The Liar

by Stephen Fry

  ‘Thank you, Adrian, I think that will do.’

  Trefusis pulled off the headphones and the air seemed to scream into Adrian’s head with a huge kicking electric shock. He gasped like a skin diver breaking the surface. He felt Donald’s hand on his shoulder and the stares of everyone else in the room piercing him through to the brain. Rocking backwards and forwards in his chair, he buried his head in his hands and began to cry.

  Through the close snivel of his weeping he heard reestablish themselves the sounds of the room: the music in the courtyard below, the ticking of the clock and Uncle David’s crude heckling.

  ‘What bloody use is this? The boy’s done no more than drool and blub like a maniac. I don’t need a machine to make him do that. One swift kick in the balls would be enough.’

  ‘I imagine,’ said Trefusis, ‘that had we left the machine attached for longer, every truth in Adrian’s brain would have been disgorged.’

  ‘What a revolting thought.’

  Adrian leant back in his chair and opened his eyes.

  ‘May I stand up please?’ he asked in a small voice. ‘I think my leg may have gone to sleep.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. Walk around the room a little, my boy.’

  Avoiding the eyes of Stefan, Simon and the Biffens, Adrian stepped down from the dais.

  Sir David gave the wide shrug of a man who believes himself to be surrounded by fools. ‘Well I dare say it might work,’ he said. ‘Just leave it where it is and walk away from the table, will you?’

  ‘In a moment, David,’ said Trefusis. ‘First I have to do this …’

  Trefusis raised the gavel like a benevolent judge and brought it down onto the coupled radios. Splinters of broken plastic flew across the room. Sir David stiffened.

  ‘You’re dead, Donald,’ he hissed. ‘Do it, Dickon!’

  ‘No! No, no, no, no, no!’

  With a screech that tore his throat Adrian threw himself at Lister, knocking him to the floor. He fell on him with a roar, banging his head down onto his chest, barking and bellowing into his face.

  ‘I’ll kill you! Kill you! I’ll kill you!’

  He felt the sharp profile of the gun against his stomach, and pressure upwards as Lister’s gun hand tried to free itself from the weight of Adrian’s body.

  Through the background clamour of upraised voices, Adrian thought he heard Simon Hesketh-Harvey shout, ‘Pull him off!’

  Hands pulled roughly at his shoulders, trying to tug him away. Why the hell didn’t they run? Why couldn’t they leave him be? What was the point of sacrificing yourself like this if your allies stayed around to watch? This was their chance to flee. Did they want to be killed?

  Adrian kicked his knee into Lister’s stomach and the gun exploded with a dull boom.

  For a second Lister and Adrian stared at each other. Someone, it could have been Uncle David, said, rather impatiently, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake!’

  Adrian felt hot blood surge against his stomach like a discharge of semen and wondered whether it was his or Lister’s.

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said as Lister rolled away. ‘It’s mine.’

  ‘It’s not my fault!’ someone close to him cried. ‘He just …’

  Adrian’s eyeballs slid upwards and he fell forward. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

  As he fell into unconsciousness he thought he heard the voice of Bob, the landlord of the Shoulder of Lamb.

  ‘You silly arse, sir. I had him covered all the time.’

  But as Adrian slipped away, Bob’s voice, if it had ever been there, tapered and dissolved into the only sound that accompanied Adrian into the darkness, the sound of Trefusis wailing.

  13

  PROFESSOR DONALD LISTER’S FACE hung above Adrian like a great white balloon. Adrian forced his eyes wider open and tried to remember who Professor Donald Lister could be. He had not realised that such a person was.

  The balloon moved away and split itself into two, like the dividing of a gigantic cell.

  ‘You should sleep, my boy,’ said Trefusis.

  ‘Sleep,’ echoed Dickon Lister.

  The two new balloons separated and disappeared from Adrian’s line of vision.

  A little while later he opened his eyes again to find Istvan Moltaj and Martin Szabó gazing down upon him. Their throats were pure and unscarred, their brown eyes round with compassion.

  ‘Very pale, Helen. Is it right he should be so pale?’

  ‘Only to be expected,’ said the voice of Lady Helen Biffen.

  Adrian smiled. ‘Thank you for welcoming me here,’ he said. ‘I had always known that death would never be the finish. I hope we can stay friends throughout eternity.’

  He realised with a flick of annoyance that although he had uttered the words quite plainly they had sounded only inside his head. His lips had not moved nor had his larynx stirred. Perhaps there was a special technique up here that he would have to master in order to be able to communicate. He dwelt on the possibility for a while and contemplated with drowsy satisfaction the prospect of the infinite time now available to him.

  Adrian awoke from his dreams in some discomfort. The bedroom was very familiar. The dressing table at the end of the bed he had seen before only recently. He hauled himself up onto his elbows to get a better view, then yelped in agony as a sharp pain shot through his stomach. Footsteps hurried towards him from a connecting room. As he sank back, spent, the thought came to him that he was in the same suite of the Hotel Österreichischer Hof that Martin Szabó had stayed in, that he was lying on the very bed that Martin Szabó had sat on when his throat had been cut.

  ‘Adrian, you shouldn’t try to move,’ said Trefusis.

