The Liar [calibre]

'It's just a quick question . . .'

'Oh, very well.'

'Is it true, sir, that you and Matron are having an affair?'

'Out, out! Get out! Out before I slash your throat with a knife and hang you dripping with blood from the flag-pole. Out, before I pull your guts from your body and stuff them down your mouth. Out, before I become mildly irritated. Go, hence, begone. Stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once. Run! run quickly from here, run to the other side of Europe, flee for your life nor give not one backward glance. I never hope to see you again in this world or the next. Never speak to me, never approach me, never advertise your presence to me by the smallest sound, or by the living God that made me I will do such things... I know not what they are but they will be the terrors of the earth. Flee hence, be not here, but somewhere in a vast Elsewhere to which I have no access. Boys who rub me up the wrong way, Newton, come to a sticky end. Be removed, piss off, heraus, get utterly outly out.'

'Thought so.'

'Grr!'

Adrian flung a book at the hastily closing door, signed the letter and lit a pipe. The snow had started to fall.

He had no more duties for the day so he decided to do a bit more work on The Aunt That Exploded, a play for the end of term that he had been cajoled into writing.

If Harvey-Potter was going to play Aunt Bewinda, something would have to be done about preserving his soprano. A definite fissure had appeared in his larynx at breakfast and a tenor Bewinda would be worse than useless. He should talk to Clare about deliberately shrinking the boy's underpants in the laundry. Anything to keep nature at bay for two months.

He still had to work on Maxted, the only master who had so far refused to participate.

'You can kick my arse from here to Norwich, Adrian, I'm not going to dress up in shorts for any man living.'

The principal idea of the play was that boys played grownups, parents, aunts, doctors and schoolmasters, and the staff played boys and, in the case of Matron, a little girl.

'Come on Oliver, even the Brigadier has agreed. It'll be wonderful.'

'If you can tell me in one word what's wrong with The Mikado?¹

'No, can't do that. "It's crap" is two words and "It's complete crap" is three.'

'Of course The Mikado is crap, but it's good healthy stodgy crap. Your blasted play is either going to be horrible pebbly crap or a great gush of liquid crap.'

'I'll do all your duties this term. How about that?'

'No you bloody won't.'

That hadn't been such a clever offer. Maxted enjoyed being on duty.

'Well I think you're a heel and a stinker and I hope that one day you'll be found out.'

'Found out? What do you mean?'

'Ho hee!' said Adrian, who knew that everyone lived in fear of being found out.

But Maxted was not to be moved, which was a nuisance because, set off in shorts and school-cap, his paunch and purple complexion would have been terrifically striking. Perhaps Adrian himself would have to play Bewinda's nephew. Not ideal casting: he was still closer in age to the boys than to any of the staff.

But it was a snug problem, the perfect sort of problem for a man in a tweed jacket, sitting in a fire-lit room with a good briar pipe between his teeth, a glass of Glennfiddich at his elbow and a blizzard whipping up outside, to ponder over. A clean problem for a clean man with a clean mind in the clean countryside.

He rubbed his fingers against the grain of his stubble and thought.

All gone. All anger quelled, all desire drained, all thirst slaked, all madness past.

There would be cricket next term, coaching and umpiring, teaching the young idea how to deal with the ball that goes on with the arm, reading them Browning and Heaney on the lawn when the sun shone and it was too hot to teach indoors. The rest of the summer would be spent discovering Milton and Proust and Tolstoy ready for Cambridge in October where, like Cranmer - but with a bicycle instead of a horse - his mind and thighs would find exercise. A handful of civilised friends, not too close.

'What do you make of that bloke in your college, Healey ?'

'He's hard to get to know. I like him, but he's private, he's unfathomable.'

'Detached somehow . . . almost serene.'

Then a degree and back here or to another school - his own perhaps. Stay on at Cambridge even . . . if he got a First.

All gone.

He didn't believe himself for a moment, of course.

He looked at his reflection in the window. 'It's no good trying to fool me, Healey,' he said, 'an Adrian always knows when an Adrian is lying.'

But an Adrian also knew that an Adrian's lies were reaclass="underline" they were lived and felt and acted out as thoroughly as another man's truths - if other men had truths - and he believed it possible that this last lie might see him through to the grave.

He watched the snow building up against the window and his mind caught the tube to Piccadilly and climbed the steps from the Underground.

There stood Eros, the boy with the bow poised to shoot, and there stood Adrian, the schoolmaster in tweeds and cavalry twills, looking up at him and slowly shaking his head.

'Of course you know why Eros was put in the Circus in the first place, don't you?' he remembered saying to a sixteen-year-old who was sharing his pitch outside the London Pavilion one July evening.

'Named after the Eros Strip Club, was it?'

'Oh that's close, but I'm afraid I can't give it you, I'll have to pass the question over. It was part of a tribute to the Earl of Shaftesbury: a grateful nation honours the man who abolished child labour. Gilbert Scott, the sculptor, positioned Eros with his bow and arrow aiming up Shaftesbury Avenue.'

'Yeah? Well, fuck all that, there's a trick over there been eyeing you up for the past five minutes.'

'Had him. Overuses the teeth. He can find someone else to circumcise. The point is, it's a kind of visual pun, Eros burying his shaft up Shaftesbury Avenue. You see?'

'Then why's he pointing down Lower Regent Street?'

'He was taken down and cleaned during the war and the fools who put him back up didn't know buggery ding-dong shit.'

'He could do with cleaning again.'

'I don't know. I think Eros should be dirty. In Greek legend, as I'm sure you are aware, he fell in love with the minor deity Psyche. It was the Greek way of saying that, in spite of what it may believe, Love pursues the Soul, not the body; the Erotic desires the Psychic. If Love was clean and wholesome he wouldn't lust after Psyche.'

'He's still looking this way.'

'His bottom is, at any rate.'

'No, the trick. He's started cruising me now.'

'I will clear away for you. Too many cocks spoil the brothel. Have him with my blessing. Just don't come crawling to me with your glans half hanging off, that's all.'

'I'll give him a minute to make up his mind.'

'Do that. I'm bound to wonder, meanwhile, was there any life more futile and perfectly representative than that of Lord Shaftesbury? His own adored son killed in a schoolboy fight at Eton while his national monument daily supervises child labour of a nature and intensity he would never have guessed at.'

'I'm definitely on here. See you later.'

Adrian dropped a log on the fire and stared into the flames. He was as secure as anyone: a real teacher with a real name, real references and real qualifications. No forgeries or tricks had brought him here, only merit. No one on earth could bang into the room and drag him to judgement. He really was a schoolmaster in a real school, really stirring a real fire in a safe and snug common room that was as real as the winter weather that really raged in the real world outside. He had as much right to pour a finger of ten-year-old malt and puff a 'soothing pipeful of the ready-rubbed as anyone in England. The grown-up didn't live who had the power to snatch away the bottle, confiscate the pipe or reduce him to stammered excuses.