Air Ambulance

by Jean S. MacLeod

  “Matron wants your report on the Blair child right away,” Evelyne Burnside informed her briskly. “I had no idea he was a—”

  “Please don’t say it!” Alison begged swiftly, aware of Sister Burnside’s chagrined flush even as she uttered the warning. “I don’t think his father would like him to feel different.”

  “The fact remains that he is different,” Evelyne Burnside said loftily, “but I know my job. Which is more than you seem to do, nurse. There’s such a thing as insubordination.”

  Alison bit her lip, aware that she had been guilty of questioning a senior’s conduct to a certain extent, but she could not have stood aside and seen Andrew hurt by a word he might not understand.

  “I’m sorry, Sister,” she apologized, bending quickly to loosen Andrew’s feverish grip on her fingers. “Will you go with Sister, Andrew, while I tell the nice lady who looks after us all that we’ve arrived safe and well?” she asked.

  Andrew’s lower lip trembled, but he pursed his mouth and nodded. He did not give Evelyne Burnside his hand, however, as she shepherded him away along the corridor, which must have seemed to him a long white tunnel of never-ending doors.

  “Now, nurse?” Matron said, when Alison finally stood before the desk in her comfortable room. “How did it go?”

  She was a woman who believed strongly in the personal touch, and this, she understood, had been a first flight.

  “Very well, ma’am. It was wonderful weather, and the patients travelled very comfortably.”

  “Of course you know that you will have all sorts of weather to contend with,” Matron said, examining some papers which lay on the desk in front of her. “The rough with the smooth. There have even been babies born in the air ambulance before it could get here, but I dare say you could take care of that, too. In complicated cases you would be given very full instructions, of course.” She was still studying the papers, frowning a little. “The instructions came in for landing on Heimra after you had left,” she observed. “It saved another journey.” She looked up. “How did the boy travel?”

  “He was airsick, I’m afraid, but I understand that he is afraid of a long trip by sea.”

  “Yes, I believe so.” Matron made a few brief notes in the log she kept of the air ambulance service before she looked up again. “You did not see the mother, I suppose?” she asked.

  “No.” The word had been dry and hard in Alison’s throat.

  “Rather a tragedy there,” Matron said, rising to her feet. “There was an accident, and the child was born the way you see him.”

  She paused, deep in her own thoughts for a moment, while something coldly afraid crept into Alison’s heart.

  “Could I have your permission, ma’am,” she asked at last, “to go to see Andrew? To see him settled in for the night?”

  Matron gave her a long, thoughtful look.

  “Go in the visiting hour,” she said. “Unless, of course, it is going to infringe on your off-duty time.”

  “That wouldn’t matter, ma’am,” Alison answered swiftly. “I think Andrew and I became friends on the journey over,” she added with a smile.

  “Well, go and see him. Tell Sister Burnside I sent you,” Matron added just before Alison closed the door behind her.

  Supper was almost over by the time she reached the dining-hall, but several of her colleagues were still sitting over cups of tea or coffee when she went in.

  “How went the flight?” somebody asked. “And how was Captain Gowrie?”

  “On his best behaviour, I’ll bet!” someone else supplied for Alison when she did not answer immediately. “Alison isn’t Ronald Gowrie’s type.”

  Alison flushed. She could not bring herself to tell them that Ronald Gowrie had already asked her out.

  “Anyone is Ronald Gowrie’s type—up to a point!” May Hardy protested from her chair beside one of the radiators. “He’ll love you and leave you, Lang, as the spirit moves him,” she warned as she saw Alison’s deepening flush. “I was six months on Air Ambulance, and I know!”

  Alison forced a smile.

  “All right,” she agreed. “I’m not falling for Captain Gowrie quite so hard as that, but thanks for the warning, all the same. I found him very nice.”

  “Everyone does until he unleashes the sarcasm on them. After that you begin to hate him—always providing that it’s not too late.” May examined her neatly-filed finger nails. “Yes, always providing it’s not too late,” she repeated heavily.

  “May fell for him like a ton of bricks,” Jenny Barr commented unkindly. “But she’s getting over it now.”

  “Any other respectable males at the airport?” May asked rather quickly.

  “There seemed to be a lot around,” Alison agreed, “but we were off almost at once.”

  “What about your patients?” Jenny asked. “We heard you touched down on Heimra on the way back.”

  “Yes. The message came out after us.” Alison felt almost reluctant to discuss her swift visit to that unexpected island. “We picked up a tonsillectomy.”

  “The Blair child,” May said airily. “Burnside has just been telling us all about him. He’s a spastic. It would appear that his mother had an accident just before he was born. Burnside fears he’s going to be difficult. Poor old Burnside! She hates scenes in her wards.”

  “She needn’t worry about Andrew Blair making a scene,” Alison said, tight-lipped. “He’s not the type to parade his emotions, even at five and a half.”

  Was that the way in which Andrew resembled Blair of Heimra, she wondered as she walked quickly along the corridor to the children’s ward an hour later—the only way? The memory of Andrew’s tight little mouth had haunted her all through her solitary meal, and Andrew’s large, serious eyes seemed to follow her everywhere.

