The Liar (7 page)

‘And you really used to have fagging and that?’

‘Yes. It’s on the way out now I believe, but when I was there you had to fag.’

‘I can’t bleeding believe it! Did you wear a boater?’

‘When appropriate.’

‘And striped trousers?’

‘In the Sixth Form.’

‘Fuck me!’ Gary had wriggled with delight.

‘I’m hardly the only one, you know. There are dozens here from my school alone, hundreds from Eton and Harrow and Winchester.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gary, ‘but it’s less than seven per cent of the population, isn’t it? People like me never usually meet people like you except in a Crown Court, when you’re wearing a wig.’

‘This is nineteen-seventy-nine, Gary, people like you are forming the Thatcher cabinet.’

Adrian had told him about life at school, about the magazine, about Pigs Trotter’s death. He had even told him about Cartwright.

Gary had immediately done a drawing of Adrian as he imagined him in a blazer and cricket whites, dawdling in front of a Gothic doorway, while capped and gowned beaks flitted in the background like crows. Adrian had bought it on the spot for ten pounds. Since then he had subsidised Gary’s cannabis and vodka by buying at least three works of art a week. But he didn’t now think he could take even one more view of himself, in any medium, from any angle, and he said so.

‘Well then,’ said Gary, ‘you’re going to have to wait for me to pay you back till the end of the year.’

‘Yes, I suppose I am,’ said Adrian. ‘Oh coitus!’

‘Oh come on, you can afford it.’

‘No, it’s not that. It’s work.’

‘Work? I thought this was supposed to be a university.’

‘Yes, well, it’s rapidly turning into a technical college,’ said Adrian, falling into an armchair.

‘Didn’t Trefusis go for your essay then?’

‘No, he loved it, that’s the problem,’ said Adrian. ‘It was too good. He was very impressed. So now he wants me to do something major. Something startling and original.’

‘Original? In philology?’

‘No, any subject. I should be flattered really, I suppose.’

Honestly, what was the point? He could tell the truth to Gary, surely? He was lying as a matter of course. Was it pride? Fear? He closed his eyes. Trefusis was right. Right but ludicrously wrong.

Why wasn’t he happy? Jenny loved him. Gary loved him. His mother sent him money. Uncle David sent him money. It was the May Term of his first year, the weather was fine and he had no examinations. Everything unpleasant was behind him. Cambridge was his. He had now made up his mind to stay here after Finals and become a don. All you had to do was memorise enough good essays and repeat them in three-hour bursts. Trefusis wasn’t an examiner, thank God.

He hung Jeremy, his blazer, on Anthony, the peg.

‘Let’s have some toast,’ he said. ‘Hunt the Thimble has provided.’

II

‘We come now, gentlemen,’ said President Clinton-Lacey, ‘to the matter of JRFs and Bye-Fellowships. I wonder if –’

Garth Menzies, a Professor of Civil Law, coughed through a cloud of dense smoke which poured into his face from the pipe of Munroe, the Bursar.

‘Excuse me, Mr President,’ he said, ‘I understood we had agreed to a no-smoking rule at Fellows’ meetings?’

‘Well, that is certainly true, yes. Admiral Munroe, I wonder if you would mind …?’

Munroe banged his pipe down on the table and gave Menzies a look charged with deepest venom. Menzies smiled and transferred a sweet from one side of his mouth to the other.

‘Thank you,’ said Clinton-Lacey. ‘Now. JRFs and Bye-Fellowships. As this body is well aware, there has been –’

Munroe sniffed the air loudly.

‘Excuse me, Mr President,’ he said. ‘Am I alone in detecting a nauseating smell of spearmint in this room?’

‘Er …?’

‘It really is most disagreeable. I wonder where it could be coming from?’

Menzies angrily took the mint from his mouth and dropped it into the ashtray in front of him. Munroe smiled beatifically.

‘Thank you,’ said Clinton-Lacey. ‘Fellows, we have a problem in retaining our present levels of postgraduates. There is a large number of Junior Research Fellows and Bye-Fellows that benefits from our grants and disbursements as you know. You will be far from unaware of the nature of the economic weather system that blows towards us from Westminster.’

Admiral Munroe ostentatiously pushed the ashtray into the centre of the table, as if the smell of mint still offended him.

Alex Corder, a theologian down the end of the table, barked a rather harsh laugh.

