The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  *

  English boarding schools have much to recommend them. If boys are going to be adolescent, and science has failed to come up with a way of stopping them, then much better to herd them together and let them get on with it in private. Six hundred suits of skin oozing with pustules, six hundred scalps weeping oil, twelve hundred armpits shooting out hair, twelve hundred inner thighs exploding with fungus and six hundred minds filling themselves with suicidal drivel: the world is best protected from this.

  For the good of society, therefore, Adrian Healey, like many Healeys before him, had been sent to a prep school at the age of seven, had proceeded to his public school at twelve and now, fifteen years old, he stood trembling with pubertal confusion on the brink of life. There was little to admire. The ravages of puberty had attacked his mind more than his skin, which was some kind of a blessing. From time to time a large, yellow-crowned spot would pop from his forehead, or a blackhead worm its way from the sweaty shelter of the side of his nose, but generally the complexion was good enough not to betray the hormonal crisis and mental havoc that boiled within and the eyes were wide and sensual enough for him to be thought attractive. Too smart at exam passing to be kept out of the Sixth Form, too disrespectful and dishonourable to be a prefect, he had read and absorbed more than he could understand, so he lived by pastiche and pretence.

  His constipation, furred tongue and foul-smelling feet were no more than conventional school attributes, passed down from generation to generation, like slang and sadism. Adrian might have been unorthodox, but he was not so blind to the proper decencies as to cultivate smooth-flowing bowels or healthy feet. His good nature prevented him from discovering the pleasures of bullying and his cowardice allowed him to ignore it in others.

  The great advantage of English public school life lies of course in the quality of tutelage it provides. Adrian had received a decent and broad English education in the area of his loins. Not all the credit for this could go to his schoolmasters, although a few of them had not been afraid to give practical guidance and instruction of a kind which would gladden the heart of those who believe that the modern teacher is slipshod in his approach to the Whole Boy. Mostly he had been given space to make his own way and learn his own lessons of the flesh. He had quickly happened upon the truth which many lonely contemporaries would never discover, the truth that everybody, simply everybody, was panting for it and could, with patience, be shown that they were panting for it. So Adrian grabbed what was to hand and had the time of his life genitally – focusing exclusively on his own gender of course, for this was 1973 and girls had not yet been invented.

  His love life, however, was less happy. Earlier that afternoon he had worshipped at his altar in a private welter of misery that his public swagger never hinted at.

  It had been upstairs, in the Long Dorm. The room was empty, the floorboards squeaking more faintly than usual beneath his tread. Cartwright’s cubicle had its curtain drawn. The distant moan of whistles and cheers on the Upper Games Field and the nearer bang of a downstairs door slamming shut had unsettled him. They were over-familiar, with a bogus, echoing quality, a staginess that put him on his guard. The whole school knew he was here. They knew he liked to creep about the House alone. They were watching, he was convinced of it. The background shouts of rugger and hockey weren’t real, they were part of a taped soundtrack played to deceive him. He was walking into a trap. It had always been a trap. No one had ever believed in him. They signed him off games and let him think that he had the House to himself. But they knew, they had always known. Tom, Bullock, Heydon-Bayley, even Cartwright. Especially Cartwright. They watched and they waited. They all knew and they all bided their time until the moment they had chosen for his exposure and disgrace.

  Let them watch, let them know. Here was Cartwright’s bed and under the pillow, here, yes, here the pyjamas. Soft brushed cotton, like Cartwright’s soft brushed hair and a smell, a smell that was Cartwright to the last molecule. There was even a single gold hair shining on the collar, and there, just down there, a new aroma, an aroma, an essence that rippled outwards from the centre of the whole Cartwrightness of Cartwright.

  For Adrian other people did not exist except as extras, as bit-players in the film of his life. No one but he had noted the splendour and agony of existence, no one else was truly or fully alive. He alone gasped at dew trapped in cobwebs, at spring buds squeaking into life. Afternoon light bouncing like a yo-yo in a stream of spittle dropping from a cow’s lips, the slum-wallpaper peel of bark on birches, the mash of wet leaves pulped into pavements, they grew and burst only in him. Only he knew what it was to love.

