An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  ‘Is that Latin, sir?’ Entirely to his own horror, the obligation to ‘cheek’ Dr Gulliver had reared itself suddenly and irresistibly out of Bobby’s past.

  ‘It is a sufficiently well-known apothegm, I should have supposed.’ Dr Gulliver had frowned in displeasure. ‘Though not, indeed from an author who is to be commended to the young. The aphorism comes from Juvenal’s Tenth Satire.’

  ‘By Jove, sir – so it does. Fortem posce animum mortis terrore carentem – would that be right? – Qui spatium vitae extremum inter munera ponat Naturae–’ Bobby broke off, not because he had forgotten Juvenal’s prayer, but because he remembered he hadn’t come back to Overcombe as an undergraduate lark. ‘I’ll be tremendously interested to meet Mr Onslow again,’ he said. ‘And any other of the masters in my time who are still here.’

  This cautious approach to the topic of Mr Nauze yielded no immediate results. Dr Gulliver had jumped to his feet with what Bobby now vividly remembered as his chronic senseless agitation. It was this – or rather it was the schizoid pairing of this with his answering air of a scholar’s deeply meditative habit – that gave Dr Gulliver his peculiarly bizarre note. Indeed (Bobby now saw), it was doubtless from this nervous peculiarity of the Doctor that Overcombe as a school derived its special quality of craziness. The thing didn’t, so far as his recollection went, at all disturb the pupils. Almost all small boys are mad; the really terrifying aspect of graduating to a public school at twelve or thirteen was the abrupt demand the transition made for an assumption of the appearances of sanity. It was at about thirteen (Mr Robert Appleby, brilliantly paradoxical novelist, reflected) that the individual is condemned to enter what the poet Yeats calls the stupidity of one’s middle years.

  ‘You must see the extensions and improvements,’ Dr Gulliver was saying. ‘We owe them to the piety – I use the word in its classical sense of pietas, Appleby – of our old boys. Of many of our old boys.’ Dr Gulliver favoured Bobby with a penetrating glare. ‘But there has been a marked short-fall, I am sorry to say, upon the total sum required. It looks as if the swimming-pool, for example, is to land us in a state of liquidation.’ Dr Gulliver paused – perhaps as a profound philologist aware that he had struck out a notably complex image. ‘Not all of my former charges, I am sorry to say, have come forward to suckle their alma mater.’ Dr Gulliver made a longer pause. Perhaps he was sorting this one out in his head. Not that he hadn’t aimed a shaft at Bobby accurately enough.

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear about a subscription,’ Bobby said unblushingly. ‘I’ve been in Samarkand.’

  ‘Indeed? Well, boys will be boys – and run into trouble from time to time. Be assured, Appleby, that your old school thinks none the worse of you.’ Dr Gulliver, who had been making for the door of his study, had stopped in his tracks. Bobby wondered whether he could conceivably be suffering from some rare disorder of the auditory system which tended to bring out ‘Samarkand’ as ‘Sing Sing’ or ‘Wormwood Scrubs’ or ‘Pentonville’. But now Dr Gulliver was speaking again. ‘I have no doubt,’ he was asking, ‘that you carry your chequebook with you?’

  Bobby – who was very much in earnest about his visit to Overcombe – acknowledged the inescapable, and paid up.

  They wandered about the large disfurnished mansion. Dr Gulliver’s extensions and improvements, if they really existed, seemed not of an obtrusive order. The form-rooms were quite unchanged – except that their bare wooden floors had been scrubbed into yet deeper grooves under the exertions of the luckless old women from the village who came in to do that sort of thing. There were the same photographs of classical statuary on the walls – revoltingly naked and resoundingly anaphrodisiac, as if purveyed by some firm of scholastic suppliers expert in sustaining the moral probity of the young. The ancient desks, plainly designed to be bolted to the floor in orderly rows, stood around in a random way like guests at a disordered party. Pen-knives had not ceased to be at work on them; Bobby particularly admired one inscription so precisely cut as clearly to represent the full-time labour of a term; it said YOGI BEAR WAS HERE. Another, more rapidly executed, said BALLS TO FATGUTS GULLIVER. Yet another appeared to be the despairing prayer of a learned child, since it read ORARE POTTER MINOR. Just as long ago, not much appeared to be done in the way of tidying up. Football-boots smothered in dried clay lay where they had been kicked into corners a term ago, their long, muddied laces writhing around them. Stamp albums; primitive musical instruments; desiccated goldfish in abandoned bowls; rejected pin-ups of male persons celebrated in one or another athletic world; the crumpled wrappings of Munchies, Crunchies, Scrumpties, Mintoes, Chockoes, Maltoes and the like; boring letters from aunts; mildly miniaturized tennis-rackets and cricket-hats: all these silted up the interstices of these chambers devoted to the pursuit of learning. As he surveyed them, Bobby felt himself assailed by an unwholesome nostalgia. It was as if he sighed for garments too short in the arm and leg, for ink on his fingers and revolting hair-creams experimentally applied to his scalp. He had to recall himself abruptly to a present world in which one or two nasty things had taken place.

