Escape to Happiness

by Mary Whistler

  “He has seen it,” she observed, and the thick white eyelids were raised as she looked directly at Guy. “He’s stayed in it too. We used to have some jolly picnic meals there, didn’t we, Guy?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “And one very wild and stormy night, when it was quite impossible to risk a car on the open cliff, we spent hours waiting for the entire cottage to be lifted and deposited in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean!”

  Guy gazed back at her thoughtfully.

  “Do you remember how very cosy we were that night, Guy? In spite of the wind and the rain and the threat of destruction?”

  This time Guy didn’t answer.

  “We kept a huge fire going, and I carried my mattress into the living-room, and you sat in a chair until it was dawn. Then, when the wind dropped, we came back here to Tregony’s Choice, and Mrs. Bewes cooked us a magnificent breakfast.”

  Carmella’s eyes were bright with reminiscence, and her mouth curved upwards appreciatively. She tightened the belt of the lavender wool dress she was wearing so that it revealed the sheath-like shape of her figure and flung herself down on her favourite couch, and lay looking upwards at Guy as if she would compel him to remember every detail of that night as well.

  “Bacon and eggs and mushrooms,” she murmured. “What a night, and what a breakfast!”

  “I’ve eaten quite a few breakfasts since then,” Guy remarked curtly, but Rose thought his look dwelt almost avidly on the figure on the couch, and it was not until she herself moved away that he swung round and demanded to know where she was going.

  “Come back here, Rose. I don’t mind you helping Carmella with her cottage, but I won’t have you disappearing as frequently as you do!”

  For Rose had formed a habit of leaving them alone whenever she could think up an excuse to do so, especially since Carmella - following a plaintive complaint about the room she had been allocated - had made it more or less impossible for Guy to withhold the offer of his grandmother’s suite. And now she was installed in the very bedroom that was graced by her photograph, and the sitting-room that smelt of sandalwood and moth-balls was the room where she wrote her letters and rested when she wanted to be alone ... as, apparently, she did occasionally. Although she called it being discreet.

  “I can’t intrude myself on a pair of lovers all the time, can I?” she demanded, with one of her arch looks.

  Now, as Guy made to follow Rose from the room, she called him back.

  “Leave her, Guy! Even the most enamoured young woman likes to have a little freedom to go her own road occasionally, you know!”

  But Guy’s eyes were glittering with impatience as he swung back to her.

  “I won’t have Rose made to feel that she has to leave us together sometimes! Not even for old times’ sake!” Carmella stretched herself sinuously on the couch, and looked up at him almost sleepily.

  “Does she know about our ‘old times’ together? All our old times? Does she know how desperately in love with one another we were, and that you threatened to commit suicide when we parted? I’m thankful, of course, that you didn’t, darling! ... But you did threaten, didn’t you?” smiling at him languorously.

  “I did,” he admitted stiffly.

  “And does Rose know that?”

  “She knows quite a lot,” as if he was speaking through set teeth, “and your endless innuendoes will have caused her to imagine a lot more.”

  “Oh, darling, imagination is scarcely called for, is it? Every time you look at me you re-live the past! And Rose is quite an intelligent young woman.”

  “You arrived at the most inopportune time,” he told her, speaking with intense bitterness. “I never wanted to see you here again, and yet here you are ... in my house, when I would much rather you were somewhere at the far end of the world! I wish you would go away again. I don’t want you here, near Rose!”

  “But, darling,” she said softly, sitting up and reaching out and touching his sleeve gently, “I’m here to help you to your Rose. I’ve already offered to do all I can to help you get married quickly, and I honestly think you should get married quickly, because Rose is a very attractive young woman, and Bruce Carter will take her off you without a twinge of conscience if you give him the opportunity. I was watching them the other night when they were standing in that window.”

  “I was watching them too,” Guy said curtly.

  She glanced at him oddly.

