Cold Fusion (26 page)

Viv sat up. His face was blank, his lips blue-tinged. He detached himself from me, pushed open the door and got out, his movements careful, controlled. I followed, and Alfred clambered stiffly out too.

“Please,” Viv said, pressing one hand to the metalwork. “I know you both want to help, but I find this mortifying. I’ll be back in a minute. Please let me alone.”

We obeyed him. What else were we going to do? In my way I was as subservient to him as the old man was, as much under his spell. Neither of us would ever be free of him. The hole he would leave in our universe would never be filled. Alfred folded his arms and paced, his brow furrowed so deep I could have planted potatoes. I leaned on the bonnet of the truck and clasped my hands behind the back of my neck. Viv had made it as far as he could out of earshot but sounds still reached us, faint and desperate.

I hit my limits and pushed upright, ready to go after him, but Alfred turned on a sixpence and planted a hand in my chest. “No. You heard him.”

“You can hear him too. He might be dying.”

“If he’s spoken to you, and confided in you what ails him, and you know how it must be with him if we can’t get him help, you must have agreed with him at some point to let him have that choice.”

“Yes. Yes, I did. But not in a ditch in the middle of nowhere. Not on his own.”

“It’s no’ likely to happen this way. I went through this with his poor father a dozen times over. If he falls quiet, we’ll go to him. Agreed?”

I didn’t get time to argue. The bushes by the roadside stirred, and Viv made his way out into the glare of the headlights, looking like his own ghost. I couldn’t break paralysis, but Alfred whipped out from some inner pocket a large and immaculate handkerchief. “Here, laddie,” he said steadily. “Wipe your face.”

“Thank you.” Viv took it from him and dabbed at his mouth. “There’s something I need to say to you. Please don’t interrupt. I believe that, over the years, I and my father too may have treated you as in some way less than us. May have—”

“My laird, I am aware of the difference in station. Far from resenting it, I and my own father have taken pride, and kept our own dignity, in—”

“Alfred. What did I just ask you not to do?”

“To interrupt, my laird.”

“I know about the station, and the pride and the dignity too. All right?” Viv laid his hands on the old man’s shoulders. “But if ever we made you think that we didn’t love you dearly, that was wrong.”

He dropped to his knees, too hard for Alfred to catch him. At last I could move, and I darted to his side. “Vivian! Oh, Christ. Viv!”

Gravely Alfred knelt beside us. I wanted to seize him by his neat little collar and make him panic too. I didn’t want him to ease Viv out of my arms, but I was weak with terror and couldn’t stop him. He laid him flat on the snowy verge, and I tore off my jumper and tucked it under his head.

“You said it wouldn’t happen this way,” I choked out, looking into my lover’s vacated face, marble-still in the stark light, long black lashes shading hollows under his eyes. “He doesn’t just go off and leave us, not like this.”

“I don’t know how it happens.” The work-roughened fingers pressed into Viv’s throat with surpassing tenderness. “I didn’t know with his father, and I don’t…” He went still, every fibre of him attentive, listening. “No. Not this time. Help me get him up!”

Chapter Sixteen

“You do realise, if you’d died back there, your last words would have been to the old family retainer, not to me?”

That seemed to amuse him. The faintest phantom of his dazzling smile appeared and went, sunshine parting the clouds. It was the first reaction I’d had to my pleas, prayers and efforts at conversation all the way down the western slopes of Glenmore Forest Park and into the outskirts of Aviemore. His head was pillowed on my lap. I was trying to absorb each jounce of the truck before it could reach him. I pushed back sweat-soaked curls from his brow. He was hanging on, but his breathing was shallow, his bony frame in my arms feeling more and more like a shell with each passing mile.

He reached up for me, fingers closing gently around the back of my neck. “I’d have found a word for you,” he whispered, “I’m sure.”

I’d gone past the point of tears. If he was awake and talking, that was enough for me, and I took his valiant effort as a direct hit on my heart. “You’d better have. It won’t be necessary, though—you’ve just got to hang on.”

