The Liar (16 page)

‘Conradin was a boy who had a horrible, repressive aunt,’ said Gary. ‘So he prayed to Sredni Vashtar, his polecat …’

‘Or ferret.’

‘He prayed to his polecat or ferret and his prayers were answered. Sredni Vashtar killed the aunt.’

‘And meanwhile Conradin calmly made himself another piece of toast.’

‘I see,’ said Jenny. ‘The polecat is a kind of phallic symbol, do we think?’

‘Honestly, dear,’ said Gary, ‘you’re so obsessed, you’d think a
penis
was phallic.’

‘Well Sredni Vashtar is a monster from the Id, at the very least,’ said Adrian. ‘The dark, hot-breathed stink of the animal that Conradin would one day release from its dark hiding-place to wreak its revenge on the chintz and teacups of his aunt’s drawing-room life.’

‘Do you think this boy is trying to tell you something?’

‘Perhaps his thimble is a thimble no more, but a long, furry savage beast that wriggles and spits and mauls aunts. I’ll write and ask him.’

He looked through the rest of his post. A cheque from his mother was always welcome, a cheque from Uncle David for five hundred pounds even more so. He slipped it quickly into his jacket pocket. Reminders that Billy Graham was in Cambridge and would preach in Great St Mary’s were always monumentally unwelcome, as were invitations to hear
Acis and Galatea
played on original instruments.

‘But not sung,’ he suggested, looking through the rest of his mail, ‘on original voices. I suppose in two hundred years’ time they’ll be giving Beatles concerts on ancient Marshall … oh and a letter from old Biffo, bless him.’

Biffen was the only master from school with whom Adrian stayed in touch. The man was so fluffy and white and decent and had taken so much pleasure in the news of Adrian’s scholarship to St Matthew’s which had somehow filtered through to the school the year before, that it would have been a positive cruelty not to write to him from time to time to let him know how it was all going.

He glanced through the letter. Biffen was full of the news of the Dickens manuscript.

‘Donald writes me that there may be some doubt about it. I do hope not.’

‘I’d forgotten Biffo knew Trefusis,’ said Adrian, laying the letter aside. ‘Hello! What have we here?’

There was a crumpled handwritten note for him. ‘Please come to tea at C5, Great Court, Trinity. Alone. Hugo.’

‘How is Hugo?’ asked Jenny. ‘I haven’t seen much of him since
Flowerbuck
.’

‘I remember him being rather naff in Bridget’s production of
Sexual Perversity In Chicago
,’ said Gary. ‘He kept forgetting his lines and tripping over. He hasn’t been in anything since.’

Adrian put the note down and yawned.

‘He’s probably been swotting for his Part One’s. He was always that kind of creep. Hand me Justin and Miroslav.’

*

Adrian noticed that the permanent puddle in the passageway between King’s and St Catharine’s had iced over. Spring was having to make a fight of it. He wrapped Miroslav, his cashmere scarf, closer round him as he stepped out into the icy gale that blasted along King’s Parade. They used to say that Cambridge was the first stopping place for the wind that swept down from the Urals: in the thirties that was as true of the politics as the weather.

Adrian wondered whether he mightn’t become political himself. Always one to walk the other way from trends, he sensed that left-wingery was about to become very unfashionable. Long hair was out, flared jeans were out, soon there would be no more cakes and ale, canapés and Sancerre at best, Ryvita and mineral water at worst. Trefusis complained that the modern undergraduate was a cruel disappointment to him.

‘They’re all getting firsts and married these days, if you’ll forgive the syllepsis,’ he had said once. ‘Decency, discipline and dullness. There’s no lightness of touch any more, no irresponsibility. Do you remember that damning description of Leonard Bast in
Howards End?
“He had given up the glory of the animal for a tail-coat and a set of ideas.” Change tail-coat to pin-stripe and you have modern Cambridge. There’s no lack of respect today, that’s what I miss.’

As Adrian hurried past the Senate House he noticed two old men standing outside Bowes and Bowes. He put an extra spring in his step, a thing he often did when walking near the elderly. He imagined old people would look at his athletic bounce with a misty longing for their own youth. Not that he was trying to show off or rub salt into the wounds of the infirm, he really believed he was offering a service, an opportunity for nostalgia, like whistling the theme tune from
Happidrome
or spinning a Diabolo.

He skipped past them with carefree ease, missed his footing and fell to the ground with a thump. One of the old men helped him up.

‘You all right, lad?’

‘Yes fine … I must have slipped on the ice.’

Using Justin, his umbrella, as a walking-stick, he hobbled down Trinity Street, ruthlessly mocking himself.

‘Adrian, you’re an arse. In a world of arses, you are the arsiest by a mile. Stop being an arse at once, or I’ll never talk to you again. So there.’

‘Is there a problem, sir?’

‘Oh sorry, no … I was just … humming to myself.’

He hadn’t realised he’d been talking out loud. The Trinity porter stared at him suspiciously, so as Adrian limped into Great Court, he broke into more definite and deliberate song to prove his point.

‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ he fluted. ‘How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet, a will o’the wisp, a clown.’

Hugo’s rooms were in the corner tower. The same tower where Lord Byron had kept his bear, arousing the wrath of the college authorities, who had told him sniffily that the keeping of domestic animals in rooms was strictly forbidden. Byron had assured them that it was far from a domestic animal. It was an untamed bear, as wild and savage as could be, and they had been reluctantly obliged to let him keep it.

‘How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?’

Hugo opened the door.

