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‘Of course.’ She had a twinkle back in her eye. ‘Though I’m not into rock and roll. A sedate waltz is more in my line.’
‘So can I book the first one?’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘Get away with you.’ She chuckled. ‘When the young females of Willowmere see you all dressed up, the likes of me won’t be able to get near you.’
David laughed. ‘Talking about young females, I gave one a lift from the station today.’
‘Oh, yes? And who would that be?’
‘She’s called Laurel and is the niece of Elaine the practice manager.’
Sarah smiled. ‘So that’s another one that’ll be in the queue.’
I don’t think so, he thought, and returned to more serious matters by changing the subject. ‘Right, Sarah. So shall I do what I’ve come for?’
He checked her heart and blood pressure, felt her pulse and the glands in her neck, and when he’d finished told her, ‘No problems there at the moment, but before I go is there anything troubling you healthwise that you haven’t told me about?’
She shook her silver locks. ‘No, Doctor. Not at the moment.’
He was picking up his bag. ‘That’s good, then, and if I don’t see you before I’ll see you at the party in the park.’
‘So tell me more about Dr Trelawney,’ Laurel said after David had gone. ‘He told me that he’s one of the GPs here.’
‘He joined us just a short time ago from St Gabriel’s Hospital where he was a registrar seeking a change of direction,’ Elaine explained. ‘David has replaced Georgina Allardyce, who has just given birth and tied the knot for a second time with the husband she was divorced from almost four years ago.
‘Georgina is on maternity leave at the moment and may come back part time in the future. In the meantime, we are fortunate to have David, who is clever, capable, and has slotted in as if he was meant to be part of the village’s health care.’
‘He was kind and I don’t think I behaved very well,’ Laurel said regretfully. ‘In fact, I was a pain. I’ll apologise the next time we meet, but I felt so awful. I’m a freak, Elaine.’
‘Nonsense, Laurel. You are brave and beautiful,’ her aunt protested. ‘The scars, mental and physical, will fade. Just give them time, dear.’
‘Everything is such an effort,’ she said despondently. ‘I’d put on my war paint and nice clothes to make a statement, but didn’t fool anyone, certainly not the Trelawney guy. He suggested that I see a doctor.’
‘And what did you say to that?’
‘That I’d seen plenty over the last few months and was about to tell him that I’m no ignoramus myself when it comes to health care, but you arrived at that moment.’
‘Right,’ Elaine said briskly, having no comment to make regarding that. ‘Let’s get you settled in. David said you fainted, so how do you feel now?’
‘Better. He gave me some milk and biscuits.’
‘Good. So let’s show you where you’ll be sleeping. Take your time up the stairs, watch your leg. I’ve put you in the room with the best view. It overlooks Willow Lake, which is one of the most beautiful places in the area.’
‘Really,’ was the lacklustre response, and Elaine hid a smile. Laurel was a city dweller through and through and might be bored out here in the countryside, but she needed the change of scene and the slower pace of life. Elaine wasn’t going to let her go back to London until she was satisfied that her niece was fully recovered from an experience that she was not ever likely to forget.
‘Is your fiancé going to visit while you’re here?’ Elaine asked after she’d helped bring up Laurel’s cases. ‘He will be most welcome.’
‘It’s off,’ Laurel told her as she peered through the window at the view that she’d been promised. ‘I’m too thin and pale for him these days…and then there are the scars, of course.’
‘Then he doesn’t love you enough,’ Elaine announced, and without further comment went down to make them a late lunch.
She was right, Laurel thought dolefully when she’d gone, but it hurt to hear it said out loud. Darius was in the process of making his name in one of the television soaps and had rarely been to see her while she’d been hospitalised, and less still since she’d been discharged. When she’d said she was going to the countryside to assist her recovery he’d thought she was out of her mind.
‘You’re crazy, babe,’ he’d said. ‘Why would you want to leave London for fields full of cow pats?’
If his visits had been sparse, not so Elaine’s. Her aunt had been to see her in hospital whenever she could and Laurel loved her for it. Other friends had been kind and loyal too. But Darius, the one she’d wanted to see the most, had been easing her out of his life all the time. In the end, dry eyed and disenchanted, she’d given him his ring back.
After they’d eaten Elaine said, ‘Why don’t you sit out in the garden for a while and let the sun bring some colour to your pale cheeks while I clear away?’
‘If you say so,’ Laurel agreed without much enthusiasm and, picking up a magazine that she’d bought before leaving London, went to sit on the small terrace at the back of the lodge. But it wasn’t long before she put it down. It was too quiet, she thought, spooky almost. How was she going to exist without the hustle and bustle of London in her ears?
For the first time since she’d arrived, she found herself smiling. What was she like! Most people would jump at the chance to get away from that sort of sound, yet here she was, already pining for the throb of traffic.
