Chapter 44
‘I know it’s not quite a honeymoon in the Seychelles,’ said Grace, as she slid the platter of Danish pastries onto the table in the doctors’ lounge the next morning. ‘But we’re all so thrilled for you, we wanted to mark the occasion somehow.’ She batted away the bunch of helium balloons that seemed to have acquired a life of their own and kept bobbing towards her head.
‘It’s just so lovely to have you back, Gracie,’ Holly replied, pulling her into a hug. ‘We missed you.’
Grace smiled. ‘Well, after yesterday, it was an easy decision in the end. Can’t hide out for ever when there’s all this drama and upheaval going on, now can I?’ And she meant it too; some part of her brain had switched from fear to feisty during Jemima’s unscheduled delivery and there was no switching it back, it seemed.
‘We even got the posh coffee from The Deli,’ interrupted Dan with a grin. ‘I think we’re all feeling a little delicate this morning.’ He rubbed a hand across his eyes tiredly and Holly felt a flicker of guilt for not only springing a surprise wedding on their friends, but for doing it on a Sunday. Coming to work this morning felt like a labour of love for all of them.
‘How’s Mims doing?’ Holly asked Dan quietly as the helium balloons took on Taffy, attracted by some kind of static electricity to his hair and making it look as though he were under attack.
‘She’s doing well. And the baby is a sweetheart. I stayed with them for a few hours and popped into Elsie’s again this morning while you lazy buggers were still in bed. Frankly, I think relief is the overriding emotion all round.’
Holly shook her head, frowning. ‘I can’t believe all of that was going on and you never said a word.’
Dan shrugged. ‘We didn’t want to spoil your big day. Did you have a lovely time?’
‘We really did. It was everything I was hoping for, and more. And some of the photos are just gorgeous – everyone’s so chilled out and happy. Nobody stressing about the arrangements or what to wear for weeks in advance. Sort of like a family-friendly elopement.’ Holly grinned. ‘Sorry you missed out on the speeches.’
‘I should be apologising to you. I hardly fulfilled my duties as Best Man – no speech, no Stag Night – not so much as a Bambi-evening.’ He looked mildly put out at being deprived of the opportunity for revelry.
‘Have the Stag next weekend if you like,’ Holly suggested.
Dan stared at her incredulously. ‘You do know what goes on at a Stag Night?’
Holly looked over at Taffy and smiled. ‘Well, since we live in the real world, not a movie, I’m guessing you could still have a cracking evening out without breaking our marriage vows or any local laws.’
‘Maybe,’ Dan teased. ‘But then – where would be the fun in that?’
‘Are you still going on about this Stag Night?’ asked Grace, as she wandered over to join them. ‘Let it go. They’re married already.’
‘I hardly held up my end of the Best Man arrangement though, did I?’ Dan said grumpily. Grace leaned against his shoulder and he automatically slid his arm around her waist.
For a moment, Holly felt a flicker of concern that these two were more obviously loved-up than the newlyweds in the room. But then, seeing them together, so newly smitten, but so long in the making, it felt churlish to deny them that blissful stage where everything was new and wonderful and shiny. She and Taffy had spent the night in the attic room at Elsie’s, where the twins and Eric had joined them at roughly three a.m. when Mims’s baby had squawked them all wide awake. It was all very well being spontaneous, but she rather wished she’d thought past ‘I do’ and on to a wedding night to remember for all the right reasons.
Still, she thought, the night may not have been a runaway success, but her wedding had been Holly-and-Taffy-style perfection, and that was what mattered. A little dose of reality afterwards was actually no bad thing; just part of the tapestry of her life here in Larkford.
‘Knock-knock,’ said Chris Virtue, poking his head round the door. ‘Can I come in?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but strode into the room and helped himself to a Danish. He looked exhausted, haggard almost, and his usual debonair humour was noticeably missing. As the pastry flaked around his mouth, Holly watched how his gaze always settled on Grace and it was obvious that Dan hadn’t missed that either.
‘What can we help you with?’ Dan said, switching into ultra-polite mode.
