The Liar

'Oh God. But if you've known all along, why haven't you . . .'

'Blown the whistle? I have my reasons and your manuscript serves them perfectly. The English department at St Matthew's has never had so many research fellows or been flooded with so many grants. The Dickens Society of Chicago alone . . . but that is of no interest to you. I am sincerely delighted. This is the second time you have failed to disappoint me. It's so hard to find a good crook these days. You're a treasure, Adrian, a real treasure. One thing I am unclear on, though. Why did you hit upon the happy idea of having the manuscript discovered in St Matthew's and not in the University Library?'

'Well, I wanted it to be college property. I assumed then that you would be the one to publicise it.'

'And I would be the one with egg on my face when the truth came out? I suspected as much. You are too splendid. I know we shall become friends.'

'No I didn't exactly mean . . .'

'You have done your college a great service. I will leave now, to allow space for carnival, riot, drugs and carnal frenzy to develop. Silenus and his leering wrinkles are not required when youth is sporting. Oh look, there is that man from Narborough, the one you routed on the cricket field the first time ever we met. Excellent performance, my dear Cartwright! I am not ashamed to say that I wept openly.'

Hugo nodded vaguely and came up to Adrian, flushed and swaying, a bottle in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

'Look where he comes,' said Adrian, 'the Allegory of Dissipation and Ruin.'

Hugo burped happily and gestured at Trefusis who was saying his farewells to Jenny.

'I know that old fart from somewhere,' he said.

'You are talking about the old fart that I love. That old fart is a genius. That old fart won a thousand pounds by backing Chartham Park against Narborough Hall. You must remember the cricket match.'

'Oh yes, that's right. You cheated.'

'Cheated?'

'Donald Trefusis. Philip Slattery's uncle. Friend of old Biffo Biffen's from school. I don't forget anything, me. Mnemosyne was, let us not forget it, the mother of the Muses.'

Adrian looked at him in surprise. 'Well, quite.'

'At least according to Hesiod. So what is the old fart that you love doing here?'

'He's the ADC treasurer.'

Jenny came up with Gary.

'For God's sake stop drinking, Hugo. You'll look forty tomorrow instead of fourteen if you carry on at this rate.'

'A man who has just exposed himself to four hundred people, including his mother, has every right to drink.'

'God yes, I forgot the famous Helen Lewis was in,' said Adrian. 'How did she like it?'

'She was highly complimentary about everyone except me.'

'She didn't like you?'Jenny asked.

'She just didn't mention me, that's all.'

Jenny consoled him with the thought that it was probably professional jealousy. Adrian beckoned to Gary, who was pogoing with a lighting technician.

'Trefusis knows all,' he said. 'The bugger burglarised our rooms. But it's all all right.'

'What does Trefusis know?' said Hugo, who had overheard.

'Nothing, nothing.'

'He's the old fart that Adrian loves,' Hugo confided to Jenny and the rest of the room. 'I used to be the old fart that he loves. Now it's Trefusisisisis.'

'That's right, Hugo, time for bye-byes.'

'Really?' said Jenny. 'I thought / was the old fart he loved.'

'Adrian loves everybody, didn't you know? He even loves Lucy.'

'And who the hell is Lucy?'

'Oh my goodness, is that the time? Jenny, if we're going to hit Newnham tonight we should . . .'

'Lucy is his dog. He loves Lucy.'

'That's right. I love Lucy. Starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Now I really think . . .'

4Do you know what he did once? In Harrogate. He pretended to . . .'

'Oh shit, he's about to throw,' said Gary.

Adrian caught the brunt of the vomit, which, in an unusual fit of humility, he rather thought he deserved.

III

'So let me see if I understood you, Dr Anderson.' Menzies removed his spectacles and pinched the bridge of his nose like a rep actor in a court-room drama. 'Not one word, not one syllable of this document is in fact the work of Charles Dickens?'

'It certainly looks as if the paper and writing materials are modern. The handwriting however . . .'

'Oh for goodness' sake, if the ink is twentieth-century how can the manuscript be in Dickens's own hand? Or are we now to authorise research grants that will establish the use of the retractable biro in Victorian Britain? Perhaps you even believe that Dickens is still alive?'

'I think I should remind the governing body,' said Clinton-Lacey, 'that the film is due to be premiered next week. Some kind of statement is going to have to be made.'

'The college will be a laughing-stock.'

'Yes indeed,' said Trefusis. 'Sketches on Not The Nine o'clock News, a cartoon by Marc. Calamitous.'

'Well it's your department, Donald,' said Menzies. 'Rather than sit back and enjoy this cataclysm, why don't you come up with a solution?'

Trefusis stubbed out his cigarette.

'Well now, that is precisely what I have taken the liberty of doing,' he said. 'With your permission I shall read a statement that the press might be offered without too much embarrassment.'

Everyone around the table murmured assent. Trefusis took a piece of paper from his satchel.

'"Using a linguistic analysis program pioneered by the English faculty in collaboration with the Department of Computing Science,'" he read, "'Dr Tim Anderson, Fellow of St Matthew's College and Lecturer in English at the University, has refined and perfected techniques which have allowed him to determine precisely which parts of the play The Two Noble Kinsmen were written by Shakespeare and which by Fletcher.'"

'Er ... I have?' asked Tim Anderson.

'Yes, Tim, you have.'

'What on earth has Shakespeare got to do with it?' cried Menzies. 'We are talking about . . .'

'"Comparing textual samples of known Shakespeare against the writings of the Earl of Oxford, Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe, he is also in a position to prove that all the plays of the Shakespearean canon are the work of one hand, William Shakespeare's, and that Oxford, Bacon and Marlowe are responsible for none of it. There are, however, some intriguing passages in three of the plays which would appear not to be by Shakespeare. Dr Anderson and his team are working on them now and should soon have positive results. An interesting byproduct of this important work is the discovery that the novel Peter Flowerbuck is not by Charles Dickens, but is almost certainly the work of a twentieth-century writer. There is evidence, however, that the story is based on an original Dickens plot. Dr Anderson's team is following up this suggestion with great energy." I think that should meet the case.'

'Ingenious, Donald,' said Clinton-Lacey. 'Quite ingenious.'

'You're too kind.'

'I don't see what's so ingenious about it. Why bring Shakespeare in?'

'He's diverting attention, Garth,' Clinton-Lacey explained. 'Bring out the name Shakespeare and it's even bigger copy than Dickens.'

'But all this guff about Dr Anderson working on bits of Shakespeare and the plot lines being original Dickens? What's that about?'

'Well you see,' said Trefusis. 'It shows that we are currently researching all this important material, that there may be something in Peter Flowerbuck after all.'

'But there isn't!'

'We know that, but the newspapers don't. In a couple of months' time the whole thing will be forgotten. If they do make enquiries about our progress we can say that Dr Anderson is still working on the problem. I'm sure Tim will be able to bemuse the press.'

'He will be the one to make the announcement then?'

'Certainly,' said Trefusis. 'I have nothing to do with the affair.'

'I'm unsure as to what the tension between the ethical boundaries and the margins of pragmatism might announce themselves to be in a situation which . . .' Anderson began.

'You see? Tim will do splendidly. His is the only major European language I still find myself utterly unable to comprehend. The press will be bored. It isn't quite enough of a hoax story to excite them and is too rigorous and scientific to have any human interest.'

'But all this means that we will have to keep funding the extra staff,' Menzies complained. 'For appearances' sake.'

'Yes,' said Trefusis dreamily, 'there is that drawback of course.'

'That's outrageous.'

'Oh I don't know. As long as they're kept busy lecturing, teaching undergraduates and authenticating documents that will be sent to us from all over the world - now that we are acknowledged as the leading university for authorial fingerprinting - I'm sure we'll find a use for them. They may even pay their way.'

IV

'You're lying,' said Gary. 'You've got to be lying.'

'I wish I were,' said Adrian. 'No, that's not true, I wouldn't have missed it for worlds.'

'You're telling me that you sold your arse down the Dilly?'

'Why not? Someone's got to. Anyway it wasn't my arse exactly.'

Gary paced up and down the room while Adrian watched him. He didn't know why he had told him. He supposed because he had been stung once too often by the accusation that he had no idea what the real world was like.

It had started when Adrian had mentioned that he was seriously considering marrying Jenny.

'Do you love her?'

'Look Gary. I'm twenty-two years old. I got here by the skin of my teeth, because I awoke from the bad dream of adolescence in the nick of time. Every morning for the next, God knows, fifty years, I'm going to have to get out of bed and participate in the day. I simply do not trust myself to be able to do that on my own. I'll need someone to get up for.'

'But do you love her?'

'I am magnificently prepared for the long littleness of life. There is diddley-squat for me to look forward to. Zilch, zero, zip-all, sweet lipperty-pipperty nothing. The only thought that will give me the energy to carry on is that someone has a life which would be diminished by my departure from it.'

'Yes, but do you love her?'

'You're beginning to sound like Olivier in The Marathon Man, "Is it safe? Is it safe?" "Sure it's safe. It's real safe." "Is it safe?" "No, it's not safe. It's incredibly unsafe." "Is it safe?" How the hell do I know?'

'You don't love her.'

'Oh piss off, Gary. I don't love anyone, anything, or anybody. Well, "anyone" and "anybody" are the same, but I can't think of a third "any". Which reminds me . . . that bloody Martini advert, it's bugged me for years. "Any time, any place, anywhere." What the fuck difference is there between any place and anywhere? Some advertising copy-writer was paid thousands for that piece of rubbish.'

'This is a change of subject on a cosmic scale. You don't love her, do you?'

'I just said. I don't love anyone, anything or any body, any time, any place, anywhere. Who does?'

'Jenny does.'

'Women are different, you know that.'

'I do as well.'

'Men are different too.'

'Gay men, you mean.'

'I cannot believe I am having this conversation. You think I'm like Emma, don't you? "Adrian Healey, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-three years in the world with very little to disturb or vex him.'"

'Distress or vex, I think you'll find. It's as good a description as any.'

'Really? Well, I may have missed some of Jane Austen's subtler hints, but I don't think Emma Woodhouse spent part of her seventeenth year as a harlot in Piccadilly. I haven't read it for a couple of years of course, and some of the obliquer references could have passed over my head. Miss Austen also seems to fight very shy of describing Emma's time in chokey on remand for possession of cocaine. Again I'm perfectly prepared to concede that she did and that I have simply failed to pick up the clues.'

'What the fuck are you going on about?'

And Adrian had told him something of his life between school and Cambridge.

Gary was still indignant. 'You plan to marry Jenny without telling her any of this?'

'Don't be so bourgeois, my dear. It doesn't suit you at all.'

Adrian was growing disillusioned with Gary. He had started on his History of Art, or History O Fart, as Adrian liked to call it, at the beginning of the year and ever since he had begun to evolve into something else. Bondage trousers had given way to second-hand tweed jackets with Hermes silk nourishing from the breast pockets. The hair returned to its natural dark, slicked back with KY jelly; knives and forks dangled no more from the lobes. The Damned and The Clash were less likely to blast across the court from the rooms now than Couperin and Bruckner.

'It only needs a moustache for you to look like Roy Strong,' Adrian had told him once, but Gary hadn't been moved. He wasn't going to be the world's little piece of pet rough any more and that was that. And now he was lecturing Adrian on the ethics of personal relations.

'Anyway, why should I tell her? What difference would it make?'

'Why should you marry her? What difference would it make?'

'Oh let's not go round in circles. I've tried to tell you. I've done all my living. There's nothing to look forward to. Do I go into advertising? Do I teach? Do I apply to the BBC? Do I write plays and become the voice of the Bland Young Man generation? Do I consider journalism? Do I go to an acting school? Do I have a shot at industry? The only justification for my existence is that I am loved. Whether or not I like it, I am responsible for Jenny and that is something to get up in the morning for.'

'So it's a life of sacrifice. You're afraid that if you don't marry her, she'll top herself? I hate to wound your vanity but people don't behave like that.'

'Oh don't they? Don't people kill themselves?'

Jenny entered without knocking.

'Hiya, bum-holes, I cleared your pigeon-holes on the way in. Exciting jiffy-bag for you, big boy. Could it be the clitoral exciter we ordered?'

'Morning toast more like,' said Gary, taking the package and passing it over.

Adrian opened it while Gary explained to Jenny the history of Toast By Post.

'You taught a boy two years ago and he still has this crush on you?'

'His faithful little heart overflows with love.'

'Nonsense,' said Adrian. 'It was never more than an elaborate joke. If anything the parcels mock me.'

'Do you think he wanks into them before he seals them up?'

'Gary!'Jenny was shocked.

'As in "I'm coming in a jiffy", you mean? No, I do not, though I grant you the toast is a bit soggy. What else have we? A little pot of apricot jam, a pat of butter, a note which says, "And Conradin made himself another piece of toast. . .'"

'That boy is weird.'

'Who's Conradin?'Jenny asked.

'Reach down my index, Watson, and look under "C". Dear me, what villainy is grouped under this letter alone! There's Callaghan, the politician to whose door we traced what you in your memoirs gave the somewhat fanciful title the "Winter of Discontent", Watson. Here's Callow, the second most dangerous actor in London, any one of whose grimaces may be fatal, Lewis Collins, Charlie Chester, Leslie Crowther of dread memory, Marti Caine, what a catalogue of infamy is here . . .but no Conradin. Peter Conrad, who invented opera, William Conrad, whose Cannon was a Quinn Martin Production, but no Conradin.'

'I think it's from a Saki short story,' said Gary. 'Sredni Vashtar, the polecat.'

'Oh yes, you're quite right. Or was he a ferret?'

'And what's the relevance to you?' asked Jenny.

'Well, there we have to peer into the dark, dripping mind of Hunt the Thimble. The chances are that it is simply a literary reference to toast, and he is fast running out of those. But there could be a Meaning.'

'Conradin was a boy who had a horrible, repressive aunt,' said Gary. 'So he prayed to Sredni Vashtar, his polecat . . .'

'Or ferret.'

'He prayed to his polecat or ferret and his prayers were answered. Sredni Vashtar killed the aunt.'

'And meanwhile Conradin calmly made himself another piece of toast.'

'I see,' said Jenny. 'The polecat is a kind of phallic symbol, do we think?'

'Honestly, dear,' said Gary, 'you're so obsessed, you'd think a penis was phallic.'

'Well Sredni Vashtar is a monster from the Id, at the very least,' said Adrian. 'The dark, hot-breathed stink of the animal that Conradin would one day release from its dark hiding-place to wreak its revenge on the chintz and teacups of his aunt's drawing-room life.'

'Do you think this boy is trying to tell you something?'

'Perhaps his thimble is a thimble no more, but a long, furry savage beast that wriggles and spits and mauls aunts. I'll write and ask him.'

He looked through the rest of his post. A cheque from his mother was always welcome, a cheque from Uncle David for five hundred pounds even more so. He slipped it quickly into his jacket pocket. Reminders that Billy Graham was in Cambridge and would preach in Great St Mary's were always monumentally unwelcome, as were invitations to hear Acis and Galatea played on original instruments.

'But not sung,' he suggested, looking through the rest of his mail, 'on original voices. I suppose in two hundred years' time they'll be giving Beatles concerts on ancient Marshall ... oh and a letter from old Biffo, bless him.'

Biffen was the only master from school with whom Adrian stayed in touch. The man was so fluffy and white and decent and had taken so much pleasure in the news of Adrian's scholarship to St Matthew's which had somehow filtered through to the school the year before, that it would have been a positive cruelty not to write to him from time to time to let him know how it was all going.

He glanced through the letter. Biffen was full of the news of the Dickens manuscript.

'Donald writes me that there may be some doubt about it. I do hope not.'

'I'd forgotten Biffo knew Trefusis,' said Adrian, laying the letter aside. 'Hello! What have we here?'

There was a crumpled handwritten note for him. 'Please come to tea at C5, Great Court, Trinity. Alone. Hugo.'

'How is Hugo?' asked Jenny. 'I haven't seen much of him since Flowerbuck.¹

'I remember him being rather naff in Bridget's production of Sexual Perversity In Chicago] said Gary. 'He kept forgetting his lines and tripping over. He hasn't been in anything since.'

Adrian put the note down and yawned.

'He's probably been swotting for his Part One's. He was always that kind of creep. Hand me Justin and Miroslav.'

Adrian noticed that the permanent puddle in the passageway between King's and St Catharine's had iced over. Spring was having to make a fight of it. He wrapped Miroslav, his cashmere scarf, closer round him as he stepped out into the icy gale that blasted along King's Parade. They used to say that Cambridge was the first stopping place for the wind that swept down from the Urals: in the thirties that was as true of the politics as the weather.

Adrian wondered whether he mightn't become political himself. Always one to walk the other way from trends, he sensed that left-wingery was about to become very unfashionable. Long hair was out, flared jeans were out, soon there would be no more cakes and ale, canapes and Sancerre at best, Ryvita and mineral water at worst. Trefusis complained that the modern undergraduate was a cruel disappointment to him.

'They're all getting firsts and married these days, if you'll forgive the syllepsis,' he had said once. 'Decency, discipline and dullness. There's no lightness of touch any more, no irresponsibility. Do you remember that damning description of Leonard Bast in Howards End? "He had given up the glory of the animal for a tail-coat and a set of ideas." Change tail-coat to pin-stripe and you have modern Cambridge. There's no lack of respect today, that's what I miss.'

As Adrian hurried past the Senate House he noticed two old men standing outside Bowes and Bowes. He put an extra spring in his step, a thing he often did when walking near the elderly. He imagined old people would look at his athletic bounce with a misty longing for their own youth. Not that he was trying to show off or rub salt into the wounds of the infirm, he really believed he was offering a service, an opportunity for nostalgia, like whistling the theme tune from Happidrome or spinning a Diabolo.

He skipped past them with carefree ease, missed his footing and fell to the ground with a thump. One of the old men helped him up.

'You all right, lad?'

'Yes fine ... I must have slipped on the ice.'

Using Justin, his umbrella, as a walking-stick, he hobbled down Trinity Street, ruthlessly mocking himself.

'Adrian, you're an arse. In a world of arses, you are the arsiest by a mile. Stop being an arse at once, or I'll never talk to you again. So there.'

'Is there a problem, sir?'

'Oh sorry, no . . .I was just. . . humming to myself.'

He hadn't realised he'd been talking out loud. The Trinity porter stared at him suspiciously, so as Adrian limped into Great Court, he broke into more definite and deliberate song to prove his point.

'How do you solve a problem like Maria?' he fluted. 'How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet, a will o'the wisp, a clown.'

Hugo's rooms were in the corner tower. The same tower where Lord Byron had kept his bear, arousing the wrath of the college authorities, who had told him sniffily that the keeping of domestic animals in rooms was strictly forbidden. Byron had assured them that it was far from a domestic animal. It was an untamed bear, as wild and savage as could be, and they had been reluctantly obliged to let him keep it.

