The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  Not unadjacent? Jesus …

  Bullock slapped Tom on the back.

  ‘Hey, Tommo!’ he said. ‘I see you’ve got Atom Heart Mother at last. What do you reckon? Far outsville or far insville?’

  While Tom and Bullock talked about Pink Floyd, Sampson told Adrian why he thought Mahler was in actual fact wilder, in the sense of more controlled, than any rock group.

  ‘That’s an interesting point,’ said Adrian, ‘in the sense of not being interesting at all.’

  When the tea and toast were finished, Bullock stood up and cleared his throat.

  ‘I think I should announce my plan now, Sam.’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Sampson.

  ‘What ho!’ said Adrian, getting up to shut the door. ‘Treasons, stratagems and spoils.’

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Bullock. ‘My brother, I don’t know if you know, is at Radley, on account of my parents thinking it a bad idea to have us both at the same school.’

  ‘On account of your being twins?’ said Adrian.

  ‘Right, on account of my mother OD-ing on fertility drugs. Any old way, he wrote to me last week telling me about an incredible bitch of a row blazing there on account of someone having been and gone and produced an unofficial magazine called Raddled, full of obscene libellous Oz-like filth. And what I thought, what Sammy and I thought, was – why not?’

  ‘Why not what?’ said Tom.

  ‘Why not do the same thing here?’

  ‘You mean an underground magazine?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Tom opened and shut his mouth. Sampson smirked.

  ‘Jesus suffering fuck,’ said Adrian. ‘It’s not half a thought.’

  ‘Face it, it’s a wow.’

  ‘These guys,’ said Tom, ‘the ones who put out this magazine at Radley. What happened to them?’

  Sampson polished his spectacles with the end of his tie.

  ‘Ah, now this is why we must proceed with great circumspection. They were both, hum, “put out” themselves. “Booted out” I believe is the technical phrase.’

  ‘That means it’s got to be a secret,’ said Bullock. ‘We write it in the holidays. You send me the material, typed onto stencils. I get it duplicated on my dad’s office Gestetner, bring it back at the beginning of next term, we find a way of distributing it secretly round all the Houses.’

  ‘All a bit Colditz, isn’t it?’ said Tom.

  ‘No, no!’ said Adrian. ‘Don’t you listen to Thompson, he’s an old cynicky-boots. I’m in, Bollocks. I’m in for definite. What sort of material do you want?’

  ‘Oh you know,’ said Bullock, ‘seditious, anti-public school. That kind of thing. Something to shake them up a bit.’

  ‘I’m planning a sort of fabliau comparing this place with a fascist state,’ said Sampson, ‘sort of Animal Farm meets Arturo Ui …’

  ‘Stop it, Sammy, I’m wet at the very thought,’ said Adrian.

  He looked across at Tom.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘Yeah, why not? Sounds a laugh.’

  ‘And remember,’ said Bullock, ‘not a word to anyone.’

  ‘Our lips are sealed,’ said Adrian. Lips. Sealed. Dangerous words. Not five minutes could pass without him thinking of Cartwright.

  Bullock took a tobacco tin out of his pocket and looked around the room.

  ‘Now,’ he said, ‘if someone would close the curtains and light a joss-stick, I have here for your delight some twenty-four-carat black Nepalese cannabis resin which should be smoked immediately on account of it being seriously good shit.’

  II

  Adrian threw himself along the corridor towards Biffen’s form-room. Dr Meddlar, one of the school chaplains, stopped him.

  ‘Late, Healey.’

  ‘Really, sir? So am I.’

  Meddlar took him by the shoulders. ‘You’re riding for a fall, Healey, you know that? There are hedges and ditches ahead and you are on course for an almighty cropper.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘And I shall be cheering and laughing as you tumble,’ said Meddlar, his spectacles flashing.

  ‘That’s just the warm-hearted Christian in you, sir.’

  ‘Listen to me!’ spat Meddlar. ‘You think you’re very clever, don’t you? Well let me tell you that this school has no room for creatures like you.’

  ‘Why are you saying this to me, sir?’

