The Liar (36 page)

‘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 persuasive 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.

Adrian waited for the pack of drunken rejects from the Mitre to disperse. They stood jeering boozily outside the pub for what seemed an age before at last shouting and kicking their way towards Magdalene Bridge and out of sight. The street was empty. Adrian crossed over and edged his way round to the alleyway that connected the two pubs. The ground floor of the Shoulder of Lamb was empty. Adrian looked around for a box or beer crate that he could stand on. There was a plastic dustbin in the corner of the alley marked ‘Mitre Only!’ in white paint, the exclamation mark betraying a whole history of bitter inter-pub rivalry that Adrian had time to find both comic and pitiful. He edged the bin under the Shoulder’s ground floor window and, setting his left leg onto the lid, tried to haul himself up, but the dustbin buckled and he found himself thigh deep in refuse. Pain ripped across his stomach and he gagged at the stench of garbage that rose to his nostrils. It was an abiding mystery to Adrian that all man-made rubbish smelt the same once it had been in a dustbin for any length of time. Trying hard not to breathe, he turned the bin upside down and tested if the base would be more likely to take his weight. It held and Adrian got his foot to the window ledge and straightened himself. His head was now no more than two feet below the level of the first floor window. He heard the voice of Humphrey Biffen.

‘I’m still not quite sure how we score this,’ he was saying.

‘Excuse me?’ said a Szabó.

‘Well, it’s Donald’s victory again. No doubt about that,’ said Nancy. ‘Even if we take Lyre Bird out of the picture altogether. He was, after all, a shared resource. The same result would have been achieved without him. He merely added zest. You have to admit it, you failed to take Walton’s Rules into account and you genuinely believed that you held one half of Mendax: you loused up, didn’t you, David?’

‘Bollocks to the lot of you,’ growled the voice of Uncle David. ‘Donald changed the game halfway through! Turned it into some half-baked fiction just so that he could put that dandiprat of a nephew of mine over his knee and give him a spanking. A spanking that he richly deserved, I will grant you.’

‘Well, that’s what gave you half a chance,’ said Nancy. ‘You were beaten all ends up and you know it.’

‘Ha! You wait. Just you watch my smoke. If you’re not all excessively nice to me I’ll set the next round in Lebanon and then you’ll know what’s what.’

‘What are you going to tell the department?’ asked Humphrey.

‘Nothing
to
tell. Wasted a tiny amount of cash on the surveillance of Stefan. A few flights to Salzburg. Activated our man Locksmith in Budapest. An idle bugger who needed a sharp toe up his totsie anyway. No harm done. The world knows you’re my Moriarty, Donald. They let me have a fly at you once in a while, to humour the mad dog in me. They’re relieved to see that I have a human flaw, is my view of it.’

‘And when do you play your next game?’ asked the other Szabó.

‘We try to make each game run for at least two or three years,’ said Trefusis. ‘Like any decent real life engagement. We will take the next year off before starting again. David and I are the antagonists and it is up to us to recruit as we please. I nearly always have Humphrey and Helen on my side, and David likes to use Dickon. I am the spy and David the spycatcher.’

‘Donald devises the scenario and I have to stop him. Which I did in seventy-four.’

‘David is at liberty to use all the facilities of his Service, but at his own risk.’

‘And at yours, old love,’ said David. ‘The fact that you are now branded a dirty lavatory loiterer is some kind of victory for me, I venture to think.’

‘That’s a point,’ said Simon. ‘You did nearly get yourself sent to prison, Donald.’

‘An unlooked-for occurrence, I admit, but these things lend lustre to the reputation of a fading don, don’t you feel?’

‘Can’t you do something about that, David?’ asked Helen. ‘A word in the right ear, a review of evidence, a retraction from the arresting officer …
something?
’

‘Of course, of course,’ Uncle David’s voice murmured affably.

‘Really David, there’s no need …’

‘When did you start all this please?’

‘When the game proper ended,’ said David. ‘About twenty years ago life in the Service became dull, pompous, sordid and absurd. Bloody good bouillabaisse, Bob.’

‘Thank you, sir. Got the trick of it in Marseille.’

‘Yum, yum.’

‘Tell me a thing,’ said Trefusis. ‘In the car driving over to Salzburg, Adrian told me what we might call his life story.’

‘Oh ah?’

‘He told me about you and Helen at school, Humphrey.’

‘Yes, he came to a couple of our Friday afternoon teas, didn’t he, dear?’

‘He told me too, about bumping into you, David, at Lord’s in … seventy-five or six it must have been.’

‘Oh yes, that’ll be the Aussie test. I remember. Don’t know what he means by “bumping into me” though.’

‘No?’

‘His parents were going on holiday. Naturally they didn’t want the little rat getting under their feet then. Shoved him onto me.’

‘He hadn’t … then …
run away
from home in any way?’

‘Good Lord no! That what he told you? No, no. Pretty normal schooling he had as far as I can remember. Got slung out for nobbing half his house and circulating filthy drivel in a school magazine. Couple of years at the local college in Gloucester where he got his “A” levels. Taught at some prepper in Norfolk. Then St Matthew’s. Why, tell you something different did he?’

