Geoffrey laughed as he accelerated away. “Tomato soup/’ he said.
Sally was crying. “It’s everybody hating us, even the children. It’s horrid.”
“They hate the car, really. They’d have been sure to hit one of us if they’d really been aiming at us. Cheer up, Sal. We’re not going through any more towns. We’ve chosen a whole lot of little lanes that ought to miss them completely, and you’ll have to do the map-reading. I’ll teach you as soon as we come to a safe bit of straight where we can’t get surprised.” They found a good place almost at once, by a stream under some willows. Geoffrey stopped the car and switched off the engine.
“It’s quite easy,” he said, “especially as we’re going north so everything’s the right way round. These yellow and green and red lines are the roads. That’s all that matters for the moment, but you’ll learn the other signs as we go along. That’s Brocken-hurst, which we’ve just been through, and we’re here. We want to get up to this road with the pencil mark beside it, which is the one we’re supposed to be on, so we go up here, see, to the A35. That’s about three miles. Then we turn right, and quite soon come to a bridge — this blue line is the river. Then a bit over a mile further on, when we’re almost in Lyndhurst, we turn left through Emery Down and we’re on our proper road. Try and tell me what’s going to happen next about a mile before we get to it. Right? Off we go.”
What happened next was a tree across the road. It had evidently been there a couple of years, but nobody had tried to move it. Instead, passers-by had beaten a rutted track round the roots, which Geoffrey had to follow. The Rolls lurched and heaved at a walking pace, with the ruts, hardened by months of summer, wrenching the steering wheel about. Geoffrey remembered what the military-looking gentleman had told him about Silver Ghosts being used in the First World War to carry dispatches through the shell-raddled terrain behind the trenches. He realized, too, that he still had the five-year-old tires on. The ram was a nuisance in the tight curve of the track, poking ahead and catching in brambles and weeds, but the big engine wrenched it through. It might come in useful soon: the A35 was the old main road between Southampton and Bournemouth, and there was that bridge. He swung back thankfully on to the remains of the old tarmac.
A couple of miles later he eased cautiously out on to the main road. Its surface was no better than that of the side lanes — worse, if anything, as it seemed to have seen more traffic — but it was wide enough for him to pick some sort of path between the potholes. They swirled past a cart, leaving the driver to shout the usual curse through their long wake of dust. Now that they were coming out of the forest, there would be more people about, of course. The road dipped towards the stream, and there was the bridge.
And there, on the bridge, was the tollgate. Sally had mentioned tollgates to M. Pallieu, who had informed the General. The ram had been built on his instructions. It was his sort of weapon.
The gate looked hideously solid, with a four-inch beam top and bottom, set into a huge post at either side. Geoffrey changed down to third and second, double-declutching anxiously. The tollkeeper, a fat woman in a white apron, came to the door of her cottage, stared up the road and screeched over her shoulder. Geoffrey changed down (beautifully — the military-looking gentleman would have been delighted) into first, glanced at the gate — now only twenty foot away — decided he was still going too fast and eased off, to a trot, to a walk. With the gate a yard off he accelerated. The whole car jarred through all its bones as the ram slammed into the bottom beam — they weren’t going to make it. With a deep twang the hinges gave, the structure lifted and leapt sideways, and the car surged forwards. A big man with an orange beard pushed out from behind the woman, swinging a sledgehammer, but before he got within smiting distance a yellow thing looped out of the car behind Geoffrey’s head and caught him in the face. Unbalanced by the swing of his mallet he fell backwards, bringing the fat woman down too. Geoffrey drove on.
“What on earth was that that hit him?” he asked. “I threw your smelly stove at him,” said Sally. “I never liked it anyway. I hope they aren’t all as excited as that.”
“With luck we won’t meet many. We’ll hardly be on main roads at all. But rivers are almost the only thing we can’t find a way round, so we’ve got to go over bridges. I didn’t expect the gates to be quite as strong as that.”
“We turn left quite soon,” said Sally. “When are we going to have lunch?”
“Let’s go on a bit. I don’t really want to stop till I need a rest from driving. There ought to be some biscuits somewhere. If we get a puncture we’ll just have to stop.”
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 . . .