by Tom Sharpe
Mr Wyve agreed most heartily. He had been impressed by the story about the bears catching salmon in the swiftest-flowing rivers. The unspoken comparison had been a nice one. ‘I don’t think the Praelector and his ilk could possibly come into the category of a species that needs protecting,’ he said. ‘As you so rightly say, it has been a privilege to watch an old educated mind at work.’
‘Until these last few days I would have questioned your use of the word “educated”. Now I don’t,’ Mr Retter agreed.
*
The Praelector was worried. It was of course nice to know that the College had been rescued from bankruptcy but there were still problems ahead. The Bursar was in Fulbourn Mental Hospital, and the Praelector felt strangely sorry for him. After all the Bursar had inadvertently been responsible for the forty million pounds and, while the Praelector couldn’t be said to like the man, the Bursar had done his best to keep Porterhouse solvent and would keep it so now that it had adequate funds.
In the afternoon the Praelector sent for a taxi and had himself driven out to the hospital to see the Bursar.
‘He has recovered from the effects of whatever drug he had taken but all the same I have my doubts about discharging him quite so soon,’ the psychiatric doctor in charge of detoxification told him. ‘He is still extremely anxious and suffers quite severe episodes of depression. He seems to have an obsession about the oddest menagerie of animals.’
‘Let me guess what they are,’ the Praelector said. ‘Pigs, turtles, baby octopuses, sharks, and possibly piranhas. Am I by any chance right?’
The doctor looked at him in astonishment. ‘How on earth did you know?’ he asked.
But the Praelector’s discretion prevented him from telling. ‘As Bursar I am afraid he has been under the most fearful strain about our finances. Porterhouse, as you must surely know, is not a rich college and the poor chap felt responsible for our problems. But all that is past and thanks to his magnificent efforts we are quite solvent again.’
‘But why are his obsessions centred on pigs and turtles and –’
‘Simple,’ said the Praelector. ‘At our annual Founder’s Feast we do tend to do ourselves very well and some-times a little too exotically. I don’t know if you realize the cost of genuine turtles these days. And sharks are by no means cheap and of course we always have a wild boar. It was all too much for the Bursar.’
‘I’m not in the least surprised,’ said the doctor. ‘I cannot think of a more breathtakingly indigestible menu. And you really have piranhas too?’
‘Only as a savoury at the end of the meal. Served on toast with a slice of lemon they make a very fine digestive. If you’d feel like accepting an invitation one of these days …’
But the doctor excused himself and hurried away. The Praelector went into the Bursar’s room, where he found him studying an immigration form for New Zealand. ‘You’re not seriously thinking of leaving us, are you?’ he asked. ‘At the very moment of your greatest achievement? Besides, they tell me it is an exceedingly dull country.’
‘That’s why I’m going there,’ said the Bursar. ‘I’d go somewhere even duller if I could think of it.’
‘But my dear Bursar, you can be as dull as ditchwater in College. And besides, it is precisely now that we have forty million pounds from Transworld due to us that we need your expertise.’
‘Like a hole in the head,’ said the Bursar bitterly. The anti-depressants he was on had slowed his thinking. ‘I … Did you say forty million pounds?’
The Praelector nodded. ‘I did. Mr Hartang has very generously doubled the amount of compensation in return for a promise that there be no publicity. He has for his own good reasons undergone what I believe is known as a change of heart.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Bursar. ‘He hasn’t got a heart. He’s got a beating bank vault. And even if he had, what about that bloody man Kudzuvine? If he is still in the Master’s Lodge, there is no way I am coming back to Porterhouse.’
The Praelector smiled benignly at him and patted his shoulder. ‘I give you my word of honour that Mr Kudzuvine is no longer with us,’ he said. ‘He is immersed in –’
‘The Bermuda Triangle tubewise. Don’t tell me,’ squawked the Bursar.
‘I was going to say in a totally different occupation and one in which he can exercise his talents to the full and find complete satisfaction.’
‘Like he’s killing things,’ said the Bursar.
