by Tom Sharpe
‘I am authorized,’ said the Praelector when the slight courtesies were over, ‘by the College Council of Porterhouse College to offer you the position of Master of the College.’ He paused and looked at Hartang with all the solemn benevolence he could muster. Hartang was staring at him through lightly tinted glasses – the dark blue ones had gone with the white socks and moccasins – with a mixture of incredulity and extreme suspicion.
The Praelector savoured his astonishment for a moment and then went on. ‘My purpose in doing so is to achieve two objects, the first beneficial to the College and the second, I believe, very much to your standing as an eminent financier and as an individual. Let me say that the gift of the Mastership at Porterhouse is the Crown prerogative and it is only in exceptional circumstances that the Crown, or to be more precise the Government of the day, that is to say the Prime Minister, is prepared to derogate its authority in these matters to the College Council. It has done so in the present case for reasons that we need not go into and which, in any event, I am not at liberty to divulge. Suffice to say these reasons have to do with the national interest. Treaty obligations with certain countries can be obviated by your acceptance while at the same time your recognized financial expertise will remain inviolate.’ The Praelector paused again and this time he assumed the most solemn expression to emphasize the seriousness with which he had spoken. He hadn’t tickled trout as a boy without learning when to take particular care. Edgar Hartang hardly breathed at the other end of the green sofa.
‘Naturally you will want to consider the proposal at your leisure and consult your advisers before giving an answer. However, I can assure you that the position of Master is not offered lightly or capriciously. Nor does it involve more than formal duties. You would have as your residence the Master’s Lodge, the provision of College servants and of any amenities you chose to provide for your own comfort and security. At the same time your social position would be assured. I cannot put it more highly than that. Porterhouse College is one of the oldest in Cambridge and, if I may be permitted a moment’s frankness, your contribution in the field of electronic communications would be invaluable to us, to say nothing of your financial expertise. I will leave you now. I shall be staying at the Goring Hotel for three more days and will await your answer there.’
The Praelector rose and took his leave with a slight diplomatic bow. As the elevator doors shut Hartang loosened his collar and then sat down again and tried to come to terms with the extraordinary mixture of threats and promises he had just heard. In a life full of crude alarms and brutal opportunities he had never experienced anything in the least like this. For an hour he tried to find a snag in the Praelector’s offer and failed. Maybe Schnabel would know. He picked up the phone and punched the lawyer’s home number.
*
It was an altered Edgar Hartang who went into conference with Schnabel, Feuchtwangler and Bolsover that evening. The realization that something fundamental had occurred in his life had softened Edgar Hartang’s approach to his legal advisers. ‘You believe it’s for real, the old guy having the authority to negotiate like he’s an ambassador or something?’ he asked them.
‘We do,’ said Schnabel.
‘It’s a very great honour, sir,’ said Bolsover.
‘It’s helluva good protection,’ was Feuchtwangler’s comment. ‘I never heard of them extraditing a college President yet.’ Hartang gnawed a knuckle. He hadn’t liked that talk about treaty obligations one bit. A godson at Number Eleven Downing Street and what the fuck had the old geezer been doing with the guy who worked in the Home Office and Bishops and all?
‘It’s the way the Brits have always done things,’ Feuchtwangler explained. ‘They tie you up tight and then say “Join the club, old boy.” Don’t have to mention what the option is because you know. How do you think Dick Whittington became Lord Mayor of London?’
Hartang said he didn’t know any Dick Whittington. ‘What’s in it for them?’ he wanted to know.
‘What he said, your expertise. First, money. Information highway stuff costs. You’ve got to hand it to Kudzuvine. He’s done you a favour.’
It was a risky statement. Hartang wasn’t ready to think of Kudzuvine doing him any favours yet.
‘And one thing is certain,’ said Bolsover. ‘Dos Passos will be on a flight out the moment you officially accept. They’ve got him under surveillance now.’
It was a convincing point. Hartang agreed to become Master of Porterhouse.
*
‘It is amazing how things work out,’ Schnabel said as they drove away. ‘I won’t say he’s at all civilized yet but the process has begun. In two years I daresay he’ll be house-trained.’
‘Porterhouse-trained,’ said Bolsover.
33
The Praelector sat on a seat in the spring sunshine and watched some children fighting on the grass. It was a great many years since he had indulged in such an enjoyable activity, rolling over and over and trying to get the upper hand in a tussle with another boy but he could remember vividly what fun it had been even when he had lost. And now for the first time for many years he was having fun again though this time it was the fun of genuine conquest. Of course there would be more battles to come. For one thing Hartang would have to be tamed and even in these gross days it would never do to have a Master using the word ‘motherfucker’ at High Table too often. But the Praelector intended to leave that aspect of Hartang’s development to the other Fellows and to the atmosphere of the College with its many little formalities. His more immediate problems were quite different. He had to persuade the College Council to ratify Hartang’s appointment and he had never faced a more difficult task in his life. Even the most brilliant Cambridge academics had no grasp of the political implications of finance and industry. Brought up in a Welfare State they had not lived through the Twenties and Thirties when the poor had been genuinely hungry and men and women and children had pinched white faces and there had been Salvation Army soup kitchens. Some of them had read about such things but they had never experienced them. Instead they indulged in nostalgic charades and mock hunger-marches, their plump comfortable faces glowing with health and their feet shod in warm well-soled shoes, and went home afterwards filled with a sense of self-righteous concern and satisfaction to congratulate themselves on their moral stance over smoked salmon and coq-au-vin in centrally heated houses. And everywhere television and glossy magazines insulated and to some extent inoculated them from real pain and misery. The Praelector had lived too long to forget the world before Beveridge and the need to produce manufactured goods for export. Now Porterhouse had to come to terms with his decision or it would go under. It would be his last struggle. He got up and walked back to the hotel relishing the thought of the Dean’s face when he heard the news.
