by Tom Sharpe
‘He’s up in the communications room,’ the man said when he’d shut the door. ‘He never seems to sleep. Spends his time surfing the Internet for stuff I didn’t know existed and I used to be on the Porn Squad before I joined this outfit. I’ll buzz him you’re coming.’
The Praelector waited in the drawing-room staring out into the pulsating night and thinking about the May Balls he had known in his youth. They had been sedate affairs and he had enjoyed them enormously, swinging round the Hall doing the quickstep or a fox-trot and, most daringly of all, the tango with a polished liveliness and delight that was a world away from the mechanical Bacchanalia the young now seemed to crave. Not that he blamed them. They were drowning out a world that seemed to have no structure to it and no meaning for them, a monstrous bazaar in which the only recognized criteria were money and sex and drugs and the pursuit of moments of partial oblivion. Perhaps it was a better world than the one he had known when Europe had gone to war and discipline was everything. He didn’t know and wouldn’t live long enough to find out.
He was interrupted in his reverie by the arrival of Hartang. He was smaller than the Praelector had remembered him, seemed to have shrunk and had a haggard look about him. ‘You wanted to see me?’ he asked almost humbly, his weak eyes blinking in the bright light of the drawing-room.
The Praelector nodded deferentially. ‘Good evening, Master,’ he said. ‘I trust I am not disturbing you. I’m afraid our May Ball this year is unusually noisy. The students are celebrating the change in the College fortunes and your appointment.’
Hartang smiled slightly. He was never too sure about the Praelector. ‘It’s nice to hear kids enjoying themselves,’ he said. He indicated a chair and the Praelector sat down.
‘I have come, Master, to say that your Inauguration Feast has been fixed for Thursday and to find out if this suits you.’
‘Inauguration Feast?’ Hartang sounded uncertain.
‘Yes, it is a necessary part of the formal ceremonies which are traditional in Porterhouse with the appointment of a new Master. We take sherry in the Combination Room and then proceed to the Hall where you will take your place in the Master’s chair.’
‘I’ve got to do this?’ Hartang asked.
‘No Master has ever been known to absent himself,’ said the Praelector. ‘It is considered a great honour. The College is closed for the evening and no guests are invited. It is a purely private Porterhouse function.’
Hartang considered the matter for a moment. ‘I guess it’ll be all right,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, I guess so. Thursday?’
‘We gather at 7.30 and the Senior Fellows will escort you to the Combination Room. You will not be required to make a speech.’
‘Sounds fine with me. 7.30?’
Thank you, Master, we will be honoured by your presence.’
The Praelector left the Lodge well satisfied, and Hartang went back to his communications room. He wanted to find out what the yen was doing. It was up and the Tokyo Stock Exchange was down 100 points. He’d got it right again.
*
Purefoy and Mrs Ndhlovo sat on the bank of the river on the way to Grantchester watching the punts go by. It was 6 a.m. and the revellers were going happily up to the Orchard Tea Garden for breakfast before drifting wearily back to Cambridge and bed. It was the custom and in their evening dresses and dinner jackets they struck a discordantly gay note against the pollarded willows and the flat farm fields on the far bank. ‘Not our scene,’ said Purefoy. ‘But worth seeing. Like going back fifty years and probably much more. Weird.’
But Mrs Ndhlovo was a little envious. She would have liked to dance the night away and be lying in a punt while Purefoy poled it up the river with the one-handed twist some of the young men affected before leaving the punt pole dragging in the water for a moment to steer. All the same she knew what Purefoy meant. Even at their dances the English lacked the vivacity of the people she had seen in South America and Africa. Their laughter was different too and hadn’t the same joyfulness about it. To her ear it didn’t seem spontaneous, merely an awkwardly conventional response that was required of them. But these were young people whose year had been spent in pursuit of academic excellence and in serious discussions and the world weighed heavily upon them. They were recruits in the army of the intellect, drilled and disciplined in thinking. And after a week listening to Skullion she was confused. Behind the façade of convention so many dark inhibitions found expression in the weirdest ways. Nothing was what it seemed. She and Purefoy had been taken behind the scenes into a little world full of the strangest inconsistencies and disguised animosities that was both sad and alarming and full of hidden unhappiness. It was not her world.
