The Liar (18 page)

‘Yeah?’ said Bennett-Jones with a nasty leer. ‘Well it just so happens that Mr Tickford calls to you from across his study, an’all.’

‘Dear me! Five minutes’ separation and already he pines for me. Perhaps he wants my advice on demoting some of the prefecture. Well, I am always happy to look in on dear Jeremy. Lead the way, young man, lead the way.’

Tickford was standing behind his desk, his face deathly white.

‘This book,’ he said, holding up a paperback, ‘does it belong to you?’

Oh Christ … oh Jesus Christ …

It was Adrian’s copy of
The Naked Lunch
.

‘I … I don’t know, sir.’

‘It was found in your study. It has your name written in it. No other boy in the school has a copy in their study. On the instructions of the headmaster the prefects checked this morning. Now, answer me again. Is this your book?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Just tell me one thing, Healey. Did you write the magazine alone or were there others?’

‘I –’

‘Answer me!’ shouted Tickford, slamming the book down onto the desk.

‘Alone, sir.’

There was a pause. Tickford stared at Adrian, breathing heavily from his nostrils like a cornered bull.

Oh cuntly cunt. He’s going to hit me. He’s out of control.

‘Go to your study,’ said Tickford at last. ‘Stay there until your parents come for you. No one is to see you or talk to you.’

‘Sir, I –’

‘Now get out of my sight, you poisonous little shit.’

6

JUST AS ADRIAN
was getting thoroughly bored, the President started to wind up the meeting.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘it’s getting rather late. If there is no further business, I would like to –’

Garth Menzies rose to his feet and smiled the smile of the just.

‘There is one thing, Master.’

‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No, sir. I don’t believe it can.’

‘Oh, very well then.’

Adrian cursed inwardly. They all knew the subject Menzies was going to raise and Menzies knew that they knew. They had been given the chance to raise it themselves but they hadn’t. So be it. Very well. Other men might shrink from their duty, but not Garth Menzies.

He barked his throat clear.

‘I am amazed, Mr President, absolutely amazed that this meeting can contemplate adjournment without first discussing the Trefusis Affair.’

A dozen heads looked sharply down at their agenda papers. A dozen pairs of buttocks clenched tightly together.

He had said it. The man had said it. Such a want of delicacy. Such wounding impropriety.

At the far end of the table a mathematician specialising in fluid dynamics and the seduction of first year Newnham girls blew his nose in a hurt manner.

Those parts of Adrian that weren’t already looking sharply down or clenching tightly together contrived to quiver with disfavour.

How incredibly like Garth to bring up the one subject that everyone else in the room had been so elegantly avoiding. How childish the rhetoric with which he claimed to be amazed at that avoidance.

‘I find myself wondering,’ said Menzies, ‘how we feel about having a criminal amongst us?’

‘Now, really Garth –’

‘Oh yes, Master, a criminal.’

Menzies, tall and thin, face as white, shiny and bold Roman as the cover page of the quarterly journal of civil law it was his pride to edit, had placed his left thumb along the lapel of his coat and now he stooped forwards from the waist, waving in his right hand, in what he hoped was a brandish, a copy of the
Cambridge Evening News
.

Adrian found himself chilled by the sight of a grown man trying so transparently to strike the forensic pose of a glamorous barrister. No matter how he aged, and there was not now one dark hair on his head, Menzies could never look any grander than a smart-arsed sixth-former. A smart-arsed
grammar-school
sixth-former, Adrian thought. He cut a dreadful sort of Enoch Powell figure. A kind of adolescent Malvolio, all elbows and shiny temples. Adrian found Menzies as tiresome as his archetypes; unspeakable to behold, dangerous to discount.

Menzies resented his widespread popularity because he felt it sprang from illogical and irrelevant factors like his breath, his voice, his sniffs, his gait, his clothes, his whole atmosphere. For that reason he devoted himself with all the dismal diligence of the dull to giving the world more legitimate grounds for dislike. That, at least, was Adrian’s interpretation. Donald always claimed to like the man.

If Donald had been present to witness him now, newspaper in hand and destruction in mind, Adrian was sure he would have altered his opinion.

President Clinton-Lacey, at the head of the table, looked down at his agenda and shaded his eyes. From under his hand he waggled a covert eyebrow at Adrian like a schoolboy sharing a joke under a desk-lid. But there was an urgency and seriousness in the look which told Adrian that he was being given some kind of signal.

Adrian wasn’t sure if he could interpret it. He stared ahead of him, perplexed. Did the President want him, as a friend of Donald’s, to speak up? Was he warning Adrian not to let his feelings get the better of him? What? He returned the look with a questioning lift of his own eyebrows.

