The Way to London

by Alix Rickloff

  Clearly her look of cheerful interest needed practice if Michael’s response was anything to go by. He shot her a sardonic smile. “I read and write and even do sums. I’m a veritable savant.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic. It doesn’t suit you. What did you study?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t. Stop being so defensive, or is it to be name, rank, and serial number the rest of the trip?”

  “Suppose I’m still not used to the Lucy Stanhope who cares what I have to say.” He dodged a slap that sent them swerving across the narrow road and nearly into a ditch. “Steady on. All right, if you must know I went for architecture, but my father took ill so I left my job in the city to come home and help out.”

  “Will you go back now that you’ve been invalided out?”

  “Don’t know. It really wasn’t my cup of tea.”

  Bill started a loud and very flat version of “Aiken Drum,” which almost drowned out the car’s ominous rattling chug.

  “Funny,” Michael continued, “but I spent my entire childhood wanting to escape this place. I was lucky. Got good marks. Was singled out to attend a posh prep school in Hampshire. Then off to university. I had dreams of being the next Edwin Lutyens.”

  “So what happened? Why give that dream up?”

  “I guess somewhere along the way another dream took over.”

  After a swift assessing glance, he cleared his throat and resumed his scan of the road while she, suddenly self-conscious, focused on Bill—namely fantasizing about stuffing his face with a sausage roll before he could squeeze out one more verse of “Aiken Drum.” The boy couldn’t hit an F-sharp to save his life.

  The car dropped over the crest of a shallow hill and the road fell into green shadow, a lattice of trees above, heavy thickets of fern and rhododendron perfuming the air. Lucy closed her eyes, the filtered flash of sunlight beating against her eyelids. Even blind, she sensed Michael beside her and her skin prickled with something that, were it any other man, she might have called expectation. She’d no time to consider this rather horrible and unnerving idea when a honk of the horn had her sitting up as they passed a line of military trucks. Lucy was reminded of the telegram boy, the women’s taut silence, Mrs. McKeegan’s quiet rage against the war.

  “Must be headed to the army camp near Lufton,” Michael suggested.

  A young man waved to her out of the back of the last truck, his cap pushed back on a face round and smooth as a child’s. Her chest ached with an odd sadness. “Do you ever wonder what might have happened if you hadn’t fallen ill, Michael? If you hadn’t been discharged?”

  “Don’t you start fussing at me about my health. I’ve had enough of that from Dr. Carr.”

  “Do I look like someone who fusses? I just . . . started thinking . . .”

  He didn’t answer, but a sadness entered his usually carefree gaze. He reached for a cigarette, fumbling to light it as he drove. He took a long drag, his eyes intent on the road, though she wondered if he was really seeing the bends and turns or if his mind was miles away.

  “You’d be dead like the rest of them,” she said quietly. “Or imprisoned. Or missing with no way to know what had happened but only a constant questioning that goes nowhere.” She looked away across the gentle hills, seeing her own ghosts in the movement of sun and cloud against the green. “I’m very glad you got sick, Michael.”

  He slid his eyes from the road toward her, and their stares caught and held. They were back in his room, his fingers barely touching the curve of her hip, his breath warm on her cheek. In her imagination, this time when she turned to face him, he did not step away. Her stomach clenched and a strange fluttering started in her chest until Bill shouted, “Oi! Watch the tree!”

  Michael jerked his hand hard on the wheel, the estate wagon swerved and steadied, and the moment was lost.

  His voice, when it finally came, was—as always—laced with laughter. “Is that a perverse way of saying you might actually like me?”

  Shaken at this bewildering ache of reckless desire, Lucy conceded with a grim smile of her own. “Let’s just say I don’t not like you.”

  Their eyes met once more, his seeming to scorch a path straight through to her spine. Her skin prickled as if she’d touched a live wire while her stomach lifted and swooped as if she were back on the Strathleven.

