The Liar (27 page)

But there again, when he sipped at the whisky his eyes failed to water and his throat forgot to burn. The body shamelessly welcomed what once it would have rejected. At breakfast he demanded not Ricicles and chocolate spread, but coffee and unbuttered toast. And if the coffee was sugared he leapt from it like a colt from an electric fence. He ate the crust and left the filling, guzzled the olives and spurned the cherries. Yet inside he remained the same Adrian who fought down the urge to stand and shout ‘Bollocks’ during church services, smelt his own farts and wasted hours skimming through
National Geographic
on the off-chance of seeing a few naked bodies.

He turned back to his work with a sigh. God could worry about what he was and what he wasn’t. There was the tea-party scene to be written.

He hadn’t been working for more than ten minutes when there came another knock at the door.

‘If that is anyone under the age of thirteen they have my permission to go and drown themselves.’

The door opened and a cheery face peered round.

‘Wotcher, cock, thought I’d come and cadge a drink.’

‘My dear Matron, you can’t have run out of Gees linctus again.’

She came and looked over his shoulder.

‘How’s it going?’

‘The agony of composition. Got to keep everyone satisfied. I’m preparing a huge part for you.’

She massaged his neck.

‘I can take it.’

‘Oh you proud, snorting beauty, how I love you.’

It was a private joke that the boys had somehow got wind of. She was a thoroughbred filly and he was her trainer. Adrian had started it when he found out that her father bred race-horses for a living. She looked the part too, with a great mane of chestnut hair and dark eyes that she rolled in mock passion when Adrian patted her hindquarters.

She had come to Chartham as an assistant matron at the age of sixteen and had been there ever since. There were rumours amongst the staff that she was a lesbian, but Adrian put that down to wishful thinking on their part. She was now such an attractive twenty-five-year-old that they had to find some excuse for not desiring her and her liking for jeans and jackets over skirts and blouses made sapphic preferences an obvious escape route for them.

She had latched onto Adrian as soon as he had arrived.

‘She always pretends to pant after new masters,’ Maxted had said. ‘It’s just showing off to the boys to disguise her dykery. Tell her to bog off.’

But Adrian enjoyed her company: she was brisk and clean. Her breasts were high and handsome, her thighs strong and supple and she was teaching him to drive. Despite the heat of their language they had never come close to anything physical, but the thought beat its wings in the air whenever they were together.

He watched her wandering around his room, picking things up, examining them and putting them down again in the wrong place.

‘She’s restless, she needs a good gallop over the downs,’ he said.

She went to the window.

‘It’s really settling, isn’t it?’

‘What is?’

‘The snow.’

‘I find it unsettling as a matter of fact. I’m on duty tomorrow and I shall have to find something for the boys to do. The rugger pitch will be four foot under if it carries on at this rate.’

‘The school was cut off from the outside world for a whole week in seventy-four.’

‘And it’s been cut off ever since.’

She sat on the bed.

‘I’m leaving at the end of the year.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘I’ll have been here nearly ten years. It’s enough. I’ll go home.’

Every member of staff spoke regularly about leaving at the end of the year. It was their way of showing that they weren’t stuck, that they had a choice. It meant nothing, they always came back.

‘But who will spoon out the little darlings’ malt? Who will paint their warts and kiss the place and make it well? Chartham needs you.’

‘I mean it, Ade. Clare is fretting in her loose-box.’

‘It’s time some stallion was found to cover you, certainly,’ Adrian agreed. ‘The colts here have been very disappointing and the staff are all geldings.’

‘Except you.’

‘Ah, but I’ve still a few seasons of racing left in me before I get put out. After I’ve won the Cambridge Hurdles my stud fees will be that much higher.’

‘You’re not a queer are you, Adrian?’

He was startled by the question.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I know what I like.’

‘And do you like me?’

‘Do I like you? I’m flesh and blood aren’t I? How could anyone not be thrilled by your tightly fleshed points, your twitching hocks, your quivering neck, your shining hindquarters, your heaving, shimmering flanks?’

‘Then for God’s sake, fuck me. I’m going mad.’

