MARY FELT A SENSE OF MOTION AND OPENED HER eyes a fraction. There was a man she didn’t recognise wearing a sort of uniform. That was odd. She was lying in some kind of moving vehicle. She rolled to the left as it turned a corner, and realised someone was holding her hand, clutching it tight. She opened her eyes further.
‘Oh Mary, my God, I thought you were dead,’ Wallis cried. Tears were rolling unchecked down her cheeks. ‘Please don’t die.’
Mary tried to speak but found it difficult. ‘Won’t,’ she managed, before closing her eyes again, overcome with exhaustion.
When she next woke, she was in what was clearly a hospital, being lifted from a stretcher onto a crisp white bed. The sheets felt cold and the air smelled of disinfectant and starch. She wanted everyone to leave so she could sleep, but a doctor was ordering that she be X-rayed. He spoke with an American accent and Mary wondered if she had been unconscious for a while and had been shipped back to America.
‘Where am I?’ she mumbled, and a nurse in a white headdress replied: ‘You’re at the American Hospital in Neuilly. Your friends thought that was best. We all speak English here.’
Mary nodded. That was good.
After the X-ray, she was taken to a private room, where a doctor shone a light in her eyes, took blood from a vein in her arm, and generally poked and prodded her. She just wanted to sleep, and at some point told them so. She was dimly aware of Wallis and Ernest asking the doctor how she was, and she strained to listen.
‘Damage to spine . . . emergency surgery to remove one kidney . . . condition critical . . . wait and see.’
Ernest, ever practical, was asking the questions and it sounded as though Wallis was still crying. Poor Wallie.
Mary slept again, and wakened in the dead stillness of night. There was no sound apart from a low hum of machinery. Outside the window the sky was dark, without so much as a hint of dawn. She turned her head and realised Wallis was still there, sitting in a chair by her bedside.
‘Mary, darling,’ she whispered. ‘You’re here. I’m so glad you’re awake. Are you in pain?’
Mary shook her head, squeezed Wallis’s fingers. ‘Thank you for staying with me.’
‘Of course I stayed with you!’ Wallis exclaimed. ‘You’re the best friend I ever had and I couldn’t bear to lose you. Do you have any idea how much I need you? I don’t think you do.’ She started crying again. Mary could see in the dim light filtering in from the hallway that her eyes were swollen.
She squeezed Wallis’s hand again. ‘You’re not going to lose me.’
Wallis leant over the bed, sobbing. ‘Promise me,’ she managed to say, her words smothered in Mary’s shoulder.
‘I promise,’ Mary said, before the veil of exhaustion fell again and she drifted off to sleep.
When she opened her eyes, she could tell it was morning from the shafts of brilliant sunlight slanting into the room.
‘Hello, Mary,’ said a man’s voice, and she was startled to see Ernest sitting in the chair beside her. She felt self-conscious that she was wearing only a hospital gown.
‘Where’s Wallis?’ she murmured, her lips parched and throat dry.
‘She’s gone to change but she’ll be back soon. She’s terribly distressed. We all are. I cabled your mother and Jackie, and Jackie wanted to catch the next sailing but I persuaded him to wait until there’s more news of your condition. He has cabled his Aunt Minnie to come and look after you. She’ll be here later in the day.’
Mary frowned. She had only met Jacques’ aunt once before, when she visited New York. She liked her but did not know her well. Still, she supposed Minnie was her closest relative on this side of the Atlantic.
‘Can I get you anything?’ Ernest asked.
‘Water,’ she begged, and he poured a glass from a jug by her bed and held it to her lips while she took a sip. Close up, Mary could see brown shadows under his eyes. Was he worried about her? Ernest was always so self-possessed, it was hard to tell what he was thinking.
‘You’ve given us quite a fright, old girl,’ he said, trying for a lightness of tone. ‘Glad to see you are still with us.’
‘You know me,’ Mary managed to reply. ‘I never like to be the first to leave a good party.’
By the time Aunt Minnie arrived, wearing a voluminous umber dress that swept the ground as she walked, Mary had been pronounced out of danger. There was no need for emergency surgery on her kidneys, which appeared to be functioning again, but the doctor warned that it was likely to be a long, gruelling convalescence because of the spinal injury she had incurred. She had stitches to cuts on her arms and legs, a giant bruise on her forehead, and every part of her body ached.
‘You go join your friends and enjoy your holiday,’ she told Wallis. ‘I’ll be fine. If I’m still here when you’re travelling back to London, drop in and bring me a KT.’
‘Yes, you go,’ Aunt Minnie urged. ‘I’ll rent an apartment near the hospital and stay with Mary until she’s well enough to sail home.’
‘I can’t . . . I feel as though the accident was my fault,’ Wallis insisted. ‘It should have been me.’
Mary smiled. ‘What kind of twisted logic is that, Wallie? You should have stepped in front of me and got hit instead? You prize idiot! No, I insist you have your holiday. I’ll write and describe my progress in tedious detail.’
Later that afternoon, two nurses held Mary as she swung her legs to the floor to try and stand for the first time. There was a sickening pain on either side of her lower back and pins and needles shot down her legs, worse on the right side. She willed her feet to move one in front of the other but it felt as if the signals from her brain were not getting through. Eventually she managed one step before collapsing back onto the bed.
‘One step today, two tomorrow,’ Minnie soothed. ‘We’ll get through this. Never fear.’
Ernest came that evening to say goodbye. He had to return to London for work the following morning. Everyone else had left the room so they managed a few words alone.
‘What will you do when you get back to New York?’ he asked. ‘About your marriage, I mean.’
In the forty-eight hours since her accident there had already been several heartfelt cables from Jacques, saying how much he loved her, that he couldn’t lose her, and promising the earth if she would just come back to him.
‘I’m going to see if it can be fixed,’ she said.
He nodded and cleared his throat, but did not meet her eyes.