Summer Seaside Wedding (6 page)

‘Yes, that is what I am, and would prefer a house with central heating.’

They were almost home and Leo was about to deliver a body blow. He was going to explain that he hadn’t been able to resist spending the afternoon and early evening with her, but now it had to stop because he felt he wasn’t being fair in monopolising her, as he had been from the day of her arrival in the village.

It wasn’t the truth, of course. If the past wasn’t still tugging at him, he would have no reason to back away from her and would ‘monopolise’ her to his heart’s content.

But he’d never overcome the aching void inside him because after Delphine he didn’t trust himself to be able to carry through the demands of complete commitment to another woman.

He wasn’t sure how Amelie would react when he’d said what he had to say. She was not predictable, but he was soon going to find out. When they pulled up outside her temporary residence he said gravely, ‘Can I come in for a moment?’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said brightly, with the pleasure of the time they’d just spent together coming through in her smile.

‘Can I get you a drink?’ she asked when they were facing each other in the sitting room.

He shook his head. ‘No, thanks. I will say what I have to say and then I’ll go.’

Her eyes widened and she said with a shaky laugh, ‘That sounds ominous. What is it that I have done?’

You’ve changed my life, was the reply he would like to have had for her, but it would hardly fit in with what he’d been grimly rehearsing.

He watched the colour drain from her face as he began to speak in what he hoped was a voice of logical calmness. When he’d finished she said with quiet dignity, ‘You have just made something that was lighthearted and casual seem as nothing. I have felt sometimes that you found me too much in your face. It was why you suggested I could occupy my evenings down on the beach, wasn’t it? As to your comment about monopolising me, I don’t hear you asking how I feel about that, if I liked it or not. It’s more a matter of you offloading me, isn’t it, Leo? I will bear in mind what you have said, and now will you please go.’

He took a step towards her and with her voice rising she said, ‘Do not come near me, Leo. All my pleasure at being in your country is due to you and the practice, but mostly to you. Now it has gone and I have done nothing wrong that I am aware of.

‘I will not repay Dr Lomax, far away in France, for his kindness by breaking my contract with the Tides surgery. But the moment it is complete I will be gone.’

He had listened in silence to what she had to say, the same as
she
had done while
he
had been saying
his
piece, and now he pointed himself towards the door and did as she’d asked, wanting to kick himself for not telling her about Delphine.

When he’d gone she walked slowly up the stairs and threw herself down on the bed. White-faced and tearless, she gazed up at the ceiling.

You are the unwanted one again, she told herself, and don’t blame Leo. He has been merely doing the honours on behalf of the practice and now wants to end it so that he can get on with his own life again, so don’t take offence.

Yet this time she didn’t feel prepared to turn the other cheek. She’d done no wrong in being attracted to a man who had shown her nothing but kindness and was now wearying of the task he had set himself. The coming Monday morning at the practice was taking on the shape of an ordeal instead of the pleasurable time she’d been looking forward to.

In the apartment across the way Leo’s thoughts were no happier.

He’d already suggested to Harry that Amelie should do the easiest of the home visits on her own as from Monday. So when she was informed of the arrangement she was going to see it as a follow-up to today’s catastrophic clearing of the air, which would make everything worse between them.

What she’d said kept going through his mind. That he’d turned a relationship that had been light-hearted and casual into nothing. It had been a bit strong but he’d got the gist of it, and admitted he deserved top marks for the effort he’d put into spoiling it.

He’d even found her an evening job down on the beach to keep them apart, which she’d referred to coldly.
Yet he had known he wouldn’t be able to keep away from her even then. She was the best thing that had happened to him in years, but because he couldn’t forget the past he’d spoilt what they’d had.

She’d already been hurt by lover boy across the Channel, and been cursed with parents who were never there for her. He longed to make up for those things, but whether
he
would ever be the right one for Amelie was another matter.

