by Stephen Fry
‘Hi,’ said Cartwright.
‘Did you pass your exam then?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your Grade Three piano. You remember. Last term.’
‘Oh, that. Yes thanks.’
‘Great.’
More immortal dialogue from the Noël Coward of the seventies.
‘So,’ said Adrian, ‘do you come here … er … is this something you’ve been to many times?’
‘Most Fridays,’ said Cartwright. ‘I’ve never seen you here before.’
‘No, well … I’ve not been invited before.’
‘Right.’
‘So … er … what happens exactly?’
‘Well, you know, it’s just a tea-party, really.’
And so it had proved. Biffen had instigated a book game in which everyone had to own up to books they’d never read. Biffen and Lady Helen called out titles of classic novels and plays and if you hadn’t read them you had to put your hand up. Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, Animal Farm, Madame Bovary, 1984, Lucky Jim, Sons and Lovers, Othello, Oliver Twist, Decline and Fall, Howards End, Hamlet, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the list of unread books that they managed to compile had made them all giggle. They had agreed that by the end of term the list would have to be much more obscure. The only two books that had been read by everyone present were Lord of the Flies and Catch 22 which, Biffen remarked, said much about English teaching at prep schools. It was all a transparent, and to Adrian rather wet, device to get everyone to read more, but it worked.
Adrian, despite the gentility of it all, had rather enjoyed himself and was fired with an enthusiasm for outreading everyone on the Russians, who always sounded the most impressive and impenetrable.
‘I mean,’ he said to Cartwright as they walked back to Tickford’s, ‘this place can really get you down. It’s not a bad idea to have a sanctuary like that to go to, is it?’
‘He’s going to be my tutor next year when I’m in the Sixth Form,’ said Cartwright. ‘I want to go to Cambridge and he’s the best at getting you through Oxbridge Entrance apparently.’
‘Really? I want to go to Cambridge too!’ said Adrian. ‘Which college?’
‘Trinity, I think.’
‘God, me too! My father was there!’
Adrian’s father in fact had been to Oxford.
‘But Biffo thinks I should apply to St Matthew’s. He has a friend there he was in the war with, a Professor Trefusis, supposed to be very good. Anyway, we’d better get a move on. Don’t forget we’re gated. It’s nearly five already.’
‘Oh shit,’ said Adrian, as they broke into a run.
‘Did you read the magazine, then?’ he asked as they jogged up the hill to Tickford’s.
‘Yes,’ said Cartwright.
And that was that.
‘It was practically a conversation, Tom!’
‘Great,’ said Tom. ‘Thing is …’
‘It’s all settled. He’ll join me at Cambridge in my second year. After we’ve graduated we’ll fly to Los Angeles or Amsterdam to get married – you can there, you know. Then we’ll set up house in the country. I’ll write poetry, Hugo will play the piano and look beautiful. We’ll have two cats called Spasm and Clitoris. And a spaniel. Hugo likes spaniels. A spaniel called Biffen.’
Tom was unimpressed.
‘Sargent was in here ten minutes ago,’ he said.
‘Oh pissly piss. What was he after?’
‘Tickford wants to see you in his study straight away.’
‘What for?’
‘Dunno.’
‘It can’t be … does he want to see you as well? Or Sammy or Bollocks?’
Tom shook his head.
‘He’s got nothing on me,’ said Adrian. ‘He can’t have.’
‘Stout denial,’ said Tom. ‘It works every time.’
‘Exactly. Brazen it out.’
‘But I tell you,’ warned Tom, ‘there’s definitely something up. Sargent looked scared.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Adrian, ‘he hasn’t the imagination.’
‘Shit-scared,’ said Tom.
The Housemaster’s study was through the Hall. Adrian was surprised to see all the prefects standing about in a cluster near the door that connected the boys’ side of the House to Mr and Mrs Tickford’s living quarters. They stared at him as he went through. They didn’t jeer or look hostile. They looked … they looked shit-scared.
Adrian knocked on Tickford’s door.
‘Come in!’
Adrian swallowed nervously and entered.
