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