An Awkward Lie by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

Overcombe as an undergraduate lark. ‘I’ll be tremendously interested to meet Mr Onslow again,’ he said. ‘And any other of the masters in my time who are still here.’
    This cautious approach to the topic of Mr Nauze yielded no immediate results. Dr Gulliver had jumped to his feet with what Bobby now vividly remembered as his chronic senseless agitation. It was this – or rather it was the schizoid pairing of this with his answering air of a scholar’s deeply meditative habit – that gave Dr Gulliver his peculiarly bizarre note. Indeed (Bobby now saw), it was doubtless from this nervous peculiarity of the Doctor that Overcombe as a school derived its special quality of craziness. The thing didn’t, so far as his recollection went, at all disturb the pupils. Almost all small boys are mad; the really terrifying aspect of graduating to a public school at twelve or thirteen was the abrupt demand the transition made for an assumption of the appearances of sanity. It was at about thirteen (Mr Robert Appleby, brilliantly paradoxical novelist, reflected) that the individual is condemned to enter what the poet Yeats calls the stupidity of one’s middle years.
    ‘You must see the extensions and improvements,’ Dr Gulliver was saying. ‘We owe them to the piety – I use the word in its classical sense of pietas , Appleby – of our old boys. Of many of our old boys.’ Dr Gulliver favoured Bobby with a penetrating glare. ‘But there has been a marked short-fall, I am sorry to say, upon the total sum required. It looks as if the swimming-pool, for example, is to land us in a state of liquidation.’ Dr Gulliver paused – perhaps as a profound philologist aware that he had struck out a notably complex image. ‘Not all of my former charges, I am sorry to say, have come forward to suckle their alma mater .’ Dr Gulliver made a longer pause. Perhaps he was sorting this one out in his head. Not that he hadn’t aimed a shaft at Bobby accurately enough.
    ‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear about a subscription,’ Bobby said unblushingly. ‘I’ve been in Samarkand.’
    ‘Indeed? Well, boys will be boys – and run into trouble from time to time. Be assured, Appleby, that your old school thinks none the worse of you.’ Dr Gulliver, who had been making for the door of his study, had stopped in his tracks. Bobby wondered whether he could conceivably be suffering from some rare disorder of the auditory system which tended to bring out ‘Samarkand’ as ‘Sing Sing’ or ‘Wormwood Scrubs’ or ‘Pentonville’. But now Dr Gulliver was speaking again. ‘I have no doubt,’ he was asking, ‘that you carry your chequebook with you?’
    Bobby – who was very much in earnest about his visit to Overcombe – acknowledged the inescapable, and paid up.
    They wandered about the large disfurnished mansion. Dr Gulliver’s extensions and improvements, if they really existed, seemed not of an obtrusive order. The form-rooms were quite unchanged – except that their bare wooden floors had been scrubbed into yet deeper grooves under the exertions of the luckless old women from the village who came in to do that sort of thing. There were the same photographs of classical statuary on the walls – revoltingly naked and resoundingly anaphrodisiac, as if purveyed by some firm of scholastic suppliers expert in sustaining the moral probity of the young. The ancient desks, plainly designed to be bolted to the floor in orderly rows, stood around in a random way like guests at a disordered party. Pen-knives had not ceased to be at work on them; Bobby particularly admired one inscription so precisely cut as clearly to represent the full-time labour of a term; it said YOGI BEAR WAS HERE. Another, more rapidly executed, said BALLS TO FATGUTS GULLIVER. Yet another appeared to be the despairing prayer of a learned child, since it read ORARE POTTER MINOR. Just as long ago, not much appeared to be done in the way of tidying up. Football-boots