style="font-size:15px;"> ‘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
