Going It Alone

by Michael Innes

  2

  Being driven back to his own apartment, Averell remembered a question one used to be asked in wartime. Is your journey really necessary? Just at the present moment, there was no doubt what his answer would have to be. He often had one or another specific reason for wanting to visit England, and was rationally annoyed that he was unable to do so without incurring some unacceptable financial penalty. But nothing of the sort was in question now, and what he had involved himself with was merely a petty act of symbolic defiance. Georges had been right, therefore, in saying that the thing must be done with style and with that plume, so to speak, waving. And this raised an issue he hadn’t at all thought out. He was booked for a week’s deception. But for how long was he booked for an act of impersonation as well?

  It dawned on him that impersonation could be a deep and mysterious affair: one answering, perhaps, to needs and impulses wholly buried in the unconscious. Surely it must be something of this kind that had prompted him to fall in with Georges’ bizarre and rather disreputable suggestion – this quite as much, at least, as the attractiveness he remembered as attaching to mere undergraduate follies and pranks?

  He would be turning himself into somebody else. Put thus starkly, it suddenly became an alarming idea. Clearly there were people who enjoyed doing just this – including, in a sense, the entire theatrical profession. And doesn’t every child delight in dressing up? But all that was play; was imitation, mimesis, willing suspensions of disbelief. To plan veritably to foist an imposture on others was quite a different thing. Crooks of various kinds did it soberly – and probably joylessly – in the way of business. Crooks who got any pleasure out of it were to be found mainly in storybooks. Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull, for instance: there, certainly, had been a chap with plenty of élan to bring to the job. But Gilbert Averell was no Felix Krull. (Nor was meant to be, the Prince de Silistrie might have added from his abundant store of English literary references.) Yet conceivably every Averell has a Krull inside him, hollering to be let out. Perhaps this was what had happened. And ‘had happened’ got it just right, since he knew quite positively, if mysteriously, that he was committed to the outrageous charade.

  He had been seeing the element of full-scale, one hundred per cent impersonation as lasting for about thirty seconds at either end of the adventure: for just so long, in fact, as he was displaying that passport beneath a notice reading ‘Other EEC Nationals’, or something of the sort. He’d be himself in England.

  He’d be himself in England – hiring a car at Heathrow (if he decided to fly rather than travel by rail and sea) and simply driving down to his elder sister’s house in Berkshire. He’d have sent a telegram ahead of him, and his visit would occasion no surprise. His sister certainly kept no account of his regular English sojournings; it would never occur to her that anything irregular was afoot; the little visit would be the most normal, the pleasantest thing in the world. Then he’d return as he had arrived, and collect the proceeds of his wager. There hadn’t of course been a wager. But the thing felt that way – and it was probably the best way to feel about it.

  Yet all this precisely lacked the panache which would alone render the exploit other than feeble. He knew that he’d better keep it that way. The alternative was to sail (or tack or wallow) through a week in London as the Prince de Silistrie; to throw himself into the part for the benefit of porters and hotel clerks and waiters; to drop into French when some difficult English idiom appeared to elude him: every kind of nonsense of that sort. He found himself wishing that Georges wasn’t a prince. To be a prince in France didn’t mean all that. The younger sons of a duc – he vaguely seemed to recall – often perplexingly ran to the title of prince. But in England it sounded very grand. Something to be stared at.

  Thus was Gilbert Averell still meditating when he got back to his own apartment in the rue Lafitte. And there a variety of small practical problems at once beset him. Was he to book himself out of France in his friend’s name? There might be something slightly tricky about that. Was he to pocket a substantial sum in francs in the reasonable confidence that nobody was going to ask to see his wallet? If he did, and if he then changed them into pounds sterling even in small batches in England, would this involve his producing what purported to be Georges’ signature? What about his suitcases, which were so boldly stamped GA? He knew that in all these minor matters there lay no substantial difficulty. They were harassing, all the same. He felt he wasn’t really well cast in the role of adventurer.

  Yet anything that added to the effect of challenge ought to be reckoned as a gain. The more of a pushover the thing was, the sillier would it be. He ought even to be looking forward to the sudden bobbing up of unexpected emergency, such as would require a quick wit to cope with. But what about the blankly not-to-be-coped-with sort? Suppose he fell gravely ill. Suppose he was knocked down by a bus. The game would be up – and not to the effect that he had simply been out-staying his ticket-of-leave. And it wouldn’t be Gilbert Averell alone who was compromised. The Prince de Silistrie would be compromised as well. Georges would assuredly hasten to the land of the free (on that British passport, if need be) and grandly declare himself to have been responsible for the entire ludicrous and scandalous affair. They might both end up in what Georges called the nick. A magistrate at Bow Street or wherever might be amused, but was more likely to think of the Inland Revenue. It would all take – at the most optimistic estimate – a lot of living down. No betting man would give much for his chances of receiving that honorary fellowship.

