Unknown

VI ROUGH PASSAGE

THEY found an open upland of chalk an hour later, between Winchester and Salisbury, roughly, where an old chalkpit opened off the road. Geoffrey drove in between the high banks and discovered that the place had been used, in civilized days, as a graveyard for abandoned cars. There were a dozen rusting sedans amid the nettles and elders.

The floor of the pit was hard enough to hold a jack. Sally climbed up with the food to the untended grassland above the pit and kept a lookout while he changed the tires. (These came already attached to their steel rims, which were then bolted to the wooden wheels — it couldn’t have been easier.) That left him with two good spares and the four old ones. He climbed up and joined Sally.

The Rolls was invisible from a few yards, but they

could see for leagues. The countryside to the south, which had once been mile-square fields, had reverted to a mosaic of tiny, unrelated patches, some worked, some abandoned. About half a mile away to the south he could see a piece of green with a row of dots spread across it at the line where the green changed texture. He ate a slab of bread and camem-bert and saw that the dots had moved — they were a team of men mowing a hayfield with scythes. Behind them came another pattern of dots, again altering the texture of the green: more men (or probably women) tossing the hay out of its scythe-laid rows so that every stem and blade was exposed to the reliable sun. A few fields away they’d got beyond that stage and were loading the pale, dried hay on to a wooden wagon. Elsewhere the cereal crops were still tender green, oat and wheat and barley each showing its different shade in long narrow strips. The sun was very hot, and there were lots of butterflies, all the species regenerated since men stopped spraying. Geoffrey felt tired as tired.

“I think I’d better try and have a nap, Sal, or I might drive off the road. Wake me up the moment you see anything funny. You’d better put everything back in the car, so that if we really are caught napping we can say we had nothing to do with it. We just found it, and were waiting for someone to come along and tell us what to do next. I’ll stick to my robe, just in case. Remember, I'm your idiot brother, deaf and dumb but quite harmless, and you're in charge of me, trying to get us north to stay with our married sister in, um, Staffordshire. You take the grub down, and I'll see if I can find a place without too many ants.”

“When do you want to wake up, supposing nothing happens?”

“Give me a couple of hours, about.”

He rolled up his jersey with the robe inside it for a pillow, and wriggled round for a place where his hip felt comfortable. The grass ticked with insect life. The sun was very bright. A seed-head tickled his cheek. Hell, he wasn’t going to be able to sleep here . . .

“Wake up, Jeff. Wake up.”

He sat up, the side of his face nubbly with the knitwork of the jersey. The sun had moved, and the mowers were near the end of their field. The wagon was gone, and the air was still and heavy with grass pollen.

“I’m sorry, Jeff. You’ve slept for about three hours, but they’ve pulled that hay cart on to this road, and I think they’ll be bringing it up the hill. They’re going awfully slowly. There. You can see them coming out by that copse.”

A green-gold hump heaved into sight out of the trees. There was a man in blue overalls lying on his back on top of it, with his hand behind his head. The wagon was about the size of a toy, and it would be ages before the horses brought it creaking up the hill.

“Anything happen while I was asleep?”

“Nothing, except that a rabbit came and nibbled one of the wheels, but I threw stones at it and it ran away.”

Geoffrey lunged down the slope to look at his tires. On the left front there were a series of strong gouges, running in pairs — not nibbling, but a determined attack. The cart was still a good twenty minutes off, he decided — not worth risking a tire like that over these roads. He got the jack out, fumbled it into position, pulled himself together and changed the wheel deliberately. Eight minutes, not bad. There was time to fill up with petrol. Its stench rose shimmering into the untainted air. Four gallons gone.

As they backed out on to the road there were shouts from down the hill. Three men with hayforks, very red in the face, were running slowly up towards them. Golly, they must have spotted the tire treads in a patch of chalk dust on the untended tarmac. Lucky he’d been given as much as three hours’ sleep — the countryside must be fantastically empty for nobody to have come up the road in all that time. The Rolls whined to the top in second and hummed down the far side, leaving the haymakers shouting. One of them had been wearing a smock, of the kind you used to see in particularly soppy nursery rhyme books.

On the next long stretch of road he stopped and sorted out the most obviously French blanket. This he folded in two, with the tent pole in the fold; he ran about six foot of cord from each corner of the hood at the back of the car to the two projecting ends of pole; then he made a couple of holes through the blanket and tied the pole in.

