by Mary Stewart
My hands were shaking and slippery on the wheel but when the car leaped forward again down the slope, I began to feel steadier. Down a bank, with a rush like a lift, along an uneven stretch of flat, round another high walled bend … and we were out of sight and well away … and it might take him some time to find out why the Bentley spluttered and would not start, with everything, apparently, intact.
Presently we dropped gently round the last bend, and swung on to the good surface of the Tarascon road. I turned to the right in St. Rémy, twisted through back streets till I thought I might have confused my trail a little, then, still keeping generally eastwards, hummed along the narrow country roads with elation in my heart.
11
Exit, pursued by a Bear
(Shakespeare)
Anywhere but Avignon. I might have given him the slip altogether, I hoped at any rate that I had delayed him considerably, but I could not risk leading him straight back to Avignon, and to David. Or, for that matter, back on to my own trail, which from Avignon, wherever I went, would be an open book. I sent the car at what speed I dared over the rough narrow roads, between their blinding high hedges of thorn and cypress, while I thought of where to go and what to do.
I would get clear away, if I could, then I would telephone Louise, tell her as much as I knew, and ask her to pack up and come to meet me. She could hire a car; I would pay for it, and it would save her having to wrestle on the crowded trains with two people’s luggage. But where would she meet me? I puzzled over it as the Riley crept cautiously over a narrow and manifestly unsafe river-bridge. Then I made up my mind, taking the simplest solution as being also the best. Marseilles. I had always heard, and indeed it was reasonable enough, that a big city was the easiest place to hide in, and here was I within fairly easy reach of one of the biggest cities in France. Another thing, Louise and I had originally intended to visit Marseilles for a day or so, so the obvious thing to do was to ask her to leave Avignon to meet me in Marseilles.
Even as I made the decision, the Riley ran into a small country town – a large village, by English standards – and a glance at a road sign showed me that it was Cavaillon. I turned off the road into a straight little alleyway and berthed the car. Then after I had lowered the hood and made it fast, I got back into my seat and took out the map.
For Marseilles, I saw, I should not have crossed the river, but have turned sharp south at Orgon on to the main Marseilles road. That much of my way, at any rate, I must retrace. I sat biting my lip, gazing down the narrow alley, which gave at the far end on to the main street of the town, and wondering what to do next. If I went back the way I had come, by the side-roads, and Richard Byron had picked up the trail, I would run straight into his jaws. If, on the other hand, he had not followed my actual tracks, he would be on the main road, and if I took that way I should deliver myself neatly into his hands. He had only the two alternatives, I knew, and, now, so had I.
I sat gripping the wheel, in an agony of indecision. Two alternatives … and I was wasting time. I looked at the map again, desperately tracing out with my finger the possible routes to Marseilles. There were three things, it appeared, after all, that were possible. I could take a chance, and go back by one of the two ways across the river Durance, on to the main road for Marseilles, or I could go east through Apt, on route 100, by an involved and roundabout way; or I could go back to Avignon.
The last did not count so I dismissed it straight away. And I was through with taking chances; I was through with trusting my luck. I was not going back across the Durance, to meet Richard Byron. I would go east, and take the long road to the coast. With a heavy heart I folded the map, and started up the Riley. We crept along the alley, which was barely car-width. It was roughly cobbled, and gleamed with stinking puddles where thin cats prowled and rummaged in the gutters. The plaster on the houses was peeling, the shutters hung crookedly on rusty hinges. We crawled along towards the main road.
Then stopped dead as I jammed on all the brakes and sat shaking.
In the slash of vivid sunlight which was the main road at the alley’s end, a big grey car flashed past, heading east for Route 100.
It was the Bentley.
My first thought was, absurdly enough, a sort of admiration for the speed he had made, even with my spanners in the works. My second was a sharp elation for myself. At any rate, the road to Orgon was now clear, and I could double on my tracks. I pushed the Riley forward to the brink of the alley, then braked again, and getting out of the car, ran forward to peer up the main street of Cavaillon.
The sun was blinding. The street was narrow, and crowded with the usual French country market crowd. There were women with baskets and string bags clustering round the street-stalls piled high with melons and beans and oranges and sleek purple aubergines. There were mule carts and lorries and big gleaming cars. There were dogs and children and half-naked brown men in berets and faded blue trousers.
But the Bentley had disappeared. I fancied I could see its dust still hanging in the hot quivering air at the east end of the street.
I ran to the Riley, and in a flash we were out of the alley and scudding west for the river bridge and Orgon, where one turns south-east for Marseilles.
Now that the Riley had her hood down, I was grateful for the breeze which, with our speed, fanned my cheeks and lifted my hair. But for the wind of our movement, the day was utterly still; under the pitiless sun of late morning the leaves of the planes that lined the road hung heavy, in thick lifeless clusters of yellow-green. The lovely stems of the trees with their dapple-work of silver and russet-peeled bark, shone in their long colonnades like cunningly worked pillars. The blinding road was barred by their shadows.
