Free The Liar by Stephen Fry Page A

room?’
    ‘Our room.’
    ‘Our room, that I furnish and pay for?’
    ‘This is a cartoon.’
    ‘A cartoon.’
    ‘In the original sense.’
    ‘So the original sense of cartoon is “total fucking mess” is it?’
    ‘The original sense of cartoon is a sheet of material onto which you draw the outlines of your fresco.’
    Adrian picked his way through the debris and poured himself a glass of wine from a half-empty bottle on the mantelpiece. A half-empty bottle of the college’s best white burgundy, he noted.
    ‘Fresco?’
    ‘Yeah. When I’ve designed it, I simply hang the sheet over the wall, prick the outline onto the wet plaster and get to work as quickly as possible before …’
    ‘What wet plaster would that be?’
    Gary pointed to a blank space of wall.
    ‘I thought there. We just rip off the old plasterwork, bit of bonding on the laths, and Bob’s your uncle.’
    ‘Bob is not my uncle. I have never had an uncle called Bob. I never intend to have an uncle called Bob. If being Bob’s nephew involves destroying a five-hundred-year-old …’
    ‘Six hundred years actually. It’s going to be a representation of Britain in the late seventies. Thatcher, Foot, CND marches, unemployment. Everything. I paint it, then we cover it with wood panelling. That’s the expensive bit. The panelling will have to be hinged, see? In a hundred years’ time this room will be priceless.’
    ‘It’s already priceless. Couldn’t we leave it as it is? Henry James had tea here. Isherwood made love to a choral scholar in that very bedroom. A friend of Thomas Hardy’s committed suicide here. Marlowe and Kydd danced a galliard on these exact floorboards.’
    ‘And Adrian Healey commissioned Gary Collins’s first fresco here. History is an on-going process.’
    ‘And what’s our bedder going to say?’
    ‘It’ll brighten her day. Better than picking up the manky Y-fronts of the economists opposite.’
    ‘Fuck you, Gary. Why do you always make me sound so prissy and middle-class?’
    ‘Bollocks.’
    Adrian looked round the room and tried to fight down his bourgeois panic.
    ‘So, hinged panelling, you say?’
    ‘Shouldn’t cost too much if that’s what you’re worrying about. I picked up this builder who’s working on the site of Robinson College. He reckons he can get me some good stuff for under five hundred and he’ll do all the rendering and plastering for free if I let him fuck me.’
    ‘Not exactly in the great tradition is it? I mean, I don’t think that Pope Julius and Michelangelo came to a similar kind of arrangement about the Sistine Chapel. Not unless I’m very much mistaken.’
    ‘Don’t bet on it. Anyway, someone’s got to fuck me, haven’t they?’ Gary pointed out. ‘Since you won’t I’ve got to look elsewhere. Makes good sense.’
    ‘Suddenly the whole logic becomes clear. But what about work? I’m supposed to be working this term, don’t forget.’
    Gary got to his feet and stretched.
    ‘Bugger that, that’s what I say. How was the porn?’
    ‘Incredible. You’ve never in all your life seen anything like it.’
    ‘Naughty pictures?’
    ‘I’m not sure I’m ever going to be able to look a labrador in the face again. But, ruined as my faith in humankind may be, I have to say that we of the twentieth century are a pretty normal bunch compared to the Victorians.’
    ‘Victorian porn?’
    ‘Certainly.’
    ‘What did they
do?
I’ve often wondered. Did they have dicks and fannies and the rest of it?’
    ‘Well of course they did, you silly child. And the zestier volumes indicate that they had a great deal more. There’s a –’
    Adrian broke off. He had suddenly given himself an idea. He looked at Gary’s cartoon.
    Why not? It was wild, it was dishonest, it was disgraceful, but it could be done. It would mean work. A hell of a lot of work, but work of the right kind. Why not?
    ‘Gary,’ he said. ‘I suddenly find myself at life’s crossroads. I can feel it. One road points