The Liar (26 page)

‘No.’

‘No. He’ll be out of it quick as shit off a shovel and then Hugo Bullock will still be the only name on my list.’

‘He … my friend won’t miss me until the evening.’

‘I see, what’s his job?’

‘Look, I said. I’m only going to tell you about the other man.’

‘My pencil is poised, Hugo.’

After Adrian had signed his statement they brought him a cup of tea. A detective inspector came in to read through it. He glanced at Adrian.

‘Looks like you’re in a bit of luck, Bullock. Zak is not exactly a stranger to us. About five nine, you say?’

‘Well I said I thought he was about the same size as Sergeant Canter.’

‘Stud in the left ear?’

‘I’m pretty sure it was the left.’

‘Yeah. We lost the bastard a couple of months ago. If he’s where you say he is you’ve done us a bit of a favour.’

‘Oh well. Anything to help.’

The detective inspector laughed.

‘Get him charged and sorted out with a brief, John. Possession.’

‘What’s a brief?’ asked Adrian when the inspector had gone.

‘Solicitor.’

‘Oh. I thought … you know, legal aid. Don’t you provide one?’

‘A boy like you … your parents are going to want to appoint one.’

‘My parents?’

‘Yeah. What’s their address?’

‘I’d … I’d much rather keep my parents out of it. They don’t know where I am you see and I’ve put them through enough really.’

‘They file you as a missing person?’

‘Yes … I mean, I think they did go to the police. I bumped into my godfather and he said they had.’

‘I think they’d be happier knowing where you are then, don’t you?’

But Adrian remained firm and was led to the desk to be charged as Hugo Bullock.

‘Empty your pockets on the desk, please.’

His possessions were examined and itemised in a ledger.

‘You have to sign so that when you get them back you know we haven’t robbed you,’ said Canter.

‘Oh lordy lord, I trust you,’ said Adrian, who was beginning to enjoy himself. ‘If a chap can’t consign his chattels to an honest constable without suspicion then what has the world come to?’

‘Yeah, right. We’ll need your signature anyway. Oh, and there’s one other thing, Adrian.’

‘Yes?’

‘Ah,’ said Canter. ‘So it’s Adrian Healey, is it? Not Hugo Bullock.’

Damn, shit, bollocks and buggery-fuck.

D.S. Canter was holding up Anouilh’s
Antigone
. Adrian’s name was written on the fly-leaf.

‘Clever lad like you, falling for a trick like that,’ he tutted. ‘No Bullock on the missing persons list, you see. But I bet there’ll be a Healey, won’t there?’

II

A bell rang in the corridor, doors slammed and voices rose in anger.

‘Watch yourself, Ashcroft, one more sound out of you and you’re on report.’

‘But what did I do?’

Adrian shut his eyes and tried to concentrate on the letter he was writing.

‘Right! I warned you. Loss of privileges for a week.’

He took a piece of paper and spread it flat on the table. A cold wind blew outside and the sky had darkened to gunmetal grey. Snow was on the way.

‘Please Mr Annendale, may I get a book from the library?’

‘If you hurry.’

Adrian picked up a pen and began.

13th February 1978

Dear Guy,

I have been meaning to pluck up the nerve to write to you for some time. I was finally pricked into action by seeing you in
The Likeness
the other night. You were brilliant as always. I loved you in both parts – though the Good Shelford reminded me more of the Guy I Know (up in the gallery) …

I wonder if you found out what happened to me? I have a feeling that you imagined me skipping off with your money. But perhaps you heard the truth. The fact is that after I had been to see your friend Zak I was arrested by the police in possession of your end-of-shoot cocaine – you were just finishing
The Red Roof
if you remember. You’ll be pleased to know, by the way, that Zak wasn’t ripping you off – the haul was described in court as seven grammes of highest quality Andean flake.

It may be that you’ve been suffering from a guilty conscience about my innocent involvement in the whole affair, but if you have, I can now cheerfully relieve you of that burden. I was treated well and never put under pressure to reveal any names.

