‘Oh, come, Uncle Gilbert! He must just have been looking for the back door or something. We don’t go in for inquisitive yokels round about Boxes. They’re all too utterly absorbed in their own minuscule affairs.’ Gillian was clearly rather pleased with her command of this phrase. ‘And nobody,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘would hope for a glimpse of incestuous orgy through our drawing-room window.’
‘I suppose not.’ Averell turned back with his niece towards the house, chiefly concerned to conceal that he was a little shocked by this freedom of fancy on the part of a schoolgirl. But he was also wondering whether the episode just concluded had prevented Ruth from giving him any further useful information about that telephone call, or whether he now knew as much about the occasion of Tim’s staying away from Boxes as she did. And what would Tim mean by a phrase like ‘unwelcome attentions’? It might after all be something in the area that Averell himself had rather frivolously suggested: ‘girl trouble’, as the young people now succinctly expressed it. Tim might have tangled with a nymphomaniac female who would pursue him to his mother’s house and scandalously clamour at its gates. But this wasn’t really plausible, and it was foolish to imagine that whenever somebody of Tim’s age got into trouble it was a matter of sex rearing its ugly head. What might be called a political reading of the mystery was much more likely to be on the mark, and what Tim had in mind was the hazard of his family’s being upset by the arrival of a policeman or some officer of a court bearing a summons or a warrant or similar engine of the law.
And this view of the matter assumed a higher probability later that evening. It seemed that it was Ruth’s turn to cook the dinner, and to her daughters, therefore, fell the duty of entertaining their uncle at a pre-prandial hour. With some solemnity they made him go down to the cellar and choose a bottle of wine. Kate uncorked it with enormous care, and with an equal precision Gillian set it down at what he pointed to as the appropriate distance from the drawing-room fire. Then the girls sat down and prepared to chatter. Or, rather, he thought it was going to be like that but it turned out slightly differently.
‘Uncle Gilbert,’ Kate asked sharply, ‘has my mother talked to you about Tim?’
For Kate to say ‘my mother’ like that was very formal; it might almost be said to be out of Jane Austen. So Averell felt that something serious was being heralded. And as the question was calculated to force his confidence, and as Kate would normally be punctilious in such a regard, he was constrained to feel that his nieces had their anxieties too.
‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘She’s disappointed he isn’t coming home.’
‘She says,’ Gillian said, ‘that it’s nothing, and that Tim’s just very busy because of his exams at the end of next term. But of course he can be as busy as he likes that way here.’
‘And have us waiting on him hand and foot,’ Kate said.
‘Particularly foot,’ Gillian said. ‘We run and fetch him his slippers.’
‘But hand as well. The brimming glass thrust into it.’
‘As a special privilege we’re allowed to stuff his pipe for him or watch him shave.’
‘And a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne is applied to the wearied brow.’
‘If you have something to say,’ Averell said, ‘don’t shy away from it.’
‘We’re sorry,’ Gillian said more soberly. ‘I suppose we’re rather nervous, as a matter of fact. We’re a family almost disgustingly without secrets, as a rule. But now Mummy doesn’t know we suspect anything’s wrong, and we do. So it’s awkward.’
‘Just what do you suspect is wrong?’
‘It’s not exactly that, really,’ Kate said. ‘It’s just that we have a piece of specific information. We noticed it in a newspaper, and Mummy didn’t, and somehow we didn’t want to call her attention to it.’
‘In case it was all nonsense, or irrelevant,’ Gillian said. ‘It was a paragraph saying that two young men whom we know are Tim’s very close friends have hit a bad patch. Something about a judge having issued an injunction, whatever that is, and their having ignored it, and so its being a contempt.’
‘Whatever that is,’ Kate said. ‘But it sounds pretty pompous and portentous.’
‘And you think Tim may be standing by to help, or something like that?’ Averell paused to consider his own question. ‘I can’t see that he wouldn’t simply let your mother know about that. It can’t be so very terrible. Less alarming, really, than vague conjecture.’
