The Liar (11 page)

Adrian detested cube calls, though a psychologist might have tried to persuade him otherwise, considering how far out of his way to collect them he seemed to go. He thought it an illogical form of punishment, as irritating for the prefects who were shaken from their slumbers as for the offenders.

The system was open to massive abuse. Prefects could settle scores with colleagues they disliked by sending them cube callers every day for a week. Tit-for-tat cube call wars between prefects could go on like this for whole terms. In Adrian’s House, Sargent had once had a feud with a prefect in Dashwood House called Purdy. On every day of one horrendous week Adrian had collected single cube calls from Sargent for absurd minor offences: whistling in his study during prep; having his hands in his pockets while watching a match; failing to cap a retired schoolmaster who had been walking down the High Street and whom Adrian had never even had pointed out to him before as a cappable entity. On each of Sargent’s cube calls that particular week Purdy’s had been the name listed. On the fifth day Adrian had sidled apologetically into Purdy’s cube to find it empty.

‘The bird had flown, my old love,’ he had tried to explain to Sargent when returning his unsigned chit. ‘But I did abstract Purdy’s sponge-bag from his bedside, just to prove that I was in his cube.’

That afternoon Sargent and Purdy had fought each other on the Upper. After that Adrian was left alone.

Of course prefects could do each other favours as well.

‘Oh Hancock, there’s a not-half scrummy scrum-half in your Colts Fifteen, what’s his name?’

‘What, Yelland you mean?’

‘That’s the one. Rather fabulous. You … er … couldn’t find your way clear to sending him over one morning, could you? As a little cubie?’

‘Oh all right. If you’ll send me Finlay.’

‘Done.’

Adrian as a new boy had been startled to find, on his first ever cube call, that the prefect whose signature he needed slept naked with only one sheet to cover him and was extremely hard to wake up.

‘Excuse me, Hollis, Hollis!’ he had squeaked desperately in his ear.

But Hollis had just groaned in his sleep, rolled an arm over him and pulled him into his bed.

The only really enjoyable part of the cube call for Adrian was the burglary. Officially all the Houses were locked until seven, which was supposed to make it pointless to set off early on a cube call and take the thing at a leisurely pace. But there were larder, kitchen and changing-room windows that could be prised open and latches that could yield to a flexible sheet of mica. Once inside all you had to do was creep up to the dorm, tiptoe into the target prefect’s cube, adjust his alarm clock and wake him. That way you could start the call at half past five or six and save yourself all the flap and hurry of trying to complete it in forty minutes.

‘Yup,’ Adrian told Bullock. ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it. I reckon I know a way into every House.’

*

Two days later the whole school awoke to
Bollocks!

From three in the morning until half past six, Tom, Adrian, Bullock and Sampson, working from maps and instructions drawn up by Adrian, had invaded the Houses and left copies in studies, common rooms, libraries and in piles at the foot of staircases. They had seen no one and been seen by no one. They had come down to breakfast in their House as apparently amazed and excited by the appearance of the magazine as everyone else.

In school, before morning chapel, they joined the knots of people under the noticeboards in the colonnade, twittering about its contents and trying to guess who the authors were.

He had been wrong to worry that the sophistication of the others’ contributions would outshine his. His brand of salacious populism was far more interesting to the school than the recondite pedantry of Bullock and Sampson, and much less aggressive than Tom’s style of Open Field Beat. The most feverish speculation of the day centred around the identity of Woody Nightshade. Everywhere Adrian went he heard snatches of his article being quoted.

‘Hey there, Marchant. Fancy a quick round of the Biscuit Game?’

‘They can chop off your hair, my children, but they can’t chop off your spirit. We are winning and they know it.’

‘A school isn’t an ante-room for real life, it is real life.’

‘Passive resistance!’

‘Let’s set our own syllabus. Fail their exams, pass our own.’

The school had never known anything like this. At the eleven o’clock break on the morning of its appearance there was no other topic of conversation in the Butteries.

‘Go on, admit it, Healey,’ Heydon-Bayley said to Adrian, his mouth full of cream-slice, ‘it was you wasn’t it? That’s what everyone’s saying.’

‘That’s odd, someone told me it was you,’ said Adrian.

He found it achingly frustrating not to be able to crow about his part in it. Bullock, Sampson and Tom revelled in the anonymity, but Adrian longed for applause and recognition. Even jeering and hissing would have been something. He wondered if Cartwright had read his article. What would he think of it? What would he think of the
author
of it?

