Going It Alone (15 page)

‘Dave’s sometimes taken that way, Anne.’ Tim, although clearly much troubled, said this quietly. ‘He’s not ditching us or anything. He’ll be back.’

‘I believe he tumbled to something we didn’t,’ Lou said. ‘And he’s off to take advantage of it. I call it a bit mean.’

‘It’s nothing of the sort – and we must just hope it isn’t dangerous. Dave sees a thing, you see, and charges at it. Ever since a kid, he’s had an urge to be the lone ranger.’

Several hours went by, and Dave didn’t come back. Midnight arrived. There was no Dave still.

Nothing so uncomfortable had ever happened to Gilbert Averell before. The mere physical unease for a start irked him to an extent he’d have been ashamed to confess. The resources of Adrian’s
ménage
, although made freely available, were limited in the extreme. When the children had been put to bed Averell was accommodated on the sofa, and the young people scrounged around and borrowed several kitchen chairs. At a late hour they all drank more tea and consumed an emergency supply of fish fingers. It was rather like being in a play by Samuel Beckett, wherein all things are reduced to an absolute minimum.

But much worse than this, of course, was the nervous strain of waiting for Dave. Oddly enough, the person who seemed to feel this most acutely was Adrian, who at one point became so fidgety that his wife was constrained to suggest a resumption of the reading from Xenophon. As she herself was obviously able to follow the language, as Tim had ‘done’ Greek at school and could still understand bits and pieces now and then, as Averell was obliged to admit considerable classical accomplishment, and as Twite had departed, this left out only the two young women, and such was their desperation that they both stoutly declared that they would be happy to listen in. So this bizarre exercise was indulged in for the better part of an hour. But by that time the vanguard of the Ten Thousand had reached the summit of Thekes and were shouting so wildly that Xenophon was hurrying up from his pest of danger at the rear, expecting some disastrous ambush. Nothing of the kind. His soldiers had glimpsed the sea.
Thalassa
,
thalassa!
At this supreme moment in historiography Adrian broke down, and declared that he could no further go. The three other scholars present found this emotion infectious. Anne and Lou were mystified but impressed. They brewed yet more tea.

For Averell the one point of comfort in all this was the thought that his companions were at least realizing their helplessness. The villains might by now be chopping Dave into messes with a barbarity equalling Xenophon’s Persians at the top of their form. Nothing could be done about it. Clue or lead as to Dave’s intentions and whereabouts there was absolutely none. So a breaking-point must come, Averell thought, when they must all hurry off to a police station. Even so, they’d have a weird story that would take quite some time to sort out. And it was hard to see what the full might of the Metropolitan Police could effect, except to start a hunt for an elderly Bentley or a small tip-up truck with a trailer hitched behind it.

Of course this was to take the darkest of several possible views – as the young Xenophon had done when he heard all that shouting. It was conceivable that Dave was on top of the situation, always supposing that there was a situation to be on top of. He might simply be off on the most harmless, if futile, of wild goose chases. It was even possible to feel that the sober probabilities lay that way. But Averell found that he couldn’t persuade himself of this for many minutes on end. He had the wild thought – almost the hopeful thought – that he had misjudged Dave’s toughness; that the boy had lost his nerve and (as his companions might say) chickened out on the whole affair. Alternatively (and not quite so horribly) he might have driven his great car so furiously through London that a serious accident had resulted and Dave had been carried off in an ambulance.

‘What about the hospitals?’ Averell asked, breaking a long silence. ‘Can one ring round the casualty wards and ask for information?’

‘There must be scores of them,’ Tim said shortly.

‘Yes, of course. But don’t you think that all information about serious accidents is centralized at once; that somewhere the police have an hour-by-hour record of the lot?’

‘We must give it time. We must give Dave time.’ Tim produced this doggedly and (Averell thought) almost pig-headedly. ‘In the morning, yes. But now we’d better go to bed.’

‘I believe that would be the judicious thing.’ Adrian said this with an odd mingling of firmness and perturbation. ‘There are one or two things that have to be thought out. I very much feel the need of that myself.’

‘Adrian, whatever do you mean by that?’ Tim demanded. ‘If you have something to say, for Christ’s sake say it.’

