The Liar

now.'

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

'There is truth in that remark.'

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

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

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

Jenny got up and switched off the television.

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

'That is something I did say, yes.'

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

'I'm insanely excited.'

'Good.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What happens in scene twelve?'

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

'Here I am.'

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

Hugo and Adrian walked into the theatre together.

'Nervous?'said Adrian.

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

'Your mother?'

'She's an actress.'

'Why did I never know that?'

'Why should you have done?'

'No reason, I suppose.'

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

Flowerbuck, he intoned to himself, has taken the boy Joe Cotton back to his house in Russell Square, convinced that he is his sister's son. Joe on arrival immediately tries to take off his clothes, unable to imagine that he would be expected to do anything else in a gentleman's house. Peter and Mrs Twimp, his housekeeper, calm him down and give him a bath. Mrs Twimp, played by Bridget Arden, injects into the scene her own brand of malapropistic comedy as they try to question Joe on the details of his early childhood. His memory is very uncertain. He recalls a