Going It Alone by Michael Innes

information about that telephone call, or whether he now knew as much about the occasion of Tim’s staying away from Boxes as she did. And what would Tim mean by a phrase like ‘unwelcome attentions’? It might after all be something in the area that Averell himself had rather frivolously suggested: ‘girl trouble’, as the young people now succinctly expressed it. Tim might have tangled with a nymphomaniac female who would pursue him to his mother’s house and scandalously clamour at its gates. But this wasn’t really plausible, and it was foolish to imagine that whenever somebody of Tim’s age got into trouble it was a matter of sex rearing its ugly head. What might be called a political reading of the mystery was much more likely to be on the mark, and what Tim had in mind was the hazard of his family’s being upset by the arrival of a policeman or some officer of a court bearing a summons or a warrant or similar engine of the law.
    And this view of the matter assumed a higher probability later that evening. It seemed that it was Ruth’s turn to cook the dinner, and to her daughters, therefore, fell the duty of entertaining their uncle at a pre-prandial hour. With some solemnity they made him go down to the cellar and choose a bottle of wine. Kate uncorked it with enormous care, and with an equal precision Gillian set it down at what he pointed to as the appropriate distance from the drawing-room fire. Then the girls sat down and prepared to chatter. Or, rather, he thought it was going to be like that but it turned out slightly differently.
    ‘Uncle Gilbert,’ Kate asked sharply, ‘has my mother talked to you about Tim?’
    For Kate to say ‘my mother’ like that was very formal; it might almost be said to be out of Jane Austen. So Averell felt that something serious was being heralded. And as the question was calculated to force his confidence, and as Kate would normally be punctilious in such a regard, he was constrained to feel that his nieces had their anxieties too.
    ‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘She’s disappointed he isn’t coming home.’
    ‘She says,’ Gillian said, ‘that it’s nothing, and that Tim’s just very busy because of his exams at the end of next term. But of course he can be as busy as he likes that way here.’
    ‘And have us waiting on him hand and foot,’ Kate said.
    ‘Particularly foot,’ Gillian said. ‘We run and fetch him his slippers.’
    ‘But hand as well. The brimming glass thrust into it.’
    ‘As a special privilege we’re allowed to stuff his pipe for him or watch him shave.’
    ‘And a handkerchief soaked in eau-de-Cologne is applied to the wearied brow.’
    ‘If you have something to say,’ Averell said, ‘don’t shy away from it.’
    ‘We’re sorry,’ Gillian said more soberly. ‘I suppose we’re rather nervous, as a matter of fact. We’re a family almost disgustingly without secrets, as a rule. But now Mummy doesn’t know we suspect anything’s wrong, and we do. So it’s awkward.’
    ‘Just what do you suspect is wrong?’
    ‘It’s not exactly that, really,’ Kate said. ‘It’s just that we have a piece of specific information. We noticed it in a newspaper, and Mummy didn’t, and somehow we didn’t want to call her attention to it.’
    ‘In case it was all nonsense, or irrelevant,’ Gillian said. ‘It was a paragraph saying that two young men whom we know are Tim’s very close friends have hit a bad patch. Something about a judge having issued an injunction, whatever that is, and their having ignored it, and so its being a contempt.’
    ‘Whatever that is,’ Kate said. ‘But it sounds pretty pompous and portentous.’
    ‘And you think Tim may be standing by to help, or something like that?’ Averell paused to consider his own question. ‘I can’t see that he wouldn’t simply let your mother know about that. It can’t be so very terrible. Less alarming, really, than vague conjecture.’
    ‘It was a great shock to my