The Liar

'You're just saying that because you didn't understand it,' said Adrian.

'I'm just saying that because I did understand it,' said Tom. 'Any road up, we'd better start making some toast. I invited Bullock and Sampson over.'

'Oh, what?'

'We owe them a study tea.'

'You know I hate intellectuals.'

'You mean you hate people who are cleverer than you are.'

'Yes. I suppose that's why I like you so much, Tom.'

Tom gave him a pained, constipated stare.

'I'll boil the kettle,' he said.

Cartwright looked up from the Chamber's Encyclopaedia and mouthed, 'Otto Von Bismarck born in . . . in 1815, the year of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. Founder of modern Germany . . .'

In his line of sight were hundreds of books, the only one of which he could remember reading was To Kill a Mockingbird in the company of the rest of his fifth form at prep school. Such a great many books and yet this was still only the House library. The School library had thousands and thousands more and university libraries . . . Time was so short and his memory so feeble. What was it Healey had said? Memory is the mother of the Muses.

Cartwright levered Malthus to Nantucket from off the shelf and looked up Muses. There were nine of them and they were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. If Healey was right then Mnemosyne must mean memory.

Of course! The English word 'mnemonic', something that reminds you of something. Mnemonic must be derived from Mnemosyne. Or the other way around. Cartwright made a note in his rough-book.

According to the encyclopaedia, most of what was known of the Muses came down from the writings of Hesiod, particularly this Theogony. That must have been the poet Healey was referring to, Hesiod. But how did Healey know all that? He never seemed to be reading, at least no more than anyone else. Cartwright would never catch up with him. It just wasn't bloody fair.

He wrote down the names of the Muses and returned with a sigh to Bismarck. One day he would get right to the end, to zythum. Not that he needed to. He had peeped ahead and seen that it was a kind of ancient Egyptian beer, much recommended by Diodorus Siculus - whoever he was.

Everyone had been rather surprised the day Adrian announced that he was going to share a study with Tom.

'Thompson?' Heydon-Bayley had shrieked. 'But he's a complete dildo, surely?'

'I like him,' said Adrian, 'he's unusual.'

'Graceless, you mean. Wooden.'

Certainly there was nothing obviously appetising about Tom's appearance or manner, and he remained one of the few boys of his year with whom Adrian had never made the beast with two backs, or rather with whom he had never made the beast with one back and an interestingly shaped middle, but over the last year, more people had come to see that there was something arresting about Tom. He wasn't clever, but he worked hard and had set himself to read a great deal, in order, Adrian assumed, to acquire some of Adrian's dash and sparkle. Tom always went his own way with his own ideas. He managed to get away with the longest hair in the House and the most public nicotine habit in the school, somehow without ever drawing attention to himself. It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

Freda, the German undermatron, once discovered him sunbathing nude in the spinney.

'Thompson,' she had cried in outrage, 'you cannot be lying about naked!'

'Sorry, Matron, you're right,' Tom murmured, and he had reached out a hand arid put on a pair of mirrored sunglasses. 'Don't know what I was thinking of.'

Adrian felt that it was he who had brought Tom into notice and popularity, that Tom was his own special creation. The silent spotty gink of the first year had been transformed into someone admired and imitated and Adrian wasn't sure how much he liked it.

He liked Tom all right. He was the only person he had ever spoken to about his love for Cartwright and Tom had the decency not to be interested or sympathetic enough to quench the pure holy flame of Adrian's passion with sympathy or advice. Sampson and Bullock he could do without, however. Especially Sampson, who was too much of a grammar-school-type swot ever to be quite the thing. Not an ideal tea-companion at all.

Tea was a very special institution, revolving as it did around the ceremony and worship of Toast. In a place where alcohol, tobacco and drugs were forbidden, it was essential that something should take their place as a powerful and public totem of virility and cool. Toast, for reasons lost in time, was the substance chosen. Its name was dropped on every possible occasion, usually pronounced, in awful public school accents, 'taste'.

'I was just having some toast, when Burton and Hopwood came round . . .'

'Harman's not a bad fag actually. He makes really majorly good toast . . .'

'Yeah, you should come round to my study, maybe, we'll get some toast going . . .'

'God, I can hardly move. I've just completely overdone it on the toast . . .'

Adrian had been looking forward to toasting up with Tom in private and talking about Cartwright.

'Oh, Christ,' he said, clearing a space on his desk for the teapot. 'Oh, Christly Christ.'

'Problem?'

'I shall know no peace other than being kissed by him,' moaned Adrian.