  Haaaaaaah … if they really were watching then now was the time to pull back the curtain and jeer, now was the time to howl contempt.

  But nothing. No yells, no sneers, no sound at all to burst the swollen calm of the afternoon.

  Adrian trembled as he stood and did himself up. It was an illusion. Of course it was an illusion. No one watched, no one judged, no one pointed or whispered. Who were they, after all? Low-browed, scarlet-naped rugger-buggers with no more grace and vision than a jockstrap.

  Sighing, he had moved to his own cubicle and laid out the astrakhan coat and top hat.

  If you can’t join them, he thought, beat them.

  *

  He had fallen in love with Hugo Alexander Timothy Cartwright the moment he laid eyes on him, when, as one of a string of five new arrivals, the boy had trickled into evening hall the first night of Adrian’s second year.

  Heydon-Bayley nudged him.

  ‘What do you reckon, Healey? Lush, or what?’

  For once Adrian had remained silent. Something was terribly wrong.

  It had taken him two painful terms to identify the symptoms. He looked them up in all the major textbooks. There was no doubt about it. All the authorities concurred: Shakespeare, Tennyson, Ovid, Keats, Georgette Heyer, Milton, they were of one opinion. It was love. The Big One.

  Cartwright of the sapphire eyes and golden hair, Cartwright of the Limbs and Lips: he was Petrach’s Laura, Milton’s Lycidas, Catullus’s Lesbia, Tennyson’s Hallam, Shakespeare’s fair boy and dark lady, the moon’s Endymion. Cartwright was Garbo’s salary, the National Gallery, he was cellophane: he was the tender trap, the blank unholy surprise of it all and the bright golden haze on the meadow: he was honey-honey, sugar-sugar, chirpy chirpy cheep-cheep and his baby-love: the voice of the turtle could be heard in the land, there were angels dining at the Ritz and a nightingale sang in Berkeley Square.

  Adrian had managed to coax Cartwright into an amusing half-hour in the House lavs two terms previously, but he had never doubted he could get the trousers down: that wasn’t it. He wanted something more from him than the few spasms of pleasure that the limited activities of rubbing and licking and heaving and pushing could offer.

  He wasn’t sure what the thing was that he yearned for, but one thing he did know. It was less acceptable to love, to ache for eternal companionship, than it was to bounce and slurp and gasp behind the fives courts. Love was Adrian’s guilty secret, sex his public pride.

  *

  He closed the changing-room door and fanned himself with the lavender gloves. It had been a close thing. Too close. The greater the lengths he went to to be liked, the more enemies he gathered on the way. If he fell, Bennett-Jones and others would be there to kick him. One thing was for certain, the Queer Pose was running dry and a new one was going to have to be dreamt up or there would be Trouble.

  A gang of fags was mobbing about by the notice-boards. They fell silent as he approached. He patted one of them on the head.

  ‘Pretty children,’ he sighed, digging into his waistcoat pocket and pulling out a handful of change. ‘Tonight you shall eat.’

  Scattering the coins at their feet, he moved on.

  Mad, he said to himself as he approached his study door. I think I must be mad.

  Tom was there, in a yoga position, biting his toenails and listening to Aqualung.
Adrian sank into a chair and removed his hat.

  ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘you are looking at a crushed violet, a spent egg, a squeezed tube.’

  ‘I’m looking at a git,’ said Tom. ‘What’s with the coat?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Adrian, ‘I am stupid today. And every day. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Horrid, horrid, horrid. Morbid, morbid, morbid. Torrid, torpid, turbid. Everything in my life ends in id. Get it?’

  ‘Get what?’

  ‘Id. It’s Freud. You know.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Yeah. Id.’

  ‘Idealistic idiot, idiosyncratic idler. Everything begins in id as well.’

  ‘Everything begins with “I”, you mean. Which is ego,’ said Tom, placing an ankle behind his ear, ‘not id.’

