The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  ‘Queer!’ she shouted after him.

  ‘Lesbian!’ he yelled back.

  When he came back next term, she was gone. Her replacement was a forty-year-old with one breast who most certainly was lesbian, which allowed the rest of the staff the free luxury of finding her irresistibly desirable. They spent their days saying she was a grand old girl and their evenings attempting to coax her down to the pub.

  ‘Your girlfriend has gone, sir,’ said Newton. ‘Whatever are you going to do?’

  ‘I shall devote the rest of my life to beating you into a purée,’ said Adrian. ‘It will help me forget.’

  III

  The morning of the match, Hunt had put a message under Adrian’s toast as usual. This time it was a large heart-shaped piece of paper covered in kisses. This was going too far.

  In theory, the boy on clearing duty should be the one to make masters’ toast, but Hunt had long since decided that no one but he was going to make Adrian’s. He fought everyone for the right. Whenever Adrian came down there would be two pieces on his side plate, and under them would be a message, usually nothing more dreadful than ‘Your toast, sir …’ or ‘Each slice hand-grilled the traditional way by heritage craftsmen’. But love-hearts were too much.

  Adrian looked round the hall to where Hunt was sitting. The boy pinkened and gave a small wave.

  ‘What’s Hunt the Thimble given you today, sir?’ asked Rudder, the prefect next to Adrian. Hunt was known as the Thimble for the obvious reason and because he was said to be rather under-endowed.

  ‘Oh nothing, nothing … the usual drivel.’

  ‘I bet it isn’t, sir. We told him that it was Valentine’s Day today.’

  ‘But Valentine’s Day, Rudder dearest, falls on February the fourteenth and lies there until the fifteenth of that month. Unless I have become so bored by your anserine conversation and fallen asleep for four months, this is currently the month of June we are enjoying. What else, after all, could explain your cricket whites?’

  ‘I know, sir. But we told him Valentine’s Day was today. That’s the joke.’

  ‘Ah! Well, if the Queen can have two birthdays, why cannot Hunt the Thimble be granted the right to celebrate two Valentine’s Days?’

  ‘He told me,’ said Rudder, ‘that if he didn’t get one back from you, he was going to hang himself.’

  ‘He said what?’ said Adrian, going white.

  ‘Sir?’

  Adrian grabbed Rudder’s arm.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Sir, you’re hurting! It was just a joke.’

  ‘You find the idea of suicide amusing, do you?’

  ‘Well no, sir, but it was just …’

  There was a silence. The boys at his table looked down at their cereal bowls. It wasn’t like Adrian to be angry or violent.

  ‘I’m sorry my angels,’ he said, with an attempt at a laugh. ‘No sleep last night. Working on the play. Either that or I’m turning mad. It was a full moon you know, and there’s a history of lycanthropy in my family. Uncle Everard turns into a wolf every time he hears the Crossroads theme tune.’

  Rudder giggled. The uncomfortable moment passed.

  ‘Well, looks like a fine day today. I vote we load a crate of Coke onto the minibus before we go. You know what Narborough match teas are like.’

  A mighty cheer now. The other tables looked across enviously. Healey’s lot was always having fun.

  *

  The atmosphere in the minibus was tense. Adrian sat with them and tried to appear sunny and confident. It was no good his telling them to remember that it was only a game when he was as nervous as a kitten himself.

  ‘We’ll take a look at the pitch,’ he told Hooper, the captain, ‘and we’ll decide then. But unless it’s decidedly moist, put them in the field if you win the toss. “Knock ’em up, bowl ’em out” … it never fails.’

  He was pleased with what he had done to the cricket eleven. He had never been much of a player himself but he knew and loved the game well enough to be able to make a difference to a schoolboy team. Everyone had agreed, watching his first eleven play a warm-up match against a scratch Rest of the School side, that he had done a tremendous job in two weeks.

  But now they faced their first real opposition and he was worried that against another school they would fall to pieces. Last year, Hooper told him, Chartham Park was the laughing-stock of the whole area.

  The bus whined up the Narborough driveway.

  ‘Who’s been here before?’

