Going It Alone

by Michael Innes

  That Kate and Gillian had been putting on their final inches since he last saw them was a reproach to him that he felt even as he scrambled from the car. It must be longer than he had been vaguely reckoning since he last visited Boxes.

  ‘Gilbert, how splendid to see you!’ Ruth said when she had kissed him and presided over her daughters accepting the same mode of greeting. She spoke with a lightness of air, just short of gaiety, which seemed to tell Averell one thing at once. If there was grave and urgent trouble about Tim it hadn’t yet been communicated to, or discovered by, Tim’s sisters. And the twins themselves made an immediate announcement that appeared to confirm this.

  ‘And just in time,’ Gillian said. ‘We’re off tomorrow.’

  ‘To Rome,’ Kate said. ‘Just the two of us. Isn’t that super? Not that we don’t wish Mummy would come.’

  ‘Quite impossible,’ Ruth said, maintaining her carefree note. ‘Smoky Joe would pine away. And the girls are quite old enough–’

  ‘Mummy!’ Kate and Gillian exclaimed simultaneously – one in ridicule and one in mock-indignation, but with an identical toss of the head.

  ‘It sounds a bold plan for mere children,’ Averell said – humorously, as would be expected of him. He turned aside briefly to pay off his driver. ‘Are you going to put up in a pub?’ he then asked.

  ‘Well, no.’ Kate made this admission with reluctance. ‘Mummy has some friends in Rome. Almost relations, it seems, in a distant way. Gillian says everybody ought to have foreign relations, provided they are decently distant. I say we don’t need any, because we have you, Uncle Gilbert. As a quasi-foreigner, one may say.’

  Averell picked up his suitcase and followed the Barcrofts into the house. His nieces, he told himself, were at least still at a stage he remembered: that of constantly trying out an expanding vocabulary. But they must be at the beginning of almost the last of their school holidays. There would be a lot to talk about in the way of their future plans. But what about Tim? There was as yet no sign of him.

  He went up to his room, and found with satisfaction that it was the one with its own bathroom. One had to be pretty elderly, at once to think about that. To the girls between themselves he was no doubt ‘dear old Uncle Gilbert’. He washed and unpacked, getting out the three small presents he had brought along with him. They were minute expensive things of what he thought of as the cosmetic order, and had been chosen from a list with which he had been provided against such occasions by a Frenchwoman of considerable fashion. It seemed strange to be handing such objects to schoolgirls – rather like taking a box of cigars to a nephew still at Rugby or Marlborough. When he went downstairs again it was time for tea.

  ‘But it isn’t Rome,’ Kate said at once, ‘simply because eligible chaperonage is on tap there.’ The girls were clearly so full of their coming adventure that they had no disposition to talk about anything else. ‘There are two Romes, you see. Which means one for Gillian and one for me.’

  ‘Two Romes? A respectable one and an underworld one, do you mean?’ Averell was now urgently wanting to know about Tim, but felt he had to play.

  ‘Well, it might be seen that way,’ Gillian said. ‘There’s the Rome of Cicero and Pliny the Younger, and all those virtuous bores. And there’s the Rome of the bad old Popes. Borgias and people like that.’

  ‘I see. And have you tossed up?’

  ‘Yes, we’ve tossed up. And I’ve got classical Rome and Kate’s got the Renaissance.’

  ‘I think you underestimate the complexity of the situation.’ Averell accepted scones, butter, and Ruth’s strawberry jam – justly judged incomparable. ‘There are innumerable Romes, each packed tight upon the other. It’s a regard in which Freud declared Rome to resemble the human mind.’

  This information was received with respect. Kate and Gillian, although their frivolous presents had been received with rapture, were no doubt young intellectuals in the making. Averell wondered how much of their brother’s vision of society they received as gospel. If the girls also took up demonstrating and sitting-in in a big way it would come a little hard on Ruth, although Ruth would be entirely loyal to them. And Ruth, after all, was as committed as Tim to the theory of a disintegrating social order. (And who in his senses is not? It was darkly that Averell asked himself this question, in the hinterland of which lay his sense of himself as involved in an ‘irrelevant’ course of life.)

