Air Ambulance (18 page)

“Oh—walking beside the sea.”

“Saying goodbye?” He looked at her oddly. “Blair thinks we can both make the journey back to the mainland on Friday. He believes I should have some sort of electrical treatment for my arm.”

“It’s time you had it,” Alison tried to agree lightly. “I’ll come and visit you in hospital, if you like,” she offered.

He did not answer that, and Isobel said that it was time they went back to the house. He stood up, determined to walk without her assistance, but at the steps she drew his hand very firmly through her crooked arm.

“One move at a time!” she reminded him gently. “You can’t do everything at once.”

The following morning, however, found him down at the jetty where Sandy was busy servicing the launch.

“Where are you going?” he asked the old sailor.

Sandy looked up from under his red brows to smile at him. “I thought of taking a wee dander round the island,” he admitted, “just to see how the engine is working. It wouldn’t be taking more than an hour, I would say.”

“Would you be needing company, Sandy?” Ronald asked.

“I could be doing with a hand with the tiller,” the old man decided, sucking reflectively at his empty pipe. “That is if you’ve not forgotten the art since you’ve left Heimra.”

“You never forget it, Sandy,” he said as he put a leg carefully over the gunwale and heaved himself aboard.

“Maybe Mr. Blair wouldn’t be approving of me taking you,
”
Sandy suggested as an afterthought. They were away from the jetty now and heading towards Coirestruan. “But he didn’t say that you weren’t to get the feeling of the sea back into your bones, did he?”

“He gave me
carte blanche,
Sandy. I was to do what I liked, within reason.”

Sandy pressed the engine into full throttle.

Coirestruan was running fast, but they were going with the tide, and soon they were rounding the headland
to
Rudha-nan-Gael
—the Point of the Stranger.

“The seals are late this year,” Sandy observed. “Late at the breeding grounds. You can see the little fellows over there in their white coats.” He pointed with the stem of his pipe to the great slabs of smooth grey rock beneath the Point. “You’ll remember them on Heimra Mhor when you were a lad? Your mother used to lose you for hours, but always knew where to find you in the end. The seals seemed to have a fascination for you even more than they had for the other lads about the shore. Once,” he mused, “I took you off the Pladda island when the tide had caught you, but you’ll not be remembering that. It was a long time ago.”

“I remember, Sandy.” Ronald’s eyes were remote. “And I remember the lecture you read me afterwards! Never to lie out on the rocks till the sea came up to the soles of my boots because my mind was on something else! How’s that for a memory?”

Sandy nodded his grizzled old head.

“It’ll do,” he agreed. “And here was me thinking you hadn’t a memory at all!”

They sailed on, past the tiny bays of the west and round the farthest point where a lone heron fished diligently between the rocks, until they came to the more sheltered water on the eastern shore.

Here, too, they came within sight of Monkdyke.

Ronald kept his head averted as long as he could, gazing deliberately eastward, but in the end he forced himself to look at the small, square house perched above the
machar.

It appeared grey and deserted until suddenly his eyes were focusing on something else, nearer at hand. It was the figure of a girl in a yellow dress. She was walking slowly from the shelter of the rocky buttress round which they had just come, and another, taller figure was approaching her across the sand.

In some inexplicable way it was Hannah he recognized first. Hannah Auld, who had brought Margot up. He had probably accepted the possibility of encountering Hannah somewhere on the island, and he would have recognized the gaunt figure in the severe navy blue costume anywhere, but not the other. Not Margot walking over the sand in a yellow dress. Margot walking with no more aid than a stout ash stick!

They were near enough now to see the fairness of her hair with the sun glinting on it to turn it to spun gold, and the rounded cheek and the slim body which once he had crushed in his arms and held, swearing that he would never let her go.

And what had Margot vowed? That she, too, would never desert him. That she would always love him—that they were “different” because their love would last forever!

He laughed harshly, trying to force his eyes away when she turned at the sound of the launch’s engine, but he could not. She
looked towards them, halting in her tracks until Hannah came up with her and helped her to the chair that had been left on the
machar
.

He was too surprised, too stunned, too much torn by returning memories to raise a hand in salute. They were near enough. The launch was in shallow water, following the curve of the bay, and he could almost have called to her by name, waiting for her cry of surprise in return, but he did none of these things. He sat there in the boat like a figure carved in stone, a man who knows without doubt that nothing he has done in the interval has blotted out the memory of the past.

He was hers. The Margot who had stormed his heart was still in possession of it. She had gone deliberately out of his life, she had married someone else, she had bruised his faith and trodden on his dreams, but she was still his love—his first love—the image he had set up in his youth which no other image had quite come near.

Oh, he knew her frailties all right! He was conscious of the selfishness and the carelessness of what she did, but in that moment he was beyond reasoning. If he had been there beside her on the sand, he would have been at her feet.

Deliberately he looked away, towards the sea and the grey distance where the mainland hills shouldered the sky.

Sandy grunted, turning the launch seawards to negotiate the jagged reef which separated Monkdyke’s hidden bay from the long white stretch of the Silver Strand.

“There’s cloud building up yonder,” he observed, nodding towards the mainland. “Maybe we’ll be getting a storm. It’s a northeast wind.”

Ronald Gowrie did not answer him. The launch and Sandy and the jetty where Andrew was waiting for him with Isobel and Alison might not have been there at all. He was deep in the past, with the years of living and regretting and vowing never to love again fallen away from him, and the clear picture of a girl in a yellow dress before his eyes.

But Margot was a woman now, he reminded himself. A woman who should have grown up in the interval. She was old enough to have matured and learned about life, as he had done. But Margot had always hung on to youthful things, living in a strange little dream world of her own. It had been the princess-dream come true when she had married Gavin Blair and she had jettisoned everything on her way to Heimra.