“What’s that for?” said Sally.

“Sweep out our tracks, with luck.”

“It won’t last very long, I’d have thought. Haven’t you got anything tougher, like a piece of canvas or something?”

“No.”

“What about cutting some branches out of the hedge. You could tie them in two bunches, and it wouldn’t matter if they wore a bit, because there’d always be more twigs coming down.”

“I suppose that’d work, too, but let’s see how we get on with this first.”

They drove on, Sally kneeling in her seat and looking backwards. The blanket lasted about three miles. Sally hummed perkily as she helped him cut two large besoms of brushwood and tie them where the blanket had been. Off they went again, Sally still watching backwards.

“It’s making a terrible lot of dust, Jeff — much more than before.”

Hell. He ought to have thought of that, with the roads so white with powder from the chalk hills. They were sending up a signal for miles in every direction. Better to leave tracks behind than warn people you were coming. He stopped, climbed down again and cut the bundles free.

Just outside Over Wallop they came round a corner to find a high-piled hay cart clean across the road, maneuvering to back into a farmyard. Geoffrey braked hard. There was no hope of turning in the narrow lane before the farm workers were on them — he’d have to reverse out and find a way round. But before he came to a complete stop the cart horses panicked, rearing and squealing as they struggled to escape through the quickset hedge opposite the farm gate. The cart came with them, up to its shafts, leaving a possible gap behind it. He wrenched the gear into first and banged through, misjudging it slightly so that the near mudguards grated against the farm wall. Amid the grinding and shouting he was aware of a portentous figure poised in midair above him, arms raised, spear brandished, like St. Michael treading down the dragon. He ducked as the man on top of the hay flung his missile, but the hayfork clanged into the bonnet and stuck there, flailing from side to side, as he drove on into the village. He couldn’t afford to stop and pull it out until he was well clear of the houses, by which time it had wrenched two hideous wounds in the polished aluminum. Thank heavens Lord Montagu wasn’t there to see how his toy was being treated.

The railway bridge over the road at Grately was down, and they had to grind up the embankment, jolt over the deserted rails and lurch down the far side, the ram twanging the rusty fence wire as if it had been thread.

Three quarters of an hour later they were driving towards Inkpen Beacon, just south of Hungerford. The westering sun lay broad across the land, and under the bronze, horizontal light the hollows and combes were already filling with dusk. Above the purr of the engine and the hiss of the passing air they heard a hallooing on the hill above them; the gold horizon was fringed with horsemen, who were careering along the ridge of down to cut across their path where the road climbed to the saddle. Geoffrey grinned to himself. There was still a couple of hundred yards of flat to allow him to take a run at the incline, so there was no need to change down. He pressed firmly on the accelerator and the sighing purr rose to a solid boom; the feel of the wheel hardened in his hands and the rose-tangled hedges blurred with backward speed. The military-looking gentleman had told him that a single-seater Silver Ghost, stripped for racing, had done a hundred miles an hour at Brooklands; this one was supposed to do seventy in its whining sprint gear, but he wasn’t using that on a hill — third should do it. The needle stood just over fifty as the bonnet tilted to take the meat of the twisting slope. Sally laughed beside him.

The horsemen were hidden now, behind the false crest of the down, and the engine, losing the impetus of its first rush, changed its note to a creamy gargle and swung them up the hill at a workaday forty. The hedges gave way to open turf as the Rolls swept towards the top and there were the horsemen again, coming along the ridge track at a whooping gallop, a dozen of them, barely fifty yards away. They hadn’t a hope, except for the little man who led them on the big roan with a hawk on his wrist and his green cloak swirling behind him. He was barely six yards off when the Rolls, bucketing in a bad patch of potholes, hurtled over the saddle and whisked away down into the sudden cutting on the northern slope. Sally twisted in her seat to watch the hunters.

“That was fun,” she said.

“Yes. What did they do?”

“They talked and waved their arms and then one of them started to gallop off that way. Wait a sec while I look at the map. I thing he was going to Hungerford.”

