“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.