The Liar

'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.'