An Awkward Lie by Michael Innes

happened. The door opened, and a young woman was revealed in a strong shaft of sunlight. She was the third young woman in the photograph. And she was the girl as well.
     

4
     
    ‘You!’ Bobby exclaimed.
    It was the only conceivable thing to say – or ejaculation to utter. The girl’s appearance, after all, was very much a coup de théâtre . For one thing, the sunlight was behaving precisely as it had done before, and what Bobby saw – what, alarmingly, he recognized – was the girl as if she had stood virtually naked before him. Once more, it was a figure before a voice. The effect lasted, indeed, only for a moment – for the girl, as if aware of it, stepped rapidly into the hut and closed the door. In this moment she said nothing. She glanced at Bobby fleetingly and with gravity. Then she turned to Hartsilver, with a hint of politely dissimulated surprise on her face.
    ‘Are you busy?’ she asked.
    ‘By no means, my dear.’ Hartsilver seemed delighted at the girl’s arrival. ‘I am merely receiving a visit from an old pupil. You would have met him at lunch if you hadn’t been away. This is Mr Appleby. Bobby, let me introduce you to Miss Danbury, one of our house-mothers.’
    ‘How do you do?’ the girl said. She spoke a shade coolly, as if not entirely disposed to pass over the fact that the young man thus presented to her had behaved bizarrely.
    Bobby was dumbfounded – so much so that for a second his surface awareness was confined to the irrelevant reflection that calling young women house-mothers must be one of Overcombe’s notably few concessions to the march of time. Then it struck him that the sunlight had put on another disconcerting turn. That was it. The girl had come indoors from a blaze of it, and he himself must be in some sort of half-shadow which had prevented recognition. He took a couple of steps forward – so precipitately that they brought him awkwardly close to the girl’s person. So he hastily shoved out a hand, which of course was more awkward still. The girl’s expression didn’t change. Bobby heard himself say ‘How do you do?’ in an idiotic manner. There was a moment’s silence.
    ‘I suppose I only came in to gossip,’ Miss Danbury said to Hartsilver. Her tone was wholly easy and unaffected. ‘But there is something I want to ask you. I’ve found a small boy crying bitterly because he can’t draw his dog. He has a dog at home, and he’s been trying to draw it – and colour it too – so as to gain a little moral support from it. But he can’t make the thing look like his dog. Do you think you could help him to produce something that will be his dog? He does need comforting, poor little chap. It’s his first term.’ The girl turned to Bobby. ‘Mr Appleby, did you pine for a pet when you were a new boy here?’
    This competent manner of receiving Bobby into grace through a little polite conversation didn’t please Bobby at all.
    He even found himself resenting the mere suggestion that he could ever have pined for a pet. So he glowered at the girl in a manner that would have been wholly embarrassing if Hartsilver hadn’t been saying that he could certainly draw any individual dog to order, even if he had never seen the brute; and that the distressed infant might present himself for this purpose immediately after prep.
    These benevolent remarks at least gave Bobby time to think. Perhaps (he was sometimes to reflect a little later) they even gave him time to imagine things. Hadn’t Miss Danbury’s cool look also been a warning look ? Wasn’t she – doubtless for some good reason – anxious that her first strange encounter with Bobby should be kept secret at present? Here was the truth – or a fragment of it – at last. Not a flicker of recognition was to pass between them until they could be sure of privacy. Having realized this, Bobby tried to catch Miss Danbury’s eye. Having caught it, he gave Miss Danbury a meaning look. Receiving no response to this,