  ‘We’ve had to get new passports,’ Kate said suddenly. ‘The photographs make us look like nothing on earth. But I suppose all passports do. You must show us yours, Uncle Gilbert.’

  ‘So I must,’ Averell said – with a nonchalance masking ludicrous alarm. And he added, very quickly, ‘But what have you both put down under “profession”? Is it “Schoolgirl”? Whatever you put, you know, will follow you around for years.’ He felt he had to labour this red herring. ‘What about “Scholar-elect of Somerville College, Oxford”?’

  ‘It would be a bold prolepsis,’ Gillian said – blessedly falling to the vocabulary lure. ‘We’ve just put “Student”, as a matter of fact. It’s noncommittal and far-reaching. You might use it yourself, Uncle Gilbert. What do you actually put?’

  Averell couldn’t remember what he did put – and was not in a position to refresh his memory in the matter.

  ‘“Scholar”,’ he said at random (and improbably). And he added, almost at a gabble, ‘T S Eliot once told me he put “Company Director”. It got him a lot more respect, he said, than if he’d put “Poet”.’

  ‘Or “Author of The Waste Land”,’ Kate said. ‘That would have puzzled them.’

  The twins were both so pleased with this, and with an uncle who, in the dark ages, had owned so distinguished an acquaintance, that they fortunately forgot about passports, and began bringing their aged kinsman up to date on the present state of English poetry. They liked Philip Larkin – chiefly (Gillian said) because they both owned an antiquarian side, but also because he also reminded them of their Uncle Gilbert. But did he know Anthony Thwaite? Did he know Adrian Mitchell? Had he read The Apeman Cometh? Averell suffered this bombardment happily. And it didn’t particularly disturb him that the girls hadn’t so much as mentioned their brother. Tim was among those major facts of life that can be taken for granted. And was famous. Everything that Tim was doing, everybody must already know.

  Tea was over – including that cherry cake with a superabundance of cherries that it had been recalled Uncle Gilbert peculiarly approved of. Averell felt what a fool he had been not to see more of these girls. At the same time he was quite glad when they jumped simultaneously to their feet and departed on the various appointed tasks of the late afternoon. It was clear that, in the domestic way, they backed up their mother with all necessary vigour. Perhaps for the first time, it came vividly to Gilbert Averell that through long school terms, and for many years, Ruth and Smoky Joe had been coping with Boxes alone.

  ‘Ruth,’ Averell said, ‘I’m wondering more and more about Tim. Tell me now.’

  6

  ‘It’s rather vague,’ Ruth Barcroft said. She spoke hesitantly, and a small rattle of china came from the tray on which she was stacking the tea things for removal. Both these phenomena surprised Averell. ‘I don’t even know,’ she said, ‘where Tim is.’

  This remark too – or the tone of it – was puzzling. No doubt a mother likes to be kept informed about the movements of her children, but it had to be supposed that a twenty-two-year-old son might reasonably drop out of contact for brief periods now and then.

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me,’ Ruth said.

  This, if it accounted for the manner of Ruth’s last speech, was perplexing in itself, and Averell waited for some further information. But Ruth was silent, her attention being apparently given up to the neat brushing of crumbs from one plate to another.

  ‘Was this in a letter?’ Averell asked cautiously.

&nb
sp; ‘He rang up.’ Ruth made yet another pause. ‘Gilbert, do they let you ring up from – from police-stations, and places like that?’

  ‘Good heavens, Ruth! But, yes. At least I expect that in some cases they do. Are you afraid Tim has been arrested again?’

  ‘It might be that, mightn’t it? Or he may even be in gaol by now. The telephone call came just before I rang you up in Paris.’