  No. This was all wrong. He was all wrong. She didn’t care how relaxed she felt in his company or what crazy notions entered her head when she looked at him, the sooner she nipped these ridiculous feelings in the bud, the better for everyone. Turning away, she choked free words guaranteed to make him despise her. “After all, if you were dead, I’d have no one to give me a lift to London.”

  “That’s a rotten thing to say.” He laughed it off as he’d laughed off all her other caustic remarks, but she was ready for him. She knew where to place the knife.

  “Did you think it might be something more than that? Don’t flatter yourself, Corporal. You’re sweet, but I need a man who can do more for me than change a tire.”

  Bull’s-eye. There was no hint of amusement—or warmth—in his gaze now.

  Michael maneuvered the car off the road and onto the edge of a long sloping field.

  “Sellotape and string, I believe you said?” Lucy chided as the estate wagon sputtered, coughed, and died, steam spewing from under the hood.

  Below them, a meandering belt of trees revealed the cut of a creek bed. In the sudden quiet, the trilling squawk of a blackbird sounded from the wood, and there was the far-off chuff of a tractor.

  Bill tumbled out, eager to stretch. Michael opened the bonnet, the steam escaping in a great heated cloud. “Damn. I just fixed this yesterday.”

  “Anything I can do?” Lucy asked.

  “Not unless you’ve got a set of hose clips in that handbag of yours.” She lifted her arm and pushed up her sleeve. “And don’t bother checking your bloody watch. You’ll get there when you get there. I can’t do anything until the engine cools.” He retrieved a toolbox from the back of the wagon, muttering under his breath the whole time.

  If there had been any flutter of mutual attraction, her nasty comment had squashed it flat. No more quiet confidences. Only a stony uncomfortable silence. She should be relieved. Instead, she merely felt disappointed it had taken so little to drive him away.

  Perhaps a little fence-mending was in order. She just needed to be sure that once she mended the fence, she made very certain it remained high and wide enough to keep Michael on the far side, where he couldn’t hurt her—and she couldn’t hurt him. She got out of the car to stretch her legs before leaning against the door. “Architecture wouldn’t have been my first guess.”

  “I’m well aware of your first guess,” he answered from under the hood. “You made it clear when we met.”

  “Sometimes, first impressions can be wrong.”

  He glanced over, his expression unreadable. “Well, in this case, yours was right. I’m a backwater provincial who’d rather spend an afternoon jawing with the gaffers outside the pub than with a bunch of stuffed shirts at the Savoy Grill.”

  “Doesn’t it get dull?”

  “Depends on what you consider dull.”

  “Doing the same things with the same people in the same place day after day until you’re old and gray with nothing to show for your life at the end but a mossy stone in a churchyard.”

  “When you put it like that, it’s no wonder you run from it like the plague. But turn that on its head. Knowing who you are and who you can count on, and knowing no matter how far you travel, you always have a warm hearth waiting. No questions asked. No judgments made.”

  “You make it sound almost bearable,” she said, using flippancy to mask the sudden tightness in her chest.

  He finally looked up, his mouth thin, face unusually taut. “Small doesn’t mean less, Lucy. Then again, quiet doesn’t mean trouble-free. Sorrows find you no matter how you try to escap
e them. I learned that one the hard way. I imagine you will too.”

  “Michael—” she started.

  “If we’re going to make it to the station, I need to concentrate.” He burrowed himself back under the hood, effectively dismissing her.

  “Of course.” While his attitude didn’t surprise her, his opinion did. She’d pegged him as a glass-half-full type. So, did this morose outlook have anything to with the hidden photograph and the crumpled letter? Could the choirboy have a dark side?

  Was something burning?

  Bill knelt beside the car, charring bits of dried grass. A small thin flame caught and flared.

  “Is that my lighter?” Lucy asked.

  Bill struggled to look innocent and failed miserably. “It was down in the seat of the car, miss. Honest. I didn’t know it was yours.”

  “No, and I’m sure the engraved initials weren’t any help at all.” She grabbed her handbag and the old car rug from the back of the wagon. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “All right.” Bill rose from his knees, dusting himself off before plunging his hands in his pockets.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  He grinned, dragging the lighter from his pocket.