  ‘Because if you don’t learn to live with others, if you don’t conform, your life is going to be one long miserable hell.’

  ‘Will that give you satisfaction, sir? Will that please you?’

  Meddlar stared at him and gave a hollow little laugh. ‘What gives you the right to talk to me like that, boy? What on earth do you think gives you the right?’

  Adrian was furious to find that there were tears springing to his eyes. ‘God gives me the right, sir, because God loves me. And God won’t let me be judged by a f-f-fascist – hypocrite – bastard like you!’ He squirmed away from Meddlar’s grasp and ran on down the corridor. ‘Bastard,’ he tried to shout, but the words choked in his throat. ‘Fucking bloody bastard.’

  Meddlar laughed after him. ‘You’re evil, Healey, quite evil.’

  Adrian ran on and out into the quad. Everyone was in morning school. The colonnade was empty, the Old School Room, the library, the headmaster’s house, the Founder’s lawn, all deserted. This again was Adrian’s home, an empty world. He imagined the whole school with noses pressed up against their form-room windows staring out at him as he ran through the West Quad. Prefects with walkie-talkies striding down the corridor.

  ‘This is Blue Seven. Subject proceeding along past the Cavendish library towards the Music School. Over.’

  ‘Blue Seven this is Meddlar. Interview went according to plan, subject now unstable and in tears. Red Three will continue surveillance in the Music School. Over and out.’

  Either they’ve got a life and I’m imaginary, thought Adrian, or I’ve got a life and they’re imaginary.

  He’d read all the books, he knew he was really the same as anyone else. But who else had snakes wrestling in their stomachs like this? Who was running beside him with the same desperation? Who else would remember this moment and every moment like it to the last day of their lives? No one. They were all at their desks thinking of rugger and lunch. He was different and alone.

  The ground floor of the Music School was filled with little practice-rooms. As Adrian stumbled along the passageway he could hear lessons in progress. A cello pushed a protesting Saint-Saëns swan along the water. A trumpet further along farted out ‘Thine be the glory’. And there, third from the end, Adrian saw through the glass panel, was Cartwright, making quite a decent fist of a Beethoven minuet.

  Fate was always doing this. There were six hundred boys in the school and although Adrian went out of his way to intercept Cartwright and to engineer apparently accidental meetings – he had learnt his timetable off by heart – he was sure that he bumped into him by genuine chance more often than was natural.

  Cartwright appeared to be alone in the practice-room. Adrian pushed open the door and went in.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, ‘don’t stop, it’s good.’

  ‘Oh, it’s terrible really,’ said Cartwright, ‘I can’t get the left hand working smoothly.’

  ‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ said Adrian and immediately wanted to bite off his tongue.

  Here he was, alone in a room with Cartwright, whose hair was even now leaping with light from the sunshine that poured in through the window, Cartwright whom he loved with his whole life and being and all he could find to say was ‘That’s not what I’ve heard.’ Jesus, what was the matter with him? He might just as well have put on an Eric Morecambe voice, shouted ‘There’s no answer to that’ and slapped Cartwright’s cheeks.

  ‘Um, official lesson?’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’ve got my Grade Three exam in half an hour, so this is a practice. It lets me off double maths at least.’

&nb
sp; ‘Lucky you.’

  Lucky you? Oh, pure Oscar Wilde.

  ‘Well, I’d better let you get on with it then, hadn’t I?’

  Great, Adrian, brilliant. Magisterial. ‘I’d better let you get on with it then, hadn’t I?’ Change one syllable and the whole delicate epigram collapses.

  ‘Right,’ said Cartwright and turned back to his music.

  ‘Cheerio, then. G’luck!’

  ‘Bye.’

  Adrian closed the door.

  Oh God, Oh Godly God.

  He wound a fraught trail back to the form-rooms. Thank God it was only Biffen.

  ‘You’re extraordinarily late, Healey.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Adrian, sitting at his desk, ‘the way I look at it, better extraordinarily late than extraordinarily never.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me what kept you?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’

  Something of a gasp ran round the form-room. This was going it a big strong, even for Healey.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Well, not in front of the whole form, sir. It’s rather personal.’

