An Awkward Lie (9 page)

‘Ah, that one. Her name–’ Hartsilver too broke off, but only because there had been a knock at the door of his hut. ‘Come in.’

Then it happened. The door opened, and a young woman was revealed in a strong shaft of sunlight. She was the third young woman in the photograph. And she was the girl as well.

‘You!’ Bobby exclaimed.

It was the only conceivable thing to say – or ejaculation to utter. The girl’s appearance, after all, was very much a
coup de théâtre
. For one thing, the sunlight was behaving precisely as it had done before, and what Bobby saw – what, alarmingly, he recognized – was the girl as if she had stood virtually naked before him. Once more, it was a figure before a voice. The effect lasted, indeed, only for a moment – for the girl, as if aware of it, stepped rapidly into the hut and closed the door. In this moment she said nothing. She glanced at Bobby fleetingly and with gravity. Then she turned to Hartsilver, with a hint of politely dissimulated surprise on her face.

‘Are you busy?’ she asked.

‘By no means, my dear.’ Hartsilver seemed delighted at the girl’s arrival. ‘I am merely receiving a visit from an old pupil. You would have met him at lunch if you hadn’t been away. This is Mr Appleby. Bobby, let me introduce you to Miss Danbury, one of our house-mothers.’

‘How do you do?’ the girl said. She spoke a shade coolly, as if not entirely disposed to pass over the fact that the young man thus presented to her had behaved bizarrely.

Bobby was dumbfounded – so much so that for a second his surface awareness was confined to the irrelevant reflection that calling young women house-mothers must be one of Overcombe’s notably few concessions to the march of time. Then it struck him that the sunlight had put on another disconcerting turn. That was it. The girl had come indoors from a blaze of it, and he himself must be in some sort of half-shadow which had prevented recognition. He took a couple of steps forward – so precipitately that they brought him awkwardly close to the girl’s person. So he hastily shoved out a hand, which of course was more awkward still. The girl’s expression didn’t change. Bobby heard himself say ‘How do you do?’ in an idiotic manner. There was a moment’s silence.

‘I suppose I only came in to gossip,’ Miss Danbury said to Hartsilver. Her tone was wholly easy and unaffected. ‘But there is something I want to ask you. I’ve found a small boy crying bitterly because he can’t draw his dog. He has a dog at home, and he’s been trying to draw it – and colour it too – so as to gain a little moral support from it. But he can’t make the thing look like his dog. Do you think you could help him to produce something that
will
be his dog? He does need comforting, poor little chap. It’s his first term.’ The girl turned to Bobby. ‘Mr Appleby, did you pine for a pet when you were a new boy here?’

This competent manner of receiving Bobby into grace through a little polite conversation didn’t please Bobby at all.

He even found himself resenting the mere suggestion that he could ever have pined for a pet. So he glowered at the girl in a manner that would have been wholly embarrassing if Hartsilver hadn’t been saying that he could certainly draw any individual dog to order, even if he had never seen the brute; and that the distressed infant might present himself for this purpose immediately after prep.

These benevolent remarks at least gave Bobby time to think. Perhaps (he was sometimes to reflect a little later) they even gave him time to imagine things. Hadn’t Miss Danbury’s cool look also been a
warning look
? Wasn’t she – doubtless for some good reason – anxious that her first strange encounter with Bobby should be kept secret at present? Here was the truth – or a fragment of it – at last. Not a flicker of recognition was to pass between them until they could be sure of privacy. Having realized this, Bobby tried to catch Miss Danbury’s eye. Having caught it, he gave Miss Danbury a meaning look. Receiving no response to this, he gave her – certainly rashly – a swift wink. Miss Danbury failed to wink in reply. Instead, she turned away from Bobby through an angle of some thirty degrees. Bobby realized – with the effect of a poet rediscovering life in a dead metaphor – that this was what is called being given the cold shoulder. Miss Danbury conversed with Mr Hartsilver on current Overcombe affairs. As Miss Danbury was certainly not an ill-bred girl, the implication of this was clear. Bobby shook hands with Hartsilver, gave Miss Danbury a kind of Jane Austen bow, and retreated from the Art Block with dignity.

