Wedding Bells For The Village Nurse

It had taken just a matter of minutes to make herself a coffee and a sandwich, then she went upstairs to unpack. As she crossed the landing the door of her parents’ bedroom was open and they were all there, the aids to mobility that were the lifesavers of those who had very little of it.

How could it all have changed so suddenly? she thought dejectedly. Her mother had always seemed invincible, nothing ever pierced her armour of capability, but something had, a creeping painful illness that was attacking her freedom of movement and the amazing energy she’d always had.

In her own room, overlooking rocky cliffs that descended to the seashore, there was comfort to be had. It was exactly as she’d left it, with her surfboard propped up in the corner, and as she stroked it lovingly it seemed to be just the thing to take away the hurt of arriving to an empty house with so much worry on her mind.

A summer sun was beating down and the sea was so blue she gave in to temptation. Deciding there was no need for a wetsuit, she fished out a bikini and once she’d changed into it tucked a towel under her arm. With sandals on her feet she picked up the surfboard and after locking the door behind her began to walk down the road that led to the beach.

She usually clambered over the rocks as a more speedy way of descending but today, wanting to savour every moment of her return, she used the slower and more sedate pathway.

‘Hi, Jenna, where’ve you been?’ a male voice cried as she hit the beach. ‘Haven’t seen you in ages.’

It was Ronnie, one of the lifeguards out on patrol, and as he came loping across she laughed up at him, the reason for her being there forgotten in the pleasure of the moment.

He was a muscular thirty-six-year-old, married with a wife and children he adored, living in a cottage at the other side of the bay, and always had a cheery greeting for Dr Balfour’s daughter when she came surfing.

‘I’ve been taking some time out,’ she told him, ‘and am now back for good.’

‘Great!’ he enthused. ‘We’ve been short of glamour on the beach since you went.’

‘Yes, I’ll bet,’ she joked, ‘and where is everyone on a sunny day in the height of the holiday season?’

She’d seen a few surfers in the water when she’d been looking through the window of the taxi, but now there was only one and he was on the point of coming out, carrying his board as he strode towards them.

‘They’ve all gone to the opening of a new theme park not far away,’ he replied, ‘or disappeared earlier on fishing trips.’

Out of the corner of her eye Jenna saw that the man who had just come striding out of the surf had stopped beside a folded towel and was now drying himself briskly. As she observed him she thought with a body like that he put Ronnie’s bronzed biceps in the shade.

He was half-turned away from them and she registered a thatch of dark hair, flat and glistening wet against his head, and hands with long supple fingers holding the towel. The vivid scar that she’d noticed across his chest as he’d moved in their direction was no longer visible, but there had been time for her nurse’s practised eye to observe that it was red and jagged as if from a recent injury.

‘Not good about your ma, is it?’ Ronnie was saying sympathetically.

‘No,’ she replied glumly, taking her glance off the man with the scar and feeling that until she’d seen her mother for herself she didn’t want to talk about it.

‘Cheer up, Jenna,’ the amiable lifeguard said, sensing a drop in spirits. ‘How about a kiss to celebrate your return?’

She was smiling again. Ronnie was a tease. ‘You’ll have to get down on your knees and beg,’ she told him.

He obeyed with a bellow of laughter and, planting a butterfly kiss on the top of his head, Jenna left him there and began to move towards the water.

The solitary surfer had finished drying himself and as he turned to pick up his board they almost collided as they came face to face.

‘Sorry,’ he said abruptly.

‘It’s OK,’ she told him easily, meeting the dark hazel gaze that was also part of the package with a sudden feeling of breathlessness and weakness of the knees.

He would be a tourist, she could bet on it, she was deciding, while at the same time registering that there was no responding cordiality in his expression. So with that thought in mind she sidestepped him and proceeded towards a joyful reunion with the pounding Atlantic breakers.

When she turned he’d gone and so had Ronnie. She had the beach to herself and in a moment of wild joy Jenna walked into the oncoming tide with surfboard at the ready.

She could have stayed there for ever, but a glance at her watch said that soon her parents would be back and the moment she was dreading would be upon her.

Had the young blonde in the bikini been the Balfours’ prodigal daughter? Lucas Devereux pondered as, with feet slapping wetly against the stone of an old causeway, he walked to where he’d parked his car.

He’d heard the lifeguard greet her and the name had fitted, as had the flippancy she’d displayed. He’d wondered a few times how a daughter could leave her mother in the state that she had been in during her last months as head of the practice and flounce off to do her own thing.

Keith had been there for Barbara, of course, and he was much easier to get on with than his wife. She was a very strong character, while all her husband asked for was peace, and from what he’d heard the man didn’t get much of that.

