Wedding Bells for the Village Nurse

by Abigail Gordon

  ‘So you’re not going back to heart surgery at the hospital?’

  ‘No. Not just yet. I might do eventually, but for the moment I need some healing time—both mind and body.’

  He could have told her that she was playing a large part in that, but the healing process wasn’t so far advanced that he was going to start making commitments that he might feel he couldn’t keep, and there was still a slight chill in the atmosphere that told him not to push it.

  ‘I’ve got some champagne on ice to celebrate. Would you care to join me?’ he asked, hoping to lighten the atmosphere.

  She’d gone pale. ‘Celebrate what exactly?’

  ‘Me having turned a drab mausoleum into a home. What else?’

  What else indeed? Had she really seen him with that woman? she wondered.

  There were flowers on a small table nearby and the card with them said, From Philippa with love, so what was she supposed to think?

  Lucas was observing her thoughtfully and he said slowly, ‘Did you drive past the hospital on your way to the shops this morning?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  If she’d said yes he might have put her mind at rest one way or the other, but could she cope with it?

  While they were seated on tea chests, drinking the champagne, Lucas asked, ‘What do you do with yourself on Sundays?’

  She was on safe ground with that question and smiled across at him.

  ‘I used to spend the day on the beach, or go sailing with my friends, but now it isn’t so easy. I came home to look after my mother and that is my main concern. I always thought she was invincible but am discovering that she’s human like the rest of us. Considering what she used to be like, she’s coping reasonably well with what is happening to her.’

  ‘So you are going to be on the home front all day?’

  ‘Not all day. In the afternoon Dad always takes Mum for a cream tea, which she loves, and then they linger in the countryside for a while as it’s so beautiful around here, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he murmured, with a faster-beating pulse as his glance took in the slender stem of her neck rising smooth and sun-kissed above the cleft of her breasts. He’d been hurt in mind and body, he thought, but Jenna was beautiful and untouched, which was how it should be.

  She was observing him with questioning eyes above the sparkling liquid in the glass, and twirling the stem of it between her fingers she commented, ‘You’re miles away.’

  He shook his head. She was wrong. He was exactly where he wanted to be.

  She didn’t refuse when he said he would walk her home. The morning’s incident outside the hospital was still there at the back of her mind, but with sudden recklessness she decided to live for the moment.

  During the downhill stroll to the headland neither of them had forgotten the small girl whose afternoon of play had turned into a helicopter ride to hospital with a possible stay in the children’s orthopaedic ward ahead of her.

  ‘Which one of us is going to phone the hospital tomorrow?’ Lucas said.

  ‘I will,’ she offered. ‘We haven’t got a name, but I’m sure A and E will remember the little girl who arrived by helicopter. It’s been quite a day, hasn’t it?’

  It was an opening, a chance for him to mention what he’d been doing at the hospital with his ex-fiancée, but it fell on stony ground, and when they reached Four Winds House he said, ‘Thanks for coming to visit. I’ll see you on Monday afternoon at my clinic and in the morning at the surgery too, as I’ll be filling in for Ethan while he’s away.’

  ‘Yes, so I believe,’ she said, and waited to see what he would do next.

  She didn’t have to wait long. ‘Until Monday, then,’ he told her, bent and kissed her cheek, and was gone.

  Tracing her fingers across the place where his mouth had rested, she realised just how much she had fallen in love with him, and wondered if this was as far as they were ever going to get.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IT WAS Monday morning and Meredith from the Mariners Mooring guest house had come to hear the results of the tests that Ethan had organised on her behalf, leaving Lucas with the task of telling her that the ESR test for polymyalgia had come back positive and that she needed to take some steroids.

  ‘I don’t want to have a moon face or put on lots of weight,’ she wailed when she heard the news.

  He’d been seeing patients since seven o’clock, mostly people who needed to see a doctor before going to work, and at eight o’clock young Maria had brought him coffee and toast, but he’d put it to one side until he’d seen Meredith, and in the light of her protest had explained to her that there was an upside to that kind of medication.

  ‘You will have lots of energy while on the prednisolone,’ he told her, ‘and can take comfort that the other side effects you mentioned will be a temporary thing. They will recede once the steroids are gradually reduced in keeping with regular ESR tests.’

  Meredith had left in a less fraught state of mind than when she’d arrived and at the point of departing had said on a different matter, ‘You have a new doctor joining the practice today, I believe, Dr Leo Fenchurch. On Ethan’s recommendation he’s booked in with us for a while until he gets settled, so I’d better get back to the guest house and make sure that all is ready for his arrival.’

  After she’d gone Lucas glanced through the window and was relieved to see that the red sports car was parked outside, so it seemed as if Jenna was happy enough to use it during working hours, and recalling her changing moods of Saturday he wondered what she would be like today and whether she was as uncomplicated as he’d first thought.

  After the unsettling meeting with Philippa, who was very mistaken if she had any ideas about taking up where they’d left off, he’d been looking forward to Jenna’s serenity and it hadn’t been there. She’d had something on her mind but hadn’t been prepared to say what.

