The Liar [calibre]

Trefusis tore a bread roll in half and looked speculatively into a large mirror over Adrian's shoulder.

'Really? Bless my soul, it's a small world and no mistake.'

'You don't think . . . you don't think they might be . . .following us?'

Trefusis raised his eyebrows. 'It's possible of course. It's always possible.'

Adrian grabbed Trefusis's arm across the table. 'I could go and, have a pee and put their car out of action. What do you say?'

'You think micturating over their car would put it out of action?'

'No, I mean pretend to have a pee but actually wrench out the rotor arm or take the distributor cap or whatever it is you do.'

Trefusis gazed at him with only the trace of a smile on his face. 'Do you know how they make foie gras?

'Donald, I'm serious. I'm sure they're following us.'

With a sigh, Trefusis put down the fragment of brioche he had been buttering.

'I'm serious too. It's time, young Healey, that you knew what this trip was all about.'

'Really?'

'Really. Now, I'll ask you again. Do you know how to make foie gras?'

Adrian stared at Trefusis. 'Er . . . no. No I don't.'

'Very well then, I'll tell you. You rear a goose from a puppy or calf or whatver a goose is when young.'

'Chick? Gosling?'

'Quite possibly. You take a young Strasbourg goose-cub, chick or gosling and you feed it rich grain in a mashy pulp.'

'Fatten it up, you mean?'

'That's right, but the mashy pulp is placed, you see, in a bag.'

'A bag?'

'That's right. A bag or sack. The bag or sack has some species of nozzle or protuberance at the narrow end, which is forced down the goose's gullet or throat. The bag or sack is then squeezed or compressed and the meal or fodder thus introduced or thrust into the creature or animal's crop or stomach.'

'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 to 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 . . . lepoisson est arrive.'

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 dore, 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.'