The silence was broken suddenly by the noise of a car pulling up on the lane at the side of the garden and when she looked up Laurel saw that the window on the driver’s side was being lowered and the village doctor that she’d met earlier was observing her over the hedge.
‘So how’s it going?’ David asked. ‘Are you feeling better?’
‘Er, yes, a bit,’ she said, taken aback at seeing him again in so short a time. ‘You didn’t have to come to check on me, you know.’
‘I’m not,’ he told her dryly. ‘There are plenty of others who will actually be glad to see me. I’m in the middle of my house calls so I won’t disturb you further.’
She’d given him the impression that she thought him interfering, Laurel thought glumly as he drove off. What a pain in the neck he must think she was.
Elaine appeared at that moment with coffee and biscuits on a tray and as they sat together companionably, she asked, ‘Did I hear a car?’
‘Yes. It was your Dr Trelawney.’
‘David?’
‘Yes, on his home visits. He saw me out here and stopped for a word. He doesn’t look like a country type. How does he cope with it, I wonder?’
‘The job?’
‘No, the silence.’
‘You ungrateful young minx,’ Elaine declared laughingly. ‘Lots of people would give their right arm to live in a place like this.’
‘Yes, but what do you do for fun?’
Still amused, she replied, ‘Oh, we fall in love, get married, have babies, take delight in the seasons as they come and go, count the cabbages in the fields…’
‘You haven’t done that, though, have you?’
‘Counted the cabbages? No, but I’ve been in love. Sadly I was never a bride. I lost the love of my life before our relationship had progressed that far.’
‘Yes, and it’s such a shame,’ Laurel told her. ‘You would have been a lovely mum. That’s what you’ve been like to me, Elaine.’
‘You are my sister’s child,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve tried to make up for what she and your father lacked in parenting skills, but they did turn up at the hospital to see you, didn’t they?’
‘For a couple of hours, yes, because they’d read about me in the papers, but they were soon off on their travels again.’
‘That’s the way they are,’ Elaine said soothingly. ‘Free spirits. We’ll never change them and they do love you in their own way.’
‘I’ve lost my way, Elaine,’ she said forlornly. ‘I used to be so positive, but since it happened I feel as if I don’t know who I am. My face isn’t marked, for which I’m eternally grateful, but there are parts of the rest of me that aren’t a pretty sight.’
‘That won’t matter to anyone who really loves you,’ she was told. ‘Like I said before, you’re brave and beautiful.’
‘I wish,’ was the doleful reply.
David Trelawney was house hunting. Since moving to Willowmere he’d been living in a rented cottage not too far from the surgery and Bracken House, where James Bartlett lived with his two children.
So far it was proving to be an ideal arrangement. It wouldn’t have been if his high-flying American fiancée had wanted to join him, but that was not a problem any more.
They’d called off the engagement just before he’d accepted the position at St Gabriel’s, and though it had left him with a rather jaundiced attitude to the opposite sex, his only regret was that he’d made an error of judgement and would be wary of repeating it.
Yet it wasn’t stopping him from house hunting. He didn’t want to rent for long, but so far he hadn’t made any definite decision about where he was going to put down his roots in the village that had taken him to its heart. He told himself wryly that he’d made a mistake in his choice of a wife and wasn’t going to do the same thing when it came to choosing a house.
He’d spent his growing years in a Cornish fishing village where his father had brought him up single-handed after losing his wife to cancer when David had been quite small, and once when Caroline had flown over to see him he’d taken her to meet him.
‘Are you sure that she is the right one for you, David?’ Jonas Trelawney had said afterwards. ‘She’s smart and attractive, seems like the kind of woman who knows what she wants and goes out to get it, but I know how you love kids and somehow I can’t see her breast feeding or changing nappies. Have you discussed it at all?’
‘Yes,’ he’d said easily, putting from his mind the number of times the word ‘nanny’ had cropped up in the conversation.
He’d met her on a visit to London. She’d been staying in the same hotel with a group of friendly Texans who, on discovering that he had been on his own, had invited him to join them as they saw the sights.
She’d made a play for him, he’d responded to her advances, and the attraction between them had escalated into marriage plans, though he’d had his doubts about how she would react to the prospect of living in a town in Cheshire, as at that time he’d been based at St Gabriel’s Hospital.
It was going to be so different to the glitzy life that he’d discovered she led when he’d visited her in Texas. Yet she hadn’t raised any objections when he’d said that he had no plans to leave the UK while his father was alive. But he was to discover that the novelty of the idea was to be short-lived as far as Caroline was concerned.