'How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?'

Hugo opened the door.

'I brought a jar of anchovy paste, half a dozen potato farls and a packet of my own special blend of Formosan Oolong and Orange Pekoe,' said Adrian, 'but I was set upon by a gang of footpads outside Caius and they stole it all.'

'That's all right,' said Hugo. 'I've got some wine.'

Which was about all he seemed to have. He poured out two mugfuls.

'Very nice,' said Adrian, sipping appreciatively. 'I wonder how they got the cat to sit on the bottle.'

'It's cheap, that's the main thing.'

Adrian looked round the room. From the quantity of empty bottles about the place he supposed that cheapness must indeed have been the deciding factor in Hugo's wine-buying policy. The place was very meanly appointed; apart from the usual college tables and chairs, the only things of interest that met Adrian's inquisitive scrutiny were a photograph of Hugo's actress mother on the table, a Peter Flowerbuck poster on the wall which showed Adrian in a tall hat leading Hugo away from a snarling Gary, a handful of Penguin classics, a guitar, some LPs and a record-player.

'So anyway Hugo, my old penny bun. How is everything?'

'Everything,' said Hugo, 'is terrible.'

It didn't look it. Drink never shows in the faces of the young. Hugo's eye was bright, his complexion fine and his figure trim.

'Work is it?'

'No, no. I've just been thinking a lot lately.'

'Well, that's what we're here for, I suppose.'

Hugo filled up his mug with more wine.

'I just want to see if I've got you straight. You seduce me in my first year at school and then ignore me completely until you make up a lie about Pigs Trotter having been in love with me . . . Julian Rundell told me the truth about that, by the way. Then you seduce me again by pretending to be asleep. Years later, after having cheated my prep school out of a cricket victory, you tell me that you weren't really asleep that night, which I didn't in fact know, even though I said I did. Then what happens? Oh yes, you write a fake Dickens novel describing a character who looks like me and just happens to make love to someone who looks like you while that person just happens to be asleep. I think that's everything. You see, all I want to know is . . . what have I done?'

'Hugo, I know it seems . . .'

'It worries me, you see. I must have done something terrible to you without knowing it and I'd like it all to stop now, please.'

'Oh God,' said Adrian.

It was so hard to connect this man with Cartwright. If Hugo had taught at another prep school and gone to another university, the memory of him wouldn't be muddied by a sight like this alien Hugo who trembled and wept into his wine. It was another person of course, molecularly every part of the old Cartwright must have been replaced dozens of times since he, had been the most beautiful person who ever walked the earth. And the old Adrian who had loved him was not the same as the Adrian who beheld him now. It was like the philosopher's axe. After a few years the philosopher replaces the head, later he replaces the shaft. Then the head wears out and he replaces it again, next the shaft again. Can he go on calling it the same axe? Why should this new Adrian be responsible for the sins of the old?

'It's so easy to explain, Hugo. Easy and very hard. Just one word covers it all.'

'What word? No word could explain it. Not a whole Bible of words.'

'It's a common enough word, but it might mean something different to you than it does to me. Language is a bastard. So let's invent a new word. "Libb" will do. I libbed you. That's all there is to it. I was in libb with you. My libb for you informed my every waking and sleeping hour for . . . for God knows how many years. Nothing has ever been as powerful as that libb. It was the guiding force of my life, it haunted me then and haunts me still.'

'You were in love with me?'

'Well now, that's your word. Libb has a great deal in common with love, I admit. But love is supposed to be creative, not destructive, and as you have found out, my libb turned out to be very harmful indeed.'

Hugo gripped the rim of his mug and stared into his wine.

'Why can't you . . .'

'Yes?'

'I mean . . . everything you do . . . that bloody magazine, the being asleep, the cricket match, that Dickens novel . . . everything you do is ... is ... I don't know what it is.'

'Duplicitous? Covert? Underhand? Sly? Devious? Evasive?'

'All of those things. Why have you never come out and said anything or done anything in the open?'

'I'm fucked if I know, Hugo. I'm seriously fucked if I know. Perhaps because I'm a coward. Perhaps because I don't exist except in borrowed clothes. I used to think everyone but me was a fraud. It's simple logic to realise that, except to a madman, the opposite must have been the truth.'

'Hell's bells, Adrian. Have you any idea how much I admired you? Any idea at all? Your talent? You used to come into the changing-room sometimes dressed as Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward or whoever and stride up and down like a prince. You used to make me feel so small. All the things you can do. My mother thinks I'm a bore. I used to wish I could be you. I fantasised being you. I would lie awake at night imagining what it would be like to have your tall body and your smile, your wit and words. And of course I loved you. I didn't libb you or lobb you or lubb you or labb you, I loved you.'

'Oh lord,' sighed Adrian. 'If I find a way of expressing adequately now what I am thinking and feeling you will take it to be a piece of verbal dexterity and the latest in a long line of verbal malversations. You see! I can't even say "deceit". I have to say "verbal malversations". Everyone's honest but me. So perhaps I should just whine and moan wordlessly.'

Adrian opened the window and howled into Great Court like a demented muezzin, taking the performance so far as to produce real tears. When he turned to face back into the room Hugo was laughing.

'What they call keening, I believe,' said Adrian.

'Well, there's always the cliche,' Hugo said, extending his hand. 'We can be just good friends now.'

'Here's looking at you, kid.'

'Here's looking at you, kid.'

'We'll always have Paris.'

'We'll always have Paris.'

Adrian raised his mug of wine. 'Here's death to the past.'

'Death to the past.'

A Tweed, a Shapeless Green Needlecord Jacket and an Eau de Nil Chanel Suit sat in conference in the Savile Club Sand Pit.

'I'm very much afraid that someone in St Matthew's is not to be trusted.'

'Garth, you think?'' asked the Shapeless Green Needlecord.

'Garth is much as he was in your day, Humphrey. Maddening, sour, truculent and asper. Not a natural player, I feel. Not a concealer. It is also very unlikely that he would have been introduced at this late stage.'

'Have you heard from Bela?' the Chanel Suit wanted to know.

'Not a whisper. He knows that the Budapest network have him under the tightest possible surveillance. Pearce is playing for very high stakes this time.'

'Don't I know it!' said the Eau de Nil Suit. 'My bag burst in the middle of Waitrose's yesterday.'

The others giggled like schoolchildren.

'Oh dear me,' said the Tweed. 'However did you explain it?'

'I didn't. I just fled, leaving my shopping behind. I don't know if I can ever show my face in there again.'

They drank tea in companionable silence.

'Who then?' asked the Needlecord suddenly. 'If not Garth?'

The Tweed made a suggestion.

'Donald, no!'protested the Eau de Nil Suit.

The Tweed shrugged apologetically.

'What a howling shit.'

'Well, perhaps his insertion into play may turn out to be rather a useful development.'

'I don't see how.'

'He's plasticine.'

'Outdated you mean?'

'Not Pleistocene, Humphrey. Plasticine. We had all considered him as a possible player for the future, had we not? We know what a shifty little soul he is. Much better to have him as an enemy than as a friend. This is all turning out to be much more fun and much more complex than I had anticipated. The plot thickens like finest Devon cream.'

'If Pearce is going to play dirty like this, Donald, shouldn't we do the same?'

'Humphrey's right, you know,' said the Chanel Suit. lWhy don't I ask Nancy and Simon if they can't lend a hand?'

'Tug of loyalties?' the Tweed wondered. 7 mean Simon works for Pearce, after all.'

'I like to hope,' said the Eau de Nil Chanel Suit, 'that Simon's real loyalties go deeper than that.'

'Very well then. Recruit them and familiarise them with the ground rules. Stefan is due in England soon. He will have news from and of Bela. You know, this is all highly satisfactory.'

'It's not going to get out of control is it?' asked the Needlecord. 'I'm not sure I like the introduction of killing. Pearce cannot bear to be beaten, you know.'

'No more can I,' said the Tweed. 'And I won't be.'

Five

'You were his best friend,' Mrs Trotter said. 'He talked about you a great deal, how clever and amusing you were. He was very fond of you.'

'Well, Mrs Trotter,' said Adrian, 'I was very fond of him. We all were.'

'I do hope you and . . . and the other boy . . . Cartwright . . . can come to the funeral.'

She looked just like Pigs when she cried.

That evening the whole House was already in a slightly hysterical state by the time Tickford broke the news officially at House Compline.

'Some of you, I don't know . . . may know,' he said, '. . .may have heard, I don't know, that there has been a tragedy here. Paul Trotter took his own life this afternoon. We have no idea why. We don't know. We just don't know. We can't know.'

Fifty pairs of eyes swivelled towards Adrian, wondering. Why had be been sent for first? Why had he been shut up with Tickford and Pigs's parents for so long?

Cartwright had not yet been spoken to. He knew nothing and his eyes turned towards Adrian too, large and full of awe.

'I'm afraid he must have been very unhappy,' continued Tickford, apparently to the ceiling. 'Very unhappy, I don't know why. But we shall say a prayer for him and commend his soul to God. Almighty Father . . .'

Adrian felt a thigh being pressed against his as he knelt to pray. It was Rundell.

'What?'

'I saw him,' whispered Rundell. 'Yesterday afternoon in the cemetery, he went up and sat next to you!'

'So what?'

'Refresh him with your Mercy, cleanse him with your Love . . .'

'And then you came down together and he was crying.'

'That has nothing to do with it.'

'In the name of your Son who died that all might have eternal life 'Oh, yeah?'

'Amen.'

Tom asked no questions and Adrian couldn't bring himself to tell him anything.

Biffo had sent a note the next morning. 'What terribly upsetting news, terribly upsetting. Helen and I were so distressed. I taught Trotter last year; such a delightful boy. I do hope you feel free to come and talk to me about it. If you would like to, of course. Helen and I would be delighted if you could make more of our Friday afternoon visits this term. With every sympathy at this dreadful time. Humphrey Biffen.'

Tom and Adrian were playing cribbage during the afternoon when there was a knock at the door.

'Avanti!'

It was Cartwright, looking frightened.

'Can I have a word with you, Healey?'

Tom saw the expression on Cartwright's face and reached for a book and a pair of sunglasses.

'I'd better grow.'

'Thanks, Thompson.' Cartwright stood looking at the floor and waited for Tom to close the door behind him.

'Sit down do,' said Adrian.

'I've just been to see Tickford,' said Cartwright, either not hearing or not heeding the invitation.

'Oh, ah?'

'He said Trotter had some sort of ... a kind of crush on me. And that you told him that.'

'Well, that's what Trotter told me.'

'But I didn't even know him!'

Adrian shrugged.

'I'm sorry, Cartwright, but you know what this place is like.'

Cartwright sat down in Tom's chair and stared out of the window.

'Oh hell's bells. It'll be all over the school.'

'Of course it won't be,' said Adrian. 'Tickford won't tell anyone. I certainly won't tell anyone. I mean, I haven't even told Thompson and I tell him everything.'

'But Tick says I've got to go to the funeral. What will people think of that?'

'Well. . .' said Adrian, thinking fast. 'I'm going to the funeral too. I'll put it around that your parents are friends of Trotter's parents.'

'I suppose that'll do,' said Cartwright, 'but why did you have to tell Tick in the first place?'

'It was suicide! He left a note. It said "Healey will explain" or something like that. What else could I do but tell the truth?'

Cartwright looked up at him.

'Did Pigs, did Trotter say . . . did he tell you how long he'd had this, this thing for me?'

'Since you came to the school apparently.'

Cartwright dropped his head and stared at the floor. When he looked up again there were tears in his eyes. He looked angry. Angry and to Adrian more beautiful than ever.

'Why did he tell you?' he cried. 'Why couldn't he have told me? And what did he have to go and kill himself for?'

Adrian felt taken aback by the anger in Cartwright's voice.

'Well, I suppose he was scared in case . . . in case you rejected him or something. I don't know how these things work.'

'More scared of me rejecting him than he was of killing himself?'

Adrian nodded.

'So now I'm going to have to wake up every morning for the rest of my life knowing that I'm responsible for someone's suicide.'

The tears splashed down his face. Adrian leant forward and held his shoulder.

'You must never think of it like that, Hugo. You mustn't!' he said.

He had never called him Hugo before and he hadn't touched him since their brief how-do-you-do in the House lavs, which was before Adrian had known he was in love.

'I'm as responsible as you are, really,' Adrian said. 'More responsible, if anything.'

Cartwright stared in surprise.

'How do you mean?'

'Well,' said Adrian, 'I could have advised Trotter to tell you, couldn't I? I could have told him not to bottle it up.'

'But you weren't to know what was going to happen.'

'And nor were you, Hugo. Now come on, dry your eyes, or people will really know something is wrong. We'll go to the funeral and then in a couple of weeks we'll have forgotten all about it.'

'Thanks, Healey. I'm sorry to be so . . .'

'Adrian. And there's nothing to be sorry about.'

Between that day and the day they travelled up to Harrogate they hadn't exchanged a word. Adrian had seen him mobbing around with his friends as if nothing had happened. The House did its best to forget the whole embarrassment. Trotter was thought of with the kind of contempt and revulsion young Englishmen of the right type reserve for the sick, the mad, the poor and the old.

The funeral was set for ten in the morning, so Tickford had decided that they should travel up the evening before and spend the night in a hotel. For the whole duration of the journey Cartwright stared out of the window.

He's beginning to resent Trotter's posthumous power over him, Adrian thought.

The Tickfords didn't speak much either. This was a duty they did not relish. Adrian, never a tidy traveller, twice had to ask Ma Tickford, who was driving, to stop the car so that he could be sick.

He couldn't imagine why he had dropped Cartwright in it the way he had. A kind of revenge he supposed. But revenge for what? And on whom? A revenge on the ghost of Trotter or on the living, breathing Cartwright?

He wasn't Woody Nightshade, he was Deadly Nightshade. Everybody who had anything to do with him was lethally poisoned.

But they don't exist, he kept repeating to himself as they rattled up the AI. Other people don't exist. Trotter isn't really dead because he was never really alive. It's all just a clever way of testing me. There's no one in these cars and lorries driving south. There can't be that many individual souls. Not souls like mine. There isn't room. There can't be.

But suppose Trotter's ghost watched him? Trotter would know everything by now. Would he forgive him?

From now on, I conform.

He should have guessed that Tickford would give him and Cartwright a twin room at the hotel. The bill was being settled by the school, after all.

Their room was at the end of a creaking corridor. Adrian opened the door and bowed Cartwright in.

Manly, unconcerned and businesslike, he told himself. Two healthy English school chums sharing digs. Holmes and Watson, Bunny and Raffles. Nothing else.

'So, Cartwright old boy - which bed do you fancy?'

'I don't mind really. This one'll do fine.'

'Okay. Bags the bathroom first, then.'

Like all the English hotels Adrian had ever stayed in, this one was appallingly overheated. He undressed and slipped naked into bed while Cartwright brushed his teeth in the bathroom.

Now then, Healey, he warned himself. You're to behave. Understand?

He switched out the light above his bed just as Cartwright came out, magnificently clad in sky-blue pyjamas of brushed cotton, swinging a sponge-bag from his wrist.

'Night then, Cartwright.'

'Night.'

Adrian closed his eyes. He heard Cartwright shuffle off his slippers and get into bed.

Don't let him turn his light off. Make him pick up a book. Please, God, please.

He strained his ears and caught the sound of a page turning.

Thank you, God. You're a treasure.

During the next five minutes Adrian allowed his breathing naturally to deepen into a slow rhythm until any observer would swear that he was fast asleep.

He then began to give the impression of a more troubled rest. He turned and gave a small moan. The eiderdown fell to the floor. He rolled over far to one side, causing the top sheet to come away. A minute later he turned the other way violently, kicking with his foot so that the sheet joined the eiderdown.

He was now naked on the bed, breathing heavily and writhing. Cartwright's light was still on but the pages had stopped turning.

'Adrian?'

It had been a light whisper, but Cartwright had definitely spoken.

'Adrian . . .' Adrian mumbled in return, half snoring the word as he turned to face Cartwright, mouth open, eyes closed.

'Adrian, are you all right?'

'No one left in the valley,' said Adrian, flinging out a hand.

He heard Cartwright's bed creak.

Here we go, he thought to himself, here we bloody well go!

Cartwright's feet padded across the room.

He's next to me, I can sense it!

'I'il eat them later . . . later,' he moaned.

He heard the rustle of a sheet and felt the eiderdown being pulled on top of him.

He can't just be going to tuck me up! He can't be. I've got a stiffy like a milk-bottle. Is he flesh and blood or what? Oh well, here goes. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

He arched his body and thrashed his legs up and down.

'Lucy?' he called, quite loudly this time.

Where he got the name Lucy from, he had no idea.

'Lucy?'

He swept out an arm and found Cartwright's shoulder.

'Lucy, is that you?'

The eiderdown was slowly pulled away from him again. Suddenly he felt a warm hand between his thighs.

'Yes,' he said, 'yes.'

Then soft hair brushing against his chest and a tongue licking his stomach.

Hugo, he sighed to himself. Hugo! and out loud, 'Oh Lucy -Lucy!'

He was awoken by the sound of a lavatory flushing. The eiderdown was on top of him and the sun was shining through a gap in the curtains.

'Oh God. What have I done?'

Cartwright came out of the bathroom.

'Morning,' he said brightly.

'Hi,' mumbled Adrian, 'what the hell time is it?'

'Seven thirty. Sleep all right?'

'Jesus, like a log. And you?'

'Not too badly. You talked a lot.'

'Oh sorry,' said Adrian, 'I do that sometimes. I hope it didn't keep you awake.'

'You kept saying Lucy. Who's Lucy?'

'Really?' Adrian frowned. 'Well, I used to have a dog called Lucy . . .'

'Oh, right,' said Cartwright. 'I wondered.'

'Works every time,' Adrian said to himself, turning over and going back to sleep.

It was a small funeral. A small funeral for a small life. Trotter's parents were pleased to see Adrian again and were polite to Cartwright, but they couldn't entirely disguise their distaste for him. His beauty, pale in a dark suit, was an affront to the memory of their pudgy and ordinary son.

After the ceremony they drove to the Trotters1 farmhouse five miles outside Harrogate. One of Pigs Trotter's sisters gave Adrian a photograph of himself. It showed him lying on his stomach watching a cricket match. Adrian tried hard but couldn't remember Pigs Trotter taking it. No one commented on the fact that Trotter kept no photographs of Cartwright.

Mr Trotter asked Adrian if he would come and stay in the summer holidays.

'You ever sheared sheep before?'

'No, sir.'

'You'll enjoy it.'

Tickford took the wheel for the homeward journey. Adrian was allowed in the front next to him. They didn't want to risk him being sick again.

'A sorry business,'said Tickford.

