Alison could see that. There was a restlessness in him that he would not challenge, a fear of meeting life face to face for a second time.
What was his story? There had been so many rumours. There always were in a big hospital, and she had never taken much notice of them before. She had not known him, but now, after just this one flight, she seemed to have known him for a very long time.
Perhaps that was generally the case when someone took your life and your whole future into their steady hands and guided you through the air to safety. The wonder of flight was still with her. She could not accept it as an everyday thing and it was Ronald Gowrie who had given her the confidence she needed.
He put the Heron down on the inadequate little airstrip on Heimra Mhor with faultless precision, the landing wheels touching the firm white sand with the lightest of jolts.
“I’ll say au revoir, because we’re sure to meet again.” The doctor held out his hand. “Perhaps one day you may take a holiday and come and see the islands properly.”
“I’d love that,” Alison assured him. “But holidays are few and far between. I’ve no time due till late on in the summer.”
Yet she was to come to the islands again sooner than she thought.
He stood in the doorway, blocking up most of it, yet behind him Alison was aware of a tall, powerfully-built man in thick tweeds standing waiting with a small child by the hand. He was someone she had seen before, and as she wrestled with a fleeting memory, the doctor turned and recognized him.
“Blair, my dear fellow! This is a surprise. A grand surprise!” he added heartily, as he jumped down and extended a hand.
Blair? Blair! Of course! Alison was remembering now quite clearly, but the man she remembered had worn a white coat, with a doctor’s stethoscope dangling about his neck—a younger man than this. A houseman in those days, with all the marks of brilliance on him. A young man with a shining goal in view.
And now he was Blair of Heimra, because his brother had died and he had taken on the responsibility of a name.
Watching him through one of the portholes as he shook the elderly doctor by the hand, welcoming him like an old friend, she wondered if he regretted the loss of his profession, as any man in his profession might, and then she remembered what Ronald Gowrie had said about him—about his pride and arrogance—and would not look at him any more.
Turning back to the stretcher, she stood waiting beside her patient, and in that moment she became aware of the pilot’s brooding face. He was looking at Blair of Heimra as if he hated him, as if there was something far more personal than just the use of the airstrip on Heimra Beag between them.
Did they know one another? It was not improbable, Alison decided. They had been brought up for many years on neighboring islands—one island, really, with only a narrow strait between—yet Ronald Gowrie sat on at the controls, making no movements to get out, even to smoke the cigarette which he enjoyed so much.
He acknowledged the doctor’s departure with a quick salute, but almost immediately Blair of Heimra held up a detaining hand.
The little doctor walked back towards the plane, and Alison moved to the door. Standing above the two men on the windy stretch of sand, her hands resting on the metal framework of the door, as if for support, she met Blair of Heimra’s cold grey eyes above the doctor’s head. They were eyes which summoned her up unwaveringly, assessing her worth in one swift glance, it seemed, before he would place his trust in her.
Compared with the squat little figure of the Highland doctor, he looked abnormally tall and dominating, a man fully aware of his own power, yet the child clinging to his hand looked up at him in absolute confidence and trust.
With a sense of shock Alison saw that the boy was hopelessly crippled, although the small, twisted body held a suggestion of assurance which appeared to have defeated the physical handicap. While he stood with Blair of Heimra, the child, too, had a sense of power. It was only when Blair loosened the clinging fingers from his own and urged him towards the plane that some of the brightness died out of the boy’s finely-boned face, and the blue eyes clouded over with dismay.
Alison moved slowly towards them.
“Can I help?” she asked uncertainly. “Perhaps he’s afraid of the plane.”
Blair looked down at her in the full sunlight, and something akin to recognition flickered in his eyes.
She felt nonplussed because she had been so sure that he would not remember.
“I’m sending the boy back to Glasgow with you,” he said before she could answer the more personal reference. It seemed that it did not require an answer. He had remembered her, and his assessment was complete. She was the efficient unit he needed in this present emergency. “I’ve phoned all the necessary particulars to the hospital,” he added in a brisk, professional tone which suggested that the doctor had not been left behind when the laird had come to Heimra. “He is to see Professor Brackenridge, and come back with the next available plane. You won’t find him any trouble,” he continued when the boy turned away for a moment. “He has a horror of the sea. The air journey was the only way.”
Alison looked at the boy and smiled.
“I’ll take care of him,” she promised. “Is there anything he has to have?”
“Not necessarily.” He was looking directly at her again, seeing her primarily as the nurse, of course. “I think you can give him the confidence he needs. He’s a spastic, but I think you’ve already recognized that,” he added.
She nodded, conscious of a choking sensation at the back of her throat which defeated speech. Was the child his own, the son a man in his position must surely long for? The boy was about five years old and badly lame, but he had all the marks of good breeding about him. The finely-boned face and large blue eyes gave him a gentle look, so that there was little about his appearance to connect him with Blair of Heimra. Yet Blair himself had brought him to the plane and had made the necessary arrangements for his flight.
Alison looked down at the child.
“You haven’t told me your name,” she said.
