The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  Since then I have been to a crammer’s in Stroud, passed exams and find myself filling in time teaching at a prep school in Norfolk before going off to St Matthew’s College, Cambridge – not quite poacher turned gamekeeper … slave turned slave-master? Something like it. Boy turned man, I suppose.

  My name, as you probably know, is as far from Hugo Bullock as a name can be without actually falling over, but I won’t bother you with it. This is just to wish you well and thank you for a month or two of unsurpassable fun and frolic.

  I hope you are now treating your nostrils as well as you treated

  Your very own

  Hugo Bullock

  There was a knock on the door.

  ‘Please, sir, can I ask a question?’

  ‘Newton, I distinctly heard with my own two ears – these, the ones I put on this morning because they go so well with my eyes – that Mr Annendale gave you permission to go to the library and get a book. I did not hear him give you permission to come to my room.’

  ‘It’s just a quick question …’

  ‘Oh, very well.’

  ‘Is it true, sir, that you and Matron are having an affair?’

  ‘Out, out! Get out! Out before I slash your throat with a knife and hang you dripping with blood from the flag-pole. Out, before I pull your guts from your body and stuff them down your mouth. Out, before I become mildly irritated. Go, hence, begone. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once. Run! run quickly from here, run to the other side of Europe, flee for your life nor give not one backward glance. I never hope to see you again in this world or the next. Never speak to me, never approach me, never advertise your presence to me by the smallest sound, or by the living God that made me I will do such things … I know not what they are but they will be the terrors of the earth. Flee hence, be not here, but somewhere in a vast Elsewhere to which I have no access. Boys who rub me up the wrong way, Newton, come to a sticky end. Be removed, piss off, beraus, get utterly outly out.’

  ‘Thought so.’

  ‘Grr!’

  Adrian flung a book at the hastily closing door, signed the letter and lit a pipe. The snow had started to fall.

  He had no more duties for the day so he decided to do a bit more work on The Aunt That Exploded, a play for the end of term that he had been cajoled into writing.

  If Harvey-Potter was going to play Aunt Bewinda, something would have to be done about preserving his soprano. A definite fissure had appeared in his larynx at breakfast and a tenor Bewinda would be worse than useless. He should talk to Clare about deliberately shrinking the boy’s underpants in the laundry. Anything to keep nature at bay for two months.

  He still had to work on Maxted, the only master who had so far refused to participate.

  ‘You can kick my arse from here to Norwich, Adrian, I’m not going to dress up in shorts for any man living.’

  The principal idea of the play was that boys played grown-ups, parents, aunts, doctors and schoolmasters, and the staff played boys and, in the case of Matron, a little girl.

  ‘Come on Oliver, even the Brigadier has agreed. It’ll be wonderful.’

  ‘If you can tell me in one word what’s wrong with The Mikado?’

  ‘No, can’t do that. “It’s crap” is two words and “It’s complete crap” is three.’

  ‘Of course The Mikado is crap, but it’s good healthy stodgy crap. Your blasted play is either going to be horrible pebbly crap or a great gush of liquid crap.’

  ‘I’ll do all your duties this term. How about that?’

  ‘No you bloody won’t.’

  That hadn’t been such a clever offer. Maxted enjoyed being on duty.

  ‘Well I think you’re a heel and a stinker and I hope that one day you’ll be found out.’

  ‘Found out? What do you mean?’

  ‘Ho hee!’ said Adrian, who knew that everyone lived in fear of being found out.

  But Maxted was not to be moved, which was a nuisance because, set off in shorts and school-cap, his paunch and purple complexion would have been terrifically striking. Perhaps Adrian himself would have to play Bewinda’s nephew. Not ideal casting: he was still closer in age to the boys than to any of the staff.

  But it was a snug problem, the perfect sort of problem for a man in a tweed jacket, sitting in a firelit room with a good briar pipe between his teeth, a glass of Glennfiddich at his elbow and a blizzard whipping up outside, to ponder over. A clean problem for a clean man with a clean mind in the clean countryside.

  He rubbed his fingers against the grain of his stubble and thought.

  All gone. All anger quelled, all desire drained, all thirst slaked, all madness past.

  There would be cricket next term, coaching and umpiring, teaching the young idea how to deal with the ball that goes on with the arm, reading them Browning and Heaney on the lawn when the sun shone and it was too hot to teach indoors. The rest of the summer would be spent discovering Milton and Proust and Tolstoy ready for Cambridge in October where, like Cranmer – but with a bicycle instead of a horse – his mind and thighs would find exercise. A handful of civilised friends, not too close.

  ‘What do you make of that bloke in your college, Healey?’

  ‘He’s hard to get to know. I like him, but he’s private, he’s unfathomable.’

  ‘Detached somehow … almost serene.’

  Then a degree and back here or to another school – his own perhaps. Stay on at Cambridge even … if he got a First.

  All gone.

  He didn’t believe himself for a moment, of course.