‘Barbarians,’ he said. ‘They’re all barbarians.’

‘The government,’ said Clinton-Lacey, ‘the justice of whose doctrines we are not assembled here to discourse upon, has certainly struck an attitude towards the universities which must give us cause for alarm.’

‘The Prime Minister is a scientist,’ said Corder.

Garth Menzies raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sure no one would accuse the Prime Minister of academic partiality.’

‘Why ever not?’ said Munroe.

‘Well, whatever her possible bias,’ said Clinton-Lacey, ‘there is a feeling in government that the Arts side, oversubscribed by candidates for entrance as it already is, must be, er, honed, and extra encouragement given to the disciplines which can more productively … ah! Professor Trefusis!’

Trefusis stood in the doorway, a cigarette dangling from his lips, peering vaguely as if unsure whether this was the right room or the right meeting. The sight of Menzies’ disapproving glare seemed to reassure him; he entered and slid down into the empty seat next to Admiral Munroe.

‘Well, Donald, I am sorry that you seem to have been delayed again,’ said Clinton-Lacey.

Trefusis was silent.

‘Nothing serious I hope?’

Trefusis smiled affably around the room.

‘Nothing serious I hope?’ repeated the President.

Trefusis became aware that he was being addressed, opened his jacket, switched off the Walkman that was attached to his belt and slipped off his earphones.

‘I’m sorry, Master, did you speak?’

‘Well yes … we were discussing the fall-off in resources for the Arts.’

‘The Arts?’

‘That’s right. Now …’

Menzies coughed and pushed the ashtray towards Trefusis.

‘Thank you, Garth,’ said Trefusis, flicking the ash from his cigarette and taking another puff. ‘Most thoughtful.’

The President persevered.

‘We will not have enough money to create any more Junior Research Fellows in the Arts for at least two years.’

‘Oh, how sad,’ said Trefusis.

‘You are not concerned for your department?’

‘
My
department? My department is English, Master.’

‘Well precisely.’

‘What has English to do with “the Arts”, whatever they may be? I deal in an exact science, philology. My colleagues deal with an exact science, the analysis of literature.’

‘Oh poppycock,’ said Menzies.

‘No, if anything it’s hard shit,’ said Trefusis.

‘Really, Donald!’ said the President. ‘I am sure there is no need …’

‘Professor Trefusis,’ said Menzies, ‘this is a minuted meeting of adults, if you feel you can’t preserve the decencies of debate then perhaps you should leave.’

‘My dear old Garth,’ said Trefusis, ‘I can only say that you started it. The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. “Poppycock” means “soft shit” – from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you,
pappe kak
.’

Menzies purpled and fell silent.

‘Well, be that all as it may, Donald,’ said the President, ‘the subject was resourcing. Whatever our views on the rights and wrongs of government policy, the fiscal reality is such that …’

‘The reality,’ said Trefusis, offering cigarettes around the table, ‘as we all know, is that more and more young people are begging to be admitted to
this
college in
this
university to read English. Our English department receives a higher number of applicants for each available place than any other department in any other university in the country. If the rules of the market place, which I understand to be sacred to the gabies, guffoons and flubberhaddocks in office, are to apply, then surely we should be entitled to
more
fellowships, not fewer.’

‘The feeling, Donald,’ said the President, ‘is that English graduates cannot offer an expertise of benefit to the country. The fruits of research in botany or genetics or even my own subject, economics, are recognised as having a palpable value to the world …’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Menzies.

‘Poppycock,’ said Munroe, accepting a box of matches from Trefusis.

‘But you and your colleagues,’ said the President, ignoring both interruptions, ‘are seen more and more as an intolerable burden on the tax-payer. There is nothing for you to discover of interest, nothing you can offer your undergraduates that fits them usefully into industry or profitable enterprise. You know that those are not
my
views. Around this table we have rehearsed many times the arguments and counter-arguments and I do not propose to do so again. I can only tell you that the monies will not be available this year.’

‘Mr President,’ said a don at the end of the table, ‘I would like you to register my view that this is an absolute disgrace. This Philistinism will do nothing but impoverish our country. I hope you will minute my utter disgust.’

‘Well,’ said Trefusis, ‘that should make Sir Keith Joseph and his friends shake in their boots, shouldn’t it? No, no. The time has come for action. With the Fellows’ approval I can train a hand-picked company of crack undergraduates and be in Whitehall before June.’

