The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  ‘I don’t quite understand.’

  ‘Perfectly simple! Any subject, any period. It can be a three-volume disquisition or a single phrase on a scrap of paper. I look forward to hearing from you before the end of term. That is all.’

  Trefusis fitted the earphones over his ears and groped under the sofa for a cassette.

  ‘Right,’ said Adrian. ‘Er …’

  But Trefusis had put the handkerchief back over his face and settled back to the sound of Elvis Costello.

  Adrian set down his empty glass and poked out his tongue at the reclining figure. Trefusis’s hand came up and jabbed an American single-fingered salute.

  Oh well, thought Adrian as he walked across Hawthorn Tree Court on his way to the porter’s lodge. An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.

  At the lodge he cleared his pigeon-hole. The largest object there was a jiffy-bag stuck with a hand-made label saying ‘Toast by Post’. He opened it and a miniature serving of marmalade, two slices of soggy toast and a note fell out. He smiled: more flattering attentions from Hunt the Thimble, a relic from his days at Chartham Park a year ago. He had thought then that life at Cambridge was going to be so simple.

  The note was written in an Old English Gothic which must have taken Hunt the Thimble hours to master.

  ‘He took the bread and when he had given thanks, he toasted it and gave it to Mr Healey saying, Take, eat, this is my body which is given for you: eat this in remembrance of me. Likewise after supper he took the sachet of Marmalade and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them saying, Scoff ye all of this; for this is my Marmalade of the New Testament, which is spread for you: do this as oft as ye shall taste it, in remembrance of me. Amen.’

  Adrian smiled again. How old would Hunt the Thimble be now? Twelve or thirteen probably.

  There was a letter from Uncle David.

  ‘Hope you’re enjoying life. How’s the college doing in the Cuppers this year? Had a chance to inspect the Blues XI? Enclosed a little something. I know how mess bills can mount up …’

  Mess bills? The man must be getting senile. Still, three hundred quid was surprising and useful.

  ‘… I shall be in Cambridge next weekend, staying at the Garden House. I want you to visit me on Saturday night at eight. I have a proposition to put to you. Much love, Uncle David.’

  The pigeon-hole was also stuffed with circulars and hand-bills.

  ‘A tea-party will be held on Scholar’s Lawn, St John’s College, to protest at American support for the regime in El Salvador.’

  ‘The Mummers present Artaud’s The Cenci in a new translation by Bridget Arden. Incest! Violence! A play for our times in the Trinity Lecture Theatre.’

  ‘Sir Ian Gilmour will talk to the Cambridge Tory Reform Group about his book Inside Right. Christ’s College. Admission Free.’

  ‘Dr Anderson will give a lecture to the Herrick Society entitled The Punk Ethic As Radical Outside. Non-members £1.50.’

  After a judicious binning of these and other leaflets, Adrian was left with Uncle David’s cheque, the toast, a bill from Heffers bookshop and a Barclaycard statement, both of which he opened as he walked back to his rooms.

  He was astounded to discover that he owed Heffers £112 and Barclaycard £206. With the exception of one or two novels, all the books itemised on the Heffers bill were on art history. A Thames and Hudson edition of Masaccio alone had cost £40.

  Adrian frowned. The titles were very familiar, but he knew that he hadn’t bought them.

  He quickened his pace across the Sonnet Bridge and into the President’s Court, only to charge straight into a shrivelled old don in a gown. With a cry of ‘Whoops!’ the man, whom he recognised as the mathematician Adrian Williams, fell sprawling on the ground, sending books and papers flying over the grass.

  ‘Dr Williams!’ Adrian helped him up. ‘I am sorry …’

  ‘Oh hello, Adrian,’ said Williams, taking his hand and springing up to his feet. ‘I’m afraid neither of us was looking where we were going. We Adrians are notoriously abstracted, are we not?’

  They skipped about the lawn collecting Williams’s papers.

  ‘Do you know,’ said Williams, ‘I tried one of those packet soups yesterday. “Knorr” it was called, K-N-O-R-R, a very strange name indeed, but Lord, it was delicious. Chicken Noodle. Have you ever tried it?’

