An Awkward Lie (2 page)

He straightened up, and backed out of the bunker just as he had come. He did this so precisely that the effect was odd; it was as if a heavy man had walked up to the body, knelt by it, and then been snatched into the air by a balloon, a helicopter, a demon, or a guardian angel. This fancy made Bobby pause when he had reached the grass – this in order to take a synoptic view of such other evidence of this kind as the surface of the bunker afforded. But – inevitably, perhaps – his glance was first drawn back once more to the body.

Once you had recovered from the mere gruesomeness of the spectacle – it occurred to him – your main impression was of its dramatic quality. Here, surely, was somebody who had been ruthlessly shot down as he fled. The man’s legs were splayed out in a manner suggesting just that. His left arm lay beneath his head, as if he had flung it up to protect his face as he fell. His right arm was stretched stiffly out from his side. It was as if he really were trying to reach for Bobby’s ball. Or perhaps it was not quite like that – for the hand was bent back at the wrist, and the thumb and fingers were spread out wide, and slightly crooked, like the hand of a man who makes a last desperate clutch at empty air. Bobby looked at this hand. And suddenly, without his at first at all knowing why, a queer cold tremor ran down his spine. And it was doing this – the persuasion was at once utterly illogical and wholly overwhelming – not now but a long time ago.

The feeling was one which Robert Appleby had never experienced before. A fraction of a second passed, and it had modulated into one which was almost comfortably familiar although inexpugnably strange. It was feeling known as
déjà vu
. Just this had happened long ago. Looking at that hand. And the shiver. Or the
frisson
. (Mr Robert Appleby, anti-novelist and admirer of Monsieur Robbe-Grillet, very oddly – even to his own sense – took time off to reflect upon the superiority of the French tongue.) Bobby also noticed that he was
frightened
. It was that sort of shiver (or
frisson
). He had glimpsed something which had once frightened him very much.

But now something had happened to the body. The morning sunlight (although he hadn’t consciously noted this) had been at play upon it. This remained true only of the three extended limbs. The rest of the dead man’s body was in shadow. And the shadow was the shadow of a human being. Bobby turned round, and saw the girl.

‘Has your friend had an accident?’ The girl asked this in a calm sort of way. But not in a cold way. She was humanly concerned. Because she was between Bobby and the sun still low on the horizon, he was less aware of her features than of her figure. Her face was in shadow. Her body, through what seemed a flimsy dress, was very much in silhouette. Bobby was momentarily disturbed by this. Being (as has been remarked) somewhat old-fashioned in some of his instincts, he believed in faces first and figures later: this rather than the other way about. He had a sudden strong wish – surprising in the present harassing situation – simply to see this girl; to observe her features, her expression, clearly, and thus know what she looked like. What are vulgarly called a woman’s vital statistics may be arresting, but they can’t honestly be termed informative. A voice, on the other hand, can. Bobby was a good deal struck by the girl’s voice.

‘He isn’t a friend,’ Bobby said. ‘And I don’t think he’s had an accident. Or not what you could call an accident. I think he’s killed himself – or that somebody has killed him.’

‘You mean you’ve never seen him before? You’ve just stumbled upon him?’

‘I haven’t done any stumbling.’ Bobby didn’t quite know why he produced this absurdly literal reply. ‘But that’s my ball in the bunker. I simply walked up, and there he was.’

‘A stranger?’ It was rather sharply that the girl seemed to put this question.

‘I didn’t say that. I said not a friend.’ Bobby felt that he was talking rather stupidly. Perhaps he was suffering from what they called shock. ‘I’ve a queer notion that I knew him long ago.’

‘He’s not going to be much helped by that.’ As well as being calm, the girl’s voice was now critical. ‘Hadn’t we better get some help?’

‘Well, yes. But not help for
him
. He’s quite dead. I thought I’d told you that.’ Bobby took a few steps away from the bunker. There was no reason why he shouldn’t get a clearer view of this girl who had sprung from nowhere. ‘Do you live round about here?’

‘Not very much.’ The girl didn’t make this sound a very evasive reply. ‘Do you?’

