The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,85

two going to get married, then?’ Mary went on, seemingly with no embarrassment. ‘Or just go at it like rabbits whenever Poppy’s out of the house?’

The warmth got to my cheeks and I felt their heat even through the tea steam. Gabriel made an odd choking noise. ‘It’s hard,’ he said, when tea stopped spraying.

‘Yes, I gathered it was.’ Mary’s tone gave no hint as to whether the double entendre was deliberate or not. ‘You not wanting to move him in and all. Sensible though. Your girl’s been through enough with moving here. And her pillock of a dad.’ She ‘tch’d’ again. ‘Him dressing up and talking like a twenty-year-old when he’s not going to see twenty again with a bloody big telescope.’

‘He’s not all bad,’ I said mildly.

‘He’ll have a ponytail next,’ Mary said.

Gabriel and I tried very hard not to look at one another and we sat and drank our tea in the woodsmoke-smelling interior of the van as it rocked with each new gust of wind. There was the occasional thump as lone and particularly adhesive apples finally detached onto the roof and the spider-fingers noise of the hedge trailing on the paintwork. I still felt the tiny glow of pride inside that Mary thought I’d done a good job with Poppy. Karen thought so too, so maybe I had. Maybe I’d finally got something right. Been good enough at something.

Beside me I became aware of Mary slumping onto the bench seat and I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. I had to admit it was slightly soporific, the dim light from the lantern on the table, the gentle rock and roll of the van against the wind and the warmth from the stove, but when I turned to check whether she was actually asleep or just relaxed and dozing, what I saw made me shout and jump up.

‘Gabriel! Something’s wrong!’ Mary was awake, but staring rigidly ahead. One side of her face seemed to have melted down like candle wax, her mouth pulled towards her shoulder. ‘Mary?’

Gabriel was on his feet now too. ‘Mary?’ He spoke more gently than I had. Mary’s eyes moved and she made a ‘gggggg’ sound, but that was all. ‘Let’s lay you down,’ he said. With seemingly little effort, he picked Granny Mary up and carried her to the back of the caravan, where he laid her down on her little box bed. Her mouth seemed to be straining as if she was trying to speak, her right arm was clenched tight against her body but her left was flailing about, trying to indicate something.

‘Another stroke?’ I asked, half under my breath. I didn’t know why I was whispering; there were only three of us in here and one of us clearly already knew what was happening.

‘We need an ambulance.’ Gabriel was groping in his pockets. ‘My phone’s out of charge.’

I remembered all the first-aid training that I’d been forced to undergo as a teacher. Speed was of the essence in cases of stroke, I remembered that much. ‘Mine is in the kitchen.’ I ran, down the slippery steps, through the mud, and grabbed my phone from the kitchen worktop, where it lay inert. Dialled 999 as I ran back through the orchard.

The line crackled into life and I blurted our emergency as I dashed back into the van, where Gabriel was crouched next to Mary, holding her left hand.

The operator crackled. Took the call but her responses were so broken that I couldn’t understand her. Gabriel took the phone from me. ‘No, not an ambulance,’ I heard him say. ‘Hello? Can you hear me?’

‘Got… details. Ambulance… way… take time… roads difficult.’

‘No! We need a helicopter! Our road is blocked!’

Mary made the ‘gggggg’ noise again and he passed the phone to me. ‘Did you get that?’ I was shouting, although I didn’t know why. ‘There’s a flood at the bottom of the road and a tree down at the top!’

‘Amb…’ crackle crackle ‘… despatch… keep… warm.’

‘WE NEED THE HELICOPTER!’ I yelled, although volume wasn’t the issue. By the time an ambulance got here and they’d negotiated getting a stretcher around the fallen tree, walked down to the house and walked back… well. FAST, that was what they said about strokes, wasn’t it?

Now Gabriel had joined in and we were booming, ‘WE NEED THE HELICOPTER!’ as though the phone didn’t exist and we were trying to make the despatch unit hear.

‘Ambulance… been… on way.’ And the line went dead. Whether we’d been cut