“Andrew.” He gazed back at her almost suspiciously at first. “I’m not going with you,” he intimated with a decisiveness of purpose which associated him immediately with the tall man by his side.
“But wouldn’t you like to see how the plane works—how we make it fly?” she asked. “You might even be able to sit near the pilot and help to make it go. I could ask him for you,” she suggested brightly.
The child looked at Blair for confirmation of this.
“It’s perfectly true,” he said. “Pilots are always helpful sort of people, Andy. If you knew how to make the plane go, you could always help to bring it back to Heimra more quickly,” he pointed out.
The child pondered the wisdom of this in silence for a moment and then, abruptly, he stretched out his hand to Alison, willing to accompany her on the conditions offered.
She took the thin, cold fingers in hers, chafing them gently as he looked for his gloves. They hung by elastic from his coat sleeves, and she thrust his frozen hands into them as the doctor came down from the plane.
“Everything’s O.K.!” he announced. “Gowrie’s itching to be off, so we’d better not hold him up any longer. Strange chap!” he mused. “Belonged here on Heimra at one time, but doesn’t seem interested now. Wouldn’t even get down for the usual cigarette at a safe distance! Ah, well, I suppose he wants to get back to the mainland as quickly as he can. It’s a job to these fellows. Nothing more.”
But a job they do with infinite skill and patience and understanding, Alison thought. When they are on duty they are the ambulance!
“Gowrie?” Blair said. “Yes, it’s an island name. There were two families of them on Heimra some time ago. I always think it’s a pity when people go away like that—when the very last roots are torn up.”
Perhaps that was what had brought him back to Heimra, Alison pondered, looking at the dark, determined profile etched against the grey peaks of h
is native land. The roots that his family had put down into the sparse, rocky soil had proved stronger than all the ties of his chosen profession when it had come to a question of choice, yet the break with medicine must have been difficult. He had been known at the Victoria as a coming man, a brilliant surgeon in the making, and now it had all been thrown aside for this!
She looked at Heimra and across the angry strait of Coirestruan to Heimra Beag, and suddenly she knew what had drawn him back. Not just the pride in possession nor the glory in a name, but all the magic of these secret islands which had to be felt to be fully believed.
Even now Heimra had begun to cast its spell on her; even now her heart beat suffocatingly close against her throat as the wind which blew across the machar stirred and caressed her cheek.
Her fingers tightened on Andrew’s small, gloved hand and she led him gently towards the cabin door.
“I’ve got to say goodbye!” he cried, pulling away from her. “He isn’t coming with us.”
He was halfway towards Blair, adulation shining in the piquant little face as he looked up at this splendid figure of a man who was surely his hero, whatever the rest of the world might think about him. Alison’s eyes were suddenly so misted by tears that she could not see whether Blair kissed him or not.
Certainly he lifted him into his arms and put him down again, and when the engines revved into life he shook him rather solemnly by the hand.
“It won’t be long,” he said. “We’ll be waiting for you coming back.”
There was no obvious sign of emotion in the strong, set face of the man beneath her as Alison moved to close the door. His jaw was as hard as granite and his eyes suddenly as coldly grey. If this parting had distressed him he did not show it, which was perhaps best for the sake of the child, but somewhere deep down in her heart she wished that she had been able to offer him reassurance.
As the Heron rose and settled in the sky she remembered that no mention had been made of Andrew’s mother.
“All right back there?”
Ronald Gowrie had turned in the pilot’s seat, and she unbuckled her own seat belt and went towards him. For a moment she could not answer his question. The face he had turned towards her for a split second had been deadly white, and his hands were clenched on the controls till he became aware of her watching him.
“I—yes,” she murmured indefinitely. “Are you?”
“Me?” he lied. “Don’t worry! I’m not going to plunge you in the drink. Anyway, Ginger will be taking over in a couple of shakes. We’re clear of Heimra now.”
CHAPTER TWO
TO Alison’s dismay, almost all the way back to the airport Andrew was sick. He clung to her piteously, yet at the back of his quick little mind there was the thought of guiding the plane towards the mainland.
After a while Ronald Gowrie took him up in front to stand between him and Ginger, and for the first time Alison was able to look at her list. The doctor had added Andrew’s name to it before they had left Heimra, together with the particulars of his case.
“Hannah MacKelvie,” she read. “Aged 81, of Bowmore. Fracture of the pelvis; suspected rupture of the small intestine, Cardiac condition.”
“Andrew Montgomery Blair. Aged 5 years and 8 months, of Garrisdale House, Heimra Beag. Tonsillectomy.”
She read the second name again and again before she put the list back on the overhead rack above her seat. Andrew Montgomery Blair. So the child was his son—the future Blair of Heimra! The tragedy of it struck her with the force of a physical blow as she recalled the man himself, strong, upright, powerful in body and mind, arrogant almost in the perfection of his manhood. What had happened, she wondered. What had happened to give him a son like this?
Suddenly she was remembering that Blair of Heimra had not mentioned his wife. Not even in the moment of parting had he spoken to Andrew about his mother. Perhaps she was dead.