He watched very closely to see how people reacted when accused of being a contributor. He was always trying to improve his mastery of the delicate art of lying and the spectacle of people telling the truth under pressure repaid close study.

He noticed that people said things like:

‘Yeah, it was me actually.’

‘Piss off, Aitcheson! Everyone knows it was you.’

‘Oh God! How did you find out? Do you think Headman knows?’

Adrian memorised all the replies and reproduced them as faithfully as he could.

And then the authorities had struck back.

Adrian’s Housemaster, Tickford, rose to his feet after lunch that same day, as did the other eleven Housemasters in the other eleven Houses.

‘All copies of this magazine will be collected from studies by the prefects before Games this afternoon and destroyed. Anyone found in possession of a copy after three o’clock will be severely punished.’

Adrian had never seen Tickford look so furious. He wondered if he could possibly have guessed that
Bollocks!
had originated in his House.

He and Tom had handed their two copies in cheerfully.

‘There you go, Hauptmann Bennett-Jones,’ said Adrian, ‘we have also an edition of
The Trial
, by the notorious Jew, Kafka. Berlin would appreciate it, I am thinking, if this too was added to the bonfire. Also the works of that decadent lesbian Bolshevik, Jane Austen.’

‘You’d better watch it, Healey. You’re on the list. If you had anything to do with this piece of shit then you are in trouble.’

‘Thank you, Sargent. You needn’t take up any more of our valuable time. I’m sure you have many calls of a similar nature to make in the neighbourhood.’

But for all the sensational impact of the magazine, Adrian felt somehow a sense of anti-climax. His article would never make a shred of difference to anything. He hadn’t exactly expected open warfare in the form-rooms, but it was depressing to realise that if he and Bullock and the others were exposed tomorrow they would be expelled, talked about for a while and then completely forgotten. Boys were cowardly and conventional. That’s why the system worked, he supposed.

He sensed too that if he came across the article in later life, as a twenty-year-old, he would shudder with embarrassment at the pretension of it. But why should his future self sneer at what he was now? It was terrible to know that time would lead him to betray everything he now believed in.

What I am now is
right
, he told himself. I will never see things as clearly again, I will never understand everything as fully as I do at this minute.

The world would never change if people got sucked into it.

He tried to explain his feelings to Tom, but Tom was not in communicative mood.

‘Seems to me there’s only one way to change the world,’ said Tom.

‘And what’s that?’ asked Adrian.

‘Change yourself.’

‘Oh, that’s bollocks!’

‘And
Bollocks!
tells the truth.’

He went to the library and read up his symptoms in more detail. Cyril Connolly, Robin Maugham, T.C. Worsley, Robert Graves, Simon Raven: they had all had their Cartwrights. And the novels! Dozens of them.
Lord Dismiss Us, The Loom of Youth, The Fourth of June, Sandel, Les Amitiés Particulières, The Hill
…

He was one of a long line of mimsy and embittered middle-class sensitives who disguised their feeble and decadent lust as something spiritual and Socratic.

And why not? If it meant he had to end his days on some Mediterranean island writing lyric prose for Faber and Faber and literary criticism for the
New Statesman
, running through successions of houseboys and ‘secretaries’, getting sloshed on Fernet Branca and having to pay off the Chief of Police every six months, then so be it. Better than driving to the office in the rain.

In a temper, he took out a large Bible, opened it at random and wrote ‘Irony’ down the margin in red biro. In the fly-leaf he scribbled anagrams of his name. Air and an arid nadir, a drain, a radian.

He decided to go and see Gladys.
She
would understand.

On his way he was ambushed from behind a gravestone by Rundell.

‘Ha, ha! It’s Woody Nightshade!’

‘You took the words right out of my mouth, Tarty. Only you would know about something as disgusting as the Biscuit Game.’

‘Takes one to know one.’

Adriam mimed taking out a notebook.

‘“Takes one to know one,” I must write that down. It might come in useful if I ever enter a competition to come up with the Most Witless Remark in the English Language.’

‘Well I beg yours.’

‘You can’t have it.’

Rundell beckoned with a curled finger. ‘New wheeze,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

Adrian approached cautiously.

‘What foul thing is this?’

‘No, I’m serious. Come here.’

