by Tina Beckett
‘Hugo, I know what I felt—when I kissed you.’ She put her hands behind her and took a step back. ‘When I’m with you I feel like someone else. It would be so easy to fall into this place, become your lover, become Ruby’s best friend, become Hamster’s third favourite cushion, but you’d tie me down. You’d fret—you already do—and before I know it you’d be watching what I eat and checking my long-term sugar levels and making sure I wear warm coats and boots when it’s raining and not letting me do the hard medical cases because it might upset me. And I’m sick of cotton wool; I’m just...over it.’
‘Polly, of all the things I’m offering, cotton wool isn’t one of them.’
‘You’re saying you wouldn’t fuss?’
‘Warm coats, boots, the Hamster cushion thing...all those things are negotiable,’ he said evenly. ‘But if we ever tried it...maybe you couldn’t stop me caring.’ He had to be honest. ‘I’d hope you could care back.’
‘I don’t do caring.’
‘I’ve watched you for days now. You care and you care and you care.’
‘Not with you.’
There was nothing to say to that. Nothing at all.
He’d been stupid to ask. This place—his life—had nothing a woman like Polly would wish to share. How could he ever have imagined otherwise?
He looked at her for a long moment and then, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he started untangling tinsel. And Polly knelt again to put decorations into boxes.
‘There’s broken glass by your knee. Be careful.’
‘I know,’ she snapped, but she hadn’t noticed—he knew she hadn’t. She looked and saw the shattered Christmas bauble. ‘Thank...thank you.’
‘I’ll get the dustpan.’
‘I broke it. I’ll fix it.’
‘Fine,’ he said and then his cellphone rang and he was almost relieved. He went outside to answer it because he needed space.
He felt like smacking himself over the head. For one brief moment he’d tried to prise open the doors that enclosed him. All he’d done was frighten her.
Where to take it from here?
Nowhere.
* * *
She was an idiot.
She gathered the shards of glass and then got the vacuum cleaner because you could never be too careful with glass on carpet and she wasn’t stupid...
She was stupid, stupid, stupid.
For heaven’s sake... He wasn’t asking her to marry him, she told herself. He was simply asking her to extend her time here as a locum.
Ruby would love it. Hamster would love it.
Polly would love it?
Love... The word echoed round and round in her head. She hit the power switch to the vacuum cleaner so it faded to silence and she gazed round at the mess that was the living room.
Mess. Christmas.
Family.
She didn’t do family. She hated Christmas.
But still she was staring around the room. One intact Christmas branch, gaily decorated. One lopsided silver tree, semi naked. Hugo saw this place as a trap, she thought. A prison. Oh, but if she let herself care...
If she cared, he’d care right back, and the cotton wool would enclose her.
‘It’s a mess,’ she muttered to herself and suddenly she found herself thinking of her parents’ Christmases. They were perfection in planning and execution. Exquisite. Her mother employed party planners.
There’d be no soggy flour on her mother’s carpet. The only thing missing from her family’s perfect Christmas this year would be her.
And, stupidly, she felt tears well behind her eyes. She dashed them away with an angry swipe. What the heck... She didn’t cry. She never cried.
She’d walked away from her family Christmas without a second glance. She’d felt joyful to be escaping.
And here was Hugo offering her another family Christmas. Not yet, she thought, not this Christmas, but she knew his offer was like an insidious web—‘Come into my parlour,’ said the spider to the fly...
Only it wasn’t like that. What fly had ever thought the spider doing the inviting was gorgeous? What spider was ever kind, skilled, gentle, loving, awesome...?
Stop it, stop it, stop it, she told her spinning head. You’ve refused him and there’s an end to it. You don’t want to be caged. Get your head in order and get on with cleaning up this mess.
And then Hugo walked back into the room and one look at his face told her cleaning had to be put onto the backburner.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘TROUBLE?’ POLLY DIDN’T have to ask but she did anyway. Vacuum cleaning was forgotten.
