Escape to Happiness

by Mary Whistler

  She had never handled such a big car before, and the Bentley was long and sleek and beautiful. It was silvery grey, like the wings of a moth, and when she first saw it in the garage where she was instructed to pick it up she wondered how she was ever going to manoeuvre it out of such a confined space.

  The garage attendant at the block of exclusive flats looked at her somewhat curiously. Whether or not he read the newspapers Rose did not know, but apparently he was not unaccustomed to Mr. Wakeford allowing a friend to borrow one of his cars, and since Rose had a written authority from the owner himself there was no reason why the attendant should prove unhelpful.

  He saw Rose into the driving seat, and directed her past several other gleaming cars, then touched the peak of his cap ere she became one with the stream of nighttime traffic. The harsh glare of the overhead lights confused her at first, but once she had picked up Wakeford and they were heading for the outer suburbs her confidence returned. She had always enjoyed driving, and the Bentley responded magnificently ... almost too magnificently until she had learned to assess its potentialities. And there was a strange pleasure in sitting enthroned in so much comfort, behind a glittering wheel, with a long line of streamlined bonnet extending in front of her.

  Once the comparative darkness of the outer suburbs was left behind, and the real darkness of the open countryside showed up the broad beam of their headlights, Rose felt she could sit back comfortably in her seat and feel almost relaxed. Beside her Wakeford watched her in silence for several miles, only occasionally issuing an instruction, or recommending her to bear left, or handle her gears with a little more finesse; and at last he pronounced his opinion that she was doing very well, and fell into a quiet but very deep sleep at her elbow.

  After that Rose felt more than ever that this was something quite unreal, and as mile after mile unfolded, and the slight haziness of an autumn night cleared away to reveal the stars and the low-hanging disc of a late-rising moon, a peculiar sensation of excitement took possession of her. It was more like a slightly feverish exhilaration, for they were heading towards the sea, and they were travelling towards the west, and only yesterday she had yearned for a breath of sea air, and the thought of the open spaces had quickened her pulses. Now her pulses leapt and danced at the spectacle of moonlight on dark woods, and sleeping fields and silent villages had a magic under the stars that was unlike any magic she had known before. Tall church towers were fingers pointing to the stars, and the odd light that flickered here and there was a fairy light, and not just a lantern glowing in a bam, or an electric bulb in a cottage window.

  They sped past village greens and duckponds and ancient inn signs, and at one o’clock in the morning Guy Wakeford was still sleeping. Rose glanced sideways at him occasionally, and she realized that he was probably mentally and emotionally, as well as physically, exhausted. His dark head made a dark blur against the silver-grey upholstery, and when a moonbeam touched him he looked startlingly pale. The shapely mouth was drawn at the corners, the firm chin rested on his Old Etonian tie. His eyelashes were as thick and black as a woman’s ... perhaps thicker and blacker, for there was a wiry quality about them, as if they were endowed with a vitality of their own.

  When they lifted suddenly, and he stared almost dreamily about him, Rose had her eyes glued to the road ahead. She was a small figure behind the wheel, and his eyes swung round to her and stayed there.

  “Well, fair head, you’re doing very well,” he said.

  Rose pushed a strand of the fair hair out of her eyes, and turned to look at him. She didn’t forget to slow down the Bentley before she did so.

  “You’ve been sleeping very peacefully,” she said.

  “Leaving you to cope with the business of driving,” he remarked. “Do you find it rather lonely driving through the night?”

  “Without anyone to talk to, yes,” she replied. “In any case, I’ve never done it before.”

  “And you’re only doing it now because I’ve forced you,” he observed composedly. He sat up and peered at a signpost as they passed it. “At least we’re on the right road, and that proves you’re to be trusted. You’ve done exactly what I told you to do, and in another couple of hours we shall be there.”

  “Where?”

  “Within a few miles of our destination. Somewhere where we can have breakfast.”

  “Surely no one will serve us breakfast at four o’clock in the morning?”

  “We can sit in the car and wait for a more reasonable hour,” he told her. “And if you like you can have a sleep. Would you like me to take over the wheel now?”

  But she shook her head.

  “I’m perfectly all right. This is a dream of a car to drive, and as a matter of fact I feel remarkably fresh. But I’d like to know more about our destination, why we’re going there, and what will happen to us when we arrive.”

  “You’ll find all that out when we do arrive,” he replied almost languidly. “Curiosity is such a besetting sin that I prefer not to satisfy yours.”

  “But that’s unreasonable. I have a right to know!”

  “Yes; you have a right to know,” he agreed, and turned his head and studied her. “You’re rather an extraordinary young woman, you know. You could have done quite a lot to make things awkward for me ... yelled for help, since I was literally abducting you, or driven straight to a police station and handed me over to the constable in charge. Or perhaps you were aware that I still had this little thing in my pocket,” touching it significantly.

  “You’ve been sleeping for some time,” she reminded him.

