Going It Alone by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page A

Don’t you still smoke that pipe, Gilbert? You know I don’t mind it.’
    ‘You still haven’t alarmed me, Ruth, I’m thankful to say.’ (This wasn’t quite true.) ‘But perhaps you’d better tell me all that Tim said when he rang up. In the first place, why did he ring up when he did?’
    ‘Because he’d arranged to come straight home at the end of term, and now he wasn’t going to.’
    ‘So he was probably ringing up from Oxford?’
    ‘I don’t think so. He seems to have been a good deal out of Oxford lately. Undergraduates come and go as they please much more than they used to do. Particularly in a final year, when they mayn’t be in college more than a couple of times in a week.’
    ‘I suppose it’s reasonable enough. They’re grown up, after all. But it wasn’t like that when I was at Cambridge. Managing undetected French leave was part of the fun.’
    ‘I’m not sure that Tim goes in for fun, Gilbert. In spite of your jokes about vice-chancellors’ wives.’
    ‘In fact, it would be student politics – and of the activist sort, as they say – that would take him here and there?’
    ‘Well, yes – and what would be called student journalism too, I suppose. Have you heard of En Vedette ? It’s a paper he works for. I don’t even know what it means.’
    ‘You print a thing en vedette if you set it up in very large type. But a vedette is also a guard or sentinel. So I suppose there’s meant to be a double meaning.’
    ‘I see.’ Ruth was always impressed by her brother’s knowledge of the French tongue. ‘Well, Tim writes articles for it. And he goes to those stupid demonstrations and sit-downs, if that’s what they’re called, and takes photographs at them. He likes to snap policemen grabbing banners, and shoving around on horseback, and all that sort of thing. Of course, it’s just high spirits, but I feel it might always lead to trouble. And Tim seems to me too serious for the nonsense side of student activities. To my mind, he usually shows very good judgement about the issues he feels to be important.’
    ‘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