The Liar (5 page)

Adrian looked at Tom who nodded gravely.

‘Very well then,’ said Adrian. ‘One evening about three years ago … almost exactly three years ago in fact, I was sitting at home watching television. It was
A Man Called Ironside
, I remember. My father is a Professor of Biochemistry at Bristol University and he often works late. My mother had been in the kitchen since three in the afternoon drinking vodka from a teacup. At ten o’clock she smashed the cup onto the floor and cried out so I could hear her in the sitting room.’

Trotter shifted uncomfortably.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to tell us this, you know.’

‘No, no, I want to. She had been, as I say, drinking all afternoon and she suddenly howled, “Ten o’clock! It’s ten o’fucking clock! Why doesn’t he come? Why in God’s name doesn’t he come?” Something along those lines.

‘I went into the kitchen and looked at her face all swollen, her tear-stained and mascara-blotched cheeks and her trembling lip and I remember thinking, “She’s like Shelley Winters but without the talent.” Don’t know why a thought like that should come to me, but it did. I turned back to the telly – couldn’t bear to look at her like that – and said, “He’s working, Mother. You know he’s working.”

‘“Working?” She shrieked her stinking breath right into my face. “Working! Oh that’s very good. Screwing that
cunt
of a lab assistant is what he’s doing. The little bitch. I’ve seen her … with her stupid white coat and her stupid white teeth. Little
bitch whore!
”’

Tom and Trotter both stared at Adrian in disbelief as he screeched out the words, but his eyes were closed and he didn’t seem to be aware of them.

‘She really could scream, my mother. I thought her voice would fracture with the violence of it, but in fact it was my own which cracked. “You should go to bed, Mother,” I said.

‘“Bed! He’s the one who’s in fucking bed,” she giggled, and she pulled at the bottle and the last of the vodka just dribbled down her mouth and mixed with the tears that ran down the folds of her fat face. She burped and tried to jam the bottle into the waste-hole of the waste-disposal thing, the thingummy.’

‘Garburator,’ said Pigs Trotter. ‘I think they’re called Garburators.’

‘Garburator, that’s it. She tried to jam the bottle down the Garburator.

‘“I’m
going
to
catch
them at their little
game
,” she chanted – she put on a kind of sing-song voice whenever she was pissed, it was one of the signs that she was really gone – “
That’s
what
I’m
going to
do
. Where are the keys?’

‘“Mother, you can’t drive!” I said. “Just wait, he’ll be back soon. You see.”

‘“Where are the keys? Where are the fucking car keys?”

‘Well, I knew exactly where they were. In the hall, on the table, and I ran for them and stuffed them into my mouth. God knows why. That really got her going.

‘“Come here you little bastard, give me those keys!”

‘I said, “Mother, you can’t drive like this, just leave it, will you?”

‘And then … then she picked up a vase from off the table and flung it at me. Broke on the side of my head and sent me flying against the foot of the stairs where I tripped and fell. See that scar, just there?’

Adrian parted his hair and showed Trotter and Tom a small white scar.

‘Five stitches. Anyway, there was blood all running down my face and she was shaking me and slapping my face, left and right, left and right.

‘“Will you give me those fucking keys?” she kept screaming, shaking me on every syllable. I sprawled there, I was crying I don’t mind telling you, really wailing. “Please, Mother, you can’t go out, you can’t. Please!”’

Adrian stopped and looked around.

‘Dare we risk a cigarette, do you think?’

Tom lit three at once.

‘Go on!’ said Pigs Trotter. ‘What happened then?’

‘Well,’ said Adrian inhaling deeply, ‘what Mother hadn’t seen was that the moment the vase hit me, the car keys had shot out of me like a clay-pigeon from a trap. She thought I still had them in my mouth so she started to try and wrench it open, you know, like a vet trying to give a pill to a dog.

‘“So the little bugger’s swallowed them has he?” she said.

‘I shouted back, “Yes, I’ve swallowed them! I’ve swallowed them and you can’t get them back! So … so just forget it.” But like a prat of a heroine in a Hammer horror film I couldn’t help looking round for them myself, so of course she followed my eyes, crawled across the hallway and swooped on them. Then she was off. I kept shouting at her to come back. I heard the scrunch on the gravel as she drove away and then – again like some git in a film – I fainted.’

‘Christ,’ said Pigs Trotter.

‘She killed a family of four as well as herself,’ said Adrian. ‘My father, who had never had an unfaithful thought in his life, has still not really recovered. She was a bitch, my mother. A real bitch.’

‘Yes,’ said Tom. ‘Thing is, Ade, you may have forgotten, but I met your mother last term. Tall woman with a wide smile.’

‘Fuck,’ said Adrian. ‘So you did. Oh well, it was a good try anyway.’ He stood and flicked his cigarette behind a gravestone.

Trotter stared at him.

‘You mean,’ he said. ‘You mean that you made that up?’

‘’Fraid so,’ said Adrian.

‘All of it?’

‘Well my father’s a professor, that bit’s true.’

‘You fucking shitbag,’ said Trotter, tears filling his eyes. ‘You fucking shitbag!’ He stumbled away, choking with tears. Adrian watched him go with surprise.

‘What’s the matter with Pigs? He must have known it was a lie as soon as I began.’

‘Oh nothing,’ said Tom, turning his large brown eyes on Adrian. ‘His mother and two brothers were killed in a car crash three years ago, that’s all.’

