Going It Alone (2 page)

‘But I have been told that you need have no passport at all. It is a unique privilege accorded you happy citizens of the land of the brave – or is it the bold? – and the free. Certainly of hope and glory, I recall. An Englishman needs no passport either to leave or to return to his own country. It is a marvel, that.’

‘Not much more than a notional marvel, I expect. I certainly shouldn’t get in before establishing that I am a citizen of the United Kingdom, or whatever the term is. So in the end it would come to the same thing. I’d be checked up on, all right.’

‘But, my friend, if you entered regularly and then overstayed your parole, your ticket of leave. Would they clap you in the nick?’ The Prince de Silistrie was proud of his command of English idiom. ‘Would it mean durance vile?’

‘Oh, I think not. The only penalty would be in additional taxes to be paid.’

‘Which would be vexatious, of course. What is your judgement of the claret in this curious place?’

‘I’d not presume to offer one, Georges… It might be different if I were caught out in actual fraud. But that, you know, isn’t my thing.’

‘En voilà une affaire!
Then it must be a yacht.’

‘A yacht, Georges?’

‘Always I have wanted to own a yacht. I shall buy a yacht, and learn to sail it. I shall hire a crew of Bretons, so admirably anxious as they are to break the law. Am I not
bretonnant
myself? On my mother’s side, of course. We shall drop you in some secluded Cornish cove, and return later to pick you up. It will be like a taxi.’

‘Georges, what nonsense!’

‘Not at all. It will be friendship, and friendship is never nonsense. No, not ever!’ The Prince de Silistrie had uttered these words vehemently, but now his brow clouded suddenly. ‘Yet one must admit,’ he said, ‘that it is a little commonplace – yes? Such things happen, I am told, every day. And the commonplace is not your style, I know.’ He paused on this, but Gilbert Averell said nothing. He’d have supposed that the commonplace was his style. Except, he hoped, in his own field of scholarship and in a quiet way. He sipped his host’s claret in silence. There was certainly nothing commonplace about it.

‘He nothing common did or mean,’ the Prince de Silistrie went on – presumably because he had been well crammed with English literature (and with everything else) at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in youth. ‘We must think of something with more style. Something with a touch of
panache
. A vulgar term, but expressive in its way.’

Averell laughed at this – but restrainedly, since he had a sense that the Head of State himself might be sitting behind his left shoulder. His French was as perfect as an Englishman’s can be, but he wasn’t sure of ever having heard that
panache
, employed figuratively, was a vulgarism, although it was certainly trite. Georges was rather fond of instructing his friend in
nuances
of usage that he’d made up on the spot.

‘Oh, I might have a shot at the really extravagant thing, my dear Georges!’ As he said this, Averell was aware of it as a rash remark – or as a rash remark to offer to this particular companion. ‘Once in a way,’ he added, and was conscious that this didn’t much mend matters.

‘Then, my dear fellow, we must think along those lines, must we not?’ As he said this, Georges smiled charmingly, and at the same time in what Averell was relieved to recognize as a dismissive fashion. And they talked of other things.

But the next morning Averell opened an envelope on his breakfast table and found it to contain, without an accompanying message of any kind, the French passport of the Prince de Silistrie. The futile little joke annoyed him, and he resolved to register his mild displeasure by returning the document at once. He shoved it in a pocket, went to the telephone, and called a cab.

‘But it is so simple, so obvious,’ Georges was saying to him half an hour later. ‘And at the same time such a lark – and a practical joke, such as all Englishmen love. It is such fun pretending to be somebody else! I used to do it often as a boy. Sometimes for days on end. You could be now yourself and now me – day about, if it amused you. Even in French society you could pass as a Frenchman, if you were discreet. Or I think you could. The experiment would be an interesting one.’

‘No doubt. Perhaps I might even call on your Ambassador in Kensington Palace Gardens.’

‘Ah, that I could not advise. He is my uncle, you will recall. It might be awkward.’

‘A lot of things might be awkward. If they questioned me at Heathrow–’

‘But why should that happen, my dear Gilbert? The passport is in perfect order. And are we not like twins? Often I have heard people say so. It is a touching thing, that – to have a dear friend who is also as a blood-brother.’

‘Georges, I’m simply not going to play.’

‘But an Englishman always plays! He plays the game whenever it offers. It is a national trait such as all the world admires. And this game, of course, you need only play once.’

‘I’d certainly not play it more often than that.’

Nine out of ten of Gilbert Averell’s acquaintances would have declared that this was an extraordinary thing for him to say. The tenth might have recalled a young man in whom an occasional dash of high spirits had made itself evident from time to time, and who had even been known to enjoy getting the better of prefects, housemasters, deans, proctors and other vexatious authorities in divers elaborate and hazardous ways. Such impulses had never been frequent in him, but when they did erupt it could be powerfully for a time. And it is quite certain that he was now seeing the notion of making a little trip to England as the Prince de Silistrie in an attractive light; it would be amusing in itself, and it would prove to him that middle age was not yet carrying all before it in the heart of one almost habitually serious and retiring scholar.

‘What about you while I was away?’ he asked. ‘Would you be me?’

‘
Pourquoi pas, mon ami
?’ Georges had clearly not thought of this, and was delighted at the discovery of a further absurdity in the affair. ‘But not, perhaps in Paris – although it would be fun to try. Italy, shall we say? Your passport will involve no difficulties there. The eminent Mr Gilbert Averell will visit the little hill towns of Tuscany or Umbria, where disconcerting encounters are unlikely to take place. For a month, shall we say?’

‘For a week.’ Averell, who was being thoroughly weak, felt a reassuring firmness as he said this. ‘And just once and never more.’

‘Aha! Thus quoth the raven, did he not?
Allez-y
! And also
avanti
!’

‘And
bonne chance
into the bargain.’ It was a shade sombrely that Gilbert Averell thus bade a week’s goodbye to good sense. For the moment, he was barely conscious that the freakish exploit with which he had landed himself was nothing more nor less than the perpetrating of a fraud upon the Inland Revenue. But he did acutely wonder whether any enjoyment was conceivably to be extracted from it. It would only make sense if prosecuted with
élan
– which was another gallicism of the sort that the Prince de Silistrie was fond of making fun of. He’d have to try. To go through with it dismally would be too stupid for words.

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.