Chris sat back against the edge of the table and sighed. ‘Look, I’m sorry to interrupt your party, but we need to talk. We have to ramp things up a notch, guys.’ He blew out a breath that ruffled his tousled hair and looked as though he were about to burst into tears. ‘Five people died last night. All of them needlessly. Two kids and their dad from that pile-up on the motorway, an older guy with a head injury after a fall, and a cancer patient with an adverse reaction to his chemo.’ The tears were choking his voice now and Holly felt the delicious pastry cloy in her mouth. Here they were celebrating, while all of these tragedies had been unfolding in their own back yard.
‘Now, I know none of this happened in your patch per se, but your lady last night, with the nuchal cord – it could so easily have been her . . . So I was wondering whether you guys wanted to join me in kicking up a bloody great fuss. The auction is great and everything but I just don’t think it’s going to be enough – or make things change fast enough.’
‘It’s all very well pinching pennies,’ continued Grace, ‘shutting down the local maternity and oncology services, even trying to stretch how far one helicopter can reasonably cover – but people are dying. For want of some understanding about rural roads, people are dying.’
‘We need to accelerate this,’ said Chris in agreement.
Lucy reached forward and handed him a napkin, as they all uncomfortably took on board what he was saying. It was one thing to understand the theory, but confronting the reality meant that, while they had been celebrating Holly and Taffy’s marriage, other families not so far away had been needlessly losing their loved ones.
Taffy clapped a hand on Chris’s shoulder, noticeably moved by what they’d heard. ‘What’s it going to take, do you think, for people in Westminster to sit up and take notice?’
‘Remember, this is just one night. One county. How many more deaths were avoidable last night, do you think?’ Grace pointed out, choked up by the very notion of how differently things could have ended for Jemima and Rupert, had they been home alone.
‘How loudly can we shout this from the rooftops, do you think?’ Holly asked, as her brain whirred through a few scenarios. ‘Do you think any of the families will actually want to be involved?’
‘It feels a little ghoulish to even ask,’ Dan said gently. Holly could see what it cost him to say that, as the angry set to his face suggested he too was all for kicking up a bloody great shitstorm.
‘If we found out some stats across the South West,’ Grace ventured, ‘it would give us a clearer picture? Stop thinking quite so local.’
Holly nodded. ‘Maybe no names, just photos—’
‘Like a slideshow?’ queried Taffy. ‘With a voiceover? Hope it goes viral?’
Chris turned to stare. ‘Well, I was thinking placards outside the Primary Care Trust, but you guys obviously do things a bit differently.’
Grace nodded. ‘We’ve learned the hard way that there’s only so much change we can effect with local interest. If we harness the internet and the press, the message reaches a much wider audience. And that’s what we want, isn’t it? For more people to feel the outrage we do? After all, not everyone lives in a rural area, but a lot of them sure come here for their holidays. And if time is of the essence—’
‘Maybe we can ask Julia to call Quentin?’ offered Lucy, oblivious to how the mention of those two names made all the GPs stiffen. ‘He could do a documentary short?’
‘And if the grieving families don’t want to do an interview, and frankly they shouldn’t have to, couldn’t we talk to the near-misses? People like Mims who might put a human face on the issue,’ suggested Alice quietly.
Holly looked across at Taffy and saw her own emotions reflected in his face. Their sense of responsibility to their patients was so well developed that every loss felt personal to them. She laid her hand on her bump to quieten the fidgeting and kicking match that seemed to be going on in utero. ‘We can get together a war chest. We need a fighting fund, if we’re going to incur media costs – coverage won’t come for nothing.’
‘Unless we use the news cycle,’ Grace said, her brow furrowed in concentration. ‘If we can pull together something for release – a short statement to accompany a video or slideshow – we should be able to kick up quite a lot of dust without spending too much money. I for one would much rather that our fundraising actually covered the Air Ambulance repairs, or some extra midwives, rather than a fancy campaign. Simple, from the heart, no frills. We don’t need Quentin for that.’
‘I’ll ask Mims and Rupert when I see them this morning,’ volunteered Dan.
‘Can I borrow your camcorder?’ asked Lucy.
‘And let’s think about this auction and how we can boost donations. Maybe Elsie can hit up some of her cronies at Sarandon Hall for a few big-ticket items. If nothing else, maybe we can shame a few bureaucrats into action? After all, this kind of thing shouldn’t be necessary just to provide the basics of healthcare,’ Taffy said.
