Going It Alone
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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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.
Paris and Boxes
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.’