An Awkward Lie

by Michael Innes

  But Hartsilver had scarcely slipped within Bobby’s observation before he slipped out again. His place was empty; his crumpled table-napkin was being folded by the small boy next to whom he had sat; he himself had departed before the meal had reached its noisy end. Probably by this time Hartsilver didn’t even handle knives and forks too well, so that eating in public was a trial to him. But it was something that an art master – the humblest of all ushers in a private school – had to make the best of, no doubt. It seemed to Bobby that it would be civilized to try and have a word with Hartsilver. And of course it looked as if Hartsilver was the one man who might tell him something about Nauze.

  Dr Gulliver, it turned out, was minded to say goodbye to his visiting Old Boy at the end of the meal. This was fair enough, even taking into account the fact that he had extracted from Bobby a cheque for five pounds towards the cost of some building-operation which was probably entirely mythical. Headmasters are supposed to be very busy men, and it was proper that Gulliver should sustain that impression of himself. All the same, Bobby had a feeling that he was being invited to clear out less on Gulliver’s instance than on Onslow’s – and rather as if Onslow had decided that he was less a mere nuisance than some sort of threat. But there seemed no sense in this. Get yourself involved with bodies in bunkers, Bobby told himself, and in no time you are imagining things.

  So Bobby made proper remarks to his hosts, got into his car, and drove off. But after a couple of bends on Overcombe’s long and ill-kept drive, when he felt that the sound of his engine must have faded away, he drew into the side and came to a halt again. He remembered that what had gone by the grand name of the Art Block in his day had in fact been an old Nissen hut pitched some way from the main building. It seemed improbable that Hartsilver was better or otherwise accommodated now. And nothing would be happening in it at this early hour in the afternoon – one at which the whole school prescriptively took to a disorganized life on its playing fields. But Hartsilver himself would have gone back to his hut, since the place was the only tolerable refuge he had.

  This turned out to be the case. Bobby knocked at the door of the hut, and went in. Hartsilver was alone. He was contemplating a reproduction, pinned up on the wall, of a self portrait in silver-point drawn by Dürer when he was about thirteen. Dürer was thus much of an age with Hartsilver’s present charges at Overcombe. Perhaps Hartsilver was comparing the young Dürer with, say, the young Beadon – something like that. But now Hartsilver, having responded to the knock on his door, was contemplating Bobby precisely as he had been contemplating his reproduction of that marvellously precocious drawing in the Albertina. And at once Bobby remembered that this had been Hartsilver’s habit long ago. He had always contrived to see the little savages of Overcombe not as little savages but simply as endlessly fascinating plastic entities which, but for the calamity which had befallen him, he might equally endlessly have given his life to arresting on a canvas or a square of paper.

  Bobby had forgotten what it was like to be looked at with this particular eye. It was one, he thought, which his mother, so devoted a sculptor, must deliberately refrain from directing upon him. It had a depersonalizing effect, so that he wondered how he was to suggest himself to Hartsilver as being something other than a complex visual phenomenon.

  ‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ Bobby said, ‘but I’m–’

  ‘Bobby.’ Hartsilver was smiling gently. ‘Bobby Appleby. You were absolutely no good, you know, so that it’s odd that I should remember you. You might have been a Mohammedan, for all the ability you had to draw so much as a dog or a cat. Like most of the others, really. Yet there was something a little odd about its being that way with you.’ Hartsilver paused in recollection. ‘Isn’t one of your parents–?’

  ‘My father’s a policeman,’ Bobby said – and paused mischievously on this false trail.

  ‘Then it was your mother. But you were no credit to her. Yet there was something there. My dear Bobby – if I may still so address you – can it be that you have become a musician?’

  ‘I’ve become a writer – of a sort.’

  ‘That would be it!’ Hartsilver was delighted. ‘And is that why you have returned to Overcombe? But no! Your first – or even perhaps your second, would it be? – novel is behind you. So you haven’t come back to this desperate place for copy.’

  ‘Well, no – as a matter of fact I haven’t.’

  ‘I’m delighted to hear it. I give you notice that I wish positively not to be put in a novel.’

