by Maggie Hope
A wave of irritation went through Alf. He caught hold of the boy’s arm and pulled him over bodily, forcing him to look at him. He twisted the boy’s arm, making tears start to his eyes, but Michael stared at him bravely. Cheeky fond the kid was, he’d have to knock that out of him. No doubt Elsie had been too soft with the little bugger.
‘Don’t you be so flaming cheeky, lad, or I’ll give you what for when we get home,’ snapped Alf.
He caught the driver of the car looking at him in disgust. ‘What the hell’s the matter with your face?’ Alf snarled.
‘A bit rough with the lad, aren’t you?’
The driver was a family man himself; he knew how bairns could get on your nerves, how at times you could murder them, but he didn’t hold with actually hurting them, especially a little mite like that young ’un.
‘You mind your own business. When I want your advice I’ll ask for it,’ said Alf, but he loosed the boy’s arm. The driver said no more but turned his whole attention to the road ahead. He could have turfed the fellow out at the roadside but he could do with the fare, and anyway, how would that help the kid?
Alf looked down at Mary on his other side, and felt the surge of triumph again. She was really turning into a nice plump little thing. She hadn’t made a fuss either, actually liked her old dad, he was sure of it. He put an arm around her and she looked up at him, eyes large in her face. They were so like Rose’s and her hair was already darkening to black too. She had her thumb stuck firmly in her mouth, though, wasn’t saying a word. He squeezed her to him.
‘Daddy’s little pet, aren’t you, Rose?’ he said and she never moved to release herself, just stared up at him, her arms forced forward before her body, her face becoming red.
‘It’s Mary, not Rose,’ said Michael beside him. ‘Let her go, Dad, will you? She’s frightened.’
‘No, she’s not. She likes me to cuddle her, don’t you, Mary?’
He glanced up at the driving mirror and saw that the driver’s eyes were once more fixed on him. The car had slowed down too; they would never get to Bishop Auckland at this rate. Alf released Mary and leaned forward to speak to the man. ‘If we’re there before one I’ll give you a good tip,’ he said. ‘I … we have to meet someone.’
The man looked at him, his face unreadable, but he picked up speed. Alf sat back, satisfied. It was marvellous what the promise of a bit of extra money would do, he thought smugly. Well, the driver was in for an unpleasant surprise when they got there. Alf would burn in hell before he’d give him a tip.
There was hooting behind them. Alf turned round. What was the matter with the car behind? There wasn’t a soul on the road apart from the two of them. If he was in such a hurry why didn’t he just overtake and get on his way?
It was a young fellow with a girl beside him, showing off no doubt …Alf stared, his mouth open. It wasn’t true … it couldn’t be. But yes, it was, it was that lad Jeff, the one who had sniffed after his Rose. What did he think he was doing?
Jeff swung out into the road, pulling alongside the hired car for only a moment. He was making gestures to the driver to stop and the damn fool was doing just that. The other car had dropped behind again, evidently confident Alf’s driver would do as he asked. Alf leaned forward.
‘Don’t you stop! Drive on. Go, I tell you – what do you think I’m paying you for?’ He looked furiously back at the other car. Who the hell did he think he was, forcing them to stop?
The girl beside Jeff. Alf hadn’t looked at her properly until now, in fact she had been half hidden, holding her head down. Now she leaned forward and stared at him and suddenly he knew why they were doing what they were doing. But it couldn’t be, no, it couldn’t be! He leaned suddenly on the driver and the car bucked and jumped and swung round to the side and there was a crunch and Alf was thrown forward, his head and shoulders going through the windscreen, his body shielding that of the driver who was pinned in his seat by it. Behind them, the two children were thrown forward too, Mary hitting the back of the driver’s seat and falling to the floor.
Michael went flying slightly to the left where the front door had swung open and was catapulted out, going over the parapet of the bridge they were on, out into the empty air above a slowly flowing, six-inch-deep tributary of the River Wear.