‘No, no. That was broadly the story as he told it me. One or two, er … embellishments perhaps. A lot of highly entertaining nonsense about Piccadilly and prison and so forth. I’m sure he never intended to be so insulting as to expect me to believe them.’

Adrian’s foot slipped on the ledge. Scrabbling wildly to regain his balance, he kicked a toe through the window, knocked the dustbin from under him and fell backwards onto the ground. Without stopping to see what damage he had caused either to himself or to the window, he picked himself up and ran out into the street.

14

ADRIAN BROUGHT THE
tips of his fingers together and smiled gently. The girl’s voice continued to read.

‘
Othello
is a tragedy of privacy, a phrase that itself expresses incongruity, for, as with most Shakespearean tragedy, success is achieved by a treatment unsuited to the form. And it is the lack of suiting which makes the theme perennial; the tearing-down of a privacy is a subject which fits our age, as it might fit any age. It lets in chaos, and lets out love.’

‘Oh bravo!’ cried Adrian. ‘Memorably phrased, Shelagh.’

The girl flushed slightly with pleasure. ‘You like it Dr Healey?’

‘Indeed! I liked it when I first read it … phew, let me see … must be getting on for ten years ago now … nineteen eighty-one, I’m pretty sure it was … and I like it just as much now. If anything age seems to have improved it. John Bayley,
Shakespeare and Tragedy
, published, unless I’m very much mistaken, by Routledge and Kegan Paul.’

‘Oh dear,’ the girl flushed again, but not this time with pleasure.

‘Too memorably phrased I am afraid, my dear.’

‘Thing is …’

‘I
know
you are … frantically busy. But believe me, I had far rather listen to that good essay than the bad one you would have contrived without Bayley’s help. All’s well. I think you will manage to get yourself an adequate degree without my pestering you every fortnight for an essay, don’t you?’

‘Well …’

‘Of course you will!’ Adrian stood and refilled Shelagh’s glass. ‘A little more malvoisie for you?’

‘Thank you.’

‘A smoky volcanic bite that cannot disgust. You act, I believe?’

‘Yes … that’s why I get so behind with work.’

‘I don’t know why I say “believe” you act, I’ve seen you in a number of productions. My wife is down from London this weekend, you may have heard of her?’

‘Jenny de Woolf, the director? Of course!’

‘Then why don’t you come round to our house in Trumpington this evening and say hello?’

‘Really? I’d love to.’

‘All right, my dear. Seven o’clock, shall we say?’

‘That would be fine. Thanks!’

Adrian watched with approval as the girl gathered her bag and her scarf and made for the door. ‘By the way, Shelagh …’

She paused enquiringly in the doorway.

‘I note,’ said Adrian, ‘that you are a member of the University Humanist Society.’

She looked back at him with a hint of defiance and suspicion.

‘Yes?’

‘You take it seriously?’

‘Very.’

‘You dislike religion perhaps?’

‘I loathe religion.’

‘Ah, now that is interesting. I think that tonight I shall invite old Trefusis along as well, you’d like him I’m sure, and I know he’ll like you. We are currently working on a … on a problem that may interest you.’

‘Oh?’

‘As you may know, the nineties have been nominated the “Decade of Evangelism” by various functionaries culled from the madder wings of the Christian church.’

The girl’s mouth wrinkled in comic disgust. ‘Don’t remind me.’

‘We have discovered that behind this weird and pitiable phrase there lies …’ Adrian broke off. ‘Never mind. I’ll tell you the rest tonight. Dryden House, Trumpington. Can’t miss it.’

The girl looked intrigued. ‘Right. I’ll see you then, Dr Healey. Er … bye then.’

‘Goodbye, Shelagh. Oh and Shelagh?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention this to anyone for the moment. You’ll find out why.’

Adrian looked out of the window and watched the girl hop across the grass of Hawthorn Tree Court. He smiled to himself as he sat at his desk and wrote a short note on a sheet of writing-paper.

‘To Bald Eagle. Gingerbread. Informal. I think the game may well be afoot. Love Liar Bird.’

Adrian leant back in his chair, fed the paper into his fax machine and pressed an autodial key. He watched the sheet chug through the machine before crossing to his window again.

On the other side of the court he could make out the figure of an old man through an open window on the first floor. The figure stooped down for a moment and fiddled with something on his desk and then came up bearing a ripped sheet of paper. He turned in Adrian’s direction, flourishing the paper like a Morris dancer waving a handkerchief, and executed a quick little jig.

Adrian laughed and turned back into the room.

Acknowledgements

Donald Trefusis and his Wireless Essays first appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme
Loose Ends
. I should like to thank the producer Ian Gardhouse, and the presenter Ned Sherrin, for allowing the Professor a platform for his ideas and observations.

There is no possibility that this book could ever have been written without the violent threats and pitiless blackmail of Sue Freestone of William Heinemann and Anthony Goff of David Higham Associates.

I’m grateful to my parents for their researches into Salzburg, to Tim Rice for allowing the quotation from ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’, to Hugh and Jo Laurie for reading the manuscript when they had hundreds of better things to do, and to Jo Foster for everything.

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