  ‘I see. But he made no secret of that last affair, did he? I seem to remember your hearing about it at once, and his coming home to Boxes as soon as they bailed him out.’

  ‘Yes, and it was even rather funny. Tim had to go and report himself to Constable Capper in the village, and it embarrassed Capper frightfully. But this may be different.’

  ‘It may be altogether different, Ruth, and have nothing to do with the police at all.’ Averell was astonished by the extent to which his sister appeared to be upset by Tim’s disappearance, which was still for no longer than the inside of a week. ‘Let’s face it, my dear. The boy may have all sorts of reasons for being a bit coy about his whereabouts for a time. For instance, there may be a girl in the case.’

  ‘He’d tell me, wouldn’t he, if there was a girl?’

  ‘In some circumstances he might.’ Averell was astonished this time by such a flight of maternal innocence. ‘But he’d be no more likely to tell you than to tell his sisters if he were having a shot – perhaps even a first shot – at something strictly dishonourable. Having a quiet weekend, say, with his vice-chancellor’s well-preserved siren of a wife.’ Averell checked himself, aware of having a very uncertain touch at this sort of thing, and doubting whether it was appropriate in face of his sister’s evident forebodings. ‘No point,’ he ended briefly, ‘in ducking such perfectly normal things.’

  ‘It didn’t sound like that.’

  ‘Well, Ruth, you haven’t told me how it did sound.’

  ‘Like something I didn’t like. I’m glad I’m getting the girls away.’

  ‘In heaven’s name, my dear! You haven’t arranged this trip for them because of how Tim sounded on a telephone?’

  ‘Of course not. Rome was all arranged months ago. It’s just fortunate it’s now, if something really bad is turning up. Don’t you still smoke that pipe, Gilbert? You know I don’t mind it.’

  ‘You still haven’t alarmed me, Ruth, I’m thankful to say.’ (This wasn’t quite true.) ‘But perhaps you’d better tell me all that Tim said when he rang up. In the first place, why did he ring up when he did?’

  ‘Because he’d arranged to come straight home at the end of term, and now he wasn’t going to.’

  ‘So he was probably ringing up from Oxford?’

  ‘I don’t think so. He seems to have been a good deal out of Oxford lately. Undergraduates come and go as they please much more than they used to do. Particularly in a final year, when they mayn’t be in college more than a couple of times in a week.’

  ‘I suppose it’s reasonable enough. They’re grown up, after all. But it wasn’t like that when I was at Cambridge. Managing undetected French leave was part of the fun.’

  ‘I’m not sure that Tim goes in for fun, Gilbert. In spite of your jokes about vice-chancellors’ wives.’

  ‘In fact, it would be student politics – and of the activist sort, as they say – that would take him here and there?’

  ‘Well, yes – and what would be called student journalism too, I suppose. Have you heard of En Vedette? It’s a paper he works for. I don’t even know what it means.’

  ‘You print a thing en vedette if you set it up in very large type. But a vedette is also a guard or sentinel. So I suppose there’s meant to be a double meaning.’

  ‘I see.’ Ruth was always impressed by her brother’s knowledge of the French tongue. ‘Well, Tim writes articles for it. And he goes to those stupid demonstrations and sit-downs, if that’s what they’re called, and takes photographs at them. He likes to snap policemen grabbing banners, and shoving around on horseback, and all that sort of thing. Of course, it’s just high spirits, but I feel it might always lead to trouble. And Tim seems to me too serious for the nonsense side of student activities. To my mind, he usually shows very good judgement about the issues he feels to be important.’

  ‘I’d not doubt that for a moment.’ Ruth’s firm defence of her son was thought by Averell to be very much in order. ‘But please go back to the telephone call. What more did he say?’

  ‘At first he just said that he happened to be pretty busy at present, so he wouldn’t be coming home during this vacation after all. I was very disappointed, as you can imagine, but of course I tried not to show it. But, somehow, I was alarmed as well.’