  For most of the morning he continued to confront the momentous issue (as it now seemed to him) of just how he was going to spend seven April days. Was it in London as the Prince de Silistrie; as an industrious hoaxer, in fact, building up a little fund of exploits with which to entertain Georges when he got back to Paris? Was it in London as nobody in particular, doing the theatres and concerts and galleries and whatever else offered by way of entertainment for a solitary visitor? Or was it as Gilbert Averell, visiting his sister Ruth Barcroft and her family in a perfectly normal way? Berkshire could be delightful at this time of year. There would be armies of daffodils in Ruth’s wild garden, one day seemingly dashed for ever to the ground by a late frost, and the next erect again in brilliant sunshine. On the Ridgeway the winter’s mud and rut would have dried out, and it would be terrain good for windy walking under scurrying cloud, a protean sky.

  But about this attractive picture there was a snag. It was all very well to say that the visit would be perfectly normal; that no thought to the contrary would enter his sister’s head. It wouldn’t be normal, but part of a situation which, although merely amusing in Georges’ eyes (and intermittently in his own), would perplex and distress Ruth were she to get wind of it. And Ruth, he very well understood, had endured her share of family troubles. It would be a great shame if her reliable brother Gilbert proved to have turned up on her as the consequence of what she might read as downright dishonest behaviour.

  Faced with this sobering discovery, Gilbert Averell ought, of course, to have washed out the whole thing. But that, he thought, would be to represent himself to his friend Georges in a poor-spirited light; would even, in an irrational way, be a kind of hauling down the flag. No, he’d go ahead! But he’d opt for London.

  This was Averell’s state of mind (if mind it can be called) when his telephone rang. And it proved to be his sister on the line.

  Ruth’s voice came across with the complete clarity that long-distance calls so frequently achieve. She might have suddenly been in the room with him, so that the smallest inflexion or change of tone coming through the instrument seemed to carry a visual impression too – as of a smile, a questioning glance, a shade of perplexity or surprise passing over her face.

  ‘Gilbert, it’s Ruth. How are you?’

  ‘Fine, only rather idle. How about yourself?’

  ‘Not too bad. Do you hate the telephone?’

>   ‘No, of course not. Or not if it’s you. Why?’

  ‘You sound as if you’re not being idle at all, but rather busy or preoccupied or something, and not terribly wanting to be disturbed.’

  ‘Absolutely not. I’ve just been thinking about you, as a matter of fact. It must be telepathic as well as telephonic. How are all the family?’

  ‘Just as they should be. For the most part.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Gilbert, I don’t want to badger you, if you’re absorbed in things. I meant to write, but then I thought I’d ring up. This instrument’s more revealing than a carefully composed letter, don’t you think?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Averell, as a scholar, had faith in the written word. ‘But I’ve known it to generate misconceptions at times.’ He hesitated for a moment. It was clear to him that Ruth was upset. And she wasn’t one from whom small upsets elicited hasty appeals. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve just been wondering whether you might be coming home for a bit in the near future. But for God’s sake don’t think I’m trying to summon you. I know about that tiresome tax business, for one thing.’

  ‘Oh, that!’

  Hearing his own dismissive note, Averell realized he had taken a first step in deception within the family. It didn’t feel at all nice. And if there was real trouble in what he sometimes facetiously called darkest Berkshire he ought not to be importing fibs into it. He knew the right thing. He must recover his own passport from Georges at once, and travel openly to England by the first available flight. It was something he’d had to do once before – on an overdraft at the ticket-of-leave bank, so to speak. It was simply necessary to notify some authority or other in writing, and everything became perfectly regular. If Ruth was in some substantial difficulty he’d do precisely this.

  ‘Never mind about that,’ he said, and this time didn’t hesitate. ‘Is it Tim?’

  ‘Well, yes – it is, rather.’ There was a pause. ‘Gilbert, I do need your advice.’

  ‘Listen, Ruth – and what I say is absolutely true.’ Fleetingly, Averell registered that this was an odd thing to have to say to a sister. ‘I’m on the point of coming over, as a matter of fact. And I’ll make for Boxes straight away.’

  Boxes was the odd name of Ruth Barcroft’s house.

  ‘That’s just wonderful.’

  ‘Is there anything more you want to tell me now?’

  ‘Yes. Or I don’t know. Gilbert, do people listen in on these calls?’

  ‘Good heavens, no! It would take an army to monitor cross-Channel chit-chat.’ For the first time, Averell was really alarmed. ‘So go ahead. Whatever it is, I can think it over in the air.’

  ‘I think I’d rather wait, after all. It’s silly. But I’m as nervous as a cat.’

  ‘Very well. And now I’ll ring off. There’s just one arrangement I have to make in a bit of a hurry, as a matter of fact. I’ll send a telegram about when I arrive. Keep going, Ruth. Goodbye.’

  As Averell put down the receiver he noticed that his hand was trembling. But he made his vital call at once. It was to be told that the Prince de Silistrie was not at home. In fact the Prince de Silistrie had gone abroad. And no, he had given no forwarding address – saying merely that he would be away for only a week.

  So Georges had wasted no time. And it was up to Averell to waste no time either. He called the airline, and booked a flight in Georges’ name. He’d enter into the deception in style, he told himself – even solemnly appearing to set out from his friend’s deserted apartment.