'Yes, sir.'

Tickford gestured over his shoulder towards Cartwright, who was leaning against Ma Tickford and snoring gently.

'I hope you haven't told anyone,' he said.

'No, sir.'

'You must get on with the term now, Adrian. It has not started well. That disgusting magazine and now this . . . all in the first week. There's a bad spirit abroad, I wonder if I can look to you to help combat it?'

'Well, sir '

'This may be just the jolt you need to start taking yourself seriously at last. Boys like you have a profound influence. Whether it is used for good or evil can make the difference between a happy and an unhappy school.'

'Yes, sir.'

Tickford patted Adrian's knee.

'I have a feeling that I can rely on you,' he said.

'You can, sir,' said Adrian. 'I promise.'

It was four o'clock when they got back. Adrian returned to his study to find it empty. Tom was obviously having tea somewhere else.

He couldn't be bothered to track him down, so he made toast on his own and started on some overdue Latin prep. If he was going to turn over a new leaf then there was no time like the present. Then he would write back to Biffo. Attend all his Friday afernoons. Read more. Think more.

He had hardly begun before there came a knock at the door.

'Come in!'

It was Bennett-Jones.

'Really, R.B.-J. Flattered as I am by your fawning attentions I must ask you to find another playmate. I am a busy man. Virgil calls to me from across the centuries.'

'Yeah?' said Bennett-Jones with a nasty leer. 'Well it just so happens that Mr Tickford calls to you from across his study, an'all.'

'Dear me! Five minutes' separation and already he pines for me. Perhaps he wants my advice on demoting some of the prefecture. Well, I am always happy to look in on dear Jeremy. Lead the way, young man, lead the way.'

Tickford was standing behind his desk, his face deathly white.

'This book,' he said, holding up a paperback, 'does it belong to you?'

Oh Christ... oh Jesus Christ . . .

It was Adrian's copy of The Naked Lunch.

'I... I don't know, sir.'

'It was found in your study. It has your name written in it. No other boy in the school has a copy in their study. On the instructions of the headmaster the prefects checked this morning. Now, answer me again. Is this your book?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Just tell me one thing, Healey. Did you write the magazine alone or were there others?'

'I–'

'Answer me!' shouted Tickford, slamming the book down onto the desk.

'Alone, sir.'

There was a pause. Tickford stared at Adrian, breathing heavily from his nostrils like a cornered bull.

Oh cuntly cunt. He's going to hit me. He's out of control.

'Go to your study,' said Tickford at last. 'Stay there until your parents come for you. No one is to see you or talk to you.'

'Sir, I–'

'Now get out of my sight, you poisonous little shit.'

A Peaked Cap, waving a sheet of typescript, hurried into the Customs office where a Dark Grey Suit was watching television.

'Comrade Captain,' he said. 7 have the inventory of the delegation's luggage.'

'You can cut out the Comrade crap for a start,' said the Dark Grey Suit, taking the proffered sheet.

'Szabo's articles are itemised at the top, sir.'

'I can read.'

The Dark Grey Suit scanned the list.

'And you searched the rest of the team just as thoroughly?'

'Just as thoroughly Com– Captain Molgar, sir.'

'The chess books have been checked?'

'They have all been checked and replaced with identical copies in case of . . .'the Peaked Cap gestured hopefully. He had no idea what the original chess books might have contained. 'In case of. . . microdots?'he whispered.

The Dark Grey Suit snorted contemptuously.

'This radio in Ribli's luggage?'

'A perfectly ordinary radio, Captain. Comrade Ribli has taken it abroad many times. He is not under suspicion also?'

The Dark Grey Suit ignored the question.

'Csom's suitcase seems to be very heavy.'

'It is an old case. Leather.'

'Have it X-rayed.'

'Yes, sir.'

'Yes, Captain.'

'Yes, Captain.'

'That's better.'

The Peaked Cap coughed.

'Captain, sir, why do you let this Szabo out of the country if he is . . .?'

'If he is what?'

'I-I don't quite know, sir.'

'Szabo is one of the most talented young grandmasters in the world. The next Portisch. All this checking is simply a routine test of your efficiency, nothing more. You understand?'

Yes, Captain.''

'Yes, Comrade Captain.'

'Yes, Comrade Captain.'

The Dark Grey Suit hummed to himself. He did not know what they were looking for either. But the British had been paying him a great deal for many years and now that they suddenly wanted him to work for his money he supposed he had no business complaining. This was not dangerous work, after all. He was doing no more than his usual duty and if the authorities discovered his unusual interest in Szabo they would be more likely to reward him for his zeal than shoot him for his treachery.

He had hoiked out Szabo's file that morning to see if there was anything there to justify this sudden British directive. There was nothing there: Stefan Szabo, a perfectly blameless citizen, grandson of a Hungarian hero and a great chess hope.

The solution came to the Dark Grey Suit in a blinding flash. Stefan Szabo was planning, sometime during the tournament in Hastings, to defect. The British needed to check that he was an honest defector, that he was not bringing any equipment out with him that would suggest a darker purpose.

But why should a successful chess-player need to defect? They made plenty of money, which they were allowed to keep, they were granted unlimited travel abroad, foreign bank accounts. Hungary was not Russia or Czechoslovakia, for God's sake. The Dark Grey Suit, who had betrayed his country for years, felt a stab of resentment and anger against this young traitor.

'Little shit,' he thought to himself. 'What's wrong with Hungary that he needs to run away to England?'

Six

Just as Adrian was getting thoroughly bored, the President started to wind up the meeting.

'Now,' he said, 'it's getting rather late. If there is no further business, I would like to - '

Garth Menzies rose to his feet and smiled the smile of the just.

'There is one thing, Master.'

'Can't it wait?'

'No, sir. I don't believe it can.'

'Oh, very well then.'

Adrian cursed inwardly. They all knew the subject Menzies was going to raise and Menzies knew that they knew. They had been given the chance to raise it themselves but they hadn't. So be it. Very well. Other men might shrink from their duty, but not Garth Menzies.

He barked his throat clear.

'I am amazed, Mr President, absolutely amazed that this meeting can contemplate adjournment without first discussing the Trefusis Affair.'

A dozen heads looked sharply down at their agenda papers. A dozen pairs of buttocks clenched tightly together.

He had said it. The man had said it. Such a want of delicacy. Such wounding impropriety.

At the far end of the table a mathematician specialising in fluid dynamics and the seduction of first year Newnham girls blew his nose in a hurt manner.

Those parts of Adrian that weren't already looking sharply down or clenching tightly together contrived to quiver with disfavour.

How incredibly like Garth to bring up the one subject that everyone else in the room had been so elegantly avoiding. How childish the rhetoric with which he claimed to be amazed at that avoidance.

'I find myself wondering,' said Menzies, 'how we feel about having a criminal amongst us?'

'Now, really Garth–'

'Oh yes, Master, a criminal.'

Menzies, tall and thin, face as white, shiny and bold Roman as the cover page of the quarterly journal of civil law it was his pride to edit, had placed his left thumb along the lapel of his coat and now he stooped forwards from the waist, waving in his right hand, in what he hoped was a brandish, a copy of the Cambridge Evening News.

Adrian found himself chilled by the sight of a grown man trying so transparently to strike the forensic pose of a glamorous barrister. No matter how he aged, and there was not now one dark hair on his head, Menzies could never look any grander than a smart-arsed sixth-former. A smart-arsed grammar-school sixth-former, Adrian thought. He cut a dreadful sort of Enoch Powell figure. A kind of adolescent Malvolio, all elbows and shiny temples. Adrian found Menzies as tiresome as his archetypes; unspeakable to behold, dangerous to discount.

Menzies resented his widespread popularity because he felt it sprang from illogical and irrelevant factors like his breath, his voice, his sniffs, his gait, his clothes, his whole atmosphere. For that reason he devoted himself with all the dismal diligence of the dull to giving the world more legitimate grounds for dislike. That, at least, was Adrian's interpretation. Donald always claimed to like the man.

If Donald had been present to witness him now, newspaper in hand and destruction in mind, Adrian was sure he would have altered his opinion.

President Clinton-Lacey, at the head of the table, looked down at his agenda and shaded his eyes. From under his hand he waggled a covert eyebrow at Adrian like a schoolboy sharing a joke under a desk-lid. But there was an urgency and seriousness in the look which told Adrian that he was being given some kind of signal.

Adrian wasn't sure if he could interpret it. He stared ahead of him, perplexed. Did the President want him, as a friend of Donald's, to speak up? Was he warning Adrian not to let his feelings get the better of him? What? He returned the look with a questioning lift of his own eyebrows.

In reply the President gave a 'yackety-yack' gesture with his hand.

Clinton-Lacey's Boltonian sense of humour was notorious but surely he meant something more than 'Oh, that Menzies, he does go on, doesn't he?'

Adrian decided it must be a demand for him to do some filibustering. He swallowed nervously. He was only an undergraduate after all and these were not the sixties. The days of genuine student representation on the boards of governors of the colleges were long gone. It was understood that he was a constitutional hiccough that it would have been embarrassing to cure. He was there to listen, not to comment.

However.

'Don't you think, Dr Menzies,' he began, not daring to look up, 'that the word "criminal" is a bit strong?'

Menzies rounded on him.

'Forgive me, Mr Healey, you are the English student. I am just a lawyer. What on earth would I know about the word criminal? In my profession, out of ignorance no doubt, we use the word to describe someone who has broken the law. I am sure you could entertain us with an essay on the word's origin that would prove conclusively that a criminal is some kind of medieval crossbow. For my purposes however, in law, the man is a criminal.'

'Now, gentlemen . . .'

'Dr Menzies' clumsy sarcasm aside,' said Adrian, 'I have to say that I know full well what criminal means and it is a perfectly ordinary English word, not a legal term, and I resent it being used of Donald. It makes him sound like a professional. One crime doesn't make a criminal. It would be like calling Dr Menzies a lawyer just because thirty years ago he practised briefly at the Bar.'

'I have every right in the world, Mr President,' shrilled Menzies, 'to call myself a lawyer. I believe my reputation in the legal field has done nothing but reflect credit on this institution '

'Perhaps it wouldn't be unfitting if I said something here,' said Tim Anderson. His book on Jean-Luc Godard had recently been exceptionally well reviewed by his wife in Granta magazine and he was in a less solemn mood than usual.

'I think it would be immensely unfitting,' snapped Menzies.

'Well that's a not uninteresting point, certainly,' said Anderson, 'but I was thinking more that I don't know many people who couldn't express doubt about the strategies that the authorities adopt in situations not a million miles dissimilar to this one and I just don't think that's something we shouldn't be unafraid to shirk addressing or confronting. That's all.'

'I have just been told by a student that I have no right to call myself a lawyer, Master,' said Menzies. 'I await an apology.'

'Dr Menzies is an academic,' said Adrian. 'He is a teacher. I'd have thought that that was quite enough of a profession for one man. I maintain that he is not a lawyer. Law just happens to be the subject he teaches.'

'I am not absolutely sure that I see the relevance of this,' said the President and something in the tone of his voice made Adrian look at him again. He was rolling an eye in the direction of the corner of the room.

The cameras!

Since the beginning of this, Adrian's third and final year, St Matthew's had put up with a television crew on the premises. Their technique, that of becoming part of the furniture, was working so well that they had become appallingly easy to ignore. They had lived up to the name of fly-on-the-wall and only the odd irritating buzz reminded the college of their existence.

It was clear that the President did not want Adrian to forget them. He could not possibly allow anything of the Trefusis Affair to be seen on national television. Adrian's duty lay clear ahead of him. He had to find a way of doing or saying something that would make the film of the meeting, or this part of it, unsuitable for family viewing.

He took a deep breath.

'I'm sorry, Master,' he said, snapping a pencil, 'but the point is that I won't sit here and hear my friend insulted, not if the accuser is the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Procurator Pissing Fiscal and the Witchfinder Fucking General all rolled into one.'

A splutter of incredulity from a middle-aged Orientalist met this unusual outburst.

'Donald has been called a criminal,' Adrian went on, warming to his theme. 'If I run down the street to catch a bus, does that make me an athlete? If you yodel in the bath, Master, does that make you a singer? Dr Menzies has a tongue like a supermarket pricing-gun.'

'Twisting my words won't help.'

'Untwisting them might.'

'Well untwist these words, then,' said Menzies, forcing his copy of the newspaper under Adrian's nose.

'What the yellow rubbery fuck do you think you're up to now?' said Adrian, pushing the newspaper away. 'If I want to blow my nose, I'll use a frigging snot-rag.'

'Healey, have you run mad?' hissed Corder, a theologian, sitting next to Adrian.

'Stick it up your heretical arse.'

'Well!'

'Explain it to you later,' said Adrian in an undertone.

'Oh, it's a game!'

'Sh!'

'Splendid!' whispered Corder, and then sang out, 'Oh, do come on, Garth, get a sodding move on.'

'Well,' said Menzies. 'I have no idea what childish motive you have for hurling abuse at me, Mr Healey. Perhaps you think it is funny. At the risk of being told that I have no sense of humour I am quite prepared to suggest that even an undergraduate audience would remain unmoved by the spectacle of a student insulting one more than twice his age. As for Dr Corder, I can only assume that the man is drunk.'

'Piss off, you fat tit,' said Corder primly.

'Mr President, are they to be allowed to continue in this fashion?'

'Dr Corder, Mr Healey, let Dr Menzies have his say, please,' said the President.

'Right you fucking are, Mr President,' said Adrian, standing up and immediately sitting down again. He had noticed that the microphone boom was only a few inches higher than his head. If he kept standing up he had a notion it would appear in shot and spoil the footage.

'You have the floor, farty,' said Corder.

'I think I'd better say for my own part,' said Tim Anderson, 'that notwithstanding '

'Thank you,' said Menzies.

Adrian burped loudly and felt with his feet for the TV cabling which ran under the table.

'Now, for those of you have not seen it,' Menzies continued, fishing his spectacles out of his jacket pocket, 'there is an article in this evening's local paper which is of exceptional interest to this college. I shall read it to you.

'"Professor Donald Trefusis,'" he intoned, in that awful declamatory chant reserved by politicians for public readings of I Corinthians 13, '"holder of the Regius Chair in Philology and Senior Tutor of St Matthew's College, appeared at Cambridge magistrate's court this morning charged with gross indecency . . ."'

Menzies broke off. While he had been speaking a large electric lamp in the corner of the room had begun to totter on its base. It creaked on its stand, unable to make up its mind whether to crash to the ground or return to an upright position. By the time a technician had noticed and started to run across to save it, it had decided on the floor. It was the noise of the ten kilowatt bulb exploding that had interrupted Menzie's flow.

'Oh dear,' said Adrian, standing up, distraught. 'I think my feet may inadvertently have become tangled up in your cables for a moment. I'm so sorry . . .'

The BBC director smiled at him through clenched teeth.

'If Mr Healey can manage to sit still for just three minutes,' Menzies continued, 'I shall resume . . .'

'You had got as far as gross indecency,' said Adrian.

'Thank you. "... charged with gross indecency. The Professor had been arrested in the Parker's Piece men's toilet at three o'clock the previous night. A youth, described as in his late teens, escaped after a struggle with police. The Professor (66) pleaded guilty. The President of St Matthew's College was unavailable for comment this morning. Donald Trefusis, who is well-known for his articles and broadcasts, told the Evening News that life was very extraordinary."'

'Yes, well thank you, Garth,' said the President, 'I think we're all pretty much aware of the details of this morning's court-room drama. I suppose you think something should be done about it?'

'Done?' said Menzies. 'Of course something should be done!'

Adrian stood up.

'Hoover, Wrigleys, Magicote, Benson and Hedges, Sellotape, Persil, Shake and Vac, Nestles Milky Bar,' he said and sat down again. He had a vague idea that brand names couldn't be mentioned on the BBC.

'Thank you, Adrian,' said the President, 'that will do.'

'Yes sir, Mr President, sir!' said Adrian.

Tim Anderson spoke.

'I don't think I'd be wrong in detecting - '

'If an undergraduate were compromised in this fashion,' said Menzies, 'we would have no hesitation in sending him down. Professor Trefusis is a member of the college just like any student. I submit that under the college ordinance of 1273 and subsequent statutes of 1791 and 1902 we are duty bound to take disciplinary action against any Fellow who brings the good name of the college into disrepute. I move that this meeting of the Fellows immediately invite Professor Trefusis to relinquish the post of Senior Tutor and furthermore I move that they insist he withdraw from any active teaching post in this college for one year. At the very least.'

'Nice subjunctives,' murmured Adrian.

'Now steady on, Garth,' said the President. 'I'm sure we're all as shocked as you are by Donald's . . . Donald's . . . well, his behaviour. But remember where we are. This is Cambridge. We have a tradition of buggery here.'

'Bottomy is everywhere, you know,' the ninety-year-old treble of Emeritus Professor Adrian Williams sang out. 'Wittgenstein was a bottomist, they tell me. I read the other day that Morgan Foster, you remember Morgan? Next door, at King's. Wrote A Passage to India and Howards End. Wore slippers into Hall once. I read that he was a bottomite too. Extraordinary! I think everyone is now. Simply everyone.'

A red-faced statistician thumped the table angrily.

'Not I, sir, not I!' he thundered.

'I don't think we should be unafraid not to discuss the gay dialectic as an energy and the homophobic constraints that endorse its marginalisation as a functionally reactive discourse,' said Tim Anderson.

The cameraman in the corner tilted his camera from one end of the table to the other, quite unable to decide on whom to concentrate his lens.

'If I can speak,' said Adrian.

He had just unwrapped a packet of cigarettes and now scrunched up the cellophane so loudly that the microphone boom, which had just reached him, swung away like a startled giraffe and struck Menzies on the head.

A production assistant with a clipboard giggled and was rewarded with a look of foul contempt from the President.

Menzies was not to be put off.

'The fact is this, Master. There are laws. Homosexual acts are only permitted amongst consenting adults in private.'

'Are you allowed in law, Dr Menzies,' asked Adrian, 'to defecate in public?'

'Certainly not!'

'How would I be charged if I did?'

'Gross indecency, beyond question, the case of the Earl of Oxford '

'Exactly. But would I be arrested for taking a crap in a public lavatory?'

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'So a public lavatory is, in law, a private place?'

'You're twisting words again, Healey.'

'But again, the words are already twisted. Either a municipal bog is a private place or it isn't. If it is a private place in which to shit, how is it not a private place in which to fellate?'

'Oh, it was fellatio, was it?' the President seemed surprised.

'Well, whatever.'

'Who was doing it to whom, I wonder?'

Menzies' hold on his temper was weakening.

'Either the law is the law or it is not! If it is your intention to campaign for a change in that law, Healey, very good luck to you. The fact remains that Professor Trefusis has brought into disrepute the good name of this college.'