But the Praelector was not to be drawn. ‘He is engaged in work that is utterly removed from anything he has done previously,’ he said. ‘You will never see or hear from him again. And no, he is not dead. He is very much alive and, I am told, happy. Now then, I have a taxi waiting …’
The Bursar was finally convinced. Something quite astonishing must have happened to the College finances for the Praelector to keep a taxi waiting with the meter running all this time. ‘You’ve really been very good to me,’ he said emotionally as they went down the corridor and out into the open air. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without you.’
‘I’m sure you would have done just as well,’ said the Praelector, ‘but I really don’t think you’d have found life in New Zealand to your taste. All that lamb.’
The Bursar agreed. He’d gone off lamb.
26
For the Dean the next few days were as hellish as any he had known. He sat in his room trying to come to terms with Skullion’s threat. Everything he had ever believed in had been put in jeopardy by that confession. He was confronted by a disgustingly brutal world in which the traditional virtues he held dear had been swept aside. Duty, deference, honour and justice had all gone. Or were in conflict with one another. ‘It is my duty to inform the police,’ he said to himself, only to hear another part of his mind tell him not to be such a fool. ‘After all, the fact that Skullion told you he killed Sir Godber is no proof that he did. He has only to deny it and then where would you be?’ The Dean could find no answer to the question. Then again there was the honour of the College to take into account. Even an unsubstantiated accusation would create a scandal and Porterhouse had had too many scandals in recent years to withstand another. A fresh crisis would only provide an excuse for those who wanted to change the whole character of the College and the Dean and the Senior Tutor would be ousted by the likes of Dr Buscott and brash young Fellows. The Prime Minister would appoint a new Master and Porterhouse would become nothing more than an academic forcing-house like Selwyn or Fitzwilliam. The Dean put his duty to one side and with it went his belief in justice.
There were other consequences. All his life the Dean had seen Skullion as a servant, a social inferior whose deference was living proof that the old order had not fundamentally been changed. Skullion had destroyed that comforting illusion. ‘Don’t you Skullion me,’ he had said. ‘It’s Master from now on.’ With that command, and there could be no other term for it, the Dean’s world had been turned upside down. Coming so shortly after his encounter with the drunken Jeremy Pimpole living in squalor in the gamekeeper’s cottage, Skullion’s assertion of his own authority had shattered the Dean’s dream of society. Little islands of the old order, where deference was due, undoubtedly remained but the tide of egalitarian vulgarity was rising and in time would swamp them all. The Dean had seen that barbarism in action at the motorway service areas and had been appalled. To encounter it in Porterhouse was more than he could bear. To add to his sense of disillusionment there was also the knowledge that he had been wrong about Sir Godber’s death and Lady Mary had been right. Her husband had been murdered. And to compound that awful realization, the Dean had misunderstood the meaning of the dying man’s last words and had interpreted them to make his murderer the Master of Porterhouse. There was a horrible irony about that error but the Dean was in no mood to appreciate it. Instead he kept to his rooms and thought the darkest thoughts, dined silently in Hall and took long melancholy walks to Grantchester debating what on earth to do.
It wa
s on one of these walks that he encountered the Praelector. He too seemed preoccupied. ‘Ah, Dean, I see you too have taken to doing the Grantchester Grind,’ the old man said.
The Dean did his best to smile. ‘I take my constitutional,’ he said. ‘I find it helps my rheumatism to get some exercise.’
‘That too,’ the Praelector agreed. ‘Though in my case I come to try to clarify my thoughts about the state of the College. It is not good.’
‘In what respect?’ enquired the Dean cautiously.
‘I do not know precisely. Though in the Bursar’s absence I have had occasion to examine the accounts and our expenses and I have to say they are as bad as the poor man has always maintained. Even to my untrained eye the situation looks desperate. I fear we are facing bankruptcy.’
‘Bankruptcy? But the College can’t go bankrupt. Such things don’t happen. We are not some sort of business company or any individual. Porterhouse is an institution, one of the oldest in Cambridge. They won’t allow us to go bankrupt.’
