The Liar [calibre]

'Well, Donald, I am sorry that you seem to have been delayed again,' said Clinton-Lacey.

Trefusis was silent.

'Nothing serious I hope?'

Trefusis smiled affably around the room.

'Nothing serious I hope?' repeated the President.

Trefusis became aware that he was being addressed, opened his jacket, switched off the Walkman that was attached to his belt and slipped off his earphones.

'I'm sorry, Master, did you speak?'

'Well yes ... we were discussing the fall-off in resources for the Arts.'

'The Arts?'

'That's right. Now Menzies coughed and pushed the ashtray towards Trefusis.

'Thank you, Garth,' said Trefusis, flicking the ash from his cigarette and taking another puff. 'Most thoughtful.'

The President persevered.

'We will not have enough money to create any more Junior Research Fellows in the Arts for at least two years.'

'Oh, how sad,' said Trefusis.

'You are not concerned for your department?'

'My department? My department is English, Master.'

'Well precisely.'

'What has English to do with "the Arts", whatever they may be? I deal in an exact science, philology. My colleagues deal with an exact science, the analysis of literature.'

'Oh poppycock,' said Menzies.

'No, if anything it's hard shit,' said Trefusis.

'Really, Donald!' said the President. 'I am sure there is no need . . .'

'Professor Trefusis,' said Menzies, 'this is a minuted meeting of adults, if you feel you can't preserve the decencies of debate then perhaps you should leave.'

'My dear old Garth,' said Trefusis, 'I can only say that you started it. The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. "Poppycock" means "soft shit" -from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you, pappe kak.'

Menzies purpled and fell silent.

'Well, be that all as it may, Donald,' said the President, 'the subject was resourcing. Whatever our views on the rights and wrongs of government policy, the fiscal reality is such that . . .'

'The reality,' said Trefusis, offering cigarettes around the table, 'as we all know, is that more and more young people are begging to be admitted to this college in this university to read English. Our English department receives a higher number of applicants for each available place than any other department in any other university in the country. If the rules of the market place, which I understand to be sacred to the gabies, guffoons and flubberhaddocks in office, are to apply, then surely we should be entitled to more fellowships, not fewer.'

'The feeling, Donald,' said the President, 'is that English graduates cannot offer an expertise of benefit to the country. The fruits of research in botany or genetics or even my own subject, economics, are recognised as having a palpable value to the world . . .'

'Hear, hear,' said Menzies.

'Poppycock,' said Munroe, accepting a box of matches from Trefusis.

'But you and your colleagues,' said the President, ignoring both interruptions, 'are seen more and more as an intolerable burden on the tax-payer. There is nothing for you to discover of interest, nothing you can offer your undergraduates that fits them usefully into industry or profitable enterprise. You know that those are not my views. Around this table we have rehearsed many times the arguments and counter-arguments and I do not propose to do so again. I can only tell you that the monies will not be available this year.'

'Mr President,' said a don at the end of the table, 'I would like you to register my view that this is an absolute disgrace. This Philistinism will do nothing but impoverish our country. I hope you will minute my utter disgust.'

'Well,' said Trefusis, 'that should make Sir Keith Joseph and his friends shake in their boots, shouldn't it? No, no. The time has come for action. With the Fellows' approval I can train a hand-picked company of crack undergraduates and be in Whitehall before June.'

'This pose of embittered and embattled artist,' said Menzies, 'is unseemly and out of date. Society can no longer afford its jesters and is weary of being hit over the head with empty pigs' bladders. The world is bored of the piffling excesses of the Arts, of its arrogance and irrelevance to the real world. Your fat could do with trimming.'

'You're right of course,' said Trefusis, 'I see that now. We need lawyers. Wave upon wave of them.'

'Well of course it's very easy to mock . . .'

'It's certainly easy to mock some things,' agreed Trefusis. 'Oddly enough though I've never found it easy to mock anything of value. Only things that are tawdry and fatuous - perhaps it's just me.'

III

'Sp you see my little honeypot baby-squeeze,' said Adrian, 'I have to come up with some bloody piece of research or I may be out on my rather divinely shaped ear.'

'Well it's about time you did some work,' said Jenny, biting his nipple.

'That's a horrid thing to say. Now go a bit lower down and get those lips working, it's my turn to come and I have to be off to the University Library.'

Jenny sat up.

'That reminds me,' she said. 'Mary and I have written a letter to all the Senior Tutors in Cambridge.'

'Good God,' said Adrian, pulling her head down again, 'this is no time to babble of schoolgirl crushes.'

'No listen,' she said popping up. 'It's the pornography.'

'What?'

'You know I've been going to Tim Anderson's lectures on Derrida and Sexual Difference?'

'Look, if your mouth's busy you could at least use your hands. There's some baby oil under the bed.'

'Well, he showed us some pornography last week. Boxfuls of it. From the University Library. It's a copyright library, you see, so they get a copy of everything published. Everything.'

'What, you mean . . . everything?'

'Everything. Centuries of pornography up to the present day. The cellars are packed with tons of the most degrading and disgusting . . . I'm talking about amputees, children, appliances, things you could never even imagine.'

'You don't know what I could imagine.'

'I went to have a look at some of it. All I needed was Helen Greenman's signature. Told her it was to do with Tim Anderson's lectures. Well I mean, this stuff shouldn't be at Cambridge. It has no possible academic justification. It's degrading to women and should be burnt.'

'And degrading to animals and children and appliances, I shouldn't wonder.'

'Adrian, it's not funny. I think the UL dignifies this shit by storing it. So Mary and I are trying to get it banned.'

'What sort of things did you see exactly?'

'Well you have to view it in a private room . . .'

'Describe it to me . . . and use your left hand. That's it. A bit faster. Yes! Oh yes indeed. Now, what did you see?'

'Well there was one where this woman took a pork-pie . . .'

IV

'That's the posish, Gary,' said Adrian when he had walked back from Newnham to St Matthew's. 'It's all there, a whole index expurgatorius waiting to be drooled over. And this is what the librarian needs to be shown.'

He handed him a small piece of paper on which was written:

'I authorise access to Jennifer de Woolf, an undergraduate of this college, to the following titles of Special Research Material . . .'

Underneath were listed titles of books and magazines and at the bottom was the signature, 'Helen Greenman, Senior Tutor, Newnham College'.

Gary's mouth fell open.

'Elsa and the Bull, Young Nuns, Concentration Camp Action . . . you're joking . . . My Hot Little Daughter, Hung, Young and Handsome, Tampon Tina, Fist Fuck Faggots, Clingfilm Fantasies. Clingfilm'? Bleeding Christ.' '