Chapter Thirty
‘I’m their sister, let me go!’ Rose shouted, and the ambulance man hesitated and glanced at his colleague who nodded. He released his hold on her and she climbed in and sat between the stretcher beds. Michael lay, white and quiet. Oh, God, he was dead and it was her fault, all of it. If she hadn’t got Jeff to race after them the twins would be alive and well, both of them.
‘Auntie Elsie?’ On the other side Mary moved, moaning a little, asking for her aunt, and the ambulance man moved to check her, feeling her pulse, his eyes going over her.
‘Lie still now, petal,’ he said, his voice calm, cool. ‘Don’t move, there’s a good girl.’
‘How is she?’ Rose whispered anxiously.
He smiled in a way meant to comfort. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ll soon be there. We’re taking them to Hartlepool, it’s nearer than Durham.’
He moved to Michael, feeling for the pulse in his temple, pulling the red blanket more closely round his body. Michael looked so small lying there, small and vulnerable, and Rose felt her heart dissolving into tiny bits. But there was whimpering coming from the other side now. Mary was moving her head from side to side.
‘Auntie Elsie? Auntie, where are you? My shoulder hurts, Auntie Elsie.’
‘I’m here, Mary. I’m here, pet. It’s Rose. Don’t you know me, Mary?’
The child opened her eyes fully. ‘Rose?’ she asked, uncertainly, but at least she knew her and Rose breathed a prayer of gratitude. ‘Rose, it hurts,’ her sister said, the high thin thread of her voice sounding so pathetic Rose felt she couldn’t bear it. She put out her hand and Mary clung to it, her fingers tightly wrapped around hers.
‘I know, love, but we’ll soon be at the hospital and the doctor will make you better.’ Please God, and Michael too. The journey seemed to be taking for ever, though in fact, when she glanced at her watch, it had only been five minutes. The longest five minutes of her life. Rose hardly dared look at Michael’s face now, terrified she might see that the tiny thread which was holding him to life had been broken.
She held Mary’s hand, stroking it gently, and her mind went back to the series of horrifying images that had gone before. Never would she be able to erase from her memory that image of Michael suspended in the air above the burn. It would be her everlasting penance. She had raced up to the bridge, to the broken wall and the car crumpled into it, Jeff close behind her, calling, ‘Rose! Rose, don’t …’ But she had to see for herself, only she didn’t know where to look first.
‘You stay here, I’ll see about Michael,’ said Jeff. He put a hand on her shoulder to make sure she had heard but it only galvanised her into action and she was round the wall – the wall which stretched for no more than six feet. Six feet of wall in all that long stretch of road with nothing else at the sides but grass and wooden fences and hedges, and they had had to hit the wall. She was over the fence and down the grassy slope, pushing cows out of her way. They took fright, already startled by the commotion in their midst, and ran clumsily up the bank, away from where they had been drinking at the burn.
Barely looking at the figure of Alf, slumped over the seat and still over the wildly cursing figure of the driver, she dared to look at Mary, sitting on the floor in the back of the car, her shoulder at a strange angle, her little head swaying backwards and forwards, saying nothing, eyes closed. She was at least alive. But Michael couldn’t be, could he? Of course he couldn’t. No one could be alive after falling over a wall and down into a burn filled with boulders and rocks and pebbles, all so hard.
Rose was aware of them yet not aware as she reached the saturated bank by the side of the burn, mud all churned up for a depth of some inches
so that she slipped and fell and struggled through it on her hands and knees to where the limp figure of her brother lay. So still. Oh, dear God, so still.
‘Don’t move him, Rose! Don’t move him!’ Jeff was waving his arms and shouting from the top of the bank. ‘An ambulance is coming.’
But she had to move Michael’s head, turn his face to the side for it was in the mud. She moved it gently then pulled at her skirt to wipe his face but it too was smothered in mud so she tugged impatiently at her coat buttons and found the tail of her blouse and used that. She hooked her finger in his mouth to clean it of mud. Oh, God be praised, there was but a tiny amount on his lips, none deep inside, he could breathe. She tore a piece from her blouse and dipped it in the stream and used that to clean his lips and teeth.