‘It was a great shock to my mother,’ Kate said, resuming her more severe manner, ‘when they locked Tim up. She tried to conceal it, but it was. And I’ve no doubt she’s imagining the same thing now.’
‘Yes,’ Averell said quietly. ‘As a matter of fact, she is.’
‘And Tim’s a very tiresome young man. Tiresome Tim is how he was born, I think.’ Gillian produced these unfavourable judgements vehemently but not to an effect of any great conviction. ‘Oh, dear! I forgot the sherry.’
The sherry was produced, and Ruth made a brief appearance to share it. She then returned to the kitchen; Kate went to the dining-room to lay the table; Gillian disappeared in order to ensure the nocturnal comfort of Smoky Joe. So there was no further talk about what was so plainly in everybody’s head. There was, in fact, none until, shortly before bedtime, Tim Barcroft made his unexpected homecoming to Boxes.
7
The young man had let himself in with a latchkey – and surely very quietly, since nobody had heard a sound until he was in the room. Perhaps he had intended a childish effect of surprise. And surprise of a sort he did achieve: this by striding straight to the window, drawing back a curtain, and peering intently into the dark. It was the window, as it happened, through which the mysterious intruder had done his peeping a few hours before.
Averell decided that he didn’t at all like this theatrical behaviour. It was disturbing Ruth, and his nieces were clearly uncertain whether or not they were being entertained to an obscure joke. Yet in a moment it was over, and Tim, seemingly much at his ease, was standing in front of the fireplace and glancing at his relations smilingly.
‘Here’s the prodigal son come home,’ he said. ‘And the fatted calf actually all ready prepared! Uncle Gilbert’s the fatted calf. Let’s fall to and devour him.’
‘Tim, dear,’ Ruth said.
‘Yes, it’s me.’ Tim bent down swiftly and kissed his mother, and when he straightened up again his manner had changed. ‘Did I worry you on the telephone?’ he asked. ‘It was stupid of me, and I’m sorry. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about. I was upset by something so trivial that it would be idiotic to talk about it. Short of the fatted calf, is there anything in the larder? I’m splendidly hungry.’
Much as if they really were in the habit of scurrying to fetch their brother his slippers, Kate and Gillian vanished into the kitchen. And their mother, too, rose.
‘I must take a look at your bedroom, dear,’ she said. And she walked rather slowly from the room. It was an action that gave Averell an immediate pause. The girls had been thinking only of feeding their brother on demand. But Ruth’s thus immediately withdrawing had been prompted by something else, and its effect on her brother was that of having had a ball swiftly lobbed into his court. Ruth had decided that, despite Tim’s so briskly asserting there was nothing to worry about, something was on foot that men had best get down to together. And now it looked as if she was right.
‘I’m damned glad you’re here,’ Tim said abruptly. ‘I’d no idea. But I’ll have this quick meal by the fire, talking any nonsense I can. Please play it that way, Uncle Gilbert. And then we’ll get them off to bed.’
‘Very well.’ For the moment, Averell could think of nothing more to say. He was wondering whether Tim had gone off his head, and a glance at the young man was far from reassuring. It was as if, alone with his uncle, he had fleetingly let fall a mask
. ‘Wild eyed’ would be the right description of him – that, and possibly ‘haggard’ as well. But perhaps it was simply that he was, for some reason, physically exhausted. He looked as if he had been travelling fast and far, and very uncomfortably as well.
