The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  Trotter shifted uncomfortably.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell us this, you know.’

  ‘No, no, I want to. She had been, as I say, drinking all afternoon and she suddenly howled, “Ten o’clock! It’s ten o’fucking clock! Why doesn’t he come? Why in God’s name doesn’t he come?” Something along those lines.

  ‘I went into the kitchen and looked at her face all swollen, her tear-stained and mascara-blotched cheeks and her trembling lip and I remember thinking, “She’s like Shelley Winters but without the talent.” Don’t know why a thought like that should come to me, but it did. I turned back to the telly – couldn’t bear to look at her like that – and said, “He’s working, Mother. You know he’s working.”

  ‘“Working?” She shrieked her stinking breath right into my face. “Working! Oh that’s very good. Screwing that cunt of a lab assistant is what he’s doing. The little bitch. I’ve seen her … with her stupid white coat and her stupid white teeth. Little bitch whore!”’

  Tom and Trotter both stared at Adrian in disbelief as he screeched out the words, but his eyes were closed and he didn’t seem to be aware of them.

  ‘She really could scream, my mother. I thought her voice would fracture with the violence of it, but in fact it was my own which cracked. “You should go to bed, Mother,” I said.

  ‘“Bed! He’s the one who’s in fucking bed,” she giggled, and she pulled at the bottle and the last of the vodka just dribbled down her mouth and mixed with the tears that ran down the folds of her fat face. She burped and tried to jam the bottle into the waste-hole of the waste-disposal thing, the thingummy.’

  ‘Garburator,’ said Pigs Trotter. ‘I think they’re called Garburators.’

  ‘Garburator, that’s it. She tried to jam the bottle down the Garburator.

  ‘“I’m going to catch them at their little game,” she chanted – she put on a kind of sing-song voice whenever she was pissed, it was one of the signs that she was really gone – “That’s what I’m going to do. Where are the keys?’

  ‘“Mother, you can’t drive!” I said. “Just wait, he’ll be back soon. You see.”

  ‘“Where are the keys? Where are the fucking car keys?”

  ‘Well, I knew exactly where they were. In the hall, on the table, and I ran for them and stuffed them into my mouth. God knows why. That really got her going.

  ‘“Come here you little bastard, give me those keys!”

  ‘I said, “Mother, you can’t drive like this, just leave it, will you?”

  ‘And then … then she picked up a vase from off the table and flung it at me. Broke on the side of my head and sent me flying against the foot of the stairs where I tripped and fell. See that scar, just there?’

  Adrian parted his hair and showed Trotter and Tom a small white scar.

  ‘Five stitches. Anyway, there was blood all running down my face and she was shaking me and slapping my face, left and right, left and right.

  ‘“Will you give me those fucking keys?” she kept screaming, shaking me on every syllable. I sprawled there, I was crying I don’t mind telling you, really wailing. “Please, Mother, you can’t go out, you can’t. Please!”’

  Adrian stopped and looked around.

  ‘Dare we risk a cigarette, do you think?’

  Tom lit three at once.

  ‘Go on!’ said Pigs Trotter. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Adrian inhaling deeply, ‘what Mother hadn’t seen was that the moment the vase hit me, the car keys had shot out of me like a clay-pigeon from a trap. She thought I still had them in my mouth so she started to try and wrench it open, you know, like a vet trying to give a pill to a dog.

  ‘“So the little bugger’s swallowed them has he?” she said.

  ‘I shouted back, “Yes, I’ve swallowed them! I’ve swallowed them and you can’t get them back! So … so just forget it.” But like a prat of a heroine in a Hammer horror film I couldn’t help looking round for them myself, so of course she followed my eyes, crawled across the hallway and swooped on them. Then she was off. I kept shouting at her to come back. I heard the scrunch on the gravel as she drove away and then – again like some git in a film – I fainted.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Pigs Trotter.

  ‘She killed a family of four as well as herself,’ said Adrian. ‘My father, who had never had an unfaithful thought in his life, has still not really recovered. She was a bitch, my mother. A real bitch.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘Thing is, Ade, you may have forgotten, but I met your mother last term. Tall woman with a wide smile.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Adrian. ‘So you did. Oh well, it was a good try anyway.’ He stood and flicked his cigarette behind a gravestone.

