“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.
VII THE STORM
FUNNY,” said Geoffrey. “It looks as if someone had been lighting a series of enormous bonfires down here. D’you think they’ve been trying to burn the Motorway?’"
“It isn’t quite like bonfires — it’s too clean. There’s always bits and bobs of ends of stick left round a bonfire, and the ash doesn’t blow away either, not all of it. It makes itself into a sticky gray lump. It is funny. I suppose they could have come and swept it up.”
There was something else funny too. Geoffrey felt it in a nook of his mind as being wrong, out of key with the solid sunshine of the day. There was a flaw in the weather ahead of them, a knot in the smooth grain of the sky. Nothing to see, unless it lay hidden beyond the hills of the Welsh border. It worried
him, so much so that he kept glancing at the horizon and almost drove headlong into a vast pit in the road where a bridge had once carried the Motorway but was now a scrawl of rusted and blackened iron. He let the weight of the car take them down the embankment and stopped in the lower road to look at the wreckage.
“It must have been a bomb did that, Sal.”
“They don’t have bombs. It’s been burned, hasn’t it?”
Very odd. The destruction didn’t look as if it had been done by people at all. He felt thoroughly uneasy as he drove up the far embankment. The flaw in the weather was insistent now, either stronger or closer — he thought he could see a change in the hue of the air just north of one of the hills on the western horizon. Another three miles and he was sure. Soon the shape of the hammerheaded cloud that brings thunder was unmistakable. Odd to see one of them, all alone, but nice to know what it was that had been worrying him. He drove on, relieved.