An Awkward Lie (8 page)

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:

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

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

‘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 recall 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 an 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.

‘There he is.’

Hartsilver, instead of waiting for Bobby to identify Nauze for himself, had placed a finger on one of the photographs.

‘I’d have known him at once.’ Bobby was able to speak with conviction, for it had instantly become incredible that Bloody Nauze’s features could ever have become dim to him. ‘He doesn’t look much at home, does he? But this is the first one in which he appears. And it’s only two years before I do.’

‘And three years later he has departed.’ Hartsilver was thumbing forward through the photographs. ‘How often, I wonder, has he come into my head since then? Not often. Now you say he may be dead, and I reply that the news distresses me. A mere convention of speech, I fear. But does it strike you that some of these boys may be dead too? Indeed, it’s a certainty. Disease has faltered in its attack upon the young, no doubt. But the motor-car and the motor-cycle have taken over.’

‘I suppose so.’ Bobby didn’t think much of this gratuitous mortuary reflection. ‘But I’m more concerned about the girl. I told you there was a girl.
She
may be dead. If she is, I shan’t readily forgive myself.’ Bobby paused, and noticed that Hartsilver had come to the end of fingering over the photographs. ‘Is that last year’s?’

‘Yes. These are the people you met at lunch.’

‘Not all of them. There’s a bald-headed man with a squint in this photograph. I didn’t see him.’

‘Ah, poor Rushout. He suffered from chronomania, and left hurriedly.’

‘Chronomania?’

‘A charitable term invented by myself, Bobby. Rushout took to going round the dormitories in the small hours and possessing himself of the boy’s watches. And he didn’t return them. Dr Gulliver, who is of course a man of the very highest moral probity, decided that it really wouldn’t quite do.’

‘I see. And there are three young women in the photograph, but there were only two at lunch. I suppose–’ Bobby broke off abruptly, and suddenly pointed with a trembling finger.
‘That one – who is she?’