*
Purefoy Osbert and Mrs Ndhlovo sat in the sunshine too on a bench under the wall of Peterhouse with the old river gate behind them. It was blocked up now and the river over a hundred yards away but it had been from that gate that the Masters and Fellows had stepped into boats centuries earlier to travel down to their colleges and avoid the mud and filth of the streets.
‘I had to come and explain,’ she was saying. ‘After all it was only a joke, and all right it wasn’t in the best taste but really good jokes so seldom are.’
Purefoy scowled at some horses browsing in the grass in front of them. He still hadn’t made up his mind about Mrs Ndhlovo and her sister. And he was no longer sure he believed a word she said. On the other hand he was secretly pleased she had never been the third wife of the late Mr Ndhlovo.
‘It was the only way I could get into the country,’ she had explained. Purefoy said he didn’t understand.
‘How do you imagine someone without a birth certificate or a passport can pass through Immigration Control without any papers? It is impossible.’
‘But you must have had some sort of identification. You must know who you are.’
‘I know who I am n
ow, but I didn’t then. Nobody knew. You have never lived in a country like Argentina under the Generals where people quite literally disappeared. That’s what happened to my mother and father. Brigitte and I were found one morning on a picnic table on the bank of the Rio Plata in a town called Fray Bentos. We had labels tied to us with the word “Unknown” in English written on them. So we went to a Catholic orphanage where the nuns called us Incognito. That was a joke too, to begin with, but the name stuck and I became Ingrid Natasha Cognito and Brigitte was more fortunate. All the same we hated the orphanage and the nuns and we ran away and went to Paraguay. And that wasn’t nice at all because we had to live with some very poor Germans in a really strange settlement. We had blue eyes and fair hair and spoke English.’
Purefoy listened with a drowsy fascination. The River Plate, Fray Bentos and the meat-packing factory which had closed, the Golf Club with the Coronation Plaque for George VI on the wall and the distances of the holes still in yards, Paraguay and Stroessner’s German-helmeted troops goose-stepping in a dusty plaza, the dilapidated farmhouses of the descendants of nineteenth-century German settlers, strange South African sects in modern buildings, heat and insects, and then back through Uruguay to Montevideo, a city which was frozen in the 1950s and where Anglos still gathered in the English Club with its cracked and pasted dining-room window and the plaster ceiling in the bar broken and partly fallen and its bound copies of the Montevideo Times piled in the library next to the ancient and unused fencing gallery. From there to Africa, this time with the help of the South African sectarians.
The white horses grazed on the meadow grass and Purefoy’s imagination followed the story of Miss I. N. Cognito’s wanderings with the growing conviction that she must be telling the truth. All the same he was still suspicious. In the modern world everyone in faintly civilized society had to have some means of identifying themselves even if it was only some nuns in an orphanage or someone who had known them for a time.
‘That doesn’t help you get into the UK,’ Ingrid said. ‘You try coming into Heathrow with no passport or birth certificate and no one to vouch for who you are. It’s weird. Those immigration officers don’t even pretend to think you’re telling the truth. We tried it one time on a cargo flight from Lusaka. That was a mistake. It got the crew into terrible trouble and they gave us the most gruesome body searches. And laxatives in case we’d swallowed condoms of drugs or diamonds. Not nice.’
‘What on earth were you doing in Lusaka?’
‘I told you we had become born-again members of the Benoni Sect. Some woman had visions or something back in 1927 and the people thought this was a good time to move out of South Africa with some money to build missions in South America.’
‘They could have given you some means of identification …’
‘Could have. Didn’t because we told them the religion was a phoney and it’s amazing how intolerant religious people can be when you refuse to believe. They cast us out into outer darkness, in this case Brakpan, and we had to make it on our own.’
‘So how did you get into this country?’
‘By making friends with a nice Greek who had a corner store and two sisters who didn’t mind losing their passports. We had to give them back to him in Athens. After that it wasn’t so difficult. We worked our way along the Mediterranean to Spain, on yachts mainly, and a sweet old man in Palamos needed crew. His wife didn’t like crossing the Bay of Biscay in winter and went home by air. So one day we sailed into Falmouth and came ashore when no one was looking.’
‘And you still have no papers? You don’t have a passport or a birth certificate or anything?’
‘Oh, but I have. Once you’re here it’s easy to get a birth certificate.’
‘How?’ Purefoy asked. He wanted certainty. She gave it to him.