  ‘Well of course it’s very easy to be clever. If you could just help me out of this coat, I’m beginning to sweat.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Tom. ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘No.’

  Adrian fought his way out of his costume and into his uniform while Tom reverted to a half-lotus and recounted his day.

  ‘Went into town and bought a couple of LPs this afternoon.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Adrian, ‘let me guess … Parsifal and Lark Ascending?’

  ‘Atom Heart Mother and Salty Dog.’

  ‘Close.’

  Tom lit a cigarette.

  ‘You know what pisses me off about this place?’

  ‘The cuisine? The distressingly plain uniforms?’

  ‘I bumped into Rosengard in the High Street and he asked me why I wasn’t watching the match. I mean what?’

  ‘You should’ve asked him why he wasn’t.’

  ‘I said I was just on my way.’

  ‘Rebel.’

  ‘I like to keep my nose clean.’

  ‘Well, “I’m just on my way” isn’t a very stylish handkerchief, is it? You could have said that the match was too exciting and that your nervous system simply couldn’t bear any more suspense.’

  ‘Well I didn’t. I came back here, had a wank and finished that book.’

  ‘The Naked Lunch?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What did you reckon?’

  ‘Crap.’

  ‘You’re just saying that because you didn’t understand it,’ said Adrian.

  ‘I’m just saying that because I did understand it,’ said Tom. ‘Any road up, we’d better start making some toast. I invited Bullock and Sampson over.’

  ‘Oh, what?’

  ‘We owe them a study tea.’

  ‘You know I hate intellectuals.’

  ‘You mean you hate people who are cleverer than you are.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose that’s why I like you so much, Tom.’

  Tom gave him a pained, constipated stare.

  ‘I’ll boil the kettle,’ he said.

  *

  Cartwright looked up from the Chambers Encyclopaedia and mouthed, ‘Otto Von Bismarck born in … in 1815, the year of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. Founder of modern Germany …’

  In his line of sight were hundreds of books, the only one of which he could remember reading was To Kill a Mockingbird in the company of the rest of his fifth form at prep school. Such a great many books and yet this was still only the House library. The School library had thousands and thousands more and university libraries … Time was so short and his memory so feeble. What was it Healey had said? Memory is the mother of the Muses.

  Cartwright levered Malthus to Nantucket from off the shelf and looked up Muses. There were nine of them and they were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. If Healey was right then Mnemosyne must mean memory.

  Of course! The English word ‘mnemonic’, something that reminds you of something. Mnemonic must be derived from Mnemosyne. Or the other way around. Cartwright made a note in his rough-book.

  According to the encyclopaedia, most of what was known of the Muses came down from the writings of Hesiod, particularly this Theogony. That must have been the poet Healey was referring to, Hesiod. But how did Healey know all that? He never seemed to be reading, at least no more than anyone else. Cartwright would never catch up with him. It just wasn’t bloody fair.

  He wrote down the names of the Muses and returned with a sigh to Bismarck. One day he would get right to the end, to zythum. Not that he needed to. He had peeped ahead and seen that it was a kind of ancient Egyptian beer, much recommended by Diodorus Siculus – whoever he was.

  *

  Everyone had been rather surprised the day Adrian announced that he was going to share a study with Tom.

  ‘Thompson?’ Heydon-Bayley had shrieked. ‘But he’s a complete dildo, surely?’

  ‘I like him,’ said Adrian, ‘he’s unusual.’

  ‘Graceless, you mean. Wooden.’

  Certainly there was nothing obviously appetising about Tom’s appearance or manner, and he remained one of the few boys of his year with whom Adrian had never made the beast with two backs, or rather with whom he had never made the beast with one back and an interestingly shaped middle, but over the last year, more people had come to see that there was something arresting about Tom. He wasn’t clever, but he worked hard and had set himself to read a great deal, in order, Adrian assumed, to acquire some of Adrian’s dash and sparkle. Tom always went his own way with his own ideas. He managed to get away with the longest hair in the House and the most public nicotine habit in the school, somehow without ever drawing attention to himself. It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

  Freda, the German undermatron, once discovered him sunbathing nude in the spinney.

