Isabel's Healing Read online

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to all the front line medical and support staff who have worked so hard to look after people through the Corona Virus pandemic. Words can’t convey what we owe you. Thank you so much.

  Published in 2020 by Ryeland Press

  Copyright © Maggie McIntyre

  First Edition

  The rights of Maggie McIntyre to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Cover Photo: Attribution to Cottonbro from Pexels

  Cover Design: Karen D. Badger

  Formatting: Karen D. Badger

  All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the author.

  ISBN 979-8-650898-73-3

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks and appreciation goes to my brilliant cover designer, formatter and editor, Karen Badger of Badger Bliss Books. If this book comes to life, it is mostly all down to you.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  About the Author

  Coming Soon by Maggie McIntyre

  New Releases by Fellow Authors

  Chapter 1

  “Bel, you might call her something other than, The Girl!”

  “Well, what am I supposed to call her? I’ve not even spoken to her. I can’t remember her name, Brianna, Bramble, whatever...? You and my dear brother have fixed this up with hardly a nod in my direction.

  “Has the thought ever crossed both your minds that I might actually appreciate having some say in who has to come and look after my every need, and yes, I bloody well mean ‘every need’ for the next eight weeks?”

  Claire Bridgford sighed a very small sigh, but buried her impatience under sympathy towards her much younger sister-in-law. Bel was now balefully glowering at her from the passenger seat of the Grey Citroen Berlingo, a car which Claire and her husband had driven as a second vehicle for more than ten years.

  It was large enough to carry Bel, her wheelchair and all of her academic books and files to the cottage they had booked for the next two months. Claire’s husband Edward had driven ahead with clothes, medical necessities, and a large box of groceries. It was an expedition which Claire had never thought was wise, and it now seemed more foolish than ever.

  Bel, with two broken arms, crushed ribs and a badly broken lower leg and right ankle, was more bandage than person right now. She was completely incapacitated, until they could at least get some of the casts off her limbs. She was also in constant pain. It was no wonder she was in a foul mood.

  After a month in the hospital, all Bel wanted was to get away from people, to go up into the Welsh hills and hide away, nursing her bruised and battered body, her mental exhaustion and shattered nerves, and something she rarely shared with Claire, her truly broken heart.

  Now she knew she was making things worse for everybody, by her senseless grumbling. She felt ashamed, but couldn’t seem to control her anger.

  Claire persisted. “Her name is Bryony. I’m sure you do remember, unless the anesthetics have really done your head in. We couldn’t consult with you very much while you were in the hospital, could we? You were completely out of it most of the time, but we’re sure she’ll be suitable.

  “Edward has interviewed her on Skype, and she has good references. She’s a final year medical student. She’s bright. She’ll be a good caregiver and assistant. It’s only for eight weeks, or less, if you decide to curtail this experiment and come back home with us. So try not to prejudge, eh?”

  Isabel, or Bel, Bridgford bit her lip and met Claire halfway on her request. She let her head, with its still thumping headache; give a tiny nod of assent.

  Of course she should be nicer to her brother and sister-in-law, who’d returned home just to help her. They curtailed their long-planned summer holiday in Tuscany, then arranged her transfer from London up to Liverpool by ambulance, and had visited her in hospital daily from their home twenty miles away. It had been for nearly a month now.

  Her nemesis had been some car crash. The little Fiat Panda she drove ‘met’ a ten-ton truck head-on, just after the lorry had careened down an access road down onto the M25, the orbital route around London. The truck’s driver suffered a major heart attack and died before their vehicles even collided. His truck then destroyed her little car, pushing it, and what was left of Bel, back up the motorway for more than fifty yards.

  The ensuing carnage had made the TV news, for it had blocked the M1 for the rest of the afternoon. It took a fire and rescue team three hours to cut her out of what had once been her vehicle. Those were three hours she could well live without remembering.

  The flashes of recall she did have were all of red-hot, blistering agony. Isabel had already coped with twenty years’ of intermittent pain, after a series of misadventures during her more than active life, but the time following the crash were by far the worst days of her life.

  Claire was now driving them placidly along quiet country roads which wound their way out of the lush and fertile plains of South West Cheshire into the border country between England and Wales. South of the famous Snowden mountain range, it seemed a semi-mystical land of rolling forests, and tight, sheltered valleys, she remembered from childhood outings, home to sheep farmers, and self-sufficiency buffs. This was the first time Bel had escaped the confines of a hospital ward in more than a month.

  “How much further?” Bel knew she sounded like a child asking, ‘Are we there yet?’

  “Another forty miles, just under an hour on these windy roads. Are you thirsty? Do you want me to pull over and give you a drink?”

  “No, don’t worry. I’m fine. Let’s push on. I am keen to arrive.”

  Claire still couldn’t really understand why Bel wanted to hole herself up in Wales so much. She was more than welcome to stay with her and her husband in sensible, suburban Chester. They could buy in care on an hourly basis, and while Isabel’s mental instability and mood swings were still a cause for concern, Claire wished she had heeded their advice.