“Bother. That front chap looked like someone important, and he’ll get them to send messengers out to warn the countryside. That means it won’t be safe to stop for at least another twenty miles, and I’d been hoping to camp for the night before long. I’d better fill up with petrol now, to be on the safe side. D’you think there’ll be another tollgate at — where is it?”

“Kintbury.”

There was — a re-used level-crossing gate, with its oil lanterns still on it. They left it in spillikins, crossed the A4 and boomed up the hill to Wickham, where they swung left on to the old Roman road to Cirencester, Ermine Street. It was busier than any road they’d been on. Haymakers were coming home now, through the dusty brown shadows of evening; old crones led single cows back to the byres; courting couples walked entwined through the shadier passages beneath arched beeches; the odd rider spurred towards some engagement. Twice Geoffrey had to swing on to the verge and jolt round a towering wagon with its team of fear-crazed horses (small horses — five years is nothing like long enough to revive the strain of the huge, strong, patient Shires, which hauled for our ancestors for generations before the tractor came). The second time, Sally was hit on the arm by the blunt side of a flung sickle, just at the moment when Geoffrey felt his left front wheel slithering into a hidden ditch beneath the grass. Raging, he wrenched at the live wheel and stamped on the accelerator. It happened to be the right thing to do, and the car roared free, nudging the corner of the wagon so that the whole cargo, already unsettled by the antics of the horses, tilted sideways and settled on the man who had thrown the sickle.

“It’s not bad,” said Sally, “honestly. It’s just a sort of thin bruise. Crimminy though, this thing’s sharp on the other side.”

At Baydon there was some sort of merrymaking or religious procession or something in the main street (which is all Baydon consists of). Anyway it involved a lot of hand-drawn carts with a ring of candles round the rim of each, very pretty in the dusk-tinged night. The villagers were all in fancy dress, looking like dolls on a souvenir stall, but jumped squawking for safety as Geoffrey, still stupid with rage at a society where grown men felt it was proper to throw deadly tools at his kid sister, clove into the procession. The ram splintered the handcarts. Candles cartwheeled into the shadows. Women shrilled and men bellowed. On the other side of the village they were in blackness, real night, with a lot of stars showing.

“Time to find somewhere to sleep, Sal. See if you can spot a place which looks empty on the map. I don’t mind turning off this road if we have to.”

“Anywhere for the next six or seven miles, I think.” (Sally had Arthur’s pencil torch out.) “After that we come to a sort of plain which seems absolutely crammed with villages, and then we’ve got to turn off and start wiggling, which I’d rather not do in the dark.”

They found a spot, a couple of miles on, where the road dipped over the shoulder of a hill and eased to the right to take the gentler slope. But a still earlier age had preferred to cut the corner, and it was possible to drive down the old track — as old, perhaps, as the Romans — into a natural pull-off. They were only fifteen yards from the road, but hidden by a thorn thicket. Geoffrey left the engine running and scouted off into the dark to make sure he could get out at the far end, if need be. Then, while Sally rummaged for a cold supper and the engine clicked as it cooled, he unrolled a ball of twine and rigged a kind of trip wire all round the car. They sat, backs to the warm radiator, in the balmy dark and ate garlic sausage, processed cheese, bread and tomatoes, and drank the last of the Coca-Cola.

“You aren't frightened of this car, Sal?"

“No. Not any longer. Really it’s more like an animal — a super charger for rescuing princesses with. We’ve been frightfully lucky so far, haven’t we, Jeff?”

“I suppose so. That was a nasty bit when we found the wagon across the road, and I suppose the other man could have hit you with the sharp side of his sickle.” (He’d found it on the floor of the car, and it really had been sharp, honed like a carving knife.) “And other places too, honestly. I was scaredest at that first toll bridge, because it was something we’d planned for and didn’t seem to be working. But we’ve got to be lucky, Sal, so there’s no point in thinking about it.”

“You’re all like that. Boys and men, I mean. If there’s no point in thinking about something, you don’t. Are we going to sleep on the grass or in the car?”

“In the car. We aren’t really far enough from

Baydon for comfort. I’ll prime the cylinders and put a bit of pressure in the tank, just in case we have to be off in a hurry. I wonder whether it’s worth making a hill fog. It wouldn’t be difficult tonight.”

“Funny how you know about that when you can’t remember anything else.”

“I don’t have to remember it. I just know.” “Anyway, don’t let’s have a fog. It would be a pity to spoil the stars.”