Tickford was sitting behind his desk, fiddling with a letter-opener.
Like a psychopath toying with a dagger, thought Adrian.
The window was at Tickford’s back, darkening his face too much for Adrian to be able to read his expression.
‘Adrian, thank you for coming to see me,’ he said. ‘Sit down, please sit down.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Oh dear … oh dear.’
‘Sir?’
‘I don’t suppose you have any idea why I have sent for you?’
Adrian shook his head, a picture of round-eyed innocence.
‘No, I should imagine not. No. I hope word has not got out.’
Tickford took off his glasses and breathed anxiously on the lenses.
‘I have to ask you now, Adrian … oh dear … it’s all very …’
He replaced the glasses and stood up. Adrian could see his face clearly now, but still he couldn’t read it.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I’m going to have to ask you about your relationship with Paul Trotter.’
So that was it!
The moron had gone and blabbed to someone. The Chaplain probably. And vicious Dr Meddlar would have been only too keen to repeat it to Tickford.
‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’
‘It’s a very simple question, Adrian. It really is. I’m asking you about your relationship with Paul Trotter.’
‘Well, I haven’t really … really got one, sir. I mean, we’re sort of friends. He hangs around with me and Thompson sometimes. But I don’t know him very well.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘Well yes, sir.’
‘It is terribly important that you tell me the truth. Terribly important.’
A boy can always tell when a master is lying, Adrian thought to himself. And Tickford isn’t lying. It is very important.
‘Well, there is one thing, sir.’
‘Yes?’
‘I really don’t know that I should repeat this to you, sir. I mean Trotter did tell me something in confidence …’
Tickford leant forward and took Adrian’s hand by the wrist.
‘I promise you this, Adrian. Whatever Trotter may have said to you, you must now tell me. Do you understand? You must!’
‘It’s a bit embarrassing, sir … couldn’t you ask him yourself?’
‘No, no. I want to hear from you.’
Adrian swallowed.
‘Well sir, I bumped into Trotter yesterday afternoon and he suddenly … he suddenly started crying and so I asked him what the matter was and he said he was very unhappy because he was … well he had a sort of …’
God this was hard.
‘… he was … well he said he was in love with someone … he, you know, had a pash on them.’
‘I see. Yes, of course. Yes I see. He thought he was in love with someone. Another boy, I suppose?’
‘That’s what he said, sir.’
‘Trotter was found in a barn in Brandiston Field this afternoon,’ he said, pushing a piece of paper across the desk. ‘This note was in his pocket.’
Adrian stared.
‘Sir?’
Tickford nodded sadly.
‘The stupid boy,’ he said. ‘The stupid boy hanged himself.’
Adrian looked at the note.
‘I’m very sorry but I couldn’t bear it any more,’ it read. ‘Healey knows why.’
&nb
sp; ‘His mother and father are on their way down from Harrogate,’ said Tickford. ‘What am I going to say?’
Adrian looked at him in panic.
‘Why, sir? Why would he kill himself?’
‘Tell me the name of the boy he was … he had this thing for, Adrian.’
‘Well, sir …’
‘I must know.’
‘It was Cartwright, sir. Hugo Cartwright.’
Two Savile Row suits, a Tommy Nutter and a Bennett, Tovey and Steele, faced each other over a table at Wiltons.
‘Good to see the Native back again,’ said the Bennett, Tovey and Steele. ‘I was beginning to think it extinct.’
‘Now you say that,’ said the Tommy Nutter suit, ‘but I’ve got rather a soft spot for the Pacific chaps myself. They’re sort of wetter somehow, don’t you think? Fleshlier if there is such a word.’
The Bennet, Tovey and Steele did not agree. He considered it typical of the Tommy Nutter to have a loud taste in oysters.
‘This Montrachet’s a bit warm, isn’t it?’
The Bennett, Tovey and Steele sighed. He had been brought up from his nanny’s knee to believe that white Burgundies should not be overchilled. They knew him at Wiltons and took great care to present his wines just so. The Tommy Nutter would resent a lecture, however. Men of his stamp were absurdly sensitive.