  Trotter stared at him.

  ‘You mean,’ he said. ‘You mean that you made that up?’

  ‘’Fraid so,’ said Adrian.

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘Well my father’s a professor, that bit’s true.’

  ‘You fucking shitbag,’ said Trotter, tears filling his eyes. ‘You fucking shitbag!’ He stumbled away, choking with tears. Adrian watched him go with surprise.

  ‘What’s the matter with Pigs? He must have known it was a lie as soon as I began.’

  ‘Oh nothing,’ said Tom, turning his large brown eyes on Adrian. ‘His mother and two brothers were killed in a car crash three years ago, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh no! No! You’re kidding!’

  ‘Yes I am, actually.’

  An MCC Tie sat down next to a Powder Blue Safari Suit at a window table in the Café Bazaar. White Shirts with Black Waistcoats hurried to and fro, the change jingling in their leather pouches.

  ‘Herr Ober,’ called the MCC Tie.

  ‘Mein Herr?’

  ‘Zwei Kaffee mit Schlag, bitte. Und Sachertorte. Zweimal.’

  The waiter executed a trim Austrian bow and departed.

  The Powder Blue Safari Suit mopped his brow.

  ‘No exchange was made,’ he said.

  ‘Well now,’ said the MCC Tie. ‘Odysseus will certainly have got hold of the documents and will be preparing to take them out of Salzburg. He must be followed and relieved of them.’

  ‘If the Trojans are prepared to kill Patrochlus in broad daylight …’

  ‘They won’t dare harm Odysseus.’

  ‘He has a companion, you know. A young Englishman.’

  The MCC Tie smiled.

  ‘I’m fully aware of it. How shall we style him?’

  ‘Telemachus?’

  ‘Quite right. Telemachus. Remind me to tell you all about Telemachus.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Intimately. I think we will find that it won’t be necessary to inflict harm upon either Odysseus or Telemachus. Just so long as we can lay our hands on Mendax.’

  ‘They are leaving tomorrow.’

  ‘Are they now? What kind of chariot are they riding?’

  ‘Odysseus has a red Wolseley.’

  ‘Typical. Quite typical.’

  The MCC Tie looked across at the Safari Suit with an expression of affectionate contempt.

  ‘I don’t suppose, Hermes, that you possess such a thing as a short-wave wireless?’

  ‘A report to make?’

  ‘Don’t be foolish. BBC World Service. The West Indies are playing England at Old Trafford today.’

  ‘Playing? Playing what?’

  ‘Cricket, you arse of a man. Cricket.’

  2

  I

  ‘THE PERIPHRASTIC “DO” was a superfluous tense-carrier,’ said Adrian. ‘Semantically empty yet widely used. The major theories of the origin of the periphrastic “do” are three: One) It was derived from the influence of the corresponding use of “faire” in French. Two) It developed out of the Old English causative “do”. Three) It derived from semantic development of the full factitive very “do”. An examination of these three theories should tell us much about alternative approaches to diachronic synt
ax and generative grammar.’

  He looked across to the sofa. Trefusis was lying on his back, an overflowing ashtray on his chest, lightweight earphones around his neck and a square of mauve silk over his face, through which he managed to smoke. If it weren’t for the rise and fall of the ashtray and the clouds of smoke weaving through the silk, Adrian might have thought him dead. He hoped not, this was a good essay he was reading out and he had taken a lot of trouble over it.

  Friends had warned against the Philology option.

  ‘You’ll get Craddock, who’s useless,’ they said. ‘Trefusis only teaches research students and a few select undergraduates. Do the American paper like everyone else.’

  But Trefusis had consented to see him.

  ‘The Early Middle English periphrastic “do” could occur after modals and “have” + past participle. It was essentially a second position non-modal operator mutually exclusive with “be” + past participle and incompatible with a passive format. As late as eighteen-eighteen some grammarians wrote that it was a standard alternate to the simple form, but others denounced its use in any but empathic, interrogative and negative sentences. By the mid-eighteenth century it was obsolete.’