'You never liked him did you?' Adrian couldn't help saying. 'Well, here's your chance. He's down. Kick him good and hard.'

'Mr President,' said Menzies, 'I have proposed a motion to the Fellows. That Donald Trefusis be stripped of his Senior Tutorship and suspended from the college for a full year. I demand it to be put to the question.'

'Mr President,' said Adrian, 'surely Dr Menzies can't have forgotten that a motion cannot be voted on unless saving that it howmay shall as thus nemcon, neplus ultra before these presents, as witness the hand thereunto, be seconded?'

'Er . . . quite right,' said the President. 'I think. Do we have a seconder?'

Silence.

'I ask again. Do we have a seconder for Dr Menzies' proposal that Donald Trefusis be relieved of his college duties for the period of one year?'

Silence.

Menzies' chalk-white cheeks were lit with the pin-prick of crimson which, for him, passed for a manly blush.

'Madness, absolute madness! The college will live to regret it.'

'Thank you, Dr Menzies,' said the President.

He turned to the film crew.

'That is the end of the meeting. I'll ask you to go now, as we have one or two private college matters to discuss which cannot possibly be of relevance to your film.'

The crew silently gathered their equipment. The director glared at Adrian as he left the room. The female assistant .with the clipboard winked.

'I'm in there,' Adrian thought to himself.

'Now then,' said the President, when the last of the crew had gone. Tm sorry to keep you all, but I received a letter from Professor Trefusis this morning and I think you had better hear it.'

He took a letter from his inside pocket.

'"Henry,"' he read. '"By the time you read this I am very much afraid that my improvidence will already have been made known to you. I feel I must first offer the profoundest of apologies for the embarrassment I have caused to you and the college.

'"I will not burden you with reasons, excuses, denials or explanations. I have no doubt in my mind however that it would be a sensible thing for me to ask you if I might take advantage of my right to a sabbatical year. I had intended to ask this of you in any case, as my book on the Great Fricative Shift impels me to visit Europe for research materials. May I therefore take this opportunity to beg your permission to leave Cambridge immediately until sentence, which I am assured will at worst take the form of nothing more inconvenient than a small fine and at best a reprimand from the bench, has been passed upon me?

' "Perhaps you will be so kind as to let me know of your decision in this matter as soon as possible, Henry, for there are many arrangements to be made. Meanwhile, in all contrition I remain, Your good friend Donald.'"

'Well,' said Menzies at last, 'how ironic. It seems that Professor Trefusis can be credited, in some regards at least, with more decency than the rest of the fellowship.'

'Up your crack, you fat runt,' said Corder.

'The game's over now, Alex,' said Adrian. 'The film crew has gone.'

'I know,' said Corder, stuffing his briefcase with detritus from the meeting. 'That was for real.'

In a small bedroom a Striped Nightgown had been talking to a Donkey Jacket.

The tape of the conversation was being listened to by a Dark Grey Suit. He felt sorry for the Donkey Jacket having to cope with the ruined husk of a once fine mind.

The old fool was babbling of bacon and cheese.

'It's all right, Grandfather, you should rest now.'

''Steffi's cheese is in the ice-box, you see,' whimpered the Striped Nightgown.

'That's right,' soothed the Donkey Jacket. 'Of course it is.'

Your cheese is in the pantry.'

'In the pantry, that's right.'

'I saw God yesterday, he's very kind. I think he likes me.'

'I really think you should sleep, you know.'

The Donkey Jacket sounded very distressed. The Dark Grey Suit heard the sound of the old man crying.

'Told him that I hadn't had a shit in two weeks, Martin. "You won't need to in Heaven," he said. Wasn't that kind?'

'Very kind. Very kind indeed.'

'Take two kinds of cheese. Always two kinds. One for the mouse and one for the ice-box.' s

'That's right.'

'Bit of pörkelt wouldn't hurt. With some egg-dumplings and red cabbage. No sugar though.'

'Off to sleep now.'

The Dark Grey Suit heard the Donkey Jacket rise from the bed. Heard him kiss the forehead of the Striped Nightgown. Heard the Donkey Jacket's footsteps make for the door. Heard . . . a strained whisper? The Dark Grey Suit turned up the volume of his tape-recorder to maximum.

'Martin! Martin!' A hoarse, urgent command from the old man.

The Donkey Jacket's footsteps stopped near the door.

'Sew it into the lining of your jacket!'

So the old bastard was sane after all. The Dark Grey Suit reached for a pad and composed a cypher for London.

Seven

Crossing the river by way of the Sonnet Bridge on a direct course from the President's Lodge to Donald Trefusis's room in Hawthorn Tree Court, Adrian slapped each stone ball that marched along that noble structure's span in frustration. He had hated that meeting, hated the relish with which Garth Menzies had read out the article in the Cambridge Evening News, hated the bubbling looks of salacious amusement on the faces of the BBC crew. All of them laughing at Trefusis.

Hell and hot shit, he said to himself, Donald of all people.

The Tea Room Trade they called it in America; in English, Cottaging. Putting yourself up for quick sex in a public loo.

'Bad news, Adrian,' the President had said that morning. 'Donald has gone and popped up in the guise of a lavatory cowboy. He tells me he's due in court at ten thirty. The Evening News is sure to cover it. And tomorrow the nationals. What the hell are we going to do?'

Adrian remembered the times he had sprawled on Donald's chesterfield of a summer evening, hot from a game of cricket. Or the weeks they had shared hotel rooms in Venice and Florence and Salzburg during last year's long vacation. The man had never so much as touched Adrian's shoulder. But then why on earth should he have? There were plenty of lanky, languid undergraduates in the University more appetising than Adrian. Anyway, maybe Donald's tastes were more Orton than Auden. Perhaps it was only anonymous rough trade that lit his fire. Live and let live, of course: but better he should paw Adrian than kneel before some greasy truck driver to whom the name Levi Strauss meant nothing but jeans and, by blowing him, blow a reputation, a career and a way of life.

It was Adrian's last summer, but whenever he crossed the bridge, no matter how occupied he might be, he could never prevent himself from looking across at the Backs, the green train of lawn and willow that swept along the river behind the colleges. With a late afternoon mist descending on the Cam, the absurd beauty of the place depressed him deeply. Depressed him because he caught himself failing to react properly to it. There had been a time when that blend of natural and human perfection would have caused him to writhe with pleasure. But now human affairs and the responsibilities of friendship had claimed that part of him that was capable of feeling and there was nothing left over for nature or the abstract.

Donald Trefusis, a urinal Uranian, a bog bugger. Who'd've thought it?

Adrian, no stranger to sexual adventurism, had never been struck by the charms of the public lavatory as an erotic salon. There had been an occasion, not long after his expulsion from school, when he had found himself forced to answer the griping of his bowels in a Gents in the bus-station at Gloucester.

Sitting there, gently encouraging his colon, he had suddenly become aware of a note being fed through an uncomfortably large hole in the wall that divided him from the neighbouring cubicle. He had taken and read it more in an innocent spirit of good citizenship than anything else. Perhaps some unfortunate disabled person had got into trouble.

'I like young cock,' the note said.

Shocked, Adrian looked at the hole. Where the note had been there was now a human eye. Because he couldn't think of anything else to do under the circumstances, or because he was born foolish, Adrian smiled. A winning smile, accompanied by a friendly, faintly patronising wink: the kind of beaming encouragement you might give a toddler who has presented you with an incompetent drawing.

There immediately followed a shuffle of feet next door and a clink of belt buckle hitting concrete. After a brief pause, a bulky and rather excited penis pushed itself through the hole and twitched urgently.

Without pausing for hygiene and comfort, Adrian had yanked up his trousers and fled in panic. For the next half-hour he wandered Gloucester looking for a place in which he might wipe himself, not daring to risk another public convenience. To this day Adrian failed to see any allure in the lavatory. Apart from anything else the smell. And the risk . . . but risk was the whole point, he supposed.

But nonetheless, the Trefusis that he knew - the man with startled white hair and Irish thorn-proof jackets, patched at the elbows, Trefusis the Elvis Costello fan and Wolseley driver, Trefusis the sports fan and polyglot - it wasn't easy to imagine that Trefusis frenziedly gobbling at a trucker. It was like trying to picture Malcolm Muggeridge masturbating or Margaret and Denis Thatcher locked in coital ecstasy. But hard to imagine or not, these things had all presumably happened.

Adrian hopped across the lawn of Hawthorn Tree Court, a precaution learnt from schooldays.

'Healey, can't you read?' they used to shout after him.

'Oh yes, sir. I'm very good at reading, sir.'

'Then can't you see that it clearly says, Don't Walk On The Grass?'

'I'm not walking, sir. I'm hopping.'

'Don't be clever, boy.'

'All right, sir. How stupid would you like me to be, sir? Very stupid or only quite stupid?'

He threw himself up the stairs and thumped on Trefusis's oak. College rooms had two doors and if the oak, the outer door, was closed, it was generally held to be bad form to clamour for entrance. Adrian reckoned that circumstances warranted the solecism.

From within he heard a muffled curse.

'Donald, it's me. Adrian. Won't you let me in?'

After a sigh and a creak of floorboards the door opened.

'Really, couldn't you see that my oak was sported?'

'I'm sorry, but I thought '

'I know. I know what you thought. Come in, come in. I was recording.'

'Oh, sorry.'

Donald's irregular broadcasts on the radio, his 'wireless essays' as he called them, had recently given him a modest amount of fame that had kindled the resentment felt by men like Garth Menzies. Adrian found it hard to believe that, after the events of last night and this morning, Trefusis could contemplate continuing with them. He was even now rewinding the tape on his Uher recorder.

'Sit down,' he said. 'There's a rather comical Batard-Mon-trachet on the side. You might pour out two glasses.'

Now he poured out two glasses of wine and threaded his way through the librarinth towards the small study-within-a-study which contained Donald, his desk, his computer and his tape-recorder. The study was in the centre of the room and made up an inner sanctum no more than six foot square and eight foot high entirely constructed of books, mostly books in Romanian, it appeared. There was even a door. This had been made as part of the set for a student production of Travesties, which Trefusis had enjoyed. The director, Bridget Arden, a pupil of his, gave him the door as a present. It had required large stage weights to keep it upright at first, but with books stacked all round its frame it was soon as firmly wedged in place as could be.

One advantage of this strange inner room, Trefusis claimed, was that it made an excellent soundproof chamber for his broadcasts. Adrian's view was that it satisfied a vague agoraphobia, or at least claustraphilia, that he would never admit to.

Trefusis was speaking into the microphone as Adrian tiptoed through with the glasses.

'. . . and since this embarrassment in all its noble and monumental proportions will be known to you by now through the kind offices of the press, I shall, for the moment, spare you a description of its more gaudy details, although I look forward to sharing them with you in a frank, straightforward and manly way before the year is quite out. For the time being I will, if I may, take a break from these wireless essays and see something of the world. When I have found out what the world is like, be sure that I will let you know, those of you who are interested, of course, the others will simply have to guess. Meanwhile if you have been, then continue to and don't even think of stopping.'

He sighed and put the microphone down.

'Well, it's all very sad,' he said.

'Where shall I put the wine?' said Adrian, looking around for a free space.

'I should try your throat, dear boy,' said Trefusis, taking his glass and drinking it down. 'Now. I suppose you have come to tell me about the meeting?'

'It was outrageous,' said Adrian. 'Menzies was after your blood.'

'The dear man. How silly of him, it wasn't there, it was in here all the time, running through my body. He should have come and asked for it. Was he terribly cross?'

'He wasn't too pleased by my tactics, anyway.'

Trefusis looked at him in alarm.

'You didn't say anything reckless?'

Adrian explained how the meeting had gone. Trefusis shook his head.

'You are a very silly boy. Clinton-Lacey read out my letter, I suppose?'

'Yes, it rather took the wind out of Menzies' sails. But it wasn't necessary, Donald, no one else wanted you to step down. Why did you write it?'

'The heart has its reasons.'

'You've got to watch Menzies. I bet he'll fight your reappointment next year.'

'Nonsense, Garth and I simply overflow with love for each other.'

'He's your enemy, Donald!'

'He most certainly is not,' said Trefusis. 'Not unless I say so. He may dearly want to be my enemy, he may beg on bended knee for open hostility of the most violent kind, but it takes two to tangle. I choose my own enemies.'

'If you say so . . .'

'I do say so.'

Adrian sipped at the wine.

'Buttery, isn't it? The vanilla comes as a late surprise.'

'Yes, yes it's excellent. . . um . . .'

'You have a question?'

This was rather difficult.

'Donald?'

'Yes?'

'About last night . . .'

Trefusis gazed at Adrian sadly.

'Oh dear, you are not going to ask me an embarrassing question, are you?'

'Well, no,' said Adrian, 'not if it does embarrass you.'

'I meant you,' said Trefusis. 'You are not going to embarrass yourself, are you?'

Adrian gestured helplessly.

'It just seems so . . . so . . .'

'So squalid?'

'No!'said Adrian. 'I didn't mean that, I meant it seemed so . . .'

'So unlike me?'

'Well . . .'

Trefusis patted him on the shoulder.

'Let's go to the Shoulder,' he said. 'I'm sure Bob will find a nice quiet table for us.'

The Shoulder of Lamb was very crowded. Choral Scholars from St John's, limp with Pimms from an early May Week garden party, were singing an a capella version of 'Message in A Bottle' in one corner, a pair of millionaire computer designers poked each other heatedly on the chest in another. Adrian remembered how two years ago one of them had bummed cigarettes off him in the Eagle. Now his company was worth sixty million pounds.

The landlord stepped crisply forward and winked.

'Professor Trefusis, sir, and young Mr Healey!' he said, rolling his head back on his neck like a sun-struck sergeant-major. 'Bit busy this evening, sir.'

'So I see, Bob,' said Donald. 'Is there somewhere . . .?'

'I'il take you upstairs, sir.'

Bob led them through the front bar. One or two people stopped talking when they caught sight of Trefusis. Adrian was amazed at the blithe calm with which he greeted them.

'Evening, Michael! I did so enjoy your Serjeant Musgrave. Quite to the purpose. Such boots, too.'

'Simon! I see that your results were posted. A Third! You must be thrilled.'

Bob took them up the stairs.

'We was all most proud to read of your exploits in the paper, sir.'

'Why, thank you, Bob.'

'Reminds me of my old Adjutant when we was on household duties at the Palace. Fuckingham Palace we used to call it then, of course.'

'I'msure.'

'Dear oh dear, St James's Park was a sink in those days, sir. Wasn't a bush that didn't have at least one guardsman and customer in it. Course, you'll remember Colonel Bramall, won't you, sir?'

'Thank you Bob, this room will do splendidly. Perhaps Nigel could be induced to bring up a couple of the Gruaud Larose?'

'Certainly, sir. How about a nice veal and ham pie? Spot of chutney?'

'Ludicrously ideal.'

'He'll be with you in a breath, sir.'

When they had disposed of the veal and ham pie, but not the chutney, which Trefusis warned would have a most ruinous effect on the palate, he poured out two glasses of wine.

Adrian gulped at his greedily, determining that drunkenness was the only state in which to cope with his discomfort. If the Wizard of Oz was going to reveal himself as a sad and bewildered old man, Adrian didn't want to be sober when it happened.

To be fair, Donald looked about as sad and bewildered as the Laughing Cavalier as he sipped his claret and dipped his head in appreciation.

'A purist might recommend another year of ageing for the tannin to smooth out its rougher edges,' he said. 'I think it already supernacular, however.'

'It's fine,' said Adrian, pouring himself another glass.

Trefusis watched him contentedly.

'A good wine is like a woman,' he said. 'Except of course it doesn't have breasts. Or arms and a head. And it can't speak or bear children. In fact, come to think of it, a good wine isn't remotely like a woman at all. A good wine is like a good wine.'

'I'm rather like a good wine too,' said Adrian.

'You improve with age?'

'No,' said Adrian, 'whenever I'm taken out I get drunk.'

'Except that in your case you get laid down after drinking, not before.'

Adrian blushed.

'Oh dear,' said Trefusis, 'that was not a sexual allusion. Merely frivolous paronomasy on the theme of alcoholically induced unconsciousness. I was particularly pleased with "in your case". Are you to be discomfited by the potential for erotic interpretation of every remark I might make?'

'I'm sorry,' said Adrian. 'I've a feeling I'm a bad vintage.'

'That's nonsense, but very graceful. We were talking of drink, I've always believed it right for young people to drink. Not be alcoholic of course, that is a passive state of being, not a positive action. But it is good to drink to excess. That sounds like a toast. To excess.'

'To excess,' said Adrian, bumpering. 'Nothing exceeds like it.'

'Your strenuous tongue is bursting Joy's grape against your palate fine, and that's just as it should be.'

'Keats,' burped Adrian. 'Ode to Melancholy.'

'Keats indeed,' said Trefusis, refilling their glasses. 'Ode on Melancholy in fact, but we are beyond pedantry here, I hope.'

'Bollocks,' said Adrian, who hated being corrected, even kindly.

'Now,' said Trefusis, 'we should talk.

'For the moment,' he said, 'I have nothing to say on the subject of last night. One day, when the world is pinker, I will a tale unfold, whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine, and generally make you go all of a dither. But for the moment, shtum, you can keep all thoughts on the topic to yourself: zip your lip. However I do have a proposition to put to you which I would like you to consider very seriously. You have no fixed plans for next year, I think?'

'That's right.'

Adrian had made up his mind to wait until after his Finals before deciding what to do with himself. If he got a First he still planned to stay at Cambridge, otherwise he supposed he would look for a teaching job somewhere.

'How would it be, I wonder, if you were to spend the summer travelling with me?'

Adrian goggled. 'Well, I . . .'

'As you know, I shall be doing a little research for my book. But I have something else to do. There is a problem that needs sorting out, a noisesome problem but not unchallenging. I believe you will be able to offer me material assistance with it. In return I will naturally take care of all expenses, hotels, flights and so forth. It will, I think, be a tour not wholly devoid of interest and amusement. At journey's end we will both deposit ourselves back in England, you to become Prime Minister or whatever lowly ambition you have set your sights on, me to pick up the threads of a ruined and disappointed career. How does that strike you as a plan?'

It struck Adrian as Roscoe Tanner struck a tennis-ball, but how it struck him as a plan he couldn't say. His mind reeled with questions. Had Trefusis run mad? What would his parents say? Should he tell them? Did Donald expect him to share his bed? Is that what it was all about?

'Well?'

'It's . . . it's unbelievable.'

'You don't like it?'

'Like it? Of course I like it, but '

'Excellent!' Trefusis poured out two more glasses of wine. 'Then you're game?'

If I refused to sleep with him, thought Adrian, would he just kick me out and abandon me in the middle of Europe without a penny? Surely not.

'God yes!' he said. 'I'm game.'

