Going It Alone

by Michael Innes

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Averell found himself a little disturbed by these unassuming claims, or rather by the manner in which they had been offered to him – its implication being that he was himself an Englishman. He had told himself that occasions would arise in which a quick-witted response would be required of him, and perhaps this was one of them already. What if this intolerably familiar little bourgeois now blankly asked him for his own name? Was he to reply with hauteur, ‘Monsieur de Silistrie’, or was he simply to say, ‘Gilbert Averell’? It would be possible, of course, simply to remain silent. A thrusting chap like this must be accustomed to being snubbed often enough.

  But this particular small crisis (if indeed it was that) didn’t occur. Flaubert was more interested in Flaubert than in his interlocutor.

  ‘I’ve always been grateful to my mother for talking English to me,’ he pursued. ‘There’s a great advantage in possessing the two languages, as I fancy you do yourself. In the commercial world, that is. If two languages come to you for free, as it were, it’s not too hard picking up bits and pieces of a couple of others. And with that you’re quite off the ground. They feel they can send you anywhere.’ Flaubert paused on this, and to a disturbing effect of consulting a not too rapidly operating imagination. ‘I travel in containers,’ he then pronounced.

  ‘In containers?’ Averell repeated, perplexed. The image of a packaged Flaubert thus presented took a little sorting out.

  ‘Advanced collapsible containers. It’s a very strong line. Pretty well does away with having to fix up return loads. Any chance of interesting you, by the way?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ Averell had provided himself for his flight with the current Revue des deux Mondes, but hadn’t in fact opened it – perhaps because its title was tiresomely symbolic of his own present predicament. He’d better open it now. The engines had changed their note, which meant the plane was beginning to descend. He’d have reached the safety of Heathrow (if it was safety) in no time. There, it oughtn’t to be too difficult to brush this burr-like person off. Meanwhile, however, the conversable Flaubert ignored the respectable journal which his victim had brought up pretty well to his own nose.

  ‘But this isn’t a business trip with me,’ Flaubert went on. ‘Or not altogether. Of course one combines business and pleasure when one can. I keep up with my English relations, you see. You never know when people may be useful to you. That’s a motto of mine.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it is.’ The frigidity with which Averell uttered this gave him courage, and he lowered his Revue sufficiently to enable him to tap its open page. ‘But you will forgive me, sir. I have to make a note or two on something here before reaching my destination.’

  ‘London, is it?’

  ‘No, not London.’

  ‘Ah.’ Fleetingly, Flaubert gave the impression of a rather stupid man surprised once more. ‘Well, it’s not London for me either,’ he said – almost aggressively, Averell thought.

  At this moment the little lights went on, and a young woman sternly called for an extinguishing of cigarettes and the fastening of seatbelts. Gilbert Averell breathed a sigh of relief. Release was at hand.

  4

  Most of the passengers were French, so there was quite a queue at the little booth labelled ‘Other EEC’. Averell vaguely wondered whether they had names like Balzac and Proust and Malraux. Apart from this, names, strangely enough, weren’t worrying him. He was scarcely aware that he himself had a name. It was as if, at this crucial juncture, some process of mild dissociation had set in. It was as if he were going through a trivial formality and there was nothing more to it. Georges’ passport said ‘Prince’, since the Republic preserves the courtesies in these matters. But the man at the desk was neither impressed nor interested. It was only to be observed that he put a date-stamp on the passports of everybody coming in this way.