She turned over and looked down at the grass. Some ants were busily going to and fro along a path of their own devising, never deviating for more than a moment from some unknown and interminable purpose. Mrs Ndhlovo wondered if she looked like that seen perhaps from a satellite. It was certainly how Purefoy behaved, busily pursuing his facts and placing so much reliance on the written word. Skullion had shaken that solid confidence with his oral history of forty-odd years in Porterhouse and perhaps Purefoy would change. It wouldn’t be enough. He was already working furiously, editing the typescript that had cost so much, cutting a digression here and noting it for future use, removing unnecessary repetitions and even once – and in her eyes unforgivably – removing a double negative ‘in the interest of clarity’. Mrs Ndhlovo sighed and rolled over again to look up at some passing clouds in the blue summer sky.
‘Purefoy my love,’ she said, ‘you aren’t the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow any longer. You’re the James Skullion Memorial Fellow. You’ll write a book from what he’s given you and with all the checking of cross-references it will be your life’s work. Your opus dei.’
But Purefoy Osbert didn’t get the allusive pun. His had been a strictly Protestant upbringing. ‘Ours,’ he said and lay down beside her. Mrs Ndhlovo smiled but said nothing. She wasn’t going to stay in Cambridge and she wasn’t going to stay with Purefoy, but she had no intention of telling him that now. He was too happy. It would be soon enough when he had his nose in the book to give him a sense of real achievement and lessen his feelings of loss. Besides, it would never have worked. Purefoy was far too easy to lie to and far too gentle to hurt. She would find an improper man who would understand her.
*
In Porterhouse the marquees were gone and only the marks on the lawn remained where the dance floors and the pegs had been. The courts were silent again and the tables and benches had been brought back into the Hall when Kudzuvine presented himself nervously at the Porter’s Lodge and was admitted.
‘Shoot, what’s happened to the grass?’ he asked Walter as they went through to the Buttery. ‘That stuff has been there hundreds of years. Like it’s a protected species. How come it’s all fucked up?’
‘It was the May Ball last week.’
In Kudzuvine’s head the words had a sinister ring to them. ‘Last week? Last week was June.’
‘Yes sir,’ said Walter. ‘Last week was June.’ He wasn’t going to bother explaining things to the Yank. He’d had them up to the eyeballs. Only Mr Skullion knew how to handle them and he was in the Combination Room sitting in his wheelchair with his bowler hat still defiantly on and eyeing the Fellows with a hard unyielding authority. Even the Dean was solemnly deferential now. He knew when he was beaten.
Only the Chaplain’s bonhomie remained unchanged. ‘Ah, Skullion, my dear old fellow, how splendid to see you again. It seems ages since we had a chat. What have you been doing?’
‘Oh, this and that,’ Skullion said. ‘Mostly this, but a bit of that.’
‘A bit of that, eh? And at your age! How I envy you. I remember once years ago now …’ But he stopped himself in time and looked puzzled. ‘A bit of this and that, eh? Well I never.’
Presently, when everyone was assembled, the Praelector and the Dean and the Senior Tutor in their festal
gowns and silk hoods walked slowly across the Garden to fetch the new Master. Hartang walked back between them. In the background the two men kept a discreet watch on the procession and then followed.
‘We are deeply honoured …’ the Dean was saying but the words meant something else to the security men. They had no time for Hartang and would be glad to get back to some real work. They took their places in the Hall, the shorter one in the Musicians’ Gallery and the older man in the shadows behind High Table where Arthur was lighting the candles and the silver gleamed. They didn’t have long to wait. The new Master said he didn’t drink amontillado and no one offered him whisky. Then the door of the Combination Room opened and the Fellows filed in. This time the Dean and the Praelector preceded Skullion in the wheelchair and Hartang followed. He was feeling really awful. This was it, his future life and it was his idea of hell.