‘Oh no! No! You’re kidding!’

‘Yes I am, actually.’

2

I

‘THE PERIPHRASTIC “DO”
was a superfluous tense-carrier,’ said Adrian. ‘Semantically empty yet widely used. The major theories of the origin of the periphrastic “do” are three: One) It was derived from the influence of the corresponding use of “faire” in French. Two) It developed out of the Old English causative “do”. Three) It derived from semantic development of the full factitive very “do”. An examination of these three theories should tell us much about alternative approaches to diachronic syntax and generative grammar.’

He looked across to the sofa. Trefusis was lying on his back, an overflowing ashtray on his chest, lightweight earphones around his neck and a square of mauve silk over his face, through which he managed to smoke. If it weren’t for the rise and fall of the ashtray and the clouds of smoke weaving through the silk, Adrian might have thought him dead. He hoped not, this was a good essay he was reading out and he had taken a lot of trouble over it.

Friends had warned against the Philology option.

‘You’ll get Craddock, who’s useless,’ they said. ‘Trefusis only teaches research students and a few select undergraduates. Do the American paper like everyone else.’

But Trefusis had consented to see him.

‘The Early Middle English periphrastic “do” could occur after modals and “have” + past participle. It was essentially a second position non-modal operator mutually exclusive with “be” + past participle and incompatible with a passive format. As late as eighteen-eighteen some grammarians wrote that it was a standard alternate to the simple form, but others denounced its use in any but empathic, interrogative and negative sentences. By the mid-eighteenth century it was obsolete.’

Adrian looked up from his sheaf of papers. A brown stain was forming in Trefusis’s handkerchief, as the silk filtered the smoke.

‘Um … that’s it …’

Silence from the sofa. Far away all the bells of Cambridge began to chime the hour.

‘Professor Trefusis?’

He couldn’t have slept through an essay of that quality, surely? Adrian cleared his throat and tried again, more loudly.

‘Professor Trefusis?’

From under the handkerchief came a sigh.

‘So.’

Adrian wiped the palms of his hands on his knees.

‘Was it all right?’ he asked.

‘Well constructed, well researched, well supported, well argued …’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘Original, concise, thoughtful, perceptive, incisive, illuminating, cogent, lucid, compelling, charmingly read …’

‘Er – good.’

‘I should imagine,’ said Trefusis, ‘that it must have taken you almost an hour to copy out.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Come, come, Mr Healey. You’ve already insulted your own intelligence.’

‘Oh.’

‘Val Kirstlin,
Neue Philologische Abteilung
, July 1973, “The Origin and Nature of the Periphrastic Verb ‘Do’ in Middle and Early Modern English”. Am I right?’

Adrian shifted uncomfortably. It was hard enough to know what Trefusis was thinking when his face was unveiled; with a handkerchief over him he was as unreadable as a doctor’s prescription.

‘Look, I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘The thing is …’

‘Please don’t apologise. Had you bothered to do any work of your own I should have been obliged to sit through it just the same, and I can assure you that I had much rather listen to a good essay than a mediocre one.’

Adrian couldn’t think of an adequate reply to this.

‘You have a fine brain. A really excellent brain, Mr Healey.’

‘Thank you.’

‘A fine brain, but a dreadful mind. I have a fine brain
and
a fine mind. Likewise Russell. Leavis, a good mind, practically no brain at all. Shall we continue like this, I wonder?’

‘Like what?’

‘This fortnightly exhibition of stolen goods. It all seems rather pointless. I don’t find the pose of careless youth charming and engaging any more than you find the pose of careworn age fascinating and eccentric, I should imagine. Perhaps I should let you play the year away. I have no doubt that you will do very well in your final tests. Honesty, diligence and industry are wholly superfluous qualities in one such as you, as you have clearly grasped.’

‘Well, it’s just that I’ve been so …’

Trefusis pulled the handkerchief from his face and looked at Adrian.

‘But of course you have! Frantically busy. Fran-tically.’

Trefusis helped himself to another cigarette from a packet that lay on top of a tower of books next to the sofa and tapped it against his thumb-nail.

‘My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘I am a student of language, Mr Healey. You write with fluency and conviction, you talk with authority and control. A complex idea here, an abstract proposition there, you juggle with them, play with them, seduce them. There is no movement from doubt to comprehension, no breaking down, no questioning, no excitement. You try to persuade others, never yourself. You recognise patterns, but you rearrange them where you should analyse them. In short, you do not think. You have never thought. You have never said to me anything that you believe to be true, only things which sound true and perhaps even ought to be true: things that, for the moment, are in character with whatever persona you have adopted for the afternoon. You cheat, you shortcut, you lie. It’s too wonderful.’

‘With respect, Professor …’

‘Pigswill! You don’t respect me. You fear me, are irritated by me, envy me … you everything me, but you do not respect me. And why should you? I am hardly respectable.’

‘What I mean is, am I so different from anyone else? Doesn’t everyone think the way I think? Doesn’t everyone just rearrange patterns? Ideas can’t be created or destroyed, surely.’

‘Yes!’ Trefusis clapped his hands with delight. ‘Yes, yes, yes! But who else
knows
that they are doing that and nothing else?
You
know, you have always known. That is why you are a liar. Others try their best, when they speak they mean it. You never mean it. You extend this duplicity to your morals. You use and misuse people and ideas because you do not believe they exist. Just patterns for you to play with. You’re a hound of hell and you know it.’