Cynthia Smart's Midwife Crisis by Liz Davies

Author:Liz Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-17T22:02:36+00:00

Chapter 22

‘You’ll stay for lunch, won’t you?’ Maggie asked Max when he came to pick Cynthia up the following morning. It seemed to have become something of a mantra for her. ‘I’m cooking roast beef.’

Is that why her mum had shoved such a large joint into the oven earlier? Cynthia had naively assumed it was because her mum liked to feed half of the village – she always took a Sunday lunch around to Mr Williams next door – but it appeared her sneaky mum was already plotting to persuade Max to stay a while.

‘He can’t, Mum, he’s got places to be, people to see,’ Cynthia said, feeling awful about lying but she wasn’t up to sitting through another meal with the pair of them. Not so soon – give it a couple of weeks and she might have recovered from the previous ordeal.

‘That’s a shame – I didn’t get to show you Cynthia’s baby photos.’

‘It was good to see you, Mum,’ she butted in. ‘I’ll visit again soon, I promise.’ She gave her mother a quick hug and ushered a bemused Max out of the door.

‘Nice to see you again, Maggie. I can pop in another time to see those photos. I’m often passing, so it’s easy to call in.’

‘You wouldn’t dare,’ Cynthia hissed.

‘Watch me,’ Max said out of the corner of his mouth.

Maggie trotted behind them down the path and, as Cynthia opened the car door, her mother whispered in the loudest voice possible, ‘Remember what I said about the way he looks at you,’ then stepped back with a huge smirk on her face.

‘What was all that about?’ Max wanted to know was they drove off.

‘Nothing. She was talking about next door’s dog,’ she improvised.

‘Eh?’

‘You had to be there.’

The journey was mostly motorway and not very inspiring, but once they’d left the dual carriageway they were soon travelling down narrow leafy lanes with woodland either side, interspersed with the occasional open field. Cynthia felt as though she was in a different world.

After driving through a particularly dense forested area, she said, ‘This is what I imagined the New Forest to be.’

‘Haven’t you been here before?’

‘Not that I can remember. With the sea so close, we tended to go there instead. That’s where Mum and I went yesterday. We had a pleasant stroll along the beach.’

‘I think your mum is great.’

‘Believe me, the feeling is mutual. She was all over you like a rash.’

Max chuckled. ‘I tend to have that effect on women of a certain age.’ He was obviously joking, and Cynthia wondered if he knew just how devilishly handsome he was. Surely he couldn’t have got to forty-five and not realised it?

‘Here we are,’ he announced, taking a sharp left through a set of open, rickety gates and easing the car down a narrow, tarmacked track which was only wide enough for one vehicle at a time.

‘Oh, my word, it’s divine,’ she cried as the trees opened up to reveal several stone buildings laid out in an open-sided rectangle.

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