  He looked at his reflection in the window. ‘It’s no good trying to fool me, Healey,’ he said, ‘an Adrian always knows when an Adrian is lying.’

  But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian’s lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man’s truths – if other men had truths – and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

  He watched the snow building up against the window and his mind caught the tube to Piccadilly and climbed the steps from the Underground.

  There stood Eros, the boy with the bow poised to shoot, and there stood Adrian, the schoolmaster in tweeds and cavalry twills, looking up at him and slowly shaking his head.

  ‘Of course you know why Eros was put in the Circus in the first place, don’t you?’ he remembered saying to a sixteen-year-old who was sharing his pitch outside the London Pavilion one July evening.

  ‘Named after the Eros Strip Club, was it?’

  ‘Oh that’s close, but I’m afraid I can’t give it you, I’ll have to pass the question over. It was part of a tribute to the Earl of Shaftesbury: a grateful nation honours the man who abolished child labour. Alfred Gilbert, the sculptor, positioned Eros with his bow and arrow aiming up Shaftesbury Avenue.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, fuck all that, there’s a trick over there been eyeing you up for the past five minutes.’

  ‘Had him. Overuses the teeth. He can find someone else to circumcise. The point is, it’s a kind of visual pun, Eros burying his shaft up Shaftesbury Avenue. You see?’

  ‘Then why’s he pointing down Lower Regent Street?’

  ‘He was taken down and cleaned during the war and the fools who put him back up didn’t know buggery ding-dong shit.’

  ‘He could do with cleaning again.’

  ‘I don’t know. I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I’m sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn’t lust after Psyche.’

  ‘He’s still looking this way.’

  ‘His bottom is, at any rate.’

  ‘No, the trick. He’s started cruising me now.’

  ‘I will clear away for you. Too many cocks spoil the brothel. Have him with my blessing. Just don’t come crawling to me with your glans half h
anging off, that’s all.’

  ‘I’ll give him a minute to make up his mind.’

  ‘Do that. I’m bound to wonder, meanwhile, was there any life more futile and perfectly representative than that of Lord Shaftesbury? His own adored son killed in a schoolboy fight at Eton while his national monument daily supervises child labour of a nature and intensity he would never have guessed at.’

  ‘I’m definitely on here. See you later.’

  Adrian dropped a log on the fire and stared into the flames. He was as secure as anyone: a real teacher with a real name, real references and real qualifications. No forgeries or tricks had brought him here, only merit. No one on earth could bang into the room and drag him to judgement. He really was a schoolmaster in a real school, really stirring a real fire in a safe and snug common room that was as real as the winter weather that really raged in the real world outside. He had as much right to pour a finger of ten-year-old malt and puff a soothing pipeful of the ready-rubbed as anyone in England. The grown-up didn’t live who had the power to snatch away the bottle, confiscate the pipe or reduce him to stammered excuses.

  Yet the sparks that spat up the flue spelt Wrigleys and Coke and Toshiba in Piccadilly neon; the escape of steam from the logs hissed a meeting of prefects plotting punishment.

  He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.

  But there again, when he sipped at the whisky his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout ‘Bollocks’ during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies.

  He turned back to his work with a sigh. God could worry about what he was and what he wasn’t. There was the tea-party scene to be written.

  He hadn’t been working for more than ten minutes when there came another knock at the door.

  ‘If that is anyone under the age of thirteen they have my permission to go and drown themselves.’

  The door opened and a cheery face peered round.

  ‘Wotcher, cock, thought I’d come and cadge a drink.’

  ‘My dear Matron, you can’t have run out of Gees linctus again.’

  She came and looked over his shoulder.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘The agony of composition. Got to keep everyone satisfied. I’m preparing a huge part for you.’

  She massaged his neck.

  ‘I can take it.’

  ‘Oh you proud, snorting beauty, how I love you.’

  It was a private joke that the boys had somehow got wind of. She was a thoroughbred filly and he was her trainer. Adrian had started it when he found out that her father bred race-horses for a living. She looked the part too, with a great mane of chestnut hair and dark eyes that she rolled in mock passion when Adrian patted her hindquarters.

  She had come to Chartham as an assistant matron at the age of sixteen and had been there ever since. There were rumours amongst the staff that she was a lesbian, but Adrian put that down to wishful thinking on their part. She was now such an attractive twenty-five-year-old that they had to find some excuse for not desiring her and her liking for jeans and jackets over skirts and blouses made sapphic preferences an obvious escape route for them.

  She had latched onto Adrian as soon as he had arrived.

  ‘She always pretends to pant after new masters,’ Maxted had said. ‘It’s just showing off to the boys to disguise her dykery. Tell her to bog off.’

  But Adrian enjoyed her company: she was brisk and clean. Her breasts were high and handsome, her thighs strong and supple and she was teaching him to drive. Despite the heat of their language they had never come close to anything physical, but the thought beat its wings in the air whenever they were together.

  He watched her wandering around his room, picking things up, examining them and putting them down again in the wrong place.