Purefoy looked at her in amazement. ‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘At least, I hope you didn’t.’
‘Well, we had to do something. And he was such a pathetic man. All alone in the world and slaving away in Somerset House and no one had been nice to him before.’
‘So you got a passport in the name of Mrs Ndhlovo?’ said Purefoy suspiciously.
‘Oh no, not Mrs Ndhlovo. She was only a temporary expedient much later. I’m Isobel Rathwick and I was born in Bournemouth. I’m entirely legitimate now. All the same I much prefer Mrs Ndhlovo. I don’t want you to call me anything else. It gives me a lot of fun with all those serious people who are concerned about the Third World.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Purefoy. ‘And what about your sister? What’s she doing now?’
‘Being frightfully respectable in Woking. She’s married and has two daughters, but every now and then she has to break out and go back to being herself.’
‘It all sounds very odd to me. I don’t see how you can live a lie.’
‘Because we’ve had to invent ourselves, Purefoy dear, just like everyone else.’
‘Not me,’ said Purefoy. ‘I’m certain I know who I am.’
‘You only think you do,’ Mrs Ndhlovo thought but she didn’t say it.
They strolled back up King’s Parade and looked at the stalls in the market and had tea in a little café behind the Guildhall, and this time Purefoy told her about his sparring rounds with the Dean and the Senior Tutor, and how Skullion had been taken away.
‘Oh Purefoy, how brilliant. And it’s all because of me and Brigitte. I think I shall become something called … What shall we call it? A Provocator, yes, a Provocator and conduct classes for shy young men who believe everything they are told or read in books. I’m tired of Male Infertility and Masturbatory Techniques and all those earnest women feeling deeply about Female Circumcision and not a smile among them.’
‘But you are an expert on it. You can’t just give it up like that.’
‘I took it up just like that,’ said Ms I. N. Cognito. ‘I got the slides in London and read up on all the rest. And if you want to know why, because I was bored with being a stewardess on airlines and being polite to people I would never want to see again. Oh, the lies one had to tell! And they were always the same boring lies. At least as Mrs Ndhlovo I could be more imaginative, but that’s got boring too, and people, usually most unattractive ones, will come up to me afterwards and ask questions. The number of really awful women who have tried to proposition me! But now it’s all going to be different. I want you to show me your Porterhouse. I’m going to apply for the post of Provocator. Junior Provocator. Do you think they’ll accept me?’
‘They’ve got enough troubles already,’ said Purefoy.
*
In the bedroom at General Sir Cathcart D’Eath’s ‘safe house’ near the Botanical Gardens Myrtle Ransby was experiencing a sense of the unreal combined with a hangover that was the worst she had ever known. She had arrived at the right time the night before as the General had ordered, having had one or two brandies to steady her nerves which were still affected by meeting the American with the bloodstained apron, the awful knife and the partly dismembered stallion at the Catfood Canning Factory. She had let herself in the back door and after one or two more brandies – there was no one else about – she had managed with great difficulty to get into the black latex suit and had put the hood on over her en bouffant. Then she had sat down and waited, every now and then helping herself to some more brandy. The client hadn’t turned up. Myrtle rummaged in her bag and read the General’s instructions again. He had definitely said Friday at 8 p.m. It was now nearly nine. Well, she’d get paid whatever happened. Those torn notes were going to become whole ones even if she had to sit there all night. Two hours later she decided to take the hood off and get some fresh air. This entailed removing the rubber gloves first and they wouldn’t come. She was interrupted in her struggle with the things by the need to go wee-wee and she was fighting another battle, this time with the bottom half of her costume when the phone rang. Myrtle told it to go fuck itself and stayed where she was. Then, when it was too late, she made an attempted dash for the t
hing and tripped over. The phone stopped ringing. Myrtle reached for the brandy bottle and drank quite a lot more. It was almost midnight when she tried to go to the bathroom again and inadvertently switched the light off and couldn’t find the switch again. By now her efforts to rid herself of the gloves, the hood and the rest of her costume had become a waste of time. In the darkness she crawled about the floor and found the brandy bottle and finished it. Presently she passed out and spent the night where she lay, happily unaware of time, place and her own condition.
Morning, not a bright morning in the shuttered room, was very different. It took her some time to work out why she could hardly breathe, could only see out of part of one eye – the hood and en bouffant had both changed position – and was encased in something that was at once cold and sticky. Slowly and painstakingly she managed to get to her feet and make it with the help of the wall to the bathroom and turn the light on. The image in the mirror did nothing to restore her self-esteem. Used to fairly awful mornings in the company of boys at the airbase with peculiar tastes in fetish costumes, she had never seen herself in anything approaching this bizarre condition. Myrtle Ransby sat down on the lavatory and began to cry before dimly remembering that she had promised her husband she’d be back by one o’clock at the latest. She had also been promised the other half of the two thousand pounds. For a moment fury rose in her. She had been betrayed, was in a strange house and in a rubber suit that was far too small for her. She felt like death. Worst of all it was the weekend and somehow she had to get home. At that moment the effects of the brandy made themselves felt in various ways.