The Runaways

by Patricia Robins

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

When Judith and Rocky elope to Gretna Green they sincerely believe marriage will solve all their problems. But the elopement proves to be the beginning of an entirely new set of difficulties... Rocky begins to wonder if his parents were right - is he even in love? Were they too young after all? And in the background Gavin, Judith's boss, watches her disillusionment with a concern which is growing into something more.

Release date: January 29, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

‘HOW much further, Rocky?’

Judith looked anxiously at the slim figure behind the steering wheel. It seemed as if they had been driving for days rather than hours, and everything had conspired to make the journey as difficult as possible.

Rocky suddenly slammed on the brakes and the car skidded slightly on the dark, wet road. He swore under his breath and then, without looking at Judith, he opened the car door and disappeared, bareheaded, into the driving rain. For a moment his tall, slim figure was silhouetted in the light of the headlamps; then she saw the faint glimmer of his torch against the white sign-post. A minute or two later he climbed back into the car, a gust of rain blowing in with him.

In those brief moments his tweed jacket had become soaked and the rain was dripping down his white face in rivulets. His voice was flat and emotionless as he said:

‘We must have missed the road just after Carlisle. That signpost said half-a-mile to Rockcliffe, wherever that might be.’

He sounded cross – almost as if it were her fault they had lost their way. Perhaps it was her fault, Judith thought miserably. She had been the navigator, tracing out their route from Yeovil to Gretna Green along the thin red lines of the A.A. book. But it was Rocky who had said at Carlisle:

‘You can put that thing away now. We’re nearly there.’

Tactfully she decided this was not the moment to argue and she reached for the A.A. book and studied the map once more.

‘I’m afraid we went wrong at Stanwix,’ she said at length. ‘It must have been when we were behind that big furniture lorry, darling. But it’s not going to matter too much. After we’ve passed through Rockcliffe we can get back on the A74 and then it’s only a couple of miles to Gretna.’

Still he did not smile or put out a hand consolingly to hers. She bit her lip, trying not to let the deep depression that had been gathering inside her gain control. Rocky must be tired. He’d driven the first six hours non-stop on top of a hard day’s work. Their only halt at the transport café for a meal had been as brief as possible and then he had been back behind the wheel once more, fighting all the way through ceaseless driving rain that limited visibility to a few yards, sometimes to inches. The monotonous click-click, click-click of the windscreen wipers had played on her nerves. How much more aggravating must it have been to Rocky, who could never take his eyes from the dark road ahead.

Judith wished she had accepted her father’s offer of a course of driving lessons on her seventeenth birthday last summer. She had always wanted to learn to drive, and her father had been more than a little surprised when she refused. She hadn’t felt able to give him the true reason – that she wanted every spare moment free to be with Rocky; that even those few hours a week were hours far too precious to miss. Until now, she hadn’t regretted her decision. No one in their right senses would prefer to sit beside a driving instructor, learning how to cope with gears, when the alternative meant lying on the river bank on a hot summer’s evening with Rocky’s arms about her, or dancing on a Saturday evening, or playing tennis together at the Club.

How fortunate for both of them that they were so fond of tennis, for they could meet at the Club without her parents realizing that this was just another date with Rocky, of whom they seemed so stupidly to disapprove. Neither her father nor her mother had actually refused to allow her to go out with Rocky, but they said quite firmly that twice a week was enough; that it was quite wrong at her age to limit herself to one boy-friend, and that she must never be out later than midnight and then only when they knew who she was with and where she was going.

Judith had tried so hard not to feel that they were being old-fashioned and unreasonable. All parents refused to recognize that their children had grown up, she told herself. They still thought of her as a child rather than a woman. How could they know that love had transformed her in one moment from child to adult!

Judith had never been particularly close to either parent, perhaps because she had been born very late in their lives and the gulf of forty years was too great to be bridged. She’d never really noticed it until she met Rocky and then she was suddenly aware that she could never explain to these quiet, elderly, grey-haired people that nothing in the world mattered to her except Rocky. She didn’t expect them to understand. How could they? Their love for each other was a quiet, friendly affection that belonged to a generation who had been brought up to think of sex as a necessary evil. She and Rocky had often discussed it and thought with sympathy how incomplete that generation’s youth must have been.

