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 take a car from the museum? They could choose a route that avoided towns and villages. They would come so fast that nobody would be ready to bar their way and they would outrun any pursuit. They might meet casual obstacles, but some of the great old cars were built almost like tanks, enormously simple and robust. They could be further strengthened.… 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 two big canisters of decocooning fluid, spare tires, two batteries, a bag of tools, cartons of sustaining food, bedding, and so on. Beside them lay the “ram,” a device like a cowcatcher to be bolted on to the front of the Rolls—Basil and Arthur had welded it together in their garage, because Sally had said they might need it. But an even more curious item, perhaps, was Sally’s pouch of horse bait, in case the Rolls was a flop and they had to trudge into the New Forest and steal ponies after all. The General had dug up a professional horse thief, a gypsy. He had been very old and smelly, and had smiled yellowly all the time, but he’d pulled out of pocket after pocket little orange cubes that smelt like celestial hay. He had whined horribly at the General for more money, but when he realized that he’d been given as much as he was going to get he had changed his personality completely, becoming easy and solemn, and had said that Sally was born to great good fortune.
They could see the banks of the estuary now, on both sides, a darker grayness between the steel-gray water and the blue-gray sky. The rich men’s yachts were all gone. There was a noise of hammering and a flaring of lights from Buckler’s Hard, as if the old shipyard were once again building oaken seagoers, in a hurry after two hundred years of idleness. The banks came closer. There were houses visible by the shapes of their roofs against the skyline, but few showed any lights in a land where once again men went to bed at dusk and rose at dawn. A dog howled and Geoffrey cringed a little in the darkness, sure that the animal spoke for the whole countryside, that somehow it had sensed them and their cargo, alien and modern; sure that they would land to meet a crowd of aroused villagers, bristling with staves and spears (like the soldier-men at Weymouth) who would chump them all into shapeless bloody fragments, like the jaws of some huge, mindless hound. But no dog answered; there was no calling of voices from dark house to dark house, no sudden scurrying of lanterns; the ketch whispered on through the darkness between the black, still woods on either side of the water.
After an endless time the two brothers held a low-voiced talk with Mr. Raison, crept forward and brought the mainsail down with a faint clunking. They drifted along, barely moving, under the jib. Staring forward, Geoffrey saw the reach of water down which they were sailing darken in the distance, as if it were passing through the blackness under trees. Mr. Raison gave a low whistle and put the wheel over. The jib came down, flapping twice like a shot pheasant. The anchor hissed overboard (its chains had been replaced with nylon rope at Morlaix). They were there. The ketch lay in the center of the pool below the abbey. The blacker patch of water had been land.
Sally pulled the trailing dinghy in by its painter and Geoffrey eased himself in, then stood, wobbling slightly, to receive stores, stowing canisters and bedding all around him until there were only three inches of freeboard left, and barely room for Basil to lower himself in and row them ashore. He really was an expert. He pulled with short, tidy strokes and caught the oars out of the water with a cupping twist of the wrists that made neither swirl nor splash. The only sound was that of a few drops from the oar tips.
They unloaded their cargo over a patch of bank slimy with the paddling of ducks, and Basil went back for more. Geoffrey sat on a drier patch higher up the bank and stared at the star-reflecting water. The ketch itself was invisible against trees.
Thank heavens, anyway, he hadn’t needed to make a wind for them. The breeze, which had been perfect, was now dying away to stillness, and soon there’d be an offshore wind to take the ketch out. But they’d a good four hours’ work to do before then, and four hours seemed nothing when you thought that before next nightfall Sally and he would, like as not, be dead. Funny to think of all those distinguished officers scampering across Europe, bullying underlings over the telephone, just in order to land a couple of kids in Hampshire to steal a motorcar, when the odds were that all three, the Rolls and Sally and himself, would finish up among the rusting rubbish at the bottom of a duck pond.
He began to worry again about Sally, though she’d been happy and excited on the way over. She’d hated France with its whizzing cars and jostling citizens. The only aspects of civilization she’d really enjoyed had been Coca-Cola and ice cream, and she’d got on best with the smelly old gypsy man. After he’d left she had filled every spare nook of her clothes with the orange horse bait, which she kept pulling out to sniff during their endless planning sessions.
Suppose that by some crazy fluke they brought it off and England became again the England he remembered, would Sally ever be happy? And then there was the General. At first Geoffrey had worshipped him, a magnificent manifestation of absolute will, whose orders you obeyed simply because he was giving them; but then he’d found himself puzzled by the great man’s actual motives: the readiness to slaughter a couple of kids on the off chance of pulling off a farfetched coup—did he really know what he was up to? Or was he like a mindless machine, pounding away toward some unthought-out purpose.
