Authors: Stephen Fry
‘Why not just let it feed normally?’
‘Because this procedure is undertaken many times a day for the whole of the poor animal’s life. It is force-fed on a massive scale. Force-fed until it is so gorged and gross that it can no longer move. Its liver becomes pulpy and distended. Ideal, in fact, for flash frying and presenting with a glass of spacious Montrachet or fat, buttery Corton Charlemagne.’
‘That’s horrific!’ said Adrian. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’
‘I wanted you to taste it. It is one of the highest pleasures known to man. Wasn’t it Sydney Smith who had a friend whose idea of heaven was eating it to the sound of trumpets? Like most of our highest pleasures, however, it is rooted in suffering; founded in an unnatural, almost perverted, process.’
Adrian’s mind raced forward, trying to think of the relevance of this to their situation. He ran a storyline through his head. A European cartel of
foie gras
manufacturers, determined to prevent the Common Market from outlawing their product. Prepared to kill in order to protect what they saw as their God-given right to torture geese for the tables of the rich. Surely not? That sort of thing simply did not happen. And even if it did, it was scarcely the sort of affair in which Trefusis would interest himself.
‘So what exactly …?’
‘This forcing of a goose is an image I want you to hold in your head while I tell you of something else … ah …
le poisson est arrivé
.’
Trefusis beamed as two large dishes, each covered with an immense silver
cloche
, were set before them. The waiter looked from Adrian to Trefusis with an expectant smile and – now sure of their attention – he swept each
cloche
clear with a flourish, releasing clouds of delicately fishy steam.
‘
Voilà! Bon appetit, messieurs!
’
‘Enlightening that what we call John Dory the French call Saint Pierre, the Italians San Pietro and the Spanish San Pedro.’
‘Who was John Dory, do you think?’
‘Oh, I imagine the Dory is from
doré
, gilded or golden. Of course we do sometimes call it St Peter’s fish, I believe.
Merci bien
.’
‘
M’sieur!
’ The waiter bowed smartly and strutted away.
‘Howsomever that may be,’ said Trefusis. ‘Some time ago I was contacted – I believe that’s the right word? – by an old friend of mine, Tom Daly. Tom used to be the garden steward at St Matthew’s and a fine gardener he was too, as green-fingered as … as …’
‘As a Martian with septicaemia?’
‘If that pleases you. It fell out that in nineteen-sixty-two Tom pleached, plashed and entwined himself with one Eileen Bishop. In due course he pollinated her and there sprung up a fine young son. In a simple but affecting ceremony in Little St Mary’s later that year I agreed to renounce the world, the flesh and the devil in order to cleanse my soul in readiness for the task of standing sponsor to their freshly budded sprig, whom they had decided to baptise Christopher Donald Henry.’
‘This gardener married and had a son and you are his godfather?’
‘I believe that’s what I said,’ said Trefusis. ‘Then in nineteen-seventy-six, to the distress of us all, Tom left the college to take up the post of chief borough gardener in West Norfolk. When next you admire the gay rampage of tulips at a roundabout in King’s Lynn or the giddy riot of wayside lobelia in central Hunstanton, you’ll know whom to thank. Be that as it may. Beyond the usual silver porringer at birth and the bi-annual five-pound note, my contribution to Christopher’s moral welfare has been scant. I have to confess that Christopher, my godson, is a child of whom I stand rather in awe.’
Adrian tried to picture the Professor standing rather in awe of anything.
‘The boy is remarkably gifted you see,’ said Trefusis, gently laying a sliver of fish-bone on the side of his plate. ‘His mathematical ability as an infant was simply astounding. From an early age he exhibited almost supernatural powers. He could multiply and divide long numbers in seconds, calculate square and cube roots in his head, do all the circus tricks. But he had a fine mind as well as an arithmetically prodigious brain and it was assumed that he would make his way to Trinity and contribute something to the field of pure mathematics before he was thirty or whatever age it is that marks the Anno Domini of mathematicians.’
‘I believe they’re pretty much over the hill by twenty-six these days,’ said Adrian. ‘How old is he now?’