He wasn’t wrong about her reaction when Harry said first thing on Monday morning, ‘You are on your own today with the home visits, Amelie. We’re passing on to you the ones that should be the least traumatic. Although one can never be sure of that. Some of the calls we receive asking for a visit don’t describe clearly enough the seriousness of the problem. Anyway, see how you get on. If you come across anything you can’t handle, give one of us a ring.’

She managed a smile that was a cover-up for what she was really thinking, which was that Leo had to be behind her suddenly being seen as ready to work on her own.

As if Harry had read her mind he said, ‘Having had you with him while he was doing house calls, Leo feels that you are ready to go solo.’

There had been no sign of him so far and she said casually, ‘Where is Leo, Dr Balfour? I haven’t seen him since I arrived.’

‘Went out on an urgent call at eight o’clock and
isn’t back yet,’ he said briefly, and went to sort out his own day.

By the time Leo returned, Amelie was already dealing with her allocation of those in the waiting room, and as the morning progressed there was no time to dwell on anything but the problems of patients who had come for help and relief from the failings of the body.

Jonah Trelfa was one of those. A strapping sixty-year-old farmer with snow-white hair and a ruddy complexion, he’d come with chest pains and breathlessness, which had set alarm bells ringing.

Amelie had worked in a cardiac unit in the French hospital that she’d left in so much haste to catch her flight to the UK, and knew the signs of a heart problem.

‘Is it just indigestion, Doctor?’ he asked when she’d finished examining him, almost pleading for a reprieve.

‘I don’t think so, Mr Trelfa,’ she told him gently. ‘Your heart is not behaving itself at the present time and needs sorting. If you would like to come with me to the nurses’ room they will do an ECG and we’ll take it from there.’

The results indicated that atrial fibrillation was present and before she sent for an ambulance Amelie went to seek out one of the other doctors to confirm that she was doing the right thing.

Harry was with a patient but Leo had just returned from what had turned out to be a lengthy house call, and as their glances met she was relieved that their first meeting after the putdown of Sunday night
should be about the needs of someone else rather than their own.

When she’d explained about Jonah’s ECG she said, ‘Could you spare a moment to examine him first before I summon an ambulance?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he replied, and when he’d done as she asked said, ‘Send Mr Trelfa to the cardiac unit straight away. There are worse heart defects than atrial fibrillation, but no GP should hesitate to send a patient with that kind of problem to be checked out.’

As he turned to go he asked in a low voice, ‘Everything all right?’

‘Yes. Fine. Just doing my job
and
taking life as it comes,’ she told him lightly, then closed the door behind him and gave her attention to Jonah, who needed her more than Leo did. But the feeling that life in Bluebell Cove had lost its sparkle was still very much in her mind.

She’d been totally content since arriving there with a place in the practice waiting for her, and with Leo, fantastic Leo, kind and supportive all the time. But now he wanted to opt out of their brief enchanted relationship for reasons that
he
understood…and
she
didn’t.

By the time Jonah had departed in the ambulance to Hunter’s Hill Hospital, exhibiting a stoic calm for someone with newly diagnosed heart disease, Leo was closeted with his own patients and the morning progressed in the Tides Practice until it was time for a quick bite and then off into coast and countryside to visit the sick and suffering. So far the only time they had spoken had been the brief exchange of words about a patient.

That was about to change. When Amelie went out onto the forecourt of the practice to acquaint herself with the car that had been provided for her, Leo was on the point of leaving but stopped when he saw her. Winding down the car window, he asked, ‘So are you au fait with the arrangements for today, Amelie?’

‘And what arrangements would they be?’ she asked coolly.

‘Doing the home visits on your own.’

‘Yes. I’m “au fait” with most things’, she told him. ‘I’ll phone if there is anything I am not sure of.’

‘Of course,’ was the reply, ‘but we
are
talking about the practice.’

‘Exactly,’ she agreed, and settled herself behind the wheel of the hire car with a determination that had a message of its own.

Her first call was at the home of a smart middle-aged woman called Beverley McBride, who was much involved in village affairs, but not on this occasion.