They were supremely glad that they belonged to the youth of today who could accept that sex was part of love and marriage, and something to be gloried in rather than to be ashamed of. Of course, she and Rocky did differ on one point. Rocky believed that trial marriages, as he called them, were good. He’d wanted to make love to her, fully and completely, not for his sake only but for hers, too. He wanted them both to be quite sure that they were physically suited, as they were in every other way.

Judith, much as she yearned to belong to Rocky in the way that he wanted so much, still could not bring herself to accept the necessity for experience of this sort before marriage. Her love for Rocky was so complete, such a deep certainty in her mind and heart and thoughts, that she never doubted the complete success of the physical side of their relationship.

In some strange way she could not quite understand, Rocky’s physical need for her seemed greater than hers for him! Inevitably every evening ended in long, passionate embraces and Rocky’s voice, urgent and desperate, begging her to give way. She had read enough to know that this continual tension must be bad for him, and she herself had felt her resolve to wait for marriage grow weaker as the summer days passed to autumn and autumn to winter. Now they could no longer lie on the river bank and watch the stars come out. The desperate search for somewhere to be alone together was becoming increasingly hopeless. Rocky was not welcome in her parents’ home and although her mother and father were polite enough to Rocky when she asked him back for a meal, or to hear a new record, they would no more have left her alone with him in the drawing-room than they would countenance a request to share her summer holiday with him. She knew they didn’t trust him but put this down to their out-of-date ideas on modern behaviour and felt slightly hurt by the fact that they did not, at least, trust her.

With Rocky’s parents the situation was not much better. He was studying for his City and Guilds examination whilst serving his student-apprenticeship with an aircraft company. His father was in the same firm and was tremendously ambitious for his only son. So far, Rocky had done very well and his father bitterly resented that Judith should have come into his life to cause rival interest to his career. Rocky denied she was any such thing. He told his parents a thousand times that Judith gave him an incentive to work harder and to get on; that since Judith had to be home at a reasonably early hour, he could do his studies after his dates with her. He often worked until two or three in the morning and even Judith had had to admit that his mother was right when she said he was beginning to look pale and exhausted. Mrs. Rockingham made little effort to conceal the fact that she considered Judith to blame.

These were the factors that had brought them to the momentous decision to get married. It seemed to both of them the answer to all their problems. Married, they would, as Rocky so much desired, belong to each other completely. Since they would be able to share the long hours of the night together, they would have no need to waste the evening dancing, walking, playing tennis; Rocky could come home and work at his studies while she took care of him and the house. There would be no time for housework during the day since she, too, must keep on her job as secretarial assistant to the local vet. They had worked out a budget for themselves and with their two pay-packets they could afford to live, if not in their own home, at least in furnished rooms. In five years, if they were careful, they could save enough to pay the deposit on a house.

For three weeks they had spent most of their moments together planning how they would live when they were married. It was only in the last week that both had suddenly realized that neither his parents nor hers would give consent. It was Judith who had swept aside this particular hurdle by suggesting Gretna Green. Rocky had been uncertain. For one thing, it would be extremely difficult to get three weeks away from work when he had not long ago had a fortnight off for his summer holiday. For another, if either set of parents reported them to the police, it could get into the daily papers and he wasn’t sure that his firm would keep him on since he, being the elder, would be held responsible. Yet, at the same time, it was Rocky who couldn’t stand the thought of four more years to wait!

Thinking back, as she sat silently at Rocky’s side in his mother’s ancient Morris, bumping along the bad, Scottish by-road only a mile from their destination, Judith recalled that the ultimate decision to come had been Rocky’s. His uncertainty had affected her in the end and two nights ago she had told him she had made up her mind to drop the whole idea.

Some inner mature wisdom told her that the outcome could not be happy unless Rocky were absolutely certain this runaway marriage was the right thing for them both. Had she but known it, this decision was the one weapon that could make him swing to the opposite point of view. From that moment, he would hear nothing against their elopement. He swept aside her questions about a job during the three weeks residence in Scotland before they could obtain a licence, their lack of a car – he would borrow his mother’s – where and how they would live. He seemed suddenly to be fired with a god-like enthusiasm that could overcome any problem and cope with any emergency, and when Judith had slipped out of her house after tea, with her suitcase, she, too, had been borne along on a wave of exhilaration and determination to brave anything for each other.

When had this wave receded like the outgoing tide, leaving her mind and heart like the wet sand, deserted, lonely and afraid? On that long, bleak stretch of road between Shap Fell and Penrith, where the fan-belt broke and she had had to spend a lonely half-hour in the car while Rocky went in a passing lorry to the next garage for a replacement? Or was it before that, when somewhere around Shrewsbury the overworked windscreen wipers had packed in altogether and they had to stop every hundred yards or so, taking it in turns to get out and wipe the windscreen until they found an all-night garage with the right size of blades in stock?