‘Eighteen or so. He is lucky, you might think, to have a father proud of his gifts and who, moreover, would have been happy for him to employ them academically, in the service of scholarship, for the sake of the pure art of pure mathematics. Many fathers of comparably modest incomes would have looked on a clever son as a route to riches. My son the financier, my son the barrister, my son the accountant. Tom stood quite ready and without rancour to explain the child away as my son the loopy mathematician with the scurfy hair and bottle-end spectacles.’
‘And …?’
‘Three years ago Christopher was awarded a scholarship to a public school in Suffolk: the money came from an organisation Tom Daly had never heard of. It now seems that this organisation is proposing to put Christopher through Cambridge. He will read not Pure Maths there, but Engineering. What is worrying Tom is that the organisation is only interested in Christopher because of his potential as a brain. After university they want him to go into industry.’
‘What is the organisation?’
‘I’ll come to that. Tom believes that Christopher shouldn’t be committed so early. He is frightened that this organisation is, in effect, buying his son. So he came to me and asked if I knew anything of them. I was able to confirm that I did. I have known of them for some time.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Let’s settle up. I will tell you the rest on the road. What would be an adequate lagniappe, do you think?’
Adrian looked out of the rear window.
‘They
are
following us!’
‘How frustrating for them. All that power under their bonnet and they are forced to hold their pace down to our niggardly fifty-five miles per hour.’
As Trefusis spoke, the BMW moved out to the left and swept past them. Adrian caught a glimpse of the driver’s face, alert and tense behind the wheel.
‘The same man all right. British number plates. Right-hand drive. GB sticker on the back. Why’s he passed us, though?’
‘Perhaps a relay,’ said Trefusis, ‘someone else will take up the pursuit. It is scarcely a problem to identify a car of this age and distinction.’
Adrian looked at him sharply. ‘You admit that we’re being followed then?’
‘It was always a possibility.’
Adrian popped a lump of barley-sugar into his mouth. ‘You were telling me about this organisation. That paid for your godson to go through school.’
‘I have become increasingly aware in recent years,’ said Trefusis, ‘of what can only be called a conspiracy on a massive scale. I have watched the most talented, the most able and most promising students that come through St Matthew’s and other colleges in Cambridge and other universities in England … I have watched them being bought up.’
‘Bought up?’
‘Purchased. Procured. Acquired. Gotten. Let us say an undergraduate arrives with phenomenal ability in, for example, English. A natural candidate for a doctorate, a teaching post, a life of scholarship or, failing those, a creative existence as poet, novelist or dramatist. He arrives full of just such ambitions and sparkling ideals but then … they get to him.’
‘They?’
‘Two years after graduation this first-class mind is being paid eighty thousand pounds a year to devise advertising slogans for a proprietary brand of peanut butter or is writing snobbish articles in glossy magazines about exiled European monarchs and their children or some such catastrophic drivel. I see it year after year. Perhaps a chemist will arrive in the college. Great hopes are held out for his future. Nobel Prizes and who knows what else besides? He himself is full of the highest aspirations. Yet even before his final exams he has been locked and contracted into a job for life concocting synthetic pine-fresh biological soap powder fragrances for a detergent company. Adrian, someone is getting at our best minds! Someone is preventing them from achieving their full potential. This organisation I told you of is denying them a chance to grow and flourish. A university education should be broad and general. But these students are being
trained
, not
educated
. They are being stuffed like Strasbourg geese. Pappy mush is forced into them, just so one part of their brains can be fattened. Their whole minds are being ignored for the sake of that part of them which is marketable. Thus they have persuaded my godson Christopher to read Engineering instead of Mathematics.’
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘I cannot tell how long. Years, I suspect. I first began to take real notice fifteen or twenty years ago. But it is getting worse. More and more brilliant students are being diverted from work that could be of real benefit to mankind and their country. They are being battery farmed. Young Christopher Daly is just one of thousands.’
‘My God!’ said Adrian. ‘You know who’s behind this? We’ve got to stop them!’
‘It’s a conspiracy of industrialists, of certain highly placed economists and of members of governments of all political colours,’ said Trefusis.
