I had to travel about five miles on the bypass, and as the mini was elderly used the slow lane, to be sandwiched between a milk lorry ahead and a crowded estate-car, roughly as old as the mini, behind. On the upward curve over the first down the lorry was forced to a crawl. Margaret’s mini was past soaring up hills, so I changed into low gear and closed the windows so as not to be suffocated by diesel fumes. In the driving mirror I saw the driver of the estate-car was growing restive. Twice he attempted to overtake, but we had reached the top of the hill before a gap in the stream of cars streaking up on our right allowed him to slip in between the lorry and myself.
The lorry speeded up on the downhill run to the next roundabout and the huge road-signs giving warning of the end of the twin carriageway and the start of two-way traffic. Directly we reached the single main road the estate-car’s off-side indicator began flickering. The driver had five passengers ‒ three women and two men. From the stack of suitcases strapped on the overhead rack and the fact that they were driving away from the coast I guessed they were returning from a holiday. They were not very young, and from the back-slapping and laughter I could see through the glass rear doors in fine form.
The lorry-driver had not waved the estate-driver on. The latter sounded his horn impatiently, and without waiting for any sign nosed his car into the middle lane, accelerating as he did so. Instantly, urgently, the lorry-driver’s arm appeared to wave him back. The lorry-driver’s reactions were quick, but not quick enough, as the estate-car-driver’s acceleration beat him to it. He was abreast with the lorry when I saw the oncoming small black car overtaking on the other side, and overtaking fast. It took a conscious effort to resist the urge to close my eyes, while I signalled to the traffic behind and made an emergency stop. The safety-belt held me back as I jerked forward and at the same second heard the ghastly clash of metal hitting metal.
The estate-car reeled drunkenly, shot sideways across the road and oncoming traffic, and came to rest with its bonnet jammed in the sloping grass bank edging the road on the other side. It only missed hitting an oncoming white sports-car by inches and by the swiftness of the young sports-car-driver’s reaction. He swerved across the road between my mini and the car behind without touching either of us, and stopped his unharmed car on our grass verge about fifty feet away.
I realized all that later. At the actual moment I was transfixed with horror by the antics of the small black car. The impact had caused it to buck like a frightened horse. It turned right over backwards, spun briefly upside down like a top, then, still upside down, skidded into the back of the now stationary lorry. The jolt dislodged the back row of heavy milk-churns. They toppled over the chain holding them in place, spilling themselves and their contents into the road. Within seconds the road was white with milk. On the driver’s side of the wrecked black car the whiteness was turning red.
The lorry-driver jumped down as I leapt out of the mini and ran to the black car. At the back of my mind I was conscious of feeling very cold and of legs heavy as lead.
‘I warned the bugger!’ gasped the lorry-driver unsteadily. ‘I warned the bugger to stay back! Didn’t you see me, girl?’ He shook his fist at the driver of the estate-car, who had climbed out and was staring blankly across the road. ‘See what you done?’ he shouted.
The estate-car-driver’s stare did not alter. His passengers were filing out in a dazed little procession. There was no movement from the little black car, and the stain on the road was spreading.
I heard my voice say, ‘I can’t get this door open.’ It did not sound like my voice.
The lorry-driver was about forty and powerfully built. He tried, failed, cursed. ‘Jammed. Let’s have a go at that other, mate.’ He pushed aside another man. ‘One of them’s cut bad from all this bleeding blood ‒ my Gawd!’ The door was open, and the crumpled figure of a man had toppled from the passenger seat into the road. ‘Look at the poor bugger’s face ‒’ His arm hit me across the waist. ‘Keep back, girl!’
‘No.’ I ducked under his arm and went on my knees. ‘Let me see if it’s him that’s bleeding. I’m a nurse.’
A small crowd was round us. A woman screamed. ‘His face!’ Somewhere close I heard someone vomiting. I nearly did so myself. I had to force down the wave of nausea. It was impossible to tell the age of the man who owned that face, what he had looked like five minutes ago, or even that that was the face of a man. But he was breathing, and he was not having an arterial haemorrhage. ‘See he’s able to breathe and don’t move him,’ I said, to no-one in particular, pulling off my hat before half-diving, half-crawling, into the upturned car.