  What would she do up there in the hills all day? Isabel had a book to write, she knew, but she always had a book of some sort to write, and her still troublesome concussion would surely prevent her achieving very much on this new project.

  Isabel waited now for her headache to settle. “Sorry, Claire. You’ve been wonderful, both of you. It’s just...”

  “I know. It’s been hell, and so frustrating for you. But I’m so glad we could rent you the house for the summer, and the girl, Bryony, she told Edward she’s a fast typist. She will be able to type up your book, as soon as you feel strong enough to dictate the first chapters.”

  “Yes, but the deadline for the first draft remains September 1st. My whole year was planned around getting it done on time. The UN Climate Change summit...I’m supposed to have something published for distribution by the conference next ye
ar. I’ve wasted a whole month already!”

  Claire sighed, and they drove on, using her GPS to locate the little white cottage, perched by itself along a track at the top of a long winding hill. Edward was already there, unpacking the suitcases and boxes from his car, and waving at them as they approached.

  “Hi, as you see, it is a nice cottage. The key was under the old milk churn, just as they told us. I think the previous tenants must have moved out very recently, because the Aga still feels warm. I’ve switched it back on. I know it is summer, but you will need it for cooking and to heat the hot water. Everything comes off it, so I hope you won’t feel too warm, Bel.

  “The beds need making up, but there is plenty of linen available. I’ve left everything for your caregiver to sort out and arrange for you as you want it, and there’s a guidebook explaining everything about it.

  “Now, I had better go and fetch this girl, Machynlleth station now. Let me help you out of the car and into your wheelchair first though.”

  He reached down and helped Isabel swing her legs round and hop up onto one foot, but she needed his help to balance and sit down in the wheelchair. She was secretly suddenly nervous, now she had achieved her goal of actually arriving at the cottage.

  Edward noticed her looking around.

  “Well, here, you’ll have very few distractions. The woods are vast, and this is on a private road. Only a handful of walkers if any will come up here to disturb you.”

  It was a beautiful spot, and as isolated as she had hoped, and the view was magnificent. But as Isabel well knew, one can’t live on a view.

  Edward left them to drive ten miles south to Machynlleth, to collect the girl from the train which would arrive about 4:30 pm. If the train was on time, they would soon have sight of his grey Peugeot edging its way back up the valley.

  Claire pushed the wheelchair inside the cottage, bumping slightly over the door lintel, which jarred Bel’s nerves and made her grimace in pain. They went from room to room, and saw the clean linen left out for each bed, at the two far ends of the one-storey cottage.

  It was a typical Welsh long house, probably two or three hundred years old, but thankfully modernized. The bathroom at least was updated, and had room for a wheelchair to enter, park and turn.

  Claire wheeled Bel back into the living room and then at her request took the chair back outside and parked it under a larch tree in the front garden. They both gazed down the valley and over to distant fields and woods dipping away to the southeast.

  It was truly a beautiful Welsh summer’s afternoon, with a light refreshing breeze. Isabel suddenly hated it for not matching her personal physical misery and mental frustration. Black clouds and pouring rain would at least indicate some cosmic empathy. Bel started to extend her pessimism into a general moan about the new girl.

  “Probably it will be too quiet for her, if she’s used to university in central London. She’ll have to cook, and do the laundry, drive, and manage the bloody chair in and out of the car. She’ll have to help me dress and undress. She’ll even have to get me on and off the loo!”

  Bel knew she would detest every personal indignity she would have to suffer at the hands of this girl, who had just answered the advert her brother had placed in the Lady magazine of all sites.

  The Lady! Bel would never have described herself as a Lady. She was an explorer, an anthropologist, a ferocious campaigner for women’s rights, and exposé of the FGM scandals still rife in so much of the world.

  She had spent half her forty-two years in and out of sub-Saharan Africa, and she had headed up one of the most sharp-edged and radical aid agencies, worked to change legislation in three continents.

  Yet here she was, grounded by some-one else’s heart attack, a random connectivity which meant her normally strong muscles were becoming completely wasted, her bones crushed and her ligaments in a mess. It had also devastated her immediate plans and made her outrageously furious with the Universe.

  “Yes, I know it’s been very hard for you. But at least this will be better than in the hospital. You can maybe build up a relationship. At least with one assistant, you won’t have to keep reintroducing your particular problems. You can train her. You’re good at training.”

  “Am I? There are many folk who would disagree with you. I’ve become quite snappish in my old age.”

  “Bel, stop that! You are not old. You’re only forty-two for God’s sake. Compared to me you’re a spring chicken. You have a life ahead of you still. I know the last three years have been tough.”

  “Understatement of the year...but with this on top of everything...”

  Bel was tempted, just tempted, mind, to feel thoroughly sorry for herself, but she knew that was not the way to promote good healing. She acknowledged she was lucky to be alive, not like the wretched driver of the lorry.