  “And I was trying to discover whether I could still make you forget everything but myself!” A whimsical expression chased itself across her face. “Ah, well, that’s life! But you’re not going to pretend you’re in love with her, are you?”

  “I mean to marry her,” Guy said stonily.

  She ran her fingers up and down his arm soothingly. “Of course, darling. But love and marriage ... they’re poles apart, aren’t they? You and I could have had them both, but I was sidetracked by Roger, and that ended that. However, for you marriage is important, and Rose is a sensible, passable girl. She’ll make you a good wife, and marriage itself will probably prove a steadying influence in your case. We can’t have you behaving again as you behaved a few weeks ago!”

  “I’m never in the least likely to do that again,” he said stiffly.

  “You won’t leave Rose standing at the altar?” She glanced up at him with a kind of gentle jibing look in the dark eyes. “Not even if you got involved in a collision with a taxi?”

  “History seldom repeats itself,” he replied stiffly.

  “You can never tell,” she remarked, helping herself to one of her own cigarettes and lifting her face for his lighter. The dark eyes were suddenly deep and inscrutable and thoughtful at the same time, and he found himself forced to meet then as the gold lighter produced its little spurt of flame, and a puff of smoke arose between them. “I’ve known people who have had the most extraordinary things happen to them, and happen to them again ... It’s almost as if the first episode invites a repetition! Not in exactly similar circumstances, of course, but ... these things do happen.”

  He put away his lighter and withdrew from her at least a couple of feet.

  “I shall marry Rose,” he told her. “Nothing will prevent me from marrying Rose!”

  CHAPTER XIII

  Filled with an urge to get away from them both, Rose went for a longer walk on the shore than she usually did. She felt that she had had rather a lot of Tregony’s Choice over the last few days - since Carmella entered it - and the feel of the strong, cool wind in her face, and the smell of the sea, were extraordinarily good.

  They banished the distaste she had experienced when Carmella did those clever things to her belt and emphasized the long, lovely lines of her body, and Guy stood looking down at her as if she was a magnet that drew his gaze... an inescapable magnet!

  She headed in the direction of Carmella’s cottage, but she had no intention of visiting it today. Carmella never bothered to lock it up, and she could enter it if she wished, but after those disclosures about the night of storm and tempest, when Carmella Tracy, as she was then, and Guy, the man whose admiration she still invited, had sheltered there for hours on end ... until the dawn, in fact! ... she felt she could hardly bear to see it again, let alone enter it.

  She wondered why she was allowing herself to be used in such a futile game, when it was obvious that Guy’s infatuation for Carmella was as alive as before. He hadn’t forgotten her, and he couldn’t resist her, but he was counting on Rose to save him from committing any folly where the widow was concerned. And, being a widow, she was possibly even more dangerous than she was before ... experienced, and therefore deadly, calculating, but cool. She knew what she wanted, and she was going after it.

  Rose was curiously certain of that, in spite of all that talk of weddings in Paris. They might eventually arrive in Paris - if Rose was weak enough to allow herself to continue to play Guy’s game! - but it would not be for the purpose of getting Rose married.

  Carmella had
no time for Rose, and the younger girl believed that she despised her. She despised her because she allowed herself to serve the purpose of a tool, and the man who, somewhat despicably, depended on her was tormented by the constant presence of another woman. It must be obvious to the woman of the world that the engagement that had been announced so hurriedly was no more than a piece of camouflage, and that Guy had no love for Rose. He was protective towards her, kind and considerate ... and he looked upon her as a kind of sheet anchor! ... but he was not in love with her. And although Rose strove so hard to conceal what she felt, there must be moments when she gave herself away to the watchful, sloe-black eyes that missed nothing ... Moments when she could hardly endure to look at the other pair, and the secret agony she experienced because but for his earlier experience Guy would by this time have been putty in the hands of his only love looked out of her eyes, and set up a kind of revulsion.

