Going It Alone Read online

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  Going It Alone

  First published in 1980

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1980-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755120973 EAN: 9780755120970

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President's Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen's University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Part One

  Paris and Boxes

  1

  There is a story to the effect that when Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles was first translated into Japanese the novel had to be drastically abbreviated. Hardy’s own understanding of this was customarily conveyed in the words, ‘They like literary works to be very short’. But his wife – his second wife – put a different colouring on the matter. The Japanese, she would explain, hold it virtuous in a girl to sell herself to assist her family, so a substantial part of Tess’ tragedy as her creator had conceived it would merely perplex the readership being aimed at in the particular market involved.

  The present chronicle does not concern the seduction of any innocent country girl. Yet this fragment of literary history has its relevance for us, since it turns upon the fact that the canons of public morality can vary a good deal from quarter to quarter of the globe. It may even do so as between one and the other side of the English Channel. Of this the business of paying one’s taxes is a signal instance, and it is here, as it happens, that we must begin.

  There are countries in which (although it seems very shocking to us) defrauding the tax-gatherer is held to be positively virtuous, just as Tess’ resigning herself to living with the nasty Alec d’Urberville is credited with being in the eyes of Japanese citizens of the most unimpaired moral perception. In England, on the other hand, it is held far from proper to behave after this fashion, and we are admired by our friends (and commended by our accountant) only if we so dispose our affairs as ‘not to attract’ more taxation than we must. Here is a key phrase, indeed, in the vocabulary of many honourably prosperous and public-spirited and patriotic persons. If, for example, it is fiscally advantageous to make your permanent abode in Paris or Rome rather than in London nobody is going to think twice about asking you to dinner or, for that matter, taking you on as a son-in-law. And if you retain your British nationality you may even be awarded some signal honour by the Crown.

  Gilbert Averell – with whom we shall have much to do – fell roughly within this category, although he can scarcely be held to have been characteristic of it. He wasn’t a pop star. He wasn’t a retired tycoon living on his loot. He might, indeed, have been held to belong with those described by the poet as loitering heirs of city directors, since he had been left – and was content to live upon the income from – a moderate fortune acquired by a father who had laboured in the City of London. Properly provided with a classical education, he had been at Cambridge in the flight that just misses a fellowship. He had never ceased to regret the failure, and it was his secret hope that he might one day be elected into an honorary fellowship at his old college. There was nothing presumptuous about this unconfessed ambition of Gilbert Averell’s, since he had employed the leisure his private income allowed him in establishing himself as a private scholar of considerable distinction. His classical training had led him early in his career to the writing of a respectable monograph on the plays of Racine, and from this he had moved on to the field of Anglo-French literary relations. He made many friends in France – not only in the universities but in the higher reaches of society as well, since he possessed the perfect diffidence and unobtrusive reserve which the French fondly suppose still to characterize persons of birth and breeding in these islands.

  Such circumstances might in themselves have disposed Averell to embrace something like an expatriate condition. But his doing so had undoubtedly been promoted by financial considerations also. He was a bachelor, but one possessed of sisters, nieces and nephews to whom he was deeply but not too obviously attached. And although the greater part of his father’s fortune had come to him absolutely he regarded himself as its guardian rather than as its sole proprietor, and he would have been distressed had he been obliged to feel that his devotion to unremunerative pursuits must operate gravely to the disadvantage of these relations. Here was where the tax-gatherer came
in – or rather where, so far as was legally possible, he was to be bowed out. Averell was concerned a little to husband such wealth as he had. The necessary dispositions proved to be not too complicated. He established himself in the fair land of France. He came to England as often as he could and would then (unlike Shakespeare’s princess) go well satisfied to France again.

  Thus matters stood for a long time. Yet there was a limiting condition upon the acceptability of the situation. Averell came to feel that the British government wasn’t over-generous in that number of weeks in the year he was allowed to spend as a guest in his native land. He came to feel there was something arbitrary and unreasonable about it; almost that here was a fiat or ukase that it would be legitimate to dodge from time to time if dodged it could be.