The Chaplain said Grace and Hartang was offered the Master’s Chair. On either side of him the Fellows took their seats and at the very end Skullion sat in his wheelchair looking down the table with approval. At least the standards he had known were being kept up. The silver had been polished and the old oak table gleamed with wax. That gave him some sense of accomplishment but he had greater cause for satisfaction. All the same he was still afraid. The Fellows of Porterhouse, of Porterhouse past, had not been men who gave way to threats – not easily at any rate – and there was still the danger that they would deceive him. Even the Hall played a part in his apprehension by calling up memories of feasts and great occasions when he had been a servant of the College and proud of his position. Skullion closed his mind to the siren call of that past with its deference and its social wiles and steeled himself with a contempt for the present. He was helped by the occasional anxious look the Dean gave him. They were all as old and feeble as he was in his body but theirs was a worse weakness: they had lost their spirit. They were going to see that he hadn’t.
‘I hope we are not going to have anything too rich,’ Hartang said to the Praelector.
‘I can assure you, Master, that the menu has been carefully chosen with your constitution in mind. I trust you like German wine. We start with Vichyssoise and we have a delicate Rhein wine to go with it. Then there is the cold salmon, one of the Chef’s specialities and a great favourite with the Queen Mother.’ He broke off to allow the Dean to tell the story of his meeting with the Queen Mother or the Queen as she then was and the King on the battleship, the Duke of York, then Flagship of the Home Fleet during the Fleet Review on the Clyde in 1947 and how when the Prime Minister, Mr Attlee, was piped on board he didn’t know whether to take his hat off or leave it on and he held it sort of hovering above his head. To make matters worse, King George VI and the Queen and, of course, the young Princesses with Prince Philip in tow had been round the Fleet on a motor torpedo boat which made a terrible din and was so loud when it came alongside that the Royal Marine Guard of Honour on the quarterdeck had barely heard the order to Present Arms. The Senior Fellows knew the story off by heart and Hartang wasn’t interested in kings and queens unless he held them in his hand, but the story saw them through the soup and the salmon. All Hartang was thinking was that he was safe. Safe and bored. His thoughts drifted to Thailand and the beach house he owned there and what he would do if he were there instead of sitting with these stuffed shirts.
A moment later he knew with a terrible certainty that he was not safe. The doors at the far end of the Hall under the Musicians’ Gallery had been flung open and four waiters entered carrying on their shoulders like some monstrous bier a vast pig, a tusked boar with a blackened apple in its mouth. Behind them came waiters with two more great roast boar. And beside the first pig came Kudzuvine dressed from top to toe in black with an enormous carving knife and fork in his hands. For several seconds Hartang gazed at the ghastly beasts in frozen terror. At the long tables the undergraduates were shouting and clapping enthusiastically. It was bedlam in the Hall. Then with a scream only he could hear – his mouth opened but no sound came out – the financier struggled to his feet unable to take his eyes off the approaching monstrosity. This was death and Kudzuvine was its herald. The Master’s great Chair fell back with a crash and Hartang recoiled in horror. The Fellows had no eyes for him. They stared at the boar with astonishment and delight. The Chaplain’s simple Grace, ‘For what we are about to receive may the good Lord be thanked,’ had been answered in full measure. So had the Praelector’s intention. Hartang staggered a few steps and fell.
‘Kudzuvine, attend your Master,’ ordered the Praelector and Kudzuvine came round the table, but there was no need for his appearance to complete the charade. Hartang was already dead.
*
‘A Porterhouse Blue, do you think?’ the Senior Tutor enquired when the body had been removed and the great boar had been carved by the Chef.
‘Less a Blue than a yellow, if you ask me,’ said the Dean, who had suddenly remembered Hartang’s phobia about pigs on the tape.
‘It looks as though we are going to have to look for another source of funding,’ said the Bursar sadly. ‘It’s really most unfortunate.’
