An Awkward Lie (10 page)

And then a very dreadful thing happened. Bobby suddenly found himself wondering whether he was going to faint instead. Equally suddenly, a flash of self-knowledge told him why. Ever since the thing on the golf-course happened, he had been fooling around with this girl inside his head. And, until this very moment, it had all been nonsense: a rather messy fudging up of romantic feeling about a young woman encountered in gruesome circumstances.

The same young woman was now before him – indicted of lies, stricken by some ghastly and guilty predicament. And Bobby loved her deeply. She had been Rosaline on the golf course. She was Juliet now.

She had walked away, and Bobby was left to consult his own troubled mind. He had to ask himself why he wasn’t running after her, shouting that they mustn’t part like this. It was essentially because of a sudden conviction that, if he wasn’t to proceed with her on what might prove some fatally wrong assumption, he must give himself time to think. But of course the person professionally equipped to do the sort of thinking that seemed required – thinking about a darkening mystery in a context of what appeared to be revolting crime – was his father. So his first impulse to action was simply to get into his car again and drive hard for Dream.

Perhaps Bobby had decided against this in the very moment that he
had
sat down – for he had sat down – on the curly pipe on which Susan Danbury had been sitting moments before. To go home would be to decamp, and this was something he mustn’t do. For Overcombe had become, incredible as it seemed, a sinister place. He was in no doubt of this at all, although it wasn’t anything which could be called thinking that had brought him to such a conclusion. Something instinctive and irrational was at play upon him. Or if there were objective reasons for his feeling, they belonged to that category of clues and signals which slip into the mind without being consciously registered – and which produce (he had heard his father say) what is popularly called a hunch. He had a hunch about Overcombe. It seemed a very strange place to have a hunch about.

He mustn’t drive away – unless he could take Susan Danbury along with him. And Susan had shown no disposition whatever to treat him as a knight errant. There was no reason why she should. ‘What have you to say to that?’ he had demanded, hastily and aggressively, for all the world like some Detective Branch policeman whom his father would never have tipped as likely to go far. At this thought Bobby jumped to his feet – the outcropping sewage machinery wasn’t at all comfortable, anyway – and paced up and down the ridiculous concrete expanse he had so ham-handedly chosen for the recent
rencontre.
When he and Susan were married, they would have to recollect that their first meeting had been in company with a corpse, and their second on top of a monstrous cloaca.
For love has played his mansion in the place of excrement…
As this observation by his favourite poet came into Bobby’s head, Bobby had to admit to himself that perhaps he was going crazy. For one thing, he wasn’t remotely likely to marry Susan Danbury. She just wasn’t going to feel about him in that sort of way. As for how he felt about her – well, that was a matter of a hard core of conviction at present surrounded by layers of the most appalling bewilderment.

He knew nothing whatever about her – except that here she was, and that she was employed at Overcombe to ensure that Master Beadon and his contemporaries washed behind their ears. And no doubt the bunch of tenth-rate ushers employed to staff the place on its scholastic side were constantly making passes at her. Bobby remembered with horror that evidences of the same sort of thing long ago had been a topic for ribaldry among the more knowing of the young gentlemen under Dr Gulliver’s tutelage. But this was an irrelevant thought, and he swopped it for the reflection that if he had made a poor job of learning almost anything about Susan he had scarcely done much better in the case of Nauze. He now knew when Nauze had left the school, and he had been told something about the man’s abilities and habits which he hadn’t known before. Nauze had possessed what Hartsilver described as an astounding linguistic faculty; he had been skilled at crossword puzzles and mathematical problems; he had drunk a great deal; he had perhaps left Overcombe rather abruptly. This was a meagre gathering. Was there anything else that he had learnt about Nauze?

Nauze had been the man in the bunker
. When Bobby had arrived at Overcombe, he had brought with him a mere hypothesis. He would take away a certainty.

Abandoning the septic tank and making his way slowly back to his car, Bobby checked over this proposition. It turned, of course, upon the two appearances of the girl: first by the bunker, and now here. For if the body in the bunker had not been that of Nauze then Bobby’s trip to Overcombe had been, so to speak, entirely at random. And that such a random trip should have brought him up against the girl again was quite astronomically unlikely; one had only to think of the total population and the geographical limits of the British Isles to see that the chances against such a further encounter were a good many million to one.

