Going It Alone (10 page)

‘But your camera, Tim!’ Ann was exclaiming in dismay. ‘It was an enormously expensive one, wasn’t it?’

‘Well, yes – it was.’ Tim said this a little awkwardly, perhaps because the camera had been a present from Uncle Gilbert on his twenty-first birthday. ‘It’s insured, though.’

‘Do you always make people laugh?’ Lou asked, with every appearance of candid surprise. ‘If you want to keep this bomb to yourself, I expect people will say you must have your way, since it was you who was intended to be at the receiving end of the affair. But an insurance company will want to see the camera before they stump up. And when you hand it to them looking like a present from Hiroshima they’ll ask the reason why. You must be joking.’

This cogent speech upset Tim a good deal – and (Averell felt) further heightened the boy’s interest in the speaker. It would be a secure guess that the modest son-of-the-house at Boxes enjoyed the devotion of numerous young women in the circle in which he moved. The girl called Anne was one of them. Lou had not yet signed on. And that was why some higher command in the commune, or whatever it was, had sent Lou – the objective Lou – along. She’d take a dispassionate look inside Tim’s head and report on what was cooking there.

‘But not all the recent photographs themselves?’ Anne was asking with deepened horror. ‘The demo in Parliament Square, and the mounted fuzz in Whitehall, and the ones that are to be for “Sitters-in at Home” in
En Vedette
, and all those racists marching in Notting Hill?’

‘The whole lot,’ Tim said, a shade impatiently. ‘I had to put out a bit of a fire, you know, as well as coping with Death-and-Gory Hat. It doesn’t matter a damn. There’s plenty more of all that on the conveyor belt to do the candid camera on. And plenty of kids ready to take on the job. Thinking of themselves as investigative journalists uncovering all Hades in Pimlico. As for me, it’s about time I was moving on and concentrating on something sensible. Housing, perhaps. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.’

It was evident that this was a rather scandalous speech – even a subversive one. It was Lou who took it in her stride.

‘Glamour-boy’s divine discontents are fine,’ she said, ‘and let them have their day. But the question seems to be whether he has all that many days to look forward to himself. Are they going to go on trying to kill you? It may be a petty question, but we’re quite seriously interested in it.’

‘All right. And yes, they are. They’ve been on the job down here at Boxes already.’ For the moment Tim was really angry. ‘Oddly enough, I’m quite seriously interested in that myself.’

Averell, who felt it would be imprudent to take any part in this spirited conversation, found himself not quite sure about the accuracy of what Tim had just said. In fact, there was really no evidence that the intruder of the previous afternoon and night had been lethally disposed. Of course he might have been. But equally he might have been less an intending assassin than a mere spy. Had the people who certainly had intended to kill Tim, and who had contrived two singularly brutal shots at it, for some reason changed their ground? Was there now something they simply wanted to
know
before they returned to one form or another of drastic action? And when one came to recall the matter coolly did not one feel that the interloper at Boxes had lacked the stuffing of, say, the man who had driven that car murderously at Tim in London? Certainly the episode in the dark showed up in retrospect as faintly ludicrous. A punch on the nose and a hack at the shins failed to add up to the behaviour to be expected of an atrocious criminal.

‘Come right back,’ Anne said. ‘People suddenly wanting to liquidate Timothy Barcroft of Boxes Esquire. Just
why
? What have you been up to, Tim? I ask you.’

‘I haven’t a clue. Uncle Gilbert knows that.’

‘Christ, Tim! You must know what you’ve been
doing
, mustn’t you? Don’t you keep a diary or something?’

‘Certainly not. It’s a most immature and conceited thing to do – keeping a diary.’

‘
I
keep a diary,’ Lou said. ‘What about the funny little pocket diary all Oxford undergraduates are always peering at? Don’t you even put engagements in it?’

‘Never been engaged, Lou. But stay around, and I’ll think it over.’

It was at least in some absence of mind, Averell noted, that Tim had produced this singularly undistinguished pleasantry. He was no longer casting any sort of speculative eye over the latest girl to arrive on his scene, but was scowling discontentedly into his coffee mug.

‘Would I be in a state of shock?’ he suddenly asked nobody in particular. ‘It’s something one’s always reading about in the newspapers nowadays. You see your dear old grandmother fall downstairs and break her neck, and they take you to hospital and treat you for shock. Or you forget everything leading up to that terrible moment of granny’s end, and that’s called amnesia.’