“I will. I’m tired, though, Mallory.”

“I know. Not long now.”

Why was Alfred slowing up again? I raised my head, ready to deliver a blue-blooded Calder bark at him myself. He forestalled me, grabbing his mobile off the passenger seat and waving it at me. “I’ve got a bloody signal. At last.”

“So?”

“So I’m not about to trust this crate to get us where we need to be in time. There’s no A&E in Aviemore—I’m calling an ambulance from Raigmore at Inverness.”

I nodded, unable to get a word out. Viv’s eyes had closed again, and for every breath he took there was a timeless trough before the next lift of his chest. I lost myself in these lacunae, these desolate waits. I was aware of Alfred putting through the 9-9-9 call. I heard
Drescher’s
, heard him explain with the patience of painful experience that it should be treated like a crisis of ALS. He gave names and numbers of the doctors who had diagnosed Viv and his father and could offer best advice, his accent tamed down to a shadow of itself so that all should be clear for the phone. I heard his recommendation—it sounded more like an order—that Viv should be transferred to the Braidwood facility in Edinburgh as soon as he was stabilised, and then we were on the move again. There was only one road, and each yard we covered would be a yard closer to meeting the ambulance en route.

I didn’t think we would make it. Inverness was thirty miles from here, and although we’d left the snow behind on the hilltops, I couldn’t imagine keeping Viv’s fires burning across that distance. I kissed his damp brow. I endured ten more minutes of the sleep-wrapped Aviemore suburbs flashing by the windows, the curtains in the roadside houses snugly closed against the streetlights, all the life safe and warm behind them.

“Mr. Macready,” I said, not reaching to touch him this time because I couldn’t spare a hand from holding Viv. “I think it’s too far. I don’t think…”

“Do you imagine they’re sending a land vehicle? For the Laird of Kerra?”

Fear and exhaustion were fogging my brain. What else—a fairy coach? This was Britain, and as far as I knew, our proud if beleaguered NHS would treat everyone the damn same. Then a throbbing sound snagged the edge of my attention, and I craned my neck to see a weird fish-shaped constellation detach itself from the heavens and come to parallel our track along the road, lights blazing. “Oh, thank God. The air ambulance.”

“That’s right.” Alfred’s mobile rang, and he chucked it at me. “Answer that. Tell them I’m heading for Avielochan, where the chopper can land.”

Yes, the helicopter would have come out for anyone. I couldn’t help a surge of relief, though, as if somebody somewhere had finally realised what was at stake here, the value of the life that might be lost. The ambulance-service insignia on the machine’s flank might as well have been the crest of the Calder estate. Alfred revved the truck through a gate and up onto the flank of the moor. I didn’t dare let Viv lie flat, so I stayed in the truck, holding him clear of the drowning ocean of his lungs, while the old man jumped out, waving.

The rotors’ throb became a world-consuming beat, shaking the hills on their foundations, loud enough even for me to believe that rescue was at hand, a cure for the unbearable. Two green-clad figures were out and ducking beneath the blades almost before touchdown. They were clutching heavy-looking holdalls, and I knew from TV dramas that these would contain resuscitation gear.

“Viv,” I said, having to shout at him over the racket of the blades. “They’re here, okay? It’s gonna be all right.” He clutched my hand in response, or that was how I interpreted his convulsive grab. I dragged on a mask of calm for the first burly paramedic pulling open the truck’s rear door. “We’re in here. Quick, please. I’m not sure he’s breathing.”

After that it was out of my hands. The second medic ran round the back of the truck and hauled me out by my armpits. He was kind, and made sure I was on my feet before he let me go, but his whole focus was centring where it ought to be—on Viv, who had fallen back like a stem-cut rose onto the seat, who was neither fighting nor responding to the lights being shone into his eyes, the repeated shouts of his name. That was okay, though. It meant things would get done urgently and fast. If he’d been more responsive, maybe the paramedics wouldn’t have understood how serious things were. I managed to persuade myself it was a good thing when they tipped his head back and shoved a tube down his throat.

