Clef heart with 'When words fail' quote on back

Agnes Pargeter sat with him after the midnight round, because the ward was quiet and because nobody else would. She hummed the tune her mother used to hum over the mangle, a plain Welsh hymn with a dip in the middle. Halfway through the second verse his right forefinger lifted and tapped the dip exactly, twice, then again, then a long slow stop.

Dunstan the porter, pushing the linen trolley past, stopped at the door. He kept a mouth organ in his tunic pocket and said his grandfather had played for the pit men when their tongues failed them after a fall, so the lads could still find each other in the dark. Nobody on the ward believed him, but the next night he played the hymn low, and the old man's hand rose and dropped in time, marking the bass like a conductor who had given up the baton.

On the Friday the man drew something on the sheet with one finger: a curl, a round belly, two dots set to the right. Agnes looked at it a long time before she understood it was a heart made from music. She wrote in the notes that he had spoken, in the only way left to him, and she did not write what he had said.