Going It Alone (3 page)

But about this attractive picture there was a snag. It was all very well to say that the visit would be perfectly normal; that no thought to the contrary would enter his sister’s head. It wouldn’t be normal, but part of a situation which, although merely amusing in Georges’ eyes (and intermittently in his own), would perplex and distress Ruth were she to get wind of it. And Ruth, he very well understood, had endured her share of family troubles. It would be a great shame if her reliable brother Gilbert proved to have turned up on her as the consequence of what she might read as downright dishonest behaviour.

Faced with this sobering discovery, Gilbert Averell ought, of course, to have washed out the whole thing. But that, he thought, would be to represent himself to his friend Georges in a poor-spirited light; would even, in an irrational way, be a kind of hauling down the flag. No, he’d go ahead! But he’d opt for London.

This was Averell’s state of mind (if mind it can be called) when his telephone rang. And it proved to be his sister on the line.

Ruth’s voice came across with the complete clarity that long-distance calls so frequently achieve. She might have suddenly been in the room with him, so that the smallest inflexion or change of tone coming through the instrument seemed to carry a visual impression too – as of a smile, a questioning glance, a shade of perplexity or surprise passing over her face.

‘Gilbert, it’s Ruth. How are you?’

‘Fine, only rather idle. How about yourself?’

‘Not too bad. Do you hate the telephone?’

‘No, of course not. Or not if it’s you. Why?’

‘You sound as if you’re not being idle at all, but rather busy or preoccupied or something, and not terribly wanting to be disturbed.’

‘Absolutely not. I’ve just been thinking about you, as a matter of fact. It must be telepathic as well as telephonic. How are all the family?’

‘Just as they should be. For the most part.’

‘Yes?’

‘Gilbert, I don’t want to badger you, if you’re absorbed in things. I meant to write, but then I thought I’d ring up. This instrument’s more revealing than a carefully composed letter, don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps.’ Averell, as a scholar, had faith in the written word. ‘But I’ve known it to generate misconceptions at times.’ He hesitated for a moment. It was clear to him that Ruth was upset. And she wasn’t one from whom small upsets elicited hasty appeals. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I’ve just been wondering whether you might be coming home for a bit in the near future. But for God’s sake don’t think I’m trying to summon you. I know about that tiresome tax business, for one thing.’

‘Oh, that!’

Hearing his own dismissive note, Averell realized he had taken a first step in deception within the family. It didn’t feel at all nice. And if there was real trouble in what he sometimes facetiously called darkest Berkshire he ought not to be importing fibs into it. He knew the right thing. He must recover his own passport from Georges at once, and travel openly to England by the first available flight. It was something he’d had to do once before – on an overdraft at the ticket-of-leave bank, so to speak. It was simply necessary to notify some authority or other in writing, and everything became perfectly regular. If Ruth was in some substantial difficulty he’d do precisely this.

‘Never mind about that,’ he said, and this time didn’t hesitate. ‘Is it Tim?’

‘Well, yes – it is, rather.’ There was a pause. ‘Gilbert, I do need your advice.’

‘Listen, Ruth – and what I say is absolutely true.’ Fleetingly, Averell registered that this was an odd thing to have to say to a sister. ‘I’m on the point of coming over, as a matter of fact. And I’ll make for Boxes straight away.’

Boxes was the odd name of Ruth Barcroft’s house.

‘That’s just wonderful.’

‘Is there anything more you want to tell me now?’

‘Yes. Or I don’t know. Gilbert, do people listen in on these calls?’

‘Good heavens, no! It would take an army to monitor cross-Channel chit-chat.’ For the first time, Averell was really alarmed. ‘So go ahead. Whatever it is, I can think it over in the air.’

‘I think I’d rather wait, after all. It’s silly. But I’m as nervous as a cat.’

‘Very well. And now I’ll ring off. There’s just one arrangement I have to make in a bit of a hurry, as a matter of fact. I’ll send a telegram about when I arrive. Keep going, Ruth. Goodbye.’

As Averell put down the receiver he noticed that his hand was trembling. But he made his vital call at once. It was to be told that the Prince de Silistrie was not at home. In fact the Prince de Silistrie had gone abroad. And no, he had given no forwarding address – saying merely that he would be away for only a week.

So Georges had wasted no time. And it was up to Averell to waste no time either. He called the airline, and booked a flight in Georges’ name. He’d enter into the deception in style, he told himself – even solemnly appearing to set out from his friend’s deserted apartment.

Timothy Barcroft was twenty-two, and at twenty had experienced brief fame or notoriety. As a student he had come to hold strong views on the evils of capitalist society, nuclear weapons, sub-human housing, racialism, the CIA, and numerous other conditions and institutions that ought simply not to be. His condemnations and indignations tended to be on the sweeping side, and he was at various times a nuisance to sundry authorities with whom he came in conflict. Much of this happened because he was a very nice young man; and it was one of his chronic troubles, even grievances, that many, although by no means all, of his elected Aunt Sallys persisted in so regarding him even after he had taken a good hard swipe at them. He felt he wasn’t being treated seriously – which is an unforgivable offence against the sensibilities of the generous young.