  Carmella knew why Rose had escaped yet again to the beach this afternoon, and why she wouldn’t fight for what was rightfully hers. Guy was not hers, and she knew it. ... Carmella knew it, and even Bruce Carter knew it.

  That was why he had pitied her, and attempted to warn her, the other night.

  As she fought her way along the beach, in the teeth of a rising gale, Rose had the feeling that a considerable period of time must elapse before she returned to Tregony’s Choice. She even hated the thought of going back to the house at all, and as the wind tore at her hair, and whipped the colour out of her cheeks with its very fierceness, she wondered why there was any question of her going back when she wasn’t really needed. The thought that she could seize this opportunity to disappear out of Guy Wakeford’s life with the same lack of warning that he had appeared in hers was a tempting thought just then. It might not be a very practical thought, for all her clothes were at the house, as well as her handbag, and the little money that she had, but it would free her of this degrading sensation that she was being used ... lending herself to a pointless scheme to deceive someone who was undeceivable.

  Guy would be in no more danger if she went than if she stayed; and if he missed her at all, it would be only for a very short while. He would soon forget her, although he said he couldn’t do without her.

  The wind, coming straight off the Atlantic, wrested her intake of breath at the depressing certainty of how quickly she would be forgotten away from here, and she knew she would have to leave this exposed stretch of beach, and seek somewhere more sheltered inland. She could hardly keep upright as she turned from the full force of the gale and was buffeted towards the towering cliffs that had previously been on her left hand, and by the time she reached the comparative shelter of the cliffs the rain was drenching her. She had been this way before, and she knew there was a path that wound upwards to the cliff top, and from there she could reach the road ... If she could stand upright on the cliff top!

  For the first time it struck her that she had been foolhardy to come as far as this on such an unpromising afternoon, and the very thought of making her way back to London also now struck her as absurd. For one thing she doubted whether she could reach the station, and for another any prolonged absence without some sort of preparation for what she intended to do would almost certainly cause a modicum of alarm at Tregony’s Choice when the weather deteriorated into one of the early winter storms such as it obviously intended to do before nightfall, and they might even start looking for her, or send out some sort of alarm in connection with her.

  She could imagine Bruce Carter, if word reached him that she had not returned, doing something quite determined about looking for her; and somehow she could not quite see Guy doing nothing at all ... Although Carmella would probably try and persuade him that there was nothing they could do on such a night!

  A wild Cornish night, the sort with which she was familiar!

  Near the top of the cliff Rose felt as if every hair on her head was being wrenched from it, and gasping and clinging to the steep ascent she. finally crawled out on to the grass-covered headland. The last shred of daylight had vanished abruptly, banished by a vicious black cloud overhead, and the contents of that cloud were let loose over Rose as she turned to run in the direction of the dimly seen road. But the wind thought otherwise, and she was dragged at and snatched back, buffeted, bruised, and shaken as if she was no more than a piece of thyme on the headland, long before she could get anywhere near the road. The sound of the freshening hurricane in her ears was like a triumphant roar, and in addition she was lashed at cruelly by the rain.

  She yielded to the concentrated violence of the elements, and cowered down, seriously disconcerted, on the short grass. Once the storm of rain had passed she could see that she was some considerable distance from the road, and she doubted whether the wind would ever permit her to reach it without hurling her into the sea. Near at hand - amazingly near at hand, since it was a mercy something solid was - was a whitewashed cottage, standing in a pocket-handkerchief sized garden. There was a tamarisk hedge protecting one side of the garden, and she decided that if she could crawl along in the shelter of that hedge she might reach the cottage.

  It was probably empty ...Or, if it wasn’t, the occupants would probably offer her shelter... And it was not until she was actually under the lee of the tamarisk hedge that she recognized the whitewashed building she was approaching. It was Carmella’s cottage - The Bosun’s Locker - and as far as she knew it was open to anyone who tried the door handle, and chose to walk in. And only that morning she had helped Carmella put the small sitting-room to rights, and hang curtains at the kitchen windows.

