The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  ‘Nothing, nothing.’

  ‘He’s the old fart that Adrian loves,’ Hugo confided to Jenny and the rest of the room. ‘I used to be the old fart that he loves. Now it’s Trefusisisisis.’

  ‘That’s right, Hugo, time for bye-byes.’

  ‘Really?’ said Jenny. ‘I thought I was the old fart he loved.’

  ‘Adrian loves everybody, didn’t you know? He even loves Lucy.’

  ‘And who the hell is Lucy?’

  ‘Oh my goodness, is that the time? Jenny, if we’re going to hit Newnham tonight we should …’

  ‘Lucy is his dog. He loves Lucy.’

  ‘That’s right. I love Lucy. Starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Now I really think …’

  ‘Do you know what he did once? In Harrogate. He pretended to …’

  ‘Oh shit, he’s about to throw,’ said Gary.

  Adrian caught the brunt of the vomit, which, in an unusual fit of humility, he rather thought he deserved.

  III

  ‘So let me see if I understood you, Dr Anderson.’ Menzies removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose like a rep actor in a court-room drama. ‘Not one word, not one syllable of this document is in fact the work of Charles Dickens?’

  ‘It certainly looks as if the paper and writing materials are modern. The handwriting however …’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, if the ink is twentieth-century how can the manuscript be in Dickens’s own hand? Or are we now to authorise research grants that will establish the use of the retractable biro in Victorian Britain? Perhaps you even believe that Dickens is still alive?’

  ‘I think I should remind the governing body,’ said Clinton-Lacey, ‘that the film is due to be premièred next week. Some kind of statement is going to have to be made.’

  ‘The college will be a laughing-stock.’

  ‘Yes indeed,’ said Trefusis. ‘Sketches on Not The Nine O’Clock News, a cartoon by Marc. Calamitous.’

  ‘Well it’s your department, Donald,’ said Menzies. ‘Rather than sit back and enjoy this cataclysm, why don’t you come up with a solution?’

  Trefusis stubbed out his cigarette.

  ‘Well now, that is precisely what I have taken the liberty of doing,’ he said. ‘With your permission I shall read a statement that the press might be offered without too much embarrassment.’

  Everyone around the table murmured assent. Trefusis took a piece of paper from his satchel.

  ‘“Using a linguistic analysis program pioneered by the English faculty in collaboration with the Department of Computing Science,”’ he read, ‘“Dr Tim Anderson, Fellow of St Matthew’s College and Lecturer in English at the University, has refined and perfected techniques which have allowed him to determine precisely which parts of the play The Two Noble Kinsmen were written by Shakespeare and which by Fletcher.”’

  ‘Er … I have?’ asked Tim Anderson.

  ‘Yes, Tim, you have.’

  ‘What on earth has Shakespeare got to do with it?’ cried Menzies. ‘We are talking about …’

  ‘“Comparing textual samples of known Shakespeare against the writings of the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe, he is also in a position to prove that all the plays of the Shakespearean canon are the work of one hand, William Shakespeare’s, and that Oxford, Bacon and Marlowe are responsible for none of it. There are, however, some intriguing passages in three of the plays which would appear not to be by Shakespeare. Dr Anderson and his team are working on them now and should soon have positive results. An interesting by-product of this important work is the discovery that the novel Peter Flowerbuck is not by Charles Dickens, but is almost certainly the work of a twentieth-century writer. There is evidence, however, that the story is based on an original Dickens plot. Dr Anderson’s team is following up this suggestion with great energy.” I think that should meet the case.’

  ‘Ingenious, Donald,’ said Clinton-Lacey. ‘Quite ingenious.’

  ‘You’re too kind.’

  ‘I don’t see what’s so ingenious about it. Why bring Shakespeare in?’

  ‘He’s diverting attention, Garth,’ Clinton-Lacey explained. ‘Bring out the name Shakespeare and it’s even bigger copy than Dickens.’

  ‘But all this guff about Dr Anderson working on bits of Shakespeare and the plot lines being original Dickens? What’s that about?’

  ‘Well you see,’ said Trefusis. ‘It shows that we are currently researching all this important material, that there may be something in Peter Flowerbuck after all.’