'Wonderful!' said Trefusis. 'Then let us drink to our Grand Tour.'

'Right,' said Adrian draining his glass, 'our Grand Tour.'

Trefusis smiled.

'I'm so very pleased,' he said.

'Me too,' said Adrian, 'but. . .'

'Yes?'

'This problem you mentioned. That I may be able to help you with. What exactly . . .?'

'Ah,' said Donald. 'I'm afraid I am not yet fully at liberty, as they say, to disclose the details.'

'Oh.'

'But I don't suppose there's any harm in my asking you to cast your mind back to last summer. You remember the Salzburg Festival?'

'Vividly.'

'I am sure you haven't forgotten that terrible business in the Getreidegasse?'

'The man in the Mozart museum?'

'That same.'

'I'm hardly likely to forget it. All that blood.'

Bob appeared at the door.

'Sorry to disturb, gents. Thought you might appreciate some of this superior Armagnac brandy.'

'How solicitous!' said Trefusis.

'May I enquire, sir, whether everything went well?'

'Everything went splendidly, Bob. Splendidly.'

'Oh goody-good,' said Bob, taking three small brandy glasses from his jacket pocket. 'I'll join you then, if I may.'

'Please do, Bob, please do. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so pour us each one desperate measure.'

Bob complied.

'We were just talking about Salzburg.'

'Ooh, nasty business that, sir. Poor old Moltaj. Throat slit from ear to ear, they tell me. But then you both saw it in the flesh, didn't you, sirs?'

Adrian stared at him.

'I know you'll do right by old Moltaj, Mr Healey,' said Bob, clapping him on the shoulder. 'Course you will, sir.'

A St Matthew's Tie with Liberty silk handkerchief flamboyantly thrust into the breast pocket was bent double in Corridor Four of the third floor of Reddaway House next to the door marked '3.4.CabCom'. He seemed to be taking an unconscionable time in doing up the laces of his black Oxford shoes. It was almost impossible for him not to hear voices coming from behind the door.

'I was just thinking, sir, that what with the Bikini alert over Iran and everything . . .'

''Bugger the bloody Persians, Reeve - I have a Limit Zero Cabinet Appro on this.'

'Copeland is very keen that we should co-operate.'

'Listen to me. The Hairy Mullah is there to stay. You know it, I know it. Neither Copeland nor anyone at Langley nor over here has got a choirboy's chance in Winchester of doing anything about it. Checkmate, d'you see? I don't suppose you know what checkmate means?'

'Well. .:

'Of course you don't, you went to Oxford. Checkmate comes from the Arabic "shah mat"- the King is dead. Well the Shah is mat, all right, he's as mat as a bloody doornail, and I don't propose to waste time feeding the ambitions of his whining progeny - they can live it up in Monaco and Gstaad for the rest of their lives as far as I'm concerned. Clear the board, put the chessmen back in their box, we've got bigger capon to baste.'

'Right, sir.'

'Right. So. Report?'

'Well, sir. I'm sorry to have to make report that the ObSquad lost Castor for a day.'

What.?'

'Er . . . if you take a look at this, sir. It's a Cambridge police report.'

The St Matthew's Tie heard the wobble of a cardboard wallet being opened.

'Castor and Odysseus, eh?''

'We rather think so, sir.'

'So are you telling me that Odysseus has got the whole box of tricks now?'

'No, sir, . . if you remember our signal from Locksmith in Budapest, Castor may have given one part of Mendax to Odysseus but the other half will be with Pollux, sewn into the lining of his jacket.'

'And Pollux is still in Troy?'

'Not exactly sir. Vienna Station received another signal from Locksmith this morning, fully prioritised.'

'Fully whatted.?'

'Er . . . prioritised, sir.'

'Christ.'

'It seems that Pollux left Troy last night.'

'Headed for the Greek camp?'

'Bestguess, sir.'

There was a long pause.

The St Matthew's Tie straightened himself to allow a little blood to flow down from his head.

'If you're right, Reeve, Odysseus will make his way Greekwards in the next few days too.'

'With Telemachus, do you think?'

Another long pause was followed by the sound of a folder being dropped on a desk.

The St Matthew's Tie stooped to do up another shoe-lace.

'Well, nothing to keep me in England now that Botham seems to have lost us the blasted Ashes. I'll fly over the moment anything develops.'

'Cricket not going too well then, sir?'

'The man's a bloody disgrace. He couldn't captain a paraplegic netball team.'

'Will you be around for initialling appropriation orders later in the afternoon, sir?'

'Well, young Reeve, after a brief luncherising and half an hour's memorandorising Cabinet, I'll be at Lord's.'

'Right, sir.'

'So if you want me to signatorise anything, send Simon Hesketh-Harvey round, he's a member. Now I must go and lavatorise. And while I'm away for God's sake try and learn to speak English.'

The St Matthew's Tie hurried along the corridor to his office. He heard the door of 3.4.CabCom opening. A voice hailed him.

'Ho there, young Hesketh-H!'

The St Matthew's Tie turned. A Bennett, Tovey and Steele Suit was standing in the corridor.

'Morning, sir.'

'Snap.'

They looked at each other's neck-ties with a smile.

'You may have to change that for the good old orange and yellow this pip emma,' said the Bennet, Tovey and Steele.

'Sir?'

'If you're a good boy, Reeve will send you over to me at Lord's this afternoon to watch the final death throes.'

'Good-o,' said the St Matthew's Tie. 'I shall enjoy that, sir.'

'Right. Oh, by the way– '

'Sir?'

'Prioritise. Ever come across that one?'

'Ugh!' said the St Matthew's Tie. 'Langley?'

'No, that arse Reeve, of course. Last week it was "having a meet-up with", God knows what new linguistic macedoine he's going to serve up next.'

'One shudders to think, sir.'

'All right then, Simon, off you pop.'

Eight

I

'I have taken much care in packing,' said Trefusis as he pushed shut the boot of the Wolseley. 'A tin of barley-sugar for you, Castrol GTX for the car, figgy oatcakes for me.'

'Figgy oatcakes?'

'Oatcakes are very healthy. Hotels, restaurants, cafés, they all take their toll. Salzburg is not kind to the figure. At my age travel broadens the behind. A stearopygous Trefusis is an unhappy Trefusis. The buns and tortes of Austria are whoreson binders of your whoreson stool. But a figgy oatcake laughs at constipation and favours rectal carcinoma with a haughty stare. In the grammar of health, while cream may hasten the full stop, porridge will ease the colon.'

'Oh, ah,' said Adrian. 'And curry creates the dash, I suppose.'

'Oh, I like that. Very good. "Curry creates the dash." Yes, indeed. Most. . . most. . . er, what is the word?'

'Amusing?'

'No . . . it'll come to me.'

The interior of the car smelt of Merton Park thrillers, Bakelite headsets and the Clothes Ration. It only needed the profile of Edgar Wallace or the voice of Edgar Lustgarten to sweep Adrian and Trefusis, with bells ringing, into a raincoat and Horlicks Britain of glistening pavements, trilbied police inspectors and poplin shirts. So familiar was the odour, so complete the vision it evoked as they swung with a whine of gears out of the college gates and onto the Trumpington Road, that Adrian could almost believe in reincarnation. He had never smelt that precise smell before, yet it was as known to him as the smell of his own socks.

Trefusis would not be drawn on the purpose of their mission to Salzburg.

'You knew that man who was killed then?'

'Knew him? No.'

'But Bob said...'

'I do hope the Bendix doesn't give out. The Wolseley 15/50 is a marvellous saloon, but the Bendix is most terribly susceptible to trouble.'

'Well if you didn't know him, how come you know his name?'

'I suppose one could call such an affliction bendicitis.'

'When I first arrived in Cambridge there was a rumour that you recruited for MI5. Either that or for the KGB.'

'My dear fellow, there is not a don over the age of sixty who is not said to be the fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh man in some improbable circle of spies, double agents and ruthless traitors.

'You should pay no attention.'

'You worked at Bletchley during the war though, didn't you? On the Enigma code.'

'So did Beryl Ayliffe the college librarian. Are we to believe that she is an MI5 . . . what's the word . . . operative?'

Adrian pictured the chain-smoking chatelaine of the St Matthew's library.

'Well no, of course not,' he conceded. 'But . . .'

'Ha, ha. More fool you, because she is!'

'What?'

'Or is she?' mused Trefusis. 'So damned difficult to tell in this damned deadly game we play. Anyway, what does it matter? Isn't it all the bloody same? Left, right? Right, wrong? The old distinctions don't matter any a damned damn any more, damn it.'

'All right, all right,' said Adrian, stung by the mockery. 'I grant you it all sounds a bit stupid. But we did see a man killed last year. You can't get away from that.'

'Assuredly.'

'And that's why we're going back to Salzburg?'

'I don't think we'll eat until we get to France. There's a surprisingly good restaurant at the railway station at Arras. See if you can find it on your map, there's a dear.'

II

Adrian had never eaten foiegras before.

'I thought it was just pate,' he said.

'Oh no, the pate is quite inferior. These are the livers themselves. Flash fried. I think you'll be pleased.'

Adrian was.

'It just literally melts in the mouth!' he exclaimed. 'Unbelievable!'

'You'll find the Corton Charlemagne an excellent accompaniment. Perfectly served at last. I have an ex-student who is likely to become the next editor of the Spectator. On his succession I shall offer for publication a little article on the iniquity of the British habit of over-chilling white Burgundies. If one's young friends are going to disgrace themselves by writing for such low periodicals the least they can do is assuage their guilt by providing a platform for advanced ideas. I make it a point to teach all my pupils to believe in properly served wine.'

Adrian listened with half an ear to the Professor's flow of conversation. A young man and woman had entered the restaurant a moment earlier and now floundered in the middle of the room, waiting for someone to show them to a table. Adrian's eyes narrowed suddenly. He leant across to Trefusis.

'Don't look now, but that couple behind you who've just come in . . .' He lowered his voice to a whisper. 'They were on the boat with us! I swear it's the same two. They were behind us in the car queue. In a green BMW.'

Trefusis tore a bread roll in half and looked speculatively into a large mirror over Adrian's shoulder.

'Really? Bless my soul, it's a small world and no mistake.'

'You don't think . . . you don't think they might be . . .following us?'

Trefusis raised his eyebrows. 'It's possible of course. It's always possible.'

Adrian grabbed Trefusis's arm across the table. 'I could go and, have a pee and put their car out of action. What do you say?'

'You think micturating over their car would put it out of action?'

'No, I mean pretend to have a pee but actually wrench out the rotor arm or take the distributor cap or whatever it is you do.'

Trefusis gazed at him with only the trace of a smile on his face. 'Do you know how they make foie gras?

'Donald, I'm serious. I'm sure they're following us.'

With a sigh, Trefusis put down the fragment of brioche he had been buttering.

'I'm serious too. It's time, young Healey, that you knew what this trip was all about.'

'Really?'

'Really. Now, I'll ask you again. Do you know how to make foie gras?'

Adrian stared at Trefusis. 'Er . . . no. No I don't.'

'Very well then, I'll tell you. You rear a goose from a puppy or calf or whatver a goose is when young.'

'Chick? Gosling?'

'Quite possibly. You take a young Strasbourg goose-cub, chick or gosling and you feed it rich grain in a mashy pulp.'

'Fatten it up, you mean?'

'That's right, but the mashy pulp is placed, you see, in a bag.'

'A bag?'

'That's right. A bag or sack. The bag or sack has some species of nozzle or protuberance at the narrow end, which is forced down the goose's gullet or throat. The bag or sack is then squeezed or compressed and the meal or fodder thus introduced or thrust into the creature or animal's crop or stomach.'

'Why not just let it feed normally?'

'Because this procedure is undertaken many times a day for the whole of the poor animal's life. It is force fed on a massive scale. Force fed until it is so gorged and gross that it can no longer move. Its liver becomes pulpy and distended. Ideal, in fact, for flash frying and presenting with a glass of spacious Montrachet or fat, buttery Corton Charlemagne.'

'That's horrific!' said Adrian. 'Why didn't you tell me that before?'

'I wanted you to taste it. It is one of the highest pleasures known to man. Wasn't it Sydney Smith who had a friend whose idea of heaven was eating it to the sound of trumpets? Like most of our highest pleasures, however, it is rooted in suffering; founded in an unnatural, almost perverted, process.'

Adrian's mind raced forward, trying to think of the relevance of this to their situation. He ran a storyline through his head. A European cartel of foie gras manufacturers, determined to prevent the Common Market from outlawing their product. Prepared to kill in order to protect what they saw as their God-given right to torture geese for the tables of the rich. Surely not? That sort to thing simply did not happen. And even if it did, it was scarcely the sort of affair in which Trefusis would interest himself.

'So what exactly . . .?'

'This forcing of a goose is an image I want you to hold in your head while I tell you of something else . . . ah . . . lepoisson est arrive.'

Trefusis beamed as two large dishes, each covered with an immense silver cloche, were set before them. The waiter looked from Adrian to Trefusis with an expectant smile and - now sure of their attention - he swept each cloche clear with a flourish, releasing clouds of delicately fishy steam.

Voilà! Bon appetit, messieurs/'

'Enlightening that what we call John Dory the French call Saint Pierre, the Italians San Pietro and the Spanish San Pedro.'

'Who was John Dory, do you think?'

'Oh, I imagine the Dory is from dore, gilded or golden. Of course we do sometimes call it St Peter's fish, I believe. Merci bien.'

'M'sieur!' The waiter bowed smartly and strutted away.

'Howsomever that may be,' said Trefusis. 'Some time ago I was contacted - I believe that's the right word? - by an old friend of mine, Tom Daly. Tom used to be the garden steward at St Matthew's and a fine gardener he was too, as green-fingered as . . . as . . .'

'As a Martian with septicaemia?'

'If that pleases you. It fell out that in nineteen-sixty-two Tom pleached, plashed and entwined himself with one Eileen Bishop. In due course he pollinated her and there sprung up a fine young son. In a simple but affecting ceremony in Little St Mary's later that year I agreed to renounce the world, the flesh and the devil in order to cleanse my soul in readiness for the task of standing sponsor to their freshly budded sprig, whom they had decided to baptise Christopher Donald Henry.'

'This gardener married and had a son and you are his godfather?'

'I believe that's what I said,' said Trefusis. 'Then in nineteen-seventy-six, to the distress of us all, Tom left the college to take up the post of chief borough gardener in West Norfolk. When next you admire the gay rampage of tulips at a roundabout in King's Lynn or the giddy riot of wayside lobelia in central Hunstanton, you'll know whom to thank. Be that as it may. Beyond the usual silver porringer at birth and the bi-annual five-pound note, my contribution to Christopher's moral welfare has been scant. I have to confess that Christopher, my godson, is a child of whom I stand rather in awe.'

Adrian tried to picture the Professor standing rather in awe of anything.

'The boy is remarkably gifted you see,' said Trefusis, gently laying a sliver of fish-bone on the side of his plate. 'His mathematical ability as an infant was simply astounding. From an early age he exhibited almost supernatural powers. He could multiply and divide long numbers in seconds, calculate square and cube roots in his head, do all the circus tricks. But he had a fine mind as well as an arithmetically prodigious brain and it was assumed that he would make his way to Trinity and contribute something to the field of pure mathematics before he was thirty or whatever age it is that marks the Anno Domini of mathematicians.'

'I believe they're pretty much over the hill by twenty-six these days,' said Adrian. 'How old is he now?'

'Eighteen or so. He is lucky, you might think, to have a father proud of his gifts and who, moreover, would have been happy for him to employ them academically, in the service of scholarship, for the sake of the pure art of pure mathematics. Many fathers of comparably modest incomes would have looked on a clever son as a route to riches. My son the financier, my son the barrister, my son the accountant. Tom stood quite ready and without rancour to explain the child away as my son the loopy mathematician with the scurfy hair and bottle-end spectacles.'

'And...?'

'Three years ago Christopher was awarded a scholarship to a public school in Suffolk: the money came from an organisation Tom Daly had never heard of. It now seems that this organisation is proposing to put Christopher through Cambridge. He will read not Pure Maths there, but Engineering. What is worrying Tom is that the organisation is only interested in Christopher because of his potential as a brain. After university they want him to go into industry.'

'What is the organisation?'

'I'll come to that. Tom believes that Christopher shouldn't be committed so early. He is frightened that this organisation is, in effect, buying his son. So he came to me and asked if I knew anything of them. I was able to confirm that I did. I have known of them for some time.'

'Who are they?'

'Let's settle up. I will tell you the rest on the road. What would be an adequate lagniappe, do you think?'

Adrian looked out of the rear window.

'They are following us!'

'How frustrating for them. All that power under their bonnet and they are forced to hold their pace down to our niggardly fifty-five miles per hour.'

As Trefusis spoke, the BMW moved out to the left and swept past them. Adrian caught a glimpse of the driver's face, alert and tense behind the wheel.

'The same man all right. British number plates. Right hand drive. GB sticker on the back. Why's he passed us, though?'

'Perhaps a relay,' said Trefusis, 'someone else will take up the pursuit. It is scarcely a problem to identify a car of this age and distinction.'

Adrian looked at him sharply. 'You admit that we're being followed then?'

'It was always a possibility.'

Adrian popped a lump of barley-sugar into his mouth. 'You were telling me about this organisation. That paid for your godson to go through school.'

'I have become increasingly aware in recent years,' said Trefusis, 'of what can only be called a conspiracy on a massive scale. I have watched the most talented, the most able and most promising students that come through St Matthew's and other colleges in Cambridge and other universities in England... I have watched them being bought up.'

'Bought up?'

'Purchased. Procured. Acquired. Gotten. Let us say an undergraduate arrives with phenomenal ability in, for example, English. A natural candidate for a doctorate, a teaching post, a life of scholarship or, failing those, a creative existence as poet, novelist or dramatist. He arrives full of just such ambitions and sparkling ideals but then . . . they get to him.'

'They?'

'Two years after graduation this first class mind is being paid eighty thousand pounds a year to devise advertising slogans for a proprietary brand of peanut butter or is writing snobbish articles in glossy magazines about exiled European monarchs and their children or some such catastrophic drivel. I see it year after year. Perhaps a chemist will arrive in the college. Great hopes are held out for his future. Nobel Prizes and who knows what else besides? He himself is full of the highest aspirations. Yet even before his final exams he has been locked and contracted into a job for life concocting synthetic pine-fresh biological soap powder fragrances for a detergent company. Adrian, someone is getting at our best minds! Someone is preventing them from achieving their full potential. This organisation I told you of is denying them a chance to grow and flourish. A university education should be broad and general. But these students are being trained, not educated. They are being stuffed like Strasbourg geese. Pappy mush is forced into them, just so one part of their brains can be fattened. Their whole minds are being ignored for the sake of that part of them which is marketable. Thus they have persuaded my godson Christopher to read Engineering instead of Mathematics.'

