The Liar

Trefusis stooped and picked something from the ground. He came up holding a thick oblong of folded paper which he handed to Adrian across the top of the Wolseley.

'This was wedged in the hinges of the door. What does it say?'

Adrian unfolded the oblong and spread it over the roof.

'I think it must be in code, or cypher, rather. Or whichever one was which. Either way it's gibberish to me. You take a look.'

Adrian revolved the sheet of paper to face Trefusis.

'Young Nancy takes after her mother,' he said. 'It's in Volapiik.'

'In what?'

'Volapuk. A very silly international language devised at least a hundred years ago by a charming man called Johann Schleyer. 'Vol' means world in his language and 'piik' means speak. If he had known that in English it meant vomit, he might have chosen more carefully.'

'And what does the note say?'

'It seems that we are being followed by two cars, one a French-registered blue Lemon BX, whatever that might be, the other a white Swiss Audi Four.'

'They must mean a Citroen BX and an Audi Quattro, I should think.'

'That would seem to make sense. Well, this is refreshing to know, is it not?'

'What, that we're being followed?'

'Yes.'

'But we stick out like a sore thumb in this bloody jalopy.'

'I hope so. The element of surprise is absolutely crucial.'

'What element of surprise?'

'Exactly!' beamed Trefusis as he edged onto the autoroute and pointed the Wolseley towards Germany. 'That is what is so surprising.'

The staccato rush of cars travelling in the opposite direction reminded Adrian of interminable childhood journeys to the coast. He would gaze at his father's cocked wrists on the steering wheel or count all the four-legged animals in the fields as they passed, one for a sheep or cow, two for a horse, yawning repeatedly in a giddy cloud of car-sickness. He had had a trick of covering his ears with his hands and removing them rhythmically in time to the whoosh of each car as it passed the window.

He tried it again now.

'Are we there yet, Daddy?'

'Why do people always say that on car journeys?' asked Trefusis.

'It reminds them of when they were young.'

'Humph.'

'Anyway,' said Adrian. 'We were talking about lies.'

'So we were. Light me a cigarette, there's a good fellow.'

Adrian lit two from Trefusis's cigarette case and passed one over.

Trefusis took in a deep lungful of Gold Leaf.

'We can be fairly certain,' he said, 'that animals do not lie. It has been both their salvation and their downfall. Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word 'stone' for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. 'I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent,' oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it.'

'Surely when a bird uses a twig for nesting material it is doing the same thing?'

'Birds collect for nests much as we expand our lungs a dozen or so times a minute in order to suck in air or, in our case, tobacco smoke. It is, or so I am reliably informed by those who know, an entirely instinctive mechanism. Animals do not have the lying capability of man.'

'Keats's negative capability?'

'To some extent, yes. Within our brains connections are made and stored all the time. This word signifies this thing, this fact actually occurred, this experience was in truth undergone; the whatness and whichness of everything is established. Thus I ask you, 'What did you drink just now?' and you reply 'lemon tea' because lemon tea and your recent drinking are connected. If you deliberately wish to lie you think 'lemon tea' - you can't help that because the link is there - but you search for some other drinking material and say, for example, 'apple juice'. A link is now made between your recent drinking activities, lemon tea and apple juice. The strongest link, however, is between the drinking activity and lemon tea because it is the true one. The link between what you drank and apple juice exists, because you created it. But it only exists through the link with the lemon tea. Are you following me?'

'Like a panther,' lied Adrian.

'The details of a lie are harder to recall than the truth, because they are less strongly linked in the mind. The