‘I need to go out.’
‘Tell me.’
‘If you could look after Ruby...’
‘Tell me,’ she snapped again and he paused at the door and looked at her—really looked—and she could almost see the struggle to transform her from a ditzy woman in a rainbow dress to someone who might just be a colleague.
She dropped the vacuum cleaner to help the transition. She thought about white coats but there was hardly time.
‘There’s been a landslide,’ he said.
A landslide...
The rain had stopped now, but it had been torrential. With the steepness of this valley, landslides had to be an ever-present danger.
‘I need to go...’
‘Tell me,’ she said for a third time and he got it then. She wasn’t a ditzy redhead. She was an Emergency Medicine specialist and she was demanding facts.
And he switched, just like that. As unlikely a setting as this was, in that moment they joined forces.
A medical team.
‘On the road to the south,’ he told her. ‘We already have trouble. The north road’s still cut where Horace’s truck went over. Everyone’s been using the south road. But Ben Smart’s cow got out and wandered down the road this morning in the rain. A petrol tanker came through and wiped the cow. That wasn’t a problem—apart from the cow. The tanker had bull bars. But Ben’s cow was left dead on the side of the road and Iris and Gladys Freeman live right where it was hit and they don’t want a dead cow smelling up their Christmas.’
He headed for his bedroom as he spoke, hauling on his jacket, speaking to her through the open door.
‘Ben’s not all that addicted to hard work,’ he threw at her. ‘But Iris and Gladys were insistent, so Ben got his brother and they looked at the dead cow and thought how hard it would be to bury her. They’re Smart by name but not by nature. They looked at the nice soggy side of the cliff face and thought they could just dig a bit and shove her in.’
‘Uh oh.’ Polly was heading into her bedroom too. Jeans, she thought. Jacket. And shoes. Sensible shoes would be important.
Did snakes come out after rain?
‘So...’ she called out from the bedroom. ‘Situation?’
‘The whole side of the hill’s come down. Ben’s brother, Doug, seems to have a broken leg but he got himself out. Ben was completely buried for a bit. Amy and Max Fraser were there first—they’re sensible farmers. Amy’s an ex-nurse. She says Ben’s in a bad way. Oh, and Iris and Gladys are there too, but Iris has fallen over and Gladys has hurt her back. I might be a while.’ And then she emerged from her bedroom and he was in the living room and he looked at her jeans and jacket and boots. ‘What the...?’
‘I’m coming too. Incident with multiple casualties. Why question it?’
‘Ruby?’
‘Excuse me? Am I here as a childminder?’
‘No, but...’
‘Isn’t Ruby asleep?’
‘Yes...’
‘And isn’t your normal child care system working?’
‘Polly, you can’t. You’re three days post-snake-bite.’
; ‘Yeah and you’ll be post-kick-on-the-shins if you fuss for no reason,’ she snapped. ‘Do what you must to let the hospital know Ruby needs monitoring. Then let’s go.’
* * *
What confronted them could have been a tragedy. It was bad, but by the time they got there Ben was sitting up, retching mud and wheezing. He was still gasping but at least he was conscious.
Iris and Gladys, two very elderly ladies, were fussing over him and berating him at the same time.
‘We had to do CPR for ages.’ Iris, an indomitable lady who looked to be in her nineties, was sitting back on her heels, glaring as if she wanted to punch Ben again. ‘I hit him so hard to get him breathing before Amy and Max arrived that I’ve hurt my wrists, and then he threw up on my dressing gown. And I’ll never get it dry in this weather.’
All this and she was complaining about the weather? Polly and Hugo shared a grin as they set to work.
Ben was indeed all right. He’d been momentarily buried in the mud. Luckily, Amy and Max had had a shovel on their truck and had done some fast digging. Amy was now tending to Doug, who lay beside his brother, moaning in pain.
