Slight Mourning by Catherine Aird

Author:Catherine Aird
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

This room was never entirely dark, never entirely quiet.

When all the other lights in the room had been extinguished for the night one always burned here. It was beside a bank of tiny flickering screens looking rather like a television shop-window which was showing the same programme on five different sets. Only an expert could have told that the five moving green and black outlines showed five different programmes.

And that expert was sitting in front of the screens watching carefully.

Her name was Nurse Joan Brown and this was the Intensive Care Unit of Berebury District General Hospital.

Each of the five green lines recorded the beats of one ailing heart, each of the green dots that ran across the bottom of the screens monitored a highly irregular pulse.

The noise—a susurration which never completely faded away—came from a ventilator. It was one of the mechanical aids with which the doctors were trying to keep Mr. Tom Exley alive. His wife, who was still by his bedside, didn’t know by now whether she loved or hated its faint monotonous “suff-suff” sound which had become part of the background to her life since last Saturday night. One thing she had learned by now was that the delicate pink flush on her husband’s cheeks owed everything to the machine and nothing to the healthy processes of natural life.

It was just after two o’clock in the morning when a new sound disturbed the little ward.

Nurse Brown looked up.

The monitor representing Mr. Exley’s pulse had emitted a warning bleep. She reached for the telephone. Even as she did so the green dot on the monitor screen trailed disconsolately downward and disappeared.

Mrs. Tom Exley’s vigil was over now.

Nurse Brown led her away.

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