Читать книгу The Money Makers - Harry Bingham - Страница 30

Not dead, thank God, but very, very ill.

An ambulance had come quickly. A kind paramedic had been swift to reassure a distraught Josephine that her mother’s pulse was steady, her breathing weak but constant. The journey to hospital was an unremembered rush of sirens and flashing lights. Once there, Helen Gradley was thrust fast and unemotionally on to the processing line of the modern NHS. Her case was serious and, queue-jumping the groaning hordes in casualty, she was placed immediately into intensive care. Through that night and the days that followed, diagnosis and prognosis became clearer.

Helen Gradley had had a stroke, a stoppage of blood to the brain. The consequences were hard to predict, even for a specialist. Some people lost speech, lost coordination, lost memory, then recovered the lot within weeks and months. Others might lose less, but lose it for good. With Helen, whose stroke had been severe, only time would tell.

And Josephine? That first night at the hospital she had sat up all night with her mother. Doctors had come and gone, giving conflicting advice, rushing off at the command of a pager, too busy to do their job. Josie, in her party dress still, held her mother’s hand, whispering encouragement. She remembered the mood she’d been in, climbing the hill towards home: her anger, her passionate demands for her old life back. That was all gone now. Helen Gradley, for so long the shield between her children and their father, the victim of an unfair divorce and a cruel will, lay in bed, helpless as a baby, looking to her daughter for help.

Josephine was just seventeen. She had never expected to earn a living, let alone care for a disabled parent, but she knew her duty. ‘It’s OK, Mum. I’m here,’ she said.