The old parents rallied round with character witnesses – godfathers, bishops, generals, even my old Housemaster at school would you believe? – and with squads of armed and dangerous solicitors. What chance did the magistrates stand? It was only by calling on all their reserves of pride and self-control that they managed to summon up the nerve even to put me on probation. I think one of them was so overcome by my quiet dignity and round-eyed innocence that he came within an ace of recommending some kind of civilian award for me.

Since then I have been to a crammer’s in Stroud, passed exams and find myself filling in time teaching at a prep school in Norfolk before going off to St Matthew’s College, Cambridge – not quite poacher turned gamekeeper … slave turned slave-master? Something like it. Boy turned man, I suppose.

My name, as you probably know, is as far from Hugo Bullock as a name can be without actually falling over, but I won’t bother you with it. This is just to wish you well and thank you for a month or two of unsurpassable fun and frolic.

I hope you are now treating your nostrils as well as you treated

Your very own

Hugo Bullock

There was a knock on the door.

‘Please, sir, can I ask a question?’

‘Newton, I distinctly heard with my own two ears – these, the ones I put on this morning because they go so well with my eyes – that Mr Annendale gave you permission to go to the library and get a book. I did not hear him give you permission to come to my room.’

‘It’s just a quick question …’

‘Oh, very well.’

‘Is it true, sir, that you and Matron are having an affair?’

‘Out, out! Get out! Out before I slash your throat with a knife and hang you dripping with blood from the flag-pole. Out, before I pull your guts from your body and stuff them down your mouth. Out, before I become mildly irritated. Go, hence, begone. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once. Run! run quickly from here, run to the other side of Europe, flee for your life nor give not one backward glance. I never hope to see you again in this world or the next. Never speak to me, never approach me, never advertise your presence to me by the smallest sound, or by the living God that made me I will do such things … I know not what they are but they will be the terrors of the earth. Flee hence, be not here, but somewhere in a vast Elsewhere to which I have no access. Boys who rub me up the wrong way, Newton, come to a sticky end. Be removed, piss off,
beraus
, get utterly outly out.’

‘Thought so.’

‘Grr!’

Adrian flung a book at the hastily closing door, signed the letter and lit a pipe. The snow had started to fall.

He had no more duties for the day so he decided to do a bit more work on
The Aunt That Exploded
, a play for the end of term that he had been cajoled into writing.

If Harvey-Potter was going to play Aunt Bewinda, something would have to be done about preserving his soprano. A definite fissure had appeared in his larynx at breakfast and a tenor Bewinda would be worse than useless. He should talk to Clare about deliberately shrinking the boy’s underpants in the laundry. Anything to keep nature at bay for two months.

He still had to work on Maxted, the only master who had so far refused to participate.

‘You can kick my arse from here to Norwich, Adrian, I’m not going to dress up in shorts for any man living.’

The principal idea of the play was that boys played grown-ups, parents, aunts, doctors and schoolmasters, and the staff played boys and, in the case of Matron, a little girl.

‘Come on Oliver, even the Brigadier has agreed. It’ll be wonderful.’

‘If you can tell me in one word what’s wrong with
The Mikado?
’

‘No, can’t do that. “It’s crap” is two words and “It’s complete crap” is three.’

‘Of course
The Mikado
is crap, but it’s good healthy stodgy crap. Your blasted play is either going to be horrible pebbly crap or a great gush of liquid crap.’

‘I’ll do all your duties this term. How about that?’

‘No you bloody won’t.’

That hadn’t been such a clever offer. Maxted
enjoyed
being on duty.

‘Well I think you’re a heel and a stinker and I hope that one day you’ll be found out.’

‘Found out? What do you mean?’

‘Ho hee!’ said Adrian, who knew that everyone lived in fear of being found out.

But Maxted was not to be moved, which was a nuisance because, set off in shorts and school-cap, his paunch and purple complexion would have been terrifically striking. Perhaps Adrian himself would have to play Bewinda’s nephew. Not ideal casting: he was still closer in age to the boys than to any of the staff.

