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Jenna groaned inwardly as she picked up the patient’s records and saw that she’d come for a three-monthly B12 injection to keep anaemia at bay. Mildred Waterson had been a great admirer of her mother and rightly so as Barbara had treated her for various illnesses over the years, all of them serious, and she’d always made a good recovery due to her care. With everyone else Mildred was vinegary and critical and that side of her nature became evident the moment she saw Jenna smiling across at her as she entered the room.
‘So you’re back, I see,’ she said. ‘Waited until your mother had gone first, though, didn’t you, and now they’ve taken you on in the surgery. Well, I’ll wait for my injection until Lucy comes back from wherever she’s gone, if you don’t mind.’
‘Of course I don’t mind, Mrs Waterson,’ Jenna said quietly. ‘She will only be a moment. Do take a seat.’
‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘I will. And how is your mother?’
‘As well as can be expected. I am working mornings mainly so that I can be with her in the afternoons.’
‘Yes, I should think so,’ was the acid reply.
At that moment Lucy appeared and immediately picking up on the atmosphere said smoothly, ‘Isn’t it lovely to have Jenna with us, Mildred?’
‘Mrs Waterson would prefer you to give her the injection, Lucy,’ Jenna said quickly, before any other bad vibes were put on display.
The elderly nurse said calmly, ‘Yes, fine, but in future there will be three nurses in attendance, Mildred, and it will be a matter of which one is free.’
The next patient was George Enderby, the elderly farmer who had been to Lucas’s heart clinic, and to Jenna’s relief there was a twinkle in his eye when he saw her standing there.
‘Hello, Jenna,’ he said heartily. ‘I saw you the other day, didn’t I, when I’d been to see that campanologist fellow?’
‘You’ve got that a little bit wrong, Mr Enderby,’ she told him. ‘Dr Devereux is a cardiologist.’
‘So what do those others do then, go camping?’
‘No, they are the bell ringers. The people in the bell tower who turn out for Sunday church services, weddings and funerals, and now we’ve got that sorted out I see that you’re here for a dressing on your leg, so if you’ll roll up your trousers we’ll have a look at it.’
The twinkle was still there in his eye as he did as she’d suggested and she said laughingly, ‘You were teasing, weren’t you? Wanting me to think you didn’t know that Dr. Devereux is a cardiologist.’
‘I might have been, yet it was worth it if it made you smile. But, then, you’d just had Mildred Waterson in here, hadn’t you? And with regard to the heart man, what a treat to have somebody like him here for us folks. The only thing is that his skills could be wasted in a place like this. I wonder what made him leave Hunters Hill Hospital to come and work in Bluebell Cove?’
‘I’m sure there must have been a good reason,’ she replied, as a vision of the awful scar across his chest came to mind, and she started to wonder what the effects of a physical attack and the failed romance she’d heard about could have had on him.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN Jenna left the practice at the end of the morning Lucas was in the garden once more, and after glancing quickly across to where she was mounting her cycle he didn’t attempt to make any eye contact, but what he had seen in that brief glimpse was enough to tell him that she wasn’t as happy as she’d been when they’d met outside the store earlier, and he wondered what could have made her look so downcast.
He wasn’t to know that although the farmer’s good-natured teasing had taken away some of the hurt that Mildred Waterson’s acid tongue had inflicted, the pain of being judged unfairly by some was taking away the pleasure of being back in Bluebell Cove.
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