Regular as the pulse of a racing metronome, the shadow-bars flicked along the bonnet and back over my shoulder. We sailed out of Cavaillon on the verge of the speed-limit, tore through a dusty section of untidy ribbon-building, then suddenly the road writhed out from the plane-trees, and there, in the full glare of the sun, was the Durance and the long river-bridge.
And a queue of vehicles waiting to be allowed to pass over it.
With a sinking heart I took my place in the queue. The bridge, it appeared, was only a temporary one, three hundred yards of wooden boarding, narrow and unsteady, between the newly erected iron spans. At each end was a sentry-box, from which a man in uniform controlled the passage of traffic. At the moment, the stream from the opposite end of the bridge was being given the way, and cars, lorries, and carts crawled slowly and painfully across the narrow boards, while the white baton of the agent de police stretched implacably in front of us.
The heat poured down. I could feel it striking up in waves from the upholstery of the car, and gently prickling out in sweat on my body. I could not relax; I sat rigid, with my eyes switching like a doll’s eyes from that forbidding white baton to my driving mirror, and back again.
And still the baton held us back, and the opposite stream of traffic crept forward, and all round me, before, behind, and edging forward to the left, impatient French drivers hooted and raced their engines and stamped on their klaxons, and got ready for a mad rush for first place on the narrow bridge …
Behind me, in the tiny mirror, a gigantic lorry quivered and roared, almost on my rear bumper; behind him again I could see a mule cart with a round canvas top. To my left a yellow Cadillac had edged up and was ready to slip in ahead, between the Riley and the brake van in front of me.
My nerves began to stretch. The roaring exhausts, the heat, the klaxons, the undisciplined traffic of the French highways … would the white baton never drop? The impatient racing of motors round us suddenly became feverish, and again the imperceptible movement forward began; I saw that the other end of the bridge was now barred, and only three or four vehicles were still coming across; presumably as soon as the way was empty we would be allowed to go.
I gripped the wheel tighter, with an eye on the white baton, and another on the yellow Cadillac.
; The last lorry lumbered off the reverberating boards. The white baton dropped, and a hand waved us on. The brake van leaped at the gap, and the yellow Cadillac, with a triumphant blare, cut across the Riley’s bows and roared in behind it.
I was third in line on to the bridge, when I looked in the mirror again.
And saw the grey Bentley nosing out from behind the covered mule-cart.
At the far side of the bridge stood the other queue now, with wind-screens flashing like morse in the sun. We crawled towards it. Behind me the green lorry edged on to the boards, shaking the whole contraption in a hair-raising manner. And the Bentley—
Richard Byron had reckoned without the Frenchman’s utter lack of anything that might be called conscience or courtesy on the road. For as the Bentley drew out to pass the mule-cart, the driver glanced round and saw him, and immediately, with what looked like an imprecation, lashed at his mule, and hauled at its head, so that the cart swung drunkenly across the Bentley’s bonnet. The Bentley checked abruptly, and the driver, lashing his mule again, crammed into the vacant place behind the lorry.
I reckoned afterwards that it gave me a good five miles’ start. When I slipped off the bridge on to the western bank, the mule-cart was still plodding, only a third of the way over, with the grey car, held fuming, at less than a walking pace behind it.
I put my foot down and kept it there. The Riley tore up the straight good road like a storm. We passed the brake van as if it were standing, and then I put a thumb hard down on my horn and left the yellow Cadillac blinding through my dust at fifty miles an hour.
The needle flicked up … sixty … seventy … seventy-three … and ahead in the glare I could see trees across the way … A turn sharp to the left. I lifted my foot off the accelerator …
Mercifully there was nothing coming. We took the turning on the wrong side, and the back of the car skidded round it in the dust. There was a protesting scream from the tyres, and then the car straightened out and roared along the crown of the road. I felt no fear any more, I could not afford to think of anything but my driving … the world had narrowed down to the blinding straight ribbon of the route nationale, and the shadow-flecks across it that blurred now into one long flicker of shadows, like an old film.
I don’t even remember Orgon. I suppose I must have slowed down for it, and gone through it with some care, but we were through it before I knew, and out on the road again, with my blessed good engine pulling like the horses of the sun.
We flashed by a little farmstead, set among its bronzed ryefields, swung out for a cruising car, and passed a cart as if it did not exist. A long white hill loomed up, between slopes of baking scrub, and then we were up the hill with the smooth rush of a lift, and dropping down the other side as if the hill had never been.
A little hamlet, pink-painted among dark cypress, hurtled towards us, closed in on us, was gone. Two oncoming cars went by, with a smack like the rattle of a drum.
And the long road writhed and turned and rose and fell beneath the roaring tyres to whip back and away in the driving mirror like a flying snake. And in all the world there was nothing but the racing engine and the rushing air and the road that streamed and streamed towards us.
12
And southward aye we fled
(Coleridge)
Then, suddenly, we were not alone any more. Out of the tail of my eye, to the right, I saw the plume of white smoke that meant a railway engine. The line was running parallel to the road, about fifty paces away, and an express came steaming out of a wooded defile, placidly heading south, like a pompous and attendant sprite.