  Yet she’d seemed tranquil enough when she’d rung briefly on Sunday morning to report that the little girl from the accident on the rocks had sustained a fractured leg, but, apart from much bruising, had escaped any serious injury to her back.

  The call had lasted only minutes as she’d been helping her mother to get dressed and as they’d said goodbye he’d been reckoning up the hours to when he would see her again.

  The tea was going cold and the toast beginning to look like cardboard so he took a quick break before the new doctor arrived.

  Afterwards Lucas went to the nurses’ room with the notes of a patient who was due for vaccinations before a visit to the Middle East and found Jenna her usual smiling self, trim and capable as she and the other two nurses dealt with those requiring their services.

  ‘Hello,’ she said in a low voice when he appeared beside her. ‘You must feel as if you’ve done a day’s work already.’

  ‘This is peanuts compared to a sixteen-hour shift in Theatre,’ he told her whimsically.

  ‘No wonder you’re not missing it,’ she commented, and before he had the chance to reply said, ‘Has the new doctor arrived yet?’

  ‘Not yet. He rang earlier to say that he’s motoring down from Manchester after being on the wards until late last night, so he can be forgiven if he arrives somewhat jaded. But once he’s settled in, his presence will be most welcome. Being a doctor short since Francine went hasn’t made our lives any easier.’

  On that observation he returned to his own room and as the morning progressed Jenna felt that the summer sun had never shone brighter because she was back near Lucas again.

  When Leo Fenchurch presented himself at the surgery in the middle of the morning there was nothing jaded about his appearance. A fair-haired six-footer with a smiley mouth, his manner gave no indication of exhaustion or the guarded approach of someone in strange surroundings.

  He had arrived without any luggage and when he and Lucas had introduced themselves the newcomer explained that he’d stopped off at the guest house first so that he could deposit his belongings before reporting to t
he surgery.

  The next step was introducing Leo to the staff, which in Ethan’s absence was made up of Lucas himself, the three practice nurses, three receptionists, an Age Concern representative, Brenda the cleaner, and a midwife and a district nurse who at the time of his arrival were both out on the district.

  By the end of the day the older staff members were wanting to mother the new doctor and the younger ones were thinking along different lines but were just as impressed, with the exception of Jenna, who had eyes only for one man and it wasn’t Leo.

  Fortunately there were not many patients booked in for the heart clinic in the afternoon and as Jenna did any ECGs that Lucas required and made sure that results from other tests he’d requested were on his desk as each patient was shown into his consulting room, the afternoon passed smoothly enough, but she couldn’t help thinking again that the top cardiovascular surgeon from Hunters Hill should be back where he belonged.

  Yet each time the thought came, the scar across his chest would come to mind, along with a vision of the woman who had been in his life long before she’d appeared on the scene.

  The new doctor had been familiarising himself with the layout of the practice while they’d been occupied and settling himself into the consulting room that would be his, and when it was time for the late afternoon surgery he and Lucas took it between them.

  There’d been a phone call from Ethan to ask if Leo Fenchurch had arrived and he’d been informed that he had. When Lucas had enquired how things were at his end, it sounded as if they weren’t any better, and Jenna wondered what could have gone wrong between the good-natured head of the practice and his lovely French wife.

  It was time to go. Most of the staff had gone and, on the point of leaving herself, Jenna asked the newcomer, ‘How has your first day gone, Dr Fenchurch?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘This place is something else. I’m going to like Bluebell Cove. If I don’t fall asleep over my evening meal I shall have a stroll down to the beach and investigate the pub, in that order. What do you do with your evenings, Nurse Balfour?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ she told him laughingly. ‘And my name is Jenna.’

  At that moment Lucas appeared, ready to lock up for the night, and when he saw her smiling and relaxed with the new doctor, he thought grimly that this was the kind of guy who would make her happy, a carefree, easygoing type, not much unlike Ronnie the lifeguard, and totally different from himself, with his scarred body and shattered faith in the decency of others.

  When Jenna arrived home her mother’s first words were, ‘What is the new doctor like?’ Her daughter had told her that there was to be another new face at the surgery and anything of that nature was of interest to her.

  ‘Bright and breezy, free and easy,’ she replied. ‘And already in love with Bluebell Cove.’

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s staying at Meredith’s and hasn’t brought anyone with him as far as I know.’

  ‘What does Dr Devereux think of him?’

  Jenna was smiling. ‘I don’t know. He isn’t likely to confide in me, is he? I’m another newcomer and a part-time employee at that. Lucas Devereux is at the top of the hierarchy and I’m at the bottom.’

  ‘Yes, but you are a Balfour.’

  She took her mother’s swollen hand in hers and said gently, ‘The only Balfour that mattered was you…and you won’t ever be forgotten.’

  Her father, who had just come in from the garden, had heard what she’d said and commented, ‘Jenna is right, my dear, you won’t be forgotten.’

  ‘Not by my patients maybe,’ she said wryly, ‘but what about the two of you who so often had to take second place?’

  ‘We’ve coped, haven’t we?’ he said, turning to his daughter, and with the memory coming to mind of how he had once said that some day he would explain why her mother had always been so driven by her vocation, Jenna went to start preparing the evening meal with the intention of reminding him of that promise before the night was over.