  ‘Oh I see. I see,’ said Biffen. ‘Well, in that case, you had better tell me afterwards.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Nothing like getting a schoolmaster’s curiosity glands juicing.

  Adrian looked out of the window.

  ‘Oh to be in Cartwright, now that March is here.’

  Any minute now, some lucky examiner was going to be watching a lovely little frown furrow Cartwright’s brow as he skipped through his minuet. Watching the woollen sleeve of his winter jacket ride up his arms.

  ‘Whenas in wool my Cartwright goes, Then, then methinks how sweetly flows. That liquefaction of his clothes.’

  He became aware of Biffen’s voice knocking at the door of his dreams.

  ‘Can you give us an example, Healey?’

  ‘Er, example, sir?’

  ‘Yes, of a subjunctive following a superlative.’

  ‘A superlative, you say, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A subjunctive following a superlative?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘Um … how about “le garçon le plus beau que je connaisse”?’

  ‘Er … the finest boy that I know? Yes that meets the case.’

  ‘Finest, sir? I meant the most beautiful.’

  Damn, he was supposed to be phasing out the queer pose. Well, at least it got a laugh.

  ‘Thank you, Healey, that will do. Be quiet, the rest of you, he really doesn’t need any encouragement.’

  Oh but I do, thought Adrian, I need all the encouragement going.

  The lesson moved on, Biffen leaving him alone to daydream.

  At the end of the forty minutes he reacted to the bell as fast as he could, streaking to the doorway from the back of the form-room and trying to lose himself in the crowd, but Biffen called him back.

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something, Healey?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You owe me an explanation for your unpunctuality, I think.’

  Adrian approached the dais.

  ‘Oh yes, sir. The thing is, sir, I was going to be late anyway – only a bit, but I bumped into Dr Meddlar.’

  ‘He kept you for twenty minutes?’

  ‘Yes, sir – or rather no, sir. He was very rude to me. He upset me, sir.’

  ‘Rude to you? The Chaplain was rude to you?’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not how he would put it, sir.’ Adrian had a shot at his pure but troubled expression. It was particularly effective when looking up at someone, as he was now. It was loosely based on Dominic Guard’s Leo in the film of The Go-Between. A sort of baffled honesty.

  ‘He … he made me cry, sir, and I was too embarrassed to come in blubbing, so I went and hid in the music-room until I felt better.’

  This was all terribly unfair on poor old Biffen, whom Adrian rather adored for his snowy hair and perpetual air of benign astonishment. And ‘blubbing’ … Blubbing went out with ‘decent’ and ‘ripping’. Mind you, not a bad new language to start up. Nineteen-twenties schoolboy slang could be due for a revival.

  ‘Oh dear. But I’m sure the Chaplain must have had good reason to be … that is, Dr Meddlar wouldn’t speak sharply to you without cause.’

  ‘Well I admit I was cheeky to him, sir. But you know what he’s like.’

  ‘He is, I am sure, a scrupulously fair man.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I – I wouldn’t want you to think that I’ve been lying to you, sir. I’m sure Dr Meddlar will tell you his side of the story if you ask him.’

  ‘I won’t do that. I know whether a boy is telling me the truth or not.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Did he hell. They never bloody did.

  ‘I don’t want to lecture you, Healey, and I don’t want to keep you from your morning break, but you must face the fact that many members of staff are beginning to lose their patience. Perhaps you feel they don’t understand you?’

  ‘I think the problem is that they do understand me, sir.’

  ‘Yes. You see that is exactly the kind of remark that is guaranteed to put certain masters’ backs up, isn’t it? Sophistication is not an admired quality. Not only at school. Nobody likes it anywhere. In England at any rate.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘You’re the cleverest boy in my French set. You know that perfectly well. But you’ve never worked. That makes you the stupidest boy in the school.’

  Parable of the talents next, what was the betting?

  ‘What are your university thoughts?’

  ‘Oh, well sir … you know. After “A” levels I think I’ll’ve had it with education, really. And it will probably have had it with me.’