But it was a snug problem, the perfect sort of problem for a man in a tweed jacket, sitting in a firelit room with a good briar pipe between his teeth, a glass of Glennfiddich at his elbow and a blizzard whipping up outside, to ponder over. A clean problem for a clean man with a clean mind in the clean countryside.

He rubbed his fingers against the grain of his stubble and thought.

All gone. All anger quelled, all desire drained, all thirst slaked, all madness past.

There would be cricket next term, coaching and umpiring, teaching the young idea how to deal with the ball that goes on with the arm, reading them Browning and Heaney on the lawn when the sun shone and it was too hot to teach indoors. The rest of the summer would be spent discovering Milton and Proust and Tolstoy ready for Cambridge in October where, like Cranmer – but with a bicycle instead of a horse – his mind and thighs would find exercise. A handful of civilised friends, not too close.

‘What do you make of that bloke in your college, Healey?’

‘He’s hard to get to know. I
like
him, but he’s private, he’s unfathomable.’

‘Detached somehow … almost serene.’

Then a degree and back here or to another school – his own perhaps. Stay on at Cambridge even … if he got a First.

All gone.

He didn’t believe himself for a moment, of course.

He looked at his reflection in the window. ‘It’s no good trying to fool me, Healey,’ he said, ‘an Adrian always knows when an Adrian is lying.’

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian’s lies were real: they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man’s truths – if other men had truths – and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

He watched the snow building up against the window and his mind caught the tube to Piccadilly and climbed the steps from the Underground.

There stood Eros, the boy with the bow poised to shoot, and there stood Adrian, the schoolmaster in tweeds and cavalry twills, looking up at him and slowly shaking his head.

‘Of course you know why Eros was put in the Circus in the first place, don’t you?’ he remembered saying to a sixteen-year-old who was sharing his pitch outside the London Pavilion one July evening.

‘Named after the Eros Strip Club, was it?’

‘Oh that’s close, but I’m afraid I can’t give it you, I’ll have to pass the question over. It was part of a tribute to the Earl of Shaftesbury: a grateful nation honours the man who abolished child labour. Alfred Gilbert, the sculptor, positioned Eros with his bow and arrow aiming up Shaftesbury Avenue.’

‘Yeah? Well, fuck all that, there’s a trick over there been eyeing you up for the past five minutes.’

‘Had him. Overuses the teeth. He can find someone else to circumcise. The point is, it’s a kind of visual pun, Eros burying his shaft up Shaftesbury Avenue. You see?’

‘Then why’s he pointing down Lower Regent Street?’

‘He was taken down and cleaned during the war and the fools who put him back up didn’t know buggery ding-dong shit.’

‘He could do with cleaning again.’

‘I don’t know. I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I’m sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn’t lust after Psyche.’

‘He’s still looking this way.’

‘His bottom is, at any rate.’

‘No, the trick. He’s started cruising me now.’

‘I will clear away for you. Too many cocks spoil the brothel. Have him with my blessing. Just don’t come crawling to me with your glans half hanging off, that’s all.’

‘I’ll give him a minute to make up his mind.’

‘Do that. I’m bound to wonder, meanwhile, was there any life more futile and perfectly representative than that of Lord Shaftesbury? His own adored son killed in a schoolboy fight at Eton while his national monument daily supervises child labour of a nature and intensity he would never have guessed at.’

‘I’m definitely on here. See you later.’

Adrian dropped a log on the fire and stared into the flames. He was as secure as anyone: a real teacher with a real name, real references and real qualifications. No forgeries or tricks had brought him here, only merit. No one on earth could bang into the room and drag him to judgement. He really was a schoolmaster in a real school, really stirring a real fire in a safe and snug common room that was as real as the winter weather that really raged in the real world outside. He had as much right to pour a finger of ten-year-old malt and puff a soothing pipeful of the ready-rubbed as anyone in England. The grown-up didn’t live who had the power to snatch away the bottle, confiscate the pipe or reduce him to stammered excuses.

Yet the sparks that spat up the flue spelt Wrigleys and Coke and Toshiba in Piccadilly neon; the escape of steam from the logs hissed a meeting of prefects plotting punishment.

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.