Strange,’ she said. ‘Beauty but no character.’ Then she turned to face him. ‘And you?’ She looked at him with disconcerting directness. Her eyes were Cat’s and Ivo’s eyes, very round, very dark, not his own blue ones. She waited, still and quite composed. Simon picked up the drawing and began to cover it with a sheet of protective film.
    ‘I wish your father hadn’t rung you. You needed a holiday.’

    ‘I’ll get another. I’m going for a cup of tea. Shall I bring you some?’
    But his mother shook her head. At the door Simon glanced round and saw that she was stroking her daughter’s hair gently back from her face.

Six
    ‘Come over here … have lunch with me.’
    ‘Maybe tomorrow.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘I’m going to Hylam Peak … it’s a good walking day. I’ll get a pub lunch.’
    ‘Brooding?’
    ‘Not exactly.’
    ‘I’ll ring you later.’
    Simon put the phone down. His sister knew him too well. Brooding? Yes. When he felt like this he was not good company, he needed to put distance between himself and home and, as Cat herself had oncesaid, walk the brooding out of his system. It was everything – having to break off his time in Venice, Martha, and still the hangover from last year. The following Wednesday he would be back at work. He needed to brood now.
    Hylam Peak was one of a chain of hills that ran thirty miles to the west of Lafferton, approached by a twisting road that climbed across open moorland. A few damp villageshuddled in the shadows of thesteep dips between the peaks. In summer the tracks were bright with slow-moving trains of walkers, climbers hung like spiders from ropes attached to the rocky outcrops. These peaks were Bevham’s playground. People got out of the city to fly kites and microlights, hang-glide and race mountain bikes.
    For the rest of the year, especially in bad weather, no one came.Simon liked it best on days like this, when he could sit at the top of Hylam Peak among the cries of the sheep and the soaring buzzards and look across three counties, draw, think, even sleep on the dry patchy grass, and speak to no one.
    He wondered how people survived in families and crowded places of work, buses, trains, busy streets day in, day out, without a solitary escape to wild emptyplaces.
    He was the only one in the roughly fenced-off area that served as a car park. He took out his canvas satchel, immobilised the steering wheel and zapped down the locks. Nothing at all was left in the car apart from an old rug and neither radio nor CD