  Bobby’s chief problem was the girl. Objectively and subjectively, she was very much a puzzle. What had happened to her? Anybody – any responsible person – would have to be interested in that. She had vanished while hard up against some brutal crime, and in circumstances which remained wholly mysterious. That was the external enigma. But there was a further enigma inside Bobby’s head. Was he more involved in tracing her – or in rescuing her, as it must surely be – than if she were just any young woman similarly circumstanced? It had been for only three or four minutes that she had existed for him. And she had existed only as a voice, a figure in the fragrance of dawn. That sort of thing is something you lay on when going after effects of cheap romance. So perhaps he had involved himself in a foolish entanglement of that sort.

  Bobby had given a great deal of thought to sex, and had concluded, on grounds of high theory, that the individual’s approach to it ought to be variously experimental. Unfortunately he could hardly recall an occasion upon which he himself had contrived to experiment with sex, since sex always seemed to get ahead and experiment with him. Perhaps that was what was happening again now. It was undeniable that he knew hardly anything whatever about this girl – not even whether she had an interesting mind or a nice smell. Yet here he was – plainly on the verge of losing sleep over her in the very largest way.

  He recalled himself to his surroundings in Overcombe School. This business of pottering round with Gulliver was of no use whatever. He simply wanted to find out from Gulliver – or, if not from Gulliver himself, then from some other old inhabitant – what had happened to a former assistant master called Nauze. It was possible that nobody would remember anything about him. He might hardly have impressed himself on his colleagues at all. With them, he hadn’t enjoyed the freedom of a gym-shoe for that purpose. On the other hand, somebody just might turn up with a handful of information which would either exclude or make slightly less arbitrary the strange possibility Bobby had thought up about the identity of the body in the bunker.

  They passed through a day-room deserted except for two small boys absorbed in a game of chess. With automatic omniscience, Dr Gulliver paused to direct one of them in the move he should next make. In another room quite a little crowd were quarrelling over the running of a model railway. Yet a third, however, afforded a glimpse of some dozen studious infants sitting in well ordered rows while producing with a weary docility the animal-like noises which in an English school pass for the language of Racine and Voltaire. The time-table at Overcombe had always been like that. Sometimes a single lesson would go on bewilderingly for hours, while at other times almost the entire staff vanished for days on end. And Bloody Nauze, come to think of it, had done rather more vanishing than most.

  ‘Can you tell me,’ Bobby asked, ‘what happened to Mr Nauze?’

  ‘And now we must
visit the playing-fields.’ Dr Gulliver, who had halted very abruptly in his tracks, made one of his subphrenetic dashes towards an outer door. For a moment Bobby had a hopeful feeling that his question, thus obtrusively ignored, had at least for some mysterious reason been a disconcerting one. But perhaps nothing more had been involved than Gulliver’s general battiness. And now they were traversing a large derelict conservatory (described in the prospectus of Overcombe as ‘affording abundant opportunity for simple horticultural experiments’) on their way to the open air. ‘For our annual Sports approach,’ the Doctor was saying. ‘The prizes, I am delighted to be able to divulge, will be presented by Air Vice-Marshall Synn-Essery. Synn-Essery – the family, as you know, is of the highest antiquity – is not among the least distinguished of Overcombe’s alumni. Mr Onslow – whose people, by the way, hold some kinship with the Synn-Esserys – is naturally concerned that everything should go with even more than the customary éclat. We shall find him, I think, superintending the construction of the Long Jump.’