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “But it’s just possible I sleep with only one eye closed. However, I never had any intention of hurting you, and you probably knew it, and because you’ve done everything I asked you to do I’ll let you know that the place we’re making for is a house that was left to me by my grandmother, and it’s very close to the sea. You can see the sea from most of the windows, and hear it from every corner of the garden ... That is, when it’s rough. Do you like the sea?” he asked.

  “I’ve always lived near it,” Rose admitted.

  And yet when I came upon you for the first time, you were working late in a dreary London office!”

  “It so happens that nowadays I have to earn my own living,” she replied. She concentrated on the road ahead, bathed in the rich warmth of their headlamps. “What I’m wondering is how do you propose to remain hidden in a house that was left you by your grandmother, and where a good many people must know you?” she asked. “Especially if they read the newspapers!” she added.

  Guy Wakeford smiled, after lighting himself a cigarette, and enquiring whether she would like one, too.

  “That will be absolutely simple,” he told her. “When people know you, and are loyal to you, everything is simple!”

  “I see,” she said.

  After that they were silent for some time, although she knew he was completely wakeful beside her. She had the feeling, too, that he watched her hands on the wheel, every slight turn of her head with its cap of pale, shining hair, the outline of her profile in the starlight. The moon had long since waned, and, but for those remote stars, it would be a very dark world indeed ... almost frighteningly dark when one drove through it with a stranger at one’s elbow, a stranger who was either sunk in dejection or weariness, had a plaster above one cool blue eye, blood on his tie, and had behaved in a most unorthodox fashion!

  Only once, after they fell silent, did he rouse himself and utter something that sounded like a petulant oath.

  “I don’t like to think of you driving all this way without relief. You’d better let me take over, and get some sleep.”

  “No. You’ve got a damaged wrist.”

  “I can manage, if you’re not afraid I’ll land you in the ditch.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll keep going. It’s you who needs all the sleep you can get. I don’t suppose you had much last night.”

  “Not muc
h,” he admitted. “I had too much to think about.” And then he smiled at her, very strangely and sweetly, in the starlight. “You’re a good girl, Rose! I like you,” he said.

  A few hours later they were sharing a breakfast table in a small but comfortable inn. There was a delightful aroma of coffee floating in the air, and also the unmistakable fragrance of mushrooms. The landlord had picked them himself that morning, and his wife had cooked them. Rose decided that never had mushrooms and bacon tasted so good, or toast been so delectably crisp.

  As she helped herself to another slice, buttered it and topped it with preserve, she met the blue eyes of the man who had forced her into this extraordinary position across the table. He too had seemed very hungry when they sat down to the table, and now there was an unmistakable gleam of contentment in his eyes.

  “Ah, Rose,” he murmured, as he offered her his cigarette case, “you have to admit that this is better than London! What would you be doing at this precise moment if I hadn’t rescued you?”

  She glanced at her watch. It was still only a little after seven o’clock.

  “I think I should still be in bed.”

  “At what time do you breakfast?”

  “About a quarter to eight. I leave for the office at half past eight.”

  “On what do you breakfast?”

  She smiled slightly.

  “Sometimes I boil myself an egg. Sometimes not.”

  He glanced at her extremely slender figure - almost boyishly slender, he thought it was - and frowned disapprovingly.

  “And on what, may I ask, do you lunch?”

  She smiled more widely.

  “That rather depends on the state of the exchequer. At the beginning of the week I usually lunch rather well, but sometimes towards the end it’s an apple and a bun. There have been occasions when I’ve had to dispense with the bun, and content myself with the apple.”

  “But, good heavens!” he exclaimed. “That’s positively scandalous! No wonder there’s so little of you! Doesn’t old Mancroft pay you a decent salary?”

  “Oh yes,” she admitted at once, “but I have quite a lot to do with it. Rent to find, and clothes to buy. The food with which I stock my larder - and I don’t suppose you would consider it very well stocked! - bus fares, and so on. You’d be surprised how expensive everything is when you’re living on your own.”

  “Where are your parents?”

  She explained to him that they were both dead.

  He tapped a cigarette on the lid of his choice platinum cigarette case.

  “May I make a guess at how much you earn?”

  She told him that he could if he liked, and when he guessed wildly she laughed with genuine amusement, and when his guess was a little nearer the truth saw him look almost dismayed. It amused her still more to see the consternation that overspread his face, detect the faint horror in his voice as he observed:

  “Why, I spend more than that sometimes on entertaining a friend to lunch! Are you sure you’re not pulling my leg?”

  “Quite sure,” she answered.

  He looked into the limpid, greenish-brown eyes, and realized that she never spoke anything but the truth. There was a kind of simple candour in her face, and an obstinate clinging to standards she believed to be right. No matter the temptation that might one day be hers she would always adhere strictly to a policy of honesty, and she would never confuse the issues. With her everything was clear-cut, and she would never deceive even herself.

  It was a little surprising to a man who had frequently deceived himself, and would probably go on doing so. That a girl who reminded him of insubstantial things like thistledown and gossamer, had a wide-eyed visionary quality about her - as if she believed the world was full of all sorts of exciting possibilities that might one day come her way - an eager mouth that was just a trifle too large for her sensitive face, and a shining wonder of spun-gold hair that was a short, bright aureole exactly suited to her, should wear such an aura of inflexibility, and carry the banner of the incorruptible, was oddly disturbing to him just then.