For all his talk, Adrian had never experienced a human being of another gender before and writhing around with Clare, he was astonished by the strength of her desire. He hadn’t expected that women actually felt the kind of urge and appetite that drove men. Everyone knew, surely, that females went for personality, strength and security and were resigned to the need to be penetrated only if that was the price for keeping the man they loved? That they should arch their backs, spread wide the lips of their sex in hunger and urge him in was something for which he was not prepared. Adrian’s room was at the top of the school and they had locked the door, but he couldn’t help feeling that everyone would be able to hear her squeals and roars of pleasure.

‘Bang me, you bastard, bang me hard! Harder! Deeper and harder, you lump of shit. God that’s good.’

It explained all those jokes about bedsprings. The sex he had taken part in up until now didn’t build up these colossal pounding rhythms. He found himself driving faster and faster and joining in her shouts.

‘I … think … that … I’m … about … to … wheeeeeee! … whooooo! … haaaaaaa …’

He collapsed on her as she thrashed herself calm. Panting and sweating, they wound down together into a kind of breathless quiet.

She gripped his shoulders.

‘You beautiful fucking son of a bitch. My God I needed that. Woof!’

‘As a matter of fact,’ gasped Adrian, ‘I think I did too.’

Clare taught him a great deal that term.

‘Sex is meaningless,’ she said, ‘if it’s silent and mechanical. You have to think about it and plan it, like a dinner party or a cricket match. I tell you when to put in, how it’s feeling, you tell me what you like, when you’re coming, how you want me to move. Just remember that you have never thought a thought or imagined an act that is so dirty and depraved that I won’t have thought of it thousands of times myself. That’s true of everyone. When we stop talking and joking we’ll know it’s over.’

Two nights after the last day of term the headmaster and his wife had gone out to a dinner party, so Clare and Adrian found they had the whole school to themselves. It was cold, but they had run naked around the classrooms where she had thrown herself over a desk to be spanked, into the kitchens where they had hurled jam and lard at each other, into the staff common room where he had pumped her up with the football pump, into the boys’ showers where she had urinated over his face and finally into the gymnasium where they had rolled and rolled over the mats, shrieking and slithering and jerking in frenzy.

He lay looking up at the climbing ropes that hung from the ceiling. During the act all his senses had been suspended, but now it was over he felt the bruise on his shoulder where he had barged into a door, smelt the sour lard and urine and jam that was all over him and heard the hot-water pipes rattling under the floor and the bubbles of wind building up in Clare’s bowels.

‘Bath,’ he said. ‘Bath then bed. God I’m going to need these holidays.’

‘Stay with me here for a while.’

It was their one point of disagreement. Adrian had never been able to luxuriate in the afterglow.

‘Time for my tub.’

‘Why do you always want to have a bath the moment after you’ve made love to me? Why can’t we wriggle in our dirt for a while?’ she said.

He fought down his customary post-coital irritation and contempt.

‘Don’t go looking for something psychological that isn’t there. I have a bath after any kind of strenuous exercise. It doesn’t mean I feel dirty,’ though he did, ‘it doesn’t mean I’m trying to wash you out of my life,’ though he was, ‘it doesn’t mean guilt, shame, repentance or anything like that,’ though it did. ‘It just means I want a bath.’

‘Queer!’ she shouted after him.

‘Lesbian!’ he yelled back.

When he came back next term, she was gone. Her replacement was a forty-year-old with one breast who most certainly
was
lesbian, which allowed the rest of the staff the free luxury of finding her irresistibly desirable. They spent their days saying she was a grand old girl and their evenings attempting to coax her down to the pub.

‘Your girlfriend has gone, sir,’ said Newton. ‘Whatever are you going to do?’

‘I shall devote the rest of my life to beating you into a purée,’ said Adrian. ‘It will help me forget.’

III

The morning of the match, Hunt had put a message under Adrian’s toast as usual. This time it was a large heart-shaped piece of paper covered in kisses. This was going too far.

In theory, the boy on clearing duty should be the one to make masters’ toast, but Hunt had long since decided that no one but he was going to make Adrian’s. He fought everyone for the right. Whenever Adrian came down there would be two pieces on his side plate, and under them would be a message, usually nothing more dreadful than ‘Your toast, sir …’ or ‘Each slice hand-grilled the traditional way by heritage craftsmen’. But love-hearts were too much.

