Stephen Fry - The Liar

God this was hard.

'. . . he was . . . well he said he was in love with someone ... he, you know, had a pash on them.'

'I see. Yes, of course. Yes I see. He thought he was in love with someone. Another boy, I suppose?'

'That's what he said, sir.'

'Trotter was found in a barn in Brandiston Field this afternoon,' he said, pushing a piece of paper across the desk. 'This note was in his pocket.'

Adrian stared.

'Sir?'

Tickford nodded sadly.

'The stupid boy,' he said. 'The stupid boy hanged himself.'

Adrian looked at the note.

'I'm very sorry but I couldn't bear it any more,' it read. 'Healey knows why.'

'His mother and father are on their way down from Harro-gate,' said Tickford. 'What am I going to say?'

Adrian looked at him in panic.

'Why, sir? Why would he kill himself?'

'Tell me the name of the boy he was ... he had this thing for, Adrian.'

'Well, sir . . .'

'I must know.'

'It was Cartwright, sir. Hugo Cartwright.'

Two Savile Row suits, a Tommy Nutter and a Bennett, Tovey and Steele, faced each other over a table at Wiltons.

'Good to see the Native back again,' said the Bennett, Tovey and Steele. 7 was beginning to think it extinct.'

'Now you say that,' said the Tommy Nutter suit, 'but I've got rather a soft spot for the Pacific chaps myself. They're sort of wetter somehow, don't you think? Fleshlier if there is such a word.'

The Bennet, Tovey and Steele did not agree. He considered it typical of the Tommy Nutter to have a loud taste in oysters.

'This Montrachet's a bit warm, isn't it?'

The Bennett, Tovey and Steele sighed. He had been brought up from his nanny's knee to believe that white Burgundies should not be overchilled. They knew him at Wiltons and took great care to present his wines just so. The Tommy Nutter would resent a lecture, however. Men of his stamp were absurdly sensitive.

'Still,' said the other. 'Who's complaining? Now then. Let's talk Mendax. GDS has had no joy, I'm sorry to say, with the Odysseus material. No joy at all.'

'No decrypt whatsoever?'

'Oh, they opened it up all right. It was an old twist-cypher. Prewar. Absolute antique.'

'That figures,' grunted the Bennett, Tovey and Steele. 'And what was inside?'

'Names, addresses and telephone numbers. Load of harmless Osties.Lifted straight from the bloody Salzburg directory, would you believe?'

'The old bastard.'

'So the thing is,' the Tommy Nutter twisted the stem of his wineglass coyly, 'did this Odysseus of yours bring the material out or did he leave it behind?'

'He's had nothing in the mail. We know that.'

Your friend on the inside still paying his way?'

'Oh yes.'

'Good, because he's a greedy son of a bitch.'

The Bennett, Tovey and Steele suit ignored this. It wasn't as if the Tommy Nutter suit was paying for Telemachus. He thought he was, of course, and would probably never notice that it came directly out of the Bennett, Tovey and Steele's pocket, never to be reclaimedfrom the fund. It was a purely private business, but Cabinet liaison had to believe there was honey in it for them. It would not do for them to find out that the Service was being used entirely for the Bennett, Tovey and Steele's private ends.

'I think the Mendax material is still over there,' he said, 'without the walls of Ilium.'

'In Salzburg, you mean?' asked the Tommy Nutter, whose grip on codenames was weak at the best of times.

'That's right. In Salzburg.'

'This is all very much your own pigeon, you know. You are the only one who believes in Mendax. I am reminded of the operation you ran in seventy-six, also against Odysseus. What did that game come to?'

The Bennett, Tovey and Steele shot the Tommy Nutter a suspicious glare.

'What do you mean game?' he said. 'Why do you say game*"

'Keep your hair on, old man. I just meant that you seem to have a bit of a maggot in your head on the subject of Trefusis. Some of us are wondering why. That's all.'

'You'll find out yet. Listen. The point is this. I never said I did believe in Mendax. But if it doesn't exist why should the Trojans and Odysseus want us to believe that it does? That's worth pursuing surely?'

'Humph,' said the Tommy Nutter. 'It has at least been a cheap operation so far, that I will grant you. But we haven't a shred of proof that Szabo - what's he called again?'

'Helen.'

'We haven't a shred of evidence to suggest that Helen is anything other than a loyal servant of his state. The Trojans have just given him a medal for God's sake.'

'All the more reason to suspect Odysseus.'

'Why "Helen " by the way? Odd codename for a man.'

The Bennett, Tovey and Steele suit was not going to give the Tommy Nutter a free lesson in Homeric mythology. Where did the man go to school? The tie was no indication. Beaconsfield Conservatives or something equally foul, probably. Hadley Wood Golf Club. Carshalton Rotarians. Yuk.

'It seemed to make sense at the time,' he said.

'Oh ah,' the Tommy Nutter pressed a crumb into the table cloth. 'So tell me about these grandchildren.'

'Stefan is a chess-player. He's coming over here to play in a couple of months. They'll keep him on a long leash I shouldn't wonder.'

'And you want me to allocate resourcing?'

'I'd quite like some money made available, if that's what you mean. Grade Two surveillance should, do it.'

'I have to interface, as they say, with the Treasury tomorrow. Cabinet next week. Oh, look, you're not going to smoke are you?'

Christ! thought the Bennett, Tovey and Steele. Roll on the next Labour government.

Four

I

Tim Anderson considered the question with great care.

'I don't believe that the comparison with Oliver Twist, seductive and engaging as I would be the last to deny it being, is as valid as a first glance might allow.'

'But surely, Dr Anderson, the similarities are very clear. What we have here is a secret workhouse birth, we have a gang of boys set to work by the character Polterneck, we have the character of Peter Flowerbuck, who traces his own family connection with the Cotton twins, not unlike Mr Brownlow's quest in Oliver Twist, we have Flinter, who like Nancy is an agent of revenge. The parallels are surely most striking?'

Gary poured some more Meursault for Jenny and Adrian, never at any time taking his eyes off the screen.

'I am not going to consider failing to grant you the presence of narrative echoes,' Tim Anderson replied, 'but I would certainly find myself presented with personal difficulties if asked to deny that this is the mature Dickens of Little Dorrit and Bleak House. I'm sensing a fuller picture of a connected world here than we are allowed in Twist. I'm sensing a deeper anger, I find myself responding to a more complete symphonic vision. The chapter which describes the flood, the scene depicting the bursting of the Thames's banks and the sweeping away of the Den is a more proleptic and organic event than the reader has been confronted with in earlier novels. I would be laying myself open to a charge of being mistaken if I attempted to resist the argument that the character of Flinter is a development of both Nancy and the Artful Dodger which we can't be afraid to recognise takes us into a more terrified Dickens, a more, if you like, Kafkaesque Dickens.'