  ‘Er, I don’t think so,’ said Adrian picking up the last of the books and handing it to Williams.

  ‘Oh you should, you really should! Miraculous. You have a paper packet no larger than … well let me see … what is it no larger than?’

  ‘A paperback?’ said Adrian shuffling from foot to foot. Once cornered by Williams, it was very hard to get away.

  ‘Not really a paperback, it’s squarer than that. I should say no larger than a single-play record. Of course in area that probably is the same size as a paperback, but a different shape, you see.’

  ‘Great,’ said Adrian. ‘Well I must be …’

  ‘And inside is the most unprepossessing heap of powder you can imagine. The dried constituents of the soup. Little lumps of chicken and small hard noodles. Very unusual.’

  ‘I must try it,’ said Adrian. ‘Anyway …’

  ‘You empty the packet into a pan, add two pints of water and heat it up.’

  ‘Right, well, I think I’ll go to the Rat Man now and buy some,’ said Adrian, walking backwards.

  ‘No, the Rat Man doesn’t sell it!’ Williams said. ‘I had a word with him about it this morning and he said he might get it in next week. Give it a trial period, see if there’s a demand. Sainsbury’s in Sidney Street has a very large supply, however.’

  Adrian had nearly reached the corner of the court.

  ‘Sainsbury’s?’ he called, looking at his watch. ‘Right. I should just be in time.’

  ‘I had the happy notion of adding an egg,’ Williams shouted back. ‘It poaches in the soup. Not unlike an Italian stracciatella. Singularly toothsome. Oh, you’ll discover that Sainsbury’s display a vegetable soup on the same shelf, also made by Knorr. It’s quite hard to tell the two packets apart, but be sure to get the Chicken Noodle …’

  Adrian rounded the corner and streaked for his rooms. He could hear Williams’s voice cheerily exhorting him not to let it boil, as this was certain to impair the flavour.

  Perhaps that’s what Trefusis meant about not lying. Williams wasn’t raving about his bloody soup in order to be respected or admired, he genuinely meant to impart a sincerely felt enthusiasm. Adrian knew he could never be guilty of any such unfiltered openness but he was damned if he was going to be judged because of it.

  Gary was listening to Abba’s Greatest Hits and leafing through a book on Miró when Adrian came in.

  ‘Hello, darlin’,’ he said. ‘I’ve just boiled the kettle.’

  Adrian went up to the stereo, took off the record and frisbee’d it out of the open window. Gary watched it skim across the court.

  ‘What’s up with you, then?’

  Adrian took the Heffers and Barclaycard bills from his pocket and spread them out on Gary’s book.

  ‘You are aware that theft, obtaining goods and monies by false pretences and forgery are all serious offences?’ he said.

  ‘I’ll pay you back.’

  Adrian went to his desk and opened a drawer. His Heffers card and Visa card were missing.

  ‘I mean, you might at least have told me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought of being so vulgar.’

  ‘Well I don’t want to be vulgar either, but you now owe me a grand total of …’ Adrian leafed through his notebook, ‘six hundred and eighteen pounds and sixty-three pence.’

  ‘I said I’d pay you back, didn’t I?’

  ‘I’m busy wondering how.’

  ‘You can afford to wait. You should be glad to do a member of the working classes a favour.’

  ‘And you should have too much pride to allow me … oh for God’s sa
ke!’

  The sound of Abba singing ‘Dancing Queen’ had started up in a room the other side of the court. Adrian slammed the window shut.

  ‘That’ll teach you to throw things out of the window,’ said Gary.

  ‘It’ll teach me not to throw things out of the window.’

  ‘Suppose I pay you back in portraits?’

  Adrian looked round the room. The walls were covered with dozens of different portraits of himself. Oils, water-colours, gouaches, grisailles, pen and ink, chalk, silverpoint, charcoal, pastels, airbrushed acrylics, crayons and even Bic biro drawings, ranging in style from neo-plasticist to photorealist.