  The only person in France to whom he confessed to this persuasion was his intimate the Prince de Silistrie. Georges and he were of an age, and so like one another physically that a stranger might have supposed them to be brothers. But in temperament they differed widely, and in this no doubt lay the basis of their appeal to one another. Georges, indeed, was himself something of a man of learning; he was very clever, and possessed of wide cultivation. Yet he was also rather wild – or at least possessed of a gay insouciance and aristocratic regardlessness which his more staid and circumspect friend was disposed to envy him. Georges judged the legal limitation under which Averell lay in regard to residence in England to be a mere bêtise: the sort of busybodyism that had disastrously entered the world with the Code Napoléon. This was a judgement not altogether fair in itself, since the drastic clear-up to which the French have intermittently given that name had been much desired by all sensible people even under the ancien régime. But no doubt it had heralded an age in which even persons of consequence are increasingly bossed around. Nevertheless it was incomprehensible to the Prince de Silistrie that his friend Gilbert’s little disability couldn’t be ironed away by a word in the right quarter. And at first he simply made a joke of the whole thing.

  Then, one day, he turned serious – or as serious as it was given him to be. It was at the Polo, to which he had recently been elected, and he was entertaining his English friend to luncheon. Numerous august personages were sitting around, and their presence may a little have tempered Georges’ customary exuberance.

  ‘I suppose,’ he asked soberly, ‘it is a matter of the passport, my dear fellow?’

  ‘That comes into it, certainly. I haven’t really much thought about it.’

  ‘But surely they just wave or nod you through? These things seem to be mere formalities. It is this comical EEC.’

  ‘Well, not exactly. They know at once when I present my document that I am one whose date of entry or exit they must record. And then, I imagine, some routine inquiry is made.’

  ‘But I have been told that you need have no passport at all. It is a unique privilege accorded you happy citizens of the land of the brave – or is it the bold? – and the free. Certainly of hope and glory, I recall. An Englishman needs no passport either to leave or to return to his own country. It is a marvel, that.’

  ‘Not much more than a notional marvel, I expect. I certainly shouldn’t get in before establishing that I am a citizen of the United Kingdom, or whatever the term is. So in the end it would come to the same thing. I’d be checked up on, all right.’

  ‘But, my friend, if you entered regularly and then overstayed your parole, your ticket of leave. Would they clap you in the nick?’ The Prince de Silistrie was proud of his command of English idiom. ‘Would it mean durance vile?’

  ‘Oh, I think not. The only penalty would be in additional taxes to be paid.’

  ‘Which would be vexatious, of course. What is your judgement of the claret in this curious place?’

  ‘I’d not presume to offer one, Georges… It might be different if I were caught out in actual fraud. But that, you know, isn’t my thing.’

  ‘En voilà une affaire! Then it must be a yacht.’

  ‘A yacht, Georges?’

  ‘Always I have wanted to own a yacht. I shall buy a yacht, and learn to sail it. I shall hire a crew of Bretons, so admirably anxious as they are to break the law. Am I not bretonnant myself? On my mother’s side, of course. We shall drop you in some secluded Cornish cove, and return later to pick you up. It will be like a taxi.’

  ‘Georges, what nonsense!’

  ‘Not at all. It will be friendship, and friendship is never nonsense. No, not ever!’ The Prince de Silistrie had uttered these words vehemently, but now his brow clouded suddenly. ‘Yet one must admit,’ he said, ‘that it is a little commonplace – yes? Such things happen, I am told, every day. And the commonplace is not your style, I know.’ He paused on this, but Gilbert Averell said nothing. He’d have supposed that the commonplace was his style. Except, he hoped, in his own field of scholarship and in a quiet way. He sipped his host’s claret in silence. There was certainly nothing commonplace about it.

  ‘He nothing common did or mean,’ the Prince de Silistrie went on – presumably because he had been well crammed with English literature (and with everything else) at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly in youth. ‘We must think of something with more style. Something with a touch of panache. A vulgar term, but expressive in its way.’