‘I brought a jar of anchovy paste, half a dozen potato farls and a packet of my own special blend of Formosan Oolong and Orange Pekoe,’ said Adrian, ‘but I was set upon by a gang of footpads outside Caius and they stole it all.’

‘That’s all right,’ said Hugo. ‘I’ve got some wine.’

Which was about all he seemed to have. He poured out two mugfuls.

‘Very nice,’ said Adrian, sipping appreciatively. ‘I wonder how they got the cat to sit on the bottle.’

‘It’s cheap, that’s the main thing.’

Adrian looked round the room. From the quantity of empty bottles about the place he supposed that cheapness must indeed have been the deciding factor in Hugo’s wine-buying policy. The place was very meanly appointed; apart from the usual college tables and chairs, the only things of interest that met Adrian’s inquisitive scrutiny were a photograph of Hugo’s actress mother on the table, a
Peter Flowerbuck
poster on the wall which showed Adrian in a tall hat leading Hugo away from a snarling Gary, a handful of Penguin classics, a guitar, some LPs and a record-player.

‘So anyway Hugo, my old penny bun. How is everything?’

‘Everything,’ said Hugo, ‘is terrible.’

It didn’t look it. Drink never shows in the faces of the young. Hugo’s eye was bright, his complexion fine and his figure trim.

‘Work is it?’

‘No, no. I’ve just been thinking a lot lately.’

‘Well, that’s what we’re here for, I suppose.’

Hugo filled up his mug with more wine.

‘I just want to see if I’ve got you straight. You seduce me in my first year at school and then ignore me completely until you make up a lie about Pigs Trotter having been in love with me … Julian Rundell told me the truth about that, by the way. Then you seduce me again by pretending to be asleep. Years later, after having cheated my prep school out of a cricket victory, you tell me that you weren’t really asleep that night, which I
didn’t
in fact know, even though I said I did. Then what happens? Oh yes, you write a fake Dickens novel describing a character who looks like me and just happens to make love to someone who looks like you while that person just happens to be asleep. I think that’s everything. You see, all I want to know is … what have I done?’

‘Hugo, I know it seems …’

‘It worries me, you see. I must have done something terrible to you without knowing it and I’d like it all to stop now, please.’

‘Oh God,’ said Adrian.

It was so hard to connect this man with Cartwright. If Hugo had taught at another prep school and gone to another university, the memory of him wouldn’t be muddied by a sight like this alien Hugo who trembled and wept into his wine. It
was
another person of course, molecularly every part of the old Cartwright must have been replaced dozens of times since he had been the most beautiful person who ever walked the earth. And the old Adrian who had loved him was not the same as the Adrian who beheld him now. It was like the philosopher’s axe. After a few years the philosopher replaces the head, later he replaces the shaft. Then the head wears out and he replaces it again, next the shaft again. Can he go on calling it the same axe? Why should this new Adrian be responsible for the sins of the old?

‘It’s so easy to explain, Hugo. Easy and very hard. Just one word covers it all.’

‘What word?
No
word could explain it. Not a whole Bible of words.’

‘It’s a common enough word, but it might mean something different to you than it does to me. Language is a bastard. So let’s invent a new word. “Libb” will do. I libbed you. That’s all there is to it. I was in libb with you. My libb for you informed my every waking and sleeping hour for … for God knows how many years. Nothing has ever been as powerful as that libb. It was the guiding force of my life, it haunted me then and haunts me still.’

‘You were in
love
with me?’

‘Well now, that’s your word. Libb has a great deal in common with love, I admit. But love is supposed to be creative, not destructive, and as you have found out, my libb turned out to be very harmful indeed.’

Hugo gripped the rim of his mug and stared into his wine.

‘Why can’t you …’

‘Yes?’

‘I mean … everything you do … that bloody magazine, the being asleep, the cricket match, that Dickens novel … everything you do is … is … I don’t know what it is.’

‘Duplicitous? Covert? Underhand? Sly? Devious? Evasive?’

‘All of those things. Why have you never come out and said anything or done anything in the open?’

‘I’m fucked if I know, Hugo. I’m seriously fucked if I know. Perhaps because I’m a coward. Perhaps because I don’t exist except in borrowed clothes. I used to think everyone but me was a fraud. It’s simple logic to realise that, except to a madman, the opposite must have been the truth.’

‘Hell’s bells, Adrian. Have you any idea how much I admired you? Any idea at all? Your talent? You used to come into the changing-room sometimes dressed as Oscar Wilde or Noël Coward or whoever and stride up and down like a prince. You used to make me feel so
small
. All the things you can do. My mother thinks I’m a bore. I used to wish I could be you. I fantasised being you. I would lie awake at night imagining what it would be like to have your tall body and your smile, your wit and words. And of course I loved you. I didn’t libb you or lobb you or lubb you or labb you, I loved you.’

‘Oh lord,’ sighed Adrian. ‘If I find a way of expressing adequately now what I am thinking and feeling you will take it to be a piece of verbal dexterity and the latest in a long line of verbal malversations. You see! I can’t even say “deceit”. I have to say “verbal malversations”. Everyone’s honest but me. So perhaps I should just whine and moan wordlessly.’

Adrian opened the window and howled into Great Court like a demented muezzin, taking the performance so far as to produce real tears. When he turned to face back into the room Hugo was laughing.

‘What they call keening, I believe,’ said Adrian.

‘Well, there’s always the cliché,’ Hugo said, extending his hand. ‘We can be just good friends now.’

‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’

‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’

‘We’ll always have Paris.’

‘We’ll always have Paris.’

Adrian raised his mug of wine. ‘Here’s death to the past.’

‘Death to the past.’