  He had been given no choice in the matter of sharing rooms. Gary and he were drawn out of the tombola together, so together they were. The bondage trousers, henna’ed hair and virtual canteen of cutlery that hung from his ears told the world that Gary was a punk, the only one in St Matthew’s and as such as fascinating and horrifying an addition to the college as the modern Stafford Court on the other side of the river. Gary was reading Modern and Medieval Languages, but intended to change to History of Art in his second year: meanwhile he expressed his devotion to Adrian – real or pretended, Adrian never knew which – by treating him as an idiot older brother from another world. He had never met a public school boy before coming to Cambridge and hadn’t really believed that they existed. He had been more shocked by Adrian than Adrian had been by him.

  ‘And you really used to have fagging and that?’

  ‘Yes. It’s on the way out now I believe, but when I was there you had to fag.’

  ‘I can’t bleeding believe it! Did you wear a boater?’

  ‘When appropriate.’

  ‘And striped trousers?’

  ‘In the Sixth Form.’

  ‘Fuck me!’ Gary had wriggled with delight.

  ‘I’m hardly the only one, you know. There are dozens here from my school alone, hundreds from Eton and Harrow and Winchester.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Gary, ‘but it’s less than seven per cent of the population, isn’t it? People like me never usually meet people like you except in a Crown Court, when you’re wearing a wig.’

  ‘This is nineteen-seventy-nine, Gary, people like you are forming the Thatcher cabinet.’

  Adrian had told him about life at school, about the magazine, about Pigs Trotter’s death. He had even told him about Cartwright.

  Gary had immediately done a drawing of Adrian as he imagined him in a blazer and cricket whites, dawdling in front of a Gothic doorway, while capped and gowned beaks flitted in the background like crows. Adrian had bought it on the spot for ten pounds. Since then he had subsidised Gary’s cannabis and vodka by buying at least three works of art a week. But he didn’t now think he could take even one more view of himself, in any medium, from any angle, and he said so.

  ‘Well then,’ said Gary, ‘you’re going to have to wait for me to pay you back till the end of the year.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ said Adrian. ‘Oh coitus!’

  ‘Oh come on, you can afford it.’

  ‘No, it’s not that. It’s work.’

  ‘Work? I thought this was supposed to be a university.’

  ‘Yes, well, it’s rapidly turning into a technical college,’ said Adrian, falling into an armchair.

  ‘Didn’t Trefusis go for your essay then?’

  ‘No, he loved it, that’s the problem,’ said Adrian. ‘It was too good. He was very impressed. So now he wants me to do something major. Something startling and original.’

  ‘Original? In philology?’

  ‘No, any subject. I should be flattered really, I suppose.’

  Honestly, what was the point? He could tell the truth to Gary, surely? He was lying as a matter of course. Was it pride? Fear? He closed his eyes. Trefusis was right. Right but ludicrously wrong.

  Why wasn’t he happy? Jenny loved him. Gary loved him. His mother sent him money. Uncle David sent him money. It was the May Term of his first year, the weather was fine and he had no examinations. Everything unpleasant was behind him. Cambridge was his. He had now made up his mind to stay here after Finals and become a don. All you had to do was memorise enough good essays and repeat them in three-hour bursts. Trefusis wasn’t an examiner, thank God.

  He hung Jeremy, his blazer, on Anthony, the peg.

  ‘Let’s have some toast,’ he said. ‘Hunt the Thimble has provided.’

  II

  ‘We come now, gentlemen,’ said President Clinton-Lacey, ‘to the matter of JRFs and Bye-Fellowships. I wonder if –’

  Garth Menzies, a Professor of Civil Law, coughed through a cloud of dense smoke which poured into his face from the pipe of Munroe, the Bursar.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr President,’ he said, ‘I understood we had agreed to a no-smoking rule at Fellows’ meetings?’

  ‘Well, that is certainly true, yes. Admiral Munroe, I wonder if you would mind …?’

  Munroe banged his pipe down on the table and gave Menzies a look charged with deepest venom. Menzies smiled and transferred a sweet from one side of his mouth to the other.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clinton-Lacey. ‘Now. JRFs and Bye-Fellowships. As this body is well aware, there has been –’

  Munroe sniffed the air loudly.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr President,’ he said. ‘Am I alone in detecting a nauseating smell of spearmint in this room?’

