‘Yes, but that leaves this place…’ Elizabeth said, meeting her eye levelly – they both knew the score. Her husband had left a thriving practice behind him and a huge house, but both were on the brink of ruin. He had also left gambling debts that would swallow any cash made on the sale of either and so Elizabeth was in many ways as trapped now as she’d been when he was alive. ‘That’s why I wasn’t sure if I should mention it, just yet. You have so much already on your plate,’ she said softly.
‘I suppose I have,’ Lucy said, ‘but all the same, that shouldn’t stop you from moving forward with your life. Remember, me being here, it was always only going to be temporary.’ That was the truth; it was what she’d signed up for. She had come here for at most two weeks to keep the surgery moving until a locum could be found to slip into the role in a more permanent capacity. Those two weeks had stretched, so soon she would be here almost three months – how on earth had that happened?
‘I suppose, with Jo and all…’ Elizabeth smiled a little sadly. ‘Well, all that you’ve done here… you’ve really done far more than I ever expected. You’ve transformed the whole practice.’ She shrugged. ‘I thought maybe you’d changed your mind.’
‘Oh dear,’ Lucy said. ‘Honestly, I can’t think about anything past Mum and Niall at the moment.’ They were everything to her. They far outweighed any desire to travel or even the notion of heading back to her old job in the real world. ‘Look, at least now you can go to an auctioneer, show them the house, take their advice, and see how it would stack up against what Eric owed.’
‘Yes, I’ll have to make an appointment,’ Elizabeth said faintly.
‘You know this place…’ Lucy said. ‘The surgery, you don’t have to sell it with the house. It’s a separate building entirely, if you block off that one connecting door.’
She looked at Lucy now. The idea of selling on the practice seemed a bit crazy to her. It was being here, meeting people, having some kind of purpose that had really brought Elizabeth out of herself. Why on earth would she want to turn her back on that?
‘I don’t really want to cut my ties with this place,’ Elizabeth said as if she’d been reading her thoughts, but then she lowered her voice. ‘You know, even if I sell the house, big and grand as it is, anyone buying it is going to have to put a new roof on it and do major work inside with replacing the electrics and looking at how the whole house is heated. It’s like an ice box in winter time… in some ways, all I’m selling is an address, a view and maybe, at most, original period details.’ She smiled sadly at that. ‘The thing is, we both know I have to clear off Eric’s debts first and I’ll be lucky to make enough from the sale of the house to do that. Prices down here aren’t what they are in Dublin. If this house was in the city, I could probably set myself up in Monte Carlo for the rest of my days with what it would make.’
They both laughed at that, but of course, she was right: Dublin prices were rocket high. If Lucy sold her own it would probably bring in enough to buy out Elizabeth entirely and leave her with a tidy profit after clearing Eric’s debts. By comparison to the east coast rush to market, houses down in Ballycove had not been bitten by the property madness this time round. ‘At the same time, there’s something liberating in knowing that I can leave the house behind, you know?’
‘Well, I hope that the house you set your heart on comes up at exactly the right time then for you,’ Lucy said softly.
‘Let’s hope so.’ Elizabeth began to clear away their dishes.
‘It’ll be a sign.’ Lucy didn’t really believe in all that angel or sign nonsense. She’d seen too much of what could not easily be explained by the hand of goodwill or a benevolent God who always managed to turn things out for the best. Children’s oncology wards tended to knock any of those notions from you, early on in medicine. ‘You don’t want to go jumping in and selling the practice without giving it a good bit of thought though. I mean, it’s a job for you at the moment and…’ She broke off. ‘You’re too young to settle into an early retirement at the back end of the village.’
‘That’s very nice of you indeed, but we both know, the way Eric has left me financially, I may not have the luxury of choosing.’
The following week was probably the longest Lucy had ever put in since she’d arrived in Ballycove. It was not that the work was any harder than usual or that she didn’t enjoy it, rather it was that constant background worry of Jo in her mind. Was she making the right choice by not having chemotherapy? The consultant had explained a week earlier that first they could attempt to shrink the cancer, buy them back a little time. This would mean heavy blasts for two weekly sessions over the next four weeks. If at the end of this, the cancer had been affected in the way they hoped, they would review her and make a plan from there.