An Awkward Lie (7 page)

‘Ah, Onslow,’ Dr Gulliver said. ‘You will remember – um – Appleby.’

‘No.’ It was with conviction, and after only the briefest glance at Bobby, that Mr Onslow responded with this monosyllable. ‘Beadon, you young lout, look nippy with that barrow, or I’ll have the skin off you.’

‘Vellee-vellee good, sahib.’ Beadon, a slender and fair child whom Dr Gulliver would have been able to authenticate to the gratified inquirer as one of the Wiltshire Beadons, was not perturbed. And Bobby, glancing at Onslow, recalled that this stupid, boorish and unquestionably spurious athlete had never been known to apply any instrument of correction, whether licensed or unlicensed, to the person of any of his charges. It seemed a considerable virtue to Bobby, and for a moment he found himself wishing that Onslow didn’t dislike him to the extent he patently did. For Onslow had now turned back and given Bobby a ferocious scowl. Perhaps it was merely that Bobby (Robert Appleby, scrum-half, Oxford and England) was not yet running to fat. Or perhaps Onslow actually did have memories – and displeasing memories – of Bobby as a small boy. Indeed, Bobby had to confess to himself, this was only too likely. But now Dr Gulliver was speaking again. He seemed a little put out by the
farouche
comportment of his partner.

‘Appleby,’ Dr Gulliver said, ‘has just been mentioning one of our former assistants. That agreeable young fellow Chinn.’

‘Nauze,’ Bobby said.

‘Anglo-Indian, of course, for many generations.’ Dr Gulliver was unheeding. ‘I recall that Lieutenant-Fireworker Humphrey Chinn – mark, Appleby, that the rank is full of history – assisted an ancestor of my own at the capture of Seringapatam. The date may well be memorized, Appleby. 1799.’

‘Do
you
remember Nauze?’ It was to Onslow that Bobby addressed this question. There was a possibility that, graceless though he was, Onslow might produce a little more sense than the imbecile Gulliver.

‘Nauze? You’re barking up the wrong tree. Never had a fellow of that name round here, that I can remember.’

‘He taught me Latin. Rather well, as a matter of fact.’ Bobby went on to the particulars automatically. It was surely beyond belief that Onslow could have forgotten Nauze’s very name. Onslow simply didn’t want to talk about him. And Onslow was so desperately thick that he had recourse to this absurd prevarication. For the first time since arriving at Overcombe, Bobby felt alerted to something that might really be there. Chinn, yes; Nauze, no. And if both Gulliver and Onslow chose to forget the latter, it was not at all probable that it was because he had been a trifle heavy-handed in the matter of discipline. Of course there might have been some other sort of scandal, in no way connected with, or leading to, Nauze’s ending up – if he
had
ended up – dead on a golf-course. Nauze could have turned into an awful drunk, totally unworthy to instruct the young Beadons of Wiltshire or applaud the speeches of Air-Vice-Marshall Synn-Essery – and his name be consigned to oblivion at Overcombe in consequence.

It was the present representative of the Beadons who terminated this abortive conference. He had looked at his watch (anniversary gift of a devoted aunt, Angela Lady Beadon-Beadon) and was now vigorously massaging his stomach.

‘Chop, chop,’ Master Beadon said. ‘Coolie chaps vellee vellee hungry. All coolie chaps want chop, chop. Want mungaree.’

‘Mungaree, mungaree!’ All the infants employed on the Onslow
corvée
took up this mysterious cry, pounding their bellies and contorting their features the while. Bobby had once more to remind himself that all small boys are mad. A well-trained prep-school matron must look out for symptoms of sanity in much the spirit in which she looks out for those of chicken-pox or German measles. And Dr Gulliver, who might have been expected to evince displeasure before this bizarre display, merely nodded benignly.

‘Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem
,’ Dr Gulliver said learnedly.
‘Dulce est desipere in loco.
’

‘Yes, sir.’ Bobby found himself once more spontaneously putting on his top-of-the-form turn. ‘
Neque sem per arcum
– is that right sir? –
Tendit Appollo.’

‘Excellent, Appleby.’ Dr Gulliver was highly pleased. ‘It is luncheon that our young people are thinking of. And you will join us, I trust, at our simple refection.’