‘They, Dean, they? May I enquire who this, or more precisely, these ubiquitous “They” might be?’ The Praelector paused to allow the Dean to pass through a kissing gate first.
The Dean went through and stopped. He had never before had to face such a direct question about the nature of society. To his mind, a mind as drilled in deference as Skullion’s, ‘They’ were anonymous and all-powerful and at the very heart of Britain, an unperceived amalgam of, to use one of his clichés, the Great and the Good who ran the City and Whitehall and gathered together at the Athenaeum and the Carlton and the better clubs and in the House of Lords and were united in allegiance to the Crown. To be asked who ‘They’ were was to put in question the very existence of authority itself and render nebulous unspoken certainties. ‘I cannot answer that,’ he said finally and stared out across the meadows to a pollarded willow on the river bank.
The Praelector made his way through the gate and stepped aside to let a jogging undergraduate go by. ‘The powers that be,’ he said, ‘are no longer on our side. They have been supplanted by purely mercenary men who have no social interest. My lifetime has encompassed our decline. A sad, dispiriting epoch and one that leaves us wholly at the mercy of the market. We’ve fought two wars and won a hollow victory at the cost of millions dead and all our independence lost. Sparta and Athens went that way and Greece’s greatness perished. Like them we have nothing to sell but ourselves.’
‘I do not follow you,’ said the Dean. ‘How can we sell ourselves? I have nothing to offer a buyer. I am an old man and everything I hold dear is in the College.’
‘I was speaking in more general terms. Personally I daresay we are all provided for by pensions and small private means. I have in mind the College. It is ourselves collectively.’
‘But that is out of the question,’ said the Dean. ‘The College cannot be put up for sale. We are not some marketable commodity.’
The Praelector poked a molehill with his walking stick. ‘I shouldn’t be too sure of that. In the present climate of opinion it would be a brave man who would predict what was a commodity that might be up for sale. Who would have thought a few years ago that water would be sold to private companies, some of them foreign at that, and that each English family would have to pay for a necessity of life and put a profit in the hands of individual shareholders? And water is a monopoly as well. We cannot pick and choose which tap to use. And if water, why not air?’
‘But that’s absurd,’ said the Dean. ‘Air is for everyone to breathe. It’s everywhere. It needs no pipes or reservoirs, no pumping stations or filtration plants as water does.’
‘Can you be sure? I can’t,’ said the Praelector. ‘There’s talk of air pollution all the time. The fumes from car exhausts and factory chimneys and even the boilers for domestic central heating. A perfectly valid case could be made out for processing the air and making it fit for human consumption. The men who think only of money could make out that case. “Clean air,” they’d say. And what needs cleaning costs money and must be paid for. And where there’s money to be paid there must accordingly be profit to be made. One has to have material incentive if market forces are to work. That is the principle our masters in the “powers that be” apply. They recognize no other.’
‘It is an obnoxious one,’ said the Dean heatedly. ‘I fail to see how it can be applied so generally. Some things cannot be quantified in terms of money.’
‘Name me one,’ said the Praelector.
The Dean stood still and tried to think of something beyond price. ‘A man’s life,’ he said. ‘I defy you to calculate a human life in monetary terms. It can’t be done.’
‘It can and is,’ replied the Praelector and pointed his stick at a distant concrete tower. ‘Addenbrooke’s Hospital, the new one over there. Go there and ask the doctors in the geriatric wards or in intensive care what determines when they turn a life-support machine off or why some patients are deemed not to warrant certain complicated operations? Or better still, ask them why foreign patients who can pay vast sums for liver transplants are given preferential treatment over English ones who’ve paid their taxes all their lives into the National Health Service. They’ll tell you why, those doctors will. Because the Treasury uses all those NHS payments for other things like roads and civil servants’ salaries. It goes into the general fund and only a portion goes to nursing British patients. So now the surgeons charge rich foreigners to raise the funds they need to operate on us.’