The cows were coming close again, curious as only cows can be, wary of her, their large brown eyes questioning, dropping their heads to within an inch of Michael’s face. ‘Get off! Get away!’ Rose shouted furiously at them and waved her arms and they turned clumsily and splashed off, over the stream to the other side. And then the ambulance came, two in fact, and the ambulance men had taken charge.
But now they were entering the gates of the hospital, speeding up to Outpatients and Emergency. ‘We’re almost there, darling,’ she said to Mary. ‘The doctors will make you better.’ Her sister looked fearfully at her, frightened of the unknown. Then the ambulance man was at the door and suddenly there were nurses and doctors bustling about. One of them had taken hold of her and was leading her out, sitting her down, taking the children away and Rose cried out, ‘I want to go with them!’ But hands were restraining her and a calm voice was saying something to her.
‘It’s all right, they’re in safe hands now. Sit quiet a minute, will you? You’re suffering from shock.’
She watched numbly as the adult-sized trolleys were wheeled away with the children looking smaller than ever and forced herself to stay calm. She had to keep a hold on herself. She had to, had to, had to. And then Jeff was there, sitting beside her, putting his arm around her, holding her to him.
‘They’re not dead, Jeff. They’re alive, both of them, they are, aren’t they?’ For suddenly she had a terrible fear that it was an illusion, all of this, that the twins were dead, their battered bodies lying out there on that road. The waiting room didn’t even look real to her.
‘No, they’re not dead, Rose,’ Jeff confirmed. Her father was. Oh, yes, Alf Sharpe was dead all right. And Jeff couldn’t find it in his heart to be sorry, either. He had only been stopped from immediately following Rose down the bank to the burn as he suddenly realised that the driver of the crashed car was pushing Alf’s body off him.
‘Get off me,’ he was saying, ‘bloody well get off me! Look what you did, you bloody fool –’ And Jeff had seen what was going to happen in that instant and managed to open the back door of the car and catch Alf Sharpe’s dead body before it fell on Mary where she sat on the floor between the seats, moaning now, her head not swaying any longer as she rested it on the back of the driver’s seat.
The driver himself was completely unhurt so far as Jeff could see. He had got out of the car and lurched across the road where he stood quietly vomiting over the fence.
‘Sit still, ninny,’ Jeff said to the child. ‘It’ll be all right soon, I promise you.’
He darted over to the wall and saw Rose as she put a hand out to the mud-covered body of the little boy. ‘Don’t move him,’ Jeff shouted urgently. ‘Don’t move him, Rose. Don’t – don’t move him.’ The first aid training he was undergoing for use in mining accidents was taking over.
Dear God, she loved those bairns, he thought. And he … had he been the cause of the accident? He didn’t truly know but even the thought was an agony to him. He heard a car approaching and ran out into the road, waving his arms.
‘An ambulance – call an ambulance!’ he cried, and the driver, taking in what had happened at a glance, hardly stopped but nodded his head and sped on to the village just visible in the distance.
‘Watch the bairn here, will you?’ he called to the driver of the hire car and the man nodded and came over, looking white and shaken but otherwise in one piece.
‘It wasn’t my fault, you know,’ he said. ‘She’s not badly hurt, is she? I’ve never had an accident in my life. That bloody man’s an idiot … if I’d known I’d never have driven him, I wouldn’t.’ But he was talking to thin air for Jeff was vaulting over the fence and running down the bank to where Rose crouched, touching Michael’s face gently with her fingertips, moaning softly, ‘I’m sorry, Michael, I am. I’m that sorry. Oh, God, I didn’t want you to be hurt.’
‘Michael knows that, Rose,’ said Jeff. ‘It wasn’t your fault. I don’t think it was my fault either. I didn’t crowd the car, I was careful not to.’ And it was true, he realised. In fact it had all been the fault of Alf Sharpe, just like everything else that had happened to Rose and her brother and sister.