I concentrated now on the driver. His legs were jammed. He was hanging upside down, and he was so soaked in blood that it was a few more seconds before I discovered the severed artery was somewhere in his left leg. I used his own tie as a tourniquet. ‘Anyone got a pen? Or pencil?’ I called. A hand offered me a ball-point pen. I pushed it into the tie-knot and twisted, hard.
‘Stopped it, have you, miss?’ The lorry-driver’s face appeared briefly on a level with mine. He had taken charge outside. He had sent the young sports-car-driver to ring for the police and ambulance at a phone-box a mile or so back. He had detailed another man to direct the traffic. I heard him growling at the crowd. ‘You heard what the lady said. You let that poor bugger be. Gawd knows how he’s breathing proper, but he is, so don’t you go shoving him around. Do more harm than good, see. Like the lady said.’
A police motor-cyclist arrived first. ‘Stand back, please ‒ back you get, sir ‒ madam ‒ let me get by.’ He crouched in the doorway, pulling off his leather gloves. ‘That one still alive, miss?’
‘Just. His pulse is very poor.’
‘Reckon from the state of this car it would be. You a doctor, miss?’
‘A nurse in training.’ I jerked my head. ‘I was in that mini.’
He nodded and crept forward carefully to examine the driver. ‘Lost a good bit, hasn’t he? Only the one leg as is bleeding?’
‘Far as I can tell. From the feel I’d say both are broken. Ambulance coming?’
‘On its way. We’d best not try to shift him out until it gets here in case we start up more bleeding. Will you be all right with him while I take a better look at the other bloke?’ He touched the unconscious driver’s head. ‘Don’t much fancy leaving him hanging like this.’
‘At least it’s keeping what blood he’s got left in his head.’
‘True, miss. Too true.’ He uncurled himself and disappeared.
A police-car had arrived. Suddenly the wrecked car was surrounded by uniformed figures. Two ambulances came together. One of the ambulance men crawled in to take my place whilst his colleagues consulted with the police on the best method of releasing the driver.
There was so little space in the car and I was so cramped that one of the policemen lifted me bodily out on to the road. He set me on my feet. ‘All right then, miss?’
‘Yes, thanks,’ I lied. I was now shaking with delayed-action shock.
I did not fool him. ‘You best sit down, miss. I’ll fetch one of the ambulance lads to take a look at you soon as we get this bloke out.’
‘You leave the little lady to me, mate.’ The lorry-driver was at my elbow. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her.’ He sat with me on the grass verge and with unsteady hands rolled a cigarette. ‘Give you a fag, miss?’
‘Thanks, but I don’t smoke.’
‘Me daughters don’t neither. Me lads ‒ Gawd ‒ like chimneys they are, the silly young baskets!’ He inhaled gratefully. ‘Not that I can’t be doing with this now.’
‘I can imagine,’ I said, and we were silent.
It was around fifteen minutes before the combined efforts of four policemen and two ambulance men succeeded and the driver was lifted from the wreck. The lorry-driver had offered his help. A police-sergeant told him to stay where he was. ‘You look as if you’ve had your lot for today, mister.’
‘He can say that again,’ the lorry-dr
iver confided to me. ‘Gets me in the guts, this does. Always the way of it.’
‘You’ve seen a lot of accidents?’
‘Ten years,’ he said, ‘ten years I’ve had on this milk run, see, and I seen more accidents than I’ve had Sunday dinners. But I not seen one yet as you might call a proper bleeding accident, if you takes my meaning?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
Across the road a large grey car suddenly pulled out of the Downshurst-bound traffic and stopped on the grass verge beyond the estate-car and the police busy with tape-measures and notebooks. I noticed it vaguely. The lorry-driver was more observant. ‘What’s this, then? More top brass?’ he inquired of the policeman standing over us as he wrote down our names and addresses.
The policeman glanced round. ‘Not one of ours. 7 Oak Cottages, Hurstly, did you say, Mr Jemps?’
The wedding was at Hurstly. The name reminded me of that, but the peculiar detachment of shock prevented the reminder from disturbing me in the slightest. I stared at the road and was not really surprised by the discovery that I recognized the man in a grey suit crossing with a police-sergeant. I did not even wonder mildly what on earth the S.S.O. of Benedict’s was doing on the Downshurst bypass on a mid-week morning. It was my first personal experience of the extraordinary anaesthetizing powers of physical shock. I felt as if my brain and body were stuffed with cotton-wool. It was a rather soothing sensation.
