David performs CPR on Jenny

David performs CPR on Jenny in the aftermath of the failed raid on the windmill, when she suddenly stops breathing in the back of a Land Rover. His frantic attempt to keep her alive becomes the story’s immediate confrontation with death; the epilogue later reveals that Jenny survived, and that the responders’ return to the scene came only just in time.

The Sudden Crisis

The change is abrupt: Jenny’s breathing cuts off, and David waits for another breath that does not come. He scrambles into the back of the vehicle, turns her over, and searches for a pulse. Her head falls back, her eyes are partly open, and he can find no sign of one. The shock leaves him staring and momentarily unable to move before panic gives way to action.

David has practised CPR during his training but has never had to use it. He rolls Jenny onto her back, wads a blanket beneath her neck, tilts her head back, and clears her tongue from her mouth. He pinches her nose and gives her breaths, then places his hands on her breastbone and begins pressing rhythmically as he counts. The procedure is unfamiliar in practice: he curses his awkwardness, but keeps alternating breaths and compressions.

The Attempt to Keep Her Alive

The scene follows the physical rhythm of resuscitation rather than a measured passage of time. Jenny remains limp and unresponsive. David’s vision blurs with tears, but he repeatedly breathes into her mouth, presses on her chest, and counts. Even when the thought that she is gone intrudes, he rejects it and resumes the same sequence. His work narrows into repetition: breathe, press, count.

The effort is driven by more than professional training. David is desperate to bring Jenny’s heart back to life, and he continues after the available evidence seems to tell him that the attempt is useless. The narrative makes his persistence visible through physical actions—the blanket under her neck, his hands on her breastbone, his repeated breaths—rather than through a detached account of resuscitation. Jenny’s stillness and David’s increasingly frantic rhythm occupy the scene together, setting the life he is trying to restore against the apparent finality of her body.

Emergency Response and Apparent Loss

David loses track of time and does not register the approaching sirens or headlights washing through the car. The emergency vehicles reach the driveway, but he remains fixed on Jenny and refuses to stop when hands are placed on him. He fights the responders as they pull him out of the Land Rover and away from her. Outside the house, flashing lights and vehicles make the driveway chaotic; paramedics guide him toward an ambulance, and he collapses onto the gravel as his strength gives way.

Mackenzie appears in front of David and mouths questions, but David cannot attend to him. Activity continues around the Land Rover while David hears a responder say, “It's no good. We're too late.” At that point, the words seem to confirm that Jenny has died. The epilogue supplies the crucial correction: the pronouncement that frightened David referred to Henry, not Jenny. The misunderstanding lets the scene close on what appears to be an irreversible loss, even as Jenny is still being treated.

Survival and Consequences

Jenny had, in fact, died, but David’s efforts had started her heart again. His first aid did not end the crisis: her heart stopped again shortly after she reached hospital, and once more an hour later. Each time it was restarted. The epilogue explains why professional help arrived at all. In the confusion following the failed raid on the windmill, no one had stood down the ambulances and paramedics. When David called from Henry’s house, they had only just set off for the city and were swiftly turned back. Without that chance return, Jenny might have died before help reached her.

After three days, Jenny regained consciousness; after a week, she was moved out of intensive care. Doctors had considered brain and organ damage, as well as blindness, likely possibilities, but none materialized. Her physical recovery did not immediately settle David’s concern about lasting psychological harm. Gradually, though, he understood that Jenny had retreated to Manham because she had been afraid, and that surviving her nightmare had taken that fear from her. David recognizes that he, too, has survived in a different sense. The epilogue’s account turns the apparent death scene into the beginning of a shared recovery: both had been brought back to life, though by different routes.

Narrative Significance

The action’s decisive turn lies in the distance between what David can know in the car and what the reader learns afterward. In the moment, Jenny’s absent pulse, limp body, and the responder’s words point toward death; only the retrospective account clarifies that David’s repeated compressions helped sustain her until the ambulances returned. His loss of awareness of the sirens makes the emergency response arrive first as an interruption, not reassurance, and the mistaken pronouncement briefly seals the scene in despair.

The epilogue does not present survival as an instant restoration. Jenny’s heart stops twice more, her consciousness returns only after three days, and she leaves intensive care after a week. Against those concrete delays, David’s repetitive work in the Land Rover becomes the first part of a longer rescue, not a solitary cure. The episode also changes the meaning of their second chance: it depends on his refusal to stop, the medical teams’ repeated interventions, and the accidental fact that the ambulances could be turned back. The scene’s ending is therefore both a near-fatal loss and the fragile beginning of their renewed lives.