  ‘I have, sir, for a rugger match,’ said Rudder.

  ‘Why are other schools always so forbidding? They seem infinitely bigger and more serious and their boys all look at least forty years old.’

  ‘It’s not a bad place, sir. Quite friendly.’

  ‘Friendly? The maws of the heffalump are open wide, but don’t believe that it betokens friendliness. Trust no one, speak to no one. As soon as you’ve heard this communication, eat it.’

  There was a boy in a Narborough blazer waiting to show the team where to go. Adrian watched them stream off to the back of the house.

  ‘See you there, my honeys. Don’t accept any hand-rolled cigarettes from them.’

  An old master bustled out to welcome Adrian.

  ‘You’re Chartham Park, yes?’

  ‘That’s right. Adrian Healey.’

  ‘Staveley. I’m not Cricket. Our man’s giving the team a pep talk. It’s morning break at the moment. Come through to the staff room and savage a Chelsea bun with us.’

  The staff room was baronial and crowded with what seemed to Adrian like a greater number of masters than Chartham had boys.

  ‘Ah, Chartham’s new blood!’ boomed the headmaster. ‘Come to give us a spanking, have you?’

  ‘Oh well, I don’t know about that, sir,’ Adrian shook his hand. ‘They tell me that you’re hot stuff. Double figures would satisfy us.’

  ‘That false modesty doesn’t do, you know. I can smell your confidence. You’re St Matthew’s bound, I understand?’

  ‘That’s right, sir.’

  ‘Well then, you’ll be pleased to meet my Uncle Donald who’s staying here until Cambridge term begins. He’ll be your Senior Tutor at St Matthew’s of course. Where is he? Uncle Donald, meet Adrian Healey, Chartham Park’s new secret weapon, he’s joining you at Michaelmas. Adrian Healey, Professor Trefusis.’

  A short man with white hair and a startled expression turned and surveyed Adrian.

  ‘Healey? Yes indeed, Healey. How do you do?’

  ‘How do you do, Professor?’

  ‘Healey, that’s right. Quite right. Your entrance paper was very encouraging. Pregnant with promise, gravid with wit.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And you’re a cricketer?’

  ‘Well, not really. I’ve been trying to coach a bit, though.’

  ‘Well best of luck, my dear. My nephew Philip has a youth like yourself on the staff – he’ll be going to Trinity – who is said to have done much with the Narborough side. Quite the young thaumaturge, they tell me.’

  ‘Oh dear. I think that means we can expect to be marmalised. I was hoping Narborough would have sunk into over-confidence.’

  ‘Here he comes now, you’ll be umpiring together. Let me introduce you.’

  Adrian turned to see a young man in a cricket-sweater making his way towards them.

  It had to happen one day. It was bound to have done. Adrian always imagined that it would be in the street or on a train. But here? Today? In this place?

  ‘I already know Hugo Cartwright,’ he said. ‘We were at school together.’

  ‘Hello, Adrian,’ said Hugo. ‘Ready to be pounded into the dust?’

  They put on their white coats and walked down to the ground.

  ‘What sort of a wicket have you got for us?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘Not bad, slight leg-to-off slope from the pavilion end.’

  ‘Got any bowlers who can use it?’

  ‘We’v
e a little leg-spinner I have hopes for.’

  Adrian winced: he hadn’t properly inoculated his team against leg-spin. It could run through a prep-school batting line-up like cholera through a slum.

  ‘Does he have a googlie?’

  ‘Ha-ha!’ said Hugo.

  ‘Bastard.’

  He looked different but the same. Adrian’s eyes could see the real Cartwright not too far beneath the surface. Behind the strengthened features he saw the smoother lines of the boy, within the firmer stride he read the former grace. His memory could scrub off four years of tarnish and restore the shining original. But no one else would have been able to.

  If Clare had been with him and he had said, ‘What do you think of that man there?’ she would probably have wrinkled her nose and replied, ‘Okay, I suppose. But I always think blond men look sinister.’

