The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  ‘And Pollux is still in Troy?’

  ‘Not exactly sir. Vienna Station received another signal from Locksmith this morning, fully prioritised.’

  ‘Fully whatted?’

  ‘Er … prioritised, sir.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘It seems that Pollux left Troy last night.’

  ‘Headed for the Greek camp?’

  ‘Best guess, sir.’

  There was a long pause.

  The St Matthew’s Tie straightened himself to allow a little blood to flow down from his head.

  ‘If you’re right, Reeve, Odysseus will make his way Greekwards in the next few days too.’

  ‘With Telemachus, do you think?’

  Another long pause was followed by the sound of a folder being dropped on a desk.

  The St Matthew’s Tie stooped to do up another shoe-lace.

  ‘Well, nothing to keep me in England now that Botham seems to have lost us the blasted Ashes. I’ll fly over the moment anything develops.’

  ‘Cricket not going too well then, sir?’

  ‘The man’s a bloody disgrace. He couldn’t captain a paraplegic netball team.’

  ‘Will you be around for initialling appropriation orders later in the afternoon, sir?’

  ‘Well, young Reeve, after a brief luncherising and half an hour’s memorandorising Cabinet, I’ll be at Lord’s.’

  ‘Right, sir.’

  ‘So if you want me to signatorise anything, send Simon Hesketh-Harvey round, he’s a member. Now I must go and lavatorise. And while I’m away for God’s sake try and learn to speak English.’

  The St Matthew’s Tie hurried along the corridor to his office. He heard the door of 3.4. CabCom opening. A voice hailed him.

  ‘Ho there, young Hesketh-H!’

  The St Matthew’s Tie turned. A Bennett, Tovey and Steele Suit was standing in the corridor.

  ‘Morning, sir.’

  ‘Snap.’

  They looked at each other’s neck-ties with a smile.

  ‘You may have to change that for the good old orange and yellow this pip emma,’ said the Bennett, Tovey and Steele.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If you’re a good boy, Reeve will send you over to me at Lord’s this afternoon to watch the final death throes.’

  ‘Good-o,’ said the St Matthew’s Tie. ‘I shall enjoy that, sir.’

  ‘Right. Oh, by the way –’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Prioritise. Ever come across that one?’

  ‘Ugh!’ said the St Matthew’s Tie. ‘Langley?’

  ‘No, that arse Reeve, of course. Last week it was “having a meet-up with”, God knows what new linguistic macédoine he’s going to serve up next.’

  ‘One shudders to think, sir.’

  ‘All right then, Simon, off you pop.’

  8

  I

  ‘I HAVE TAKEN much care in packing,’ said Trefusis as he pushed shut the boot of the Wolseley. ‘A tin of barley-sugar for you, Castrol GTX for the car, figgy oatcakes for me.’

  ‘Figgy oatcakes?’

  ‘Oatcakes are very healthy. Hotels, restaurants, cafés, they all take their toll. Salzburg is not kind to the figure. At my age travel broadens the behind. A steatopygous Trefusis is an unhappy Trefusis. The buns and tortes of Austria are whoreson binders of your whoreson stool. But a figgy oatcake laughs at constipation and favours rectal carcinoma with a haughty stare. In the grammar of health, while cream may hasten the full stop, porridge will ease the colon.’

  ‘Oh, ah,’ said Adrian. ‘And curry creates the dash, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, I like that. Very good. “Curry creates the dash.” Yes, indeed. Most … most … er, what is the word?’

  ‘Amusing?’

  ‘No … it’ll come to me.’

  The interior of the car smelt of Merton Park thrillers, Bakelite headsets and the Clothes Ration. It only needed the profile of Edgar Wallace or the voice of Edgar Lustgarten to sweep Adrian and Trefusis, with bells ringing, into a raincoat and Horlicks Britain of glistening pavements, trilbied police inspectors and poplin shirts. So familiar was the odour, so complete the vision it evoked as they swung with a whine of gears out of the college gates and onto the Trumpington Road, that Adrian could almost believe in reincarnation. He had never smelt that precise smell before, yet it was as known to him as the smell of his own socks.

  Trefusis would not be drawn on the purpose of their mission to Salzburg.

