An Awkward Lie Read Online Free PDF

doubt, a balanced view of the whole nature of man. Yet temperamentally he inclined increasingly to a sombre interpretation of human character and motive. Moreover, he had lately been taking bold steps in the exploration of morbid psychology.
    ‘There be them,’ Hoobin had said to his employer, ‘who be one man today and another man tomorrow. And there be them that be one man this hour and another man that hour. So it do be said to be.’
    ‘Would you say it was true of everybody?’ Appleby asked. It was his intention to suggest that while Solo put sickle to one verge of the drive Hoobin himself might put sickle to the other. But the best chance of achieving this lay in first giving Hoobin his head as a sage. ‘Would you say’ – he achieved a great effect of sharpening a philosophical discussion – ‘it was true of Solo?’
    Solo began whistling defiantly. He always did this when he heard his name mentioned.
    ‘Solo be nothing of a man.’ Hoobin would have made an excellent performer in a medieval disputation; he was a master of the distinguo . ‘Not yet wench-high, Solo be. And all childer be unaccountable quite.’
    Solo suddenly fell to whetting his sickle with demoniacal vigour. Appleby wondered if he were indulging some monstrous fantasy of eviscerating his aged uncle.
    ‘But Mr Robert,’ Hoobin pursued, ‘a bin wench-high and over them three years and more. The vittels ha the doing on’t. High living in the colleges. That and being flown with wine.’
    ‘Mr Robert,’ Appleby said with some severity, ‘is a very temperate young man.’
    ‘He be that when he be one man.’ Hoobin pounced on the thread of his former argument. ‘But what when he be another? And they do disremember, the one does, what t’other done. The right hand, Sir John, knowth not what the left hand doth. So the scholards ha brought it out.’
    Solo – who was a perfect natural only at the full of the moon – had stopped whistling, and was blunting the point of his sickle by doodling with it in the gravel of the drive. A sideways glance revealed to Appleby the rudiments of a squat and boldly callipygian female form. Prehistoric Man had been a dab-hand at this in leisure moments devoted to meditations upon fertility. Some deep atavism was prompting Solo to this means of asserting that his uncle’s estimate of his imperfect maturity was fallacious. Appleby reflected, as he had frequently had occasion to do before, that the Hoobins were a tribe who should be living not in council cottages but in caves. The thought resulted in his losing for a moment the drift of Hoobin’s remarks.
    ‘And it be the word at the Killcanon Arms,’ Hoobin was saying, ‘that her corpus be not found yet.’
    ‘ His corpus, you mean?’
    ‘That her corpus be not found yet. But time uncovers all. First a leg ’twill be, and then an arm. Let them look in the railway station, I say, where folk do leave their trunks and parcels.’
    Appleby parted from the Hoobins with some abruptness – leaving Hoobin to return, unperturbed, to telling Solo what to do. It was evident that quite a lot was abroad about the trio who had met at the bunker. And Bobby was being cast hopefully in the roles of some fiendish Jekyll and Hyde. Judith wouldn’t have turned a hair at this manifestation of the rustic mind, but it at least had power to return several times to Appleby’s thoughts during a solitary evening. At half-past eleven and with a second cigar (which was a sign of disquiet in itself) he went out into the garden.
    There was a tremendous moon – so that he almost expected to encounter Solo offering conjurations to it. The ancient house was laved in its light, like some creature of stone over which the waters of a gentle fountain flow down on every flank. The lawn was a sheet of silver – like water too, but of an utter stillness, so that one could have imagined some craft of obtrusively poetic character – say an elfin pinnace – to come gliding over it at