Adrian looked round the hall to where Hunt was sitting. The boy pinkened and gave a small wave.

‘What’s Hunt the Thimble given you today, sir?’ asked Rudder, the prefect next to Adrian. Hunt was known as the Thimble for the obvious reason and because he was said to be rather under-endowed.

‘Oh nothing, nothing … the usual drivel.’

‘I bet it isn’t, sir. We told him that it was Valentine’s Day today.’

‘But Valentine’s Day, Rudder dearest, falls on February the fourteenth and lies there until the fifteenth of that month. Unless I have become so bored by your anserine conversation and fallen asleep for four months, this is currently the month of June we are enjoying. What else, after all, could explain your cricket whites?’

‘I know, sir. But we told him Valentine’s Day was
today
. That’s the joke.’

‘Ah! Well, if the Queen can have two birthdays, why cannot Hunt the Thimble be granted the right to celebrate two Valentine’s Days?’

‘He told me,’ said Rudder, ‘that if he didn’t get one back from you, he was going to hang himself.’

‘He said
what?
’ said Adrian, going white.

‘Sir?’

Adrian grabbed Rudder’s arm.

‘
What
did he say?’

‘Sir, you’re hurting! It was just a joke.’

‘You find the idea of suicide amusing, do you?’

‘Well no, sir, but it was just …’

There was a silence. The boys at his table looked down at their cereal bowls. It wasn’t like Adrian to be angry or violent.

‘I’m sorry my angels,’ he said, with an attempt at a laugh. ‘No sleep last night. Working on the play. Either that or I’m turning mad. It was a full moon you know, and there’s a history of lycanthropy in my family. Uncle Everard turns into a wolf every time he hears the
Crossroads
theme tune.’

Rudder giggled. The uncomfortable moment passed.

‘Well, looks like a fine day today. I vote we load a crate of Coke onto the minibus before we go. You know what Narborough match teas are like.’

A mighty cheer now. The other tables looked across enviously. Healey’s lot was always having fun.

*

The atmosphere in the minibus was tense. Adrian sat with them and tried to appear sunny and confident. It was no good his telling them to remember that it was only a game when he was as nervous as a kitten himself.

‘We’ll take a look at the pitch,’ he told Hooper, the captain, ‘and we’ll decide then. But unless it’s decidedly moist, put them in the field if you win the toss. “Knock ’em up, bowl ’em out” … it never fails.’

He was pleased with what he had done to the cricket eleven. He had never been much of a player himself but he knew and loved the game well enough to be able to make a difference to a schoolboy team. Everyone had agreed, watching his first eleven play a warm-up match against a scratch Rest of the School side, that he had done a tremendous job in two weeks.

But now they faced their first real opposition and he was worried that against another school they would fall to pieces. Last year, Hooper told him, Chartham Park was the laughing-stock of the whole area.

The bus whined up the Narborough driveway.

‘Who’s been here before?’

‘I have, sir, for a rugger match,’ said Rudder.

‘Why are other schools always so forbidding? They seem infinitely bigger and more serious and their boys all look at least forty years old.’

‘It’s not a bad place, sir. Quite friendly.’

‘Friendly? The maws of the heffalump are open wide, but don’t believe that it betokens friendliness. Trust no one, speak to no one. As soon as you’ve heard this communication, eat it.’

There was a boy in a Narborough blazer waiting to show the team where to go. Adrian watched them stream off to the back of the house.

‘See you there, my honeys. Don’t accept any hand-rolled cigarettes from them.’

An old master bustled out to welcome Adrian.

‘You’re Chartham Park, yes?’

‘That’s right. Adrian Healey.’

‘Staveley. I’m not Cricket. Our man’s giving the team a pep talk. It’s morning break at the moment. Come through to the staff room and savage a Chelsea bun with us.’

The staff room was baronial and crowded with what seemed to Adrian like a greater number of masters than Chartham had boys.

‘Ah, Chartham’s new blood!’ boomed the headmaster. ‘Come to give us a spanking, have you?’

‘Oh well, I don’t know about that, sir,’ Adrian shook his hand. ‘They tell me that you’re hot stuff. Double figures would satisfy us.’