  ‘No,’ said Adrian. ‘Sorry.’ He closed his eyes in order to concentrate on framing a question but the question eluded him and he fell asleep.

  He came round a little later to find Trefusis sitting by his bed.

  ‘Morning, Donald. If it is morning.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Trefusis. ‘It is morning.’

  ‘I’m alive then?’

  ‘I think we can go that far.’

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Wednesday. How long have I been here?’

  ‘No more than a few hours.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Adrian was surprised. ‘They got the bullet out, did they?’

  ‘Bullet? There was no bullet.’

  ‘But I was shot.’

  ‘Yes, you were shot, but there was no bullet.’

  Adrian pondered this.

  ‘What’s hurting me then?’

  ‘You lost some blood. I should imagine your stomach will be a little sore for a while. The plaster from your dressing will be pulling at your skin.’

  ‘I’m quite hungry.’

  ‘Rudi will bring you something.’

  ‘Good-o,’ said Adrian and fell asleep again.

  *

  Two days later Adrian sat at the piano in the Franz-Josef Suite and picked his way through Beethoven’s Minuet in G. There was a plate of sandwiches and a glass of beer in front of him. His suitcases were assembled in the middle of the room ready to be taken down to reception. He had felt fully fit enough to bear Donald company for the long drive home in the Wolseley but Trefusis had insisted he go by air.

  Adrian’s stomach was healing very well, the raw little eruptions where the embedded wadding had been picked out with tweezers were capped with fresh scar tissue and he could now touch the long soft tongue of burn-tissue on his left side without wincing.

  He closed the piano lid and straightened himself. It was a companionable kind of pain, clean and sharp as Pilsner; a better pain than the crushing leaden ache of guilt he had carried around with him for as long as he could remember.

  There was a hearty knock at the door and Simon Hesketh-Harvey came in, followed by a beaming Dickon.

  ‘Grüß Gott,’ said Adrian.

  ‘And how’s the lad?’

  ‘The lad’s fine thank you, Dickon,�
�� said Adrian. ‘And looking forward to going home.’

  ‘That’s the ticket,’ said Simon.

  ‘No,’ said Adrian, pulling a travel wallet from his jacket pocket, ‘this is.’

  *

  A long table had been prepared in the upstairs room of the Shoulder of Lamb. Nigel the barman was serving soup under the vigilant eye of Bob, the landlord. Trefusis sat at one end, with Adrian at his left-hand side and Lady Helen Biffen on his right. Martin and Stefan Szabó, Humphrey Biffen, Dickon Lister, Istvan Moltaj and Simon and Nancy Hesketh-Harvey were all present, chattering and laughing with the hysterical bonhomie of businessmen at a Christmas party. There was one empty chair halfway down the table on Lady Helen’s side.

  ‘But why did you have to go to such lengths?’ Adrian was asking Trefusis. ‘I mean why couldn’t you just tell me what was going on?’

  ‘It was very necessary, I am afraid, that you acted in complete ignorance of the whole affair. David Pearce was paying you to spy on me after all. You believed you were acting in the interests of his department. That was how it had to remain. We knew he wanted Mendax for himself, not for his country but for his own enrichment. It was expedient that you should be unaware of this.’

  ‘What about Lister? Is he really Golka?’

  ‘Lister used to work as a junior official at the British Council in Bonn. Simon found out that Pearce had inexplicably seconded him to the Consulate in Salzburg. This puzzled Simon. He picked Lister up and questioned him with some force. Lister is indeed Golka – between ourselves,’ said Trefusis, lowering his voice, ‘not a very pleasant man, I’m afraid. It became apparent that Sir David was quite prepared to kill for Mendax. This was wholly unacceptable to us. We made Lister an offer. He was to keep us informed of Pearce’s plans, much as you were keeping Pearce informed of ours, and we would arrange that he need only pretend to kill Moltaj and Martin.’

  ‘As long as I witnessed these killings?’

  ‘Oh yes, that was very necessary. Your description of them to your Uncle David would be of the utmost importance. It had to seem to him that, although he had just failed to get hold of the Mendax papers, he had at least succeeded in getting hold of one half of the device itself. When he knew that I had the rest he would come out into the open and reveal his true motives.’

  ‘There’s one thing,’ said Adrian. ‘When you attached Mendax to me I heard nothing through those headphones but white sound. I felt no compulsion to do anything but fall asleep. All that guff I came out with, it was just a put on. I made it up.’

  ‘Of course!’ said Trefusis. ‘Haven’t you understood it yet? Mendax doesn’t exist.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s a nonsensical notion, absolutely nonsensical. But we had to make Pearce believe it could really work.’

  ‘But you hooked me up to it!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I might have blown the whistle. Simply announced that it wasn’t doing anything for me, just hissing in my ear. How could you know that I wouldn’t?’

  ‘I relied on the fact that you are a chronic liar. Once you were attached to a device that was supposed to make you tell the truth but didn’t work, you would naturally do the dishonest thing and pretend that it did. It was mixture of suggestion on my part and appalling dishonesty on yours. Not that it mattered whether you went through that charming and absurd act or not. Pearce had shown his hand by this time. I am only sorry that you decided to behave in such a peculiar fashion as to throw yourself at Lister’s gun.’