You couldn’t blame him so much, thought Geoffrey, for not being very interested in how the children got back to France, supposing they ever did. Any plan so remote had to be vague, and the best they could hope for was to hide the Rolls near their target, nose around, drive home by a different road, buy or steal a boat and sail south once more. M. Pallieu had suggested that they might carry a homing pigeon, trained by another
crony of his, but then they were disappointed to find that the crony’s pigeons could only find their way home from the south—that being how pigeons are trained: you take them a little way from their loft and let them fly home; then you take them further in the same direction; and further; and further. So the General vetoed the idea. Children, he seemed to think, make much more flexible and reliable messengers. And just as expendable.
They were taking the devil of a time about reloading the dinghy. Perhaps Sally was having second thoughts—be a good thing if she did, really. It was damned unfair blackmailing a kid to come on a business like this, and that went for himself, too. Why did it have to be them? Had the General honestly made an effort to find anyone else who was immune to the Effect, or had he just seized on their chance arrival as an opportunity to exercise his own self-justifying will? Serve the great man right if the Rolls turned out to have been burned by angry peasants. In that case he was certainly not going to go loping off into the dark to steal ponies—and they’d hang you now for that, Sally said—Blast! The dry patch he was sitting on wasn’t as dry as he’d thought, and the cold came through the seat of his trousers like a guilty conscience. He stood up and stared at the stars, then walked up onto the road.
When the dinghy came back he was exploring the potholes in the unrepaired tarmac and wondering whether they’d brought enough spare tires. Sally came up the bank to him.
“Sorry we’ve been so long,” she whispered. “We couldn’t get the ram and the wheelbarrow and us in all together. They’re going back for it now.”
Geoffrey slithered down to the water and found the wheelbarrow, which he hauled up to the road. By the time he’d brought the rest of the stores up the dinghy was back, with all three men in it.
“Thought I’d take her back, seeing as you were making the extra journey,” whispered Mr. Raison. “Don’t want some busybody coming along and spotting her. Remember I can’t get out if we have to leave after four a.m. I’ll skip off if you two aren’t back by then, Bas, and you’ll have to lay low all day. Try and get down to that broken staging just below Buckler’s Hard. I’ll look for you there about eleven, and if you aren’t there I’ll try and come up here, but it won’t be easy single-handed. Same the night after. Then I won’t try anymore, and you’ll have to steal a boat. Okay?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said the brothers together. As Mr. Raison sculled away into the shadows they picked up the ungainly ram and carried it up to the wheelbarrow. Geoffrey helped stack whatever stores they could around it, and the rest—mostly petrol—they hid in deep shadow under the old abbey wall.
The main gate was locked, and though the key fitted the lock it wouldn’t turn it. Arthur produced an oil can from a pocket and they tried again. Geoffrey was just feeling in the barrow for the big bolt-cutters when the corroded wards remembered their function. Arthur oiled the hinges, and after one ugly screech the gates swung silently open. Geoffrey shut them behind him.
The lock to the front door of the museum would not move at all, but the smaller door around on the far side gave easily enough, and they were in. The cars lay ghostly to left and right, lumpy blobs under their plastic foam and dust sheets. The floor was gray with dust, and Geoffrey was surprised that he could see it, until he realized that the moon must now be up—he hadn’t noticed in the tense crouching over the locks. He looked behind him, and saw in the dust four sets of footprints, like those black shoe-shapes which comic artists draw to show the reeling passage of a drunk along a pavement. Between them ran the telltale track of the barrow’s rubber tire—a risk, but worth it for the sake of silence. Arthur lit a pencil torch, and in its stronger glow Geoffrey saw hummocks of white stuff, like fungus, scattered between the cars. Basil walked across and pushed one with his foot.
“Plastic foam, that is,” he whispered. “Right old mess they made.”
“Forgotten how to use the equipment then?” said Arthur. “Just let’s hope that don’t start happening with us, eh?”
Silence lay around them like a dream. As they turned the corner to where the Rolls should be, Geoffrey felt that the thud of his excited blood was the loudest noise in the night.
“That’s her,” said Basil. “Drape a bit of bedding on a line atween those other two, Jeff, and we won’t hardly show no light.”
Arthur was already scratching with a fingernail at the white foam on the hood. He tore a strip of the stuff away and shone his torch on the hole. They all saw the overlapping red RR.