‘It’s called anterograde amnesia, to be precise,’ Lou said rather in the manner of an alert tutor. ‘Go on.’

‘Or you bolt into hiding as well – and for good measure fail to carry any notion of your own identity with you. At least I haven’t succumbed to that. I’m Tim Barcroft.’

‘But Tim,’ Anne asked, ‘is this in aid of anything? You’re obviously none of these things.’

‘Are you sure?
I’m
not sure. I may have forgotten
something
, don’t you think? In fact, it almost looks as if I must have. It’s very puzzling.’

At this point Averell felt he must chip in. He had remained silent for so long that he might be thought to be disapproving of this whole conference. It was true that its tone at times puzzled or even offended him. But he did feel that something might come of it.

‘It mightn’t be a bad idea,’ he said, ‘if Tim just tried to jot down a day to day record of his doings over the past week or so. I don’t believe in his having forgotten anything – or not anything in the least memorable. But the point may lie just there.’

‘How d’you mean, Uncle Gilbert?’ Tim asked swiftly – and with an intentness which made Averell uncomfortably aware that a good deal was expected of him.

‘I mean that one interpretation of the thing is this: that you may have come by information so unremarkable in itself that your mind sees, so to speak, no point in recalling it. But somebody else knows you have it, and is determined at all costs that it won’t leak out and spread abroad.’

‘Or be exploited,’ Lou said, ‘for purposes of blackmail. Something like that.’

‘Lou!’ Anne said indignantly. ‘Are you saying that anybody could possibly imagine Tim turning into a blackmailer? Surely –’

‘Lou obviously isn’t saying that,’ Averell interrupted pacifically. He was realizing that these young women were by no means bosom friends. ‘But I can conceive myself believing that somebody was thinking of having a go at blackmail with me – provided I was sufficiently deeply of a criminal turn of mind myself. The wicked are wary, and the malevolent see malevolence all around them.’

‘But it’s quite absurd!’ Anne said. ‘About us, I mean.’ For the moment, Anne wasn’t thinking very clearly.

‘It’s a strange idea, certainly, Anne. But it’s not to be rejected out of hand. Here’s an absolute mystery still, and we need to hold on to every blessed idea we can grab by the tip of the tail.’

‘Agreed,’ Lou said firmly. ‘Tim?’

‘Well, yes. But how on earth could I come by information leading straight into the area of murder and all that without myself having the remotest notion I was doing so?’

‘That’s where your day to day activities come in, Tim.’ Averell paused for a moment. ‘I admit it may be like looking for the needle in the haystack. But if there’s a needle there it
can
be found – provided one looks hard and long enough.’

‘And knows a needle when one sees it,’ Lou said. ‘The rub is there.’

‘Perfectly true, Lou.’ Averell paused for a moment’s thought. ‘Take a hypothetical case. Tim is sitting in a tube train, and a man comes in and sits down opposite to him. Tim for some reason studies this man in rather a thoughtful and covert-seeming way. Then Tim happens to open a briefcase and glance through a file of those famous photographs. He’s shy and protective about his photographs for one reason or another. So it’s rather obtrusively that he takes this peep at them in what he thinks is an unobtrusive way. Then he tucks them away again – and the man sitting opposite him simply isn’t in his head. But
he
is in the man’s head, all right. The man believes he has been identified. So at the next station he follows Tim – now thought of, let’s say, as a sort of secret agent – up into the street and manages to shove him under a bus.’

‘Thank you very much, Uncle Gilbert,’ Tim said rather wanly. ‘A least it’s a quick end.’

‘It’s a good
schema
,’ Lou said. ‘Of course, one could think up no end of other
schemata
to fit.’ Lou, like the Barcroft twins, appeared to be vocabulary-conscious. She had been attending lectures, it was to be supposed, on the theory of art – or perhaps just on Immanuel Kant. ‘And as a needle,’ she added more colloquially, ‘that man in the tube would be a hard nut to crack.’

Tim had now possessed himself of pencil and paper. It was evident that he had a considerable capacity for doing whatever his uncle suggested.