  Averell was aware of a certain impatience in himself as he waited for his suitcase to appear on the appropriate roundabout from which he would have to grab it and trundle it through Customs. But this wasn’t because he was afraid of the passport official having intuitive second thoughts and coming pounding after him. It was merely because he wanted to be well ahead of the vexatious Flaubert at the curious game of snatch-when-you-can that the contrivance imposed – distinguishably to the discomfort of the older and less agile travellers. Some of the more practised of these had secured porters with waiting trolleys, and had only to point with a magistral umbrella at their own particular gyrating property. Younger people stood poised in athletic postures, rather in the manner of fielders in a cricket match alert for the ball. It was a set-up calculated to impress upon persons like himself in their mid-fifties that they possessed neither youth nor age but only an uncomfortable hovering-point between the two. But when the moment came he proved comfortingly nippy, even retrieving a bulky bag for an agitated old lady beside him in the same instant that he ambidextrously secured his own possessions. It then only remained to decide whether he was Red or Green; the bearer or not the bearer of dutiable articles. Of course he was Green for all normal purposes. But what about all those francs? Suppose the officials on the Red side of the hall decided to do a spot-check on him, and he had to divulge this particular possession? They probably wouldn’t be interested, since it was no business of theirs to control any petty flow of currency out of France. Only it wasn’t altogether easy, in his present position, to think clearly about such matters. One felt one never knew. It was with considerable relief that he found himself over this last hurdle, coasting down a ramp, and then actually in open air. For a whole blessed week he was incontestably Gilbert Averell again.

  There was the bus that would take you into London, the bus that would take you to the railway station at Reading, taxis and hire-cars that would take you wherever you wanted to go. With these last an element of bargaining was prudent, but Averell knew he wouldn’t much bother himself about it. He was conscious of a sudden alteration in his whole nervous tone; of a buoyancy as if the very atmosphere had changed. The silly part of the affair was behind him. In front of him was a responsible mission, one vindicating his concern as a conscientious family man.

  In this fond persuasion he was giving brisk instructions to a chauffeur when, as with the dreaded voice of Demogorgon, Gustave Flaubert spoke from immediately behind him. Averell, who had supposed himself to have shaken off this pestilent (and obscurely threatening) character, was a good deal discomposed.

  ‘Did I hear you say Faringdon?’ Flaubert asked, not at all in the tone of one who apologizes for eavesdropping. ‘I’m going not far from there myself. We’ll share this car.’

  But for the declarative form into which Flaubert had cast what was not in itself a wholly inadmissible proposal, Averell might have contrived to turn it down in terms of reasonable civility. As it was, he was much more forthright.

  ‘We will certainly do no such thing,’ he said. And he jumped into the back of the car and slammed the door to. ‘Drive on!’ he said (or, rather, loudly exclaimed). ‘Pay no attention to the fellow. He’s a well-known nuisance, and almost always drunk.’ And feeling the need further to emphasize these instructions and prevarications, he waved a hand violently in the air. The car moved off at once, its driver evidently having no inclination to inquire into the rights and wrongs of the matter. Averell swung round and glanced through the back window in time to see Flaubert apparently in urgent colloquy with the driver of another car. Then, first, the twists and turns, and then the long tunnel, which extricate one from the heart of Heathrow were blessedly behind him, and he was being projected at a steady seventy miles an hour down the M4.

  He addressed himself to reviewing the family situation at Boxes as he was likely to find it. At this time of year Ruth would be getting busier in her garden every day. It would be among the vegetables for the most part. Ruth was passionately fond of flowers and had great skill with them. But of recent years she had persuad
ed herself – and tried to persuade her three children – that self-sufficiency must now be the prime concern of the small rural gentry among whom she had spent almost her entire life so far. The Barcrofts must be prepared to live entirely off the land, consuming nothing that they didn’t themselves produce. That was why there were Chinese geese on the lawns at the back of the house and a couple of goats tethered now here and now there at the front. It was why the old stable had been turned over to half a dozen pigs and there was a perpetual cackle of poultry just beyond the orchard. It was why a hand-pump of the semi-rotary sort had been installed to draw up water from the slender stream that wandered uncertainly through the place. It accounted for the fact that family locomotion was achieved by pony and trap, and that it was by this conveyance that his sister made her way to the nearby small town several times a week for the purpose of picking up a rudimentary knowledge of various useful but entirely boring crafts through the instrumentality of evening classes.

