The Liar

'Professor?'

'I knew that the man who wrote those artfully disguised second-hand essays, who disgorged such specious and ill-thought-out nonsense with such persuasive and brilliant flair wouldn't let me down. You've clearly a genius for deceit and chicanery. I look forward to seeing you next term.'

Ten 'Well!' said Trefusis when Adrian had finished. 'Did I really say that? 'A genius for deceit and chicanery'? Did I really? And we had only just been introduced. How rude.'

'I didn't take it so.'

'Well of course not.'

Trefusis groped about with this right hand in the driver's side glove compartment until he found a figgy oatcake, which he inspected carefully, blowing off a piece of fluff before popping it into his mouth. 'My goodness, Adrian,' he mumbled through the crumbs, 'that was all so much more than I had bargained for. Tell me . . .'

'Yes?'

'The girl who was the Matron at Chartham . . .'

'Clare? What about her?'

'Did you really . . .? I mean the lard and the football pump and the jam and the urine and so . . . and so on . . . you really did. . .?'

'Oh yes,' said Adrian. 'Isn't that usual?'

'Well now, usual. Usual isn't the word I'd've . . .' Trefusis wound down the window distractedly.

'Well anyway,' said Adrian, 'there it all is.'

'Young people sometimes give me the impression that I have never lived at all.'

'Surely you must have had experiences of a similar nature?'

'Oddly, no. Of a similar nature? No. It is profoundly strange I know, but I have not.'

'Well apart from . . .'

'Apart from what, dear boy?'

'Apart from, you know . . . that night in the lavs in Cambridge.'

'I beg your pardon? Oh . . . oh yes, of course. Apart from that, obviously.' Trefusis nodded contentedly. 'Now, unless I am more hugely mistaken than God, our service-station should be just around the corner. Ah! here we are. Petrol and lemon tea, I think. The car could do with a fill up and we could do with a fillip, hee-ho.'

Adrian, as the car swung off the road, marvelled, like many an English traveller before him, at the trimness and appealing order of continental service-stations. Euro-colours might be a little too bright and primary, but better this luminous cleanliness than the drab squalor of British motorway stops. How could they afford to have all the litter swept up and the paintwork so freshly maintained? Everything neat, from the little hanging-baskets of geraniums to the merry pantiled roofs that offered shaded parking to hot and weary travellers... a metallic gleam suddenly caught Adrian's eye. He gaped in astonishment.

Down the, end of the same row into which Trefusis was inexpertly manoeuvring the Wolseley was parked a green BMW with British licence plates and a Hoverspeed 'GB' sticker.

'Donald, look! It's them.'

'I should hope so too. I was most specific as to time.'

'You were what?'

'And don't forget, dearest lad, that the verb 'to be' takes a nominative complement.'

'What?'

'You said 'it's them'. What you meant of course was, 'it's they'.' Trefusis pulled up the handbrake and opened the door. 'But that's unbearable pedantry. Who, in their right mind, says 'it's they'? No one. Well? Are you going to sit in the car or are you going to come along with me and hear me practise my Luxembourgeois ?'

They took their trays of tea and buns to a table near the window. The couple from the BMW was sitting in a nonsmoking section at the other end of the dining area.

'It won't do to talk to them,' said Trefiisis. 'But it's good to know they are there.'

'Who are they?'

'Their names are Nancy and Simon Hesketh-Harvey and they have been kindly provided by an old friend of mine.'

'They're on our side then?'

Trefusis didn't answer. He bobbed his teabag up and down in its glass and thought for a moment.

'After the war,' he said at length, 'Humphrey Biffen, Helen Sorrel-Cameron, a mathematician called Bela Szabo and I had an idea.'

'At last,' said Adrian. 'The truth.'

'You shall judge. We had all of us worked together on Enigma and become increasingly interested, in our own ways, in the possibilities of language and machines. Bela knew very well that the path to what is now called computing had been opened up in Britain and America and that digital machines would one day be capable of linguistic programming. Turing's work at Bletch-ley had shown that the old Hollerin-based punched-card systems would soon be a thing of the past. Algorithmic, low-level mathematical languages would be followed by higher level modular intelligent languages giving rise, ultimately, to heuristic machines.'