Stephen Fry - The Liar

He turned back to his work with a sigh. God could worry about what he was and what he wasn't. There was the tea-party scene to be written.

He hadn't been working for more than ten minutes when there came another knock at the door.

'If that is anyone under the age of thirteen they have my permission to go and drown themselves.'

The door opened and a cheery face peered round.

'Wotcher, cock, thought I'd come and cadge a drink.'

'My dear Matron, you can't have run out of Gees linctus again.'

She came and looked over his shoulder.

'How's it going?'

'The agony of composition. Got to keep everyone satisfied.

I'm preparing a huge part for you.'

She massaged his neck.

'I can take it.'

'Oh you proud, snorting beauty, how I love you.'

It was a private joke that the boys had somehow got wind of.

She was a thoroughbred filly and he was her trainer. Adrian had started it when he found out that her father bred racehorses for a living. She looked the part too, with a great mane of chestnut hair and dark eyes that she rolled in mock passion when Adrian patted her hindquarters.

She had come to Chartham as an assistant matron at the age of sixteen and had been there ever since. There were rumours amongst the staff that she was a lesbian, but Adrian put that down to wishful thinking on their part. She was now such an attractive twenty-five-year-old that they had to find some excuse for not desiring her and her liking for jeans and jackets over skirts and blouses made sapphic preferences an obvious escape route for them.

She had latched onto Adrian as soon as he had arrived.

'She always pretends to pant after new masters,' Maxted had said. 'It's just showing off to the boys to disguise her dykery. Tell her to bog off.'

But Adrian enjoyed her company: she was brisk and clean. Her breasts were high and handsome, her thighs strong and supple and she was teaching him to drive. Despite the heat of their language they had never come close to anything physical, but the thought beat its wings in the air whenever they were together.

He watched her wandering around his room, picking things up, examining them and putting them down again in the wrong place.

'She's restless, she needs a good gallop over the downs,' he said.

She went to the window.

'It's really settling, isn't it?'

'What is?'

'The snow.'

'I find it unsettling as a matter of fact. I'm on duty tomorrow and I shall have to find something for the boys to do. The rugger pitch will be four foot under if it carries on at this rate.'

'The school was cut off from the outside world for a whole week in seventy-four.'

'And it's been cut off ever since.'

She sat on the bed.

'I'm leaving at the end of the year.'

'Really? Why?'

'I'll have been here nearly ten years. It's enough. I'll go home.'

Every member of staff spoke regularly about leaving at the end of the year. It was their way of showing that they weren't stuck, that they had a choice. It meant nothing, they always came back.

'But who will spoon out the little darlings' malt? Who will paint their warts and kiss the place and make it well? Chartham needs you.'

'I mean it, Ade. Clare is fretting in her loose-box.'

'It's time some stallion was found to cover you, certainly,' Adrian agreed. 'The colts here have been very disappointing and the staff are all geldings.'

'Except you.'

'Ah, but I've still a few seasons of racing left in me before I get put out. After I've won the Cambridge Hurdles my stud fees will be that much higher.'

'You're not a queer are you, Adrian?'

He was startled by the question.

'Well,' he said, 'I know what I like.'

'And do you like me?'

'Do I like you? I'm flesh and blood aren't I? How could anyone not be thrilled by your tightly fleshed points, your twitching hocks, your quivering neck, your shining hindquarters, your heaving, shimmering flanks?'

'Then for God's sake, fuck me. I'm going mad.'

For all his talk, Adrian had never experienced a human being of another gender before and writhing around with Clare, he was astonished by the strength of her desire. He hadn't expected that women actually felt the kind of urge and appetite that drove men. Everyone knew, surely, that females went for personality, strength and security and were resigned to the need to be penetrated only if that was the price for keeping the man they loved? That they should arch their backs, spread wide the lips of their sex in hunger and urge him in was something for which he was not prepared. Adrian's room was at the top of the school and they had locked the door, but he couldn't help feeling that everyone would be able to hear her squeals and roars of pleasure.

'Bang me, you bastard, bang me hard! Harder! Deeper and harder, you lump of shit. God that's good.'

It explained all those jokes about bedsprings. The sex he had taken part in up until now didn't build up these colossal pounding rhythms. He found himself driving faster and faster and joining in her shouts.

'I . . . think . . . that . . . I'm . . . about ... to ... wheeeeeee! . . . whooooo! . . . haaaaaaa . . .'

He collapsed on her as she thrashed herself calm. Panting and sweating, they wound down together into a kind of breathless quiet.

She gripped his shoulders.

'You beautiful fucking son of a bitch. My God I needed that. Woof!'

'As a matter of fact,' gasped Adrian, 'I think I did too.'

Clare taught him a great deal that term.

'Sex is meaningless,' she said, 'if it's silent and mechanical. You have to think about it and plan it, like a dinner party or a cricket match. I tell you when to put in, how it's feeling, you tell me what you like, when you're coming, how you want me to move. Just remember that you have never thought a thought or imagined an act that is so dirty and depraved that I won't have thought of it thousands of times myself. That's true of everyone. When we stop talking and joking we'll know it's over.'

Two nights after the last day of term the headmaster and his wife had gone out to a dinner party, so Clare and Adrian found they had the whole school to themselves. It was cold, but they had run naked around the classrooms where she had thrown herself over a desk to be spanked, into the kitchens where they had hurled jam and lard at each other, into the staff common room where he had pumped her up with the football pump, into the boys' showers where she had urinated over his face and finally into the gymnasium where they had rolled and rolled over the mats, shrieking and slithering and jerking in frenzy.

He lay looking up at the climbing ropes that hung from the ceiling. During the act all his senses had been suspended, but now it was over he felt the bruise on his shoulder where he had barged into a door, smelt the sour lard and urine and jam that was all over him and heard the hot-water pipes rattling under the floor and the bubbles of wind building up in Clare's bowels.

'Bath,' he said. 'Bath then bed. God I'm going to need these holidays.'

'Stay with me here for while.'

It was their one point of disagreement. Adrian had never been able to luxuriate in the afterglow.

'Time for my tub.'

'Why do you always want to have a bath the moment after you've made love to me? Why can't we wriggle in our dirt for a while?' she said.

He fought down his customary post-coital irritation and contempt.

'Don't go looking for something psychological that isn't there. I have a bath after any kind of strenuous exercise. It doesn't mean I feel dirty,' though he did, 'it doesn't mean I'm trying to wash you out of my life,' though he was, 'it doesn't mean guilt, shame, repentance or anything like that,' though it did. 'It just means I want a bath.'

'Queer!' she shouted after him.