‘I don’t somehow think we need to worry about the College finances,’ the Praelector said as he helped himself to some more apple sauce. ‘I happen to know he died without making a will.’
‘You mean …’ the Senior Tutor began.
‘Intestate. No next of kin. And in such cases the Crown, as you know, is the beneficiary. I think we will find we have not been forgotten. After all we have been most cooperative in dealing with a very unpleasant situation.’
The Fellows gazed at him in amazement and almost stopped eating.
‘But that will mean the Prime Minister will appoint the new Master,’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘We may well end up with Tebbit.’
‘I can think of worse choices,’ said the Dean with unintended perception.
‘You seem to forget that the Master is still with us,’ said the Praelector and directed his gaze at Skullion. ‘He has the traditional right to name his successor, and I can think of no better moment.’
At the end of the table Skullion raised his head and made his pronouncement. For one terrible moment it looked as though the Dean was going to follow Hartang’s example, but he had merely swallowed a piece of crackling the wrong way and tried to say something. When he had stopped coughing and had been given another glass of Fonbadet he was still incapable of speech.
‘What did the Dean say?’ shouted the Chaplain.
‘God knows,’ the Praelector said with the utmost tact.
42
It was mid-summer before Purefoy Osbert had completed the first edition of what he now thought of as Skullion’s memoirs. It was by no means the final version, was ostensibly no more than the punctuated transcript of the long monologue, but he felt it was enough to indicate to Lady Mary that he had not been wasting his time. Mrs Ndhlovo typed it out for him – Purefoy was far too busy cross-referencing the College archives even to look at the final version. Then to save him the trouble she took it down to London and delivered it to Lapline and Goodenough. Mr Lapline read the manuscript over and over again and on each reading was more and more appalled. ‘We can’t possibly let her see this,’ he told Goodenough. ‘It’s out of the question.’
‘I don’t see why not. After all, she asked for the facts and she has obviously got them.’
‘Yes, but she didn’t know she was going to get the most scurrilous account of her husband’s time as an undergraduate. I had no idea he was capable of such things. This bit about blackmailing the Praelector would be enough to kill her. The man was an absolute shit.’
‘We knew that already,’ said Goodenough. ‘Married for money and all that sort of thing.’
‘I daresay, but not all this sort of thing.’
‘Quite a different kettle of fish, eh?’
Mr Lapline winced. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use expressions of that sort, Goodenough. It is painful enough having to digest this filth without ad
ditional culinary references. You’ll be telling me next that Porterhouse was a positive stew.’ He smiled bleakly at his own pun.
‘It certainly makes Sir Cathcart D’Eath’s peculiar tendencies slightly more understandable,’ Goodenough said. ‘Though why he should fancy large middle-aged women in rubber beats me.’
‘Bedders and bedwetters,’ said Mr Lapline and left it at that.
‘Bedwetters? I missed that bit. Where is it?’
‘Never mind. The point is that we cannot possibly allow Lady Mary to see this … this document. It would destroy what few illusions she has left. God knows she can’t have many since the end of the Cold War. She shall carry her happy memories of her marriage to Sir Godber to her grave.’
‘Reading that little lot I’d qualify the use of the word “happy”. Still, you’re probably right. She’s old and there’s no use larding the bacon. Sorry, I meant rubbing salt into the wound.’
*
In the secretary’s office Mrs Ndhlovo was explaining to Vera why she was leaving Purefoy without telling him. ‘I don’t want to hurt him,’ she said.
Vera said she understood but doubted Purefoy would be hurt for long. ‘He falls in and out of love all the time. He was once passionately in love with me or thought he was. And my poor dear cousin is incapable of love or passion. He thinks all women are physical versions of words. It’s the worst mistake possible. I doubt if he’ll ever get married to anything more practical than a library. And at least you’ve got him off hanging. His mother will be ever so grateful. She had a bad enough time with his father who was always changing his mind. Purefoy’s mind never changes. He clings to consistent falsities.’