‘I think that’s the point, Taffs,’ Holly said gently. ‘For someone living in a big town or city, they take it for granted that they can get to a hospital if they need to. It’s not the same in the countryside, but they don’t necessarily know that.’
‘Ignorance,’ said Dan, bitterly. ‘It always comes down to ignorance.’
‘And he who shouts loudest,’ Grace reminded him. ‘Well, we may not have a fancy London address or a million people in our care, but we can shout loudly with the best of them. Maybe if we stop being an invisible, impersonal line on a balance sheet, the powers-that-be might realise that cutting our coverage actually kills. I wonder how they’d feel about that?’
‘If this was America, there’d be wrongful death suits flying around and everybody would be on their toes,’ said Chris tiredly.
‘Do we really want to go there, though? Surely a litigious approach only ends up with everyone losing but the lawyers?’ Grace said, ever the decent and considerate soul.
‘We don’t have to do it though, so much as threaten to do it,’ suggested Lucy.
‘Hint at it, maybe?’ Taffy offered.
‘I hate this,’ burst out Holly suddenly. She hadn’t even been aware that the words were in her mind, let alone tumbling out of her mouth. She took deep shuddering breaths to try and calm herself.
Chris looked panicked, obviously feeling responsible for raining on their parade. ‘God, Holly, I’m so sorry—’ he began.
‘Nobody should have to fear for the safety of their baby, or whether their child will get to hospital in time if they get rear-ended on the motorway. This is unacceptable and we shouldn’t stand for it,’ said Holly.
‘Hormones?’ queried Chris under his breath to Grace, taken aback by Holly’s vociferous eruption.
Holly wheeled to face him. ‘Humanity, actually,’ she said forcefully.
Taffy put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her face into his chest, attempting to soothe her. ‘This is hardly twenty-first-century healthcare, though, is it?’
Chris shrugged uncomfortably. ‘I can’t tell you how much it means that you all feel this way. I’ve been up half the night having angry conversations with myself. After all, it’s not as though we’ve been doing nothing, is it? I figured maybe I’d got too close to the problem, was taking it too personally.’
Grace shook her head. ‘No such thing, Chris. It is personal though, isn’t it? I mean, it could be anyone we know and love. Anyone we care about, not getting the help they need.’
Holly looked up, her mascara streaking down her cheeks. ‘You know what, I’m not interested in sticking a Band-Aid on this. Something that will peel off in a few months’ time and then we’re back to square one. Grace is right. We need to make sure our voice is heard in every negotiation. Let’s stop thinking local altogether.’
She paused and looked around the room at the expectant faces, some of them tinged with confusion. She took a deep breath to calm her racing heart. Now she’d had the idea, there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
‘Let’s raise some money, and some awareness – the auction can do that obviously – but then let’s go for gold: we need a rural consultation on every budget cut. We need someone on the inside, and any future changes need to take both urban and rural needs into account. What works in Brixham and Bristol may not work in Bibury or Broadway,’ she proclaimed.
‘A Minister for Rural Affairs,’ suggested Grace, as though it were the Holy Grail.
‘I think there already is one,’ ventured Lucy, who clearly had more time to read the newspaper than anyone else in the room. ‘But they cover the environment and farming and food – it’s a really wide brief.’
‘Jack of all trades and master of none?’ suggested Dan.
‘Minister for Rural Health then,’ countered Grace, undeterred. ‘Or even consultant. Obviously we won’t get what we want, but we can raise the level of debate in this country at the very least. It’s not just the South West either. Think about the Lake District or Norfolk or Northumberland. This has to directly affect a huge proportion of the population.’
‘About twenty per cent,’ said Lucy. ‘Give or take.’
‘How do you know all this stuff?’ asked Grace curiously.
‘I don’t know. The news. The internet. Teddy at The Kingsley Arms,’ Lucy replied.
‘What are we going to do then?’ asked Chris, clearly blown away by the strength of reaction his plea for help had elicited.
‘We are going to kick arse,’ said Holly with feeling. She swiped the mascara away from her lashes and looked over at Taffy for his support. ‘For once, we’re going to present a united front for rural England and shout loudest.’