Read Online Going It Alone by Michael Innes - Free Book Online Page B

could readily identify one familiar object and another, even down to the big garden roller that never seemed to get itself shifted out of the little hollow into which it sank perceptibly year by year. Level lawns made no part of Ruth’s programme for survival. What was probably not surviving was the group of elms beyond the stream, since in this part of the country he knew the ravages of Dutch Elm Disease to have been pervasive. But as the trees were not yet in leaf he couldn’t be certain of this in the moonlight, and he resolved to go and inspect them, and much else, after breakfast. It was a moment before he recalled that this was an inapposite proposal in the context of his present untoward situation. Yet the garden itself was at least reassuringly peaceful, and he lingered at his window for some time before lowering the sash again to the position in which it was possible to secure it while still admitting fresh air (which was something it would never have occurred to him to solicit sous les toits de Paris ). He then left the curtain drawn back and went to bed (again in his more or less adoptive language, au clair de lune ).
    Bright moonlight, like nightingales or cicadas, can be a nuisance when one wants to go to sleep. Or frogs, for that matter. Averell was just learnedly remembering the perplexing fact that the ancient Greeks and Romans held all these pests in high regard when sleep abruptly overtook him. It had been, after all, a taxing day.
    Tim (as if he were an ancient Greek or Roman himself) had been hoping for a dream of a mysteriously enlightening order. But it was to Averell himself that such a dream came – although its enlightenment, indeed, was to be of a delayed action sort. It wasn’t an edifying dream; on the contrary, it was grossly and violently sexual in a fashion wholly perplexing if one were to consider how remote from anything of the kind had been all his recent preoccupations. Yet some of these undoubtedly made themselves felt in what his slumbering mind cooked up. For one thing, the ego of the dream was by no means very clearly Gilbert Averell. Indeed, people were choosing to believe that he was really King Charles II, that merry monarch who scattered his Maker’s image through the land, and he seemed not to be doing much to disillusion them. The activities of this conceivably composite figure (which it would be by no means proper to set down upon the page) kept on being vexatiously interrupted by a little man from Hull, who went by the improbable name of Stendhal. Stendhal was an outrageous voyeur , and he kept bobbing up at the most inconvenient times. Fortunately Stendhal disliked music, being very much one to delight in treasons, stratagems and spoils. Contrive as a background to those desperate embraces a sufficiently shattering musical accompaniment, preferably Wagnerian, and Stendhal simply ceased to goggle and peer and faded away. And such an occasion made the climax of the dream. The Averell/Charles figure was striving after some positively acrobatic achievement amid a tumble of crashing chords; there was a final great clash of cymbals; Averell woke up.
    It must be admitted again that all this held little of edification; and neither was it particularly remarkable in itself. What was of some psychological interest was the fact that Averell’s moment of awakening was attended by a notable confusion of the senses, or mess-up in what the erudite call the coenaesthesia. The loud bang hadn’t been a loud bang at all; it had been a brilliant and momentary flash of light.
    Averell’s first coherent thought was to wait for the thunder clap. He even began counting, which is supposed to be the way to tell how far off such an electrical discharge has taken place. But there was no thunder. There had just been the flash of lightning and nothing else at all.
    He continued to listen, and suddenly heard the sound of what might have been something falling over in the garden. His dream had scarcely