Free An Awkward Lie by Michael Innes Page A

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