It would too. It was a night when it was easy to believe in astrology. He tucked Sally into the back seat, filled the tank with petrol, put a quart of oil into the engine, looked into the radiator and realized they ought to stop for water at the first stream they came to, primed the cylinders, pumped the tank, tied the loose end of his trip string round his thumb and attempted to find a comfortable position across the front seats. He tried several positions, but really he was too long for the width of the car — it was as if a grown man was lying down in a child’s cot. In the end he lay on his back, knees up, and started to count the ecstatic stars.

He was woken by Sally pinching his ear. It was still dark.

“Don’t do that. Go back to sleep at once. Did you have a bad dream?”

“Sh. Listen.”

League upon league the fields and woods lay round them, silent in an enchantment of dark. No, not quite silent. Somewhere to the south there was a faint but continuous noise, a rising and falling hoot, or howl, very eerie.

“What’s that?”

“Hounds. Hunting. I’ve heard them before.”

His mind flickered for an instant to the dog that had bayed on the banks of Beaulieu estuary, but whose cry had gone unanswered.

“What on earth are they hunting at this time of night?”

“Us.”

Yes, possibly. The village of Baydon might have come swarming after them, like a hive of pestered bees. More likely the man with hawk had sent a messenger to Hungerford and got a thorough pursuit organized. If he was important enough he could have commandeered fresh horses, fresh hounds even, all the way up. It wasn’t all that distance.

“How far away are they? What time is it?”

Sally looked at the stars for a moment.

“Between three and four. I don’t think they’re as far off as they sound.”

She was right. The hound cry modulated to a recognizable baying, only just up the road, a noise whose hysterical yelping note told that the dogs had scented their presence and not just their trail. The best bet was to start on the magneto: he switched on and flicked the advance and retard lever up and down. Too fast. He took it more slowly and the engine hummed alive. As he moved off there was a sudden biting pain in his right thumb. The damn string. He declutched and tugged. No go. He leant over and tried to bite the taut cord free, but achieved nothing more than saliva-covered string, as strong as ever. Suddenly the cord gave and something bonked into the bodywork beside his head — Sally had slashed the cord through with the sickle. The hounds sounded as if they were almost on them as Geoffrey eased the car over the loose rubble of the old road, jerked up on to the newer tarmac and accelerated downhill. The white dust of the road (limestone here) made the way easy to see under a large moon. They whined down the incline and curved into a long straight, overhung with beeches on the left and with a bare, brute hill shouldering out the stars on the other side. The surface was almost unpocked, and Geoffrey did fifty for six miles on end.

“Jeff! Jeff! You must slow down. I can’t read the map in the dark at this speed. We’ve got to turn off somewhere along here and there’s a stream just before. It may be another gate. No, it wasn’t — that must have been it. Now we turn right in half a mile and then left almost at once, and then — oh, I see, you've only done that to get round Stratton St. Margaret. It’s awfully wiggly. Couldn’t we go straight through at this time of night?”

They did, the exhaust calling throatily off the brick walls down the long street. Half the roofs showed starlight through them.

“Right here! Right!”

He only just got the car round on to the A361.

“I thought you said straight through.”

“Well, it’s straighter than going round, anyway. I’m sorry. We turn left in about three miles. I think I’ll be able to see soon without the torch. Bother. We could have gone straight through and branched off later. It would have saved us a lot of wiggling.” “Never mind. If that’s the main road to Cirencester there’s probably quite a bit of stuff on it in the early hours — folk going to market and so on. I hope it gets lighter soon.”

It did. The gray bars in the east infected the whole sky. The stars sickened. For about five minutes, while his eyes were adjusting to their proper function, he drove through a kind of mist which was really inside his own mind, because he couldn’t decide how far down the road he could really see. Then it was morning, smelling of green grass sappy with dew. They breakfasted early, before the dew could clear and the haymakers would be about with their forks and scythes. Geoffrey filled the radiator from a cattle trough, still a bit shaken by the distance the hunt had managed to cover (assuming that it came from Hungerford — and he was sure it did — he was obsessed by the small man on the big horse with a hawk on his wrist) in seven hours or so. He got out the map and did sums. They’d done about twenty miles between Inkpen Beacon and stopping for the night, and roughly the same again this morning. At that rate the hunt, if it kept going, would be about twelve miles behind now. Allow an hour for breakfast, and it would be six miles — say four for safety. That should be OK.

