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 cafe 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.
‘Drink?’ he asked.
This had been the latest improvement. The doctors said she could take small amounts of liquid directly rather than through the pipes. Dryden retrieved a drinking funnel from beside the bed and poured a half inch of the wine into the bulb, placing the flexible pipe beside the suction connection already looped over her lip. He held her hand as the level dropped in a series of barely perceptible retreating tides.
‘POWS?’ she prompted.
Dryden looked for a moment at the printout before he understood: ‘Yup. Italians apparently – at least for most of the war. But there’s something odd: the bones they found, it looks like he was crawling in, not getting out. Work that out, I can’t. Who was this guy?’
The COMPASS laboured and Dryden could see the sweat breaking out on her forehead. ‘I COULD FIND OUT ID.’ The sentence had taken her two minutes to type.
Dryden nodded, pressing her hand. ‘OK – please. See what you can do.’
Laura craved these tasks, he knew. Sometimes she would retrieve data for him from the internet, tracking down background details for the stories he worked on for
‘There’s an association – I’ve got the website address. And there must be records, I guess with the MoD. They must know if someone escaped. See what you can find.’
Dryden retrieved the website address from his notebook and typed it into a document on the PC.
‘HAIR?’ she asked.
He edged onto the bed and felt the warmth in the sheets as he lifted her head from the pillow and held it against his shoulder. Then he picked up the brush from the bedside table and began. ‘We should set a date – for Lucca. I talked to the people here about the trip and they said you’ll be fine for up to six hours off the machine. We can book a scheduled flight from Stansted – if there are delays we’ll just come back. Your dad said they can pick us up at Pisa.’ He brushed for a minute silently: ‘We could sit in the sun.’
They’d honeymooned in Greece but on the way home they’d flown to Lucca to see the family home. It seemed like another lifetime now, the two of them walking the hills, seeking out the deep shadows in the church below the villa, at Santo Stefano. The house, refurbished in the 1980s with cash from the cafe business in London, had stood above an abandoned vineyard for a century or more. The woodwork was dark and polished, the walls whitewashed. Inside, over the extravagant brick fireplace, hung the inevitable hunting gun and a faded picture of Laura’s father, Gaetano, standing by a military lorry in some sun-drenched North African square, his soldier’s tunic open at the neck, beaming. The buttons on his uniform caught the sun, as did the cool black barrel of the gun he held.