  Everyone has their time, Adrian thought. You can meet people of thirty and know that when their hair is grey and their face lined, they will look wonderfully at their best. That Professor, for one, Donald Trefusis. He must have looked ridiculous as a teenager, but now he has come into his own. Others, whose proper age was twenty-five, grew old grotesquely, their baldness and thickening waistlines an affront to what they once were. There were men like that on the staff at Chartham, fifty or sixty years old, but whose true characters were only discernible in hints of some former passion and vigour that would come out when they were excited. The headmaster, on the other hand, was a pompous forty-one, waiting to ripen into a delicious sixty-five. What Adrian’s own proper age was, he had no idea. Sometimes he felt he had left himself behind at school, at other times he thought he would be at his best in tubby and contented middle age. But Hugo … Hugo he knew would always be growing away from his fourteen-year-old perfection: the clues to his former beauty would become harder to find as each year passed, the golden hair would seem pale and weak at thirty, the liquid blue of the eyes would harden and set at thirty-five.

  Summer’s lease hath all too short a date, Hugo old boy, thought Adrian, but your eternal summer shall not fade. In my imagination you are immortal. The man walking beside me is merely The Picture of Hugo Cartwright, ageing and coarsening: I have the real Hugo in my head and he will live as long as I do.

  ‘I think we’ll bat first, sir,’ the Narborough captain announced after winning the toss.

  ‘That’s it, Malthouse,’ said Hugo. ‘Knock ’em up and bowl ’em out.’

  ‘Trust me to lose the toss,’ said Hooper. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Don’t be a dafty-trousers,’ said Adrian. ‘It’s a good wicket to bat second on, it’ll dry out all through the afternoon.’

  He threw the ball to Rudder, Chartham’s opening bowler, before taking his position at the stumps.

  ‘Remember, Simon,’ he said, ‘straight and on a length, that’s all you have to do.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Rudder, swallowing.

  The ground was in a kind of valley, with the looming Gothic of Narborough Hall on one rise and the church and village of Narborough on another. The pavilion was whitewashed and thatched, the weather perfect with only the faintest of breezes luffing the fielders’ shirtsleeves. The grim seriousness of the children preparing to play, the detached amusement of Hugo at square leg, the church clock chiming mid-day, the round circles of fine gang-mown cuttings in the outfield, the sun winking off the roller by the sight-screen, the distant clatter of spiked shoes on the pavilion concrete, the open blue of the wide Norfolk sky, the six pebbles in the hand of Adrian’s outstretched arm, this whole monstrous illusion froze, while to Adrian the world seemed to hold its breath as if uncertain that such a picture could last. This fantasy of England that old men took with them to their death-beds, this England without factories and sewers or council houses, this England of leather and wood and flannel, this England circumscribed by a white boundary and laws that said that each team shall field eleven men and each man shall bat, this England of shooting-sticks, weather-vanes and rectory teas, it was like Cartwright’s beauty, he thought, a momentary vision glimpsed for a second in an adolescent dream, then dispersed like steam into the real atmosphere of traffic-jams, serial murderers, prime ministers and Soho rent. But its spectral haze was sharper and clearer than the glare of the everyday and, against all evidence, was taken to be the only reality, its vapour trapped and distilled in the mind, its image, scents and textures bottled and laid down against the long, lonely melancholy of adulthood.

  Adrian brought down his arm.

  ‘Play!’

  Rudder bowled a ball of full length and the batsman swept his bat elegantly forward in defence. But the ball had already gone through him and Rice the wicket-keeper was leaping in glee. The batsman looked round in disbelief to see his off-stump lying on the ground. He returned to the pavilion shaking his head, as if Rudder had been guilty of some appalling social blunder. There was a liquid spatter of applause from the boundary. The school were in lessons and wouldn’t be watching until after lunch.

  Adrian tossed a pebble into his right hand and smiled across at Hugo.

  ‘I got him, sir!’ said Rudder, polishing the ball against his leg. ‘I bloody got him. Golden bloody duck.’

  ‘You beat him for pace, old love,’ said Adrian, drawing him aside. ‘The next batsman will be scared, bowl him two very quick ones just outside the line of off-stump and then a slower ball on middle, but disguise it.’

