sense.
In much of this Tim Barcroft must be thought of as his mother’s child. He held the same views on how things were going to work out, in his generation if not in hers. Tim’s, however, was in a way a more masculine response. Where his mother was intent simply on preserving the home and the hearth he was all for going out and taking a bash. Tim was a political animal – the leader of a pack, say – in the making, and might be an effective one if given his chance. At the moment Tim was no more than a confused Oxford undergraduate, who had hung on to his studies because he contrived to see some of them as in some way ‘relevant’ to the social predicament which clamoured to be sorted out. Tim – Averell remembered forebodingly – wasn’t an easy youth for a dim scholar to keep on terms with. He was always polite, even friendly, almost affectionate at times in an indulgent way. But the total ‘irrelevance’ of his uncle’s pursuits was all too patently clear to him. He’d be at home at present, it was to be supposed, unless he was spending his last Easter vacation before his finals in mugging up some necessary lore elsewhere. It wasn’t improbable that he was working hard, since his mother’s good sense was far from alien to him, and he knew he’d been largely wasting his time over the past three years if he wasn’t now preparing for what he’d call jumping through their bloody paper hoops.
The twin girls, Kate and Gillian, were younger, and Averell felt he didn’t know as much about them as he ought to. Was it with reluctant feet that they were standing where the brook and river meet – or were they all for plunging in? Certainly they were at the very end of their schooldays, and both were said to be quite clever. Clever enough to go up to Oxford themselves, if their mother’s letters were to be believed. They would have to decide, it seemed, whether to have a go at a college gone ‘co-residential’ in the newfangled way (their uncle thought of it as that) or to one still as conventual as the academe Lord Tennyson lost his nerve about. It comforted Averell to remember that for some years he’d been tipping permitted sums into a trust fund designed to pay for whatever variety of higher education these young people elected.
The car had turned off the motorway and was running through Lambourn, and quite soon he would see the line of the downs beneath which Boxes lay. It was a countryside speaking to him of his childhood, and he was indulging in melancholy thoughts of his elected condition of exile as the car swung round on the road to Wantage. It wasn’t the shortest route, and he was about to call out something to his driver when, rather surprisingly, he discovered in himself a feeling that he might usefully employ an extra ten minutes of solitude in clarifying his mind. As he didn’t know the situation in his sister’s household he couldn’t work out the right line to take about that, but the point was that he hadn’t quite discovered what was the right line to take about himself. Stretching the term a little, he was nothing less than a fugitive from justice, and it seemed an abuse of hospitality to park himself on Ruth without declaring the fact. This was a notion distinctly on the quixotic side, but it genuinely worried him, all the same. So he must think .
But he didn’t. When he found himself in traffic badly snarled up in Wantage market place, and the driver had resignedly switched off his engine, Averell took the opportunity to nip out and buy himself a morning paper. In Paris he regularly received The Times , but didn’t always so much as glance at it. Now he found himself dodging his present obscure mission by burying his nose in a paper of a more popular cast.
It afforded a gloomy survey of events alike at home and abroad. Unspeakable things were happening in several parts of Africa. There was political chaos in Spain. Rioting on a large scale had erupted in Rome. In the