  She inched her way along the side of the hedge, and somehow it no longer mattered that it was Carmella’s cottage. Was it only an hour ago that she had been telling herself she would never willingly enter the place again? Well, now the rather blind-looking little granite cottage, with its deep-set windows, was a sanctuary that beckoned her, and because she had been badly frightened by that squall of wind and rain she was quite desperate to reach it.

  Inside the cottage there was a smell of paraffin and incurable dampness, but it was still a haven and a refuge. There was no electric light, and she had to grope her way into the tiny sitting-room - dignified by that tide of “Lounge” in the house-agents’ literature when it was available for renting furnished. When she first saw the inside of the only sizeable room in the cottage Rose had thought it had considerable possibilities, but Carmella had neglected it badly, and her chintzes were tom and faded. The carpet was a mere apology for a carpet, and there was no warm rug before the cold stone hearth. Nevertheless, the fire was laid, and Rose reached shakily for the box of matches she knew to be on an occasional table close to the fireplace, and struck one and held it to the recently laid fire.

  Luckily the wood was dry, and the fire caught instantly and blazed away up the narrow chimney. Rose removed her sodden coat and endeavoured to dry the hair that was plastered to her head with an inadequate headsquare she found in the pocket of her coat, and then knelt in front of the fire to permit the flames to do the rest.

  Outside the wind was as demented as ever, and was hurling itself against the walls of the cottage, although the rain came in spurts and spattered the windows. The black cloud was no longer responsible for the darkness, for the night had closed down and it was inkily black a few yards from the cottage. Until the moon rose, and the storm might possibly abate with its climbing into the heavens, there would be no light on the cliff top to guide Rose back to Tregony’s Choice, even if the wind let up sufficiently to enable her to stand upright.

  She was more than fortunate to have stumbled upon Carmella Cavendish’s cottage, freshly equipped for an occupant, and as she knelt there and felt the warmth of the fire seeping into her chilled bones, and gently stirring her hair, she even felt a spasm of gratitude to Carmella herself.

  Carmella who was probably, at that moment, reclining in her usual graceful manner by the library fire at Tregony’s Choice, and doing her utmost to persuade Guy that there was
no cause to worry about Rose.

  She had been overtaken by the darkness and the freakish weather, and had sought shelter somewhere. She was perfectly safe, and would turn up bright and dry in the morning, and any anxiety on her account would be a waste of energy.

  Rose was not a child ... Rose was a young woman of sense, and why should Guy get himself worked up about her? In any case, they could do without Rose for that one evening!

  But would Guy listen to her? Would Guy allow his anxiety to be lulled, and agree with Carmella that, for the time being, at least, they could forget Rose?

  Looking at the ponderously ticking clock on the mantelpiece and marking the time - six o’clock - Rose decided that Guy would have to listen to Carmella, and have to resign himself to the dangers of being left without a chaperone at an hour of the evening when Mrs. Bewes would be shut away in her kitchen, preparing the evening meal, and there would be an atmosphere of intense cosiness in the library, and a tray of drinks on the table beside the fire.

  And Carmella making the most of a heaven-sent opportunity!

  As Rose huddled near the tiny cottage fire, and wondered whether there was any paraffin in the lamp if she tried to light it, she knew that she didn’t expect Guy to be anxious about her - not in the way a man is anxious about a woman who is important to him; and the dreary certainty that she was unimportant made her feel that it wouldn’t have mattered so very greatly if she had been blown over the cliff and into the sea during that brief tussle out there on the cliff top.

  At least she wouldn’t be feeling the gnawing loneliness she was experiencing as she crouched beside the fire.

  She looked through into the darkened bedroom, and thought of the night when Carmella had carried her mattress through into the living-room, and Guy had sat in a chair beside the fire. Those must have been momentous hours before daylight dawned, and while the wind was howling and screaming around the four walls of the cottage as it was now!