  ‘But there isn’t!’

  ‘We know that, but the newspapers don’t. In a couple of months’ time the whole thing will be forgotten. If they do make enquiries about our progress we can say that Dr Anderson is still working on the problem. I’m sure Tim will be able to bemuse the press.’

  ‘He will be the one to make the announcement then?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Trefusis. ‘I have nothing to do with the affair.’

  ‘I’m unsure as to what the tension between the ethical boundaries and the margins of pragmatism might announce themselves to be in a situation which …’ Anderson began.

  ‘You see? Tim will do splendidly. His is the only major European language I still find myself utterly unable to comprehend. The press will be bored. It isn’t quite enough of a hoax story to excite them and is too rigorous and scientific to have any human interest.’

  ‘But all this means that we will have to keep funding the extra staff,’ Menzies complained. ‘For appearances’ sake.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Trefusis dreamily, ‘there is that drawback of course.’

  ‘That’s outrageous.’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. As long as they’re kept busy lecturing, teaching undergraduates and authenticating documents that will be sent to us from all over the world – now that we are acknowledged as the leading university for authorial fingerprinting – I’m sure we’ll find a use for them. They may even pay their way.’

  IV

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Gary. ‘You’ve got to be lying.’

  ‘I wish I were,’ said Adrian. ‘No, that’s not true, I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.’

  ‘You’re telling me that you sold your arse down the Dilly?’

  ‘Why not? Someone’s got to. Anyway it wasn’t my arse exactly.’

  Gary paced up and down the room while Adrian watched him. He didn’t know why he had told him. He supposed because he had been stung once too often by the accusation that he had no idea what the real world was like.

  It had started when Adrian had mentioned that he was seriously considering marrying Jenny.

  ‘Do you love her?’

  ‘Look Gary. I’m twenty-two years old. I got here by the skin of my teeth, because I awoke from the bad dream of adolescence in the nick of time. Every morning for the next, God knows, fifty years, I’m going to have to get out of bed and participate in the day. I simply do not trust myself to be able to do that on my own. I’ll need someone to get up for.’

  ‘But do you love her?’

  ‘I am magnificently prepared for the long littleness of life. There is diddley-squat for me to look forward to. Zilch, zero, zip-all, sweet lipperty-pipperty nothing. The only thought that will give me the energy to carry on is that someone has a life which would be diminished by my departure from it.’

  ‘Yes, but do you love her?’

  ‘You’re beginning to sound like Olivier in The Marathon Man, “Is it safe? Is it safe?” “Sure it’s safe. It’s real safe.” “Is it safe?” “No, it’s not safe. It’s incredibly unsafe.” “Is it safe?” How the hell do I know?’

  ‘You don’t love her.’

  ‘Oh piss off, Gary. I don’t love anyone, anything, or anybody. Well, “anyone” and “anybody” are the same, but I can’t think of a third “any”. Which reminds me … that bloody Martini advert, it’s bugged me for years. “Any time, any place, anywhere.” What the fuck difference is there between any p
lace and anywhere? Some advertising copywriter was paid thousands for that piece of rubbish.’

  ‘This is a change of subject on a cosmic scale. You don’t love her, do you?’

  ‘I just said. I don’t love anyone, anything or any body, any time, any place, anywhere. Who does?’

  ‘Jenny does.’

  ‘Women are different, you know that.’

  ‘I do as well.’

  ‘Men are different too.’

  ‘Gay men, you mean.’

  ‘I cannot believe I am having this conversation. You think I’m like Emma, don’t you? “Adrian Healey, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-three years in the world with very little to disturb or vex him.”’

  ‘Distress or vex, I think you’ll find. It’s as good a description as any.’

  ‘Really? Well, I may have missed some of Jane Austen’s subtler hints, but I don’t think Emma Woodhouse spent part of her seventeenth year as a harlot in Piccadilly. I haven’t read it for a couple of years of course, and some of the obliquer references could have passed over my head. Miss Austen also seems to fight very shy of describing Emma’s time in chokey on remand for possession of cocaine. Again I’m perfectly prepared to concede that she did and that I have simply failed to pick up the clues.’

