Free An Awkward Lie by Michael Innes Page B

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?’
    ‘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