  ‘You knew that man who was killed then?’

  ‘Knew him? No.’

  ‘But Bob said …’

  ‘I do hope the Bendix doesn’t give out. The Wolseley 15/50 is a marvellous saloon, but the Bendix is most terribly susceptible to trouble.’

  ‘Well if you didn’t know him, how come you know his name?’

  ‘I suppose one could call such an affliction bendicitis.’

  ‘When I first arrived in Cambridge there was a rumour that you recruited for MI5. Either that or for the KGB.’

  ‘My dear fellow, there is not a don over the age of sixty who is not said to be the fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh man in some improbable circle of spies, double agents and ruthless traitors. You should pay no attention.’

  ‘You worked at Bletchley during the war though, didn’t you? On the Enigma code.’

  ‘So did Beryl Ayliffe the college librarian. Are we to believe that she is an MI5 … what’s the word … operative?’

  Adrian pictured the chain-smoking chatelaine of the St Matthew’s library.

  ‘Well no, of course not,’ he conceded. ‘But …’

  ‘Ha, ha. More fool you, because she is!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Or is she?’ mused Trefusis. ‘So damned difficult to tell in this damned deadly game we play. Anyway, what does it matter? Isn’t it all the bloody same? Left, right? Right, wrong? The old distinctions don’t matter a damned damn any more, damn it.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Adrian, stung by the mockery. ‘I grant you it all sounds a bit stupid. But we did see a man killed last year. You can’t get away from that.’

  ‘Assuredly.’

  ‘And that’s why we’re going back to Salzburg?’

  ‘I don’t think we’ll eat until we get to France. There’s a surprisingly good restaurant at the railway station at Arras. See if you can find it on your map, there’s a dear.’

  II

  Adrian had never eaten foie gras before.

  ‘I thought it was just pâté,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, the pâté is quite inferior. These are the livers themselves. Flash fried. I think you’ll be pleased.’

  Adrian was.

  ‘It just literally melts in the mouth!’ he exclaimed. ‘Unbelievable!’

  ‘You’ll find the Corton Charlemagne an excellent accompaniment. Perfectly served at last. I have an ex-student who is likely to become the next editor of the Spectator. On his succession I shall offer for publication a little article on the iniquity of the British habit of over-chilling white Burgundies. If one’s young friends are going to disgrace themselves by writing for such low periodicals the least they can do is assuage their guilt by providing a platform for advanced ideas. I make it a point to teach all my pupils to believe in properly served wine.’

  Adrian listened with half an ear to the Professor’s flow of conversation. A young man and woman had entered the restaurant a moment earlier and now floundered in the middle of the room, waiting for someone to show them to a table. Adrian’s eyes narrowed suddenly. He leant across to Trefusis.

  ‘Don’t look now, but that couple behind you who’ve just come in …’ He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘They were on the boat with us! I swear it’s the same two. They were behind us in the car queue. In a green BMW.’

  Trefusis tore a bread roll in half and looked speculatively into a large mirror over Adrian’s shoulder.

  ‘Really? Bless my soul, it’s a small world and no mistake.’

  ‘You don’t th
ink … you don’t think they might be … following us?’

  Trefusis raised his eyebrows. ‘It’s possible of course. It’s always possible.’

  Adrian grabbed Trefusis’s arm across the table. ‘I could go and have a pee and put their car out of action. What do you say?’

  ‘You think micturating over their car would put it out of action?’

  ‘No, I mean pretend to have a pee but actually wrench out the rotor arm or take the distributor cap or whatever it is you do.’

  Trefusis gazed at him with only the trace of a smile on his face. ‘Do you know how they make foie gras?’

  ‘Donald, I’m serious. I’m sure they’re following us.’

  With a sigh, Trefusis put down the fragment of brioche he had been buttering.

  ‘I’m serious too. It’s time, young Healey, that you knew what this trip was all about.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. Now, I’ll ask you again. Do you know how to make foie gras?’

  Adrian stared at Trefusis. ‘Er … no. No I don’t.’

  ‘Very well then, I’ll tell you. You rear a goose from a puppy or calf or whatever a goose is when young.’