But they must have spotted the general direction the Rolls was going by now, and they might send messengers posting up the main road to Cirencester and Cheltenham. If they took it seriously enough (and, considering Weymouth Bay and the fuss since the Rolls had been stolen and everything, there was no reason why they shouldn’t) they might then send more messengers along the main roads radiating from those towns, ordering a watch to be kept. Obviously all the bridges west of Gloucester would be closely guarded. The first danger point would be crossing the Fosse Way, a few miles on; then the A40 and A436. Besides, once people were about to mark their passage, there’d be messages and rumors streaming into the towns from the farmland, and the hunt would know which way its quarry had passed. Better not allow an hour for breakfast, really. They might be able to have a bit of a rest when they were up beyond Winchcombe and had turned sharply left.

Perhaps it was just luck, or perhaps it was because they'd kept going and left the chase miles behind, but they had almost no trouble all morning except for shaken fists and thrown stones. They motored in flawless summer between the walled fields of the Cotswolds, dipping into steep valleys where loud streams drove booming water wheels, or where gold-gray wool towns throve in the sudden prosperity which the defeat of the machine had brought back from the North. Then up, hairpinning through hangers of beeches, where herds of pigs grunted after roots, watched by small boys in smocks. Or along molded uplands where huge flocks of sheep nibbled at fields still rich from the forced harvests of six years back.

The only real excitement came from such a flock, which they met not far from Sudeley Castle in a bare lane with well-kept walls rising five feet on either side. The road foamed with fleeces for hundreds of yards, and beyond they could see a group of blue-clad drovers beginning to gesticulate at the sight of the car. There was time to hesitate. Geoffrey thought for a moment of plowing on through a carnage of mutton, but realized he’d bog down almost at once.

“How far have I got to go round if we go back, Sal?”

“Miles.”

“Oh well, let’s see what happens.”

He pulled over as far to the left as he could, and then swung right. This wasn’t going to be like a gate. He slowed below a walking speed before the ram touched the wall. The whole car groaned, jarred and stopped, wheels spinning. He backed and charged the same spot, and this time saw the top of the wall waver. Third time it gave, and the Rolls heaved itself through the gap, one wheel at a time because of the angle, like a cow getting over a fence. The grass on the other side was almost as smooth as a football field, and they fetched a wide circuit round the flock. A flotilla of sheepdogs hurled across the green and escorted them, yelping, to a flimsy gate which the ram smashed through without trouble. Soon after he had settled to the road again he realized that the car did not feel itself.

“Lean out and look at the wheels, Sal.”

“There’s something wrong with this one on my side at the back. It’s all squidgy.”

He could see nothing through the wake of dust, but when he stopped and listened there seemed to be no sound of pursuit. He climbed down, leaving the engine running, and looked at the right rear wheel. The tire was flat, with a big flap of rubber hanging away from the battered rim. When he was halfway through changing it there was a snarling scurry in the road and a black sheepdog sprang towards him, teeth bared. He lashed at it with the wrench, and it backed off and came again. He lashed again, and again it retreated. As it darted in for the third time a stone caught it square on the side of the jaw and it flounced, whining, out of range.

“I think I can keep it off for a bit, Jeff.”

“Super. Golly, you're a good shot, Sal. Where did you learn that?”

“Scaring rooks.”

When he had two nuts on she spoke again.

“There’s someone coming down the road, and I think I saw a man running behind the wall over there. Something blue went past the gate at the other side of the field.”

He hurriedly screwed on a third nut, hoping that that would be enough to hold for a few miles, and lowered the clumsy jack. As he drove off half a dozen men appeared from behind walls to left and right, like players at the end of a game of hide-and-seek.

Heaven knows what kind of an ambush they’d been planning, given five minutes more. He stopped and put the remaining nuts on just before they turned left on the A438. They banged through another tollgate, over the Avon and climbed the embankment on to the M5 Motorway near a place called Ripple. The great highway was a wound of barren cement through the green, lush pastures. It was deserted. Where they joined it was a strange area, a black, charred circle covering both lanes. Two miles later they came to another.