'How long has this been going on?'

'I cannot tell how long. Years, I suspect. I first began to take real notice fifteen or twenty years ago. But it is getting worse. More and more brilliant students are being diverted from work that could be of real benefit to mankind and their country. They are being battery farmed. Young Christopher Daly is just one of thousands.'

'My God!' said Adrian. 'You know who's behind this? We've got to stop them!'

'It's a conspiracy of industrialists, of certain highly placed economists and of members of governments of all political colours,' said Trefusis.

'But how can we prevent it? And what has it got to do with Salzburg?'

Trefusis looked across at Adrian, his eyes filled with grave concern. Suddenly he burst out laughing. Shaking his head from side to side, he snorted and struck the steering wheel. 'Oh Adrian, I am cruel! I'm wicked, naughty, dreadful and digraceful. Please forgive me.'

'What's so funny?'

'You silly, silly boy. What I have just described is the way the world works! It's not a conspiracy. It is called Modern Western Civilisation.'

'W-what do you mean?'

'Of course the best brains are lured into industry, advertising, journalism and the rest of it. Of course universities are adapting to the demands of commerce. It's regrettable and there's little we can do about it. But I think only a Marxist would call it an international conspiracy.'

'But you said an organisation . . . you told me that a specific organisation had offered that boy Christopher a scholarship.'

'The state, Adrian. A state scholarship. And the state will hope in return that he goes into something productive once he has obtained his degree. He will be incented by money, recruitment drives and the general thrust and tenor of the times. That is all.'

Adrian fumed in silence for a while.

'And this has nothing to do with what we're going to Salzburg for?'

'Nothing at all.'

'You are impossible, you know that?'

'Improbable perhaps, but not impossible. Besides, whilst what I described may not be a conscious intrigue, it is happening nonetheless and is vexatious in the extreme.'

'So you're still not going to tell me what we are in actual fact doing here?'

'All in actual good time,' said Trefusis. 'Now the Cardinal is getting thirsty; if memory has not fully quit her throne I believe there should be an amenable garage and routier in about eighty kilometres or so. In the meantime, we can tell each other the story of our lives.'

'All right,' said Adrian. 'You first. Tell me about Bletchley.'

'Little to tell. It was set up as a wartime decrypting station and filled up with mainly Cambridge personnel.'

'Why Cambridge?'

'The closest university town. At first they recruited philologists and linguists like myself.'

'This was when?'

'Nineteen-forty. Round about the time of the Battle of Britain.'

'And you were how old?'

'Tush and bibble! Is this then to be an interrogation? I was twenty-two.'

'Right. Just wondered.'

'Young and fizzing at the brim with ideals and theories about language. Now, who else was there with me? Dozens of girls who filed and clerked away with great brilliance and flair. The chess master Harry Golombek was on the team of course, and H.F.O. Alexander, also a magnificently dashing player. It was all rather cosy and fun at first, wrestling with enemy cyphers that had been intercepted all over Europe and Africa. It soon became clear, however, that the Enigma encryption device that German Naval Intelligence was using would need mathematicians to crack it. Acquaintanceship with the decryption techniques of the last war, the ability to do the Times crossword while shaving and a mastery of Russian verbs of motion were not enough any more. So they brought in Alan Turing, of whom you may have heard.'

Adrian had not.

'No? What a pity. Brilliant man. Quite brilliant, but very sad. Killed himself later. Many credit him with the invention of the digital computer. I can't quite remember how it came about. There was some pure mathematical problem which had faced the world of numbers for fifty years, I think, and he had solved it as a young man by positing the existence of a number-crunching machine. It was never his intention to build such a thing, it was merely hypothesised as a model to help solve an abstract difficulty. But unlike many mathematicians he relished the physical application of numbers. His hut in Bletchley was soon filled with rows and rows of valves. You remember valves? Tubes they call them in America. Little vacuum bulbs that glowed orange.'

'I remember,' said Adrian. 'It used to take television ages to warm up.'

'That's right. Well Alan had thousands of them all linked together in some impossibly complicated fashion. Got them from the Post Office.'

'The Post Office?'

'Yes, the GPO had been experimenting in electronics before the war and they seemed to be the only people who really knew about it. The clever thing about the Enigma machine was that, although it was purely mechanical, it changed daily and the number of permutations was so grotesquely huge that the old techniques of decryption wouldn't work. Alan cracked it quite brilliantly. But that was ony the first stage of course. He still needed to know the code before he could read the cypher.'

'What's the difference between a cypher and a code then?'

'Well, that is readily explained,' said Trefusis. 'Imagine a system in which a number refers to a letter of the alphabet. A equals one, B equals two, C equals three and so on, thus "Adrian" would be "One - four - eighteen - nine - one -fourteen", you understand?'

'Right...'

'That is a very basic form of cypher and a message written in it could be cracked by anyone of the meanest intelligence in seconds. But suppose that between us we two had personally prearranged that a word . . . "Biscuits", for example, was going to mean "nineteen-hundred hours", and that another word, for instance "Desmond", should signify "The Cafe Florian in St Mark's Square, Venice".'

'Got you . . .'

'I would then only have to signal to you: "Please send me some biscuits today, love Desmond," and you would know that I wanted to meet you at seven o'clock that evening at Florian's. That is a code and would be impossible to crack unless someone overheard us arranging it, or one of us was foolish enough to commit it to paper.'

'I see,' said Adrian. 'Then why not only use codes if they're uncrackable?'

'Unfortunately in wartime one needs to signal an enormous amount of unpredictable and detailed information. The receiver couldn't be expected to memorise thousands of different code words, and to write them down would be insecure. So it became practice to mix the two systems. A complicated cypher would be used which could only be cracked if one knew a key word, a code, which would change daily. That is how Enigma operated. So even when Enigma had been solved we needed Intelligence to help provide us with clues so that we could crack the daily code. That is where I came in, and of course, your old friend Humphrey Biffen.'

'Humphrey Biffen?'

'I believe he taught you French once.'

'Good Lord! Did Biffo work at Bletchley too?'

'Oh indeed. And Helen Sorrel-Cameron whom he later married. Guessing the daily key words was very much our speciality.'

'But however did you manage?'

'Well now, the Germans were so very confident that Enigma was uncrackable that they became remarkably sloppy about the assignation of the daily key. Intelligence furnished us with the names of operators and cypher clerks in German Naval Intelligence and Humphrey and I would make guesses. We used to keep immensely detailed files on each clerk: their likes, their loves, their families, mistresses, lovers, pets, tastes in music and food . . . oh, everything. Each day we would try out different ideas, the name of that particular operator's dog, their favourite kind of pastry, their maiden surname, that sort of thing. We usually got there in the end.'

'But the Germans must have discovered that you had cracked it, surely?'

'Well that's the peculiarity of this kind of work. Our job was simply to furnish Military Intelligence with everything we decrypted. They would then, as a rule, fail to act upon it.'

'Why?'

'Because they could on no account let the enemy know that they were reading their most secret transmissions. It is generally believed, for instance, that Churchill had prior warning of the impending Luftwaffe raid on Coventry but neglected to tell the army and air force for fear of extra defences in the area revealing to the Germans that it had been known about in advance. This is not strictly true, but it demonstrates the principle. Some believe, of course, that Admiral Kanaris, the head of German Naval Intelligence, was perfectly well aware that we were reading Enigma all along, but that he was so pro-British and distressed at the behaviour of the Fuhrer that he simply let it happen.'

'Fascinating,' said Adrian. 'God I wish I could have been around at a time like that.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Trefusis. 'I think you might have been bored.'

Trefusis peered at the landscape and the road-signs. 'Still another fifty or so kilometres before our service station. Now it's your turn. What has happened in your young life? Plenty, I make no doubt.'

'Oh not so much,' said Adrian. 'I was arrested for the possession of cocaine once.'

'Really?'

'Yes. I had been living with an actor after a few months of being a rent-boy.'

'A rent-boy?' said Trefusis. 'How enterprising! And possession of cocaine? Were you imprisoned?'

'Well first I should tell you how I was expelled from school. That should take us twenty kilometres. Then I'll tell you what happened after that.'

Nine

I

He had stared at the first paper for the whole three hours, unable to write a thing. One of the girls came up to him afterwards.

'I saw you, Adrian Healey! Couldn't you answer any of the questions, then?'

Two years in this stupid college that called its pupils 'students' and its lessons 'lectures'. How had he stood it? He should never have given way.

'I think it's the right thing, darling. It'll give you so much more independence than a school. Father agrees. You can get the bus in to Gloucester and be home with me every night. And then after you've got the "A" levels, you can sit the Cambridge entrance. Everyone says it's an awfully good college. The Fawcetts' boy – David is it? – he went there after he was . . .after he left Harrow, so I'm sure it's all right.'

'What you mean is, it's the only place for miles around that'll take boys that've been expelled.'

'Darling, that's not . . .'

'Anyway, I don't want "A" levels and I don't want to go to Cambridge.'

'Ade, of course you do! Just think how you'd regret it if you missed the opportunity.'

He had missed the opportunity, and the lectures. Instead there had been the ABC cinema and the Star Cafe, where he played pin-ball and three-card brag.

Discuss Lawrence's use of external landscape in relation to the internal drama of Sons and Lovers.

Only connect . . . How are the Schlegels and Wilcoxes connected in Howards End?

Compare and contrast the different uses of landscape and nature in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes.

Suddenly his plausible wit was of no use to him. Suddenly the world was dull and sticky and unkind. His future was behind him and he had nothing to look forward to but the past.

Goodbye Gloucester, goodbye Stroud. He was at least following a literary example. When Laurie Lee had walked out on his midsummer's morning he had had a guitar and the blessings of his family to accompany him. Adrian had a paperback copy of Anouilh's Antigone, which he had intended to read at lunchtime as some kind of feeble preparation for the afternoon's French literature paper, and fifteen pounds from his mother's handbag.

In the end he got a lift from a lorry driver who was going all the way to Stanmore.

'I can drop you somewhere on the North Circular, if you like.'

Thanks.'

North Circular ... North Circular. It was some kind of road, wasn't it?

'Er . . . is the North Circular anywhere near Highgate?'

'You can catch a bus from Golder's Green pretty quick.'

Bollocks lived in Highgate. He might be able to cadge a couple of nights there while he sorted himself out.

'I'm Jack, by the way,' said the driver.

'Er . . . Bullock, Hugo Bullock.'

'Bullock? That's a funny one.'

'I once met a girl called Jane Heffer. We should've got married.'

'Yeah? What went wrong?'

'No, I mean her being called Heffer. It's the female of bullock.'

'Oh right, right.'

They drove on in silence. Adrian offered Jack a cigarette.

'No thanks, mate. Trying to give 'em up. Don't do you any good in this game.'

'No, I suppose not.'

'So, what, you running away then, are you?'

'Running away?'

'Yeah. How old are you?'

'Eighteen.'

'Get away!'

'Well, I will be.'

Bullock's mother stood in the doorway and eyed him suspiciously. He supposed his hair was rather long.

'I'm a friend of William's. From school.'

'He's in Australia. It's his year off before going to Oxford.'

'Oh yes, of course. I just . . . wondered, you know. Not to worry. Happened to be passing.'

'I'll tell him you called if he rings. Are you staying in London?'

'Yes, in Piccadilly.'

'Piccadilly?'

What was wrong with that?

'Well, you know, more just off.'

The pin-ball machines in Piccadilly had more sensitive tilt mechanisms than those he was used to in Gloucester, and he wasn't getting many replays. At this rate he wouldn't be able to afford to carry on for more than an hour.

A man in a blue suit came down behind him and put down a fifty-pence piece.

'It's yours,' said Adrian, smacking the flipper buttons in frustration as his last silver ball rolled out of play. 'That was my last. I just can't seem to get the hang of the bloody thing.'

'No, no, no,' said the man in the blue suit, 'the fifty is for you. Have another go.'

Adrian turned in surprise.

'Well, that's awfully kind . . . are you sure?'

'Yes indeed.'

The fifty was soon used up.

'Come and have a drink,' said the man. 'I know a bar just round the corner.'

They left the chimes and buzzes and intense, haunted concentration of the amusement arcade and walked up Old Compton Street and into a small pub in a side street. The barman didn't question Adrian's age, which was an unusual relief.

'Haven't seen you before. Always good to meet a new face. Yes, indeed.'

'I'd've thought everyone was a stranger in London,' said Adrian. 'I mean, it's mostly tourists round here, isn't it?'

'Oh, I don't know,' said the man. 'You'd be surprised. It's a village really.'

'Do you often play pin-ball?'

'Me? No. Got an office up the Charing Cross Road. I just like to look in most evenings on my way home. Yes, indeed.'

'Right.'

'I thought you were a girl at first with your hair and . . .everything.'

Adrian blushed. He didn't like to be reminded how long beard growth was in coming.

'No offence. I like it... it suits you.'

'Thanks'

'Yes indeed. Yes indeedy-do.'

Adrian made a note, somewhere in the back of his mind, to get a haircut the next day.

'You sound a bit public school to me. Am I right?'

Adrian nodded.

'Harrow,' he said. He thought it a safe bet.

'Harrow, you say? Harrow! Dear me, I think you're going to be a bit of a hit. Yes indeed. You got anywhere to stay?'

'Well . . .'

'You can put up with me, if you like. It's just a small flat in Brewer Street, but it's local.'

'It's terribly kind of you . . . I'm looking for a job, you see.'

That's how simple it had been. One day a lazy student, the next a busy prostitute.

'Thing is, Hugo,' said Don, 'soon as I clapped eyes on you I thought, "That's not rent, that's the real thing." I've been around the Dilly for fifteen years and I can spot 'em, indeedy-dumplings, I can. Now I'm sorry to say that I won't fancy you next week. Unplucked chicken is my speciality and I'll be bored stiff with you Thursday. Bored limp, more like. Hur, hur! But you cut your hair a bit - not too much - keep your Harrovian accent fit and you'll be clearing two ton a week. Yes indeed.'

'Two ton?'

'Two hundred, sunshine.'

'But what do I have to do?'

And Don told him. There were two principal amusement arcades, there was the Meat Rack, which was an iron pedestrian grille outside Play land, the more active of the arcades, and there was the Piccadilly Underground itself.

'But you want to watch that. Crawling with the law.'

Don wasn't a pimp. He worked at a perfectly respectable music publishing house in Denmark Street. Adrian paid him thirty pounds a week which covered his own accommodation and the use of the flat for tricks during the day. At night it was up to the tricks to provide the venue.

'Just don't start chewing gum, shooting horse or looking streetwise, that's all.'

At first the days passed slowly, each transaction nerve-racking and remarkable, but soon the quiet pulse of routine quickened the days. The young can become accustomed to the greatest drudgeries, like potato-harvesting or schoolwork, with surprising speed. Prostitution had at least the advantage of variety.

Adrian got on pretty well with the other rent-boys. Most of them were tougher and beefier than he was, skinheads with tattoos, braces and mean looks. They didn't regard him as direct competition and sometimes they even recommended him.

'Do you know of anyone less . . . chunky?' a punter might ask.

'You want to try Hugo, he'll be doing the Times crossword down the Bar Italia this time of the morning. Flared jumbo cords and a blazer. Can't miss him.'

Adrian was intrigued by the fact that the most prosperous, pin-striped clients went for the rough trade, while the wilder, less respectable tricks wanted more lightly muscled boys like him. Opposite poles attracted. The Jacobs wanted hairy men and the Esaus wanted smooth. It meant that he more than most had to learn to spot the sadists and nutters who were on the lookout for a sex-slave. One of the last things Adrian wanted was to be chained up, flogged and urinated over.

He liked to think that his rates were competitive but not insulting. A blow-job was ten quid to give, fifteen to receive. After a week he made up his mind to forbid anything up the anus. Some could take it and some couldn't: Adrian decided that he belonged to the latter category. A couple of boys tried to convince him, as he hobbled down Coventry Street after a particularly heavy night complaining that his back passage felt like a windsock, that he would soon get used to it, but he resolved - financially disadvantageous as it might be - that his rear section was to be firmly labelled a no-poking compartment. This was a proviso he had to make clear to clients at the opening of negotiations: between the thighs was fine - the intercrural method was, after all, endorsed by no less an authoritative source than the Ancient Greeks themselves - but he was buggered if he was going to be buggered. As long as he could get it up he didn't mind sodomising a client, but his own bronze eye was closed to all comers.

When business was slack he and some of the others would mix with the journalists and professional Soho drinkers in the French House in Dean Street. Gaston, the implausibly named landlord, had no objection to their presence so long as they didn't tout for custom there. The Golden Lion next door was for that. The regulars however - embittered painters and poets for whom the seventies were an unwelcome vacuum to be filled with vodka and argument - could be savagely impolite.

'We don't need your kind of filth in here,' a radio producer, whose watery seed Adrian had spat out only the previous night, shouted one afternoon. 'Get the fuck out!'

'How ill-bred!' Adrian had exclaimed as Gaston ejected the radio producer instead.

Like Adrian, most of the boys were self-employed; one or two had ponces, but in general pimping was a feature of the more highly structured sister profession of female prostitution. The boys were free to come and go as they pleased, no one was going to tell them where they could set up their stall, no one was going to take a cut of their hard-earned cash. The cash did come in at a pleasing rate but Adrian found he had little to spend it on. Drink didn't really appeal to him much and he was too afraid of drugs to be tempted to take so much as a single pill or a single puff of anything illegal. Every day he would walk to the post office behind St Martin's-in-the-Field and deposit his earnings into an account he had opened under the name of Hugo Bullock. It was all building up rather nicely.

Chickens worried him, though. These were the children of eleven, twelve and thirteen. Some were even younger. Adrian was no Mother Teresa and far too much of a coward to beg them to go home. They were tougher than he was and would have told him to get lost anyway. Besides, they had left their homes because life there was worse, in their eyes at least, than life on the streets. If there was one thing those children knew, it was where and when they were unhappy: there was no cloud of morality obscuring the clarity of their states of mind. They weren't popular with the majority of rent-boys, however, because they attracted television documentaries, clean-up campaigns and police attention, all of which interfered with and militated against the free flow of trade. Their customers, known not unnaturally as chickenhawks, were more nervous and cautious than Adrian's brand of client, so the chickens would have to do much more of the running than he could ever have dared to do. They would spot when they were being eyed up and step boldly forward.

'Lend us ten p for the machine, mister.'

'Oh, yes. Right. There you are.'

'Second thoughts, Dad, let's go away from here.'