  ‘What the fuck are you going on about?’

  And Adrian had told him something of his life between school and Cambridge.

  Gary was still indignant. ‘You plan to marry Jenny without telling her any of this?’

  ‘Don’t be so bourgeois, my dear. It doesn’t suit you at all.’

  Adrian was growing disillusioned with Gary. He had started on his History of Art, or History O Fart, as Adrian liked to call it, at the beginning of the year and ever since he had begun to evolve into something else. Bondage trousers had given way to second-hand tweed jackets with Hermès silk flourishing from the breast pockets. The hair returned to its natural dark, slicked back with KY jelly; knives and forks dangled no more from the lobes. The Damned and The Clash were less likely to blast across the court from the rooms now than Couperin and Bruckner.

  ‘It only needs a moustache for you to look like Roy Strong,’ Adrian had told him once, but Gary hadn’t been moved. He wasn’t going to be the world’s little piece of pet rough any more and that was that. And now he was lecturing Adrian on the ethics of personal relations.

  ‘Anyway, why should I tell her? What difference would it make?’

  ‘Why should you marry her? What difference would it make?’

  ‘Oh let’s not go round in circles. I’ve tried to tell you. I’ve done all my living. There’s nothing to look forward to. Do I go into advertising? Do I teach? Do I apply to the BBC? Do I write plays and become the voice of the Bland Young Man generation? Do I consider journalism? Do I go to an acting school? Do I have a shot at industry? The only justification for my existence is that I am loved. Whether or not I like it, I am responsible for Jenny and that is something to get up in the morning for.’

  ‘So it’s a life of sacrifice. You’re afraid that if you don’t marry her, she’ll top herself? I hate to wound your vanity but people don’t behave like that.’

  ‘Oh don’t they? Don’t people kill themselves?’

  Jenny entered without knocking.

  ‘Hiya, bum-holes, I cleared your pigeon-holes on the way in. Exciting jiffy-bag for you, big boy. Could it be the clitoral exciter we ordered?’

  ‘Morning toast more like,’ said Gary, taking the package and passing it over.

  Adrian opened it while Gary explained to Jenny the history of Toast By Post.

  ‘You taught a boy two years ago and he still has this crush on you?’

  ‘His faithful little heart overflows with love.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Adrian. ‘It was never more than an elaborate joke. If anything the parcels mock me.’

  ‘Do you think he wanks into them before he seals them up?’

  ‘Gary!’ Jenny was shocked.

  ‘As in “I’m coming in a jiffy”, you mean? No, I do not, though I grant you the toast is a bit soggy. What else have we? A little pot of apricot jam, a pat of butter, a note which says, “And Conradin made himself another piece of toast …”’

  ‘That boy is weird.’

  ‘Who’s Conradin?’ Jenny asked.

  ‘Reach down my index, Watson, and look under “C”. Dear me, what villainy is grouped under this letter alone! There’s Callaghan, the politician to whose door we traced what you in your memoirs gave the somewhat fanciful title the “Winter of Discontent”, Watson. Here’s Callow, the second most dangerous actor in London, any one of whose grimaces may be fatal, Lewis Collins, Charlie Chester, Leslie Crowther of dread memory, Marti Caine, what a catalogue of infamy is here … but no Conradin. Peter Conrad, who invented opera, William Conrad, whose Cannon was a Quinn Martin Production, but no Conradin.’

  ‘I think it’s from a Saki short story,’ said Gary. ‘Sredni Vashtar, the polecat.’

  ‘Oh yes, you’re quite right. Or was he a ferret?’

  ‘And what’s the relevance to you?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘Well, there we have to peer into the dark, dripping mind of Hunt the Thimble. The chances are that it is simply a literary reference to toast, and he is fast running out of those. But there could be a Meaning.’

  ‘Conradin was a boy who had a horrible, repressive aunt,’ said Gary. ‘So he prayed to Sredni Vashtar, his polecat …’

  ‘Or ferret.’

  ‘He prayed to his polecat or ferret and his prayers were answered. Sredni Vashtar killed the aunt.’