  Adrian looked up from his sheaf of papers. A brown stain was forming in Trefusis’s handkerchief, as the silk filtered the smoke.

  ‘Um … that’s it …’

  Silence from the sofa. Far away all the bells of Cambridge began to chime the hour.

  ‘Professor Trefusis?’

  He couldn’t have slept through an essay of that quality, surely? Adrian cleared his throat and tried again, more loudly.

  ‘Professor Trefusis?’

  From under the handkerchief came a sigh.

  ‘So.’

  Adrian wiped the palms of his hands on his knees.

  ‘Was it all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Well constructed, well researched, well supported, well argued …’

  ‘Oh. Thank you.’

  ‘Original, concise, thoughtful, perceptive, incisive, illuminating, cogent, lucid, compelling, charmingly read …’

  ‘Er – good.’

  ‘I should imagine,’ said Trefusis, ‘that it must have taken you almost an hour to copy out.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Come, come, Mr Healey. You’ve already insulted your own intelligence.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Val Kirstlin, Neue Philologische Abteilung, July 1973, “The Origin and Nature of the Periphrastic Verb ‘Do’ in Middle and Early Modern English”. Am I right?’

  Adrian shifted uncomfortably. It was hard enough to know what Trefusis was thinking when his face was unveiled; with a handkerchief over him he was as unreadable as a doctor’s prescription.

  ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘The thing is …’

  ‘Please don’t apologise. Had you bothered to do any work of your own I should have been obliged to sit through it just the same, and I can assure you that I had much rather listen to a good essay than a mediocre one.’

  Adrian couldn’t think of an adequate reply to this.

  ‘You have a fine brain. A really excellent brain, Mr Healey.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘A fine brain, but a dreadful mind. I have a fine brain and a fine mind. Likewise Russell. Leavis, a good mind, practically no brain at all. Shall we continue like this, I wonder?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘This fortnightly exhibition of stolen goods. It all seems rather pointless. I don’t find the pose of careless youth charming and engaging any more than you find the pose of careworn age fascinating and eccentric, I should imagine. Perhaps I should let you play the year away. I have no doubt that you will do very well in your final tests. Honesty, diligence and industry are wholly superfluous qualities in one such as you, as you have clearly grasped.’

  ‘Well, it’s just that I’ve been so …’

  Trefusis pulled the handkerchief from his face and looked at Adrian.

  ‘But of course you have! Frantically busy. Fran-tically.’

  Trefusis helped himself to another cigarette from a packet that lay on top of a tower of books next to the sofa and tapped it against his thumb-nail.

  ‘My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘I am a student of language, Mr Healey. You write with fluency and conviction, you talk with authority and control. A complex idea here, an abstract proposition there, you juggle with them, play with them, seduce them. There is no movement from doubt to comprehension, no breaking down, no questioning, no excitement. You try to persuade others, never yourself. You recognise patterns, but you rearrange them where you should analyse them. In short, you do not think. You have never thought. You have never said to me anything that you believe to be true, only things which sound true and perhaps even ought to be true: things that, for the moment, are in character with whatever persona you have adopted for the afternoon. You cheat, you shortcut, you lie. It’s too wonderful.’

  ‘With respect, Professor …’

  ‘Pigswill! You don’t respect me. You fear me, are irritated by me, envy me … you everything me, but you do not respect me. And why should you? I am hardly respectable.’

  ‘What I mean is, am I so different from anyone else? Doesn’t everyone think the way I think? Doesn’t everyone just rearrange patterns? Ideas can’t be created or destroyed, surely.’

  ‘Yes!’ Trefusis clapped his hands with delight. ‘Yes, yes, yes! But who else knows that they are doing that and nothing else? You know, you have always known. That is why you are a liar. Others try their best, when they speak they mean it. You never mean it. You extend this duplicity to your morals. You use and misuse people and ideas because you do not believe they exist. Just patterns for you to play with. You’re a hound of hell and you know it.’

  ‘So,’ said Adrian, ‘what’s to become of me then?’