  ‘It was very brave of the poor darling,’ said Lady Helen. ‘And it was criminally foolish of Lister to have loaded blank charges. They can be very dangerous.’

  ‘It might have been necessary for him to appear to shoot one of us,’ said Trefusis.

  ‘A toast!’ cried Simon Hesketh-Harvey. ‘To Adrian Healey, saint and hero.’

  ‘Adrian Healey, saint and hero.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Adrian, touched. ‘It was nothing, really.’ He beamed around the room. ‘So the invention of Mendax was merely a ruse.’

  ‘Some of us,’ said Simon Hesketh-Harvey, ‘had been entertaining doubts as to Sir David’s trustworthiness over a number of years. Donald came up with the idea of Mendax. Over a two-year period he corresponded with Bela on the subject, knowing that Sir David would eventually get to hear of it. An old hand like Donald must expect his mail to be interfered with. He never expected that one of his own students would be set to spy on him, however. That was a tremendous bonus.’

  ‘Steady on,’ said Adrian. ‘David is my uncle you know. Blood is thicker than water after all.’

  ‘Not thicker than friendship I might have hoped,’ said Trefusis. ‘But there! No recriminations. You acted splendidly.’

  Bob, the landlord, leant forward and winked. ‘I had a great big gun pointed at Sir David from behind the curtain all the time, Master Adrian, sir.’

  ‘Well, you might have told me,’ said Adrian. A wave of tiredness came over him and he gave a huge yawn, the effort pulling at his stomach muscles and reawakening the wound.

  Humphrey Biffen must have read the momentary twinge of pain in Adrian’s face, for he was instantly on his feet. ‘You are still weak, Adrian. One of us should take you back to St Matthew’s.’

  Adrian rose as steadily as he could. ‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘The walk will clear my head.’

  Cambridge in the long vacation had a forlorn, slightly embarrassed appearance, like an empty theatre. It was a warm night. Adrian looked up at St John’s College chapel and at the stars beyond. The soft summer air refreshed him. Perhaps he would not go straight home to bed after all. There was a great deal to think about. In his pocket he had a letter from Jenny. It had awaited him in his pigeon-hole at St Matthew’s on his return from Gatwick that afternoon. It seemed that she had got herself a job as an assistant director at Stratford. Adrian crossed the road, sat on the low stone wall opposite the pub and lit a cigarette. He found that the letter could be read both as a farewell and as a plea for his return.

  ‘I cannot decide whether or not you have grown up yet. What is this fantasy world that men inhabit? I don’t think there is anything so wonderful about hard-nosed realism or remorseless cynicism, but why must you always revert to type? Have you already become an irretrievable “Enemy of Promise”? I was rereading it the other day. What is that final phrase about all Englishmen … that they become “Cowardly, sentimental and in the last analysis homosexual”? It was written fifty years ago for God’s sake! It can’t still be true can it – after a world war, a social revolution, rock and roll and all the rest?

  ‘I was so in love with you last year. I believed we were the most remarkable couple anywhere. All my friends thought I had it made, that’s a terrible phrase I know, but you know what I mean. I don’t think you quite believe that women exist. To you they’re a kind of difficult boy with surplus flesh in some places and missing flesh in others. I’m not even sure if you ever enjoyed my company, but then I don’t know if you ever enjoyed anyone else’s either, including your own. I know you hate amateur psychology but there it is.

  ‘“Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.” I can’t believe that our generation is growing up to fulfil all the ridiculous stereotypes. So I’ll become an earth mother and you will loll in front of the television watching cricket and Clint, is that it? Then why the years of education? Why a youth at all? Why read books and try to puzzle things out if it all ends in the same way?

  ‘To you and your kind your youth and upbringing take on this great mystique, the quality of myth. The first twenty years of my life are an open book, school and home, home and school, some friends here, some friends there. To you they are the backdrop to a gigantic world of fantasy to which you have endlessly to return. “Dearest creature, you do not understand …” I hear you say, as generations of men have always whined to their women. But that is the point! I do not understand. Nor, even if you had more p
ersuasive powers of exposition than you already do, could you ever make me understand. Because there is nothing to understand. That is what you have to understand. You grew up, you went to this school and that one, you made these friends and those. It was nothing. The future is a much bigger deal than the past, Adrian, a much bigger deal. Not just because it has babies in it, but because there are better people in it, who are better behaved and more fun to be with; the scenery is better, the weather is better, the rewards and thrills are better. But I really am not sure that you will ever …’

  A commotion coming from the Mitre, the pub next door to the Shoulder of Lamb, caused Adrian to look across the road. Both establishments had reached closing time. The landlord of the Mitre was escorting a boisterous group of drinkers into the street. Nigel, next door in the Shoulder, was locking up for the night. Something higher up caught Adrian’s attention. One window of the room upstairs, the private dining room which he had just left, was directly above the street entrance of the pub. Adrian could see the clear silhouette of a man standing with his back to the window. Trefusis proposing a toast, perhaps. He looked harder. No, assuredly not Trefusis.