  The opportunity came when they were in the kitchen together, clearing away after the meal, and her mother was in the sitting room watching television. She said, ‘You never did tell me why Mum was so obsessed with the practice.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Do you want to hear it now?’ he said, and she nodded.

  ‘Her father’s lifelong ambition was to be a doctor, but he came from a large family. There was never any money for that sort of thing and by the time there was he was too old to contemplate it.

  ‘So he transferred his dream onto your mother. Was determined to realise it through her abilities, and every penny he had was swallowed up in sending her to medical school. He died on the day she got her degree, but not before he’d heard her promise that she would never let him down, that her career would come before everything else in her life, and as we both know she kept her word.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’ she asked tearfully.

  ‘She wouldn’t let me. It is only of late that she has admitted to herself that he asked too much of her.’

  There was to be a meeting in the community centre later in the evening about the forthcoming Harvest of the Sea festival, which was to take place on the first Sunday in September, in two weeks’ time.

  The harbourmaster would be there with the various helpers, along with those who would be taking part, and when Jenna arrived there was a general feeling of anticipation amongst them.

  The sheds would be cleaned the night before the ceremony and the walls draped with fishnets. Shells and other sea ornaments, lobster pots and seaweed would be on display around a small stage that would have been erected for the sea queen and her retinue, who would appear as the first hymn was being announced by the vicar.

  It was always the same one, the age-old words asking for a blessing and a safe return for those whose livelihoods depended on the sea.

  When the service was over the sea queen and her attendants would proceed slowly down a centre aisle and once they had left those present would make their way to the community centre where fish and chips would be served.

  The Harvest of the Sea brought many visitors to Bluebell Cove and it was always late at night before it settled back into its usual tranquillity.

  When the meeting was over and it had been established that the sea queen and her retinue would indeed be wearing the straw hats and aprons in complete contrast to last year’s performers who had slithered along as ethereal-looking mermaids, Jenna began to walk home beneath gathering thunderclouds. Within minutes jagged flashes of lightning were zig-zagging across the sky, followed almost immediately by torrential rain.

  There were properties dotted along most of the road that led to the headland but there was nowhere nearby to shelter at that particular moment. Within minutes she was drenched and when a car passed her and then stopped a few feet away she prayed that it might be someone she knew.

  It was, and not only that, it was the one person she wanted to see. Lucas opened the door and ran towards her as another stroke of lightning set a tree in a nearby field on fire.

  ‘Come on!’ he cried above the noise of the elements. ‘Let’s get out of this.’ He grabbed her hand and within seconds they were in the car and he was turning it round and heading back to the village.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, with hair soaked and rivulets of rain running down her face.

  ‘Away from that lot,’ he said grimly. ‘The worst of the storm is in the direction that you were going and you saw what it did to that tree, didn’t you?’

  She nodded, her teeth beginning to chatter as the dress she was wearing clung to her like an extra skin.

  Lucas was pulling up outside The Old Chart House and said, ‘In you go. You need a hot toddy and some dry clothes. This is some storm!’

  ‘We never do things by halves on the coast,’ she told him, managing a shaky smile.

  ‘Is that a promise or a threat?’ he asked dryly as he hurried her inside.

&n
bsp; It was an hour later and the storm was still raging. Jenna had phoned home to let her parents know she was all right and was sheltering at Dr Devereux’s house. ‘I’ll be with you as soon as it slackens off,’ she’d told her father as she’d sat sipping the hot toddy that Lucas had promised her.

  He’d found her a robe from somewhere to put on while her clothes dried, an expensive satin creation, and it wasn’t hard to guess who it belonged to. It went against the grain having to wear it, but the alternative was sitting around in her underwear until her dress was dry, and if ever she took her clothes off for Lucas it wasn’t going to be because she’d got soaked in a downpour. So the long satin number that swept the floor when she stood up would have to suffice.

  She could smell perfume on it, lingering and musky, equally as exotic as the garment, and it didn’t make her feel any better when Lucas appeared with a hot-water bottle.

  ‘I’ve switched the heating on,’ he told her, ‘but it does take a little while to come through.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ she mumbled, and he laughed.

  ‘What did you expect me to do? Hang you out on the washing line to dry?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she said huffily, ‘but you must realise that I’m at a disadvantage wearing another woman’s robe and looking like a drowned rat.’

  He was still amused. ‘Take comfort in knowing that you look much better in it than she did, and never having seen a drowned rat I can’t comment on that. But your dress will soon be dry and then you can make your escape. It’s in the dryer.’

  There wasn’t much she could say to that so she stared into space and tried to look dignified. Lucas disappeared again and a while later he brought her the dress dried and ironed, and it seemed unreal that someone of his standing should be filling hot-water bottles for her and drying her clothes.

  She’d discovered that he wasn’t the type to pull rank, but this was going the extra mile, or was it because finding her in the storm and bringing her back to The Old Chart House had livened up a dull evening for him? With those sorts of questions in mind she said impulsively, ‘Are you lonely, Lucas?’