Three hundred yards down the tarmac he eased up and craned over his shoulder. The boar was sitting on its haunches in the middle of the arch under the trees, watching them go. It still looked enormous eighty yards back.
“They don’t come that big,” said Basil in a low voice. “ ’Tisn’t natural.”
“I don’t know,” said Geoffrey. “You get farm pigs as big as that, with proper breeding. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of farm pigs have escaped and gone wild since the Changes. How close did it get?”
“Six foot or so,” said Arthur. “Dunno that it would have done any real harm, unless it had nicked a tire. Hope there’s not many of them about, eh, Bas?”
“Looked like it was coming for the car, not for us,” said Basil.
They both sounded sick and bewildered, quite different from the calm and assured couple who had helped him steal the Rolls. Geoffrey realized that he had them on his hands now, and that he ought to make it as easy as possible for them to get back to the river by nightfall.
“Let’s have a squint at that map,” he said. “Look here. I think the best thing would be if I took you on up to Lyndhurst and then turned south. I’ve got to go there — there doesn’t seem to be any real way round it. Then I can run you down almost to Brock-enhurst and you can take the B3055 back to Beaulieu — it looks about six miles, and you don’t want to come back along the road we left by. You needn’t go into the village at all, actually, which is a good thing because it’s probably still humming. I can go off this side road here, almost to Lyndhurst, and then right up this one here, which’ll bring me back on to the road I was going to take anyway, up through the Wallops. Cheer up, Bas. I daresay you’ll feel better once you’re away from the Rolls/’
“Hope so.”
Lyndhurst was a ghost town, almost. There were no money-bringing tourists now, and the Forest, wilder than before, did not provide enough income to support a community. They boomed down deserted streets, left and left again. An old man leaning on a staff watching sheep graze a stretch of close-nibbled common turned at the sound of the motor, shook his fist at them and shouted something undis-tinguishable. But a curse, for certain.
When he judged he was just out of earshot of Brockenhurst Geoffrey stopped. The brothers climbed out and stood dully in the road.
“Now listen,” Geoffrey said. “You go down here for about half a mile and turn left. Got that? It’s just where the stream crosses the road. You’d better take your bag, Basil, but leave out anything modern.
Here; I’ll sort it out for you. Saw, hammer, chisels, cold chisel, these square nails should be OK, hand drill, bits, brace, no, not the hacksaw, I should think — that’ll have to do. Here are four gold pieces, in case you have to lie up for a bit, and need to buy food.”
“They’ll have to think of a story for them,” said Sally. “They’re a lot of money, and people always ask.”
“All right. Now listen. You’ve been working in a shipyard at Bristol as carpenter and mate, and the master died and you didn’t like the new master. So you thought you’d try your luck down this way. Got that?”
Basil glanced sideways at Arthur, doubtfully, but Arthur nodded. Geoffrey realized that he’d been speaking loud and slow, as if to a stupid kid. He went on at the same pace.
“Don’t go into Beaulieu if you can help it. Wait for two nights at the disused piles below the Hard. If you don’t meet Mr. Raison, steal a boat and sail south. Take food with you, and don’t try to do it in a rowing boat. It’s too far. It’s a hundred miles. Got it? OK, off you go. Good-bye, and thank you very much for all you’ve done. I’ll wait till you’re clear, off our road, so that people aren’t watching for anything special when you pass. Good luck.”
Basil spoke, slowly and thickly.
“I wonder if we done right, after all.”
He was looking with loathing at the Rolls.
Geoffrey caught Arthur’s eye and jerked his head sideways.
“Come along now, Bas,” said Arthur. “We best be stepping along. ’Bye, Jeff and Sally, and good luck to you, I suppose.”
The brothers turned together and walked off down the road, their shapes black in the stretches of sunlight and almost invisible in the shadows of the trees. At first they trudged listlessly, like tired men (which indeed they must have been), but after a while their backs straightened, their heads moved as if they had begun to talk to each other, and their pace became springier. At the curve of the road, beyond which they would no longer be seen, they stopped in the sunlight, turned and waved — a real good-bye this time, friendly and encouraging even at this distance. Then they were out of sight.
“I hope they’ll be all right,” said Geoffrey. “I was dead worried when they went all fuzzy like that, but they seemed to perk up once they were a bit away from the car. We’d never have got here without them. Does this thing worry you, Sal?”
“Some of the time. But I don’t think it really bothers me inside me, if you see what I mean. Not like Arthur and Basil. It was something in their minds coming out which made them go all funny. But with me it’s really only that I’m not used to engines. I’m used to thinking they’re wicked. Parson preached against machines every Sunday, almost. He said they were the abomination of deserts and the great beast in the Bible. He watched the men stoning Uncle Jacob.”
“But you aren’t suddenly going to drop a match into our petrol tank?”
“I don’t expect so. I don’t feel any different from France. I hated those little French beetles whining about, but I think some machines are lovely, like the train on the bridge. And this one too, I suppose.”
She ran a dirty hand over the old red leather. “Then you must be immune, too, or you’d have started going like the brothers. Do you think it runs in families? There was Uncle Jacob, and you, and me. Do you really think we’re the only ones?”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel like an only one.”
“Nor do I. I think I must have been immune before I got hit on the head, or I’d never have been able to look after Quern. I suppose Uncle Jacob told me —”
“Jeff, I think there’s another animal coming. I can feel it.”
“OK, Sal."
He let the big engine take the car slowly away, trying not to disturb the murderous forest which had sent the boar, but it was too late. A gray stallion, wild, swerved into the road ahead of them, snorted as it saw the car and reared with whirling hooves to meet them. Geoffrey increased his speed, nudged the wheel over so that the ram pointed directly at the beast and pooped the horn. The stallion squealed back. At the last moment, when they were doing nearly forty, he jerked the wheel to the left and back again, so that the huge car skittered sideways and on. The horse, clumsy on its hind legs, couldn't turn in time to block them, but a hoof, unshod, banged on metal somewhere at the back of the car.
They drove quietly round the outskirts of Brockenhurst until they came on a group of children playing a complicated sort of hopscotch in the middle of the road. The girls ran screaming into the houses, but the boys picked up clods and stones out of the gutter and showered them at the Rolls, which clanged like a tinsmith’s shop as Geoffrey nosed through. The windshield starred on Sally’s side, where a flint caught it. A man came and stood in a doorway with a steaming mug in his hand. He shouted and flung it at the car, but missed completely in his rage and the mug shattered against the wall of a cottage on the far side, leaving great splodges like blood on the white stucco.