The three women returned, and Tim sat down to his meal. He drank a glass of the remaining wine, but didn’t finish the bottle. He made no offer to explain himself further, but talked casually of various Oxford or family occasions. Averell sensed that he was putting into this a considerable effort of the will, and he did his best to back the boy up. Kate and Gillian were perplexed, but their feelings seemed to stop short of dismay. Ruth signalled her composure by a steady application to something she was knitting. Were they accustomed to Tim’s putting on odd turns? Averell had never heard of anything of the sort. Nor could he remember on any previous visit to Boxes an atmosphere of repressed discomfort possessing the entire household for an hour on end. Did it arise now from a sense that Tim was only half-attending to his own talk; that he was, in fact, listening for something else? One of the charms of Boxes lay in its secluded situation; it hadn’t a window from which another dwelling could be seen; the spire of a distant village church was the only evidence that man had ever set stone upon stone in England. Ruth, when in rare moments of depression she thought about selling up, would declare that such privacy was what people were now prepared to pay any money for. Averell was suddenly conscious that there was another side to this medal. Only imagine any sort of lawlessness around and that degree of isolation assumed a disadvantageous aspect. The night was very silent now; there was nothing to be heard except the ripple of the stream that ran through the garden; the proverbial crack of a twig that signals danger in juvenile romances would certainly sound like a pistol shot.
‘I want to talk to Uncle Gilbert about something entirely boring. But it will keep until you people go to bed.’
Tim had come out with this announcement as if it was the politest thing in the world, but it brought the family evening to a close on a further note of constraint, all the same. Ruth and her daughters departed, leaving Averell so surprised that for some moments he said nothing at all.
‘Wasn’t that on the cavalier side?’ he then asked mildly.
‘Bloody rude, I suppose. But it can’t be helped – and there’s more to come, I’m afraid. Uncle Gilbert, has anything out of the way happened at Boxes since you came?’
‘Good lord, no! And I only arrived this afternoon.’ Averell hesitated for a moment, and reflected that the mode of Tim’s own arrival lent a certain conceivable relevance to one very trivial episode. ‘There was somebody snooping around outside the house at teatime, as a matter of fact. Would you call that out of the way?’
For a moment Tim made no reply, but his uncle could see him stiffen in his chair. Then he sprang out of it and left the room, to return a minute later carrying a shotgun and a box of cartridges.
‘Comforting,’ he said. ‘I thought of it more than once on the way down.’
Standing in front of the fireplace, and beneath the astonished eyes of his kinsman, Tim loaded both barrels of the weapon.
‘It’s not often that I manage to pot so much as a rabbit,’ he said. ‘But the thing could deal out a fairly good peppering, all the same. There’d be a howl or two, wouldn’t you say?’
Averell didn’t say. He was wondering whether this exhibition merely astonished him, which would be reasonable, or whether it frightened him as well. For the moment, at least, he gave himself the benefit of the doubt. And now he found that he was alone in his sister’s drawing-room, with leisure to indulge in any further speculations he chose. Tim, with his gun under his arm much as if he were prowling one of the paddocks surrounding the property, had gone into the hall and shot the bolts on the front door; seconds later he was moving from room to room on the ground floor, closing windows and securing shutters. If the afternoon’s snooper returned he would now certainly be thwarted in his snooping, or even in a tolerably determined attempt to break in. Averell, as if infected by whatever imaginings his nephew was prompted by, fell to reviewing in his mind’s eye the entire layout of Boxes. It was scarcely well-calculated, he decided, to repel organized assault. But that, surely, was something altogether too extravagant to conceive.
Tim returned to the drawing-room, and quietly laid the gun down beside his chair.
‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘would you say you had a certain authority with my mother and sisters?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve certainly never done all that to earn anything of the kind, Tim. But, yes – perhaps.’
‘They must be got away.’
‘Got away!’
‘All of them, I mean. Mummy must go with the girls to Rome tomorrow. We can bring it off, if we’re firm. I’ll be staying to look after the livestock. And they all three simply adore last-moment plans.’
‘There would be room on any flight at this time of year, I suppose.’ Averell, not unnaturally, was astounded by all this, but found Tim’s earnestness and vehemence persuasive. ‘Only we’d have to be pretty brisk at putting it across at the breakfast table.’
‘We’ll manage it. We must. I’m telling you.’
‘Tim, I don’t know what to make of you. Begin at the beginning, for heaven’s sake! Just what is this all about?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But that simply doesn’t make sense.’
‘I simply don’t know. But there it is – what’s been happening.’
‘Precisely what – ?’
