Richard Cowper by Piper at the Gates of Dawn (epub)

Author:Piper at the Gates of Dawn (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

THE INTENSIVE CARE Unit was situated in the North Wing of the General Hospital. From its fourth floor windows those patients capable of looking out had a view westward across the Vale of Taunton to the Brendon Hills and northwards to the Quantocks. Few took advantage of it, for in June 1986 the vista which should have lifted the spirits served only to depress them.

Rachel Wyld was no exception. She gazed with blank eyes at the sodden landscape while the raindrops pattered against the windowpane of Ward No. 3 and trickled downwards in slow, interminable tears. On the bed behind her the man she loved lay like a corpse while the saline and glucose drips suspended above him mimicked in slow motion the weeping on the windowpane. Only the monitor screens, flipping out their indifferent impulses, insisted that Michael Carver was still technically alive, three days after being brought in from the Livermore Research Center.

Rachel turned away from the window, walked slowly over to the bedside and stared down at the impassive face. “Where in God’s name are you, Mike?” she whispered. For all the response her words evoked she might as well have been addressing an effigy on a tomb. She lowered her head until her lips were just touching his and felt, faint as a moth’s wing brushing her cheek, the minute exhalation of his breath. Then, hearing footsteps in the corridor, she straightened up and returned to her station by the window.

The door opened and a staff nurse came in. She flashed Rachel a brisk, antiseptic smile, rustled crisply over to the bed and checked the state of the drips. Then she unhooked a clipboard from the foot of the bed and consulted the monitor dials. “Isn’t this just terrible weather we’re having?” she observed.

Rachel agreed that it was.

“They say the floods are reaching right up to Nynehead. You can hardly credit it.” The nurse jotted down some figures in a rapid scribble and hung the clipboard back on its hook. “And now I think it’s time we did a little tidying up,” she remarked. She bent over the bed, produced a battery razor from her pocket and began buzzing it around the unconscious man’s cheeks and chin.

Rachel watched her with a sort of horrified fascination. “Is that really necessary?” she asked weakly.

“Dr. Phillips will be on his rounds in five minutes,” the nurse informed her. “We wouldn’t want our Mr. Carver looking scruffy, would we? There. Isn’t that better?”

Rachel found herself in the grip of a mild hysteria. “Christ,” she spluttered. “Oh, Christ, it’s too macabre. Haven’t you forgotten his fingernails?”

The nurse flushed faintly and slipped the razor back into her pocket. “I’m sorry if you find it amusing,” she retorted frostily. “I’m only doing my duty.”

“I know, I know,” whispered Rachel. “I’m sorry. It’s just that it seems so-oh, I don’t know.”

Slightly mollified the nurse smoothed down the sheet. “You’re Doctor Carver’s fiancee, aren’t you?”

“We’ve lived together for three years,” said Rachel leadenly. “Three years in May.

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