  There was nothing dippy about all this, and no levelheaded person would think of describing Ruth Barcroft as a crank. Although she had acquired a good deal of knowledge about how fiendish chemicals make their way from sacks to soil, from soil to crops, and from crops to shops and then into the human stomach, she didn’t believe that we were all soon going to sprout extra toes and disastrous mental aberrations. She didn’t, so far as her brother knew, devour apocalyptic science fictions or get hung up on television serials in which isolated handfuls of handsome young men and sexy girls struggle for survival amid the ruins of a civilized world. She just believed in a rapidly disintegrating society in which one would have to look out for one’s self and one’s children and grandchildren (not that she herself had any grandchildren as yet). Ruth’s activities, in fact, were all within the bounds of good sense.

  In much of this Tim Barcroft must be thought of as his mother’s child. He held the same views on how things were going to work out, in his generation if not in hers. Tim’s, however, was in a way a more masculine response. Where his mother was intent simply on preserving the home and the hearth he was all for going out and taking a bash. Tim was a political animal – the leader of a pack, say – in the making, and might be an effective one if given his chance. At the moment Tim was no more than a confused Oxford undergraduate, who had hung on to his studies because he contrived to see some of them as in some way ‘relevant’ to the social predicament which clamoured to be sorted out. Tim – Averell remembered forebodingly – wasn’t an easy youth for a dim scholar to keep on terms with. He was always polite, even friendly, almost affectionate at times in an indulgent way. But the total ‘irrelevance’ of his uncle’s pursuits was all too patently clear to him. He’d be at home at present, it was to be supposed, unless he was spending his last Easter vacation before his finals in mugging up some necessary lore elsewhere. It wasn’t improbable that he was working hard, since his mother’s good sense was far from alien to him, and he knew he’d been largely wasting his time over the past three years if he wasn’t now preparing for what he’d call jumping through their bloody paper hoops.

  The twin girls, Kate and Gillian, were younger, and Averell felt he didn’t know as much about them as he ought to. Was it with reluctant feet that they were standing where the brook and river meet – or were they all for plunging in? Certainly they were at the very end of their schooldays, and both were said to be quite clever. Clever enough to go up to Oxford themselves, if their mother’s letters were to be believed. They would have to decide, it seemed, whether to have a go at a college gone ‘co-residential’ in the newfangled way (their uncle thought of it as that) or to one still as conventual as the academe Lord Tennyson lost his nerve about. It comforted Averell to remember that for some years he’d been tipping permitted sums into a trust fund designed to pay for whatever variety of higher education these young people elected.

  The car had turned off the motorway and was running through Lambourn, and quite soon he would see the line of the downs beneath which Boxes lay. It was a countryside speaking to him of his childhood, and he was indulging in melancholy thoughts of his elected condition of exile as the car swung round on the road to Wantage. It wasn’t the shortest route, and he was about to call out something to his driver when, rather surprisingly, he discovered in himself a feeling that he might usefully employ an extra ten minutes of solitude in clarifying his mind. As he didn’t know the situation in his sister’s household he couldn’t work out the right line to take about that, but the point was that he hadn’t quite discovered what was the right line to take about himself. Stretching the term a little, he was nothing less than a fugitive from justice, and it seemed an abuse of hospitality to park himself on Ruth without declaring the fact. This was a notion distinctly on the quixotic side, but it genuinely worried him, all the same. So he must think.

  But he didn’t. When he found himself in traffic badly snarled up in Wantage market place, and the driver had resignedly switched off his engine, Averell took the opportunity to nip out and buy himself a morning paper. In Paris he regularly received The Times, but didn’t always so much as glance at it. Now he found himself dodging his present obscure mission by burying his nose in a paper of a more popular cast.