Jeff followed the ambulances to the hospital, hardly noticing they had turned off the Durham road and were heading into Hartlepool, driving almost on automatic pilot yet safely and surely until they turned into the hospital grounds. He lost some time finding the private car park and all the time he was thinking: suppose Rose turned away from him, suppose she blamed him for what had happened, how could he bear that? And then feeling ashamed that he could even think of himself at such a time.
But Rose, when he found her, was sitting in a chair all by herself in Outpatients, looking so tragic and alone that it was something else he found hard to bear. And she allowed him to put his arm around her and comfort her at least.
‘There’s a nasty accident just in,’ Sister Smith, the new young sister on Gynae, commented as Bob, now back on duty, sat in her office and drank a cup of milky hospital coffee. It was that period on a hospital ward when the rounds were over and lunches had been served and cleared away and the patients settled down for a sleepy afternoon. Half the staff had gone for their own break and Sister had been sitting at her desk, struggling with the off-duty rota, trying to see that the ward was covered at all times with her depleted staff as two of the nurses were down with flu. She had welcomed the arrival of Dr Morris with relief, her chance for a break.
‘Is there?’ he responded then recollected. ‘Oh, yes, I heard something about it. Two children and their father, wasn’t it?’
‘Two children anyway. Twins. The father is dead.’
‘Oh, poor kids.’
Bob wrote something down in the patient’s notes he had been reading, closed the folder and slapped it on the pile on the desk. He was late today, what with going out to Easington to see that friend of Rose’s. But it had been a good opportunity, the ward was quiet, his colleagues were there to deal with any emergencies.
He finished his coffee and got to his feet. ‘Thanks, Sister, lovely coffee,’ he lied. ‘I’ll get out from under your feet now. I know you like the afternoons free from being pestered by doctors.’
‘Not at all,’ she murmured politely.
Bob walked round the outside of the buildings on his way back to the doctors’ rest room. Normally he would have taken a short cut through Outpatients and Emergency but today was glad of the fresh air, it helped him think. For all he had had his suspicions about what it was that had really happened to make Rose as she was, it was still a shock to realise all was as her friend had told him. Poor darling Rose. All his protective instincts came to the surface. He would look after her now, do his darndest to make sure nothing hurt her ever again.
In the rest room he changed out of his white coat and washed his face and combed his hair. It was his weekend off, really, even though he had felt the need to come in again this morning, to finish writing up the notes he had been too tired to do the evening before. He felt buoyed up by the thought that he had a whole afternoon and all day Sunday to devote to Rose. She would be expecting him. He had promised to take her to the cinema, the first house, and then on to dinner at a little Itali
an cafe he knew in Old Hartlepool.
Putting on his overcoat, for it was cold out today, a stiff wind coming over the North Sea, Bob walked down the corridor, past the entrance to Outpatients and Emergency again, and out to the doctors’ car park. As he drove he thought again about the accident which had happened on the Durham road, evidently. Funny, that road was quite straight. He wondered about it. Poor kids, being hurt and losing their father like that.
Bob showered and changed, ate a late lunch and set off for Rose’s boarding house. It was a while since he had been to the pictures and he was looking forward to it. He didn’t care which picture it was, Rose could choose. No doubt she’d pick the costume drama which was on at the Odeon, Jassy, that was the name of it. Women liked costume dramas. With Stewart Granger, of course, and Margaret Lockwood.
Rose wasn’t in. The disappointment he felt was out of all proportion, he knew, but he couldn’t help it. ‘Have you any idea where she went, Mrs Dash?’ he asked. The landlady shook her head.
‘I don’t enquire into what’s none of my business,’ she said tartly. ‘I’ve other things to think about.’ She began to close the door then opened it again. ‘An’ you’re the second person to come looking for her an’ all. There was a young woman not five minutes since.’
Bob thanked her automatically and turned away. He walked to the end of the street and stood on the corner undecided. He was filled with fears for Rose, remembering the time she had been found on the caravan site at Crimdon. Had something happened to her? Oh, surely not again? No, she was quite fit now, she would be all right. A girl her age had probably been bored and just gone to look at the shops.