The Liar

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.'