He wasn’t, of course, going to be defeated. Indeed, there was no question of anything of the sort. It was merely (he told himself, his confidence returning) that this girl was giving him points in the discreet handling of the difficult and almost certainly dangerous situation in which they both found themselves. What he had to do now (if he wasn’t further to make a fool of himself) was
to read her mind
. What did she expect him to do? The answer wasn’t hard to arrive at.
Lurk
. He must lurk until she could get colourably clear of poor old Hartsilver.

Then they could confer, and each discover where the other stood.

For a moment Bobby paused irresolutely just outside the miserable hut which represented Overcombe’s concession to the aesthetic side of (juvenile) human nature. He had better not move out of sight of its door. He must conceal himself in a spot from which, upon the girl’s emergence, he could attract her attention unobtrusively. Perhaps with a low whistle.

Bobby looked about him. The Art Block stood on somewhat lower ground than the main school buildings, and at some remove from them. Quite close to it, and a little lower still, were the surface evidences of the out-size septic tank which represented Overcombe’s advance towards the concepts of modern sanitation. (The school lay a couple of miles from a by-road, let alone from any main drainage.) The delicacy of Dr Gulliver – as of Mr Onslow, no doubt – had caused this humble
necessarium
to be surrounded with a sizable if somewhat suburban-looking privet hedge. The privet hedge, Bobby reflected inconsequently, afforded a good deal more privacy than was enjoyed by the privies which here achieved their easement into external Nature. The horrible things – he suddenly vividly remembered – didn’t even have doors. In upperclass English schools, indecency is regarded as the sole effective preventive of immorality… Upon this sombre thought, Bobby dived behind the hedge.

He didn’t have to wait long – perhaps not long enough to do such thinking as he might have done. The door of the hut opened, and the girl appeared. The sun, of course, was now in her face, and for a moment Bobby (who was peering very cautiously through his hedge) saw her pucker her eyes. It wasn’t an action that should have conduced to any overwhelming impression of beauty. But it struck Bobby that way. Miss Danbury was a deliriously good-looking girl. And, of course, she had that figure too. Bobby knew he wasn’t easily going to forget it.

He wondered whether she was looking around for him. It would be the rational thing to do. But in fact Miss Danbury was now stepping out quite briskly, which was disconcerting.

Then he saw that she had taken a path which came straight towards his hiding-place. She must have guessed instantly where he had taken cover. A clever girl. He and she – Bobby told himself – might make quite a formidable team.

But Miss Danbury didn’t pause as she drew abreast of him. She walked on regardless, and in a moment would have left the septic tank behind her. So there was nothing for it but to bob up. Bobby bobbed up.

‘Hullo!’ he said. ‘It’s me. Come in here.’

At least this halted Miss Danbury in her tracks. Bobby had a notion that she looked alarmed. Perhaps she was judging him to be acting rashly once more.

‘It’s all right,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Nobody will see us.’

‘Mr Appleby, you must be quite mad.’ The girl at least wasn’t so alarmed as to take to her heels. ‘For all I know, you may be accustomed to conduct your low amours in a ditch. But a cesspool really surprises me. Good afternoon.’

‘Stop!’ Bobby must have put into this cry passion of a sort other than that which the young woman had apprehended in him. For she did stop – at a safe distance, indeed – and look at him. She looked at him rather carefully.

‘Well?’ Miss Danbury said.

It didn’t seem to Bobby that
she
could be mad, despite her extraordinary conduct. But perhaps she had lost her memory. Indeed, it was very probable that something of that kind had occurred. The affair at the bunker must have been a terrific shock for a sheltered girl like this – apprehensive of improper suggestions when one spoke to her rationally across a hedge. The whole horrible episode must have suppressed itself in her mind. So naturally she was bewildered. The essential thing was to find some gentle means of assisting her to recover from this amnesia.

‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ Bobby said. ‘I’m afraid you must find me very strange. But have you no memory of our having met before?’

‘None whatever. And, if I had, it could hardly be of a kind to licence you in this…this outbreak of lavatory humour.’

‘I suppose it is rather an unsuitable place for a conversation with a comparative stranger. Shall we go somewhere else?’