  This proved to be true. Mr Onslow – so wittily nicknamed F L – was giving instruction to a number of the young gentlemen of Overcombe in the art of cutting turfs and shovelling sand. (The prospectus called this ‘encouragement to learn something of the rural skills and crafts with which the simplest country gentleman should be familiar’.) Unlike Dr Gulliver, Mr Onslow had changed a good deal. He had changed, in fact, by several stone. He had also changed in complexion. Above the enormous pink Leander scarf which (surprisingly, on a warm summer day) was swathed several times round his neck, the face of Mr Onslow showed as a discordant beetroot. Probably he was being further throttled by the flaunting red, yellow and black of his I Zingari tie. His blazer, which asserted to the initiate that he had rowed for Cambridge in some year unknown, was no longer adequate to his girth. This, however, helped further to broadcast the notable catholicity of Mr Onslow’s athletic achievements, since what the gap revealed was a sweater proper to be worn by those who have played Association Football for Oxford. It was impossible to conceive that the motto festina lente had been much attended to by this universally accomplished person in his younger days.

  ‘Ah, Onslow,’ Dr Gulliver said. ‘You will remember – um – Appleby.’

  ‘No.’ It was with conviction, and after only the briefest glance at Bobby, that Mr Onslow responded with this monosyllable. ‘Beadon, you young lout, look nippy with that barrow, or I’ll have the skin off you.’

  ‘Vellee-vellee good, sahib.’ Beadon, a slender and fair child whom Dr Gulliver would have been able to authenticate to the gratified inquirer as one of the Wiltshire Beadons, was not perturbed. And Bobby, glancing at Onslow, recalled that this stupid, boorish and unquestionably spurious athlete had never been known to apply any instrument of correction, whether licensed or unlicensed, to the person of any of his charges. It seemed a considerable virtue to Bobby, and for a moment he found himself wishing that Onslow didn’t dislike him to the extent he patently did. For Onslow had now turned back and given Bobby a ferocious scowl. Perhaps it was merely that Bobby (Robert Appleby, scrum-half, Oxford and England) was not yet running to fat. Or perhaps Onslow actually did have memories – and displeasing memories – of Bobby as a small boy. Indeed, Bobby had to confess to himself, this was only too likely. But now Dr Gulliver was speaking again. He seemed a little put out by the farouche comportment of his partner.

  ‘Appleby,’ Dr Gulliver said, ‘has just been mentioning one of our former assistants. That agreeable young fellow Chinn.’

  ‘Nauze,’ Bobby said.

  ‘Anglo-Indian, of course, for many generations.’ Dr Gulliver was unheeding. ‘I recall that Lieutenant-Fireworker Humphrey Chinn – mark, Appleby, that the rank is full of history – assisted an ancestor of my own at the capture of Seringapatam. The date may well be memorized, Appleby. 1799.’

  ‘Do you remember Nauze?’ It was to Onslow that Bobby addressed this question. There was a possibility that, graceless though he was, Onslow might produce a little more sense than the imbecile Gulliver.

  ‘Nauze? You’re barking up the wrong tree. Never had a fellow of that name round here, that I can remember.’

  ‘He taught me Latin. Rather well, as a matter of fact.’ Bobby went on to the particulars automatically. It was surely beyond belief that Onslow could have forgotten Nauze’s very name. Onslow simply didn’t want to talk about him. And Onslow was so desperately thick that he had recourse to this absurd prevarication. For the first time since arriving at Overcombe, Bobby felt alerted to something that might really be there. Chinn, yes; Nauze, no. And if both Gulliver and Onslow chose to forget the latter, it was not at all probable that it was because he had been a trifle heavy-handed in the matter of discipline. Of course there might have been some other sort of scandal, in no way connected with, or leading to, Nauze’s ending up – if he had ended up – dead on a golf-course. Nauze could have turned into an awful drunk, totally unworthy to instruct the young Beadons of Wiltshire or applaud the speeches of Air-Vice-Marshall Synn-Essery – and his name be consigned to oblivion at Overcombe in consequence.

  It was the present representative of the Beadons who terminated this abortive conference. He had looked at his watch (anniversary gift of a devoted aunt, Angela Lady Beadon-Beadon) and was now vigorously massaging his stomach.