‘Still,’ said the other. ‘Who’s complaining? Now then. Let’s talk Mendax. GDS has had no joy, I’m sorry to say, with the Odysseus material. No joy at all.’
‘No decrypt whatsoever?’
‘Oh, they opened it up all right. It was an old twist-cypher. Pre-war. Absolute antique.’
‘That figures,’ grunted the Bennett, Tovey and Steele. ‘And what was inside?’
‘Names, addresses and telephone numbers. Load of harmless Osties. Lifted straight from the bloody Salzburg directory, would you believe?’
‘The old bastard.’
‘So the thing is,’ the Tommy Nutter twisted the stem of his wine-glass coyly, ‘did this Odysseus of yours bring the material out or did he leave it behind?’
‘He’s had nothing in the mail. We know that.’
‘Your friend on the inside still paying his way?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Good, because he’s a greedy son of a bitch.’
The Bennett, Tovey and Steele suit ignored this. It wasn’t as if the Tommy Nutter suit was paying for Telemachus. He thought he was, of course, and would probably never notice that it came directly out of the Bennett, Tovey and Steele’s pocket, never to be reclaimed from the fund. It was a purely private business, but Cabinet liaison had to believe there was honey in it for them. It would not do for them to find out that the Service was being used entirely for the Bennett, Tovey and Steele’s private ends.
‘I think the Mendax material is still over there,’ he said, ‘without the walls of Ilium.’
‘In Salzburg, you mean?’ asked the Tommy Nutter, whose grip on codenames was weak at the best of times.
‘That’s right. In Salzburg.’
‘This is all very much your own pigeon, you know. You are the only one who believes in Mendax. I am reminded of the operation you ran in seventy-six, also against Odysseus. What did that game come to?’
The Bennett, Tovey and Steele shot the Tommy Nutter a suspicious glare.
‘What do you mean game?’ he said. ‘Why do you say game?’
‘Keep your hair on, old man. I just meant that you seem to have a bit of a maggot in your head on the subject of Trefusis. Some of us are wondering why. That’s all.’
‘You’ll find out yet. Listen. The point is this. I never said I did believe in Mendax. But if it doesn’t exist why should the Trojans and Odysseus want us to believe that it does? That’s worth pursuing surely?’
‘Humph,’ said the Tommy Nutter. ‘It has at least been a cheap operation so far, that I will grant you. But we haven’t a shred of proof that Szabó – what’s he called again?’
‘Helen.’
‘We haven’t a shred of evidence to suggest that Helen is anything other than a loyal servant of his state. The Trojans have just given him a medal for God’s sake.’
‘All the more reason to suspect Odysseus.’
‘Why “Helen” by the way? Odd codename for a man.’
The Bennett, Tovey and Steele suit was not going to give the Tommy Nutter a free lesson in Homeric mythology. Where did the man go to school? The tie was no indication. Beaconsfield Conservatives or something equally foul, probably. Hadley Wood Golf Club. Carshalton Rotarians. Yuk.
‘It seemed to make sense at the time,’ he said.
‘Oh ah,’ the Tommy Nutter pressed a crumb into the table cloth. ‘So tell me about these grandchildren.’
‘Stefan is a chess-player. He’s coming over here to play in a couple of months. They’ll keep him on a long leash I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘And you want me to allocate resourcing?’
‘I’d quite like some money made available, if that’s what you mean. Grade Two surveillance should do it.’
‘I have to interface, as they say, with the Treasury tomorrow. Cabinet next week. Oh, look, you’re not going to smoke are you?’
Christ! thought the Bennett, Tovey and Steele. Roll on the next Labour government.
4
I
TIM ANDERSON CONSIDERED the question with great care.
‘I don’t believe that the comparison with Oliver Twist, seductive and engaging as I would be the last to deny it being, is as valid as a first glance might allow.’
‘But surely, Dr Anderson, the similarities are very clear. What we have here is a secret workhouse birth, we have a gang of boys set to work by the character Polterneck, we have the character of Peter Flowerbuck, who traces his own family connection with the Cotton twins, not unlike Mr Brownlow’s quest in Oliver Twist, we have Flinter, who like Nancy is an agent of revenge. The parallels are surely most striking?’