Well, he decided harshly, he wished her luck of it now.

The launch slid alongside the jetty, and he hardened his heart as Andrew scrambled aboard to greet him. If she could turn aside from a kid like Andrew, what else mightn’t she do in the shallowness of her selfish little soul?

“This is sheer truancy!” Alison warned as he got on to the jetty beside her. “You’ve been missed.”

“By Blair?” Suddenly his jaw was tight, and a fresh agony of jealousy took possession of him. Margot was likely to marry Blair now, wasn’t she? “Did he say what he wanted?”

“He thought you had better have a thorough check-up before you go on Friday,” Alison explained, “but there’s still a couple of days.”

“Still time to cancel my passage?” he suggested. “But I could go out in the ambulance plane.” He gave a short, harsh laugh. “It would give Ginger a great kick to fly me back as captain of a Heron with me safely out of harm’s way on a stretcher and not able to make any comment!”

“I don’t think you would be able to refrain, even on a stretcher!” Alison teased. “Anyway, you won’t be going back on a stretcher. If you’re allowed to fly at all you’ll be a walking case, so you can quite easily go by the ordinary service.”

Isobel had not spoken, and Andrew, too, was noticeably quiet. They were no doubt thinking of the island without him, without his companionship and the rich flavour of his humour, and the plans they had made to take him about which would all come to nothing if he went out with the plane.

“I wish you could stay,” Andrew said, taking his hand. “You said you liked to fish, and you promised to teach me to swim.”

Ronald looked down at his useless arm.

“I won’t be able to swim for a while, Andy-Pandy,” he said. “Maybe I should go to the mainland and get my arm mended first, eh?”

“Will it take long?” Andrew wanted to know.

“Not too long.”

He had not promised to come back. How
could
he promise that? When Isobel hurried Andrew off to wash his hands before lunch he turned to Alison in the hall.

“You told me Margot was crippled,” he said. “You led me to believe she would never walk again.”

Alison’s heart jarred, but she said calmly enough, knowing that he must have seen Margot from the launch.

“It was true at the time,” she said. “Or, at least, I thought it was true. The accident left her with an injury to her spine which produced paralysis. The condition is operable under certain conditions—”

“Spare me the details,” he broke in. “She can walk now. I’ve seen her.”

“Yes, she can walk,” Alison said. “It was the one likely miracle, but it didn’t seem to have come off at the final examination she had after the operation was decided against. It’s been a sort of retarded cure, if you like.” How much or how little dared she tell him? She bit her lip and rushed on: “Margot must have discovered her returning strength gradually. She didn’t want Fergus to know at first, in case it was a false alarm, in case it was just wishful thinking on her part, I suppose. But then she did know. She tried it out, I should think, and found that she could walk. She dragged her foot, but that was a detail. The great fact would be that she could move her legs again and will herself to walk a few paces. It must have been a tremendous experience to undergo alone,” she added with pity.

“Did she need to undergo it alone?” he asked sharply. “What point was there in keeping the truth from Blair, for instance? He was her doctor, wasn’t he?”

Alison hesitated, thinking that she had never been in such a difficult position before.

“But he was also her brother-in-law,” Ronald said slowly, not waiting for her reply. “He was also Blair of Heimra by proxy till her son came of age—and there was the possibility, wasn’t there, that Andrew might never see twenty-one? Blair would take care of her so long as she needed help. She was sure of that, but she wanted something more.” He looked down at her and his eyes were blazing. “Correct me if I go wrong, won’t you? I’m apt to see things crookedly at times.”

She put an appealing hand on his arm.

“Don’t judge her too harshly, Ronald,” she begged. “I know she
tricked and betrayed you
—
”

“And now she’s quite prepared to trick and betray Fergus Blair because she wants the security of being Mrs. Blair of Heimra for a second time!”

“No! No, Fergus is in love with her.” The confession was out before she realized it. “All she wants is to go to him fully cured.”

“Able to walk straight into his arms” was how Margot had put it, and the words twisted in Alison’s heart, as if a knife had been turned in an old wound.

“You believe that?” he demanded, searching her face for the truth.

“Yes,” she said, knowing how cruelly she must be hurting him. “She told me that was her reason.”

“It wouldn’t be because she wasn’t sure of him?” he suggested grimly. “I know Margot!”

“I think she was telling the truth,” Alison said.

He did not answer. Fergus had opened his surgery door and was standing in the aperture looking at them.

“If you have a
min
ute to spare before lunch, Gowrie,” he suggested, “I’d like to give you a brief check-up.”

Feeling the need for escape, Alison turned back into the deserted garden. Events seemed to be racing ahead of her, and time was ebbing like the swift-flowing tide racing through the narrow neck of Coirestruan. Time for what? To tell Fergus the truth? No, she thought, she could not do that. She had given Margot her promise to keep silent. She must go with the plane in two days’ time, whether Ronald was fit to accompany her or not, and soon she would be forgotten on Heimra, or remembered only as the nurse who had come down with the ambulance plane and had lived there for almost a month as their uninvited guest. That would be all.

It was almost more than she could do to return to the house when the luncheon bell sounded.

“Blair has given me the O.K.,” Ronald told her when she found him waiting for her in the hall. “Mainly because you will be travelling with me.”

She tried to smile. She was really pleased for his sake.

“We won’t take long to put you right at the hospital,” she assured him. “Perhaps Fergus may even come to see you there, for your final check-up.”

It was a wish, a hope, and she saw him glance at her as she uttered it. Suddenly his mouth was grim.