  3

  Timothy Barcroft was twenty-two, and at twenty had experienced brief fame or notoriety. As a student he had come to hold strong views on the evils of capitalist society, nuclear weapons, sub-human housing, racialism, the CIA, and numerous other conditions and institutions that ought simply not to be. His condemnations and indignations tended to be on the sweeping side, and he was at various times a nuisance to sundry authorities with whom he came in conflict. Much of this happened because he was a very nice young man; and it was one of his chronic troubles, even grievances, that many, although by no means all, of his elected Aunt Sallys persisted in so regarding him even after he had taken a good hard swipe at them. He felt he wasn’t being treated seriously – which is an unforgivable offence against the sensibilities of the generous young.

  Then a day came upon which Tim was involved in a ‘demo’ that went wrong. It was to be as orderly as nearly all such manifestations are meant to be. But there was a rival ‘demo’ around; the police failed to maintain their planned cordon sanitaire between the two; and a vicious punch-up was the result. Tim found himself in court, charged with having picked up a labourer’s shovel and hit a constable on the head with it. A good deal of very confident evidence was produced in support of this alarming accusation. Tim was remanded in custody; granted legal aid; that sort of thing. Then a press photographer came forward in his defence – happily possessed of a film (which had just escaped being confiscated) in which the doing of the deed was plain to see, as was – incontrovertibly – Tim himself, peacefully arguing with another minion of the law half a dozen yards away. So Tim was acquitted, and at the same time lectured by the beak on the hazardousness of associating with unruly persons neglectful of the right and proper ways of effecting beneficent social change within a true democracy. And a rather senior policeman called on him and made a strictly off-the-record apology for the unfortunate mistake that had occurred. Tim seemed to take all this well, and went his ways as before. There was a certain hardening in him, all the same, which occasioned anxiety in his family.

  Gilbert Averell (or the Prince de Silistrie) turned these matters over in his mind while high in air above the English Channel. He felt that he had never done his duty by his nephew Tim, and this even although he was much attached to the boy. Or it might be better to say that he had failed in his duty to the Barcrofts as a whole. Ruth had been divorced, very much without fault of her own, when Tim had been quite small and the twin girls barely out of their cots. She was a competent and courageous woman, and a little older than he was. Nevertheless, he ought to have made her feel, much more than he had done, that he was prepared, as her only brother, to act at need as the head of the family. But that wasn’t quite right, since he had always been ready, as now, to step forward in a crisis. It was steady background support, constant interest, that he had failed to provide. And what had been his real motive in long ago taking himself off to live in France? There would be more money for the Barcrofts one day as a result, but hadn’t he packed up partly because family responsibilities bored him; because of this and because some very commonplace pleasures (which had in fact never much commanded him) were available with less fuss and complication in an expatriate station? Whatever his reasons, the thing had been second-rate in itself – just like this wretched joke to which Georges had persuaded him.

  Of course there was no secure reason for supposing that, had he stayed put, he’d have proved any sort of good angel either to Ruth and her family or to anybody else. Tim, for instance: if he’d fussed over Tim when the boy was, say, in rebellion against a housemaster (or running after a housemaid) the effect might just have been to mess the boy up. And Tim wasn’t a mess, even if messes were things he sometimes got into. Averell blamed himself, all the same.

  Averell was sunk in these unsatisfactory musings when a man sitting next to him offered some commonplace remark about the flight. He did so in French. As they were travelling by Air France, and as Averell had shortly before spoken in French when buying himself a drink, this was natural enough. What was odd was that he replied spontaneously in English. Or it appeared, at least, odd to himself, French having been for so many years the language he employed more often than not. There seemed to be no particular reason why the stranger (who was a middle-aged and unmemorable little man of the clerkly sort) should be struck by this small linguistic circumstanc
e, since an Englishman often enough essays replying in his own tongue to a speech in another the gist of which he has just understood. In Averell, of course, the mechanism had been different. Far from living his way into his part, he was becoming progressively more and more uneasy at the impersonation he had undertaken, and he had instinctively shied away from Georges’ language. The stranger, however, did seem surprised and (what was surely perplexing) even a little amused. Averell remembered that the fellow had been close behind him as they had gone through the control at the airport, so perhaps he’d had a glimpse of that confounded French passport. That might be it. Averell, as he hit upon this explanation, was conscious of a kind of forward vista of such minute vexatious occasions.

  ‘The name’s Flaubert,’ the stranger said, easily and in English. And he momentarily elevated above his head a foolishly undersized pork-pie hat.

  Averell detested unknown persons who thrust their identity upon one with some such aggressive and underbred formula as this. Moreover, the name that the stranger had announced somehow added to the offence. There was no reason why a man encountered on an aeroplane should not be called Flaubert. There must be Flauberts around, although he couldn’t recall ever having actually met one.

  ‘Monsieur Gustave Flaubert?’ he heard himself say.

  This silly little irony was a mistake. Flaubert was delighted, and clearly regarded an intimacy as having been established.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, and much as if he were a celebrity who might expect to be thus at once identified. ‘My mother hailed from Hull,’ he announced. ‘But my father was a provision merchant in Passy. Alimentation générale, as you may have heard us call it in France.’