  ‘Chick? Gosling?’

  ‘Quite possibly. You take a young Strasbourg goose-cub, chick or gosling and you feed it rich grain in a mashy pulp.’

  ‘Fatten it up, you mean?’

  ‘That’s right, but the mashy pulp is placed, you see, in a bag.’

  ‘A bag?’

  ‘That’s right. A bag or sack. The bag or sack has some species of nozzle or protuberance at the narrow end, which is forced down the goose’s gullet or throat. The bag or sack is then squeezed or compressed and the meal or fodder thus introduced or thrust into the creature or animal’s crop or stomach.’

  ‘Why not just let it feed normally?’

  ‘Because this procedure is undertaken many times a day for the whole of the poor animal’s life. It is force-fed on a massive scale. Force-fed until it is so gorged and gross that it can no longer move. Its liver becomes pulpy and distended. Ideal, in fact, for flash frying and presenting with a glass of spacious Montrachet or fat, buttery Corton Charlemagne.’

  ‘That’s horrific!’ said Adrian. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’

  ‘I wanted you to taste it. It is one of the highest pleasures known to man. Wasn’t it Sydney Smith who had a friend whose idea of heaven was eating it to the sound of trumpets? Like most of our highest pleasures, however, it is rooted in suffering; founded in an unnatural, almost perverted, process.’

  Adrian’s mind raced forward, trying to think of the relevance of this to their situation. He ran a storyline through his head. A European cartel of foie gras manufacturers, determined to prevent the Common Market from outlawing their product. Prepared to kill in order to protect what they saw as their God-given right to torture geese for the tables of the rich. Surely not? That sort of thing simply did not happen. And even if it did, it was scarcely the sort of affair in which Trefusis would interest himself.

  ‘So what exactly …?’

  ‘This forcing of a goose is an image I want you to hold in your head while I tell you of something else … ah … le poisson est arrivé.’

  Trefusis beamed as two large dishes, each covered with an immense silver cloche, were set before them. The waiter looked from Adrian to Trefusis with an expectant smile and – now sure of their attention – he swept each cloche clear with a flourish, releasing clouds of delicately fishy steam.

  ‘Voilà! Bon appetit, messieurs!’

  ‘Enlightening that what we call John Dory the French call Saint Pierre, the Italians San Pietro and the Spanish San Pedro.’

  ‘Who was John Dory, do you think?’

  ‘Oh, I imagine the Dory is from doré, gilded or golden. Of course we do sometimes call it St Peter’s fish, I believe. Merci bien.’

  ‘M’sieur!’ The waiter bowed smartly and strutted away.

  ‘Howsomever that may be,’ said Trefusis. ‘Some time ago I was contacted – I believe that’s the right word? – by an old friend of mine, Tom Daly. Tom used to be the garden steward at St Matthew’s and a fine gardener he was too, as green-fingered as … as …’

  ‘As a Martian with septicaemia?’

  ‘If that pleases you. It fell out that in nineteen-sixty-two Tom pleached, plashed and entwined himself with one Eileen Bishop. In due course he pollinated her and there sprung up a fine young son. In a simple but affecting ceremony in Little St Mary’s later that year I agreed to renounce the world, the flesh and the devil in order to cleanse my soul in readiness for the task of standing sponsor to their freshly budded sprig, whom they had decided to baptise Christopher Donald Henry.’

  ‘This gardener married and had a son and you are his godfather?’

  ‘I believe that’s what I said,’ said Trefusis. ‘Then in nineteen-seventy-six, to the distress of us all, Tom left the college to take up the post of chief borough gardener in West Norfolk. When next you admire the gay rampage of tulips at a roundabout in King’s Lynn or the giddy riot of wayside lobelia in central Hunstanton, you’ll know whom to thank. Be that as it may. Beyond the usual silver porringer at birth and the bi-annual five-pound note, my contribution to Christopher’s moral welfare has been scant. I have to confess that Christopher, my godson, is a child of whom I stand rather in awe.’

  Adrian tried to picture the Professor standing rather in awe of anything.