  ‘Why should you be alarmed, Ruth?’

  ‘It was something I felt about Tim’s state of mind, rather than about what he had said. So I did press him a little – as I oughtn’t to have done. I said how nice it would be if he could at least see something of his sisters before they went to Rome. It was silly.’

  ‘Well, yes. It was rather.’ Averell, although he didn’t see his sister all that often, had managed to preserve with her this sort of immediate frankness in speech. ‘It wasn’t as if the girls were going away for months and months. Tim might well have been a little annoyed.’

  ‘I don’t think he was, Gilbert. But he did seem agitated.’

  ‘Agitated?’ This wasn’t at all Averell’s notion of his nephew.

  ‘He blurted out that if the girls were at home it was all the more reason for his not turning up.’

  ‘How very odd! Do you think something may have overtaken him which he feels would make him distressingly poor company? One of those sudden undergraduate depressions, for instance, or an irrational phobia?’

  ‘He did say something more, and it doesn’t fit in with anything of that sort. He said that if he did come home he would probably be bringing unwelcome attentions in his wake. Can you make anything of that, Gilbert?’

  ‘I don’t know that I can. But wait! Perhaps Tim has got mixed up in some student affair that’s going to make a lot of news when it breaks. That might mean journalists and photographers prowling round Boxes on the hunt for him – and for the rest of you as well. Tim certainly wouldn’t like that at all.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ It was an index of the depth of Ruth’s anxiety that she seemed to embrace this rather remote possibility as a cheerful reading of the matter. ‘It would be quite something,’ she added with a momentary attempt at gaiety, ‘to have even one mysterious stranger prowling around Boxes with a camera or a notebook. We sometimes don’t see anybody for a week on end.’

  During this conference, brother and sister had been sitting on either side of the drawing-room fireplace: Ruth with her tea equipage still beside her, and Averell with his back to a tall French window a good deal obscured by a holly bush under imperfect control. And as Ruth uttered her last words her eyes suddenly rounded, and her gaze fixed itself over her brother’s shoulder.

  ‘And there is somebody!’ she cried.

  Averell’s was a high-backed chair, and as a consequence of this he had to jump to his feet and swing round before he could gain a notion of what Ruth was talking about. He achieved these movements, however, with a celerity that must have surprised him had he paused to think about it. But this he was far from doing, and he was halfway to the window before a holly branch swung across it – thereby obscuring the face, and even the presence, of somebody who had been peering into the room. And now there came a clatter from outside, as if a flowerpot or watering can had been kicked over, followed by the sound of rapidly running footsteps. Averell pulled open the French window in time to see an unidentifiable male figure vanish round a corner of the house.

  Averell, extremely angry, had no other thought than of hot pursuit. It was intolerable that his sister should thus be spied upon, even if nothin
g particularly sinister were involved. And it didn’t occur to him, despite the curious context in which this impertinence had taken place, that anything of the kind was so. His reading had persuaded him that peeping and eavesdropping (often achieved en plein air by an adroit exploitation of hedges and ditches) were staple employments among the humbler sections of rural society. And for some reason he was quite confident, as he himself rounded an angle of the building, that he was going to catch the offender. When he did so, and if the intruder proved to be of mature years, he could probably do no more than utter threatening words about trespass and the police. If a juvenile was concerned he could be told he was to be led off to his father for a good hiding. Not that Averell would in fact do anything of the kind, so all that he was achieving was vindicating to himself a certain capacity for action. And unfortunately it proved entirely unrewarding. The miscreant had vanished, and the first person Averell encountered was Gillian, returning from some evening chore among the poultry.

  ‘Good heavens!’ Gillian said. ‘Why ever so hot and bothered?’

  ‘Nothing in the least important.’ Averell had rather resented this description of himself, although it was fair enough. ‘Only some confounded yokel peering outrageously through the window at your mother and myself.’