But what did this tell him about the girl? What did it tell him about her relationship with Nauze? Almost nothing – Bobby quickly saw – that was quite assured and certain.

Susan Danbury was now employed at a school where Nauze had once been employed. But Nauze had ceased so to be employed years ago – and Susan was clearly so young that she herself couldn’t have been at Overcombe for very long. So here was a very tenuous link indeed. And there was only one other real link. Three days before, and a hundred miles from Overcombe, Susan had turned up from nowhere when Bobby was in the act of discovering a dead man on a golf-course. Then Susan had vanished – to turn up at Overcombe, a place Bobby had found reason to associate with the corpse. The body had vanished as well.
Might it perhaps turn up at Overcombe too?

They had been felling some of the over-mature beeches in the long winding avenue to the school. Bobby found that he had sat down abruptly on a stump. It was at least more comfortable than one of those curly pipes. But he might probably have sat down on a thorn-tree without much being aware of the fact. The fantastic question he had just so inconsequently asked himself had pretty well laid him out.

He had better ask himself something more sensible. Wasn’t there at least one possibility which, although it postulated stiff coincidence, didn’t postulate coincidence of the virtually inconceivable order he had just felt obliged to reject?
Susan, who worked at Overcombe, had been present, entirely by chance, on the occasion of the discovering of the body of a man who had worked at Overcombe long ago
. Bobby paused on this, and saw that he had to add something else.
And again, entirely by chance, the discoverer of the body – one Robert Appleby – had been at Overcombe as well
. Gloomily, Bobby had to conclude that he was again in the region of astronomical improbability, after all.

And these mental gymnastics – which weren’t even as clear-headed as they ought to be – he had been undertaking in the interest of letting Susan out. That was the only way to express the thing. He wanted the girl to be entirely innocent of something – and without precisely knowing what that something was.

In a kind of desperation now, Bobby tried one final notion. It was at least a very simple one.
There were two girls.

This, after all, was what Susan herself had suggested. Bobby was mistaken in supposing that the girl who had come into Hartsilver’s hut was the girl who had briefly stood beside him at the bunker. He had been involved in something nasty, and had got round to imagining things. It hadn’t perhaps been very tactful of Susan to suggest he should see a doctor. But ought he at least, so to speak, to see an oculist?

No good. No good at all. One coincidence, indeed, you could get rid of in terms of it. The body discovered by Robert Appleby, Overcombe Old Boy, need not have been that of Bloody Nauze, Overcombe ex-master. But consider. Appleby, Overcombe Old Boy, discovers body minus one finger as Nauze, Overcombe ex-master, was minus one finger: this in the presence of Girl
A.
Appleby proceeds to Overcombe and encounters Girl
B
– who he is instantly convinced is Girl
A.
There is a certain plausibility about this explanation, and Girl
B
has urged it. When you go to parties, for example, you sometimes meet somebody whom you are quite convinced you have already met shortly before – and yet this proves to have been impossible. But this, of course, was a very imperfect analogy indeed. Bobby had made his way from the bunker to Overcombe (you might put in) with Girl
A
very, very much on his mind. And at Overcombe he had first instantly, and then obstinately and with unfaltering conviction, accepted Girl
B
as being Girl
A
. It was quite inconceivable that, by mere chance, there should be – here at Overcombe – a second girl so like the first girl that any simple misidentification on his part was possible. If the two girls were not the same girl then Bobby was very mad indeed, and Susan had been more than justified in those inquiries about his family doctor.

At this point, and while still sitting gloomily on the stump of the beech, Bobby felt in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch. Then suddenly he was aware that this impulse had come to him through some kind of sympathetic response to the fact that there was tobacco-smoke in the air already. A dim memory stirred in him. He got up, crossed the avenue, and dropped into a concealed hollow on the other side. Before him, comfortably sprawled on springy turf, were two of Dr Gulliver’s charges. It was clear that they had withdrawn from the afternoon’s athletic occasions for the purposes of an unholy joy. It was a delicious aroma of Turkish tobacco that was in the air. Master Beadon was one of the two sybaritic infants producing it.