  Now though, she had to brace herself against the prospect of this new caregiver, the random girl who had answered the advert and said she needed a job with accommodation, just for eight weeks until the end of August, when the girl was due to return to London for her final year’s training in clinical practice before she qualified as a junior doctor.

  Eight weeks seemed a lifetime to endure living with someone. By then, Isabel seriously hoped she would either have died or gotten better. At times she wondered if the first option wasn’t her preferred outcome.

  “I just wonder what this girl is like, on a day to day basis. How good will she be at taking direction? Will she be one of those chatty Cathies who never shut up?”

  Bel was self-aware enough to realize her normal rate of progress, whether on grass, city-street, or African bush, was extremely fast, and she went through assistants equally swiftly. Their average tenure was nine months, after which they usually either collapsed, decided they urgently needed to do a full-time Master’s Degree, or found someone to make them pregnant. One assistant had even gone so far as to have twins, simply to escape.

  “Oh well,” thought Bel gloomily. “I just hope she isn’t as bossy as me. We won’t last a week together if she is.”

  If things became desperate, she could send the girl packing for the cost of a local taxi and a train ticket. But what would she do then? She couldn’t bend her arms, so she couldn’t feed herself. She couldn’t even blow her own nose, or wipe her own backside.

  “Here they are!” called out Claire suddenly. “I can see the silver from the car glinting in the sunshine. I will go and put the kettle on.” And she retreated inside to the kitchen.

  Bel turned her head a little, and squinted in the sunshine. She should be wearing shades. She could see the Peugeot ascending the hill below, turning corner after corner, and bringing her savior, or maybe her nemesis, up to her door.

  Bel tried to scuff her chair forward with her one workable foot, but it wouldn’t budge. She realized of course that Claire had set the brake on and with both arms in plaster there was no way she could release it. She almost cried with frustration, and eventually violently kicked out at the sandy gravel under her foot, so a whole shower of pebbles flew up into the air.

  Chapter 2

  In London, two hundred miles to the south-east, Bryony Morris had also been having a bad day. Her boyfriend Aiden, golden boy of their year’s cohort, and ridiculously talented on all fronts, was supposed to be seeing her off from Euston Station, but he’d been really late picking her up, and now she was in danger of missing her train. They shot through the congestion charge check points in his old van, and screeched to a halt in front of the large London train station.

  Bryony reached behind her to grab her rucksack and messenger bag with her precious lap-top.

  “You still haven’t said “Yes.” Now you’re going off to the back of beyond for eight weeks! When can I see you?”

  Ignoring the traffic wardens bearing down on them, Aiden had jumped out of the car as she prepared to run into the station. He hugged her clumsily as she was already putting her rucksack onto her shoulders.

  “Here
! Kiss me at least!”

  Their lips briefly touched, and she gave him a squeeze as compensation.

  “Honestly, Aid, I’m not sure. Maybe in a month or so. It all depends on my patient, and it’s a long way. Look, let’s Skype or Facetime. I’ll keep in touch, I promise!”

  “Well, thanks, make sure you do. And I need an answer. Mum’s already asking me when we are setting the date. She really likes you.”

  “I know, and I like her too, I like both your parents, but that’s not really the point, is it? Look, I must fly! ‘Bye!”

  And she was gone, sprinting off towards the barriers before the trains.

  “Ok! Ok! Keep your hair on! I’m leaving.” Aiden shouted irritably at the warden bearing down on him, and revved up his van. As well as having to pay to enter central London, he didn’t want to be prosecuted for illegal parking as well. He pulled out quickly and rejoined the traffic heading west towards the Marylebone road.

  ***

  Bryony caught the train by the skin of her teeth and collapsed into a corner seat. All she had were vague directions to a cottage called Ty Bach, or ‘Little House’, and the promise that someone would meet her at Machynlleth station, a name she could barely pronounce.

  ‘Little House’ didn’t sound promising, especially since she discovered the phrase was also a euphemism for a toilet in Welsh. Not a good omen. She could barely pronounce the name of her destination station.

  “Single with student railcard to Machynlleth?”

  “Yes.”

  The guard scribbled something on her two little cards.

  “Change at Birmingham New Street.”

  “Is there a snack bar on this train?”

  “Sorry. Trolley service only. It will probably get down to this end before we get to Birmingham though.”

  Bryony was doubly frustrated, as she normally planned all her expeditions down to the nth degree, but somehow today everything had turned to mud underneath her. The washing machine in her accommodation block had not been switched on properly, so by the time she noticed it, her laundry cycle was an hour late, and her clothes, hastily stuffed into her rucksack, were all still damp. She’d intended to catch a bus down to the railway station, but Aiden had suddenly called, offering her a lift, and she couldn’t refuse. But their argument, or rather his hectoring and her hedging about, the previous evening still rankled. She would really have preferred to slip away to her summer job quietly, even if the issue of their future relationship remained unresolved.