From behind Bobby, disconcertingly, came a sudden half smothered snarl. It seemed as excessive reaction even on the brutish Onslow’s part to an invitation he didn’t approve of. But that was what the noise had been about, all the same.

Lunch proved to be another thing that hadn’t changed at Overcombe. It was undeniably nutritious, and would doubtless have received the commendations of a visiting dietician, supposing so unlikely a personage ever was to penetrate here. It could not, however, conscientiously have been described as palatable. As mungaree it served well enough; the young gentlemen of Overcombe, delicately bred though they had been in the nurseries of the affluent, shovelled it away with much more vigour than they had applied when excavating for the Long Jump. Dr Guiliver ate with every appearance of informed satisfaction, as if he were a gourmet on a particularly lucky day. His staff saw no reason for any such masquerade; they consumed what was set before them in a sullen gloom suggestive of the Bad Poor in a Victorian workhouse. The meal was thus not informative – or was so only in point of what Bobby could learn by gazing around him.

This was not encouraging. The entire staff of a place like Overcombe of course numbered no more than a dozen, and Bobby saw hardly anybody, apart from the joint proprietors, who was not quite young. Presumably nobody who could help himself stuck this sort of servitude indefinitely. There were two young women who clearly ran the domestic side. These were rather attractive, and might have achieved a good deal of Bobby’s attention had he not (in that department of the masculine psyche) been so tied up with the vanished girl. There were two almost middle-aged men whom he somehow guessed hadn’t been at the school for long; they looked highly intelligent, and must therefore belong to that class of persons who drift into humble employment through some sheer inability to manage their own lives. They would know nothing about Bloody Nauze. Nor would any of the others. Bobby had certainly never set eyes on any of them before, and they were far too junior to have memories stretching back a dozen years. Or all of them – Bobby suddenly saw – except old Hartsilver.

Old Hartsilver had been the art master – and so not thought of as a master at all. Except when ragging around in the art room, one hadn’t much noticed Hartsilver. (Indeed, one hadn’t very much noticed him then, either.) And it had taken Bobby all this time to notice him now. He sat at the head of a table given over to the very smallest boys. It looked as if he enjoyed at least one advantage over his colleagues, since he was clearly without any awareness whatever of what he ate. Bobby remembered him as living in a dream. Perhaps it was a dream of the pictures he was never going to paint. For when he was quite a young man something dreadful had begun to happen to Hartsilver’s central nervous system – at least Bobby thought it was that – so that his hands had ceased at all adequately to obey his will. Not without evidence of agonizing effort, he could control a gross tremor through the seconds necessary for showing a child how to correct the perspective of a cube, or hatch in a shadow, or recover a high-light with an india-rubber. That had been old Hartsilver then, and that was doubtless old Hartsilver now. Because he had been remote and withdrawn and gentle, the boys had teased him mercilessly. At the same time, Bobby now remembered, they had comported themselves with a flawless delicacy in any situation directly involving his disability. Bobby (or rather Robert, promising novelist) felt a sudden envy of those writers – Joyce Cary, Forrest Reid, Richard Hughes, William Golding – who could really ‘do’ children. There hardly existed a richer, more marvellous world.

But Hartsilver had scarcely slipped within Bobby’s observation before he slipped out again. His place was empty; his crumpled table-napkin was being folded by the small boy next to whom he had sat; he himself had departed before the meal had reached its noisy end. Probably by this time Hartsilver didn’t even handle knives and forks too well, so that eating in public was a trial to him. But it was something that an art master – the humblest of all ushers in a private school – had to make the best of, no doubt. It seemed to Bobby that it would be civilized to try and have a word with Hartsilver. And of course it looked as if Hartsilver was the one man who might tell him something about Nauze.

Dr Gulliver, it turned out, was minded to say goodbye to his visiting Old Boy at the end of the meal. This was fair enough, even taking into account the fact that he had extracted from Bobby a cheque for five pounds towards the cost of some building-operation which was probably entirely mythical. Headmasters are supposed to be very busy men, and it was proper that Gulliver should sustain that impression of himself. All the same, Bobby had a feeling that he was being invited to clear out less on Gulliver’s instance than on Onslow’s – and rather as if Onslow had decided that he was less a mere nuisance than some sort of threat. But there seemed no sense in this. Get yourself involved with bodies in bunkers, Bobby told himself, and in no time you are imagining things.

