An Awkward Lie (6 page)

‘In that case, Sergeant, may I ask just what is your present reading of the affair?’

‘Well, Sir John, since you ask. I’ll offer a guess. We’re far from being up against a one-man show. There’s quite a little crowd of villains somewhere. And they’re not trusting one another very far.’

Overcombe didn’t seem to have changed much. Nor did Dr Gulliver. A dozen years ago the black stuff gown perpetually worn by Dr Gulliver was green with age, and it was green with age still. Only, Bobby was now able to identify it as an Oxford MA gown. He wondered – as he had certainly never done as a small boy – whether Dr Gulliver was really a Doctor of anything, or whether, as a headmaster, he was ‘Doctor’ merely in a courtesy or Dickensian sense. It had always been understood, of course, that Dr Gulliver was immensely learned. It was on this that he had, so to speak, run; and it had never occurred to anybody to reflect that unfathomable erudition is neither necessary nor customary in the proprietor – or co-proprietor – of a private school.

It had sometimes come to Bobby to wonder why on earth he had been sent to Overcombe; or how, once there, he had ever managed to progress, through a respectable showing in Common Entrance, to a decent public school. Perhaps the flair of Bloody Nauze for driving home the Latin language with a gym-shoe was the answer. Not that there had been anything much wrong with Overcombe, apart from the mere fact that a species of total chaos reigned there from the beginning of term to the end. It had probably been different in the days of his mother’s great-uncles. They had been to Overcombe, and had all become luminaries of the Victorian Age.
That
, no doubt, was why Bobby had arrived there what he thought of as about a century later. That was how parents chose schools for children. They didn’t specifically hunt around for an establishment where there were people like Dr Gulliver and Mr Onslow and Mr Nauze; they just recalled how happy some aged relation of their own had been rumoured to be at Overcombe or whatever.

‘Appleby?’ said Dr Gulliver. ‘
Appleby
?’ Dr Gulliver twitched his gown – and with his old nervous haste, so that it was incomprehensible that the decayed garment didn’t at once disintegrate under his finger and thumb. ‘But – to be sure – Appleby! You made some slight progress in the end towards a grasp of the Punic Wars. I trust, Appleby, that you still keep to your book.’

The Punic Wars.
The Pubic Wars
. Bobby had been among the small number of precocious infants at Overcombe who could make jokes like that. The ability was gained through the pertinacious frequentation of a dictionary.
Womb, Concubine, Harlot, Semen
. Briefly, Bobby marvelled over his own dead life.

‘Are you still in partnership with Mr Onslow, sir?’ Bobby asked respectfully.

‘Ah – F L! Onslow is always called F L by the young rascals. Do you know what the initials F L stand for?’

‘I’ve no idea, I’m afraid.’

‘The jest must have been invented since your time.
Festina lente
, Appleby. It is the motto of Mr Onslow’s – um – somewhat remote kinsmen. Construe, my dear lad.’

‘Would it be something like “More haste, less speed”, sir?’

‘A most licentious translation.’ Dr Gulliver had frowned majestically. ‘We will say, if you please, “Hasten slowly”.’

‘I see, sir. It’s a terribly good joke. Mr Onslow being F L, I mean.’

‘Onslow is still with us, I am happy to say. The – um – athletic side continues in his charge, and we must not minimize its importance.
Mens sana
, Apppleby,
in corpore sano.
’

‘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.