‘More or less. My parents live at a place called Long Dream. It’s on the other side of Linger.’ Bobby, turning to face the girl, now had the sun behind him. He had a momentary sense – wholly indecorous in the circumstances – that here at last was
his
girl. He told himself hastily that the same persuasion had on quite a number of occasions visited him before and that nothing whatever had come of it. ‘I wonder,’ he said briskly, ‘if you would mind going and making a telephone call?’

‘For a doctor, you mean? Or for the police?’

‘Both, I suppose.’

‘I think that you had better do that.’ The girl had turned on the corpse a glance that was level and unalarmed. ‘You know who’s who, I suppose. I’ll stay here.’

‘I’d hardly like to think–’

‘Don’t be stupid, please. I’m not in a hurry. And a dead man – you say he
is
dead – isn’t going to hurt me. Is there a telephone in that club-house?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Then go and get on with it.’ The girl had produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘You won’t mind if I smoke?’

‘Why on earth should I? Because it’s unwomanly?’ Rather belatedly, Bobby tumbled to the girl’s meaning. ‘A dead man’s in no position to mind. So it’s up to you.’

‘Then here goes.’ The girl struck a match. ‘But you will come back when you’ve telephoned? I don’t think I want to be found alone here by a posse of policemen.’

‘Of course I’ll come back. I don’t expect I’ll be ten minutes.’

‘Then go about it now.’ The girl seemed to inhale her cigarette deeply. ‘But what you said about knowing him long ago. Have you – well, turned over the body and looked at him?’

‘No, I haven’t. One oughtn’t to do that, when a man has died in this way. But there’s something that one can see now – just as he lies there.’ Bobby hesitated. He hadn’t meant by this to suggest that the girl should scrutinize the corpse. A single glimpse must surely have been shocking enough. He saw now, however, that she was continuing to gaze at it dispassionately. It was possible that she had turned pale under the impact of this horrible experience, but her complexion was very fair, and he couldn’t be sure. He could be sure that she wasn’t insensitive. Her composure was the result of effort. So, for that matter, was his.

‘Something one can see?’ The girl had taken up Bobby’s remark incisively. ‘That tells you you’ve seen him long ago?’

‘It’s his right index finger.’

‘You are very observant. I hadn’t noticed.’ Now the girl was looking away – out over the golf-course. It was as if this last small thing was more physically discomposing than everything else. Bobby had felt the same. But then Bobby had a particular reason for it. ‘Perhaps,’ the girl added, ‘I thought it was just curled up. If I thought anything at all.’

‘It may be coincidence. I think perhaps I
will
have a look. I can just turn the head a very little.’

‘Why not?’ The girl seemed almost amused. ‘One mustn’t be squeamish. Go ahead.’ She had moved to the farther lip of the bunker, and so was on a higher level than Bobby. ‘I can see somebody,’ she said. ‘No, it’s a couple of people. On the verge of the road. Shall I go and disturb their picnic?’

‘People don’t picnic at this hour of the morning.’ Bobby – rather carefully watching where he put his feet again – walked round the bunker to join her. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Perhaps it’s not the technical word. They have a caravan – a trailer. It’s their breakfast.’

‘And they run to a pretty powerful car.’ The appearance which the girl had spotted was really too far off to be made much of, and it was only from this slightly more elevated perch that it was visible at all. ‘They look as if they were packing up,’ Bobby said. ‘And I’m fairly sure we oughtn’t to let them go. Or not without getting the number of their car. It’s just possible they may have seen something that’s important in this business. I’ll sprint over to them.’

‘I’ll do that. I don’t run too badly. And if they do get on their way, they’re more likely to stop at a wave from a girl than a man. And you get off to the telephone. The…the corpse can look after itself for the inside of ten minutes.’

‘Right!’ It seemed to Bobby there was sense in this. ‘If they’re not cooperative, scare them with the police.’

Hardly waiting for this last injunction, the girl turned and ran. It was true that this was something she knew how to do. For a brief moment Bobby watched her. Then he himself swung round and made for the club-house.