  ‘All right, sir.’

  Adrian wondered if it was a breach of etiquette for an umpire to coach during play. But then he saw Hugo, who had been replacing the bails at the other end, whispering urgently to the incoming number three. Very well then, they would fight it out between them, like First World War generals.

  Rudder did as he was told for the first two balls, letting them fly at the new batsman, who played and missed at the first and left the second alone. He came thundering up for the third ball, grunting and stamping like a buffalo. The batsman quaked.

  ‘Subtle disguise I don’t think,’ Adrian said to himself.

  The ball was let go of early and seemed to float in at half the speed. The batsman had nearly completed his defensive stroke by the time it got to him, with the result that the ball was knocked from his bat gently back to Rudder who threw it up in the air with a yell of triumph.

  ‘Caught and bowled! And hast thou slain the number three? Come to my arms, my beamish boy. Two for none, oh frabjous day, calloo callay!’

  Hugo was furious at lunch. His side had been bowled out for fourteen runs. He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘I’ll kill them!’ he said. ‘I’ll castrate them and hang their scrotums from the score-board.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Adrian. ‘We’ll probably be all out for ten.’

  ‘I’m going to replace the whole team with boys from the scholarship Sixth. At least they’ll have some brains. What good is ball sense without common sense? I mean, trying to square cut a straight half-volley! It makes me want to throw up.’

  Adrian was sure that he himself wouldn’t sulk quite as gracelessly if it had been his side that had been dismissed for fourteen. But then Cartwright had always been ambitious. He remembered the time they had walked back from Biffen’s tea-party and Cartwright had talked about going to Cambridge. That had been the same day that Trotter had hanged himself.

  Adrian smothered a sudden desire to rap his spoon on the table, call for quiet and announce, ‘This man opposite me here, my fellow umpire, I thought you might like to know that he sucked me off one night in a hotel when he thought I was asleep.’

  ‘Funny old game,’ he remarked instead.

  ‘Look,’ said Hugo. ‘If you do cream us straight after lunch, how would you feel about making it a two-innings match?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘It’ll go down as your victory of course, but we do need the practice.’

  ‘All right,’ said Adrian. ‘I’ll check with my team first.’

  Hooper was doubtful.

  ‘We’ve neve
r played two innings before, sir. What happens when we pass their first score?’

  ‘We make as many runs as possible before we’re all out.’

  ‘Sir, suppose they can’t get us all out?’

  ‘That’s when you have to declare, dear. Make sure you judge it so that there’s time to put them in again, bowl them out and then pass their total before stumps. We don’t want a draw.’

  ‘When are stumps?’

  ‘Narborough’s Mr Cartwright and I agreed on seven o’clock. I’ll have to ring the school and check with the headmaster. You’ll be late for bed of course, but it’ll all be the most super-duper fun.’

  The whole school turned out to watch after lunch. As Adrian had feared, Narborough’s leg-spinner, Ellis, completely baffled his boys. Once they had got used to the ball bouncing and spinning one way, he would send down top-spin and undetectable googlies that made the ball fly off to the waiting close field. Chartham was all out for thirty-nine after an hour and a half of tortured embarrassment. Hugo looked very smug as Narborough prepared for their second innings.

  ‘We’re only twenty-five ahead,’ said Adrian.

  ‘That’s all right, isn’t it, sir?’ said Rudder. ‘If we get them out for fourteen again we’ll have won by an innings and eleven runs.’

  ‘If.’

  The Narborough openers stalked to the wicket looking determined and confident. They were playing in front of their home crowd now and had experienced the satisfaction of seeing the Chartham team writhe.

  Rudder’s first ball was a wide. Adrian signalled it, with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Rudder with a grin.

  His next ball was driven to the mid-off boundary, the next was hooked for six. The fourth, a no-ball, was late-cut for two which became six after four overthrows had been added. The next two were both glanced for four. Rudder turned to Adrian to collect his sweater.

  ‘Two more balls yet, Simon.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘There was a wide and a no-ball in there. Two more balls.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, sir. I forgot.’

  The next two were each smacked for four over Rudder’s head.