Going It Alone Read Online Free PDF

him was a responsible mission, one vindicating his concern as a conscientious family man.
    In this fond persuasion he was giving brisk instructions to a chauffeur when, as with the dreaded voice of Demogorgon, Gustave Flaubert spoke from immediately behind him. Averell, who had supposed himself to have shaken off this pestilent (and obscurely threatening) character, was a good deal discomposed.
    ‘Did I hear you say Faringdon?’ Flaubert asked, not at all in the tone of one who apologizes for eavesdropping. ‘I’m going not far from there myself. We’ll share this car.’
    But for the declarative form into which Flaubert had cast what was not in itself a wholly inadmissible proposal, Averell might have contrived to turn it down in terms of reasonable civility. As it was, he was much more forthright.
    ‘We will certainly do no such thing,’ he said. And he jumped into the back of the car and slammed the door to. ‘Drive on!’ he said (or, rather, loudly exclaimed). ‘Pay no attention to the fellow. He’s a well-known nuisance, and almost always drunk.’ And feeling the need further to emphasize these instructions and prevarications, he waved a hand violently in the air. The car moved off at once, its driver evidently having no inclination to inquire into the rights and wrongs of the matter. Averell swung round and glanced through the back window in time to see Flaubert apparently in urgent colloquy with the driver of another car. Then, first, the twists and turns, and then the long tunnel, which extricate one from the heart of Heathrow were blessedly behind him, and he was being projected at a steady seventy miles an hour down the M4.
    He addressed himself to reviewing the family situation at Boxes as he was likely to find it. At this time of year Ruth would be getting busier in her garden every day. It would be among the vegetables for the most part. Ruth was passionately fond of flowers and had great skill with them. But of recent years she had persuaded herself – and tried to persuade her three children – that self-sufficiency must now be the prime concern of the small rural gentry among whom she had spent almost her entire life so far. The Barcrofts must be prepared to live entirely off the land, consuming nothing that they didn’t themselves produce. That was why there were Chinese geese on the lawns at the back of the house and a couple of goats tethered now here and now there at the front. It was why the old stable had been turned over to half a dozen pigs and there was a perpetual cackle of poultry just beyond the orchard. It was why a hand-pump of the semi-rotary sort had been installed to draw up water from the slender stream that wandered uncertainly through the place. It accounted for the fact that family locomotion was achieved by pony and trap, and that it was by this conveyance that his sister made her way to the nearby small town several times a week for the purpose of picking up a rudimentary knowledge of various useful but entirely boring crafts through the instrumentality of evening classes.
    There was nothing dippy about all this, and no levelheaded person would think of describing Ruth Barcroft as a crank. Although she had acquired a good deal of knowledge about how fiendish chemicals make their way from sacks to soil, from soil to crops, and from crops to shops and then into the human stomach, she didn’t believe that we were all soon going to sprout extra toes and disastrous mental aberrations. She didn’t, so far as her brother knew, devour apocalyptic science fictions or get hung up on television serials in which isolated handfuls of handsome young men and sexy girls struggle for survival amid the ruins of a civilized world. She just believed in a rapidly disintegrating society in which one would have to look out for one’s self and one’s children and grandchildren (not that she herself had any grandchildren as yet). Ruth’s activities, in fact, were all within the bounds of good