Gary poured some more Meursault for Jenny and Adrian, never at any time taking his eyes off the screen.
‘I am not going to consider failing to grant you the presence of narrative echoes,’ Tim Anderson replied, ‘but I would certainly find myself presented with personal difficulties if asked to deny that this is the mature Dickens of Little Dorrit and Bleak House. I’m sensing a fuller picture of a connected world here than we are allowed in Twist. I’m sensing a deeper anger, I find myself responding to a more complete symphonic vision. The chapter which describes the flood, the scene depicting the bursting of the Thames’s banks and the sweeping away of the Den is a more proleptic and organic event than the reader has been confronted with in earlier novels. I would be laying myself open to a charge of being mistaken if I attempted to resist the argument that the character of Flinter is a development of both Nancy and the Artful Dodger which we can’t be afraid to recognise takes us into a more terrified Dickens, a more, if you like, Kafkaesque Dickens.’
The interviewer nodded.
‘I understand that the University has already sold the film and television rights of Peter Flowerbuck?’
‘That is not substantially incorrect.’
‘Are you worried that to do this before the manuscript has been officially authenticated might lay you open to future embarrassment, should it prove to be a fake?’
‘As you know, we have taken on a number of new research fellows at St Matthew’s who are working extensively on the text to determine its authenticity-level. They will be running linguistic particles and image-clusters through a computer program which is as reliable as any chemical test.’
‘Authorial fingerprinting?’
‘Authorial is the term often used, fingerprinting, that is far from wrong.’
‘And how confident are you that this is genuine Dickens?’
‘Let me turn that question round and say that I am not confident that it isn’t Dickens.’
‘Let me turn that answer round and say “bullshit”,’ said Adrian.
> ‘Hush!’ said Jenny.
‘Well, I mean. Symphonic visions.’
‘I don’t think it insignificant,’ Anderson continued, ‘that at a time when English departments at my university and hundreds of others are being threatened with cuts, a discovery of pure scholarship like this should attract such attention and validate so completely what has quite properly been perceived as the beleaguered discipline of English studies.’
‘It’s a very lucrative discovery, certainly. How in fact was it made?’
‘I was alerted to the existence of the text by a student of mine from Newnham College. She had been participating in my seminars on Derrida and Sexual Difference and had been pursuing a number of independent lines of enquiry into the Victorian Deviant Ethic. She found the papers in the St Matthew’s College Library hidden amongst old copies of Cornhill magazine.’
‘Did she realise what she had stumbled across?’
‘She was not unaware of its potential lack of insignificance.’
‘I understand that a philologist from your own department, and indeed college, Donald Trefusis, has expressed doubts as to the genuineness of the find?’
‘I believe that I think it of immense value to express doubts. It is because of the Professor’s repeated queries that we have been granted the necessary funding to research the manuscript.’
‘Dr Anderson, many people like myself, who have read Peter Flowerbuck, have been struck by the candour and detail with which sexual activity and the nature of Victorian child-prostitution is described. Do you think Dickens ever intended to publish?’
‘We are currently trawling all biographical source materials for some clue as to the answer to that highly legitimate question. Perhaps I can turn it round, however, and ask, “Would he not have destroyed the manuscript if he never wanted it read?” Yeah?’
‘I see.’
‘I cannot deny myself the right to believe that he left it to be found. We therefore owe it to him to publish now.’
‘It is not of course a completed work. What you have is only a fragment.’
‘There is truth in that remark.’
‘Do you think there is a chance of discovering the rest of the manuscript?’
‘If it exists we are not doubtful of locating the residue.’
‘Dr Anderson, thank you very much indeed. The three currently extant chapters of Peter Flowerbuck, edited and annotated by Tim Anderson, will be available from the Cambridge University Press in October, priced fourteen pounds ninety-five. The BBC serialisation, currently in production, with an ending by Malcolm Bradbury, is due to reach our screens sometime in the spring of nineteen-eighty-one.’