  ‘Er …?’

  ‘It really is most disagreeable. I wonder where it could be coming from?’

  Menzies angrily took the mint from his mouth and dropped it into the ashtray in front of him. Munroe smiled beatifically.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clinton-Lacey. ‘Fellows, we have a problem in retaining our present levels of postgraduates. There is a large number of Junior Research Fellows and Bye-Fellows that benefits from our grants and disbursements as you know. You will be far from unaware of the nature of the economic weather system that blows towards us from Westminster.’

  Admiral Munroe ostentatiously pushed the ashtray into the centre of the table, as if the smell of mint still offended him.

  Alex Corder, a theologian down the end of the table, barked a rather harsh laugh.

  ‘Barbarians,’ he said. ‘They’re all barbarians.’

  ‘The government,’ said Clinton-Lacey, ‘the justice of whose doctrines we are not assembled here to discourse upon, has certainly struck an attitude towards the universities which must give us cause for alarm.’

  ‘The Prime Minister is a scientist,’ said Corder.

  Garth Menzies raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure no one would accuse the Prime Minister of academic partiality.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ said Munroe.

  ‘Well, whatever her possible bias,’ said Clinton-Lacey, ‘there is a feeling in government that the Arts side, oversubscribed by candidates for entrance as it already is, must be, er, honed, and extra encouragement given to the disciplines which can more productively … ah! Professor Trefusis!’

  Trefusis stood in the doorway, a cigarette dangling from his lips, peering vaguely as if unsure whether this was the right room or the right meeting. The sight of Menzies’ disapproving glare seemed to reassure him; he entered and slid down into the empty seat next to Admiral Munroe.

  ‘Well, Donald, I am sorry that you seem to have been delayed again,’ said Clinton-Lacey.

  Trefusis was silent.

  ‘Nothing serious I hope?’

  Trefusis smiled affably around the room.

  ‘Nothing serious I hope?’ repeated the President.

  Trefusis became aware that he was being addressed, opened his jacket, switched off the Walkman that was attached to his belt and slipped off his earphones.

  ‘I’m sorry, Master, did you speak?’

  ‘Well yes … we were discussing the fall-off in resources for the Arts.’

  ‘The Arts?’

  ‘That’s right. Now …’

  Menzies coughed and pushed the ashtray towards Trefusis.

 
‘Thank you, Garth,’ said Trefusis, flicking the ash from his cigarette and taking another puff. ‘Most thoughtful.’

  The President persevered.

  ‘We will not have enough money to create any more Junior Research Fellows in the Arts for at least two years.’

  ‘Oh, how sad,’ said Trefusis.

  ‘You are not concerned for your department?’

  ‘My department? My department is English, Master.’

  ‘Well precisely.’

  ‘What has English to do with “the Arts”, whatever they may be? I deal in an exact science, philology. My colleagues deal with an exact science, the analysis of literature.’

  ‘Oh poppycock,’ said Menzies.

  ‘No, if anything it’s hard shit,’ said Trefusis.

  ‘Really, Donald!’ said the President. ‘I am sure there is no need …’

  ‘Professor Trefusis,’ said Menzies, ‘this is a minuted meeting of adults, if you feel you can’t preserve the decencies of debate then perhaps you should leave.’

  ‘My dear old Garth,’ said Trefusis, ‘I can only say that you started it. The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. “Poppycock” means “soft shit” – from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you, pappe kak.’

  Menzies purpled and fell silent.

  ‘Well, be that all as it may, Donald,’ said the President, ‘the subject was resourcing. Whatever our views on the rights and wrongs of government policy, the fiscal reality is such that …’

  ‘The reality,’ said Trefusis, offering cigarettes around the table, ‘as we all know, is that more and more young people are begging to be admitted to this college in this university to read English. Our English department receives a higher number of applicants for each available place than any other department in any other university in the country. If the rules of the market place, which I understand to be sacred to the gabies, guffoons and flubberhaddocks in office, are to apply, then surely we should be entitled to more fellowships, not fewer.’