  ‘You won’t be by me.’ Bobby felt in danger of being possessed by an irrelevant excitement. It was the excitement of finding that he and old Hartsilver had been the same sort of person all the time. And perhaps (despite the gratifying acclaim bestowed by Sunday newspapers upon Robert Appleby, promising author of The Lumber Room) – perhaps he was himself going to be as thoroughly unsuccessful as this old creature, lingering out his broken career in a crazy school. But it wouldn’t matter. It was the fact that one was an artist that was the important thing. From these reflections – somewhat sentimental in character, and undeniably irrelevant to the design with which he had returned to Overcombe – Bobby managed to shake himself free.

  ‘I want to ask you something,’ he said firmly.

  ‘Really?’ It was with an air of surprise that Hartsilver said this. ‘I’m very seldom asked anything – except perhaps to give an extra hour to the most unteachable of the children, in order to iron out some difficulty in the timetable. Not that talent doesn’t lurk among the unteachable from time to time. Even through Free Expression occasionally.’

  Bobby remembered the Free Expression, and saw that it was still going on. The blackboards had become whiteboards, and the aerial dog-fights once crudely chalked on them had given way to spacecraft and extra-galactic monsters.

  ‘A boy called Beadon, for example,’ Hartsilver was saying. ‘He has a flair for caricature, and I fear his use of it at times inclines to impertinence. But I haven’t the heart to check him. On the board over there.’

  Bobby briefly inspected Beadon’s productions, since it would have been uncivil to neglect to do so. There was a passable representation of Onslow in a state of inebriety, and underneath it the words:

  THE GRATE SOAK OF PETERBOROUGH

  Next to this was Hartsilver himself dressed in a juvenile sailor-suit and dancing a hornpipe; this was labelled:

  PORTLAND BILL

  Finally there was Dr Gulliver, depicted in an attitude of weighty oratory which Bobby recalled clearly enough; he was described as:

  THE SELEBRATED SEVERN BORE BORING

  ‘At least,’ Bobby said, ‘Beadon seems to be making progress with his Geography. He just has to catch up a little in Spelling, and he’ll be a credit to the school. But what I want to ask you is this: do you remember a man called Nauze?’

  ‘Nauze?’ For a moment it was almost as if Hartsilver had an impulse to shy away from the name. If this was so, however, he recovered himself. ‘Dear me, yes. He was here in your time, was he not? You had a nickname for him: Bleeding Nauze.’

  ‘Bloody Nauze.’

  ‘To be sure. He was a little too fond of telling boys to touch their toes.’

  ‘That’s right – but not in the least to any point of scandal. But was there a scandal? Connected, I mean, with his leaving Overcombe.’

  ‘I might have been the last to hear of anything of the sort. I am not a great frequenter of our staff common room. I do have an impression, however, that Nauze left rather abruptly.’ Hartsilver was looking at Bobby in some surprise, and perhaps not altogether without disapproval. This was fair enough, since there wasn’t much propriety in an Old Boy’s seeming attempt to get idle gossip going in this way. But at least Hartsilver now went on quite readily. ‘It must have been not long after you left Overcombe yourself, so Nauze might well have faded from my mind. As a matter of fact, however, I re
call him fairly vividly.’

  ‘Do you remember something about one of his hands?’

  ‘He had a finger missing, of course. And that is perhaps a thing that a boy would be particularly likely to keep in mind. But he was notable for something quite other than any mere physical characteristic. Nauze was a remarkable man. I believe I’d call him a very remarkable man.’ Hartsilver paused. ‘His intellectual endowment was in some respects truly outstanding.’

  ‘Then why do you think he–’ Bobby broke off in some confusion, since he had been about to employ some such form of words as ‘came down to working in this cock-eyed school’. His discomfort was, if anything, increased by noticing that Hartsilver was smiling gently.