‘But how can we prevent it? And what has it got to do with Salzburg?’
Trefusis looked across at Adrian, his eyes filled with grave concern. Suddenly he burst out laughing. Shaking his head from side to side, he snorted and struck the steering wheel. ‘Oh Adrian, I
am
cruel! I’m wicked, naughty, dreadful and digraceful. Please forgive me.’
‘What’s so funny?’
‘You silly,
silly
boy. What I have just described is the way the world works! It’s not a conspiracy. It is called Modern Western Civilisation.’
‘W-what do you mean?’
‘Of
course
the best brains are lured into industry, advertising, journalism and the rest of it. Of
course
universities are adapting to the demands of commerce. It’s regrettable and there’s little we can do about it. But I think only a Marxist would call it an international conspiracy.’
‘But you said an organisation … you told me that a specific organisation had offered that boy Christopher a scholarship.’
‘The state, Adrian. A state scholarship. And the state will hope in return that he goes into something productive once he has obtained his degree. He will be incented by money, recruitment drives and the general thrust and tenor of the times. That is all.’
Adrian fumed in silence for a while.
‘And this has nothing to do with what we’re going to Salzburg for?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘You are impossible, you know that?’
‘Improbable perhaps, but not impossible. Besides, whilst what I described may not be a conscious intrigue, it is happening nonetheless and is vexatious in the extreme.’
‘So you’re still not going to tell me what we are in actual fact doing here?’
‘All in actual good time,’ said Trefusis. ‘Now the Cardinal is getting thirsty; if memory has not fully quit her throne I believe there should be an amenable garage and
routier
in about eighty kilometres or so. In the meantime, we can tell each other the story of our lives.’
‘All right,’ said Adrian. ‘You first. Tell me about Bletchley.’
‘Little
to
tell. It was set up as a wartime decrypting station and filled up with mainly Cambridge personnel.’
‘Why Cambridge?’
‘The closest university town. At first they recruited philologists and linguists like myself.’
‘This was when?’
‘Nineteen-forty. Round about the time of the Battle of Britain.’
‘And you were how old?’
‘Tush and bibble! Is this then to be an interrogation? I was twenty-two.’
‘Right. Just wondered.’
‘Young and fizzing at the brim with ideals and theories about language. Now, who else was there with me? Dozens of girls who filed and clerked away with great brilliance and flair. The chess master Harry Golombek was on the team of course, and H.F.O. Alexander, also a magnificently dashing player. It was all rather cosy and fun at first, wrestling with enemy cyphers that had been intercepted all over Europe and Africa. It soon became clear, however, that the Enigma encryption device that German Naval Intelligence was using would need mathematicians to crack it. Acquaintanceship with the decryption techniques of the last war, the ability to do
The Times
crossword while shaving and a mastery of Russian verbs of motion were not enough any more. So they brought in Alan Turing, of whom you may have heard.’
Adrian had not.
‘No? What a pity. Brilliant man. Quite brilliant, but very sad. Killed himself later. Many credit him with the invention of the digital computer. I can’t quite remember how it came about. There was some pure mathematical problem which had faced the world of numbers for fifty years, I think, and he had solved it as a young man by positing the existence of a number-crunching machine. It was never his intention to build such a thing, it was merely hypothesised as a model to help solve an abstract difficulty. But unlike many mathematicians he relished the physical application of numbers. His hut in Bletchley was soon filled with rows and rows of valves. You remember valves? Tubes they call them in America. Little vacuum bulbs that glowed orange.’
‘I remember,’ said Adrian. ‘It used to take televisions ages to warm up.’
‘That’s right. Well Alan had thousands of them all linked together in some impossibly complicated fashion. Got them from the Post Office.’
‘The Post Office?’
‘Yes, the GPO had been experimenting in electronics before the war and they seemed to be the only people who really knew about it. The clever thing about the Enigma machine was that, although it was purely mechanical, it changed daily and the number of permutations was so grotesquely huge that the old techniques of decryption wouldn’t work. Alan cracked it quite brilliantly. But that was only the first stage of course. He still needed to know the code before he could read the cypher.’