  ‘Ah, well. I could ask you not to bother me any more. Let you get on with your boring little life while I get on with mine. Or I could write a note to your tutor. He would send you down from the university. Either course would deprive me of the income, however nugatory, that I receive for supervising you. What to do? What to do? Pour yourself a glass of Madeira, there’s Sercial or Bual on the side. Hum! It’s all so difficult.’

  Adrian stood and picked his way across the room.

  Trefusis’s quarters could be described in one word.

  Books.

  Books and books and books. And then, just when an observer might be lured into thinking that that must be it, more books.

  Barely a square inch of wood or wall or floor was visible. Walking was only allowed by pathways cut between the piles of books. Treading these pathways with books waist-high either side was like negotiating a maze. Trefusis called the room his ‘librarinth’. Areas where seating was possible were like lagoons in a coral strand of books.

  Adrian supposed that any man who could speak twenty-three languages and read forty was likely to collect a few improving volumes along the way. Trefusis himself was highly dismissive of them.

  ‘Waste of trees,’ he had once said. ‘Stupid, ugly, clumsy, heavy things. The sooner technology comes up with a reliable alternative the better.’

  Early in the term he had flung a book at Adrian’s head in irritation at some crass comment. Adrian had caught it and been shocked to see that it was a first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal.

  ‘Books are not holy relics,’ Trefusis had said. ‘Words may be my religion, but when it comes to worship, I am very low church. The temples and the graven images are of no interest to me. The superstitious mammetry of a bourgeois obsession for books is severely annoying. Think how many children are put off reading by prissy little people ticking them off whenever they turn a page carelessly. The world is so fond of saying that books should be “treated with respect”. But when are we to
ld that words should be treated with respect? From our earliest years we are taught to revere only the outward and visible. Ghastly literary types maundering on about books as “objects”. Yes, that does happen to be a first edition. A present from Noël Annan, as a matter of fact. But I assure you that a foul yellow livre de poche would have been just as useful to me. Not that I fail to appreciate Noël’s generosity. A book is a piece of technology. If people wish to amass them and pay high prices for this one or that, well and good. But they can’t pretend that it is any higher or more intelligent a calling than collecting snuff-boxes or bubble-gum cards. I may read a book, I may use it as an ashtray, a paperweight, a doorstop or even as a missile to throw at silly young men who make fatuous remarks. So. Think again.’ And Adrian had thought again.

  Now he found his way back to the small clearing where Trefusis lay on his sofa blowing smoke-rings at the ceiling.

  ‘Your very good health,’ said Adrian sipping his Madeira.

  Trefusis beamed at him.

  ‘Don’t be pert,’ he said, ‘it isn’t at all becoming.’

  ‘No, Professor.’

  There followed a silence in which Adrian eagerly joined.

  He had stood in many studies in his day, tracing arabesques on the carpet with his foot, while angry men had described his shortcomings and settled his future. Trefusis was not angry. Indeed he was rather cheerful. It was perfectly apparent that he couldn’t care less whether Adrian lived or died.

  ‘As your Senior Tutor, I am your moral guardian,’ he said at last. ‘A moral guardian yearns for an immoral ward and the Lord has provided. I shall strike a bargain with you, that’s what I shall do. I am going to leave you in uninterrupted peace for the rest of the year on one condition. I want you to set to work on producing something that will surprise me. You tell me that ideas cannot be created. Perhaps, but they can be discovered. I have a peculiar horror of the cliché – there! the phrase “I have a peculiar horror” is just such a revolting expression as most maddens me – and I think you owe it to yourself, to descend to an even more nauseating phrase, to devote your energies to forging something new in the dark smithy of your fine brain. I haven’t produced anything original myself in years, most of my colleagues have lived from the nappy onwards without any thought at all making the short journey across their minds, leave alone a fresh one. But if you can furnish me with a piece of work that contains even the seed of novelty, the ghost of a shred of a scintilla of a germ of a suspicion of an iota of a shadow of a particle of something interesting and provoking, something that will amuse and astonish, then I think you will have repaid me for being forced to listen to you regurgitating the ideas of others and you will have done a proper service to yourself into the bargain. Do we have a deal?’