‘I’ll try to work backwards to the beginning of the month,’ he said. ‘I’m sure it would be no go after that. I’ve a rotten memory. I know it as often as I look at all my bloody notes on my reading. And I believe there’s a theory that memory and intelligence are just different names for the same thing. It’s discouraging.’

‘There’s hypnotism,’ Anne said resourcefully. ‘All sorts of memories can be recovered that way. Even of being born, they say.’

‘Or conceived, I suppose.’ Lou said this rather tartly. ‘Or in the night of our forebeing or the Platonic
anamnesis
. All hooey. It makes me tired.’

‘And there’s the association of ideas,’ Anne went on unheedingly. ‘We just say things to Tim, and he makes spontaneous responses, and random recent memories are recovered that way.’

‘I’m going to wash up,’ Lou said. And she collected the coffee mugs and found her way to the kitchen.

Tim scribbled, bit his free thumb, scribbled, swore softly, scratched his head. Anne sat back and appeared to be according all these activities an equal respect. Averell sat back too. He had only a very little faith in the fruitfulness of the procedure he had suggested. And he was uneasy at his going along with these young people as he appeared to be doing. They weren’t dealing with some harmless scrape but with a couple of gravely criminal acts which it was the duty of anyone aware of them to bring to the knowledge of the police. Not to do so was probably a crime in itself as well as a moral delinquency; perhaps it was what was called compounding a felony. That he had himself that trivial and stupid motive for ducking the notice of the law added to his discomfort. If Tim’s affair took some further and yet more disastrous turn and the whole story emerged into the light of day this particular aspect of it wouldn’t look well.

But that, he supposed, was a selfish consideration. And there had grown up overnight a kind of unspoken assumption that he had agreed to play the thing Tim’s way and Tim’s friends’ way. He was steadily being admitted to more of their confidence on that understanding. It was an exceedingly awkward dilemma.

‘Do you know?’ Tim said, suddenly looking up from his task. ‘This employment would be a salutary discipline to recommend to anybody.’ He paused, and then glanced at Anne. ‘Anne,’ he said, ‘run along and help Lou scratch up something for lunch. We’ve got to eat, after all.’

‘Okay, Tim.’ Anne got up and departed as obediently – Averell thought – as if she were Milton’s Eve being banished while Adam held colloquy with a superior being. It suggested that even among the emancipated young certain of the old tyrannies of sexual subjugation prevailed at a pinch.

‘Chronicles of wasted time,’ Tim said. ‘And worse. Here’s no more than a fortnight – and a couple of exploits it just wouldn’t do to bruit abroad in the old home. How disgusting!’

‘Relevant exploits?’

‘Who can tell? But I think not. Anyway, I’ll put them on the reserve list. And here goes. So just listen, Uncle Gilbert.’

But again there was an interruption. This time, it was a ringing telephone bell.

Tim left the room to take the call. The telephone at Boxes was kept in a triangular cubby-hole under the staircase – Ruth having at some time had the very proper thought that young people ought to command a certain degree of privacy when using it. But this meant switching on a light, pulling a door to behind one, and crouching in a space which might have been deliberately designed as incommodious in a mediaeval dungeon. And all this was so heavy with conspiratorial suggestion that nobody would have thought of employing it, and thus all telephone conversations, however intimate, were cheerfully carried on
coram populo
. Through the open drawing-room door, therefore, Gilbert Averell heard snatches of this one. It was mostly a matter of Tim’s listening to what was being said to him. His responses, as well as being monosyllabic in the main, were couched, it seemed to his uncle, in tones of mounting indignation. Tim said ‘Good God, the swine!’ and ‘Utterly illegal, if you ask me’ and ‘Of course it would have to be by injunction, you bloody oaf!’ Several times (and at this Averell’s heart sank) he uttered the word ‘Fuzz’ preceded by an unprintable adjective (or at least one that Averell would not have put in print himself). ‘Of course I’ll come back at once!’ he was eventually heard to say. Then he banged down the receiver, emerged from the cupboard, and shouted unceremoniously through the house at large.

‘Hi!’ Tim shouted. ‘Anne – and you, what’s-your-name. Come here at once.’

Thus rudely apostrophizing a young woman with the perfectly respectable name of Lou was on Tim Barcroft’s part an indication that he was exceedingly upset. So Averell was prepared for disaster as the boy stormed into the drawing-room again and his guests hurried across from the kitchen to join him.