  ‘And meanwhile Conradin calmly made himself another piece of toast.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jenny. ‘The polecat is a kind of phallic symbol, do we think?’

  ‘Honestly, dear,’ said Gary, ‘you’re so obsessed, you’d think a penis was phallic.’

  ‘Well Sredni Vashtar is a monster from the Id, at the very least,’ said Adrian. ‘The dark, hot-breathed stink of the animal that Conradin would one day release from its dark hiding-place to wreak its revenge on the chintz and teacups of his aunt’s drawing-room life.’

  ‘Do you think this boy is trying to tell you something?’

  ‘Perhaps his thimble is a thimble no more, but a long, furry savage beast that wriggles and spits and mauls aunts. I’ll write and ask him.’

  He looked through the rest of his post. A cheque from his mother was always welcome, a cheque from Uncle David for five hundred pounds even more so. He slipped it quickly into his jacket pocket. Reminders that Billy Graham was in Cambridge and would preach in Great St Mary’s were always monumentally unwelcome, as were invitations to hear Acis and Galatea played on original instruments.

  ‘But not sung,’ he suggested, looking through the rest of his mail, ‘on original voices. I suppose in two hundred years’ time they’ll be giving Beatles concerts on ancient Marshall … oh and a letter from old Biffo, bless him.’

  Biffen was the only master from school with whom Adrian stayed in touch. The man was so fluffy and white and decent and had taken so much pleasure in the news of Adrian’s scholarship to St Matthew’s which had somehow filtered through to the school the year before, that it would have been a positive cruelty not to write to him from time to time to let him know how it was all going.

  He glanced through the letter. Biffen was full of the news of the Dickens manuscript.

  ‘Donald writes me that there may be some doubt about it. I do hope not.’

  ‘I’d forgotten Biffo knew Trefusis,’ said Adrian, laying the letter aside. ‘Hello! What have we here?’

  There was a crumpled handwritten note for him. ‘Please come to tea at C5, Great Court, Trinity. Alone. Hugo.’

  ‘How is Hugo?’ asked Jenny. ‘I haven’t seen much of him since Flowerbuck.’

  ‘I remember him being rather naff in Bridget’s production of Sexual P
erversity In Chicago,’ said Gary. ‘He kept forgetting his lines and tripping over. He hasn’t been in anything since.’

  Adrian put the note down and yawned.

  ‘He’s probably been swotting for his Part One’s. He was always that kind of creep. Hand me Justin and Miroslav.’

  *

  Adrian noticed that the permanent puddle in the passageway between King’s and St Catharine’s had iced over. Spring was having to make a fight of it. He wrapped Miroslav, his cashmere scarf, closer round him as he stepped out into the icy gale that blasted along King’s Parade. They used to say that Cambridge was the first stopping place for the wind that swept down from the Urals: in the thirties that was as true of the politics as the weather.

  Adrian wondered whether he mightn’t become political himself. Always one to walk the other way from trends, he sensed that left-wingery was about to become very unfashionable. Long hair was out, flared jeans were out, soon there would be no more cakes and ale, canapés and Sancerre at best, Ryvita and mineral water at worst. Trefusis complained that the modern undergraduate was a cruel disappointment to him.

  ‘They’re all getting firsts and married these days, if you’ll forgive the syllepsis,’ he had said once. ‘Decency, discipline and dullness. There’s no lightness of touch any more, no irresponsibility. Do you remember that damning description of Leonard Bast in Howards End? “He had given up the glory of the animal for a tail-coat and a set of ideas.” Change tail-coat to pin-stripe and you have modern Cambridge. There’s no lack of respect today, that’s what I miss.’

  As Adrian hurried past the Senate House he noticed two old men standing outside Bowes and Bowes. He put an extra spring in his step, a thing he often did when walking near the elderly. He imagined old people would look at his athletic bounce with a misty longing for their own youth. Not that he was trying to show off or rub salt into the wounds of the infirm, he really believed he was offering a service, an opportunity for nostalgia, like whistling the theme tune from Happidrome or spinning a Diabolo.

  He skipped past them with carefree ease, missed his footing and fell to the ground with a thump. One of the old men helped him up.

  ‘You all right, lad?’