So Bobby made proper remarks to his hosts, got into his car, and drove off. But after a couple of bends on Overcombe’s long and ill-kept drive, when he felt that the sound of his engine must have faded away, he drew into the side and came to a halt again. He remembered that what had gone by the grand name of the Art Block in his day had in fact been an old Nissen hut pitched some way from the main building. It seemed improbable that Hartsilver was better or otherwise accommodated now. And nothing would be happening in it at this early hour in the afternoon – one at which the whole school prescriptively took to a disorganized life on its playing fields. But Hartsilver himself would have gone back to his hut, since the place was the only tolerable refuge he had.

This turned out to be the case. Bobby knocked at the door of the hut, and went in. Hartsilver was alone. He was contemplating a reproduction, pinned up on the wall, of a self portrait in silver-point drawn by Dürer when he was about thirteen. Dürer was thus much of an age with Hartsilver’s present charges at Overcombe. Perhaps Hartsilver was comparing the young Dürer with, say, the young Beadon – something like that. But now Hartsilver, having responded to the knock on his door, was contemplating Bobby precisely as he had been contemplating his reproduction of that marvellously precocious drawing in the Albertina. And at once Bobby remembered that this had been Hartsilver’s habit long ago. He had always contrived to see the little savages of Overcombe
not
as little savages but simply as endlessly fascinating plastic entities which, but for the calamity which had befallen him, he might equally endlessly have given his life to arresting on a canvas or a square of paper.

Bobby had forgotten what it was like to be looked at with this particular eye. It was one, he thought, which his mother, so devoted a sculptor, must deliberately refrain from directing upon him. It had a depersonalizing effect, so that he wondered how he was to suggest himself to Hartsilver as being something other than a complex visual phenomenon.

‘I’m frightfully sorry,’ Bobby said, ‘but I’m–’

‘Bobby.’ Hartsilver was smiling gently. ‘Bobby Appleby. You were absolutely no good, you know, so that it’s odd that I should remember you. You might have been a Mohammedan, for all the ability you had to draw so much as a dog or a cat. Like most of the others, really. Yet there was something a little odd about its being that way with you.’ Hartsilver paused in recollection. ‘Isn’t one of your parents–?’

‘My father’s a policeman,’ Bobby said – and paused mischievously on this false trail.

‘Then it was your mother. But you were no credit to her. Yet there was something there. My dear Bobby – if I may still so address you – can it be that you have become a musician?’

‘I’ve become a writer – of a sort.’

‘That would be it!’ Hartsilver was delighted. ‘And is that why you have returned to Overcombe? But no! Your first – or even perhaps your second, would it be? – novel is behind you. So you haven’t come back to this desperate place for copy.’

‘Well, no – as a matter of fact I haven’t.’

‘I’m delighted to hear it. I give you notice that I wish positively not to be put in a novel.’

‘You won’t be by me.’ Bobby felt in danger of being possessed by an irrelevant excitement. It was the excitement of finding that he and old Hartsilver had been the same sort of person all the time. And perhaps (despite the gratifying acclaim bestowed by Sunday newspapers upon Robert Appleby, promising author of
The Lumber Room
) – perhaps he was himself going to be as thoroughly unsuccessful as this old creature, lingering out his broken career in a crazy school. But it wouldn’t matter. It was the fact that one was an artist that was the important thing. From these reflections – somewhat sentimental in character, and undeniably irrelevant to the design with which he had returned to Overcombe – Bobby managed to shake himself free.

‘I want to ask you something,’ he said firmly.

‘Really?’ It was with an air of surprise that Hartsilver said this. ‘I’m very seldom asked anything – except perhaps to give an extra hour to the most unteachable of the children, in order to iron out some difficulty in the timetable. Not that talent doesn’t lurk among the unteachable from time to time. Even through Free Expression occasionally.’

Bobby remembered the Free Expression, and saw that it was still going on. The blackboards had become whiteboards, and the aerial dog-fights once crudely chalked on them had given way to spacecraft and extra-galactic monsters.

‘A boy called Beadon, for example,’ Hartsilver was saying. ‘He has a flair for caricature, and I fear his use of it at times inclines to impertinence. But I haven’t the heart to check him. On the board over there.’