“Can I come too?” said Sally.
“No,” said Geoffrey and M. Pallieu together.
“Yes, she must go,” said the General.
“I don’t think I like it here,” said Sally. “I think those things are horrible.”
She pointed out of the window at a Renault squealing ecstatically round a right-angled bend at 60 m.p.h. and accelerating away across the bridge, watched by a benign Gendarme.
“You would soon be accustomed to them,” said M. Pallieu.
“You’d better stay, Sal,” said Geoffrey. “Honestly England sounds much more dangerous. Nobody is going to drown you here, just for drawing pictures.”
The General grunted and looked at Sally.
“You are right, mamselle, you must go,” he said. “Your brother has no memory of what arrives in England today. He must have a guide, and you are the only possible. Michel, it is necessary.” He spoke firmly in French to M. Pallieu, and Geoffrey, used now to the sound of French, grasped that he was saying that the children had not much to tell, but might possibly find out more than previous agents. Then he turned to Geoffrey.
“Young man, with your powers you have weapons that are stronger, in the conditions, than the antitank gun. If we send you to England, what will you do? You cannot explore a whole island, two hundred thousand square miles.”
“I think I’d go and explore the freak weather centers,” said Geoffrey. “That one on the Welsh borders sounds interesting.”
“Why?” The General pounced on him, overbore him, wore him down with stares and grunts. In the end it seemed simplest to tell them about Uncle Jacob’s message, and the gossip about the Radnor border.
“Understood,” said the General. “We must direct you to that point. You will find out the location, the exact location, of the disturbance, and then we will send missiles across. We will cauterize the disease. And when you come back, you can make us some more French weather. For the last five years we have endured your horrible English weather. The rain must go somewhere, is it not, Michel?”
He laughed, a harsh yapping noise, as if he were not used to the exercise.
“Yes, General,” said M. Pallieu sadly.
IV BACK
A FORTNIGHT later, in a warm dusk, they were lounging up the Solent under the wings of a mild wind from the southwest, passengers only, on a beautiful thirty-foot ketch skippered by Mr. Raison, a solemn fat furniture designer who’d been one of the first to leave England. The General had chosen him, hauled him all the way up from Nice, because he had once kept a yacht on Beaulieu River, with his own smart, teak bungalow by the shore. He had spent every weekend of his English life sailing devotedly on those waters, until he could smell his way home in a pitch-black gale.
The crew was English too. They were brothers called Basil and Arthur. Six years before they had lived near Bournemouth, fishermen in the off season, but making most of their livelihood out of trips for tourists in the delicious summer months. Now they owned a small garage in Brest, which the General had threatened to close down unless they joined the adventure — but Geoffrey, knowing them now, realized they would have come of their own accord if they had been asked in the right way.
The ketch belonged to an angry millionaire, who hadn’t been willing to lend it until he received a personal telephone call from the President of France. (His wife had put on her tiara to listen to the call on an extension.) It was the best boat anyone knew of which did not have an engine. The point was that they still knew absurdly little about the reaction of England to machines. Would the people sense the presence of a strange engine, even if it wasn’t running? Would the weather gather its forces to drive them back? Sally thought not, but it wasn’t worth the risk.
They were going to have to rely on an engine in the end. This was the upshot of the second lot of arguments in Morlaix. (The first had been about whether Sally should come at all, Geoffrey and M. Pallieu versus Sally and the General. Sally’s side had won hands down, partly because Sally really was the only one who knew what she was talking about, and partly because the General had enough willpower to beat down three Geoffreys and twenty M. Pallieus.)
The problem had been how the children should move the hundred and fifty miles across England to the Welsh borders. Should they walk, and risk constant discovery in a countryside where every village (Sally said) regarded all strangers as enemies? Obviously not, if they could help it.
At first they’d assumed that any mechanical means were out of the question, and the General had scoured the country for strong but docile ponies. But the riding lessons had been a disaster: Sally was teachable, but Geoffrey was not. Five minutes astride the most manageable animal in northern France left him sore, sulky and irresponsible. They persevered for five days, at the end of which it was clear that he would never make a long journey in that fashion, though he could now actually stay in the saddle for perhaps half an hour at a time. But he obviously didn’t belong there. The most dimwitted peasant in England would be bound to stare and ask questions.
It was M. Pallieu who came up with the mad, practical idea. He pointed out that the engine of Quern had worked, at least. This implied that the English effect was dormant in the case of engines which had been in England all along, without running. England had got used to their presence. Would not the best thing be to find a car which had been abandoned in England and was still in working condition?
“Impossible,” barked the General.
But no, argued M. Pallieu. It happened that his friend M. Salvadori, with whom he played belotte in the evenings, was a fanatic for early motorcars. Fanatics are fanatics; whatever their subject, stamps, football, trains — they know all there is to know about it. And M. Salvadori had talked constantly of this fabulous lost treasure store, not two hundred kilometers away over the water, at Beaulieu Abbey: the Montagu Motor Museum.
When the Changes came, Lord Montagu had been among the exiles; but before he left he had “cocooned” every car in his beloved museum, spraying them with plastic foam to preserve them from corrosion. (Navies do the same with ships they don’t need.) Could they not at least attempt to steal a car from the museum, something enormously simple and robust, and dash across England until they were within range of the country they wanted to explore? M. Salvadori suggested the famous 1909 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost.
The General had sat quite still for nearly two minutes. Then he had spent two hours telephoning. Next morning a marvelous old chariot trundled into Morlaix, with a very military-looking gentleman sitting bolt upright and absurdly high behind its steering wheel, and all the urchins cheering. So Geoffrey had his first driving lessons on that queen of all cars, the Silver Ghost, taught by a man to whom driving was a formal art and not (as it is to most of us) a perfunctory achievement.
It had not been easy. In 1909 the man who drove had to be at least as clever as his car. Nowadays they built for idiots, and most cars, even the cheap ones, have to be a good deal cleverer than some of their owners. So Geoffrey, sweaty with shame, groaned and blushed as he crashed those noble gears with the huge, long-reaching lever, or stalled the impeccable, patient engine. But he improved quite quickly. Indeed, before the messenger sent by the General to Lord Montagu in Corfu returned, the military-looking gentleman went so far as to tell him that he had a certain knack with motors. The messenger had brought back sketch-plans of the Abbey and the Museum, and, best of all, keys.
So now here they were, heading up the estuary through the silken dusk, with fifty gallons of petrol in the cabin, a wheelbarrow on deck, together with the ram which Basil and Arthur had run up in their garage, and beside them two big canisters of de-cocooning fluid, spare tires, two batteries, a bag of tools, cartons of sustaining food, bedding, and so on.