Then a day came upon which Tim was involved in a ‘demo’ that went wrong. It was to be as orderly as nearly all such manifestations are meant to be. But there was a rival ‘demo’ around; the police failed to maintain their planned
cordon
sanitaire
between the two; and a vicious punch-up was the result. Tim found himself in court, charged with having picked up a labourer’s shovel and hit a constable on the head with it. A good deal of very confident evidence was produced in support of this alarming accusation. Tim was remanded in custody; granted legal aid; that sort of thing. Then a press photographer came forward in his defence – happily possessed of a film (which had just escaped being confiscated) in which the doing of the deed was plain to see, as was – incontrovertibly – Tim himself, peacefully arguing with another minion of the law half a dozen yards away. So Tim was acquitted, and at the same time lectured by the beak on the hazardousness of associating with unruly persons neglectful of the right and proper ways of effecting beneficent social change within a true democracy. And a rather senior policeman called on him and made a strictly off-the-record apology for the unfortunate mistake that had occurred. Tim seemed to take all this well, and went his ways as before. There was a certain hardening in him, all the same, which occasioned anxiety in his family.

Gilbert Averell (or the Prince de Silistrie) turned these matters over in his mind while high in air above the English Channel. He felt that he had never done his duty by his nephew Tim, and this even although he was much attached to the boy. Or it might be better to say that he had failed in his duty to the Barcrofts as a whole. Ruth had been divorced, very much without fault of her own, when Tim had been quite small and the twin girls barely out of their cots. She was a competent and courageous woman, and a little older than he was. Nevertheless, he ought to have made her feel, much more than he had done, that he was prepared, as her only brother, to act at need as the head of the family. But that wasn’t quite right, since he had always been ready, as now, to step forward in a crisis. It was steady background support, constant interest, that he had failed to provide. And what had been his real motive in long ago taking himself off to live in France? There would be more money for the Barcrofts one day as a result, but hadn’t he packed up partly because family responsibilities bored him; because of this and because some very commonplace pleasures (which had in fact never much commanded him) were available with less fuss and complication in an expatriate station? Whatever his reasons, the thing had been second-rate in itself – just like this wretched joke to which Georges had persuaded him.

Of course there was no secure reason for supposing that, had he stayed put, he’d have proved any sort of good angel either to Ruth and her family or to anybody else. Tim, for instance: if he’d fussed over Tim when the boy was, say, in rebellion against a housemaster (or running after a housemaid) the effect might just have been to mess the boy up. And Tim wasn’t a mess, even if messes were things he sometimes got into. Averell blamed himself, all the same.

Averell was sunk in these unsatisfactory musings when a man sitting next to him offered some commonplace remark about the flight. He did so in French. As they were travelling by Air France, and as Averell had shortly before spoken in French when buying himself a drink, this was natural enough. What was odd was that he replied spontaneously in English. Or it appeared, at least, odd to himself, French having been for so many years the language he employed more often than not. There seemed to be no particular reason why the stranger (who was a middle-aged and unmemorable little man of the clerkly sort) should be struck by this small linguistic circumstance, since an Englishman often enough essays replying in his own tongue to a speech in another the gist of which he has just understood. In Averell, of course, the mechanism had been different. Far from living his way into his part, he was becoming progressively more and more uneasy at the impersonation he had undertaken, and he had instinctively shied away from Georges’ language. The stranger, however, did seem surprised and (what was surely perplexing) even a little amused. Averell remembered that the fellow had been close behind him as they had gone through the control at the airport, so perhaps he’d had a glimpse of that confounded French passport. That might be it. Averell, as he hit upon this explanation, was conscious of a kind of forward vista of such minute vexatious occasions.

‘The name’s Flaubert,’ the stranger said, easily and in English. And he momentarily elevated above his head a foolishly undersized pork-pie hat.

Averell detested unknown persons who thrust their identity upon one with some such aggressive and underbred formula as this. Moreover, the name that the stranger had announced somehow added to the offence. There was no reason why a man encountered on an aeroplane should not be called Flaubert. There must be Flauberts around, although he couldn’t recall ever having actually met one.

‘Monsieur
Gustave
Flaubert?’ he heard himself say.

This silly little irony was a mistake. Flaubert was delighted, and clearly regarded an intimacy as having been established.

‘That’s right,’ he said, and much as if he were a celebrity who might expect to be thus at once identified. ‘My mother hailed from Hull,’ he announced. ‘But my father was a provision merchant in Passy.
Alimentation générale
, as you may have heard us call it in France.’

‘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.’