They walked in silence for a while and the Dean’s thoughts grew darker still. The old man’s arguments had served to reinforce his own conviction that something had to be done about Skullion. If the Praelector could face the grim realities of life without recourse to comforting pretence, the Dean felt he ought to take up the challenge himself and say what was preying on his mind. And if the College finances were in such a terrible way, and for the first time he did not doubt it, the question of the Master became more urgent still. ‘I wonder if you would come down to the river with me,’ he said when they reached the last gate. ‘It is more private there and what I have to say must be said in absolute confidence.’
They turned off the path and made their way down to the river bank. There, standing by the water and the waving weeds swept by the river’s flow, the Dean told the story of Skullion’s confession and his threat to make it public. The Praelector stared at the water weeds for some time before he spoke.
‘It fits,’ he said at last, ‘it fits the facts. I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. There is a streak of violence in us all and Godber Evans had sacked Skullion who had more violence in him than most of us. Still has it, by the sound of things. You say he threatened you?’
The Dean nodded. ‘Skullion was drunk. He said he had us by the short and curlies and by the balls, the bloody balls he said, and when I asked him why or what he meant he said he knew that Lady Mary had sent this Dr Osbert to find out who had murdered her husband. God knows how he finds out these things.’
‘Because he’s clung to his authority,’ the Praelector said. ‘In his own mind he is still Head Porter. All the servants know that too. They tell him everything they hear. The Chef, the waiters, the gyps and bedders doing our rooms. They don’t miss much, and what they don’t tell Skullion he deduces for himself. What words exactly did he use about Dr Osbert? Can you remember them?’
The Dean searched back to that bad night. ‘He asked a question,’ he said. ‘I remember that. Something to this effect, “Who put up six million pounds to send the new Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow here?” That’s what he said and when I said I did not know he said, “That bloody Lady Mary did because she wanted to know who’d murdered her husband and this Fellow is here to nose about.” Yes, that was what he said. In just those words. “To nose about.”’
‘And then?’
‘Then he said he could tell him,’ the Dean went on. ‘“Because I did. And if you try to sweep me under the carpet to the Park, I’ll tell him. Because I
murdered the bastard.” He told me to put that in my pipe and smoke it.’
The Praelector sighed a long sigh. ‘He said to sweep him under the carpet, did he? He’s got a long memory, has Skullion. I made a joke once along those lines.’
‘And he remembered it,’ said the Dean. ‘He said you’d called it under the Parket.’
‘And that’s the truth,’ the Praelector said and whacked a tuft of grass with his stick. ‘That was when Vertel had to go away before the police arrived.’ He paused for a moment. ‘So Master Skullion has us by the short and curlies, has he? I think not.’
He turned and led the way up to the tarmac path and the Dean followed. He was relieved to have confided in the Praelector. There was a strength in the older man he knew he’d somehow lost himself, a strength of purpose and a terrible clarity of thought. And this time the Praelector led the way through all the gates.
They neither of them spoke for a long while and it was only when they had crossed Laundress Green and reached the Mill that the Praelector turned aside. ‘You have told no one else, not even the Senior Tutor?’ he asked.
‘No one, Praelector, not a soul.’
‘Good. And now we’ll go separate ways into the College. We don’t want to be seen together going in. I’ll speak to you later. Things cannot rest like this.’ And with what appeared to the Dean to be surprising energy, the Praelector strode off down the lane towards Silver Street.
For a moment the Dean lingered by the Mill looking at the water churning over the weir and under the bridge beneath him, remembering nostalgically the time a South African undergraduate had swum the Mill Pond in midwinter for a five-pound bet. That had been in 1950, and the young man’s name had been Pendray. A Cat’s man, the Dean seemed to recall, and wondered what had become of him. He looked up in time to see the Praelector disappear down the public lavatory on the far side, which explained his sudden hurry. With a fresh sense of disillusionment the Dean turned away and went the other way down Little St Mary’s Passage. He would have a cup of tea in the Copper Kettle before going back to Porterhouse. There, sitting unhappily, he understood now why in earlier times the Praelector had been known as the ‘Father of the College’. The term ‘Grantchester Grind’ had taken on a new meaning for him too.