‘Rubbish!’ With marked feminine inconsequence, Miss Danbury suddenly pushed through the hedge, and confronted Bobby on the broad concrete expanse of the septic tank. It was an elaborate affair of its kind. Here and there a species of fat concrete pipe broke surface, doubled on itself at a height of about two feet, and disappeared again into the Tartarean world below. The effect was of a school of petrified dolphins disporting themselves on a petrified sea. On one of these Miss Danbury sat down. ‘Just where,’ she asked, ‘did we meet before?’

‘It was in a bunker.’

‘In a bunker!’

‘Well, beside a bunker. What
was
in the bunker – I don’t want this to be too much of a shock to you – was a dead body.’

‘Dear me! Just whose dead body, Mr Appleby?’ The girl was now looking at Bobby very steadily indeed – rather as one is told to look at a lion or tiger if it shows signs of giving trouble.

‘That’s just what I don’t know. Or not for certain. You see, the body disappeared again.’

‘Of course,’ Miss Danbury appeared to give this whole difficult business some moments thought. ‘Mr Appleby, is your home far from here?’

‘It’s at a place called Long Dream, near Linger. Perhaps you remember Linger?’ Bobby produced this almost coaxingly. ‘About a hundred miles away.’

‘I see.’ Miss Danbury paused, and then added casually, ‘Can you give me your telephone number?’

‘What on earth–’

‘I’d like you to allow me to ring up whoever is at Dream – your wife, or parents, or whoever it may be. Because, you see, I don’t think you’re very well. Please don’t think me impertinent. And I don’t expect it’s very serious. But I do feel you should be in competent hands. Have you a reliable family doctor at Dream?’

This professional house-motherly solicitude did at least a little clear Bobby’s head. If the girl was wrong in supposing him astray in his wits it was only reasonable to admit that he might be equally wrong in supposing some aberration of the memory or the like to have befallen hers. So what other hypothesis could make sense of this extraordinary situation?

‘Listen,’ Bobby said urgently. ‘Tell me this. Have you got a double?’

‘A double? How on earth should I know? There must be plenty of people totally unkown to us, I imagine, to whom we bear a more or less close resemblance. Your question simply isn’t a sensible one, Mr Appleby.’

‘That’s perfectly true. So let me ask another. Have you a twin sister?’

‘Certainly not!’ The girl shot out this reply with an asperity which seemed to surprise her.

‘I know I must seem to be behaving very impertinently, Miss Danbury. By the way, my name is Bobby.’ Bobby paused hopefully on this, but it was rather markedly that nothing came of it. ‘But surely you can see that I’m not really mad. Isn’t that so?’

‘I don’t know what is so.’ For the first time, the girl seemed not quite to know her own mind. ‘Perhaps you are simply under some misapprehension that can be cleared up. When you think you saw me before, was it for long that you saw me?’

‘Far from it. I simply–’

‘And it was when something upsetting had happened – or at least something distracting? Don’t you think that, as a consequence, you have probably made a mistake? We know that very odd things can happen over questions of identity, when there has been a question of a crime or something of the sort. People go to police stations and pick out–’

‘I want to know your name.’

‘I don’t see the slightest occasion–’

‘I want to know your name, please.’

‘It’s Susan.’

‘Susan, listen. Why can’t you trust me? Why can’t you trust me, instead of talking nonsense and involving yourself in awkward lies? I’m sorry, but I’ve suddenly got this quite clear. The mere fact of the matter, I mean. On Tuesday morning, you and I were standing beside each other on the golf-course at Linger. And there was a dead man – a murdered man, almost certainly – within three yards of us. You know that’s true. Admit it, and we may get somewhere. Go on denying it, and you may put yourself in a very difficult position.’

‘You talk like a policeman, Mr Appleby. I’ve no doubt you were on a golf-course. And I’ve no doubt some woman was too. If you say there was a dead man, I accept it. Dead men exist, and perhaps they even turn up in bunkers from time to time. Only the woman wasn’t me.’

‘Listen again, please. I haven’t come to Overcombe by chance. There was something about the dead man – and you know what it was, I think – that suggested somebody who had been here when I was a boy. So I came over to see if I could pick up some sort of trail. And what I have found is you – Susan Danbury, who vanished, just as the body did, from the golf-course at Linger. What have you to say to that?’

‘I’m not required to say anything…Bobby Appleby.’ The girl had sprung to her feet with flashing eyes – but at the same time with so extreme a pallor flooding – if pallor can flood – her face that Bobby wondered whether she was going to faint.