  ‘Chop, chop,’ Master Beadon said. ‘Coolie chaps vellee vellee hungry. All coolie chaps want chop, chop. Want mungaree.’

  ‘Mungaree, mungaree!’ All the infants employed on the Onslow corvée took up this mysterious cry, pounding their bellies and contorting their features the while. Bobby had once more to remind himself that all small boys are mad. A well-trained prep-school matron must look out for symptoms of sanity in much the spirit in which she looks out for those of chicken-pox or German measles. And Dr Gulliver, who might have been expected to evince displeasure before this bizarre display, merely nodded benignly.

  ‘Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem,’ Dr Gulliver said learnedly. ‘Dulce est desipere in loco.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Bobby found himself once more spontaneously putting on his top-of-the-form turn. ‘Neque sem per arcum – is that right sir? – Tendit Appollo.’

  ‘Excellent, Appleby.’ Dr Gulliver was highly pleased. ‘It is luncheon that our young people are thinking of. And you will join us, I trust, at our simple refection.’

  From behind Bobby, disconcertingly, came a sudden half smothered snarl. It seemed as excessive reaction even on the brutish Onslow’s part to an invitation he didn’t approve of. But that was what the noise had been about, all the same.

  Lunch proved to be another thing that hadn’t changed at Overcombe. It was undeniably nutritious, and would doubtless have received the commendations of a visiting dietician, supposing so unlikely a personage ever was to penetrate here. It could not, however, conscientiously have been described as palatable. As mungaree it served well enough; the young gentlemen of Overcombe, delicately bred though they had been in the nurseries of the affluent, shovelled it away with much more vigour than they had applied when excavating for the Long Jump. Dr Guiliver ate with every appearance of informed satisfaction, as if he were a gourmet on a particularly lucky day. His staff saw no reason for any such masquerade; they consumed what was set before them in a sullen gloom suggestive of the Bad Poor in a Victorian workhouse. The meal was thus not informative – or was so only in point of what Bobby could learn by gazing around him.

  This was not encouraging. The entire staff of a place like Overcombe of course numbered no more than a dozen, and Bobby saw hardly anybody, apart from the joint proprietors, who was not quite young. Presumably nobody who could help himself stuck this sort of servitude indefinitely. There were two young women who clearly ran the domestic side. These were rather attractive, and might have achieved a good deal of Bobby’s attention had he not (in that department of the masculine psyche) been so tied up with the vanished girl. The
re were two almost middle-aged men whom he somehow guessed hadn’t been at the school for long; they looked highly intelligent, and must therefore belong to that class of persons who drift into humble employment through some sheer inability to manage their own lives. They would know nothing about Bloody Nauze. Nor would any of the others. Bobby had certainly never set eyes on any of them before, and they were far too junior to have memories stretching back a dozen years. Or all of them – Bobby suddenly saw – except old Hartsilver.

  Old Hartsilver had been the art master – and so not thought of as a master at all. Except when ragging around in the art room, one hadn’t much noticed Hartsilver. (Indeed, one hadn’t very much noticed him then, either.) And it had taken Bobby all this time to notice him now. He sat at the head of a table given over to the very smallest boys. It looked as if he enjoyed at least one advantage over his colleagues, since he was clearly without any awareness whatever of what he ate. Bobby remembered him as living in a dream. Perhaps it was a dream of the pictures he was never going to paint. For when he was quite a young man something dreadful had begun to happen to Hartsilver’s central nervous system – at least Bobby thought it was that – so that his hands had ceased at all adequately to obey his will. Not without evidence of agonizing effort, he could control a gross tremor through the seconds necessary for showing a child how to correct the perspective of a cube, or hatch in a shadow, or recover a high-light with an india-rubber. That had been old Hartsilver then, and that was doubtless old Hartsilver now. Because he had been remote and withdrawn and gentle, the boys had teased him mercilessly. At the same time, Bobby now remembered, they had comported themselves with a flawless delicacy in any situation directly involving his disability. Bobby (or rather Robert, promising novelist) felt a sudden envy of those writers – Joyce Cary, Forrest Reid, Richard Hughes, William Golding – who could really ‘do’ children. There hardly existed a richer, more marvellous world.