‘I decided not to come home, you see, because I felt they might follow me. I’d lie low somewhere else until I got the hang of it. But then I had this other thought.’
‘Just what other thought?’ There must have been complete bewilderment in Averell’s voice. Tim wasn’t given to speaking in riddles.
‘They’d know where my home was – or they’d find out. So they might come to Boxes anyway. And it sounds as if they had.’
‘Tim, who on earth are “they”?’ Deranged persons, Averell believed, frequently got round to talking about a ‘them’ who were essentially figments of the imagination. Had Tim turned into such a one? Averell discovered with relief that he thought not. But from this it followed that the boy had actually got into deep water of some sort. And it could scarcely be with the police, or with the law in any form. You don’t, if you’re sane – and Tim, he reiterated to himself, was sane – load a shotgun in any such exigency as that. But at least there was something to explore here.
‘Tim,’ he said, ‘you talk as if some gang of criminals was after you. If that’s so, why don’t you go to the police?’
‘I can’t do that. You know I can’t.’
‘What nonsense! Anybody can go to the police.’ As he said this robustly, Averell was just conscious of the fact – and it was a mere oddity – that at this moment he himself might find contact with the police something he’d avoid if he could. Not, of course, in a situation of any real gravity. But if he did so contact them, there was a probability that, sooner or later, he’d have an awkard misdemeanour – or was it a felony? – to explain.
‘The fuzz aren’t my friends exactly,’ Tim elaborated with an air of patience. ‘They sat me down and they stood round me. I wasn’t clobbered, or anything like that. But it wasn’t nice.’
‘It certainly can’t have been.’ Averell was perfectly willing to acknowledge to himself that here was territory legitimately traumatic, so to speak, in the experience even of an entirely level-headed young man.
‘But it isn’t just that, Uncle Gilbert. It’s all so confused, and I have to try to think it out. As I said, at the moment I simply haven’t a clue. But, first, there’s this urgent thing. They might do a kidnap, mightn’t they? Here at Boxes. And then I’d be helpless. I’d have to do anything they asked.’ Tim paused. ‘For it would be like that, wouldn’t it?�
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‘I suppose it might.’ Averell saw that the proposition he was acquiescing in was comprehensible in itself but surrounded by total mystery. He also saw that Tim was unaware of the fragmentary and inconsequent nature of such information as he was giving, and that this was probably the consequence of extreme fatigue. ‘When did you last get some sleep?’ he asked.
‘Sleep?’ The word was repeated by Tim as if it was something he’d just heard of but couldn’t very certainly identify. ‘Oh, quite some time ago, it must have been.’
‘Then hadn’t we better go to bed now, and tackle this in the morning?’
‘This?’
‘Look, Tim. I always wake up quite early. I’ll make some tea and bring it to you, so that we can get things sorted out before the household’s up and around – or your new plan has to be mooted.’
‘It’s an idea.’ Tim moved uncertainly on his chair. He seemed quite to have lost the power of action which had taken him round the house, locking it up; and he had lost, too, the incisiveness with which he had ordered his womenfolk about. He didn’t even seem to be remembering his gun. ‘There was a boy at school who said he always did his maths when asleep. The answer was ready to write down when he woke up. The working, too, I suppose. They always insisted on the working. I can’t think why, provided the answer was correct.’ Tim produced an enormous and quite healthy-seeming yawn. ‘Perhaps it will come to me in a dream. Just how it started, I mean. Or why it started. Do you think?’
‘It’s worth a try. And, by the way, I’m a very light sleeper myself, Tim. So if there was the slightest disturbance round the place I’d be aware of it, and rouse you at once.’
‘Super, Uncle Gilbert.’ Surprisingly and rather touchingly, Tim got meekly to his feet. ‘Is there anything I can get you first?’ Tim glanced at Averell in a kind of sleepy appraisal, and was possibly made aware of his advancing years. ‘A hot water bottle, perhaps?’
‘No thank you, my dear Tim. I’ll be fine.’
Going It Alone Page 5