Far beneath them the mainland began to take shape, like a vast relief map laid carefully on the grey sea, its deeply-indented coastline standing up in sharp little ridges which gave place eventually to the upheaval of mountains and the long silver arm of a loch.
The vast panorama of sea and island and loch and hill held Alison spellbound as she sat watchfully beside the motionless figure on the stretcher, but when they flew above the shipyards and Ronald Gowrie took over from his First Officer, Andrew came back to sit beside her, awestricken by all there was to see. For a small boy, Alison realised, ships and cranes and gantries were far more exciting things than the magic of islands starred on a romantic sea.
For the next few minutes he clung to her hand as if he would never let her go. The airport was new to him, and there was so much activity going on everywhere he looked, but he followed her towards the ambulance without a word when she said that they must go.
The stretcher with Mrs. MacKelvie on it was already safely inside. The old lady was awake now and a little apprehensive, but she smiled stoically when the kindly St. Andrew’s ambulance men spoke to her.
“Everything’s all right, Mrs. MacKelvie,” Alison assured her looking in at the open door. “You’ve made a wonderful trip.”
“And you!” Suddenly Ronald Gowrie was at Alison’s elbow, smiling down at her, his mouth slightly crooked, his dark blue eyes friendly now. “For a first flight you did very well yourself, nurse!” His tone was still slightly mocking, but there was a certain amount of warmth behind it which she noticed with relief. “Are you off duty as soon as you get back to the hospital?”
“I believe so.” She felt herself flush as he continued to look at her. “But this is my first flight, so I’m not quite sure what happens. We’re on a rota, of course, but I have my time off.”
He stood between her and the ambulance for a moment. “I’m going to Glasgow as soon as I check in,” he announced. “We’ll meet again, of course, if you’re going to be on the air ambulance for any length of time, and I may even ditch you one of these days, so let’s celebrate while there’s yet time.”
“Celebrate what?” she asked, laughing. “My destined dip in the Atlantic?”
“Among other things!” he grinned back. “On second thoughts,” he added, “I think I’d rather land you safely on an island—if we had to come down in an emergency.”
“We’re being foolish and wasting time,” she reminded him. “Who knows? We might be on the same rota again quite soon.”
He still stood deliberately in her way of escape.
“I could take a chance on that,” he agreed, “but I would much rather make sure. What about tomorrow evening? You must be off duty sometime.”
Alison hesitated.
“I really ought to get some mending done.”
He laughed outright.
“Good heavens, woman!” he pointed out, “You can make do and mend any time. I’ll call for you at the Nurses’ Home at seven.” He had been there before, she thought, and evidently knew the way. “We can have a meal somewhere and make up our minds whether it will be a show or a dance afterwards. That suit you all right?”
“I’d like to come,” she said, suddenly meaning it because these past two hours in the air together had forged a strange sort of bond between them. “I’ll look out for you tomorrow at seven.”
He turned away with a smart salute and the ambulance driver moved towards the doors to close them behind her.
“Had an easy trip, nurse?” he asked in the kindly voice which seemed common to all ambulance men. “It’s been a fine day here.”
“It was wonderful!” she told him, feeling once again the exhilaration of her flight above the hills. “A tremendous experience in every way.”
She slipped in beside the stretcher and took Andrew Blair on to her knee. He was slightly sleepy now and a trifle more nervous, but the air-sickness had gone.
“You’ll get something nice to eat as soon as we get to the hospital,” she promised, “and there will be lots of other girls and boys to play with.”
The remark had evi
dently been a mistake, for he shrank more closely towards her.
“I don’t want to play with them,” he said. “They’re rough.”
“Not in hospital,” she assured him quickly. “The nurses will take care of you, Andrew.”
Still he shrank close to her.
“I want you!” he declared sleepily.
In any normal child, Alison thought with a full heart, the tired cry would have been for his mother, but Andrew’s mother had not been fit to make the journey with him or had deserted him long ago. She might even have died at his birth.
The thought lingered, nagging at her mind all the way to the hospital. A child needed his mother even in such a small emergency as this, but she dared not ask Andrew about his parents, not even to satisfy the recurring doubt in her own mind.
The hospital lights blinked through the gathering dusk as they swung in under the main archway, past Casualty, and on up the winding drive, and the old, strong feeling of security wrapped her round. Here, in this place, illness and death were held at bay, miracles of healing were wrought, and people were nursed back to health in the all-pervading calm of the quiet wards.
The ambulance swung round and came to rest at the west door, and immediately two white-coated orderlies were ready to help them out. Alison bent over Mrs. MacKelvie and gave her a brief smile.
“You’ll soon be safe in bed,” she said in answer to the unspoken question in the old woman’s eyes. “I’ll try to come and see you in a little while.”
Hannah MacKelvie seemed to understand, although her English was not good, and Alison made a mental note about taking a few Gaelic lessons in her spare time so that she might at least communicate her assurance to these old people in their native tongue.
Andrew still clung to her hand. Sister Burnside hovered at the reception desk, waiting to take over her new charge, but somehow Alison felt reluctant to let Andrew go.
Air Ambulance Page 2