  ‘I see. Tell me, what do you do on Friday afternoons, Healey? I take it you’re not in the Cadet Force.’

  ‘Threw me out, sir. It was an outrage.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure it was. So it’s Pioneering, is it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. There’s a little old lady I visit.’

  ‘Well,’ said Biffen filling his briefcase with exercise books, ‘there’s a little old lady and a little old man in the Morley Road you might also find time to visit one day. My wife and I always give tea on Fridays, you’d be most welcome.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘You don’t have to let us know in advance. We shall expect you when we see you. Off you go then.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Biffen, thank you very much.’

  Adrian instinctively offered his hand which Biffen took with tremendous firmness, looking him straight in the eye.

  ‘I’m not Mr Chips, you know. I’m perfectly well aware that you feel sorry for me. It’s bad enough from the staff, but I won’t take pity from you. I won’t.’

  ‘No sir,’ said Adrian, ‘I wasn’t …’

  ‘Good.’

  III

  Tom and Adrian and Pigs Trotter, an occasional hanger-on, were walking into town. From time to time track-suited boys ran past them, with all the deadly purpose and humourless concentration of those who enjoyed Games. Juniors twittered along, running sticks against palings and whispering. Adrian thought it worth while trying out his new slang.

  ‘I say, you fellows, here’s a rum go! Old Biffo was jolly odd this morning. He gave me a lot of pi-jaw about slacking and then invited me to tea. No rotting! He did really.’

  ‘I expect he fancies you,’ said Tom.

  ‘That’s beastly talk, Thompson. Jolly well take it back or expect a good scragging.’

  They walked on for a bit, Adrian practising new phrases and Pigs Trotter lumbering behind laughing so indiscriminately that Adrian soon tired of the game.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your parents, Tom.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, you never talk about them.’

  ‘Nothing to say about my folks,’ Thompson said. ‘Dad works for British Steel, Mum is next in line for Mayor. Two sist
ers, both mad, and a brother who’s coming here next term.’

  ‘What about you, Healey?’ said Pigs Trotter. ‘What do your parents do?’

  ‘Parent,’ said Adrian. ‘The mother is no more.’

  Trotter was upset.

  ‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realise …’

  ‘No, that’s fine. Car crash. When I was twelve.’

  ‘That’s … that’s awful.’

  ‘If we go to Gladys Winkworth, I’ll tell you the whole story.’

  The church in the town was perched on a hill and in the cemetery – which people of shattering wit like Sampson never tired of calling ‘the dead centre of town’ – there was an old wooden bench on which was a plaque which said ‘Gladys Winkworth’. Nothing else. The assumption was that it had been erected by a doting widower as a lasting memorial to his dead wife. Tom thought she was actually buried under it. Adrian believed it was simply the bench’s proper name and he stuck to that belief.

  From Gladys, the Upper, Middle and Lower Games Fields, the science block, the sports hall, the theatre, the Old School Room, libraries, chapel, Hall and Art School were all visible. You felt like a general observing a battle.

  The day was cold and the breath steamed from their mouths and nostrils as they climbed through the graveyard.

  ‘Alas, regardless of their fate the little victims play,’ said Adrian. ‘The quick and the young play peep-bo behind the marking stones of the cold and the dead.’

  Tom and Adrian sat down and waited for Pigs Trotter to catch up.

  ‘It’s not a nice story, the story of my mother,’ said Adrian as Trotter finally crashed down beside them, ‘but I’ll tell it if you promise to keep it to yourselves. Only Pa Tickford knows. My father told him when I arrived here.’

  Trotter nodded breathlessly. ‘I won’t tell a soul, Healey. Honest.’

  Adrian looked at Tom who nodded gravely.

  ‘Very well then,’ said Adrian. ‘One evening about three years ago … almost exactly three years ago in fact, I was sitting at home watching television. It was A Man Called Ironside, I remember. My father is a Professor of Biochemistry at Bristol University and he often works late. My mother had been in the kitchen since three in the afternoon drinking vodka from a teacup. At ten o’clock she smashed the cup onto the floor and cried out so I could hear her in the sitting room.’