  ‘Perhaps, Bobby, the poor man had a past. How lucky one is oneself not have had that. It makes not having a future a good deal more bearable. I don’t mean that Nauze – and I wonder why you are interested in him? – was the kind of man who might have left behind him anything really memorable. There are kinds of genius of whom one never feels that And no end of people of the first ability. Think of them, Bobby: all the professors and judges, the Kunsthistoriker, the Ministers of the Crown, the top civil servants.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Bobby found this sudden gentle arrogance disconcerting. ‘But was this chap Nauze, gym-shoe and all, getting on for being a genius?’

  ‘Shall I just say that he had a brilliant mind – more brilliant even than Dr Gulliver himself?’ Hartsilver had turned from arrogance to whimsical malice. Suddenly – and most surprisingly – he shot out a question. ‘Why have you hunted me out, Bobby, to ask questions about Nauze?’

  ‘I believe he may be dead. I believe he may have died in rather a horrible way. And that other people – or another person – may be in danger as a result of having been…well, in at the kill. So I want to find out about him.’

  During this quite short speech, Hartsilver had contrived to drift away. Bobby remembered this as a physical necessity of his. In the middle of quite relaxed talk, the old man would be unaccountably impelled to get out of at least touching distance of anybody else. At the moment he had returned to Dürer’s drawing of the prep-school Dürer, and was seemingly as absorbed in it as if he had never seen it before. But when he turned round it was to continue the conversation naturally enough.

  ‘My dear Bobby, this is most distressing. Did you say your father was a policeman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m being silly, my dear boy. Even I used to notice Sir John Appleby’s name in the news often enough. Are you turning detective because the role of Crown Prince is attractive to you?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ The sharpness of this had taken Bobby by surprise. ‘As a matter of fact, the person who may be in danger is a girl. It’s a little difficult to explain.’

  ‘Then let us simply return to Nauze. It would be extravagant to call him a genius. But at least he had an astounding linguistic faculty. I’d be surprised to hear that, when he had a pupil with the elements of docility, he didn’t teach Latin rather well.’

  ‘He certainly did that. I never saw him after I was about thirteen. But it was Nauze who got me my First in Mods seven years later. Incidentally, he started me on my Greek as well, and equally effectively. And I can remember having a dim sense that he’d never himself done Greek.’

  ‘Precisely. Do you do the crossword in The Times?’

  ‘Only when my father makes me help him. My father’s a fifteen to twenty minute man on it.’

  ‘Nauze’s average time was seven and a half minutes.’

  ‘That’s not possible.’

  ‘It was to Nauze. And he was equally good at various sorts of mathematical puzzle.’

  ‘I see. Did he show off?’

  ‘Far from it. His expertness was more like something that he betrayed in spite of himself. The betrayal had something to do with his drinking a great deal.’

  ‘The boys never knew anything about that.’ Bobby frowned. ‘Except – do you know? – when he had those bouts with the gym-shoe – and they were essentially bouts – we felt there was something funny about him.’

  ‘He had been drinking. It released certain inhibitions, no doubt. I believe that’s the word.’

  ‘It’s rather revolting.’ Bobby discovered that he did feel genuinely revolted. ‘Of course, it’s an utterly trivial thing. A chap extracting a harmless sort of yelp from small boys just because he’s had a pint too much. Disagreeable, all the same. Yet I rather liked Nauze. I believe that most of us did. I suppose he gave us a good conceit of ourselves. We overestimated the merit gained by passing through that mild ordeal.’ Bobby fell silent for a moment. ‘But all this is nonsense – unless it gives me a better picture of the man. I want to see Nauze clearly. In my head, I mean.’

  ‘You mean you don’t recollect his appearance?’

  ‘I thought I did. It would never have occurred to me that I couldn’t visualize him clearly enough, supposing that it had come into my head to do so. But now, when I have had occasion to try, I see something shadowy and elusive – hovering behind the pointing finger that wasn’t there.’

  ‘Most interesting. Would you go so far as to say, Bobby, that if he walked into the room now you mightn’t be quite sure of him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so. That would be quite incredible. Unless, of course he had changed a great deal. And people do change enormously in twelve years.’

  ‘It rather depends on what twelve years.’ Hartsilver had been gazing at the door of his Nissen hut rather as if he expected Bloody Nauze actually to appear. ‘Bobby Appleby has changed quite a lot. But have I?’ Hartsilver’s gentle smile flitted over his face and vanished. ‘You already saw me as on the last verge of my confine.’