Doug’s leg was fractured. His patience with his brother had snapped completely.
‘That’s the last time I’m gonna agree to one of his hare-brained schemes. “It’ll be easy,” he said. “Just dig a bit into the cliff and shove her in and we won’t even have to move her”.’
The cow, thankfully, was now buried, but at what a cost?
‘You’ve succeeded, you idiots,’ Max said dourly. ‘You’ve also succeeded in cutting the road. The north road’s still impassable so we’re stuck. The town’ll have your guts for garters, guys. Just saying.’
But while he was talking, Hugo and Polly had moved into triage mode, figuring what needed to be done and doing it with the ease of a team that had worked together for years. Polly was wiping the mud from Ben’s face, checking his mouth, his nose, his neck. She was preparing an oxygen mask. Ben was breathing but his colour was poor. Assuming his breathing had stopped, even for a moment, it was important to get his oxygen levels up.
Hugo was administering morphine to Doug, then slitting his pants leg to expose the leg break. Polly glanced over and saw no exposed bone, no break in the skin.
They might be lucky, she thought. Doug looked well into his seventies, maybe early eighties. Even a simple fracture would take time to heal but a compound fracture could be disastrous.
‘I think you’ve been lucky,’ Hugo told him, confirming what she was thinking. ‘Okay, without moving anything—head, neck, arms or legs—let’s do a bit of wiggle checking.’
She did the same for Ben, carefully checking each limb. She fitted a neck brace as a precaution—if the dirt had come down on his head she wanted an X-ray before she let him move.
‘We’ll need to get everyone to hospital,’ Hugo told her. ‘I want a proper examination.’ He turned to Gladys who looked, if anything, even older and more withered than her sister. ‘Max said you hurt your back.’
‘It’s a twinge,’ Gladys said with dignity. ‘We had to pull to try and get this idiot’s head out. Iris fell over—look at her first.’
Iris had indeed fallen over. She had a long graze, the length of her shin.
There was another exchanged glance between Hugo and Polly. Iris’s skin was old-age-dry, scarred from years of bumps and bruises and varicose veins. It’d be a miracle if her leg didn’t ulcerate. And Gladys’s hands were surreptitiously going to the small of her back. Pain was obvious and both she and Hugo could see it.
‘Right,’ Hugo said. ‘Let’s get you all into the hospital where we can look at you properly. We need to do it carefully. Amy, Max, are you happy to help? Great. Can you take Iris and Gladys—they’re both good to go sitting up, but drive slowly. Try not to bump. Ben and Doug, though, need to be transported flat. I have matting in the back of my van. Polly, can we do a three-way shift? Max, can you help?’
‘But we’re not going to the hospital,’ Gladys said, astounded, and Hugo put a hand on her shoulder and met her frightened gaze with compassion.
‘Gladys, how long did Iris’s leg ulcer take to heal? Let’s try and prevent one forming. And Iris, you can see that Gladys has hurt her back. Do you really not want me to see what the damage is? Won’t you let me see if I can stop it hurting for Christmas?’
And, put like that, heading to the hospital for each other, there was no choice.
‘We need to ring a couple of local farmers.’ Hugo had been carrying lanterns in his truck. So had Amy and Max, so the scene they were working in was lit, but to the north there was a sea of mud where the road should be. ‘We’ll need to set up road blocks and warning lamps.’
‘Can’t we get the ambulance?’ Polly asked. ‘Surely it’d be better to wait.’ The ambulance had proper stretchers—a much safer way of carrying patients with potential spinal injuries. To put them in Hugo’s van...
‘We can’t do it,’ Hugo said grimly. ‘We share the ambulance service with Willaura. They’re fifteen miles down the road, on the far side of the land slip. Given that the south road’s cut and now the north road... Sorry, guys, the truck it is.’