  It afforded a gloomy survey of events alike at home and abroad. Unspeakable things were happening in several parts of Africa. There was political chaos in Spain. Rioting on a large scale had erupted in Rome. In the industrial Midlands all sorts of people were on strike, and all sorts of other people unable to work as a consequence. Ireland was in as much of a mess as it had ever been in Mr Gladstone’s time. Desperate criminals were being pursued down motorways such as he had himself just traversed by police cars constrained to travel at a hundred miles an hour. The younger members of the aristocracy were being had up for indulging in the same turn of speed just for fun. Demotic singers and pop groups went around apparently dripping undesirable drugs. Kidnappings for ransom and the snatching of hostages for no clear purpose at all seemed to be on a daily up-and-up. And on the credit side the ledger didn’t read too cheerfully either. A group of economists of a sanguine turn of mind were predicting a conceivable improvement in the nation’s affairs at some date in the earlier l990s. Scotland Yard was being congratulated on having brought down the total of major bank raids to single figures in the month of March.

  Oh world, no world, but mass of public wrongs, confused and filled with murder and misdeeds! Old Thomas Kyd’s gloomy character would certainly reiterate this imprecation with spirit were he alive today. And it was the world, Gilbert Averell told himself, that Tim and Kate and Gillian would perhaps have to confront for the rest of their lives. Perhaps their mother was right in striving to build her little citadel.

  The buoyancy that had attended his release from Heathrow had decidedly evaporated. The car turned into the potholed drive to Boxes.

  5

  Nobody knew how Boxes had come by its name. It was not box-like in any way but large and rambling, and with gardens (now sketchily cared for) which would appropriately have gone with a house larger still. Ruth had bought it at the time of the break-up of her marriage, putting much of her available means into it even although she had got it cheap. She had got it cheap because it was built not of any reputable stone or even of brick, but of a local chalk going by the name of clunch: a soft stuff formerly in some esteem for internal decorative purposes in the dwellings of the rich, but now commonly employed for exterior and structural walls only in the hovels of the poor. It was more durable, however, than might have been supposed. What it seemingly couldn’t do was to turn corners, and a fortuitous consequence of this was the patchy use of random supplies of brick or stone at every angle of the building to a surprisingly pleasing effect of the picturesque. Ruth had taken it because, with three disfathered children to think of, she had judged it important to have a dwelling roomy enough for at least the sporadic reception of numerous friends both old and young. It was an instance of her sagacity, but
it hadn’t made for any great ease in the way of domestic economy, particularly as the house stood in that sort of isolation which rustic purveyors of casual labour, male and female alike, were coming to regard as quite beyond the range of a pushbike. And in fact Ruth and her children now did entirely for themselves. Unless indeed one counted the pony, Smoky Joe, who was quite as hard working as any of them.

  So much for Boxes (which Tim said ought to be called Clunches). When staying there Gilbert Averell was very aware of himself as of a sedentary habit. He knew that, if left there on his own, he couldn’t cope with the place for a week. Yet he was fond of the country, and fond of country pursuits in a spectator’s fashion. Had he long ago established a joint household with Ruth, as a bachelor brother might very reasonably do with a divorced sister clearly indisposed to second marriage, he would by now be settled in a way of life which at bottom would have suited him very well. What better situation could a private scholar have desired: a quiet domesticity within a couple of hours of the libraries in London, within an hour of the Bodleian in Oxford? The absurdity of his making this trip to England in a kind of disguise, and the embarrassingly improper motive underlying the fact, constituted a sort of symbolic representation of error not now to be repaired.

  The car’s approach had been heard from the house, and mother and daughters were waiting for him at the front door. Ruth was her unchanging self: bright-eyed and alert, but thinner than you felt she ought to be, in the manner sometimes to be observed in people who never allow themselves time to sit down. Kate and Gillian, on the other hand, had changed considerably. It wasn’t just that their hair was differently done, as it might be from one day to the next. They were both taller and both more nubile – if that was the proper word. And they were these things, of course, in identical degree. He knew that the twins put in quite a lot of time differentiating themselves each from the other, but it was a struggle in which Nature gave them no assistance. And their uncle suspected that if they appeared not so identical in temperament as they did before a looking glass the difference was only achieved as more or less a put-up-job. A single glance at them, incidentally, told him how imperfect as well as superficial was that resemblance of his own to his friend the Prince de Silistrie which had landed him in an undignified masquerade that he didn’t yet know whether he was going to divulge to Ruth or not.