“Mallory!”

Alfred was holding me by the arm. I didn’t know why, until he let go and the air wash from the rotors almost knocked me down. We’d created our own microclimate here, a cyclone of light and noise and crisis. He held up a finger to me. “One!”

“One what?”

“They’ll let one of us go with the chopper.”

I was having to lip-read him. The pilot was keeping her hot, ready to go, and that was good too. I liked Alfred—would have grown, like Viv, to love him dearly in the course of years—and I wondered how I was going to tell him that I’d break his neck rather than let him take my place at Viv’s side. But he poked me hard in the chest with the same finger. “You.”

As soon as I got what I wanted, I felt inadequate. “But you know all about him.”

“I’ve told them. They’re going straight to Edinburgh. Stay with him.”

“I will, I swear. What about you?”

“You know where I’m going.”

I looked into his ferocious old face. Did he mean to storm the biological Vatican in person? I wondered how Constanza would feel, waking up to find him at the foot of her bed, shotgun in hand, as if she were a rare bird he’d finally bagged. Fear dropped away from me. Whatever was necessary, Alfred would do it. He’d find a way.

The paramedics were lifting Viv out of the back seat now, transferring him onto a stretcher. They made it look easy, and maybe it was. Maybe from now the wheel would turn. Alfred whisked me round and gave me a push towards the vortex. The pilot was gesturing that I should follow the medics and keep my head low. I could manage that. I took a deep breath and ran.

* * * * *

My serenity was pure shock. I sat strapped to a seat in the thundering machine, barely noticing that my mortal frame was being hoisted up, tipped and swayed through the forty-minute flight to Braidwood, that the scattered villages drew together, stretched filaments of streetlight between them and became a heaped-up treasure cave of jewels, Auld Reekie transformed by distance to the Arabian Nights. I wasn’t allowed to touch Viv, equally trapped and tied down in his place, and for now I didn’t mind—the medics had it all in hand, tending like deft-handed priests the machines at the head of the stretcher. When we got where we were going, they would let me have him back.

They didn’t. I’d been in a helicopter a couple of times before during Peace Warrior stunts, and I wasn’t alarmed by the swoop and the drop onto the helipad, though I sensed they were coming in at the far edge of full emergency speed. I didn’t return to my skin until I was out on the tarmac, trying to keep my feet in the battering dark. The rooftop doors were flying open, light and people spilling out. They weren’t about to give Viv back to me at all. They formed a cage around him, cutting me off, and then the stretcher was retreating. I began to stumble in its wake. They let me through the doors with them, and even into the huge lift that opened its jaws to receive us. The doctor who elbowed me in the face as she held a drip bag over Viv’s wired-up, motionless form found a smile for me, a wry apology.

But then he was gone. There was a corridor, a neon-lit highway. The doors at the end of it opened—swallowed Viv and his retinue whole. I’d thought I was close enough to get engulfed too in the general rush, but the doors slammed in my face, a hissing, cushioned barricade. Automatic, no handle on the outside. Magnetic locks, probably, requiring a key card to degauss. No room for argument at all. I tried for a while anyway, tugging at the frames of the glass portholes, banging my palms off the wood.

A tired female face—way too nice to shout at, so I stopped—appeared behind the glass. The intercom rustled and opened. “Mr. Kier Mallory?”

“Yes. Let me through. Please.”

“You can’t come into ICU, not yet.”

“But…” My throat and eyes filled. “I have to stay with him. I promised Alfred.”

“Mr. Macready’s told us who you are. You’ll be given bedside access once Vivian’s stabilised. Until then, can you quit banging the doors down and try and be good?”

Too nice to shout at, too reasonable to fight. This was how people got their bloody way with me. Aggression I could match, punch my way through. I fell back, raising my hands. “Aye, all right. I’m sorry.”