  ‘The boy is remarkably gifted you see,’ said Trefusis, gently laying a sliver of fish-bone on the side of his plate. ‘His mathematical ability as an infant was simply astounding. From an early age he exhibited almost supernatural powers. He could multiply and divide long numbers in seconds, calculate square and cube roots in his head, do all the circus tricks. But he had a fine mind as well as an arithmetically prodigious brain and it was assumed that he would make his way to Trinity and contribute something to the field of pure mathematics before he was thirty or whatever age it is that marks the Anno Domini of mathematicians.’

  ‘I believe they’re pretty much over the hill by twenty-six these days,’ said Adrian. ‘How old is he now?’

  ‘Eighteen or so. He is lucky, you might think, to have a father proud of his gifts and who, moreover, would have been happy for him to employ them academically, in the service of scholarship, for the sake of the pure art of pure mathematics. Many fathers of comparably modest incomes would have looked on a clever son as a route to riches. My son the financier, my son the barrister, my son the accountant. Tom stood quite ready and without rancour to explain the child away as my son the loopy mathematician with the scurfy hair and bottle-end spectacles.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘Three years ago Christopher was awarded a scholarship to a public school in Suffolk: the money came from an organisation Tom Daly had never heard of. It now seems that this organisation is proposing to put Christopher through Cambridge. He will read not Pure Maths there, but Engineering. What is worrying Tom is that the organisation is only interested in Christopher because of his potential as a brain. After university they want him to go into industry.’

  ‘What is the organisation?’

  ‘I’ll come to that. Tom believes that Christopher shouldn’t be committed so early. He is frightened that this organisation is, in effect, buying his son. So he came to me and asked if I knew anything of them. I was able to confirm that I did. I have known of them for some time.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Let’s settle up. I will tell you the rest on the road. What would be an adequate lagniappe, do you think?’

  Adrian looked out of the rear window.

  ‘They are following us!’

  ‘How frustrating for them. All that power under their bonnet and they are forced to hold their pace down to our niggardly fifty-five miles per hour.’

  As Trefusis spoke, the BMW moved out to the left and swept past them. Adrian caught a glimpse of the driver’s face, alert and tense behind the wheel.r />
  ‘The same man all right. British number plates. Right-hand drive. GB sticker on the back. Why’s he passed us, though?’

  ‘Perhaps a relay,’ said Trefusis, ‘someone else will take up the pursuit. It is scarcely a problem to identify a car of this age and distinction.’

  Adrian looked at him sharply. ‘You admit that we’re being followed then?’

  ‘It was always a possibility.’

  Adrian popped a lump of barley-sugar into his mouth. ‘You were telling me about this organisation. That paid for your godson to go through school.’

  ‘I have become increasingly aware in recent years,’ said Trefusis, ‘of what can only be called a conspiracy on a massive scale. I have watched the most talented, the most able and most promising students that come through St Matthew’s and other colleges in Cambridge and other universities in England … I have watched them being bought up.’

  ‘Bought up?’

  ‘Purchased. Procured. Acquired. Gotten. Let us say an undergraduate arrives with phenomenal ability in, for example, English. A natural candidate for a doctorate, a teaching post, a life of scholarship or, failing those, a creative existence as poet, novelist or dramatist. He arrives full of just such ambitions and sparkling ideals but then … they get to him.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Two years after graduation this first-class mind is being paid eighty thousand pounds a year to devise advertising slogans for a proprietary brand of peanut butter or is writing snobbish articles in glossy magazines about exiled European monarchs and their children or some such catastrophic drivel. I see it year after year. Perhaps a chemist will arrive in the college. Great hopes are held out for his future. Nobel Prizes and who knows what else besides? He himself is full of the highest aspirations. Yet even before his final exams he has been locked and contracted into a job for life concocting synthetic pine-fresh biological soap powder fragrances for a detergent company. Adrian, someone is getting at our best minds! Someone is preventing them from achieving their full potential. This organisation I told you of is denying them a chance to grow and flourish. A university education should be broad and general. But these students are being trained, not educated. They are being stuffed like Strasbourg geese. Pappy mush is forced into them, just so one part of their brains can be fattened. Their whole minds are being ignored for the sake of that part of them which is marketable. Thus they have persuaded my godson Christopher to read Engineering instead of Mathematics.’