  When she reached his bedside she knew that he had been waiting for her to come, although he made no outward sign. There were toys on the coverlet and gifts from the children in the other beds, but he took little interest in them. He seemed tired, and very soon he fell asleep. Alison sat on for a while before she unclasped his clinging fingers and moved away.

  “He’s never asked once for his mother,” Evelyne Burnside announced suspiciously as she followed Alison from the ward. “It seems a strange thing to me.”

  “Perhaps she’s ill,” Alison suggested briskly. “Perhaps he hasn’t been allowed to see her for some time.”

  “And perhaps she doesn’t want to see him,” Sister Burnside suggested dryly. “There are women like that, you know.”

  “All I know is that he has a very strong man behind him,” Alison said far too sharply as she left the ward.

  Yet how could she possibly know about Blair of Heimra—what manner of man he really was? She had no knowledge of him whatsoever, apart from the fact that an honest little Highland doctor had shaken him warmly by the hand, looking at him as if he counted it an honour to call him friend, and the added fact that a small, forlorn boy had clung to him with the utmost confidence as they had said goodbye.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “WE’VE been sitting here talking for more than a couple of hours,” Ronald Gowrie pointed out, looking at his watch as he stubbed a final cigarette end into the ashtray in the centre of the table. “Too late for a show now, unless you don’t mind seeing only the second half? Personally,” he added, “half a film bores me to tears. I’m no good at picking up the threads.”

  “You told me less than an hour ago that you thought you should,” Alison reminded him.

  He regarded her questioningly.

  “Pick up the threads,” she prompted. “The threads of living objectively, you meant.”

  “I said that because I thought you might help me.” He covered her hand with his where it rested on the divan seat between them. “This isn’t a proposal of marriage or even a new approach to a flirtation,” he added with a hint of the old sarcasm creeping back into his voice. “You’re not the sort of girl one takes out and then kisses on the doorstep by
way of payment. You’re different, Alison. I want us to be friends.”

  “Of course I hope we’ll be friends,” Alison agreed immediately. “We’ll be working together some of the time.”

  “Good enough!” he said. “I’ll tell you some day why I didn’t propose to you straight away!”

  His tone had been light, but his eyes were suddenly clouded by a memory. She could not press him to talk about the past because she knew that he would come to it in his own good time. All he wanted just now was her friendship, and she was prepared to give him just that.

  “Where to?” Ronald asked as the restaurant’s revolving door closed behind them. “It looks as if we’ll have to dance. Unless,” he added as they went in search of his parked car, “you’d like a run along the coast? It’s the sort of night for it, with a moon coming up, and all that!”

  Alison said: “I think the run might be very nice,” and then regretted it, for after all, what did she really know about him?

  “Pax!” he said, reading her thoughts. “You know we’re friends!” He drove along the coast, down the estuary of the Clyde, and the moon came up over the hills behind them before they reached Largs, shimmering on the low ridge of the Cumbraes and on the dark shores of Bute across a stretch of silver Firth.

  They went as far as Ayr, out on to the Heads, where they could see the stark outline of ruined Dunure silhouetted against the sea.

  “There’s so much beauty everywhere on a night like this,” Alison reflected, sitting close beside him in the stationary car. “The sort of beauty you promised I might find on Heimra.”

  “Damn Heimra!” he exclaimed violently. “Let’s forget about it.” He pulled her towards him. “Perhaps I made a mistake about that kiss,” he added roughly. “After all, Alison, you’re a very attractive person out of uniform, even if you are a prim little nurse during the day!”

  She held him at arms’ length.

  “We’ve got to work together—remember?” she said.

  He laughed harshly.

  “I guess you’re right,” he agreed. “It was all that bit about Heimra and its magic that upset me.”

  “I’m sorry,” she apologised swiftly. “I didn’t think you felt that way about the island. I had guessed it held rather sad memories for you, but I thought it was your mother not being able to go back there before she died that hurt most.”

  She hesitated, wondering if she had already said too much, and he was silent for a long time, not answering her.

  “It was that and so much more,” he said at last. “That and the fact that the only girl I ever wanted to marry married Heimra instead.”

  She twisted round to look at him, uncomprehending at first.

  “You mean—?”

  “I mean that she married Gavin Blair instead of me,” he told her bitterly. “She married Blair of Heimra, and he was killed three months after their wedding day.”

  Alison sat very still. She could not say that she was sorry. The confession she had just listened to held all the elements of tragedy, making a mockery of any conventional expression of sorrow on her part, and she knew that Ronald Gowrie did not want her pity.

  “That’s why I’ve never been back.” Her companion’s voice was fully controlled now, all the passion gone out of it. “I couldn’t go there, even for my mother’s sake, and, anyway, all our family had left Heimra by that time. I was in Malta with the R.A.F. when Margot first met Blair. She wasn’t an island girl—she met Blair in Glasgow—but she made the most of her knowledge of Heimra to attract him. I guess she saw her chance and took it,” he added harshly. “Blair could give her so much more than I could, and I dare say she felt that she could persuade him to live away from the island some of the time. He had the money and the position to do that, too.”