The police-sergeant told his junior the gentleman was a doctor and a friend of the young lady’s, and returned to the other side of the road. The lorry-driver was now my mate. He said he was real glad to meet any friend of the little lady’s, and weren’t it a turn-up for the book the gent should be a doc? ‘Just passing was you, like? Could’ve done with you earlier, mate.’
‘So I’ve heard. A very unpleasant experience all round.’ Old Red was studying me clinically. ‘I’ve been told you’re unhurt, but I see you’ve picked up plenty of gore. How do you feel?’
‘I’m all right, thanks, Mr Leland.’
‘Good.’ He smiled professionally and took my pulse. ‘Rightish, if not quite right. Why not lie down?’
I lay back, listening to Mr Jemps, the lorryman, giving the policeman a very clear and fair account of the accident. Old Red offered cigarettes all round. Only Mr Jemps accepted. Red lit one for himself. I had not seen him smoke before, and did not know he did. The sight of him standing there smoking made me realize how little any of us in Benedict’s knew what he was really like as a man, once out of the defensive armour of his white coat. I had seen him turn human with Margaret, but that glimpse had not been enough to tell me now whether he had stopped on recognizing me for her sake or because I was a Benedict’s nurse. Either way I thought it a nice gesture, and when I next caught his eye I smiled. He smiled back, not professionally, but rather shyly.
The policeman had finished with Mr Jemps. He apologized for having to trouble me. ‘Best to get these things down straight away, miss. Care to tell me what you saw?’
‘One moment, Officer.’ Red took my pulse again. ‘If you don’t feel up to it you don’t have to talk now, Nurse Dungarvan. You can make a statement later.’
I sat up. ‘I’d rather get it over. I’m much less muzzy now.’
‘Right.’ He sat beside me and lent me his shoulder as a back-rest. My detachment was breaking up. Momentarily I realized exactly what I was doing. When I tell the girls, I thought, they’ll not believe one word of this. I would not blame them. It was hard enough to believe now, myself.
At last the policeman shut his notebook. ‘Much obliged, Miss Dungarvan, Mr Jemps. We’ll not need to detain you any longer, so when you feel like moving off you do that. We’ll be in touch with the two of you later.’ He turned to Old Red. ‘I take it you’ll be seeing the young lady’s looked after, Doctor? Nasty. Very nasty. Still, I reckon it could have been worse. No stiffs.’
‘And you know who you got to thank for that, mate, don’t you?’ Mr Jemps got on his feet belligerently. ‘This pretty little lady here. Quick as a bleeding flash she was, the way she bunged herself head first into that little black job and stopped that poor bugger what was bleeding like a bloody stuck pig, afore any of your lot got here. But for her he’d be a stiff this very minute, and I’m not telling you no lies! Proper bleeding little heroine your young lady is, Doctor!’ he informed Old Red. ‘You mind you look after her real good. Cruel shook up, she is now, like as you don’t need to be no doctor to see, but she weren’t shook up when she got a job to do!’ He rubbed his hand on the seat of his pants before offering it to me. ‘I’d best get what’s left of my milk on the road, or I’ll have the Guvnor after me. See you in court then, eh, miss? I’ll fetch the wife along. Always had a hankering to be a nurse, she did. Real keen, she’ll be, to meet you.’
‘I should like to meet her, Mr Jemps. And thank you very much. You were wonderful.’
Old Red waited until the Jemps-Dungarvan mutual-admiration society had broken up and Mr Jemps was climbing into his lorry. ‘Where were you off to, originally?’
‘A wedding.’ Normality had returned, but without affecting the conviction that I now shared with my mate Jemps and the cops that the S.S.O. of Benedict’s was my official source of strength and comfort. ‘Do you know, I’d forgotten all about it?’
‘I believe you.’ I had moved from his shoulder, so he got up and retrieved my hat. It was now lying higher up the bank behind us. ‘This yours?’
‘Yes. Thanks.’ I looked it over. ‘It’ll do again ‒’ I looked down. ‘God! My dress won’t. What time is it?’
‘Ten to twelve.’