‘This pose of embittered and embattled artist,’ said Menzies, ‘is unseemly and out of date. Society can no longer afford its jesters and is weary of being hit over the head with empty pigs’ bladders. The world is bored of the piffling excesses of the Arts, of its arrogance and irrelevance to the real world. Your fat could do with trimming.’

‘You’re right of course,’ said Trefusis, ‘I see that now. We need lawyers. Wave upon wave of them.’

‘Well of course it’s very easy to mock …’

‘It’s certainly easy to mock some things,’ agreed Trefusis. ‘Oddly enough though I’ve never found it easy to mock anything of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous – perhaps it’s just me.’

III

‘So you see my little honeypot baby-squeeze,’ said Adrian, ‘I have to come up with some bloody piece of research or I may be out on my rather divinely shaped ear.’

‘Well it’s about time you did some work,’ said Jenny, biting his nipple.

‘That’s a horrid thing to say. Now go a bit lower down and get those lips working, it’s my turn to come and I have to be off to the University Library.’

Jenny sat up.

‘That reminds me,’ she said. ‘Mary and I have written a letter to all the Senior Tutors in Cambridge.’

‘Good God,’ said Adrian, pulling her head down again, ‘this is no time to babble of schoolgirl crushes.’

‘No listen,’ she said popping up. ‘It’s the pornography.’

‘What?’

‘You know I’ve been going to Tim Anderson’s lectures on Derrida and Sexual Difference?’

‘Look, if your mouth’s busy you could at least use your hands. There’s some baby oil under the bed.’

‘Well, he showed us some pornography last week. Boxfuls of it. From the University Library. It’s a copyright library, you see, so they get a copy of everything published. Everything.’

‘What, you mean … everything?’

‘Everything. Centuries of pornography up to the present day. The cellars are packed with tons of the most degrading and disgusting … I’m talking about amputees, children, appliances, things you could never even imagine.’

‘You don’t know what I could imagine.’

‘I went to have a look at some of it. All I needed was Helen Greenman’s signature. Told her it was to do with Tim Anderson’s lectures. Well I mean, this stuff shouldn’t be at Cambridge. It has no possible academic justification. It’s degrading to women and should be burnt.’

‘And degrading to animals and children and appliances, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Adrian, it’s not funny. I think the UL dignifies this shit by storing it. So Mary and I are trying to get it banned.’

‘What sort of things did you see exactly?’

‘Well you have to view it in a private room …’

‘Describe it to me … and use your left hand. That’s it. A bit faster. Yes! Oh yes
indeed
. Now, what did you see?’

‘Well there was one where this woman took a pork-pie …’

IV

‘That’s the posish, Gary,’ said Adrian when he had walked back from Newnham to St Matthew’s. ‘It’s all there, a whole
index expurgatorius
waiting to be drooled over. And
this
is what the librarian needs to be shown.’

He handed him a small piece of paper on which was written:

‘I authorise access to Jennifer de Woolf, an undergraduate of this college, to the following titles of Special Research Material …’

Underneath were listed titles of books and magazines and at the bottom was the signature, ‘Helen Greenman, Senior Tutor, Newnham College’.

Gary’s mouth fell open.

‘
Elsa and the Bull, Young Nuns, Concentration Camp Action
… you’re joking …
My Hot Little Daughter, Hung, Young and Handsome, Tampon Tina, Fist Fuck Faggots, Clingfilm Fantasies. Clingfilm?
Bleeding Christ.’

Adrian was rifling in the drawer of his desk.

‘Too good to be missed I think you’ll agree. Where are we … ah, yes.’ He took a piece of writing-paper from his drawer. ‘Now then, Gary, my old chum, my old mate, my old mucker. Do you want to knock off say … fifty quid from your debt? Of course you do. I want you to examine this letter, paying particular attention to the signature at the bottom.’

Gary took it.

‘Dear Mr Healey, Dr Pittaway tells me that you are in need of instruction for the Philology option in the English Tripos. I have not forgotten your expertise as an umpire when we met at Chartham Park last summer and remember you as an alert young person bright with capability and promise. I would therefore be most happy to offer you what help I may. My rooms are in Hawthorn Tree Court, A3. I shall expect you at ten o’clock on Wednesday the 4th unless I hear otherwise. Please be sure to bring your mind with you. Donald Trefusis.’