‘No, no. In the morning, perhaps – as you say yourself.’ Adrian stood up. ‘We had better look around for sleeping quarters. Hortensia and I, that is. The girls must clearly have our bed.’

‘Nothing of the sort,’ Tim said, with a good deal of his old decisiveness returning to him. ‘We can still get a taxi. Anne, can you take Lou home with you?’

‘Yes, of course. I was given the prescriptive latch-key quite some time ago.’

‘Good! And Uncle Gilbert can come back with me to the flat. There will still be nobody else there. And at least the beds weren’t blown to bits. We’ll rendezvous here at breakfast-time.’

This plan – whether prudent or not – was agreed to. By Averell it was because he welcomed an opportunity of a certain amount of private talk with Tim, and because it looked like getting the young women into security and decent accommodation at least for the remainder of the night. Tim went out to find a telephone kiosk and call a cab. His uncle insisted on going with him, on the principle that two might be better than one. What might be lurking around Uffington Street still one just couldn’t tell. The effect was rather like that of the nocturnal prowl in the garden at Boxes. Only all that had harboured there had proved to be the absurd Gustave Flaubert. Here it might really be the people who had so definitely endeavoured to take care of Tim.

But the foray was uneventful, and the cab arrived. They dropped the girls at the kind of eminently respectable address that Averell had expected Anne to own. Then they went on to what Tim called his pad, where the effect was markedly different. Averell wondered whether Ruth and her daughters (by now fast asleep in Rome) so much as knew that the boy had a stake in what proved to be two floors of an almost derelict tenement building off the Mile End Road. But at least, as Tim had promised, there were beds, although Averell didn’t yet feel he wanted to tumble into one. This wasn’t because he didn’t by now feel uncommonly tired. He did – and his nervous tone wasn’t much improved by the still-evident havoc created by the letter-bomb. At least, however, this made it clear that Tim hadn’t been imagining things. (By this time Averell was feeling a certain lack of confidence in everybody – a fact which was presently to appear.)

Tim was now for the first time his uncle’s host in the full sense, and he acted properly in terms of solicitude for his comfort. This ran to the producing of a bottle of whisky from a cupboard stocked with drinks of various kinds. Tim poured a couple of not disturbingly lavish tots and signed for them on a scratch-pad provided for the purpose: a club-like arrangement which his uncle found reassuring. When they had sat down to this nightcap Averell cautiously asked a question.

‘Do you happen to know, Tim, whether that odd chap Adrian and Dave have known one another for very long?’

‘I don’t know, but I rather imagine not. Why do you ask, Uncle Gilbert?’

‘I felt that Adrian was even more disturbed than the rest of us by Dave’s failing to turn up again. It made me suppose that perhaps they are close friends.’

‘I’m sure they’re not that. But I did notice something myself. It was as if Adrian had something on his mind, but didn’t quite like to come out with it.’

‘Something like that, Tim. Might it have been because those girls were there?’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘I got the impression that Adrian had never met them before, or at least that they were virtually strangers to him.’

‘I see.’

‘And I suppose there are things one doesn’t talk about in the presence of girls – or not of girls one barely knows.’

‘I hardly think there’s much in that.’ Tim buried his nose in his glass, and conceivably reflected on the familiar topic of the generation gap. ‘Anyway,’ he said presently, ‘murder and bank robbery are perfectly respectable subjects. They’re not of the
pas devant les domestiques et enfants
order, are they?’

‘Now you’re laughing at me.’ The whisky was relaxing Averell a little. ‘But about Dave himself, Tim. Are you sure he’s a thoroughly reliable young man?’

‘Reliable!’ This time, Tim set down his glass and stared at his uncle. ‘We were at school together. Schools, in fact, since we started at the same prepper. He’s my oldest friend.’

‘So he wouldn’t rob banks.’ Averell had no idea why he offered this absurd remark. ‘Tell me a bit more about him. What does he do?’

‘What does Dave
do
? He’s like me – much too young for the world’s work, Uncle Gilbert.’ The whisky must have been affecting Tim too, since he was now being purely mischievous. ‘Dave just drives about in that useless great thing – and is of course vastly concerned to improve the human condition.’