Surely they had laughed about it at the time, or had there been something forced about Rocky’s smile? When had she begun to feel that Fate was against them and not with them on their flight to happiness?

‘There’s the main road ahead!’

Rocky’s voice sounded more cheerful, and immediately Judith’s spirits rose. So long as he was happy she didn’t mind what happened. She didn’t mind the bumping or the cold or even the driving rain outside, providing Rocky went on loving her and wanting her and not regretting their decision to run away. For his sake, she was more than willing to face the inevitable scene that must follow with her parents and his when they went home again. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing would matter then, because she would be Rocky’s wife.

As if sensing her mood, Rocky took one hand from the steering-wheel and felt for hers in the darkness, finding it and giving it a squeeze.

‘Hope we’ll find somewhere open, darling. Must be about four o’clock. Have you thought what we’re going to say when we do get there? Is it to be Mr. and Mrs. or do we register separately?’

She looked at him quickly, anxiously, and then turned away again uneasily. How stupid of her not to have thought about this. Would Rocky think she was terribly naive or priggish to want to hold on a little longer, now that she knew for sure there were only twenty-one days before they could be married? The waiting would not be hard for her, but Rocky might think it silly since there was no doubt now that they would be married so soon. Ought she to go through with it? Strange that she should be thinking of such a night as an ordeal to be ‘gone through’! It wasn’t quite that. It was the thought that they would have to sign false names in the register, that people might guess they were eloping since they were obviously English, under age, and unlikely to be arriving at a place like Gretna Green at four o’clock in the morning, in mid-December, on an annual holiday.

She tried to explain to Rocky how difficult it would be to convince anyone they were in fact a married couple.

‘I couldn’t care less!’ Rocky replied. ‘After all, we are going to be married very soon. Please, Judith!’

She felt suddenly a hundred years older than Rocky. He sounded so like a small boy asking for a sweet. He didn’t seem to realize that they would be defeating the whole object of their coming here if she gave way now. She wanted their first night together to be perfect, free of fear, of criticism by the outside world, with nothing and no one to break into the magic circle of their love. She felt quite sure that were he less tired and able to think more clearly, Rocky would agree with her.

Quite suddenly the large road-sign flashed into the headlights – GRETNA GREEN – and Judith was saved an immediate reply.

Rocky was staring out of the side-windows, his eyes searching for a hotel. There was no sign of a light anywhere. He turned the car at the far end of the village and crawled back again in low gear, then pulled the car up on the side of the road with a muttered exclamation.

‘Not a damn thing open anywhere! Gosh, Judy, I am an idiot. I should have booked in somewhere days ago. Now what are we going to do?’

‘We could sleep here in the car for an hour or two, then perhaps we can get some breakfast and ask about rooms. We don’t really want to stay in a hotel, do we? If anyone …’ she paused, uneasily. ‘… What I mean is, if anyone should guess where we’ve gone, the hotels would be the first place for them to look for us.’

Rocky drew in his breath sharply.

‘You make us sound like criminals,’ he said roughly.

Judith tried to smile.

‘Well, I suppose we are fugitives from the conventions if not from the law. It seems silly when we aren’t doing anything wrong. We aren’t, are we Rocky?’

Rocky turned away from her and stared out of the window. A car flashed by with an angry roar, and scattered a shower of muddy water in front of his face with impersonal insult.

‘Oh, God!’ he said, wearily. ‘I’m damned if I know. I wish it weren’t so blasted cold.’

Stupidly, he’d rushed out of the house when he got back from work, remembering his suit-case but forgetting his overcoat. It hadn’t been too cold then at five o’clock but it was at least ten degrees colder this side of the Border, and hellishly damp. Moreover, his tweed jacket was soaking and he would have given his eyes for a steaming hot bath. He thought of his comfortable divan bed at home, and then immediately felt guilty. Poor little Judy! She must be just as cold and depressed as he was, and, bless her, she hadn’t grumbled once.

He turned and ran his hands gently over the smooth, golden crown of her head. Her hair was the very first thing he had noticed about her that night last spring at the Tennis Club Dance. She’d been standing with her back towards him and he said to himself, half-seriously:

‘If she looks as good from the front as she do. . .