Doors opened. People spilled out. People I knew.
Mackie.
Mackie running, calling, ‘John, John,’ and reaching me and stopping dead and saying, ‘Oh my God.’
Perkin behind her, looking down, his mouth shocked open in speechlessness. Gareth saying, ‘What’s the matter,’ urgently, and then seeing and coming down scared and wide-eyed on his knees beside me.
‘We’ve been looking for you for ages,’ he said. ‘You’ve got an arrow...’ His voice died.
I knew.
‘Run and fetch Tremayne,’ Mackie told him, and he sprang instantly to his feet and sprinted away along the road to the right, his feet impelled as if by demons.
‘Surely we must take that arrow out,’ Perkin said, and put his hand on the shaft and gave it a tug. He hardly moved it in my chest but it felt like liquid fire.
I yelled... it came out as a croak only but it was a yell in my mind... ‘Don’t.’
I tried to move away from him but that made it worse. I shot out a hand and gripped Mackie’s trouser leg and pulled with strength I didn’t know I still had left. Strength of desperation.
Mackie’s face came down to mine, frightened and caring.
‘Don’t... move... the arrow,’ I said with terrible urgency. ‘Don’t let him.’
‘Oh God.’ She stood up. ‘Don’t touch it, Perkin. It’s hurting him dreadfully.’
‘It would hurt less out,’ he said obstinately. The vibrations from his hand travelled through me, inducing terror as well.
‘No. No.’ Mackie pulled at his arm in a panic. ‘You must leave it. You’ll kill him. Darling, you must leave it alone.’
Without her, Perkin would have had his way but he finally took his dangerous hand off the shaft. I wondered if he believed that it would kill me. Wondered if he had any idea what force he would have needed to pull the arrow out, like a wooden skewer out of meat. Wondered if he could imagine the semi-asleep furies he’d already reawakened. The furies had claws and merciless teeth. I tried to breathe even less. I could feel the sweat running down my face.
Mackie leaned down again. ‘Tremayne will get help.’ Her voice was shaky with stress, with the barbarity of things.
I didn’t answer: no breath.
A car pulled up behind the Land Rover and disgorged Gareth and then Tremayne who moved like a tank across the earthy verge and rocked to a halt a yard away.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said blankly. ‘I didn’t believe Gareth.’ He took charge of things then as a natural duty but also, it seemed, with an effort. ‘Right, I’ll call an ambulance on the car phone. Keep still,’ he said to me unnecessarily. ‘We’ll soon have you out of here.’
I didn’t answer him either. He sped away back to the car and we could hear his urgent voice, though not the words. He returned shortly telling me to hang on, it wouldn’t be for long; and the shock had made him breathless too, I noticed.
‘We’ve looked for you for hours,’ he said, anxious, I thought, to prove I hadn’t been forgotten. ‘We telephoned the police and the hospitals and they had no news of a car crash or anything, so then we came out here...’
‘Because of your message,’ Mackie said, ‘on the cork-board.’
Oh, yes.
Gareth’s camera was swinging from Perkin’s hand. Mackie saw me watching it and said, ‘We found the trail, you know.’
Gareth chimed in, ‘The paint by the road had gone but we looked and looked in the woods. I remembered where we’d been.’ He was earnest. ‘I remembered pretty well where it started. And Perkin found it.’
‘He went all the way along it with a torch,’ Mackie said, stroking her husband’s arm, ‘clever thing — and he came back after absolutely ages with Gareth’s camera and said you weren’t there. We didn’t know what to do next.’
‘I wouldn’t let them go home,’ Gareth said. A mixture of stubbornness and pride in his voice. Thank God for him, I thought.
‘What happened exactly?’ Tremayne asked me bluntly. ‘How did you get like this?’
‘Tell you... later.’ It came out not much above a whisper, lost in the sound of their movements around me.
‘Don’t bother him,’ Mackie said. ‘He can hardly speak.’
They waited beside me making worried encouragements until the ambulance arrived from the direction of Reading. Tremayne and Mackie went to meet the men in uniform, to tell them, I supposed, what to expect. Gareth took a step or two after them and I called him in an explosive croak, ‘Gareth,’ and he stopped and turned immediately and came back, bending down.
‘Yes? What? What can I do?’
‘Stay with me,’ I said.
It surprised him but he said, ‘Oh, OK,’ and stayed a pace away looking troubled.
Perkin said irritably, ‘Oh, go on, Gareth.’
I said, ‘No,’ hoarsely. ‘Stay.’
After a pause Perkin put his back towards Gareth and his face down near mine and asked with perfect calmness, ‘Do you know who shot you?’ It sounded like a natural question in the circumstances, but it wasn’t.
I didn’t reply. I looked for the first time straight into his moonlit eyes, and I saw Perkin the son, the husband, the one who worked with wood. I looked deep, but I couldn’t see his soul. Saw the man who thought he’d killed me... saw the archer.
‘Do you really know?’ he asked again.
He showed no feeling, yet my knowledge held the difference between his safety and destruction.
After a long moment, in which he read the answer for himself, I said, ‘Yes.’
Something within him seemed to collapse but he didn’t outwardly fall to pieces or rant or rave or even try to pull out the arrow again or finish me in any other way. He didn’t explain or show remorse or produce justification. He straightened and looked across to where the men from the ambulance were advancing with his father and his wife. Looked at his brother, a pace away, listening.
He said to me, ‘I love Mackie very much.’
He’d said everything, really.
I spent the night thankfully unaware of the marathon needlework going on in my chest and drifted back late in the morning to a mass of tubes and machines and techniques I’d never heard of. It seemed I was going to live: the doctors were cheerful, not cautious.
‘Constitution like a horse,’ one said. ‘We’ll have you back on your feet in no time.’
A nurse told me a policeman wanted to see me, but visitors had been barred until tomorrow.
By tomorrow, which was Wednesday, I was breathing shallowly but without mechanical help, sitting propped up sideways and drinking soup; talking, attached to drainage tubes and feeling sore. Doing just fine, they said.
The first person who came to see me wasn’t Doone after all but Tremayne. He came in the afternoon and he looked white, fatigued and many years older.
He didn’t ask about my health. He went over to the window of the post-operation side-ward I was occupying alone and stood looking out for a while, then he turned and said, ‘Something awful happened yesterday.’
He was trembling, I saw.
‘What?’ I asked apprehensively.
‘Perkin...’ His throat closed. His distress was overwhelming.
‘Sit down,’ I said.
He fumbled his way into the chair provided for visitors and put a hand over his lips so that I shouldn’t see how close he was to tears.
‘Perkin,’ he said after a while. ‘After all these years you’d think he’d be careful.’
‘What happened?’ I asked, when he stopped.
‘He was carving part of a cabinet by hand... and he cut his leg open with the knife. He bled... he tried to reach the door... there was blood all over the floor... pints of it. He’s had cuts sometimes before but this was an artery... Mackie found him.’