  She put it back in her handbag and snapped it shut. “You’ll end in stir before you’re thirteen, Bill Smedley.”

  “Naw, not me. I’m too slippery for the coppers to be snabbling. Besides, they got bigger fish to fry than a runt like me.”

  “I bet your boys at the Lion told you that too.”

  She and Bill set off toward the trees, the grass pulling at their legs and throwing up insects that fluttered and whirred around their heads. The day was warm and still, thick clouds spreading and breaking in a pale sky. Thoughts of war were impossible as sheep grazed a far hill and a kestrel rose and dove above them. Distant as a dream. But if she woke from such a dream, would she be back in Singapore staring down another endless empty day? The idea was enough to clench at her chest, and she nearly caught herself thanking the fates for their deadly intervention.

  “Look, Lucy. A fox.” Bill ran ahead, disappearing into the thick underbrush, but was soon back with muddy shoes. “Come see. There’s a stream up ahead and a little clearing with flowers.”

  The war had turned her life inside out, but it had dropped her here, at this spot, at this hour, with Bill. She couldn’t count it as all bad. “Show me.”

  Together, they picked a path through the tangled thicket of briars to reach the earthen rooty bank. Bill was right. Yellow kingcup bordered a stream that meandered sluggishly, eddying around the dying branches of a fallen beech tree, before creeping in a muddy froth southward, taking with it twigs, leaves, and the occasional paper wrapper and old bottle. “Here, grab me that dead limb there.”

  “Whatcha gonna do with that, Lucy?”

  She reached out with the limb, dragging the bottle in to her at the shore before taking pencil and paper from her handbag. “‘To whomever finds this note: we are trapped on a desert isle. We’re living on bananas and coconuts . . .’”

  “And bugs . . . put in bugs.”

  “Right. ‘Please rescue us.’”

  She rolled the paper and stuffed it down into the neck of the bottle.

  “Now what, miss?”

  “Now we throw it back in the water. It follows the stream out to sea and someone somewhere far away finds it and reads it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “What did you think was going to happen?”

  “I don’t know, but seems mighty tame, don’t you think? We won’t even be around when it’s read.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Then what is the point?”

  “I don’t know really.” She spread out the rug. The ground beneath was soft with moss and fern, and she lay back to stare up into the thick-laced canopy of branches. “It’s something I did when I was a child.”

  Bill sat cross-legged beside her. “Did anyone ever come to your rescue?”

  “No.” Her one word, a weight she couldn’t rid herself of despite a lifetime of frivolity.

  His hand stole into hers. “I’d have rescued you, miss.”

  The sun slanted through the leaves, warming her face. A maiden fly hovered above the surface of the stream. Bill found a bit of string in his pocket and dangled it over the water, hoping to catch a trout.

  Lucy closed her eyes despite her best intentions. She knew she shouldn’t. She should be marching straight back to the car and standing over Michael to hurry him along, but a restless uncomfortable night followed by restless uncomfortable feelings kept her where she was. She leaned back, her head propped on her arm, and let the chuckle of water and the hum of bees carry her away.

  “I wish my mam could see this place.” Bill’s murmured hopes roused Lucy from her half doze. She glanced up through heavy lids to see him lying on his stomach at the stream’s edge, staring out over the water, head in his hand, string forgotten. “In the summer when it’s too hot to sleep and it feels like the whole of the city is pressing in on you, we pack a thermos of tea and go sit out on the grass in Vicky Park. I dig my bare toes into the dirt where it’s cool and she tells me stories she makes up right out of her head.” He swatted at a fly. “She says the park is pretty enough in the daytime but she likes it better at night. She says the dark is better for pretending. It’s easier to see the pictures in your head that way.”

  “Your mother’s right.”

  A fish jumped, followed by a rattle of pebbles as Bill lunged for it. “What do you do with your mam, Lucy?”

  “Nothing if we can help it.”