It was unsettling to think of them being the same age as Cartwright. Cartwright would be sixteen going on seventeen now of course, but the Cartwright he would always know was thirteen going on fourteen. The chickens leant up against the Meat Rack pushing their tightly denimed bums against the rails when, if only the stork had dropped them down a different chimney, they could have been clothed in white flannels, driving the ball past extra cover for four runs or wrestling with ablative absolutes in panelled classrooms. If there was an accurate means of measuring happiness, with electrodes or chemicals, Adrian wondered if the schoolboy would prove to be happier than the rent-boy. Would he feel less exploited, less shat upon? Adrian himself felt freer than he ever had, but he had never been sure that he was representative.

After three weeks he decided to take advantage of his flexible hours and spend five days at Lord's watching Thompson and Lillee tear the heart out of the English batting in the second Test. He arrived at the Grace Gate early and walked round to the back to see if he could get a glimpse of the players warming up in the nets.

As he made his way past the Stewards' Offices and the members' stands he thought he caught a glimpse of a familiar figure striding towards him. He turned and started to walk in the opposite direction.

'Adrian! My God, Adrian!'

He quickened his step, but found himself blocked by the incoming tide of spectators.

'Adrian!'

'Oh, hello, Uncle David.' Adrian smiled weakly up into the thunderous face of his mother's brother.

'Where the hell have you been this last month?'

'Oh, you know . . .'

'Have you been in touch with your mother and father yet?'

'Well... I have been meaning to write.'

Uncle David grabbed him by the arm.

'You come along with me, young man. Sick with worry your mother's been. Sick. HOW you could have dared . . .'

Adrian had the lowering experience of being publicly dragged into the MCC offices like an errant schoolboy, which he supposed was by and large what he was.

'Morning, David, caught a yobbo have you?' someone called as he was pulled up the steps.

'I certainly have!'

They bumped into a tall blond man in a blazer coming the other way who smiled at them.

'Morning, Sir David,' he said.

'Morning, Tony, best of luck.'

'Thanks,' said the tall man and walked on. Adrian stopped dead as it suddenly dawned on him who it had been.

'That was Tony Greig!'

'Well who did you expect to see here, you idiot? Ilie Nastase? This way.'

They had reached a small office whose walls were covered with prints of heroes from the Golden Age of cricket. Uncle David closed the door and pushed Adrian into a chair.

'Now then. Tell me where you are living.'

'Muswell Hill.'

'Address?'

'Fourteen Endicott Gardens.'

'Whose house is that?'

'It's a bed and breakfast place.'

'Do you have a job?'

Adrian nodded.

'Where?'

'I'm working in the West End.' The 'in' was redundant, but Uncle David was unlikely to be impressed by the truth.

'Doing what?'

'It's a theatrical agency in Denmark Street. I make the coffee, that kind of thing.'

'Right. There's a pen, there's paper. I want you to write down the address in Muswell Hill and the address in Denmark Street. Then you are to write a letter to your parents. Have you any idea what you've put them through? They went to the police, for God's sake! What the hell was it all about, Adrian?'

Here he was in another study, in another chair, facing another angry man and being asked another set of impossible questions. 'Why do you do this sort of thing?' 'Why can't you concentrate?' 'Why can't you behave like everyone else?' 'What's the matter with you?'

Adrian knew that if he answered 'I don't know' in a sulky voice, Uncle David would, like dozens before him, snort and bang the table and shout back, 'What do you mean, you don't know? You must know. Answer me!'

Adrian stared at the carpet.

'Well?' asked Uncle David.

'I don't know,' Adrian said sulkily.

'What do you mean, you don't know? You must know. Answer me!'

'I was unhappy.'

'Unhappy? Well why couldn't you have told someone? Can you imagine how your mother felt when you didn't come home? When no one knew where you were? That's unhappy for you. Can you imagine it? No, of course you can't.'

Beyond a pewter mug at his Christening, a Bible at his Confirmation, a copy of Wisden every birthday and regular bluff shoulder-clapping and by-Christ-you've-grown-ing, Uncle David hadn't taken his sponsorial duties to Adrian with any spectacular seriousness, and it was unsettling to see him now glaring and breathing heavily down his nostrils as if he had been personally affronted by his godson's flight. Adrian didn't think he'd earned the right to look that angry.

'I just felt I had to get away.'

'I dare say. But to be so underhand, so ... sly. To sneak away without saying a word. That was the act of a coward and a rotter. You'll write that letter.'

Uncle David left the room, locking the door behind him. Adrian sighed and turned to the desk. He noticed a silver letter-opener on the desk in the shape of a cricket bat. He held it to the light and saw the engraved signature of Donald Bradman running obliquely across the splice. Adrian slipped it into the inside pocket of his blazer and settled down to write.Under a Portrait of Prince Ranjitsinhji,

A funny little office near the Long Room,

Lord's Cricket Ground, June 1975 Dear Mother and Father, I'm so sorry I ran away without saying goodbye. Uncle David tells me that you have been worrying about me, not too much I hope.I'm living in a Bed and Breakfast place in 14 Endicott Gardens, Highgate, and I have a job in a theatrical agency called Leon Bright's, 59 Denmark Street, WC2. I'm a sort of messenger and office-boy, but it's a good job and I hope to rent a flat soon.I am well and happy and truly sorry if I have upset you. I will write soon and at length to explain why I felt I had to leave. Please try and forgive Your doting son Adrian PS I met the new England Captain, Tony Greig, today.

Twenty minutes later, Uncle David returned and read it through.

'I suppose that will do. Leave it with me and I'll see that it's posted.'

He looked Adrian up and down.

'If you looked halfway decent I'd invite you to watch from the Members' Stand.'

'That's all right.'

'Come tomorrow wearing a tie and I'll see what I can do.'

'That's awfully kind. I'd love to.'

'They give you days off to watch cricket, do they? From this place in Denmark Street? Just like that?'

'Like the Foreign Office, you mean?'

'Fair point, you cheeky little rat. And get your hair cut. You look like a tart.'

'Heavens! Do I?'

Adrian did not return to Lord's the next day, nor any of the other days. Instead he had gone back to work and found time to hang around the Tottenham Court Road catching Tony Greig's ninety-six and Lillee's maddening seventy-three on the banks of televisions in the electrical appliance shop windows.

The risk of meeting people he knew was acute. He remem- bered how Dr Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes story had described Piccadilly Circus as a great cesspool into which every idler and lounger of the Empire was irresistibly drained. It seemed now that as the Empire had dwindled in size, so the strength of the Circus's pull had grown. Britain was a draining bath and Piccadilly, its plug-hole, now seemed almost audibly to gurgle as it sucked in the last few gallons of waste.

It was part of Adrian's job, in the centre of the whirlpool, to scrutinise every face that eddied past. Innocent passers-by tended not to meet the glances of strangers, so he usually found himself able to turn away in time if there was someone he knew in the area.

One rainy afternoon, however, about a fortnight after the meeting with his Uncle David, while sheltering in a favourite pitch under the columns of Swan and Edgar, touting for business, he caught sight of Dr Meddlar, without his dog collar but unmistakable nevertheless, coming up the steps from the Underground.

Term must be over, Adrian thought as he concealed himself behind a pillar.

He watched Meddlar look left and right before crossing over to Boots the Chemists under the neon signs. Greg and Mark, a couple of skinheads that Adrian knew, were going about their unlawful business there, and he was amazed to see Meddlar stop and talk to one of them. He was trying to look casual, but to Adrian's knowing eye it was perfectly clear that formal discussions were taking place.

Hopping through the traffic, Adrian approached from behind.

'Why, Dr Meddlar!' he cried, slapping him bonhomously on the back.

Meddlar spun round.

'Healey!'

'My dear old Chaplain, how simply splendid to see you!' Adrian shook him warmly by the hand. 'But let me give you a piece of advice - verb sap as we used to say at the dear old school - if they're asking more than a tenner for you to suck their cocks, you're being ripped off.'

Meddlar went white and stepped backwards off the kerb.

'You're leaving?' Adrian was disappointed. 'Oh, if you must. But any time you're in need of rough sex let me know and I'll fix you up with something. But as the man said in Casablanca, "Beware, there are vultures everywhere. Everywhere, vultures.'"

Meddlar disappeared into a mess of spray and car horns.

'Remember the Green Cross Code,' Adrian called after him. 'Because I won't be there when you cross the road.'

The skinheads were not pleased.

'You bastard, Hugo! We were about to score.'

'I'll pay you in full, my dears,' said Adrian. 'It was worth it. Meanwhile let me stand you both a Fanta in the Wimpy. There's no action going on in this bloody rain.'

They sat by the window, automatically scanning the crowds that blurred past.

'Why did he call you "Healey"?' asked Greg. 'I thought your name was Bullock?'

'Healey was my nickname,' said Adrian. 'I used to do impressions of Denis Healey the politician, you see. It sort of stuck.'

'Oh.'

'What a silly billy,' Adrian added, by way of proof.

'That's just like him!'

'Well, it's just like Mike Yarwood anyway.'

'And that guy really was a vicar?'

'School Chaplain, on my life.'

'Bloody hell. He was asking Terry and me if we'd tie him up. And him a bleeding Collar.'

'"I struck the board and cried No More!" said Adrian, folding his hands in prayer.

'You what?'

'George Herbert. A poem called "The Collar". It must have passed you by somehow. "Have I no garlands gay? All blasted? All wasted? Not so my heart: but there is fruit, and thou hast hands."'

'Oh. Right. Yeah.'

'You were the garlands gay, the fruit. And his hands were about to lay themselves on you, I suspect. He must have forgotten how it ends. "At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied, My Lord."'

'You don't half rabbit, do you?'

'It's a splendid poem, you'd love it. I can sprint down to Hatchards and buy a copy if you'd like.'

'Fuck off.'

'Yes, well, there is that side to it too, of course,' Adrian conceded. 'Now, if you'll forgive me, I've got to nip next door to Boots and get myself some more lotion for the old crabs.'

About two months later he was picked up by an actor.

'I know you,' Adrian said, as they sat back in the taxi.

The actor took off his sunglasses.

'Christ!'Adrian giggled.'You're - '

'Just call me Guy,' said the actor. 'It's my real name.'

A famous trick! Adrian thought to himself. I've turned a famous trick!

He stayed the night, something he had been warned against. Guy had woken him up with smoked salmon and scrambled eggs and a kiss.

'I couldn't believe you were trade, honey,' he said. 'I saw you walk from Playland to the Dilly and I couldn't fucking believe it.'

'Oh well,' said Adrian modestly, 'I haven't been at it long.'

'And Hugo, too! My favourite name. It's always been my favourite name.'

'One does one's best.'

'Will you stay with me, Hugo baby?'

The invitation couldn't have come at a better time for Adrian. Three days before he had caught sight of himself in the mirror of the Regent Palace Hotel cloakroom and been shocked to see the face of a whore looking back at him.

He didn't know how or why he had changed, but he had. Only the tiniest amount of bumfluff grew on his chin and when he shaved it off he was still as smooth as a ten-year-old. His hair was shorter, but not coiffured or poncey. His jeans were tight, but no tighter than any student's. Yet the face had screamed 'Rent'.

He smiled engagingly at the mirror. A cheap invitation leered back.

He raised his eyebrows and tried a lost, innocent look.

Fifteen quid for a blow-job. Nothing up the arse, his reflection replied.

A couple of weeks out of the Dilly would give him a chance to bring back some of the peaches and cream.

Guy lived in a small house in Chelsea and was about to start shooting a film at Shepperton Studios. He had been cruising Piccadilly for a last treat before throwing himself into five weeks of rising at six and working till eight.

'But now I've got a friend to come home to. It's wonderful, honey, wonderful!'

Adrian thought that to have someone to answer the telephone, do the shopping and keep the place tidy for him was indeed wonderful.

'I had an Irish cleaner once, but the bitch threatened to go to the press, so I don't trust anyone to come in now. I trust you, though, cutie-pie.' i The public school accent. If only they knew.

'I may be right, I may be wrong,' he sang to himself in the shower, 'But I'm perfectly willing to swear, That when you turned and smiled at me, A prostitute wept in Soho Square.'

So Adrian stayed and learnt how to cook and shop and be charming at dinner parties. Guy's friends were mostly producers and writers and actors, only a few of them gay. Adrian was the only one who called him Guy, which added a special and publicly endearing touch to the friendship. Guy was thirty-five and had been married at the age of nineteen. The child from this marriage lived with the ex-wife, an actress who had taken Guy's announcement of homosexuality very badly, instantly remarrying and denying Guy any access to his son.

'He must be about your age now, couple of years younger perhaps. I bet he's a screaming madam. It would serve the bitch right.'

One evening Guy's agent, Michael Morahan, and his wife Angela came to dinner. They arrived before Guy had returned from Shepperton so Adrian did his best to entertain them in the kitchen where he was chopping peppers.

'We've heard a lot about you,' said Angela, dropping her ocelot stole onto the kitchen table.

'Golden opinions, I trust?'

'Oh yes, you've done Tony nothing but good.'

Michael Morahan opened a bottle of wine.

'That's a seventy-four,' said Adrian. 'It'll need to be decanted or at least breathe for an hour. There's a Sancerre in the fridge if you'd rather.'

'Thank you, this will be fine,' was the blunt reply. 'I understand from Tony that you're an O.H. ?'

Adrian had already noticed the Old Harrovian tie around Morahan's neck and had his answer prepared.

'Well, to tell you the truth,' he said, 'that's a rumour that I sort of allowed to get around. Security,' he said, tapping the side of his nose. 'I may as well tell you that Hugo Bullock isn't my real name either.'

Morahan stared unpleasantly.

'So. A mystery man from nowhere. Does Tony know that?'

'Oh dear, do you think he should?'

'I'm sure not,' said Angela. 'Anyone can tell you're trustworthy.'

They went through to the sitting room, Adrian wiping his hands on a blue-and-white-striped butcher's apron he liked to wear when cooking.

'I have to look after him, you see,' said Morahan. 'Under age and anonymous is worrying.'

'I'll be eighteen in a couple of weeks.'

'You'll still be under age by three years. A man's career can be ruined. It nearly happened last year.'

'It wouldn't exactly do my career any good either, would it? So we're in a position of mutual trust, I'd've thought.'

'What do you have to lose exactly?'

'The bubble, reputation.'

'Really?'

'Yes, really.'

Angela intervened.

'It's just that we have to be sure . . . I'm sure you understand, Hugo darling ... we have to be sure that you're not going to . . . to hurt Tony.'

'But why on earth should I?'

'Oh come on, man!' Morahan snorted. 'You know what we're saying.'

'You're saying that Guy, who is thirty-five years old, rich, famous and experienced in the ways of the world, is a poor trusting innocent to be protected and I, half his age, am a corrupting devil who might hurt him? Blackmail him, I suppose is what you mean.'

'I'm sure Michael never meant that . . .'

'I shall go to the kitchen and crush a garlic'

Angela followed him in.

'It's his job, Hugo. You must understand.'

It might have been the garlic and the onions that he was chopping, it might have been anger, it might have been nothing more than performance - because it seemed dramatically the right thing to do under the circumstances - but for whatever reason, tears were in Adrian's eyes. He wiped them away. 'I'm sorry, Angela.'

'Darling, don't be ridiculous. Everything's going to be fine. Michael just wanted to . . . find me a cigarette would you? . . . he just wanted to be sure.'

They heard Guy coming up the stairs.

'Yoo-hoo, honey-bear! Daddy's home.'

Adrian winced at the language. Angela squeezed his arm.

'You love him, don't you, darling?' she whispered.

Adrian nodded. He might as well have this awful woman on his side.

'Everything's going to be fine,' she said, kissing him on the cheek.

Adrian displayed just the right kind of affection towards Guy over dinner. Not whorish, but adoring; not clinging or possessive, but happy and trusting. Michael and Angela went away full of praise for his cooking, his wit and his discretion.

Guy was very touched. He nuzzled up to Adrian on the sofa.

'You're my very special puppy and I don't deserve you. You're magical and wonderful and you're never to leave.'

'Never?'

'Never.'

'What about when I'm fat and hairy?'

'Don't be a silly baby. Come bye-byes with Guy-Guy.'

On the evening before his last day of filming, Guy asked Adrian to take an envelope to a house in Battersea and bring back the reply. Zak, the man to whom he was to deliver the envelope, would be expecting him, but he was a famous Dutch pop-star, shy of publicity, so Adrian shouldn't be surprised if he behaved oddly.

Adrian couldn't think of any Dutch pop-stars who needed to be shy of publicity in South London, but Guy's manner and lack of soupy terms of endearment suggested that this was a serious business, so he said nothing and next morning went happily on his way.

Zak was friendly enough.

'Boyfriend of Tony? Hi, good to meet you. You got something for me?'

Adrian handed him the envelope.

'Guy ... I mean Tony . . . said there'd be a reply.'

'A reply? Sure, I've got a reply. You wait here one moment.'

The envelope containing the reply was sealed and Adrian walked back over Chelsea Bridge, debating with himself whether or not to steam it open and read it when he got back to the house. He decided against it. Guy trusted him and it would be exhilarating to be so honest for a change. Instead he pulled out his copy of Antigone and read as he walked. It was something of a pose, he liked the idea of being seen reading a book in French, but he also wanted to keep fluent. It always caused a sensation in the Dilly when he was able to give directions to French tourists or, indeed, to do business with them.

He reached the King's Road and turned left. There was some kind of a scuffle going on outside the King's Tavern. A group of glue-sniffers was fighting with spray cans. One of them sprayed red paint over Adrian as he tried to hurry past.

'Oh, look what you've done!' he cried.

'Oh, look what you've done!' they shouted back, mimicking his accent. 'Fuck off, arsehole.'

They were not in a mood to be spoken to, so Adrian moved smartly away. But they decided to abandon their game and give chase.

Oh shit, Adrian thought to himself, as he ran into Bywater Street. Why did I say anything at all? You idiot, Adrian! You're going to get twenty types of crap beaten out of you now. He could hear them catching up with him. But then ... joy of joys! He heard the wee-waa, wee-waa of a police car drawing up.

Two of the kids scattered, with an officer sprinting after them. But the other three were pushed against a wall and searched.

'Thank God,' panted Adrian.

'Against that wall,' said a sergeant.

'Sorry?'

'Against that wall.'

'But I'm the one they were chasing!'

'You heard me.'

Adrian spread his legs against the wall and assumed the position.

'What's this?'

'What's what?' said Adrian. All he could see was a brick wall.

'This,' said the policeman, turning him round and holding up an envelope.

'Oh, it's a message. Belongs to a friend of mine. It's private.'

'A message?'

'That's right.'

The policeman ripped the envelope open and pulled out a polythene sachet of white powder.

'Funny kind of message.'

'What is it?' asked Adrian.

The policeman opened the sachet and dipped a finger into the powder.

'Well, flower,' he said as he sucked the finger, 'I'd say it was two years. Two years easy.'

*

A table, two chairs, a door that squeaked, cigarette smoke, no window, yellowing gloss paint, the distant murmur of the King's Road, the unblinking brown eyes of Detective Sergeant Canter of the Drug Squad.