They’d met the other day in the post office and the retired solicitor had told him that their daughter was coming home, that it was going to be a surprise for her ailing mother, and he would be obliged if Lucas didn’t mention it to anyone else.

He’d replied grimly that being involved in the affairs of others was not his forte, far from it, and that no one was going to get to know of Jenna Balfour’s return from him. No doubt if it had been her on the beach they would find out soon enough. In the close community of Bluebell Cove news got around faster than the speed of light.

As he drove inland from the beach the whitewashed wall of The Tides practice loomed up in front of him with its tubs of summer flowers at the entrance and a long wooden bench for those who preferred to wait their turn outside—weather permitting.

When he’d been discharged from the hospital where he’d been employed ever since qualifying and had ended up as a patient after an incident that had almost cost him his life, he had been persuaded by his friend Ethan Lomax to move into community health care work for a while in a coastal suburb of Devon that was blessed with golden sands and backed on to fertile countryside.

On doing so, he had rented a property called The Old Chart House just a few doors away from the surgery and it was there that he was heading with his expression just as sombre as it had been earlier when he’d seen the girl that he’d surmised might be the Balfours’ daughter.

Just as that family were going through a sticky patch, so was he, and the only person who knew about that was Ethan, who had taken over as senior partner in the local practice when the redoubtable Barbara had been forced to let someone else take the reins.

His friend had visited him in hospital a few times after the incident that had nearly killed him and had made him feel like turning his back on medicine for ever. He’d been performing a routine operation, serious enough but not normally life threatening, when the patient, a woman in her thirties, had gone into shock and died almost immediately on the operating table. There had been no response to resuscitation and he’d had the unpleasant task of telling her husband the tragic news.

The man had gone crazy, his outrage outweighing his grief, and as Lucas was turning away he’d lunged at him with a knife that he’d produced from somewhere and slashed him across the chest. The thin hospital gown he had been wearing had been no protection and the wound was life threatening.

Afterwards, on several of his visits, Ethan had mentioned casually that there could be a place for him here in Bluebell Cove if he so desired, in quieter, less stressful surroundings than those of a big hospital.

At the time he hadn’t been even remotely interested. The future had loomed like a black abyss with no sense or reason in it. But as his body had slowly healed he had accepted grimly that surgeons at the hospital where he saved lives had given him back his, and he was going to have to drag himself up out of the black void.

In the end he’d listened to what Ethan had to say with regard to life in a place like Bluebell Cove being lived at a slower pace, and his friend’s comment that surgeons of his standing were few and far between when he’d said he was thinking of giving up medicine.

He’d taken indefinite leave from the hospital in the nearby town where he’d been the top cardiovascular surgeon for the past five years and so far it was working out all right because he had fallen completely under the spell of Bluebell Cove. So much so that he was in the process of buying The Old Chart House and turning part of it into a private heart clinic which would fill the time when he wasn’t helping out at the surgery. But the nightmare that had brought him there still tormented him in the long hours of the night and on awakening.

On the outside he still gave off an aura of cool competence, but underneath there was hurt and disillusion and the fear that he would never again be the man who had always taken life by the horns, had known where he was going, what he was aiming for—that sort of confidence was now in short supply.

The one thing that his friend hadn’t taken it upon himself to offer advice on was Lucas’s broken engagement to Philippa Carswell, who had worked with him in the cardiac unit at Hunters Hill Hospital.

It had occurred just before the attack on him and he’d never mentioned it since, but there’d been a drawn, pinched look about him afterwards. At the time it had been thought by some that the broken engagement had affected his work and had led to the death of the patient on the operating table which had triggered off the savage attack on the hospital’s top heart man.

But while Lucas had been fighting for his life enquiries had shown that as usual his work had been faultless, and that the demise of the woman undergoing heart surgery had been due to a massive embolism that had blocked the main pulmonary artery and caused sudden death.

Jenna was framed in the open doorway as her father helped her mother slowly and painfully out of the car. She wanted to run to her and hold her close, but caution was holding her back. They’d parted on bad terms, for one thing, and for another it was rare for her mother to be at a disadvantage in a situation. She doubted she would take kindly to this one—a gentle approach was called for.

When Barbara straightened up on the drive supported by the two sticks that Jenna’s father had mentioned, she looked up and saw her, and Jenna felt her throat go dry as the moment took hold of the three of them.

Her mother’s face was slack with surprise and the colour was draining from it as she said, ‘Jenna! Where have you come from?’

‘Just across the Channel, Mum,’ she said softly as she walked towards her.

‘Why didn’t you let me know what was happening to you, for goodness’ sake? I would never have gone if I’d known.’