Going It Alone (6 page)

‘I’d not doubt that for a moment.’ Ruth’s firm defence of her son was thought by Averell to be very much in order. ‘But please go back to the telephone call. What more did he say?’

‘At first he just said that he happened to be pretty busy at present, so he wouldn’t be coming home during this vacation after all. I was very disappointed, as you can imagine, but of course I tried not to show it. But, somehow, I was alarmed as well.’

‘Why should you be alarmed, Ruth?’

‘It was something I felt about Tim’s state of mind, rather than about what he had said. So I did press him a little – as I oughtn’t to have done. I said how nice it would be if he could at least see something of his sisters before they went to Rome. It was silly.’

‘Well, yes. It was rather.’ Averell, although he didn’t see his sister all that often, had managed to preserve with her this sort of immediate frankness in speech. ‘It wasn’t as if the girls were going away for months and months. Tim might well have been a little annoyed.’

‘I don’t think he was, Gilbert. But he did seem agitated.’

‘Agitated?
’ This wasn’t at all Averell’s notion of his nephew.

‘He blurted out that if the girls were at home it was all the more reason for his not turning up.’

‘How very odd! Do you think something may have overtaken him which he feels would make him distressingly poor company? One of those sudden undergraduate depressions, for instance, or an irrational phobia?’

‘He did say something more, and it doesn’t fit in with anything of that sort. He said that if he did come home he would probably be bringing unwelcome attentions in his wake. Can you make anything of that, Gilbert?’

‘I don’t know that I can. But wait! Perhaps Tim has got mixed up in some student affair that’s going to make a lot of news when it breaks. That might mean journalists and photographers prowling round Boxes on the hunt for him – and for the rest of you as well. Tim certainly wouldn’t like that at all.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ It was an index of the depth of Ruth’s anxiety that she seemed to embrace this rather remote possibility as a cheerful reading of the matter. ‘It would be quite something,’ she added with a momentary attempt at gaiety, ‘to have even one mysterious stranger prowling around Boxes with a camera or a notebook. We sometimes don’t see anybody for a week on end.’

During this conference, brother and sister had been sitting on either side of the drawing-room fireplace: Ruth with her tea equipage still beside her, and Averell with his back to a tall French window a good deal obscured by a holly bush under imperfect control. And as Ruth uttered her last words her eyes suddenly rounded, and her gaze fixed itself over her brother’s shoulder.

‘And there
is
somebody!’ she cried.

Averell’s was a high-backed chair, and as a consequence of this he had to jump to his feet and swing round before he could gain a notion of what Ruth was talking about. He achieved these movements, however, with a celerity that must have surprised him had he paused to think about it. But this he was far from doing, and he was halfway to the window before a holly branch swung across it – thereby obscuring the face, and even the presence, of somebody who had been peering into the room. And now there came a clatter from outside, as if a flowerpot or watering can had been kicked over, followed by the sound of rapidly running footsteps. Averell pulled open the French window in time to see an unidentifiable male figure vanish round a corner of the house.

Averell, extremely angry, had no other thought than of hot pursuit. It was intolerable that his sister should thus be spied upon, even if nothing particularly sinister were involved. And it didn’t occur to him, despite the curious context in which this impertinence had taken place, that anything of the kind was so. His reading had persuaded him that peeping and eavesdropping (often achieved
en plein air
by an adroit exploitation of hedges and ditches) were staple employments among the humbler sections of rural society. And for some reason he was quite confident, as he himself rounded an angle of the building, that he was going to catch the offender. When he did so, and if the intruder proved to be of mature years, he could probably do no more than utter threatening words about trespass and the police. If a juvenile was concerned he could be told he was to be led off to his father for a good hiding. Not that Averell would in fact do anything of the kind, so all that he was achieving was vindicating to himself a certain capacity for action. And unfortunately it proved entirely unrewarding. The miscreant had vanished, and the first person Averell encountered was Gillian, returning from some evening chore among the poultry.

‘Good heavens!’ Gillian said. ‘Why ever so hot and bothered?’

‘Nothing in the least important.’ Averell had rather resented this description of himself, although it was fair enough. ‘Only some confounded yokel peering outrageously through the window at your mother and myself.’

‘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.

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.