  Once more she felt that odd drowsy contentment, her limbs sluggish, muscles loose, lungs filling slowly and deeply as her mind slipped from thought to thought like the insects from flower to flower. In that moment between wakefulness and sleep, an image surfaced, delicate as the wild columbine growing along the stream bank. A bright memory buried under a lifetime of slights and disillusionment. “She took me to a fair once.”

  As she spoke, the memory at first hazy with the dust of time took light like a match had been set to it. “I couldn’t have been more than five. Father was away on business. Amelia was bored. She was always bored when my father was out of town, and he was always out of town. She burst into the nursery like a whirlwind and whisked me away with her. I still remember Nanny’s face, like she’d been struck by lightning.” Lucy caught back a swift breath, her pulse drumming so loud in her ears, she no longer heard the spill of water or the trees’ leafy whisper. “It was nothing fancy, a few colorful tents along a tiny midway, but she held my hand as we strolled among the stalls. We shared peanuts from a cone of newspaper.” She swallowed, but her mouth was dry, the words like ash against her tongue. “There was a minstrel show. I remember sitting in the dark and watching her laugh at the juggler and the magician. Even in the smoky stage light, she shone like a diamond . . . or an angel. At the end after the applause, she turned to me, and . . .” Tears burned Lucy’s eyes and swam on her lashes. Her voice dropped to a whisper as if she were fearful the spell might be broken and the images disappear like popped soap bubbles. “She told me it had been the most perfect day she’d ever had.”

  “It sounds grand.”

  The deep baritone voice sent Lucy’s heart stuttering into her throat before it dropped like lead into her shoes, leaving her dizzy and a little sick.

  Not Bill.

  Michael.

  She rolled up onto her knees, ignoring the dirt and the bits of grass in her hair. She faced him, her face hot, her jaw locked against her humiliated anger.

  “How long have you been standing there?” she demanded.

  He twirled a stem of grass between his fingers. Troubled sympathy swam behind his clear blue gaze, and she waited for the hollow platitudes.

  “It took some doing, but I got the car up and running.” He tossed away the grass and shoved his hands in his pockets. “We should get a move on. No telling how long she’l
l last.”

  She began to realize he wasn’t going to fill her ears with well-meaning if clichéd inanities. That she might be able to scrape together the remnants of her dignity. Relief flooded her, and she hurriedly rose to gather up the rug. “Where’s Bill?”

  “I thought he was with you.”

  “He was. He must have wandered off.”

  She picked her way down the riverbank, where she found Bill’s piece of string crushed into a small muddy boot print at the water’s edge.

  “Bill?” she called.

  There was no answer but the spill of water over a half dam of rocks.

  “Certain he didn’t do another bunk?” Michael had followed her and now stood watching from the top of the bank.

  “He wouldn’t just leave me.”

  “People leave all the time.”

  An air kiss. A careless wave. A car’s taillights receding into the darkness as a strong hand gripped her shoulder when all she wanted to do was chase after. One perfect afternoon hadn’t been enough to make her stay. “People might, but Bill wouldn’t. He needs me to look after him.”

  Michael seemed to consider her, his features unnaturally serious, his gaze almost quizzical. “I’m beginning to wonder who’s really looking after whom.”

  Chapter 14

  Michael and Lucy split up to search. Not only could they cover more ground that way, but it gave her time to pull herself together.

  Still a bit wobbly-kneed, she headed upriver along a footpath. Trees dipped their leaf-heavy branches into the swirling water, the air pungent with the sharp scents of mud and dead leaves. A startled fox dashed across the trail. They both froze, eyes locked in a mutual moment of surprise, before the fox plunged back into the woods.

  That’s when Lucy heard Bill.

  Following his laughter, she rounded the bend to find him sitting cross-legged in a place where the creek widened and slowed to a pool. A young man sat with him, an unheeded fishing pole clamped between two large rocks, its line limp, bobber motionless.

  Bill had a cigarette between his lips and a pair of dice in his hands, which he tossed onto a piece of brown paper that looked as if it had once held someone’s sandwich. A small pile of pennies lay in a pile in the middle of the paper.