Page 96 of Christmas for the Village Midwife
She’s OK at the moment.But we could do with you sooner rather than later. I’m sure I could deliver, but I’d feel better if you were here.
Zoe would feel better if she could be there too. She had no doubt Emilia would be capable enough to get by, but Zoe didn’t like the idea of leaving them all to struggle when her expertise could make things a hundred times better. She’d made a promise too, that she would take care of Georgia, and it was a promise she took seriously. Come hell or high water, she was going to get back down to the village to be with her friend when she needed her most. If only she hadn’t left before being certain all was well. If Zoe owed Georgia nothing else, she had that mistake to make up for.
A few minutes later, Alex came back.
‘You’ve only got one shovel,’ she said, getting out of the car.
‘I wasn’t going to have you digging.’
‘Faster with two.’
‘You slide into the driver’s seat, and when I say, see if you can reverse.’
Zoe did as she was asked, and through the side mirror, she could see Alex trying to dig around the back wheels. Then he went to the front and did the same before stepping back and signalling for her to start the engine. But the wheels only spun again, and though the car inched back a little, it slid forward again almost immediately.
‘Whoa!’ Alex yelled, and Zoe killed the engine.
‘What about some cardboard?’ Zoe asked. ‘We could slide some sheets of cardboard under the tyres so they’ve got something to drive on, and it might be enough to get us free.’
‘Cardboard?’
‘My dad got stuck once, and someone came out from a nearby house and helped him with flattened cardboard boxes.’
Alex scratched at his neck, studying the car. ‘I suppose it’s worth a try. Not sure what I’ve got, but I can look in the shed…might have some leftover from when we moved in.’
Zoe got out of the car and followed him.
They gathered what they could and went back to the car. Zoe went around to each wheel this time, shoving the flattened sheets underneath each tyre to give them a surface to drive on, though no sooner had she done it than the cardboard itself began to disappear beneath a fresh layer of fast-falling snow.
‘OK!’ she shouted.
Alex revved the engine, and after a few seconds, the car began to move. And then it was free.
Zoe leaped back into the car and slammed the door shut, afraid to lose the momentum. ‘Let’s go.’
They’d barely gone twenty metres when the car began to slide again. This time it spun straight into a fencepost.
‘Shit!’ Alex leaped out to inspect the damage. ‘It’s caught one of the headlights, but it doesn’t look too bad.’
‘Can we still go?’
‘I don’t know…Zoe, I think you’re going to have to accept that we’re going nowhere in the car tonight.’
‘So I’ve wasted all that time when I could have been walking.’
‘You can’t walk it.’
‘Then how am I going to get there?’
‘Zoe’ – he leaned into her open window – ‘they have Emilia, and Simon is close by. If two fully qualified GPs can’t deliver a baby between them?—’
‘It’s not that simple!’
‘Ottilie did it. You told me she delivered Mackenzie.’
‘She was lucky – Mackenzie’s birth was straightforward, but they’re not always. What if Georgia’s is complicated? It’s not fair to ask Emilia and Simon to do it.’
‘But they could.’