My mind leaped ahead; I tried vainly to envisage the map. Would there be a railway bridge, or would it be one of those level crossings so common in southern France? So common, and so slow. Dear God, I thought to myself, so slow. I had waited before now a full twenty minutes for the bar of a crossing-gate to lift on an apparently quite empty line. And I might have grabbed a good start, but I had had some taste of the speed Richard Byron could make. I couldn’t lose him on this road, and my only chance was to get into Marseilles with sufficient start to lose him there. Five minutes would do in those swarming streets, I thought grimly, and, with a hunted glance at the train, I put my foot down again.
To this day I do not know whether the driver of that train really did try and race my car or not. It seems impossible that he should have done so, and yet it really seemed to me, pelting along beside the rattle of the express, that the train gave a lurch and a sharp wail, and thereafter really entered into the spirit of the thing. The engine and I had it neck and neck for perhaps four hundred yards, while the driver and his mate leaned out of the cab and waved, and I sat over the wheel and looked neither to right nor left. Then we began to gain. The engine, panting, fell behind, and its pursuing rattle was deadened and then lost round a wooded bluff. For another span of minutes that seemed like hours, I held the car to its speed, then suddenly we slashed up a swift hill between two banks of olive trees, and away ahead, two miles off down a straight stretch of road, I saw, like a brightly painted toy in the distance, the sentry-box and the red and white bars of the level crossing.
It was still open.
But someone, a tiny figure dim in the quivering heat of the distance, was moving out to lower the bars.
I heard myself give a little sound like a groan, as the Riley hurtled down that road like a rocket-bomb.
The sentry-box came towards us with the sickening speed of a hangar towards a homing aircraft. The man lifted his arm to the crank that would release the bars. I put the heel of my hand down hard on the horn, and kept on.
I saw the startled jerk of his head, the white blur as his face turned towards us, his instinctive leap further out of the way.
Then with a roar and a rush and a sickening jerk and sway of springs, we were through.
I heard the bar crash into its socket behind us.
We had come down that two-mile stretch in one-and-a-half minutes dead.
We ran into Salon at a decorous pace, and threaded the main street with innocent care. In my mind’s eye I saw the grey Bentley, fuming, stuck behind that maddening red and white bar until long after the train had passed.
I warned myself, through my relief, that I couldn’t count on it. Richard Byron was quite capable of bribing the official to lift the bar as soon as the express was through, and the official was no doubt quite capable of obliging him.
So I did not pause in Salon, but held straight on.
But I had begun to feel tired.
So far, I thought, as I held the car at a comfortable fifty between the flickering avenues of plane-trees, so far the breaks had been about even. And the last good break had been mine. I began, I think for the first time, seriously to believe that I might be able to get clean away, lose myself where Richard Byron could not catch up with me, go right away with Louise until the storm-centre moved, and resume our disrupted holiday elsewhere.
Later on, perhaps, when I had time to think about it, I should begin to be angry at the way my time, my liberty – yes, and my person (I smiled wryly at the outdated phrase) had been tampered with. I had got embroiled in the affair through no fault of my own, but through an impulse I still could not fully understand, the impulse that had led me in the first place to seek David’s company, and in the second, to attempt to protect him. But I had certainly not deserved the kind of thing that had recoiled upon me. I ought to be angry, but just at present I was too preoccupied with my immediate problem to indulge in righteous indignation. The fact that Richard Byron was a murderer, and possibly of unsound mind, rendered null and void any prospect of talking reasonably with him. I had to escape, and then, perhaps, I could think.
The road was climbing steadily, towards the band of hills that lies between the Etang de Berre and Marseilles. It was unbearably hot, and I was hungry, but I put the thought aside, and pressed on through that deserted landscape, in a slow steady climb towards the crest of the rocky hills.
Towards
the top the air grew fresher, and clumps of pines, looking cool and northern and beautiful, grew here and there beside the road. Then, some way ahead of me, I saw a little bistro, just a small yellow-washed house with three Continental pines to the back of it, a red petrol pump, and some small tables outside under a striped awning. Suddenly I felt unbearably thirsty. I tried to persuade myself that my lead from Richard Byron was such that I could afford ten minutes – no, five – with a long cold drink under that gay awning; that I had at any rate time to stop and buy some rolls and a bottle of red wine. But it was no use; I was definitely through with taking chances; it was Marseilles first stop. So I went relentlessly up the last hundred yards of that hill without looking at the bistro any more.
Then the decision was taken rudely out of my hands, because I was barely twenty yards short of it when I felt the Riley swerve across the road. I told myself that I must be more tired than I knew, and I straightened her up and crept on towards the crest of the long rise. Then I felt her pull and veer again, and once again I got her into line. It was only as I actually topped the rise that the dismal truth filtered through into my preoccupied and tired mind.
The breaks were even again, and this one was against me. I had picked up a puncture.
But not so badly against me, after all. The Riley, true as ever, had chosen to have her puncture within a hundred yards of an outpost of civilization, so, grateful for this unlooked-for fortune, I backed her slowly in on to the little flat stretch of gravel in front of the bistro.