Going It Alone (7 page)

‘I want to talk to Uncle Gilbert about something entirely boring. But it will keep until you people go to bed.’

Tim had come out with this announcement as if it was the politest thing in the world, but it brought the family evening to a close on a further note of constraint, all the same. Ruth and her daughters departed, leaving Averell so surprised that for some moments he said nothing at all.

‘Wasn’t that on the cavalier side?’ he then asked mildly.

‘Bloody rude, I suppose. But it can’t be helped – and there’s more to come, I’m afraid. Uncle Gilbert, has anything out of the way happened at Boxes since you came?’

‘Good lord, no! And I only arrived this afternoon.’ Averell hesitated for a moment, and reflected that the mode of Tim’s own arrival lent a certain conceivable relevance to one very trivial episode. ‘There was somebody snooping around outside the house at teatime, as a matter of fact. Would you call that out of the way?’

For a moment Tim made no reply, but his uncle could see him stiffen in his chair. Then he sprang out of it and left the room, to return a minute later carrying a shotgun and a box of cartridges.

‘Comforting,’ he said. ‘I thought of it more than once on the way down.’

Standing in front of the fireplace, and beneath the astonished eyes of his kinsman, Tim loaded both barrels of the weapon.

‘It’s not often that I manage to pot so much as a rabbit,’ he said. ‘But the thing could deal out a fairly good peppering, all the same. There’d be a howl or two, wouldn’t you say?’

Averell didn’t say. He was wondering whether this exhibition merely astonished him, which would be reasonable, or whether it frightened him as well. For the moment, at least, he gave himself the benefit of the doubt. And now he found that he was alone in his sister’s drawing-room, with leisure to indulge in any further speculations he chose. Tim, with his gun under his arm much as if he were prowling one of the paddocks surrounding the property, had gone into the hall and shot the bolts on the front door; seconds later he was moving from room to room on the ground floor, closing windows and securing shutters. If the afternoon’s snooper returned he would now certainly be thwarted in his snooping, or even in a tolerably determined attempt to break in. Averell, as if infected by whatever imaginings his nephew was prompted by, fell to reviewing in his mind’s eye the entire layout of Boxes. It was scarcely well-calculated, he decided, to repel organized assault. But that, surely, was something altogether too extravagant to conceive.

Tim returned to the drawing-room, and quietly laid the gun down beside his chair.

‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘would you say you had a certain authority with my mother and sisters?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve certainly never done all that to earn anything of the kind, Tim. But, yes – perhaps.’

‘They must be got away.’

‘Got away!’

‘All of them, I mean. Mummy must go with the girls to Rome tomorrow. We can bring it off, if we’re firm. I’ll be staying to look after the livestock. And they all three simply adore last-moment plans.’

‘There would be room on any flight at this time of year, I suppose.’ Averell, not unnaturally, was astounded by all this, but found Tim’s earnestness and vehemence persuasive. ‘Only we’d have to be pretty brisk at putting it across at the breakfast table.’

‘We’ll manage it. We must. I’m telling you.’

‘Tim, I don’t know what to make of you. Begin at the beginning, for heaven’s sake! Just what is this all about?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But that simply doesn’t make sense.’

‘I simply don’t know. But there it is – what’s been happening.’

‘Precisely
what – ?’

‘I decided not to come home, you see, because I felt they might follow me. I’d lie low somewhere else until I got the hang of it. But then I had this other thought.’

‘Just what other thought?’ There must have been complete bewilderment in Averell’s voice. Tim wasn’t given to speaking in riddles.

‘They’d know where my home was – or they’d find out. So they might come to Boxes anyway. And it sounds as if they had.’

‘Tim, who on earth are “they”?’ Deranged persons, Averell believed, frequently got round to talking about a ‘them’ who were essentially figments of the imagination. Had Tim turned into such a one? Averell discovered with relief that he thought not. But from this it followed that the boy had actually got into deep water of some sort. And it could scarcely be with the police, or with the law in any form. You don’t, if you’re sane – and Tim, he reiterated to himself,
was
sane – load a shotgun in any such exigency as that. But at least there was something to explore here.

