Going It Alone Read Free

– 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 extraordinary 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.

 
     
2
     
    Being driven back to his own apartment, Averell remembered a question one used to be asked in wartime. Is your journey really necessary? Just at the present moment, there was no doubt what his answer would have to be. He often had one or another specific reason for wanting to visit England, and was rationally annoyed that he was unable to do so without incurring some unacceptable financial penalty. But nothing of the sort was in question now, and what he had involved himself with was merely a petty act of symbolic defiance. Georges had been right, therefore, in saying that the thing must be done with style and with that plume, so to speak, waving. And this raised an issue he hadn’t at all thought out. He was booked for a week’s deception. But for how long was he booked for an act of impersonation as well?
    It dawned on him that impersonation could be a deep and mysterious affair: one answering, perhaps, to needs and impulses wholly buried in the unconscious. Surely it must be something of this kind that had prompted him to fall in with Georges’ bizarre and rather disreputable suggestion – this quite as much, at least, as the attractiveness he remembered as attaching to mere undergraduate follies and pranks?
    He would be turning himself into somebody else. Put thus starkly, it suddenly became an alarming idea. Clearly there were people who enjoyed doing just this – including,