'Look, you say it's not yours. You were delivering it for a friend. You've never used the stuff yourself. You didn't even know what it was. Frankly, Hugo, I believe you. But if you don't tell us the name of this friend, then I'm sorry to say that you'll be drowning in a bucket of hot shit without a life-belt.'

'But I can't, I really can't. It would ruin him.'

'It's not going to do you a lot of good, either, is it?'

Adrian clutched his head in his hands. Canter was friendly, amused, indifferent and tenacious.

'I've got to think up a charge, you see. What can I choose? There's possession. Let me see . . . how much was it? Seven grammes of Charlie ... bit dodgy, that. Rather a lot for personal use. But first offence, you're young. Reckon we could get away with six months DC.'

'DC?'

'Detention Centre, Hugo. Not nice, but quick. Short sharp shock. Then there's possession with intent to supply. You're looking at two years straight away, now. Then we have to think about trafficking. They throw away the key for that one.'

'But. . .'

'The thing is, Hugo, I've got a problem here you have to help me with. You've already told me that you don't take it yourself, so I can't really charge you with possession, can I? If you don't powder your own nose, you must have been intending to flog it to someone else. Stands to reason.'

'But he wasn't paying me! It was just an errand, I didn't know what it was.'

'Mm.' Sergeant Canter looked down at his notes. 'Rather a lot of cash in your post-office account, isn't there? Where's all that from, then?'

'That's mine! I've . . . I've saved it. I've never had anything to do with drugs. I promise!'

'But I look down at my notes and I don't see any names. All I see is "Hugo Bullock nicked in possession of a quarter ounce of best Bolivian Marching Powder." No one else for my charge-sheet. Just Hugo Bullock. I need the name of the man you collected it from and I need the name of your friend, don't I?'

Adrian shook his head.

The detective sergeant patted him on the shoulder.

'Lover is he?'

Adrian blushed.

'He's just... a friend.'

'Yeah. That's right. Yeah. How old are you, Hugo?'

'Eighteen next week.'

'There you go. I think I better have his name, don't you? He corrupts a nice well-brought-up young kid and he sends him to pick up his cocaine for him. The court will weep big tears for you, my son. Probation and sympathy.'

Adrian stared down at the table.

'The other man,' he said. 'The man I got it off. I'll give you his name.'

'Well, that's a start.'

'But he mustn't know that I told you.'

He had a sudden vision of a Godfather-like revenge being wreaked against him. Adrian, the man who grassed, beaten to a pulp in a prison, a brown-paper parcel of two dead fishes sent to his parents.

'I mean he won't ever know, will he? I won't have to give evidence against him or anything?'

'Calm down, Hugo, old lad. If he's a dealer we put him under surveillance and we catch him in the act. Your name never comes into it.'

Sergeant Canter leant forward, gently raised Adrian's chin with a finger, and looked into his eyes.

'That's a promise, Hugo. Believe me.'

Adrian nodded.

'But you'd better start talking quick. Your boyfriend is going to be wondering where you are by now. We don't want him to call his dealer friend up on the blower, do we?'

'No.' ,

'No. He'll be out of it quick as shit off a shovel and then Hugo Bullock will still be the only name on my list.'

'He . . . my friend won't miss me until the evening.'

'I see, what's his job?'

'Look, I said. I'm only going to tell you about the other man.'

'My pencil is poised, Hugo.'

After Adrian had signed his statement they brought him a cup of tea. A detective inspector came in to read through it. He glanced at Adrian.

'Looks like you're in a bit of luck, Bullock. Zak is not exactly a stranger to us. About five nine, you say?'

'Well I said I thought he was about the same size as Sergeant Canter.'

'Stud in the left ear?'

'I'm pretty sure it was the left.'

'Yeah. We lost the bastard a couple of months ago. If he's where you say he is you've done us a bit of a favour.'

'Oh well. Anything to help.'

The detective inspector laughed.

'Get him charged and sorted out with a brief, John. Possession.'

'What's a brief?' asked Adrian when the inspector had gone.

'Solicitor.'

'Oh. I thought . . . you know, legal aid. Don't you provide one?'

A boy like you . . . your parents are going to want to appoint one.'

'My parents?'

'Yeah. What's their address?'

'I'd I'd much rather keep my parents out of it. They don't know where I am you see and I've put them through enough really.'

'They file you as a missing person?'

'Yes ... I mean, I think they did go to the police. I bumped into my godfather and he said they had.'

'I think they'd be happier knowing where you are then, don't you?'

But Adrian remained firm and was led to the desk to be charged as Hugo Bullock.

'Empty your pockets on the desk, please.'

His possessions were examined and itemised in a ledger.

'You have to sign so that when you get them back you know we haven't robbed you,' said Canter.

'Oh lordy lord, I trust you,' said Adrian, who was beginning to enjoy himself. 'If a chap can't consign his chattels to an honest constable without suspicion then what has the world come to?'

'Yeah, right. We'll need your signature anyway. Oh, and there's one other thing, Adrian.'

'Yes?'

'Ah,' said Canter. 'So it's Adrian Healey, is it? Not Hugo Bullock.'

Damn, shit, bollocks and buggery-fuck.

D.S. Canter was holding up Anouilh's Antigone. Adrian's name was written on the fly-leaf.

'Clever lad like you, falling for a trick like that,' he tutted. 'No Bullock on the missing persons list, you see. But I bet there'll be a Healey, won't there?'

II

A bell rang in the corridor, doors slammed and voices rose in anger.

'Watch yourself, Ashcroft, one more sound out of you and you're on report.'

'But what did I do?'

Adrian shut his eyes and tried to concentrate on the letter he was writing.

'Right! I warned you. Loss of privileges for a week.'

He took a piece of paper and spread it flat on the table. A cold wind blew outside and the sky had darkened to gunmetal grey. Snow was on the way.

'Please Mr Annendale, may I get a book from the library?'

'If you hurry.'

Adrian picked up a pen and began.Dear Guy, I have been meaning to pluck up the nerve to write to you for some time. I was finally pricked into action by seeing you in The Likeness the other night. You were brilliant as always. I loved you in both parts - though the Good Shelford reminded me more of the Guy I Know (up in the gallery) . . . I wonder if you found out what happened to me? I have a feeling that you imagined me skipping off with your money. But perhaps you heard the truth. The fact is that after I had been to see your friend Zak I was arrested by the police in possession of your end-of-shoot cocaine – you were just finishing The Red Roof if you remember. You'll be pleased to know, by the way, that Zak wasn't ripping you off– the haul was described in court as seven grammes of highest quality Andean flake. It may be that you've been suffering from a guilty conscience about my innocent involvement in the whole affair, but if you have, I can now cheerfully relieve you of that burden. I was treated well and never put under pressure to reveal any names.The old parents rallied round with character witnesses - godfathers, bishops, generals, even my old Housemaster at school would you believe? – and with squads of armed and dangerous solicitors. What chance did the magistrates stand? It was only by calling on all their reserves of pride and self-control that they managed to summon up the nerve even to put me on probation. I think one of them was so overcome by my quiet dignity and round-eyed innocence that he came within an ace of recommending some kind of civilian award for me.Since then I have been to a crammer's in Stroud, passed exams and find myself filling in time teaching at a prep school in Norfolk before going off to St Matthew's College, Cambridge – not quite poacher turned game-keeper . . . slave turned slave-master? Something like it. Boy turned man, I suppose.My name, as you probably know, is as far from Hugo Bullock as a name can be without actually falling over, but I won't bother you with it. This is just to wish you well and thank you for a month or two of unsurpassable fun and frolic.I hope you are now treating your nostrils as well as you treated Your very own Hugo Bullock

There was a knock on the door.

'Please, sir, can I ask a question?'

'Newton, I distinctly heard with my own two ears - these, the ones I put on this morning because they go so well with my eyes - that Mr Annendale gave you permission to go to the library and get a book. I did not hear him give you permission to come to my room.'

'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 real: 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.

Yet the sparks that spat up the flue spelt Wrigleys and Coke and Toshiba in Piccadilly neon; the escape of steam from the logs hissed a meeting of prefects plotting punishment.

He knew he could never jingle change in his pocket or park his car like a confident adult, he was the Adrian he had always been, casting a guilty look over a furtive shoulder, living in eternal dread of a grown-up striding forward to clip his ear.

But there again, when he sipped at the whisky his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout 'Bollocks' during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through National Geographic on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies.

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.

'Lesbian!' he yelled back.

When he came back next term, she was gone. Her replacement was a forty-year-old with one breast who most certainly was lesbian, which allowed the rest of the staff the free luxury of finding her irresistibly desirable. They spent their days saying she was a grand old girl and their evenings attempting to coax her down to the pub.

'Your girlfriend has gone, sir,' said Newton. 'Whatever are you going to do?'

'I shall devote the rest of my life to beating you into a puree,' said Adrian. 'It will help me forget.'

III The morning of the match, Hunt had put a message under Adrian's toast as usual. This time it was a large heart-shaped piece of paper covered in kisses. This was going too far.

In theory, the boy on clearing duty should be the one to make masters' toast, but Hunt had long since decided that no one but he was going to make Adrian's. He fought everyone for the right. Whenever Adrian came down there would be two pieces on his side plate, and under them would be a message, usually nothing more dreadful than 'Your toast, sir . . .'or 'Each slice hand-grilled the traditional way by heritage craftsmen'. But love-hearts were too much, Adrian looked round the hall to where Hunt was sitting. The boy pinkened and gave a small wave.

'What's Hunt the Thimble given you today, sir?' asked Rudder, the prefect next to Adrian. Hunt was known as the Thimble for the obvious reason and because he was said to be rather under-endowed.

'Oh nothing, nothing . . . the usual drivel.'

'I bet it isn't, sir. We told him that it was Valentine's Day today.'

'But Valentine's Day, Rudder dearest, falls on February the fourteenth and lies there until the fifteenth of that month. Unless I have become so bored by your anserine conversation and fallen asleep for seven months, this is currently the month of June we are enjoying. What else, after all, could explain your cricket whites?'

'I know, sir. But we told him Valentine's Day was today. That's the joke.'

'Ah! Well, if the Queen can have two birthdays, why cannot Hunt the Thimble be granted the right to celebrate two Valentine's Days?'

'He told me,' said Rudder, 'that if he didn't get one back from you, he was going to hang himself.'

'He said what? said Adrian, going white.

'Sir?'

Adrian grabbed Rudder's arm.

"What did he say?'

'Sir, you're hurting! It was just a joke.'

'You find the idea of suicide amusing, do you?'

'Well no, sir, but it was just . . .'

There was a silence. The boys at his table looked down at their cereal bowls. It wasn't like Adrian to be angry or violent.

'I'm sorry my angels,' he said, with an attempt at a laugh. 'No sleep last night. Working on the play. Either that or I'm turning mad. It was a full moon you know, and there's a history of lycanthropy in my family. Uncle Everard turns into a wolf every time he hears the Crossroads theme tune.'

Rudder giggled. The uncomfortable moment passed.

'Well, looks like a fine day today. I vote we load a crate of Coke onto the minibus before we go. You know what Narbor-ough match teas are like.'

A mighty cheer now. The other tables looked across enviously. Healey's lot was always having fun.

*

The atmosphere in the minubus was tense. Adrian sat with them and tried to appear sunny and confident. It was no good his telling them to remember that it was only a game when he was as nervous as a kitten himself.

'We'll take a look at the pitch,' he told Hooper, the captain, 'and we'll decide then. But unless it's decidedly moist, put them in the field if you win the toss. "Knock 'em up, bowl 'em out" . . . it never fails.'

He was pleased with what he had done to the cricket eleven. He had never been much of a player himself but he knew and loved the game well enough to be able to make a difference to a schoolboy team. Everyone had agreed, watching his first eleven play a warm-up match against a scratch Rest of the School side, that he had done a tremendous job in two weeks.

But now they faced their first real opposition and he was worried that against another school they would fall to pieces. Last year, Hooper told him, Chartham Park was the laughingstock of the whole area.

The bus whined up the Narborough driveway.

'Who's been here before?' ^ 'I have, sir, for a rugger match,' said Rudder.

'Why are other schools always so forbidding? They seem infinitely bigger and more serious and their boys all look at least forty years old.'

'It's not a bad place, sir. Quite friendly.'

'Friendly? The maws of the heffalump are open wide, but don't believe that it betokens friendliness. Trust no one, speak to no one. As soon as you've heard this communication, eat it.'

There was a boy in a Narborough blazer waiting to show the team where to go. Adrian watched them stream off to the back of the house.

'See you there, my honeys. Don't accept any hand-rolled cigarettes from them.'

An old master bustled out to welcome Adrian.

'You're Chartham Park, yes?'

'That's right. Adrian Healey.'

'Staveley. I'm not Cricket. Our man's giving the team a pep talk. It's morning break at the moment. Come; through to the staff room and savage a Chelsea bun with us.'

The staff room was baronial and crowded with what seemed to Adrian like a greater number of masters than Chartham had boys.

'Ah, Chartham's new blood!' boomed the headmaster. 'Come to give us a spanking, have you?'

'Oh well, I don't know about that, sir,' Adrian shook his hand. 'They tell me that you're hot stuff. Double figures would satisfy us.'

'That false modesty doesn't do, you know. I can smell your confidence. You're St Matthew's bound, I understand?'

'That's right, sir.'

'Well then, you'll be pleased to meet my Uncle Donald who's staying here until Cambridge term begins. He'll be your Senior Tutor at St Matthew's of course. Where is he? Uncle Donald, meet Adrian Healey, Chartham Park's new secret weapon, he's joining you at Michaelmas. Adrian Healey, Professor Trefusis.'

A short man with white hair and a startled expression turned and surveyed Adrian.

'Healey? Yes indeed, Healey. How do you do?'

'How do you do, Professor?'

'Healey, that's right. Quite right. Your entrance paper was very encouraging. Pregnant with promise, gravid with wit.'

'Thank you.'

'And you're a cricketer?'

'Well, not really. I've been trying to coach a bit, though.'

'Well best of luck, my dear. My nephew Philip has a youth like yourself on the staff- he'll be going to Trinity - who is said to have done much with the Narborough side. Quite the young thaumaturge, they tell me.'

'Oh dear. I think that means we can expect to be marmalised. I was hoping Narborough would have sunk into overconfidence.'

'Here he comes now, you'll be umpiring together. Let me introduce you.'

Adrian turned to see a young man in a cricket-sweater making his way towards them. It had to happen one day. It was bound to have done. Adrian always imagined that it would be in the street or on a train. But here? Today? In this place?

'I already know Hugo Cartwright,' he said. 'We were at school together.'

'Hello, Adrian,' said Hugo. 'Ready to be pounded into the dust?'

They put on their white coats and walked down to the ground.

'What sort of a wicket have you got for us?' Adrian asked.

'Not bad, slight leg-to-off slope from the pavilion end.'

'Got any bowlers who can use it?'

'We've a little leg-spinner I have hopes for.'

Adrian winced: he hadn't properly inoculated his team against leg-spin. It could run through a prep-school batting line-up like cholera through a slum.

'Does he have a googlie?'

'Ha-ha!' said Hugo.

'Bastard.'

He looked different but the same. Adrian's eyes could see the real Cartwright not too far beneath the surface. Behind the strengthened features he saw the smoother lines of the boy, within the firmer stride he read the former grace. His memory could scrub off four years of tarnish and restore the shining original. But no one else would have been able to.

If Clare had been with him and he had said, 'What do you think of that man there?' she would probably have wrinkled her nose and replied, 'Okay, I suppose. But I always think blond men look sinister.'

Everyone has their time, Adrian thought. You can meet people of thirty and know that when their hair is grey and their face lined, they will look wonderfully at their best. That Professor, for one, Donald Trefusis. He must have looked ridiculous as a teenager, but now he has come into his own. Others, whose proper age was twenty-five, grew old grotesquely, their baldness and thickening waistlines an affront to what they once were. There were men like that on the staff at Chartham, fifty or sixty years old, but whose true characters were only discernible in hints of some former passion and vigour that would come out when they were excited. The headmaster, on the other hand, was a pompous forty-one, waiting to ripen into a delicious sixty-five. What Adrian's own proper age was, he had no idea. Sometimes he felt he had left himself behind at school, at other times he thought he would be at his best in tubby and contented middle age. But Hugo . . . Hugo he knew would always be growing away from his fourteen-year-old perfection: the clues to his former beauty would become harder to find as each year passed, the golden hair would seem pale and weak at thirty, the liquid blue of the eyes would harden and set at thirty-five.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date, Hugo old boy, thought Adrian, but your eternal summer shall not fade. In my imagination you are immortal. The man walking beside me is merely The Picture of Hugo Cartwright, ageing and coarsening: I have the real Hugo in my head and he will live as long as I do.

'I think we'll bat first, sir,' the Narborough captain announced after winning the toss.

'That's it, Malthouse,' said Hugo. 'Knock 'em up and bowl 'em out.''

'Trust me to lose the toss,' said Hooper. 'Sorry, sir.'

'Don't be a dafty-trousers,' said Adrian. 'It's a good wicket to bat second on, it'll dry out all through the afternoon.'

He threw the ball to Rudder, Chartham's opening bowler, before taking his position at the stumps.

'Remember, Simon,' he said, 'straight and on a length, that's all you have to do.'

'Yes, sir,' said Rudder, swallowing.

The ground was in a kind of valley, with the looming Gothic of Narborough Hall on one rise and the church and village of Narborough on another. The pavilion was whitewashed and thatched, the weather perfect with only the faintest of breezes luffing the fielders' shirtsleeves. The grim seriousness of the children preparing to play, the detached amusement of Hugo at square leg, the church clock chiming mid-day, the round circles of fine gang-mown cuttings in the outfield, the sun winking off the roller by the sight-screen, the distant clatter of spiked shoes on the pavilion concrete, the open blue of the wide Norfolk sky, the six pebbles in the hand of Adrian's outstretched arm, this whole monstrous illusion froze, while to Adrian the world seemed to hold its breath as if uncertain that such a picture could last. This fantasy of England that old men took with them to their death-beds, this England without factories and sewers or council houses, this England of leather and wood and flannel, this England circumscribed by a white boundary and laws that said that each team shall field eleven men and each man shall bat, this England of shooting-sticks, weather-vanes and rectory teas, it was like Cartwright's beauty, he thought, a momentary vision glimpsed for a second in an adolescent dream, then dispersed like steam into the real atmosphere of traffic-jams, serial murderers, prime ministers and Soho rent. But its spectral haze was sharper and clearer than the glare of the everyday and, against all evidence, was taken to be the only reality, its vapour trapped and distilled in the mind, its image, scents and textures bottled and laid down against the long, lonely melancholy of adulthood.