‘Tim,’ he said, ‘you talk as if some gang of criminals was after you. If that’s so, why don’t you go to the police?’

‘
I
can’t do that. You know I can’t.’

‘What nonsense! Anybody can go to the police.’ As he said this robustly, Averell was just conscious of the fact – and it was a mere oddity – that at this moment he himself might find contact with the police something he’d avoid if he could. Not, of course, in a situation of any real gravity. But if he did so contact them, there was a probability that, sooner or later, he’d have an awkard misdemeanour – or was it a felony? – to explain.

‘The fuzz aren’t my friends exactly,’ Tim elaborated with an air of patience. ‘They sat me down and they stood round me. I wasn’t clobbered, or anything like that. But it wasn’t nice.’

‘It certainly can’t have been.’ Averell was perfectly willing to acknowledge to himself that here was territory legitimately traumatic, so to speak, in the experience even of an entirely level-headed young man.

‘But it isn’t just that, Uncle Gilbert. It’s all so confused, and I have to try to think it out. As I said, at the moment I simply haven’t a clue. But, first, there’s this urgent thing. They might do a kidnap, mightn’t they? Here at Boxes. And then I’d be helpless. I’d have to do anything they asked.’ Tim paused. ‘For it
would
be like that, wouldn’t it?’

‘I suppose it might.’ Averell saw that the proposition he was acquiescing in was comprehensible in itself but surrounded by total mystery. He also saw that Tim was unaware of the fragmentary and inconsequent nature of such information as he was giving, and that this was probably the consequence of extreme fatigue. ‘When did you last get some sleep?’ he asked.

‘Sleep?’ The word was repeated by Tim as if it was something he’d just heard of but couldn’t very certainly identify. ‘Oh, quite some time ago, it must have been.’

‘Then hadn’t we better go to bed now, and tackle this in the morning?’

‘This?’

‘Look, Tim. I always wake up quite early. I’ll make some tea and bring it to you, so that we can get things sorted out before the household’s up and around – or your new plan has to be mooted.’

‘It’s an idea.’ Tim moved uncertainly on his chair. He seemed quite to have lost the power of action which had taken him round the house, locking it up; and he had lost, too, the incisiveness with which he had ordered his womenfolk about. He didn’t even seem to be remembering his gun. ‘There was a boy at school who said he always did his maths when asleep. The answer was ready to write down when he woke up. The working, too, I suppose. They always insisted on the working. I can’t think why, provided the answer was correct.’ Tim produced an enormous and quite healthy-seeming yawn. ‘Perhaps it will come to me in a dream. Just how it started, I mean. Or
why
it started. Do you think?’

‘It’s worth a try. And, by the way, I’m a very light sleeper myself, Tim. So if there was the slightest disturbance round the place I’d be aware of it, and rouse you at once.’

‘Super, Uncle Gilbert.’ Surprisingly and rather touchingly, Tim got meekly to his feet. ‘Is there anything I can get you first?’ Tim glanced at Averell in a kind of sleepy appraisal, and was possibly made aware of his advancing years. ‘A hot water bottle, perhaps?’

‘No thank you, my dear Tim. I’ll be fine.’

So they went upstairs to bed. And it was Averell who took charge of the gun. He had renewed doubts about Tim’s entire sanity. And this made him feel there was something to be said for the fantastic and arbitrary plan of packing Ruth off with her daughters on the following morning. If Tim could manage the livestock, he could manage Tim – or so he believed – until any brain-storm was over. And if there was no brain-storm but, on the contrary, some real if still wholly mysterious threat – then with luck the two of them might manage that together.

On these occasions – rare in recent years – when Averell spent a night at Boxes it was his habit to take a turn in the garden before going to bed. Tonight Tim’s persuasion that danger lurked there had to be deferred to, even if it was hard quite to believe in it. But at least it was possible to take a glance through the bedroom window, and Averell treated himself to this as soon as he had got into his pyjamas. He pulled back the curtain, and made to raise the sash thus exposed. It proved to come up no more than some four inches, and was then held by a catch which it took him a few moments to locate. He now recalled that all the windows were equipped in this way, and he even had a dim memory that this had been done on his own advice. The house being regularly occupied only by the three women, and quite often by Ruth alone, it had seemed an obvious measure of prudence. And it must have been these catches, among other things, that Tim had been checking on the ground floor.

