Stephen Fry - The Liar

'Sorry?'

'Come, come, Mr Healey. You've already insulted your own intelligence'

'Oh.'

'Val Kirstlin, Neue Philologische Abteilung, July 1973, "The Origin and Nature of the Periphrastic Verb 'Do' in Middle and Early Modern English". Am I right?'

Adrian shifted uncomfortably. It was hard enough to know what Trefusis was thinking when his face was unveiled; with a handkerchief over him he was as unreadable as a doctor's prescription.

'Look, I'm terribly sorry,' he said. 'The thing is . . .'

'Please don't apologise. Had you bothered to do any work of your own I should have been obliged to sit through it just the same, and I can assure you that I had much rather listen to a good essay than a mediocre one.'

Adrian couldn't think of an adequate reply to this.

'You have a fine brain. A really excellent brain, Mr Healey.'

'Thank you.'

'A fine brain, but a dreadful mind. I have a fine brain and a fine mind. Likewise Russell. Leavis, a good mind, practically no brain at all. Shall we continue like this, I wonder?'

'Like what?'

'This fortnightly exhibition of stolen goods. It all seems rather pointless. I don't find the pose of careless youth charming and engaging any more than you find the pose of careworn age fascinating and eccentric, I should imagine. Perhaps I should let you play the year away. I have no doubt that you will do very well in your final tests. Honesty, diligence and industry are wholly superfluous qualities in one such as you, as you have clearly grasped.'

'Well, it's just that I've been so . . .'

Trefusis pulled the handkerchief from his face and looked at Adrian.

'But of course you have! Frantically busy. Fran-tic-ally.'

Trefusis helped himself to another cigarette from a packet that lay on top of a tower of books next to the sofa and tapped it against his thumb-nail.

'My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.'

'What makes you so sure?'

'I am a student of language, Mr Healey. You write with fluency and conviction, you talk with authority and control. A complex idea here, an abstract proposition there, you juggle with them, play with them, seduce them. There is no movement from doubt to comprehension, no breaking down, no questioning, no excitement. You try to persuade others, never yourself. You recognise patterns, but you rearrange them where you should analyse them. In short, you do not think. You have never thought. You have never said to me anything that you believe to be true, only things which sound true and perhaps even ought to be true: things that, for the moment, are in character with whatever persona you have adopted for the afternoon. You cheat, you short-cut, you lie. It's too wonderful.'

'With respect, Professor . . .'

'Pigswill! You don't respect me. You fear me, are irritated by me, envy me . . . you everything me, but you do not respect me. And why should you? I am hardly respectable.'

'What I mean is, am I so different from anyone else? Doesn't everyone think the way I think? Doesn't everyone just rearrange patterns? Ideas can't be created or destroyed, surely.'

'Yes!' Trefusis clapped his hands with delight. 'Yes, yes, yes! But who else knows that they are doing that and nothing else? You know, you have always known. That is why you are a liar. Others try their best, when they speak they mean it. You never mean it. You extend this duplicity to your morals. You use and misuse people and ideas because you do not believe they exist. Just patterns for you to play with. You're a hound of hell and you know it.'

'So,' said Adrian, 'what's to become of me then?'

'Ah, well. I could ask you not to bother me any more. Let you get on with your boring little life while I get on with mine. Or I could write a note to your tutor. He would send you down from the university. Either course would deprive me of the income, however nugatory, that I receive for supervising you. What to do? What to do? Pour yourself a glass of Madeira, there's Sercial or Bual on the side. Hum! It's all so difficult.'

Adrian stood and picked his way across the room.

Trefusis's quarters could be described in one word.

Books.

Books and books and books. And then, just when an observer might be lured into thinking that that must be it, more books.

Barely a square inch of wood or wall or floor was visible. Walking was only allowed by pathways cut between the piles of books. Treading these pathways with books waist-high either side was like negotiating a maze. Trefusis called the room his 'librarinth'. Areas where seating was possible were like lagoons in a coral strand of books.

Adrian supposed that any man who could speak twenty-three languages and read forty was likely to collect a few improving volumes along the way. Trefusis himself was highly dismissive of them.

'Waste of trees,' he had once said. 'Stupid, ugly, clumsy, heavy things. The sooner technology comes up with a reliable alternative the better.' '

Early in the term he had flung a book at Adrian's head in irritation at some crass comment. Adrian had caught it and been shocked to see that it was a first edition of Les Fleurs du Mai.

'Books are not holy relics,' Trefusis had said. 'Words may be my religion, but when it comes to worship, I am very low church. The temples and the graven images are of no interest to me. The superstitious mammetry of a bourgeois obsession for books is severely annoying. Think how many children are put off reading by prissy little people ticking them off whenever they turn a page carelessly. The world is so fond of saying that books should be "treated with respect". But when are we told that words should be treated with respect? From our earliest years we are taught to revere only the outward and visible. Ghastly literary types maundering on about books as "objects". Yes, that does happen to be a first edition. A present from Noel Annan, as a matter of fact. But I assure you that a foul yellow livre de poche would have been just as useful to me. Not that I fail to appreciate Noel's generosity. A book is a piece of technology. If people wish to amass them and pay high prices for this one or that, well and good. But they can't pretend that it is any higher or more intelligent a calling than collecting snuff-boxes or bubble-gum cards. I may read a book, I may use it as an ashtray, a paperweight, a doorstop or even as a missile to throw at silly young men who make fatuous remarks. So. Think again.' And Adrian had thought again.

Now he found his way back to the small clearing where Trefusis lay on his sofa blowing smoke-rings at the ceiling.

'Your very good health,' said Adrian sipping his Madeira.

Trefusis beamed at him.

'Don't be pert,' he said, 'it isn't at all becoming.'

'No, Professor.'

There followed a silence in which Adrian eagerly joined.

He had stood in many studies in his day, tracing arabesques on the carpet with his foot, while angry men had described his shortcomings and settled his future. Trefusis was not angry. Indeed he was rather cheerful. It was perfectly apparent that he couldn't care less whether Adrian lived or died.

'As your Senior Tutor, I am your moral guardian,' he said at last. 'A moral guardian yearns for an immoral ward and the Lord has provided. I shall strike a bargain with you, that's what I shall do. I am going to leave you in uninterrupted peace for the rest of the year on one condition. I want you to set to work on producing something that will surprise me. You tell me that ideas cannot be created. Perhaps, but they can be discovered. I have a peculiar horror of the cliché - there! the phrase "I have a peculiar horror" is just such a revolting expression as most maddens me - and I think you owe it to yourself, to descend to an even more nauseating phrase, to devote your energies to forging something new in the dark smithy of your fine brain. I haven't produced anything original myself in years, most of my colleagues have lived from the nappy onwards without any thought at all making the short journey across their minds, leave alone a fresh one. But if you can furnish me with a piece of work that contains even the seed of novelty, the ghost of a shred of a scintilla of a germ of a suspicion of an iota of a shadow of a particle of something, interesting and provoking, something that will amuse and astonish, then I think you will have repaid me for being forced to listen to you regurgitating the ideas of others and you will have done a proper service to yourself into the bargain. Do we have a deal?'