A week ago she had been operated on for the removal of her gall bladder by keyhole surgery and of the three incisions made in her chest and stomach, two were healing well, but the third was not.

It had the redness of inflammation with a blueish tinge to it and Amelie prescribed antibiotics, along with a warning that if there was no improvement in a couple of days to contact the practice immediately.

‘I’m surprised you didn’t go back to the hospital as that is the place where you could have caught the infection,’ she said when the patient was ready for off.

‘Yes, I know,’ Beverley agreed, ‘but when I was
discharged they said if I had any problems I must see my GP.’

‘Fair enough,’ Amelie replied, unaware that she would be seeing Beverley McBride again very soon.

Her next call was a routine one at the moment. A daily visit to yet another middle-aged woman who had just had a bone from a bone bank fitted in her hip socket in place of her own, which had crumbled away, and was being given regular injections in the stomach to stop infection at such a delicate stage of her recovery.

It was all very exciting to be working on her own instead of being the onlooker that she’d been when out on the district with Leo, but it didn’t take away the hurt she’d been carrying around with her ever since the previous night.

Having accomplished all the visits she’d been given to do, Amelie was driving back to the surgery when she was surprised to see Leo parked at the side of the road in the process of changing a flat tyre. When she would have driven past, he flagged her down.

When they’d separated outside the surgery and he’d driven off in the opposite direction from her, he’d thought so much for last night’s diplomacy—a bull in a china shop would have been less clumsy.

He must have been insane to be prepared to cancel out their attraction to each other because of what had happened long ago, but its effect on him was still there in the form of always avoiding any kind of commitment with the opposite sex, and he’d felt that was where they were heading.

He’d never given much thought over the years to
what those he met saw him as, had been carefree and popular wherever he’d gone, but had always been on his guard.

Then along had come Amelie, younger than him and on her own due to the selfishness of others. He’d been jolted out of the life he’d led and was having to take a long, hard look at himself.

He supposed meeting her might not have led to so much soul-searching if he hadn’t the example of Harry and Phoebe’s love for each other always in front of him, along with the other man’s comments about what he saw as Leo’s empty life, a situation that would have lingered on if he hadn’t met Amelie.

So what had he done? He’d called a halt to the wonderful thing that had been happening between them before it had had a chance to take hold because he was discovering that her happiness was very important to him.

For her to be hurt again by him would be unthinkable if he couldn’t forget Delphine, so he’d been prepared to end it, hadn’t slept a wink afterwards, and the result was she hadn’t been prepared to stop on seeing him there by the roadside until he’d waved her down.

He wasn’t to know that the desire to pull in beside him had been there but not the certainty that it was the right thing to do after what he’d said the night before, so she would have driven on if he hadn’t signalled for her to stop.

When she went to stand beside him in a lay-by at the road edge, with a reluctance that didn’t go unobserved, he was almost done and ready to be off, but looking
down at his hands, which were decidedly oily, it seemed as if it was the right moment to say, ‘I flagged you down to ask if you have any wipes with you to get my hands clean. I usually have some in the glove compartment but must have run out.’

He’d been so desperate to have a moment alone with her that he’d come up with a trite excuse to get her to stop, and as she fished a packed out of her bag and handed it to him he thought that it had been all he could think of at that moment, and hoped that in the near future Amelie would have no reason to look in the place he’d described as being empty of them.

As he wiped the grime off his hands the silence she was hiding behind continued, and wanting to end it he asked, ‘So how has it gone, doing the rounds on your own?’

She spoke at last and her voice sounded stiff and formal. ‘All right, thank you. Dr Balfour explained it was on your advice that I was doing some of the rounds on my own, and I felt quite sure that it was all part and parcel of last night’s dumping.’

‘That’s an ugly word. I hate it.’

‘But you don’t hate what it stands for. You’d already put your plans into motion for getting rid of me with regard to our shared visits to the patients, and followed it up by preaching the gospel according to you. But as I’m used to the role of cast-off, it wasn’t such a shock. Though there is one thing that puzzles me, Leo.’