The garden was bathed in moonlight, and when Averell switched off the electric lamps he had previously turned on this milder illumination tumbled into the room in a pleasing way. He threw up the sash when he had released it, stuck his head out, and told himself that, for April, it was an uncommonly mild night. Far away, the line of the downs stood out against a clear sky in gentle undulations the traversing of which he would normally be looking forward to as a principal employment while at Boxes. In the garden itself he could readily identify one familiar object and another, even down to the big garden roller that never seemed to get itself shifted out of the little hollow into which it sank perceptibly year by year. Level lawns made no part of Ruth’s programme for survival. What was probably not surviving was the group of elms beyond the stream, since in this part of the country he knew the ravages of Dutch Elm Disease to have been pervasive. But as the trees were not yet in leaf he couldn’t be certain of this in the moonlight, and he resolved to go and inspect them, and much else, after breakfast. It was a moment before he recalled that this was an inapposite proposal in the context of his present untoward situation. Yet the garden itself was at least reassuringly peaceful, and he lingered at his window for some time before lowering the sash again to the position in which it was possible to secure it while still admitting fresh air (which was something it would never have occurred to him to solicit
sous les toits de Paris
). He then left the curtain drawn back and went to bed (again in his more or less adoptive language,
au clair de lune
).

Bright moonlight, like nightingales or cicadas, can be a nuisance when one wants to go to sleep. Or frogs, for that matter. Averell was just learnedly remembering the perplexing fact that the ancient Greeks and Romans held all these pests in high regard when sleep abruptly overtook him. It had been, after all, a taxing day.

Tim (as if he were an ancient Greek or Roman himself) had been hoping for a dream of a mysteriously enlightening order. But it was to Averell himself that such a dream came – although its enlightenment, indeed, was to be of a delayed action sort. It wasn’t an edifying dream; on the contrary, it was grossly and violently sexual in a fashion wholly perplexing if one were to consider how remote from anything of the kind had been all his recent preoccupations. Yet some of these undoubtedly made themselves felt in what his slumbering mind cooked up. For one thing, the ego of the dream was by no means very clearly Gilbert Averell. Indeed, people were choosing to believe that he was really King Charles II, that merry monarch who scattered his Maker’s image through the land, and he seemed not to be doing much to disillusion them. The activities of this conceivably composite figure (which it would be by no means proper to set down upon the page) kept on being vexatiously interrupted by a little man from Hull, who went by the improbable name of Stendhal. Stendhal was an outrageous
voyeur
, and he kept bobbing up at the most inconvenient times. Fortunately Stendhal disliked music, being very much one to delight in treasons, stratagems and spoils. Contrive as a background to those desperate embraces a sufficiently shattering musical accompaniment, preferably Wagnerian, and Stendhal simply ceased to goggle and peer and faded away. And such an occasion made the climax of the dream. The Averell/Charles figure was striving after some positively acrobatic achievement amid a tumble of crashing chords; there was a final great clash of cymbals; Averell woke up.

It must be admitted again that all this held little of edification; and neither was it particularly remarkable in itself. What was of some psychological interest was the fact that Averell’s moment of awakening was attended by a notable confusion of the senses, or mess-up in what the erudite call the coenaesthesia. The loud bang hadn’t been a loud bang at all; it had been a brilliant and momentary flash of light.

Averell’s first coherent thought was to wait for the thunder clap. He even began counting, which is supposed to be the way to tell how far off such an electrical discharge has taken place. But there was no thunder. There had just been the flash of lightning and nothing else at all.

He continued to listen, and suddenly heard the sound of what might have been something falling over in the garden. His dream had scarcely been such as to restore the energies wrested from him by the fatigues of the preceding day. Nevertheless he sprang out of bed, hastened to the window, groped for the catch, flung up the sash, thrust out his head. There was nothing out of the way to be seen. Had there been, he’d still not have seen it – the moon having dipped over the horizon and departed.