* * *
They worked solidly for the next few hours. Each of the four, although not dangerously injured, had their own urgent needs. Ben had swallowed—and inhaled—dirty water and mud. He needed intravenous antibiotics. Doug’s leg needed setting. Luckily, it was a simple tibial break but he was a pack a day smoker. He coughed and wheezed and the decision was admission, oxygen and observation.
They admitted Gladys and Iris, too. Gladys’s back showed little damage apart from osteoarthritic change but she was more shaken than she’d admit. Iris’s leg needed scrupulous cleaning and dressing, and once they’d got over their first protests the elderly ladies seemed content to be fussed over.
‘And you do need to let us fuss over you,’ Polly declared as she tucked them in for the night. ‘You’re both heroes.’
‘I agree.’ Hugo must have finished at the same time as she did. He was suddenly standing at the ward door, smiling warmly at the two old ladies. ‘Heroes, both of you. Max tells me even though you didn’t have a spade, by the time he got there you’d already got Ben’s head clear.’
‘We’re gardeners,’ Iris said as if that explained everything.
‘But we’re tired gardeners,’ Gladys whispered and snuggled down a bit further on her pillows. Polly had given them both pain relief and they seemed dozily content. ‘Thank you, dear.’
And Hugo grinned and crossed to each of them and planted a kiss on each elderly cheek.
‘No. Thank you. You’ve saved Ben’s life.’
‘Well, we’re much happier being kissed by you than by Ben,’ Gladys said and she giggled, and Hugo and Polly slipped out of the ward and left them to sleep.
Drama over. They could go home.
They walked in silence across the small distance that separated house from hospital. The silence between them was strained. Almost as soon as the hospital doors closed behind them they seemed no longer colleagues.
What then? Friends?
Ha.
But that was how they had to act, Polly thought, at least until tomorrow.
And with thought came another...
‘Hugo... If the roads are cut in both directions... You won’t be able to leave.’
Hugo didn’t break stride. ‘You think I don’t know that?’ The surge of anger in his voice was almost shocking. ‘That road can’t be made safe until it dries out, and the engineers have already assessed the other road. They need to blast further into the cliff to make it safe.’
‘So that would be...after Christmas?’ She could hardly make herself say it but it had to be said. ‘Ruby will break her heart.’
‘She’ll understand.’ But the
anger was still in his voice. ‘I’ll show her the roads.’
‘And she’ll be stoic,’ Polly whispered. ‘I don’t think I can bear it.’
‘So how the hell do you think it makes me feel?’ His words were an explosion. He stopped and closed his eyes and she could see the pain, the fury that fate had once again messed with his plans for his little niece’s Christmas. ‘How am I going to tell her?’
‘Oh, Hugo...’
‘I meant the Valley to be her base, her one sense of continuity. Now it’s like a trap.’
‘A trap for you both?’ she ventured and he stared at her for one long baffled moment and then dug his hands deep in his pockets and started walking again.
Polly didn’t move on. She stood and watched his retreating back.
She couldn’t help him. Not without...
No. She couldn’t help him.
Or could she?
Her parents’ money... Her parents’ power and resources...
They could get a chopper here first thing tomorrow, she thought. Hugo and Ruby could be at the beach long before they could ever have driven.
But how could she ask that of her parents? She thought of the look on her parents’ faces as she’d told them she wouldn’t spend this Christmas with them. They’d been gutted. So now...
How could she tell them where she was, ask them for such a favour and then tell them to leave her alone?
Family... Love...
She stood stock-still in the darkness while her thoughts headed off in so many tangents she felt dizzy.
She should be home for Christmas.
She wasn’t home. She was here. And so was Hugo because he’d chosen this place—because of love.
‘Polly? What’s wrong?’ Hugo had reached the gate into the house yard and had turned back to see what was keeping her.
‘Nothing,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Just...recalibrating. I guess this means...Christmas together.’
‘Can we keep our hands off each other until the roads clear?’ He tried to say it with humour but she heard the strain.