  ‘You haven’t changed much.’ Bobby spoke rather shortly – partly because he had almost said. ‘You’re astonishingly well-preserved’, and partly because he was becoming impatient for some real discovery.

  ‘Of course there are the photographs. You remember them? A group photograph, taken every year. Through Dr Gulliver’s great kindess, we all get a copy. I confess to having no impulse to arrange them on my wall. But it would be indecent to destroy them. So they’re in a portfolio – there by the far window.’

  Hartsilver had untied the tapes of the portfolio and hoisted it on an easel. It was the way he had sometimes shown you colour-prints and photographs if you had wandered round to the Art Block alone or with one or two other boys. It had been almost a covert activity – or at least you didn’t too readily let it get around that a holy awe befell you when you gazed upon the productions of people with names like Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca. Bobby understood that matters were different at many prep schools now, and that a precocious cultivation of aesthetic experience was all the go at them. He doubted whether this was so at Overcombe. Dr Gulliver and Mr Onslow, in point of both the theory and practise of education, were conservatively disposed.

  There was no occasion for holy awe before the group photographs, although they weren’t in fact to be contemplated entirely without some sort of emotion. Bobby had his own collection of such things at Dream, although they now reposed in an abandoned suitcase in an attic. Some were even of a pre-Overcombe-era: kindergarten memorials, or Bobby doing ballet with horrible little girls at Miss Kimp’s Academy of the Dance. After Overcombe there came the whole saga of his progress through his public school, ending up with Elevens, Fifteens, Prefects, and – ultimate pinnacle – solus between the headmaster and the headmaster’s wife in commemoration of his having become Head Boy. Then, at Oxford, the whole thing starting again, but with new sorts of relics creeping in: the menus of dining clubs, for example, or of banquets given by the affluent to celebrate their majority. It all reeked of privilege, Bobby would tell himself, and all these fond κειμηλιχ should be consigned to a bonfire. But they hadn’t been – only to a
n attic. Bobby, who was an extremely honest young man, had to tell himself that, if God were to let him choose, he wouldn’t want to have had a day of it different. Very obscurely, it had accumulated some sort of debt, and not one which you at all discharged by becoming an agreeably esteemed tiro novelist.

  These were serious thoughts, wholly inapposite to the sort of thriller or adventure story which Bobby was so anxious to see begin stirring round him. He did his best to scrutinize the Overcombe school photographs as his father might once have scrutinized such things at Scotland Yard. Year after year, they had all been taken in the same spot – before the slightly bogus Georgian portico which was the most impressive feature of the large ramshackle house. The same forms had been dragged out into the open air and disposed in the same shallow arc. But the only other contestants were Hartsilver himself, Dr Gulliver and Mr Onslow. The last, indeed, was constant only in minor degree. For whereas Hartsilver’s best suit was mysteriously as shabby in any one year as in any other, and Dr Gulliver was undeviatingly attired in his cap and gown, Mr Onslow never appeared as quite the same character twice. He could be estimated, for example as putting on about half a stone yearly, while his clothes and accoutrements suggested a kind of scholastic Proteus. Rugger balls, Soccer balls, cricket bats, hockey sticks, tennis rackets, boxing gloves, fencing foils and the like passed with him in a kind of heraldic procession down the years.

  The rest of the staff – academic or domestic, male or female – hinted a fairly brisk turnover. So, of course, did the boys. Any individual was first to be found in a row crouching cross-legged at the staff’s feet, then on tiptoe on a hazardously improvised scaffolding at the back, after that on a similar contraption on a lower level, and finally seated in a secure dignity on one or other flank of the grown-ups. Apart from this, the boys seemed to fall into two main groups. There were those who stuck out their chests and glowered defiantly at the camera; and there were those who contrived a species of concave or inward-turning stance and were chiefly evocative of small creatures of burrowing habit deprived for the time of their natural refuge. Bobby saw that he had himself been a child of the chest-protruding order.