  There was a long, uneasy silence in which the events of those bleak years seemed to pass before his anguished eye, and then he said:

  “I never saw her again. I couldn’t go back. The island was finished, as far as I was concerned. There was nothing there for me, even after I knew that he was dead. I knew she wouldn’t stay on there—Margot wasn’t that type—and, anyway, I never wanted to see her again. I suppose I thought a lot about faith and broken promises in those days. Now it’s different.”

  “I don’t think it is,” Alison contradicted gently. “You’ve been hurt, badly hurt, but you’ll love someone again. You’re quite young.”

  “I’m thirty-two.” He stared out across the silvered Firth to the distant, winking light of Pladda. “I’d made up my mind to have a whale of a time for the rest of my life, not to have any roots, just to drift and enjoy myself, but, somehow, these last few months, once or twice, on the ambulance run, I’ve felt that I wasn’t worth much. It was like being out in space with no contact with anyone, anywhere.”

  “If you met Margot again,” Alison said slowly, “it might make a difference.”

  “I never want to see her again!” he declared angrily. “She doesn’t mean a thing to me now. I would never be able to forgive her. I don’t even want to try.”

  The words were a reflection of his terrible bitterness, his deep and continuing hurt.

  “After Gavin Blair died,” Alison said, “the position wasn’t quite the same, was it? There was—the present Blair. Don’t you think he might have offered Margot a home!”

  “She wasn’t the type to stay on an island where there wasn’t ‘a lot of life’, as she called it. Fergus Blair took up the laird’s duties, I suppose, and that was that. No one on Heimra Mhor knew him very well. He was educated away from the islands, and later he was sent to study medicine at Edinburgh. He was seen about the place in the holidays—a younger son—but that was all. It was said that his father, the old laird, disapproved of the medical career, but that could be just hearsay. They were a closely-knit family, I believe, and even Fergus Blair can make my blood boil when I think of him.”

  “Surely he had nothing to do with his brother’s marriage,” Alison protested.

  “I suppose not,” he agreed, thrusting his foot down on the clutch to start the car. “But at one time they were inseparable. Oh! maybe I don’t really blame Blair so much,” he added fiercely. “He didn’t have so very long to appreciate his bargain, after all. It was Margot who was to blame from the beginning.”

  Alison saw that there was nothing to be gained by argument, and she could not really make any protest when he drove far too fast along the winding coast road between Ayr and Irvine, where he decided to take the shorter route back across the Fenwick moors.

  He was gloomily silent most of the way, only shaking himself free from the unhappy past when they reached the door of the Nurses’ Home and came to say goodnight.

  “I’ve given you a rotten evening,” he apologized contritely enough. “I didn’t mean to talk about Margot or Heimra or anything like that. I meant us to be pretty gay together.” He smiled at her ruefully. “Maybe we should have gone dancing, after all,” he suggested.

  And then, Alison thought, she might never have heard about Margot Blair or the tragedy which made Heimra a forbidden island to him. She might never have known about Fergus Blair’s background or the reason which had compelled him to give up the career in medicine for work he considered to be more important.

  There was Andrew, too, the child she had sat with almost constantly since his operation, giving him what she could of a mother’s love. Where did Andrew fit in?

  “You’ll let me see you again?” Ronald asked. “You’ll let me take you out and I’ll promise to keep my lurid past to myself?”

  He was thrusting it away from him, that past which he could not really forget, forcing it savagely to the back of his mind, into the dark and despairing places where it had lain hidden for so long, but somehow Alison knew that it was not dead. He cared about Heimra, and he still cared about Margot, whom he had once loved so hopelessly that now he imagined that he hated and despised her.

  “I’ll come,” she found herself promising.


  During the next few days Alison began to worry about Andrew Blair. It was not that the child did not improve—the tonsillectomy had been a complete success—but the small, withdrawn silences deepened, and he seemed to take little interest in what went on around him. The children’s ward in any large hospital, especially when most of the small patients are well on the road to recovery, is always a hive of activity, and Andrew was now out of bed for the greater part of the day with most of the other tonsil cases, who had been operated on at the same time as himself.

  It was not that he failed to respond to the kindness of the nurses. He accepted it gratefully, “helping” with the bed-ridden children in return, but he always seemed to be watching for someone, and he never smiled.

  Alison visited him as often as she could, but she dared not mention his mother to him in case it would precipitate the breakdown she feared was lurking just beneath the surface.

  When she arrived back at the hospital with the three “sitting” patients they had picked up on the far side of The Minch, Andrew Blair had had a visitor.

  “His uncle came to see him,” Evelyne Burnside told her laconically. “It’s made a lot of difference to him, and he’s going back with the first plane that touches down on that island of his—Heimery, or something.”

  “Heimra!” Alison said, her eyes suddenly moist. “I’m so glad someone came to see him.”

  “He put the whole ward in confusion!” Sister Burnside snapped. “These silly nurses! Any man can turn their heads, but when he happens to be handsome and wears a kilt, then they lose control completely!”

  “Andrew would be delighted about the kilt,” Alison smiled. “Does the uncle live in Glasgow?”