‘Hullo!’ Bobby said. ‘Do you mind if I smoke a very plain sort of pipe?’

‘We shall be delighted, of course.’ Beadon, although a displeasing vision of chastisement at the hand of an outraged Doctor must have been hovering before him, answered with a
sang-froid
of which Angela Lady Beadon-Beadon would undoubtedly have approved in her favourite nephew.

Bobby sat down, lit the pipe, and surveyed the two boys as candidly as they were surveying him. In terms of what he recalled of school-stories, they ought both to show complexions beginning to turn a nasty green. Nothing of the kind, however, was observable, and what he had come upon was one of those states of blissful and contented ease which talented twelve-year-olds do acquire skill in carving out of their scurrying, clamorous and harried lives.
Alas! unconscious of their fate, the little victims play.
Momentarily, a sharp nostalgia again smote Bobby Appleby.

‘This,’ Beadon said on a detectable note of social reproach, ‘is Walcot Major.’

‘How do you do?’ The second small boy made this inquiry with reserve – rather, perhaps, as his mother might make it of a new neighbour or doubtful provenance encountered after Matins outside her parish church.

‘How do you do?’ Bobby said gravely to Walcot Major. ‘My name is Bobby Appleby. I was at Overcombe.’

‘We know.’ Beadon appeared now to be aiming at a more relaxed atmosphere. ‘Some muddied oaf recognized you at lunch. He says you played scrum-half for England a long time ago. Is that so?’

‘Well, yes.’ Bobby was rather startled by this vision of the years rolling over him.

‘I
suppose
that explains your coming back.’ Beadon looked doubtful, even suspicious. ‘I’ve noticed it’s done mostly by people who make games their principal thing. Walcot has an older brother like that. An earlier Walcot Major.’

‘He’s putting on weight,’ Walcot said with obscure satisfaction. ‘Like our poor old thickie, F L. It’s what happens to muscle, if you go in for it.’

‘So I’ve been told,’ Bobby said humbly.

‘But you look to be keeping your form fairly well,’ Beadon said agreeably. ‘Do you still go for runs and things?’

‘Sometimes,’ Bobby perceived that he was in the presence of the intransigent intellectuals of Overcombe. He recalled with wonder Master Beadon putting on that coolie-turn for Onslow’s benefit. It seemed almost a
trahison des clercs
. ‘And,’ Bobby added, ‘I play golf.’

‘You’ll be able to go on doing that for a number of years. I should think.’ Walcot’s tone seemed to aim at judicious felicitation. ‘If all goes well,’ he added. ‘Do you drink much?’

‘No. And I don’t smoke cigarettes. Just this pipe two or three times a day.’

This produced a brief silence. Beadon had rolled over on his stomach, his chin cupped comfortably in his hands, and his heels kicking in air. He was almost unnervingly like an illustration from some outmoded juvenile fiction –
The Fifth Form at St Dominic’s
, or perhaps
Teddy Lester’s Schooldays
. He appeared to have taken up this position for the purpose of subjecting Bobby to closer appraisal.

‘You don’t seem to me to be quite the type,’ Beadon said firmly.

‘The type?’ Bobby was startled.

‘I’m interested in types. You see, I draw them.’

‘Yes, I know. Portland Bill, and the Severn Bore. I was admiring them.’

‘Oh, that’s all rot.’ The self-possessed Beadon was suddenly overwhelmed with confusion by this compliment. ‘A man can’t really do anything with bits of chalk. I want to go and be in a studio in Paris, as a matter of fact. With somebody like Daumier. Do you know Daumier? I don’t mean I don’t realize he’s dead. With just that sort of artist. But my parents say I’m still rather too young.’

‘I suppose it’s a matter of the age in which we live,’ Bobby offered gravely. ‘At the Renaissance, people like Michelangelo were already going great guns at round about your age. Nowadays it’s not thought healthy to be precocious like that.’

‘There you are!’ Beadon was triumphant. ‘You may be a Rugger tough, but you do understand about these things. I knew you were one of us.’