  ‘She’s restless, she needs a good gallop over the downs,’ he said.

  She went to the window.

  ‘It’s really settling, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The snow.’

  ‘I find it unsettling as a matter of fact. I’m on duty tomorrow and I shall have to find something for the boys to do. The rugger pitch will be four foot under if it carries on at this rate.’

  ‘The school was cut off from the outside world for a whole week in seventy-four.’

  ‘And it’s been cut off ever since.’

  She sat on the bed.

  ‘I’m leaving at the end of the year.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  ‘I’ll have been here nearly ten years. It’s enough. I’ll go home.’

  Every member of staff spoke regularly about leaving at the end of the year. It was their way of showing that they weren’t stuck, that they had a choice. It meant nothing, they always came back.

  ‘But who will spoon out the little darlings’ malt? Who will paint their warts and kiss the place and make it well? Chartham needs you.’

  ‘I mean it, Ade. Clare is fretting in her loose-box.’

  ‘It’s time some stallion was found to cover you, certainly,’ Adrian agreed. ‘The colts here have been very disappointing and the staff are all geldings.’

  ‘Except you.’

  ‘Ah, but I’ve still a few seasons of racing left in me before I get put out. After I’ve won the Cambridge Hurdles my stud fees will be that much higher.’

  ‘You’re not a queer are you, Adrian?’

  He was startled by the question.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I know what I like.’

  ‘And do you like me?’

  ‘Do I like you? I’m flesh and blood aren’t I? How could anyone not be thrilled by your tightly fleshed points, your twitching hocks, your quivering neck, your shining hindquarters, your heaving, shimmering flanks?’

  ‘Then for God’s sake, fuck me. I’m going mad.’

  For all his talk, Adrian had never experienced a human being of another gender before and writhing around with Clare, he was astonished by the strength of her desire. He hadn’t expected that women actually felt the kind of urge and appetite that drove men. Everyone knew, surely, that females went for personality, strength and security and were resigned to the need to be penetrated only if that was the price for keeping the man they loved? That they should arch their backs, spread wide the lips of their sex in hunger and urge him in was something for which he was not prepared. Adrian’s room was at the top of the school and they had locked the door, but he couldn’t help feeling that everyone would be able to hear her squeals and roars of pleasure.

  ‘Bang me, you bastard, bang me hard! Harder! Deeper and harder, you lump of shit. God that’s good.’

  It explained all those jokes about bedsprings. The sex he had taken part in up until now didn’t build up these colossal pounding rhythms. He found himself driving faster and faster and joining in her shouts.

  ‘I … think … that … I’m … about … to … wheeeeeee! … whooooo! … haaaaaaa …’

  He collapsed on her as she thrashed herself calm. Panting and sweating, they wound down together into a kind of breathless quiet.

  She gripped his shoulders.

  ‘You beautiful fucking son of a bitch. My God I needed that. Woof!’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ gasped Adrian, ‘I think I did too.’

  Clare taught him a great deal that term.

  ‘Sex is meaningless,’ she said, ‘if it’s silent a
nd mechanical. You have to think about it and plan it, like a dinner party or a cricket match. I tell you when to put in, how it’s feeling, you tell me what you like, when you’re coming, how you want me to move. Just remember that you have never thought a thought or imagined an act that is so dirty and depraved that I won’t have thought of it thousands of times myself. That’s true of everyone. When we stop talking and joking we’ll know it’s over.’

  Two nights after the last day of term the headmaster and his wife had gone out to a dinner party, so Clare and Adrian found they had the whole school to themselves. It was cold, but they had run naked around the classrooms where she had thrown herself over a desk to be spanked, into the kitchens where they had hurled jam and lard at each other, into the staff common room where he had pumped her up with the football pump, into the boys’ showers where she had urinated over his face and finally into the gymnasium where they had rolled and rolled over the mats, shrieking and slithering and jerking in frenzy.

  He lay looking up at the climbing ropes that hung from the ceiling. During the act all his senses had been suspended, but now it was over he felt the bruise on his shoulder where he had barged into a door, smelt the sour lard and urine and jam that was all over him and heard the hot-water pipes rattling under the floor and the bubbles of wind building up in Clare’s bowels.

  ‘Bath,’ he said. ‘Bath then bed. God I’m going to need these holidays.’

  ‘Stay with me here for a while.’

  It was their one point of disagreement. Adrian had never been able to luxuriate in the afterglow.

  ‘Time for my tub.’

  ‘Why do you always want to have a bath the moment after you’ve made love to me? Why can’t we wriggle in our dirt for a while?’ she said.

  He fought down his customary post-coital irritation and contempt.

  ‘Don’t go looking for something psychological that isn’t there. I have a bath after any kind of strenuous exercise. It doesn’t mean I feel dirty,’ though he did, ‘it doesn’t mean I’m trying to wash you out of my life,’ though he was, ‘it doesn’t mean guilt, shame, repentance or anything like that,’ though it did. ‘It just means I want a bath.’