‘Then if I go back and change I can still make the reception.’
He considered me curiously. ‘You feel up to facing a wedding reception? After this?’
‘Quite honestly, no. But there’s no more I can do here. The bride is one of my greatest school friends. We always promised to be at each other’s wedding, and if I don’t turn up she’ll be upset. If I ring and invent some excuse she knows me too well not to see through it. But how can I tell a girl this sort of truth on her wedding day? It’ll cast a hellish blight. Talk of accidents always does.’
‘But how will you explain matters when you do eventually arrive?’
‘I’ll think of something. I’ll say I forgot the time or date or way, or something. Gillian’s always been convinced I’m a complete nut, and one of the advantages of being a known nut is that one can always get people to believe one’s acted in a nutty way.’
‘Is that so?’ His eyes were amused. ‘I can see that could be useful. You don’t object to being a known nut?’
‘I used not to. I used to think it a big giggle. Now I find it gets a bit tedious sometimes.’ I thought of Humber. ‘My own fault, of course, for always acting first and thinking later.’
‘Not always a fault, as your friend Mr Jemps would most forcibly agree.’ The faintly rigid lines of his normal expression in Benedict’s had relaxed. He looked and sounded so unlike his Benedict’s self that once again I forgot his alter ego. He was just Margaret’s old chum who had loaned me a shoulder and was still metaphorically holding my hand. I was grateful for that invisible handclasp and for his last remark.
‘Well, thanks. There certainly wasn’t time for thought just now, and had there been I’d probably have been sick.’ I looked at the mini. ‘I’d better move if I’m going to go back and change.’
‘Staying with your aunt, aren’t you? Right. I don’t think you should drive yourself yet. I’ll run you back to Maggie’s, and when you’ve changed we can come back here and pick up your mini. I’ll have a word with the cops about leaving it here. I doubt they’ll object.’
I was relieved for myself, as I had been dreading driving again so soon. I was delighted for Margaret. I had to make a polite pretence at reluctance. ‘Won’t it take you very much out of your way?’
‘A little, but that’s not important. I’m not due in Downshurst for another hour. I’m lunching with Mr and Mrs Re
mington-Hart. I hoped I’d have a chance to call in on your aunt some time today, and thought I’d ring from Downshurst to ask if it would be convenient. Is she home this morning?’
‘Yes. She’ll be in all day, as I’ve got her car.’ I stood up eagerly. ‘Thank you very much. I’d love a lift back.’
‘Good.’ He spoke to one of the policemen. ‘Your car can wait,’ he said on returning. ‘Let’s go.’
We had to wait before crossing the road. As we did so he explained he had taken the day off, instead of next Sunday, which would have been part of his free week-end. He wanted to see Mr Remington-Hart about some patient and to spend next Sunday catching up on ‘cold’ cases. These were the patients with non-acute surgical conditions on the long waiting-list for non-acute ‒ i.e. cold ‒ beds. ‘We haven’t a free surgical bed today, and, by some chance, today we are quiet. So I gave myself the day off.’
I looked at the empty estate-car when we reached the other side. ‘I wonder what happened to them?’
He knew the answer from the police-sergeant to whom he had first spoken. ‘They had a few minor cuts and bruises and slight shock. They went in the first ambulance with the man with the facial injuries. The second took the man you dealt with.’
‘Do you think they’ll do?’
It was a stupid question, as he had not seen any of the victims. Instead of slapping me down, as any surgeon could quite reasonably have done in those circumstances, and particularly a surgeon with his reputed bite, he said simply, ‘Not having seen them, I can’t truthfully answer you, but from what I’ve heard the two in the black car should have a fair chance. How old were they?’
‘I’ve no idea at all about the man with the face. The other’ ‒ I hesitated ‒ ‘well ‒ not young, definitely. Thirty-fivish ‒ forty. About that.’
‘I see.’ A smile flickered over his face. ‘Though definitely not young, that’s still not too old for there to be a considerable amount of resilience present. That’s the vital element, and whilst it remains the human body can survive the most amazing injuries. As a general rule, the very old and the very young have the least in reserve, though one meets the occasional nonagenarian with the resilience of a twenty-year-old.’ He stopped, smiling apologetically. ‘I beg your pardon. I’m riding a pet hobby-horse.’
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