  He was used to spoilt and fabulous beauties who considered the end always justified the means. With this girl - who was, incidentally, no true beauty, and wore clothes bought off the peg so that they did little or nothing for her - he felt he was up against an unusual experience.

  “It doesn’t seem right that you should be entirely responsible for yourself,” he remarked, frowning suddenly. “You haven’t had to do it for long, have you?”

  “No.” But the utterly unlooked-for collapse of her home life, and the disintegration of so much that she had held dear, were too like an unhealed wound for her to want to dwell upon the subject with him. And, in any case, there was another subject of far more immediate importance that it seemed to her they were deliberately sidestepping, and she returned to it with a look of quiet persistence on her face. “Mr. Wakeford, have you stopped to think at all of the enormity of this thing you’ve done? Doesn’t it strike you that you’ve placed yourself in an intolerable position?”

  “A position is not intolerable if it makes an even worse position more bearable,” he returned.

  She gazed at him helplessly.

  “But how will you explain? There will have to be explanations. You can’t just run away and leave things to explain themselves. And people down here will recognize you, if you have a house near here.”

  “I have a house near here, but I haven’t visited it for years. And the last time I came to this inn I was in such a carefree state of mind I must have looked very different from the way I look now,” and for the first time she detected a note of bitterness in his voice.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Five years. No ... six!”

  “And you were very happy then?”

  “I was ... madly happy! Idiotically happy! As a man is when he thinks the best of life is before him, and there’s nothing more to wish for.”

  “You mean...?” Questioning him gently, for it seemed to her that he winced very often, and although he had consumed a reasonably hearty breakfast the wrist he admitted was badly sprained came into action very seldom. In fact, his right arm hung stiffly at his side.

  “I was in love.” He smiled at her crookedly across the table. “A condition, apparently, that afflicts us all at some time or other in our lives ... Although I hope it will never afflict me again! And I was actually hoping to get married. Imagine it! Hoping!”

  “Then what went wrong?”

  “Everything.” He removed a bowl of dark red roses from the centre of the table, and set it down where it was not likely to interfere with his clear view of her, or her clear view of him. “She married someone else,” he explained, smiling even more twistedly.

  Rose felt suddenly full of concern.

  “Then ... yesterday! You weren’t getting your own back on...?”

  “Certainly not!” he replied with a touch of cold reproof. “I don’t ‘get my own back’ on people, Rose. Whatever they do to me! It was simply and solely that I had to be free, as I’ve already endeavoured to make you understand.”

  “Yes, but...” She felt she was a swimmer out of her depth. He couldn’t realize what he was saying, or doing ... and he was definitely not the type of man to behave spitefully. Not with that excellent chin, and those vivid blue eyes, that were even more vividly blue now that he seemed to be releasing a whole flood of memories back upon himself. His face was so pale and gaunt that it hurt her. The dark smudges under his eyes hurt her still more. It was obvious that he had an immense capacity for feeling ... for remembering! “Have you never been able to forget her?” she enquired, with a quality of gentleness in her voice that was possibly something he had never encountered before, for he looked at her rather strangely.

  “One gets over most things ... in time,” he said quietly. “At least I’ve made that discovery. But time is a very important factor.”

  “And not even time can entirely obliterate?” she suggested.

/>   He smiled at her more whimsically, and pushed back his chair.

  “Rose, you’re young,” he said, “and this is much too early an hour in the morning for revelations concerning one’s love life. At the moment you’re deeply enough involved, too, with my determination to escape the marital state! Let’s get on our way.”

  Rose accompanied him out to the car, but when she was once more behind the wheel she couldn’t help confiding to him a suspicion she had formed that the landlord and his wife had regarded them with distinct curiosity. Definitely more curiosity than she felt sure they normally accorded a couple driving up in a car ... even at that hour of the morning!

  “Do you think they remember seeing you before? Or do you think they’ve been reading the newspapers?” she asked.

  He smiled at her in an unperturbed, faintly quizzical way.

  “If they have, Rose - been reading the newspapers, and devouring my photograph! - then at this moment they’re probably telling one another that it’s a simple matter to work out why the marriage didn’t take place. You have entered into the picture! You’re the reason why I couldn’t face matrimony with another woman!”

  Rose gasped, and the big car swerved so dangerously that he made a hasty grab at the wheel and prevented what might well have been a serious accident.

  “But that’s frightful!” she cried. “And you know very well that it isn’t true! We’ve got to do something—”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, soothingly. “It doesn’t matter in the slightest what people like that think - when you’re never likely to see them again - and in London no one has ever seen us together.”

  “But what will Mr. Mancroft think when I don’t turn up at the office this morning?”

  “We’ll work all that out later. But he most certainly will not connect you with me.”

  “How do you know? At the garage where they handed over your car to me the man looked almost suspicious. And now that you’ve vanished the police will make all sorts enquiries...” A wave of anxiety rushed over her. “You had absolutely no right to involve me in this! It was most unfair of you!”