In reply the President gave a ‘yackety-yack’ gesture with his hand.

Clinton-Lacey’s Boltonian sense of humour was notorious but surely he meant something more than ‘Oh, that Menzies, he does go on, doesn’t he?’

Adrian decided it must be a demand for him to do some filibustering. He swallowed nervously. He was only an undergraduate after all and these were not the sixties. The days of genuine student representation on the boards of governors of the colleges were long gone. It was understood that he was a constitutional hiccough that it would have been embarrassing to cure. He was there to listen, not to comment.

However.

‘Don’t you think, Dr Menzies,’ he began, not daring to look up, ‘that the word “criminal” is a bit strong?’

Menzies rounded on him.

‘Forgive me, Mr Healey, you are the English student. I am just a lawyer. What on earth would I know about the word criminal? In my profession, out of ignorance no doubt, we use the word to describe someone who has broken the law. I am sure you could entertain us with an essay on the word’s origin that would prove conclusively that a criminal is some kind of medieval crossbow. For my purposes however, in law, the man is a criminal.’

‘Now, gentlemen …’

‘Dr Menzies’ clumsy sarcasm aside,’ said Adrian, ‘I have to say that I know full well what criminal means and it is a perfectly ordinary English word, not a legal term, and I resent it being used of Donald. It makes him sound like a professional. One crime doesn’t make a criminal. It would be like calling Dr Menzies a lawyer just because thirty years ago he practised briefly at the Bar.’

‘I have every right in the world, Mr President,’ shrilled Menzies, ‘to call myself a lawyer. I believe my reputation in the legal field has done nothing but reflect credit on this institution –’

‘Perhaps it wouldn’t be unfitting if I said something here,’ said Tim Anderson. His book on Jean-Luc Godard had recently been exceptionally well reviewed by his wife in
Granta
magazine and he was in a less solemn mood than usual.

‘I think it would be immensely unfitting,’ snapped Menzies.

‘Well that’s a not uninteresting point, certainly,’ said Anderson, ‘but I was thinking more that I don’t know many people who couldn’t express doubt about the strategies that the authorities adopt in situations not a million miles dissimilar to this one and I just don’t think that’s something we shouldn’t be unafraid to shirk addressing or confronting. That’s all.’

‘I have just been told by a student that I have no right to call myself a lawyer, Master,’ said Menzies. ‘I await an apology.’

‘Dr Menzies is an academic,’ said Adrian. ‘He is a teacher. I’d have thought that that was quite enough of a profession for one man. I maintain that he is not a lawyer. Law just happens to be the subject he teaches.’

‘I am not absolutely sure that I see the relevance of this,’ said the President and something in the tone of his voice made Adrian look at him again. He was rolling an eye in the direction of the corner of the room.

The cameras!

Since the beginning of this, Adrian’s third and final year, St Matthew’s had put up with a television crew on the premises. Their technique, that of becoming part of the furniture, was working so well that they had become appallingly easy to ignore. They had lived up to the name of fly-on-the-wall and only the odd irritating buzz reminded the college of their existence.

It was clear that the President did not want Adrian to forget them. He could not possibly allow anything of the Trefusis Affair to be seen on national television. Adrian’s duty lay clear ahead of him. He had to find a way of doing or saying something that would make the film of the meeting, or this part of it, unsuitable for family viewing.

He took a deep breath.

‘I’m sorry, Master,’ he said, snapping a pencil, ‘but the point is that I won’t sit here and hear my friend insulted, not if the accuser is the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Procurator Pissing Fiscal and the Witchfinder Fucking General all rolled into one.’

A splutter of incredulity from a middle-aged Orientalist met this unusual outburst.

‘Donald has been called a criminal,’ Adrian went on, warming to his theme. ‘If I run down the street to catch a bus, does that make me an athlete? If you yodel in the bath, Master, does that make you a singer? Dr Menzies has a tongue like a supermarket pricing-gun.’

‘Twisting my words won’t help.’

‘Untwisting them might.’

‘Well untwist these words, then,’ said Menzies, forcing his copy of the newspaper under Adrian’s nose.

‘What the yellow rubbery fuck do you think you’re up to now?’ said Adrian, pushing the newspaper away. ‘If I want to blow my nose, I’ll use a frigging snot-rag.’

‘Healey, have you run mad?’ hissed Corder, a theologian, sitting next to Adrian.

‘Stick it up your heretical arse.’

‘Well!’

‘Explain it to you later,’ said Adrian in an undertone.

‘Oh, it’s a game!’

‘Sh!’

‘Splendid!’ whispered Corder, and then sang out, ‘Oh, do come on, Garth, get a sodding move on.’