Going It Alone Read Online Free PDF Page A

be useful to you. That’s a motto of mine.’
    ‘I don’t doubt it is.’ The frigidity with which Averell uttered this gave him courage, and he lowered his Revue sufficiently to enable him to tap its open page. ‘But you will forgive me, sir. I have to make a note or two on something here before reaching my destination.’
    ‘London, is it?’
    ‘No, not London.’
    ‘Ah.’ Fleetingly, Flaubert gave the impression of a rather stupid man surprised once more. ‘Well, it’s not London for me either,’ he said – almost aggressively, Averell thought.
    At this moment the little lights went on, and a young woman sternly called for an extinguishing of cigarettes and the fastening of seatbelts. Gilbert Averell breathed a sigh of relief. Release was at hand.

 
     
4
     
    Most of the passengers were French, so there was quite a queue at the little booth labelled ‘Other EEC’. Averell vaguely wondered whether they had names like Balzac and Proust and Malraux. Apart from this, names, strangely enough, weren’t worrying him. He was scarcely aware that he himself had a name. It was as if, at this crucial juncture, some process of mild dissociation had set in. It was as if he were going through a trivial formality and there was nothing more to it. Georges’ passport said ‘Prince’, since the Republic preserves the courtesies in these matters. But the man at the desk was neither impressed nor interested. It was only to be observed that he put a date-stamp on the passports of everybody coming in this way.
    Averell was aware of a certain impatience in himself as he waited for his suitcase to appear on the appropriate roundabout from which he would have to grab it and trundle it through Customs. But this wasn’t because he was afraid of the passport official having intuitive second thoughts and coming pounding after him. It was merely because he wanted to be well ahead of the vexatious Flaubert at the curious game of snatch-when-you-can that the contrivance imposed – distinguishably to the discomfort of the older and less agile travellers. Some of the more practised of these had secured porters with waiting trolleys, and had only to point with a magistral umbrella at their own particular gyrating property. Younger people stood poised in athletic postures, rather in the manner of fielders in a cricket match alert for the ball. It was a set-up calculated to impress upon persons like himself in their mid-fifties that they possessed neither youth nor age but only an uncomfortable hovering-point between the two. But when the moment came he proved comfortingly nippy, even retrieving a bulky bag for an agitated old lady beside him in the same instant that he ambidextrously secured his own possessions. It then only remained to decide whether he was Red or Green; the bearer or not the bearer of dutiable articles. Of course he was Green for all normal purposes. But what about all those francs? Suppose the officials on the Red side of the hall decided to do a spot-check on him, and he had to divulge this particular possession? They probably wouldn’t be interested, since it was no business of theirs to control any petty flow of currency out of France. Only it wasn’t altogether easy, in his present position, to think clearly about such matters. One felt one never knew. It was with considerable relief that he found himself over this last hurdle, coasting down a ramp, and then actually in open air. For a whole blessed week he was incontestably Gilbert Averell again.
    There was the bus that would take you into London, the bus that would take you to the railway station at Reading, taxis and hire-cars that would take you wherever you wanted to go. With these last an element of bargaining was prudent, but Averell knew he wouldn’t much bother himself about it. He was conscious of a sudden alteration in his whole nervous tone; of a buoyancy as if the very atmosphere had changed. The silly part of the affair was behind him. In front of