Stephen Fry - The Liar

The interviewer nodded.

'I understand that the University has already sold the film and television rights of Peter Flowerbuck?'

'That is not substantially incorrect.'

'Are you worried that to do this before the manuscript has been officially authenticated might lay you open to future embarrassment, should it prove to be a fake?'

'As you know, we have taken on a number of new research fellows at St Matthew's who are working extensively on the text to determine its authenticity-level. They will be running linguistic particles and image-clusters through a computer program which is as reliable as any chemical test.'

'Authorial fingerprinting?'

'Authorial is the term often used, fingerprinting, that is far from wrong.'

'And how confident are you that this is genuine Dickens?'

'Let me turn that question round and say that I am not confident that it isn't Dickens.'

'Let me turn that answer round and say "bullshit",' said Adrian.

'Hush!' said Jenny.

'Well, I mean. Symphonic visions.'

'I don't think it insignificant,' Anderson continued, 'that at a time when English departments at my university and hundreds of others are being threatened with cuts, a discovery of pure scholarship like this should attract such attention and validate so completely what has quite properly been perceived as the beleaguered discipline of English studies.'

'It's a very lucrative discovery, certainly. How in fact was it made?'

'I was alerted to the existence of the text by a student of mine from Newnham College. She had been participating in my seminars on Derrida and Sexual Difference and had been pursuing a number of independent lines of enquiry into the Victorian Deviant Ethic. She found the papers in the St Matthew's College Library hidden amongst old copies of Corn-hill magazine..'

'Did she realise what she had stumbled across?'

'She was not unaware of its potential lack of insignificance.'

'I understand that a philologist from your own department, and indeed college, Donald Trefusis, has expressed doubts as to the genuineness of the find?'

'I believe that I think it of immense value to express doubts. It is because of the Professor's repeated queries that we have been granted the necessary funding to research the manuscript.'

'Dr Anderson, many people like myself, who have read Peter Flowerbuck have been struck by the candour and detail with which sexual activity and the nature of Victorian child-prostitution is described. Do you think Dickens ever intended to publish?'

'We are currently trawling all biographical source materials for some clue as to the answer to that highly legitimate question. Perhaps I can turn it round, however, and ask, "Would he not have destroyed the manuscript if he never wanted it read?" Yeah?'

'I see.'

'I cannot deny myself the right to believe that he left it to be found. We therefore owe it to him to publish now.'

'It is not of course a completed work. What you have is only a fragment.'

'There is truth in that remark.'

'Do you think there is a chance of discovering the rest of the manuscript?'

'If it exists we are not doubtful of locating the residue.'

'Dr Anderson, thank you very much indeed. The three currently extant chapters of Peter Flowerbuck, edited and annotated by Tim Anderson, will be available from the Cambridge University Press in October, priced fourteen pounds ninety-five. The BBC serialisation, currently in production, with an ending by Malcolm Bradbury, is due to reach our screens sometime in the spring of nineteen-eighty-one.'

Jenny got up and switched off the television.

'Well,' said Gary, 'that's set the apple-cart amongst the pigeons and no mistake. What do we do now?'

'Now,' said Adrian, 'we wait.' ,

II

Adrian put down the cane and loosened the cravat. Gary sat down on the step and mopped his brow with a most preposterous handkerchief of bright vermilion silk. Jenny addressed them from the fire-escape.

'I have very few notes to give,' she said. 'There's an old theatrical saying, "Bad dress, good performance"; I'm sorry to have to tell you that this was an excellent dress. The mechanics of the show are all there. The greatest imponderable is the time it will take for the audience to follow Adrian into this yard. That's something we'll discover tonight. It's all there: just pace and enjoy it. We're all just waiting for the final director now -the audience. If you don't mind standing here in the sun I'll come amongst you now with individual notes.'

Jenny had approached Tim Anderson for permission to mount a production of Peter Flowerbuck and his gratitude to her for the discovery of the manuscript had made it impossible for him to refuse.

'Jenny, can I ask at this stage how you imagine presenting on stage what is, ultimately, not a play?'

'Didn't you once say yourself, Dr Anderson, that all the theatrical energy in Victorian Britain went not into drama but into the novel?'

'That is something I did say, yes.'

'The RSC is apparently planning a dramatisation of Nicholas Nickleby, surely Peter Flowerbuck is even more suited to the theatre? If we use the ADC we can take the audience outside with Peter as he goes to the Den. The yard at the side of the theatre is pretty much a Victorian slum already.'

'I'm insanely excited.'

'Good.'

'Jenny, may I ask you, do you need any help with the preparation or finalisation of a play text?'

'Oh, I'm not writing it. Adrian Healey is.'

'Healey? I wasn't aware he'd been authorised to read the manuscript.'

'Oh, he's read it all right.'

She climbed down the fire-escape now and approached Adrian and Gary with a sheaf of notes.

'The Polterneck scenes are basically fine,' she told Gary. 'But for God's sake learn that scene twelve speech properly.'

'What happens in scene twelve?'

'It's where you buy Joe. Which reminds me, where's Hugo?'

'Here I am.'

'I want to rehearse the Russell Square scene with you and Adrian. It's still not right. Let's see . . . I've got some more notes for the others. If you go and run through it on stage now I'll send Bridget over and be with you in ten minutes.'

Hugo and Adrian walked into the theatre together.

'Nervous?'said Adrian.

'A bit. My mother's coming. I don't know what she'll think.'

'Your mother?'

'She's an actress.'

'Why did I never know that?'

'Why should you have done?'

'No reason, I suppose.'

It would have been a difficult scene even if Hugo hadn't been playing Joe. Adrian ran through it in his mind, like a Radio 3 announcer giving the synopsis of an opera.

Flowerbuck, he intoned to himself, has taken the boy Joe Cotton back to his house in Russell Square, convinced that he is his sister's son. Joe on arrival immediately tries to take off his clothes, unable to imagine that he would be expected to do anything else in a gentleman's house. Peter and Mrs Twimp, his housekeeper, calm him down and give him a bath. Mrs Twimp, played by Bridget Arden, injects into the scene her own brand of malapropistic comedy as they try to question Joe on the details of his early childhood. His memory is very uncertain. He recalls a garden, a large house and a fair-haired sister but very little else. At this stage, and indeed on this stage, Adrian Healey, playing Flowerbuck, finds his memory to be uncertain too and often starts to forget his lines.

After the bath Joe is taken to the dining room to eat. Or rather the dining room comes to them. It is that kind of production. Joe recognises in horror a portrait of Sir Christian Flowerbuck, Peter's uncle.

'That gentleman hurt me!' he cries.

It transpires that Sir Christian, Peter's benefactor and godfather, whose baronetcy and money Peter is in line to inherit, had been the first man to violate Joe.