His uneasiness had become a definite thing when he’d been expecting to go over there to sort out wedding arrangements and she’d put him off, saying that she had the chance to purchase a boutique that she’d had her eye on for some time and didn’t want any diversions until the deal was settled.
‘I would hardly have thought our wedding would be described as a diversion,’ he’d said coolly, and she’d told him that she was a businesswoman first and foremost and he would have to get used to that.
‘I see, and how are you going to run a boutique in Texas if you are living over here?’ he’d asked, his anger rising.
There was silence at the other end of the line and then the dialling tone.
She phoned him again that same day at midnight Texas time. It sounded as if she was at some sort of social gathering if the noise in the background was anything to go by, and as if wine had loosened her tongue Caroline told him the truth, that she didn’t want to be a doctor’s wife any more in some crummy place in Britain and wanted to call off the engagement.
As anger came surging back he told her that it was fine by him and coldly wished her every success in her business dealings.
He discovered afterwards that there’d been more to it than she’d admitted that night on the phone. A certain senator had appeared on her horizon and she’d used the boutique story as a get-out.
In his disillusionment David decided to make a fresh start. His father had once told him that his mother had come from a village in Cheshire called Willowmere, and shortly after his engagement to Caroline had ended he met James Bartlett’s sister Anna in the company of a doctor from the village practice. They’d been involved in a near drowning incident in a village called Willowmere and the way they described the place made him keen to find where the other part of his roots belonged.
When he’d found his mother’s childhood home the discovery of it pulled at his heartstrings so much that he decided he wanted to live in Willowmere, and as if it was meant he was offered a position in the village practice.
What was left of the house stood in the centre of a field on the way to Willow Lake, a local beauty spot, and as he’d stood beside it he’d felt that this was where he wanted to be, where he wanted to bring up his children if he ever married, and at the same time contribute to the health care of those who lived there.
All that remained of it was four stone walls, the roof having long since fallen in, and he remembered his father telling him how his mother had left it as a bride and gone to live with him in Cornwall where his home had been.
David found no reason to regret his decision to move to the Cheshire countryside. He was totally happy there, but supposed it might not be everyone’s choice. For instance, there was the girl he’d met at the station, he thought as the day took its course. She’d taken a dim view of the place.
So far he hadn’t found a property that appealed to him and knew it was because every time he went back to the ruins of his mother’s home the idea of restoring it was there.
Laurel and Elaine had had an omelette for their evening meal with chips and fresh green runner beans out of the garden, and when she’d placed the food in front of her niece she’d said, ‘I know it’s not exactly the fatted calf but it’s something that I know you like.’
‘I love your omelettes,’ Laurel told her. ‘I used to dream about them when I was in hospital.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you did,’ Elaine said laughingly. ‘You must have had better things to think about than my cooking.’
‘It was the only thing that cheered me up,’ Laurel insisted. ‘Darius was in the process of ditching me slowly, the skin grafts weren’t a bundle of joy, and neither was my leg that they’d had to pin all over the place.’
‘I know, my dear,’ Elaine said soothingly. ‘I tisn’t surprising that you’re feeling low with all that has happened to you but, Laurel, it could have been so much worse.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said flatly, ‘and I really do want to like it here and get fit again. I look such a sight.’
‘Not to me you don’t.’
‘Maybe, but your Dr Trelawney kept looking at me as if I was some peculiar specimen under the microscope. I wish my hair would grow more quickly.’
‘Have patience, Laurel,’ she was told. ‘What has grown so far is still the same beautiful colour.’
‘Yes, the colour of fire,’ she said with a shudder as she ate the food beneath the watchful gaze of her hostess.
‘I think an early night would be a good idea,’ Elaine suggested when they’d tidied up after the meal, ‘but how about a breath of good country air first? Perhaps a short walk through the village, past the surgery where David and I spend our working lives, and where you might be joining us when you feel like going to see James.’
‘Yes, sure,’ she agreed, ‘and if that is where he works, where does he live?’
‘David lives in a small cottage nearby. He’s staying there until he finds a property to buy. I know that he’s house hunting quite seriously but hasn’t mentioned finding anything suitable so far.’
‘And will he be living alone when he does?’ Laurel asked.
‘Yes, as far as I know, unless he has a wife tucked away somewhere, and I doubt that.’
David was returning from his usual nightly stroll to gaze upon his mother’s old home when he saw them coming towards him. Elaine, trim as always in slacks and a smart top, and the strange young woman he’d met at lunchtime still in the same outlandish garb as before that looked totally out of place in the setting.
‘Hello, there,’ he said when they drew level. ‘Have you been showing your niece the sights of Willowmere, Elaine?’
‘Yes, some of them,’ she replied, ‘such as the surgery and your spacious accommodation.’
He smiled. ‘It’s all right for one, two at the most.’
‘And are you still house hunting?