He pointed to his trouser pocket. ‘Put your hand in there.’

‘Well frankly … even from you, Tarty, that’s a bit …’

Rundell stamped his foot.

‘This is serious! I’ve had a brilliant idea. Feel in there.’

Adrian hesitated.

‘Go
on!
’

Adrian dipped his hand in the pocket.

Rundell giggled.

‘You see! I’ve cut the pockets out. And no undies. Isn’t that brilliant?’

‘You tarty great tart …’

‘Keep going now you’ve started, for God’s sake.’

*

Adrian reached Gladys and sat down with a thump. Down below, Rundell blew an extravagant kiss and skipped off to replenish his strength before trying the game on someone else.

Why can’t I be satisfied with Tarty? Adrian asked himself, wiping his fingers on a handkerchief. He’s sexy. He’s fun. I can do things with him I wouldn’t dream of doing with Cartwright. Oh hell, here comes someone else.

‘Friend or foe?’

Pigs Trotter lumbered into view.

‘Friend!’ he panted.

‘La! You are quite done up, my lord. Come and sit this one out with me.’

Trotter sat down while Adrian fanned himself with a dock-leaf.

‘I always think the cotillion too fatiguing for the summer months. Persons of consequence should avoid it. When I have danced a cotillion, I know for a fact that I look plain beyond example. The minuet is, I believe, the only dance for gentlemen of rank and tone. You agree with me there, my lord, I make no doubt? I think it was Horry Walpole who remarked, “In this life one should try everything once except incest and country dancing.” It is an excellent rule, as I remarked to my mother in bed last night. Perhaps you will do me the honour of accompanying me to the card room later? A game of Deep Bassett is promised and I mean to take my lord Darrow for five hundred guineas.’

‘Healey,’ said Trotter. ‘I’m not saying you did and I’m not saying you didn’t, I don’t really care. But Woody Nightshade …’

‘Woody Nightshade,’ said Adrian. ‘
Solanum dulcamara
, the common wayside bitter-sweet:

They seek him here, they seek him there,

Those masters seek him everywhere.

Isn’t he nimble, isn’t he neat,

That demmed elusive bitter-sweet.

‘A poor thing, but mine own.’

‘You’ve read his article, I suppose?’ said Pigs Trotter.

‘I may have glanced through it a few times in an idle hour,’ said Adrian. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Well …’

There was a catch in Trotter’s throat. Adrian looked at him in alarm. Tears were starting up in his piggy eyes.

Oh hell. Other people’s tears were more than Adrian could cope with. Did you put an arm round them? Did you pretend not to notice? He tried the friendly, cajoling approach.

‘Hey, hey, hey! What’s the matter?’

‘I’m sorry, Healey. I’m really sorry b-but …’

‘You can tell me. What is it?’

Trotter shook his head miserably and sniffed.

‘Here look,’ said Adrian, ‘there’s a handkerchief. Oh … no, second thoughts this one’s not so clean. But I have got a cigarette. Blow your nose on that.’

‘No thanks, Healey.’

‘I’ll have it then.’

He eyed Trotter nervously. It was cheating to let your emotions out like this. And what was a lump like Pigs doing with emotions anyway? He had found a handkerchief of his own and was blowing his nose with a horrible mucous squelch. Adrian lit his cigarette and tried to sound casual.

‘So what’s troubling you, Trot? Is it something in the article?’

‘It’s nothing. It’s just that bit where he starts talking about …’

Trotter drew a copy of
Bollocks!
from his pocket. It was already folded open on the second page of Adrian’s article.

Adrian looked at him in surprise.

‘I wouldn’t get caught with this if I were you.’

‘It’s all right, I’m going to throw it away. I’ve copied it all out by hand anyway.’

Trotter dabbed a finger down on a paragraph.

‘There,’ he said, ‘read that bit.’

‘“And they call it puppy-love,”’ Adrian read, ‘“well I’ll guess they’ll never know how the young heart really feels.” The words of Donny Osmond, philosopher and wit, strike home as ever. How can they punish us and grind us down when we are capable of feelings strong enough to burst the world open? Either they know what we go through when we are in love, in which case their callousness in not warning us and helping us through it is inexcusable, or they have never felt what we feel and we have every right to call them dead. Love shrinks your stomach. It pickles your guts. But what does it do to your mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar. Suddenly, you’re above the ordinary …’