‘Well, I’m sure that’s very proper. But what are they going to
make
him do?’

‘Oh, his father wants to put him into Lloyd’s or the Stock Exchange or something equally shaming. Dave really does pretty well, if you ask me. He’s under an enormous disadvantage, you know.’

‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ Averell supposed it was to be revealed to him that Dave was an epileptic, or subject to bouts of religious mania.

‘He’s like me, as a matter of fact: an only son and with two sisters. But there the family resemblance stops. Poor old Dave has a father who’s said to be the richest man in England.’

‘And that’s a kind of hereditary curse, would you say?’ It wasn’t clear to Averell why this interesting but scarcely startling piece of information had obscurely disturbed him.

‘Well, yes. We make fun of him, of course, as an infant Croesus. But I suppose it’s unfunny, really. If one happens not to believe that one should be able to write oneself out a cheque as big as twenty men’s wages for twenty lifetimes, one is up against problems of family tradition and loyalty and all that. I’m damned glad I’m not in Dave’s shoes.’ Tim finished his whisky in sudden gloom; he was perhaps wondering whether this last remark mightn’t represent an inadvertent dip into dramatic irony. ‘And now we’d better get some sleep,’ he said.

Getting sleep wasn’t easy, at least for Gilbert Averell. He had been thinking of Dave – whose very surname he didn’t know – as existing in a sort of social vacuum: a tough and independent young man, whose courses, even when hazardous, remained his own affair. But now Dave had suddenly been presented to him as possessing a father and sisters – and presumably he had a mother as well. To these people Dave’s friends owed a duty which perhaps they hadn’t got round to thinking of very clearly. If the young man hadn’t turned up by the following morning, or at least managed to send a reassuring word about himself, his father at least ought to be let know. In fact for Averell, if he was to preserve any sense of himself as a responsible agent, there was now a deadline only a few hours ahead. All this private enterprise would have to be decisively wound up.

There was at least a relief in seeing this clearly. But before Averell did manage to fall asleep on it a further disturbing thought fleetingly visited him. He understood Tim’s aversion to the police: it had a history behind it. And the two girls he felt as in a sense tagging along. Both Anne and Lou, indeed, had an air of independence, but essentially they did as Tim told them. Dave was in a different category, and about Dave he sensed (or thought he sensed) something elusive. He had found himself capable of some rather surprising conjectures about Dave. Tim in a final analysis (and if the term was not too derogatory) was something of a parlour anarchist. Dave mightn’t be in the least like that.

These thoughts would have been very disturbing indeed had Averell not retained some sense that they were scarcely thoughts at all. They were a mere fooling around with figments, and if he went far with them he would find himself suspecting everyone of being capable of anything; of taking it for granted that nobody was what he appeared to be. And this state of mind (mildly paranoid, he supposed) was obscurely the consequence of the course of deception into which the accursed Georges had led him. It’s a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive. With this tag in his head, Averell did finally go to sleep.

He slept heavily, and it was daylight when he woke up. There were voices in the flat. He scrambled out of bed (in his vest and underpants, which was an uncomfortable thing) and went into the bomb-blasted sitting-room. It was to find Tim talking to Adrian, who seemed just to have arrived – and in a condition that was making coherent communication difficult. Adrian, it seemed, had spent a very bad night indeed; he had got up early and walked all the way from Uffington Street; and now an exasperated and increasingly apprehensive Tim was trying to get some sense out of him.

‘It was when Twite mentioned that double bass,’ Adrian was saying. ‘You remember that? It brought the thing back to me. But it seemed so unaccountable, so extremely upsetting, that I couldn’t bring myself to speak up about it. It did, I mean, seem to require thought. But this morning I felt I must come and tell you at once.’

‘Then for heaven’s sake do!’ It looked as if Tim would gladly have taken Adrian by the shoulders and shaken him. ‘What about the bloody double bass?’

‘I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you in a minute.’ Adrian was now speaking quite wildly. ‘But where’s Dave?’

‘What do you mean – where’s Dave? It’s what we all want to know, isn’t it? Pull yourself together, man!’