“Aye, that’s her,” said Arthur, and chuckled in the darkness. Geoffrey ran a cord between projections from the two white lumps on their right and draped sleeping bags into the gap. Arthur lit a small lantern torch and began tearing systematically at the cocooning plastic. Geoffrey untied the dust sheets that covered the rear two-thirds of the machine and found that the dash and the controls had also been cocooned. He helped Sally into the driver’s seat and set her pecking sleepily away, then went off with the barrow to fetch the rest of the stores. By the time he’d finished his third trip, Basil and Arthur had torn off all the cocooning that would come easily, and were working under the hood, swabbing down the plastic with solvent. It shriveled as the sponges touched it to a few small yellow blobs, which they wiped away with cloths. Sally was fast asleep on the front seat, sucking her thumb in a mess of white plastic. She grunted like a porker as Geoffrey heaved her into the back, but stayed there. He covered her with a blanket, swept out the litter of cocoon and started to swab away at the dash. She’d done pretty well, really. He finished the dash, cleared the steering wheel, gear-lever and brake, and climbed down to see how the brothers were doing. They’d almost finished.
“I’ll nip down and get the last jerrican,” he said. “Then I’ll give you a hand with the wheels and the ram.”
“Okay, Jeff. I reckon she’d start now—if she’ll start at all.”
Outside the moon was well up, leaving only the big stars sharp in a black sky. And something else was different. He stood still, and realized that the night was no longer noiseless. There was a muttering in the air. As he walked down to the gate he recognized it as the sound of low, excited voices. There was dim, flickering light beyond the bars—a lantern! He crept through the clotted mat of grasses that had fallen during five summers of neglect into the drive, and peeped around the stone gatepost. There were three or four men on the grass bank where they’d landed on the other side of the road. The one with the lantern knelt and pointed. Another ran off to the sleeping houses. They must have spotted the tread marks of the barrow’s tire. As quickly as he could move in silence, Geoffrey loped back to the museum. The brothers had hauled the ram into position in front of the bonnet and were standing scratching their heads.
“There’s no time for that! They’ve spotted the barrow tracks, or something. One of them ran off to the village!”
“Ah,” said Basil, slowly, as though someone had told him crops were moderate this year.
“What’d we better do?” said Arthur, as though he already knew the answer but was just asking for politeness.
“Do you really think she’d start?”
“Aye. We’ve put some petrol in her, and primed her, and pumped her. Mebbe we could be getting off to some tidy spot in the Forest now, and put the old ram on there.”
“What about the tires?”
“Reckon we must go chancing that, Jeff. They don’t look too bad to me. I’ll be pumping the tires while Basil cranks and you can see if she’ll go. Oil’s okay.”
Geoffrey and Basil unfastened the absurd great straps which held the top forward, eased the framework back and folded the canvas in. Sally said “I’m all right” as he lugged her back into the front seat to make room for the stores, but she stayed asleep. Then he settled himself behind the wheel, whispering to himself, “Be calm. Be calm.” Arthur was standing by the left front wheel, methodically pawing away at the footpump, when Geoffrey moved the advance/retard lever up and switched on. Basil swung the starting handle, but nothing happened. The s
ame the second time, but at the third swing the engine kicked, hiccuped and then all six cylinders woke to a booming purr. He revved a couple of times, and Arthur grinned at him through the easy note of power. This, thought Geoffrey, was far the most beautiful toy that man had ever made for himself. The idea was spoiled as a snag struck him. He gazed up the narrow and twisting path between the shrouded cars to the intractably locked main doors.
“How are we going to get out?” he shouted, though there was no need to shout. At low revs the engine made no more noise than a breeze in fir trees, but panic raised his voice.
“Ah,” said Basil. He walked around and kicked the wall behind the car.
“This is no’ but weatherboarding here,” he said. “I got a saw somewhere, and I’ll be through that upright in a brace of shakes.”
Arthur didn’t even look up from his pumping. His long, pale face was flushed with the steady pumping, and there was a pearl or two of sweat on his moustache.
“All I ask is have a care the roof don’t come down atop of us,” he said.
Basil scratched his jaw and looked up at the crossbeam.
“Don’t reckon she should,” he said. “Not till we’re out, leastways.”
He took his saw from his toolbag and sawed with long, unhurried strokes at the upright timber. When he was through at the bottom he stood on two jerricans and started again about seven feet from the ground. Arthur packed the pump into the back and went around the car, kicking the tires thoughtfully. Basil jumped down from his pedestal and heaved the cans into the back. He looked over the door at the sleeping Sally, climbed up, picked her up gently and stowed her on the floor in front of the passenger seat. Then he lifted the sleeping bags off the cord and tucked them around and over her, until she was cushioned like an egg in an eggbox. He knelt on the seat and reached over into the back, feeling in his toolbag, and brought out two hefty wrenches. He handed one to Arthur and settled into the passenger seat.
The Changes Trilogy Page 33