  Averell laughed at this – but restrainedly, since he had a sense that the Head of State himself might be sitting behind his left shoulder. His French was as perfect as an Englishman’s can be, but he wasn’t sure of ever having heard that panache, employed figuratively, was a vulgarism, although it was certainly trite. Georges was rather fond of instructing his friend in nuances of usage that he’d made up on the spot.

  ‘Oh, I might have a shot at the really extravagant thing, my dear Georges!’ As he said this, Averell was aware of it as a rash remark – or as a rash remark to offer to this particular companion. ‘Once in a way,’ he added, and was conscious that this didn’t much mend matters.

  ‘Then, my dear fellow, we must think along those lines, must we not?’ As he said this, Georges smiled charmingly, and at the same time in what Averell was relieved to recognize as a dismissive fashion. And they talked of other things.

  But the next morning Averell opened an envelope on his breakfast table and found it to contain, without an accompanying message of any kind, the French passport of the Prince de Silistrie. The futile little joke annoyed him, and he resolved to register his mild displeasure by returning the document at once. He shoved it in a pocket, went to the telephone, and called a cab.

  ‘But it is so simple, so obvious,’ Georges was saying to him half an hour later. ‘And at the same time such a lark – and a practical joke, such as all Englishmen love. It is such fun pretending to be somebody else! I used to do it often as a boy. Sometimes for days on end. You could be now yourself and now me – day about, if it amused you. Even in French society you could pass as a Frenchman, if you were discreet. Or I think you could. The experiment would be an interesting one.’

  ‘No doubt. Perhaps I might even call on your Ambassador in Kensington Palace Gardens.’

  ‘Ah, that I could not advise. He is my uncle, you will recall. It might be awkward.’

  ‘A lot of things might be awkward. If they questioned me at Heathrow–’

  ‘But why should that happen, my dear Gilbert? The passport is in perfect order. And are we not like twins? Often I have heard people say so. It is a touching thing, that – to have a dear friend who is also as a blood-brother.’

  ‘Georges, I’m simply not going to play.’

  ‘But an Englishman always plays! He plays the game whenever it offers. It is a national trait such as all the world admires. And this game, of course, you need only play once.’

  ‘I’d certainly not play it more often than that.’

  Nine out of ten of Gilbert Averell’s acquaintances would have declared that this was an extraord
inary thing for him to say. The tenth might have recalled a young man in whom an occasional dash of high spirits had made itself evident from time to time, and who had even been known to enjoy getting the better of prefects, housemasters, deans, proctors and other vexatious authorities in divers elaborate and hazardous ways. Such impulses had never been frequent in him, but when they did erupt it could be powerfully for a time. And it is quite certain that he was now seeing the notion of making a little trip to England as the Prince de Silistrie in an attractive light; it would be amusing in itself, and it would prove to him that middle age was not yet carrying all before it in the heart of one almost habitually serious and retiring scholar.

  ‘What about you while I was away?’ he asked. ‘Would you be me?’

  ‘Pourquoi pas, mon ami?’ Georges had clearly not thought of this, and was delighted at the discovery of a further absurdity in the affair. ‘But not, perhaps in Paris – although it would be fun to try. Italy, shall we say? Your passport will involve no difficulties there. The eminent Mr Gilbert Averell will visit the little hill towns of Tuscany or Umbria, where disconcerting encounters are unlikely to take place. For a month, shall we say?’

  ‘For a week.’ Averell, who was being thoroughly weak, felt a reassuring firmness as he said this. ‘And just once and never more.’

  ‘Aha! Thus quoth the raven, did he not? Allez-y! And also avanti!’

  ‘And bonne chance into the bargain.’ It was a shade sombrely that Gilbert Averell thus bade a week’s goodbye to good sense. For the moment, he was barely conscious that the freakish exploit with which he had landed himself was nothing more nor less than the perpetrating of a fraud upon the Inland Revenue. But he did acutely wonder whether any enjoyment was conceivably to be extracted from it. It would only make sense if prosecuted with élan – which was another gallicism of the sort that the Prince de Silistrie was fond of making fun of. He’d have to try. To go through with it dismally would be too stupid for words.