“There’s comfortable chairs in the lounge down the corridor if you want to sleep. The cafe’s closed, but there’s a vending machine. Are you in need of some change?”

I had absolutely no idea. “I’d rather stay here.” I took up position on the hard plastic seat nearest the doors. “I’ll be here, okay? Right here.”

I didn’t sleep. I was fairly sure of that, and it didn’t seem likely that I would, bolt upright and shot through with terror as I was. Something must have happened, though, because my next impression of the corridor was sunlight, morning bustle, the smell of coffee. And, inexplicably, sitting opposite me in her own plastic chair, my mother, with Alice Maguire’s mother grim-faced and rigid at her side.

Perhaps I’d died. This was quite a welcoming committee, even by the standards of the Kerra hellfire minister. Doubtless Jill Maguire would say I deserved it, and whatever punishments came after. I wouldn’t argue. My throat was gritty, though, and I could barely see past the scraping dryness of my eyelids. I sat forward in my chair. “Sorry. Let me just go and have a quick wash.”

In the bathroom down the corridor, I splashed water into my face and scrubbed a lingering tang of gun oil off my hands. The events of the previous night whirled around the sink with the water, and I struggled not to go down with them. None of it seemed very likely, but nor did my waking reality. I dried off with paper towels, took a second to check my unshaven, fear-haunted face was halfway presentable and free from snot or tears, and stepped back out.

My mother ran into my arms. That was more unexpected than her being here in the first place. My reflexes were firing if not much else, and I caught her, propping up her stiff little hug. “What are you doing here, Ma?”

“That old man from the castle, the one who came and told me you were still alive…he phoned in the small hours and said you were here. He sent a car. I’m glad to see you, Kier.”

“He sent a car? Alfred Macready?” I shook my head, waking up a bit. “Ma, has a doctor been through? Have they said anything about Viv?”

“No. There’s been nobody through at all.” She looked good this morning, did Ma Mallory. The dreadful headscarf was gone, the slippers replaced with smart court shoes. Hospital visiting was a bit of a calling for the North Kerra elders, and she’d risen to the occasion, though I couldn’t work out who she was here to see. “Kier, there’s something I want to tell you—something Jill wants to tell you, anyway—before you go chasing off after that young man. Will you come and sit down?”

I didn’t think so. I wanted to chase off after my young man. Then I remembered how badly I’d wanted to see Jill Maguire when I’d first got home, the sense of duty that had consumed me. That feeling was still there, made sharper by my own sense of oncoming loss. “Yes. Okay.” I resumed my seat. My ma did too, and there I was facing them again. Jill Maguire had an envelope in her hand, holding it upright by its short end like a sword. I was reminded of a pair of stiff medieval angels in a stained-glass window. Well, I’d courted this hour of judgement. I decided to help her begin. “My ma says you want to talk to me, Mrs. Maguire.”

“Not exactly. When your mother happened to be getting a ride to the hospital here, she asked me to come too.”

So, you were dragged.
Her hair was thinning, her mouth a bitter twist. Pity crawled through me—not empathy or compassion or any of the adult things we’re meant to feel for one another—just raw bloody sorrow, red as entrails in the snow. “What can I do for you? I know you hate the sight of me, but…I’ll do anything I can.”

“I want you to listen. Before I start, I warn you that I still hold you responsible for taking my child out on that fool’s mission.”

My mother bristled. I’d never seen that before, and I did a double take. She’d lived in fear of her neighbours, my father nipping her self-respect in the bud at every turn. “And I would point out to
you
, Jill Maguire, that although your daughter was a fine girl, and beloved of us all, she was
no’
a child when she decided to take her chances on that ship.”

I couldn’t believe it. In a way I didn’t care, and it was years too late for her to start defending me. My mind stretched yearningly through the tight-sealed doors to wherever Viv lay, my man who knew all my sins and loved me anyway. “Don’t, Ma,” I said uncomfortably. “Let her talk.”

“I will, if she speaks rightly. Jill, if it’s too hard for you, I’ll tell him.”