He remembered as he ran that he hadn’t, after all, managed to glimpse the features of the dead man. So he didn’t yet know – although he must soon – whether it could really, by some amazing chance, be Bloody Nauze who was lying in the bunker. Nauze (whose name rhymed with ‘rose’) had always been called that – partly because of the joke and partly because he was bloody. Although he couldn’t, that was to say, have been called with the slightest fairness a pathological sadist (supposing small boys to have been able to command such an expression), he had certainly been much too free with a gym-shoe to be an agreeable feature of a private school. Bobby had heard of this propensity of Bloody Nauze during his first night in dorm. He hadn’t, he seemed to recall, been a particularly timid infant. On the other hand, since he had never once been hit up to that point in his young life, he had no means of estimating how much a gym-shoe would hurt. He had therefore been alarmed, on the following morning, to learn that Mr Nauze was going to be responsible for guiding his first steps in the Latin tongue. Looking back later, Bobby had never had any inclination to suppose that it had been other than a mild and compassable alarm. But perhaps, in an instantly suppressed sort of way, it had really been a wild terror. For that was what he felt when Bloody Nauze suddenly shouted and pointed at him. The man had merely shouted ‘Next boy!’ when in quest of something like the genitive plural of
mensa
. And he had pointed at Bobby similarly without any sinister intent. Bobby was the next boy, and he had simply wanted to make that fact rapidly clear. But – had it been for seconds, or had it been for a whole day? – Bobby had been really bothered. He had been really bothered (he had imagined) at being pointed at with an index finger which wasn’t there.

It wasn’t the action – Bobby, a child of precociously reflective habit, had soon concluded – of what you could call a well-regulated mind. The chap did, after all, have a left hand, and why couldn’t he use that? He’d used it for the gym-shoe. Not that that had turned out, after all, much to darken Bobby’s days. Bobby had ended up getting on rather well with Bloody Nauze. For one thing, the chap had taught Latin admirably.

But all that had been at least twelve years ago. Bobby almost slackened his pace to a more elderly sort of run as this shocking fact was borne in upon him. If you could look back a dozen years like that, then in no time you would be looking back twenty or forty. His parents were fond of doing just that in their table-talk, and sometimes he had to repress an irrational panic as he listened.
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws
. That sort of feeling.

There still seemed to be not a soul around the club-house, and to get to the telephone he had to let himself in with his father’s key. He himself was only some sort of guest-member, and hadn’t a key of his own. But he had no difficulty about making the call, since there was a public telephone just inside the entrance. Bobby dialled 999 – which meant, he supposed, that he didn’t even have to pay. And got through to the police station immediately. He thought he had better begin by identifying himself.

‘My name’s Appleby,’ Bobby said.

‘Yes, Sir John.’ The voice at the other end was rather notably brisk and alert.

‘No, that’s my father. Robert Appleby.’

‘Yes, Mr Appleby.’ This time, the voice suggested a relaxed attention.

‘I’m speaking from the club-house on the golf-course. I’ve found a dead man. In a bunker.’

‘Found a dead man.’ Now the voice indicated transcription in long-hand into a notebook. ‘In a bunker.’ There was a pause. ‘Are you sure he’s dead, sir?’

‘Absolutely sure.’

‘Very good, sir. We’ll be with you in no time.’

‘Thank you very much.’ Bobby felt obscurely that this colloquy had been a little lacking in drama. ‘Ought I to call a doctor?’

‘You can leave that to us, sir. And no need to worry.’ The voice had decided to suggest reassurance and even benevolence. ‘Just stay where you are, and we’ll contact you within ten minutes.’

‘I rather think I ought to be getting back to the bunker. There’s a young–’

‘We’d prefer you to wait for us, Mr Appleby.’ For the first time, the voice was authoritative. ‘Remaining by the instrument from which a call is made cuts out confusion and often saves time. Routine request, sir.’

‘Oh, very well.’ Bobby wasn’t too pleased, and he felt suddenly tempted to administer a smart shock. So he succumbed to decidedly stretching his existing sense of the situation. ‘But it looks like murder, and I’ve seen some men preparing to make off in a car. So you’d better hurry up.’

And Bobby put down the receiver. It wasn’t without a sense that his last effort had been a shade childish. There hadn’t, after all, been the slightest suggestion that the chap in the police station at Linger had proposed to waste a moment. And something of the marked courtesy which he’d noticed his father was careful to employ in any relations with the country constabulary was no doubt incumbent on other Applebys as well. Bobby didn’t mean to be a policeman. But he had a high sense of the eminence to which his father had attained in that odd walk of life.