Free Going It Alone by Michael Innes Page B

he lay sleepless in bed – any other way of going about the thing would be disingenuous. He revolted strongly against anything of the kind – perhaps for the not very logical (but psychologically comprehensible) reason that he was himself involved in a petty deception which he now acknowledged to be of the most humiliating order. Certainly he didn’t look forward a bit to the family’s breakfast table conversation. He couldn’t criticize Tim for urging him to bring to bear what Tim had called his ‘authority’ as titular head of the family, since the boy believed himself to be facing a situation so grim that he must seize any weapon he could. But he didn’t at all know how decently to back him up.
    But when morning came the thing went pat. Tim said no more than, ‘Why don’t you go too, Mrs B? I’d adore running Boxes for a fortnight all on my own – and running Uncle Gilbert too.’ And before his mother could reply, both Kate and Gillian were urging the plan like mad. It wasn’t, Averell could see, that Tim had been confiding in them at daybreak, or even propounding the idea while giving no particular reasons at all. It was simply that the twins had been feeling it mean to leave their mother behind, and had apparently been saying so already; this and the fact that Ruth’s friend in Rome had been imploring her to join the party. In face of all this Ruth allowed herself to be swept agreeably off her feet. In no time Tim was masterfully on the telephone to the airline, booking her flight and arranging that she should pick up traveller’s cheques at her bank’s branch at Heathrow, and making sundry other practical arrangements of the most irrevocable sort. By ten o’clock mother and daughters had disappeared in a hired car down the drive.
    ‘And now,’ Tim said briskly, ‘we’re off ourselves. It’s just a matter of finding somebody to look after all that damned livestock, beginning with the confounded pony and ending with the bird-table for the finches and all that rubbish they keep hanging up for the tits.’
    ‘Is this going to be quite fair?’ Averell asked feebly. ‘We didn’t give them a hint we weren’t going to stay put.’ He was quite upset by this rapid revelation of his nephew’s masculine disregard for some of the cherished interests of his womenfolk.
    ‘To hell with all gentlemanlike feeling,’ Tim said brutally. His spirits were rising in an irresistible way. ‘I never believed that all’s fair in love, but it damned well is in war. Old Totterdel will do. He’s quite half-witted, of course, but he won’t muck up those simple chores. And if he does manage to throttle Smoky Joe, so much the better. Those kids ought to be through with pony madness by now. It ceases to be decent when a girl ought to be turning her thoughts in the direction of eligible bipeds. And if Kate and Gillian weren’t my sisters I’d be having a go at them by this time myself.’
    ‘My dear Tim –’
    ‘Okay, okay, Uncle Gilbert. I’m a bit off-balance, no doubt. And if I don’t adore the brute creation, I admit I ought to. Think of that cat.’
    ‘What cat?’
    ‘Hat.’
    ‘Hat?’
    ‘Well, this cat was called Hat. Somebody’s joke, I suppose.’ Tim looked round the empty garden of Boxes with a wariness now habitual with him. ‘I owe my life to Hat. Come inside and I’ll tell you.’
    They went into the drawing-room, which seemed instantly to have taken on an untenanted look. Tim threw himself into a chair and began to speak with the air of a man intent upon lucid narrative.
    ‘For some time, you see, I’ve been sharing some rooms in London with some other people. A pied à terre , as they used to say.’
    ‘Just other young men?’
    ‘No, not just other young men. A kind of commune thing, in a small way. You know what I mean.’
    Averell didn’t know that he did know. He was a poor authority, he told himself, on the ways of the more or less alienated young.
    ‘Well?’ he said.
    ‘I