  ‘Thompson,’ she had cried in outrage, ‘you cannot be lying about naked!’

  ‘Sorry, Matron, you’re right,’ Tom murmured, and he had reached out a hand and put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. ‘Don’t know what I was thinking of.’

  Adrian felt that it was he who had brought Tom into notice and popularity, that Tom was his own special creation. The silent spotty gink of the first year had been transformed into someone admired and imitated and Adrian wasn’t sure how much he liked it.

  He liked Tom all right. He was the only person he had ever spoken to about his love for Cartwright and Tom had the decency not to be interested or sympathetic enough to quench the pure holy flame of Adrian’s passion with sympathy or advice. Sampson and Bullock he could do without, however. Especially Sampson, who was too much of a grammar-school-type swot ever to be quite the thing. Not an ideal tea-companion at all.

  Tea was a very special institution, revolving as it did around the ceremony and worship of Toast. In a place where alcohol, tobacco and drugs were forbidden, it was essential that something should take their place as a powerful and public totem of virility and cool. Toast, for reasons lost in time, was the substance chosen. Its name was dropped on every possible occasion, usually pronounced, in awful public school accents, ‘taste’.

  ‘I was just having some toast, when Burton and Hopwood came round …’

  ‘Harman’s not a bad fag actually. He makes really majorly good toast …’

  ‘Yeah, you should come round to my study, maybe, we’ll get some toast going …’

  ‘God, I can hardly move. I’ve just completely overdone it on the toast …’

  Adrian had been looking forward to toasting up with Tom in private and talking about Cartwright.

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, clearing a space on his desk for the teapot. ‘Oh, Christly Christ.’

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘I shall know no peace other than being kissed by him,’ moaned Adrian.

  ‘That a fact?’

  ‘It is a fact, and I’ll tell you what else is a fact. It’s a fact that he is wearing his blue Shetland turtle-neck today. Even as we speak his body is moving inside it. Warm and quick. It’s more than flesh and blood can stand.’

  ‘Have a cold showe
r, then,’ said Tom.

  Adrian banged down the teapot and grabbed Tom by the shoulder.

  ‘Cold shower?’ he shouted. ‘Jessica Christ, man, I’m talking about love! You know what it does to me? It shrinks my stomach, doesn’t it, Tom? It pickles my guts, yeah. But what does it do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly I’m above the ordinary. I’m competent, supremely competent. I’m walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls. I’m one of the great ones. I’m Michelangelo, moulding the beard of Moses. I’m Van Gogh, painting pure sunlight. I’m Horowitz, playing the Emperor Concerto. I’m John Barrymore before the movies got him by the throat. I’m Jesse James and his two brothers – all three of them. I’m W. Shakespeare. And out there it’s not the school any longer – it’s the Nile, Tom, the Nile – and down it floats the barge of Cleopatra.’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Tom, ‘not bad at all. Your own?’

  ‘Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. But he could have been talking about Cartwright.’

  ‘But he was talking about alcohol,’ said Tom, ‘which should tell you a lot.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning shut up and get buttering.’

  ‘I shall put the Liebestod on the stereo, that’s what I shall do, you horrid beastly man,’ said Adrian, ‘and still my beating heart with concord of sweet sounds. But quick, man! – I hear a hansom drawing up outside! And here, Watson, unless I am very much mistaken, is our client now upon the stair. Come in!’

  Sampson appeared at the doorway, blinking through his spectacles, followed by Bullock who tossed a jar at Tom.

  ‘Hi. I brought some lemon curd.’

  ‘Lemon curd!’ said Adrian. ‘And what was I saying only this minute, Tom?’ “If only we had some lemon curd for our guests.” You’re a mind-reader, Bollocks.’

  ‘Some toast over there,’ said Tom.

  ‘Thanks, Thompson,’ said Sampson, helping himself. ‘Gooderson tells me you were not unadjacent to mobbing up R.B.-J. and Sargent in the changing-rooms, Healey.’

  ‘Dame Rumour outstrides me yet again.’