by Tom Sharpe
But Vera wasn’t prepared to argue. ‘He is an excellent researcher and a genuine scholar. You’ll see that when you meet him.’
‘I don’t intend to,’ said Goodenough.
*
Nor, it seemed, did Lady Mary. The strain of interviewing the previous applicants for the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellowship had told on her failing health. Never a very sexual person herself, she had found the interview with the psycho-anal-erotic fantasist from Grimsby deeply disturbing. Owing to an extremely painful attack of sciatica she had had to conduct it while lying on a chaise longue, and Dr MacKerbie had arrived smelling very strongly of beer and whisky. In fact he was plainly drunk at ten o’clock in the morning and had evidently got the impression that she was lying there waiting to enjoy his particular fantasies and even to experience anal eroticism herself. She had been saved by the housekeeper who heard her screams and by Dr MacKerbie, whose drunkenness made the business of undoing his trousers altogether too hazardous.
After that nightmare interview, Lady Mary invariably sat behind a substantial desk with a tape recorder running and the housekeeper’s husband standing in a corner of the room for protection. The interview with Dr Lamprey Yeaster went fairly well to begin with. The historian was at least sober and his knowledge of Historical Research into Industrial Relations in Bradford before the War was impressive. So in a way, though in an entirely different way, were his opinions on post-war immigration policies and the consequences of allowing hundreds of thousands of West Indians and Pakistanis into Britain. Lady Mary Evans had him hustled out of the house after twenty minutes and had to lie down on the chaise longue again, this time with nervous prostration.
The next six applicants all failed to satisfy her and the only one who appealed to her at all said he’d changed his mind and wouldn’t go near Porterhouse because it was a bloody snob college and anyway he was quite happy doing research into potato pathology at Strathclyde and Cambridge didn’t have anything to offer him. By the time she reached the vivisectionist from Southampton and had had to listen to a perfectly foul account of his work with cats, Lady Mary was on the point of abandoning the entire project. But her sense of duty prevailed. She phoned Mr Lapline, and was put through instead to Goodenough.
‘I do see the problem,’ he said when she complained bitterly about the quality of the applicants and wanted to know why she had been sent a man who made it his life’s work to torture cats to death when she was particularly fond of cats and … ‘I really do, Lady Mary, but the fact of the matter is that Porterhouse has a perfectly dreadful reputation, as you are probably aware, and –’
Lady Mary pointed out that as her late husband had been Master of Porterhouse and had been murdered there of course she knew it had a dreadful reputation and what had that got to do with sending her a lot of psychopaths.
‘The thing is,’ said Goodenough, ‘that it has proved extremely difficult to find genuine scholars who want to go near the place.’
‘So far you haven’t found a single scholar. That awful man from Bristol who wants to send every black person back to countries they’ve never come from …’
‘You mean Dr Lamprey Yeaster? I had no idea he held such disgraceful political views. My remit was to –’
‘From now on your remit, as you choose to call it, is to vet the applicants yourself. I am not a well person, and I refuse to have to meet people who are either mad or thoroughly repulsive in some other way. Is that clear? And anyway, why are you dealing with the matter? I have always dealt with Mr Lapline.’
Goodenough sighed audibly into the phone. ‘I’m afraid Mr Lapline is undergoing medical treatment for his gall bladder. A temporary condition but a very painful one, I’m told. In the meantime please be assured that I shall do everything necessary …’
He put the phone down and went through to Vera. ‘Well, that has simplified things,’ he said. ‘You can tell Cousin Purefoy he has the Fellowship. She doesn’t want to see any of the others. I suppose I’ll have to meet him after all.’
3
In Purefoy Osbert at Kloone University the news that he was about to become the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow at Porterhouse aroused mixed emotions, though only slightly. He was perfectly happy at Kloone where he had first studied and, having graduated, had gone on to his doctoral thesis, ‘The Crime of Punishment’, on the inequities of the penal system in Britain. On the other hand he had no doubt he would be perfectly happy in Cambridge. And the move would have its advantages. The University Library there had many more books than that at Kloone and to Purefoy it was in libraries that he could acquire certainties. Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked. Like an intellectual sniffer-dog, Purefoy Osbert kept his nose close to documents, collected information and felt confident in the certainty of his conclusions. Theories and certainties protected him from the chaos that was the universe. They also helped him to cope with the chaotic inconsistencies of his late father’s opinions.
The Reverend Osbert had been of the eclectic persuasion. Brought up as a Presbyterian, he had in his teens switched to Methodism, then to Unitarianism and from that to Christian Science before being persuaded by a reading of Newman’s Apologia that Rome was his spiritual home. The homecoming did not last long, although it contributed to Purefoy’s naming. Tolstoyan pacifism was more manifestly the answer and for a while the Rev. Osbert toyed with Buddhism. In other words Purefoy’s childhood was spent on a roller-coaster of changing philosophies and uncertain opinions. He would go to school one morning knowing that his father believed in one God, only to come home in the afternoon to learn that God didn’t exist.
Mrs Osbert, on the other hand, was entirely consistent. So long as her husband paid the bills – he had inherited a row of small houses and rented them to reliable tenants – and provided the family with a comfortable living, she did not mind what opinions he held or for how long. ‘Just stick to the facts,’ she would say when one of his digressions went on too long, and she was frequently telling young Purefoy, ‘The trouble with your father is that he is never certain about anything. He never knows what to believe. If only he could be certain about something, we’d all be a lot happier. You just bear that in mind and you won’t go the same way.’ Not wanting to go the same way as his father, who had died quite terribly on his return from a pilgrimage to a Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka where he had made the mistake of attempting to befriend a rabid dog, Purefoy had never forgotten her words. ‘I told him one of those days he would go too far,’ she explained to Purefoy after the funeral. ‘And he did. To Sri Lanka. And all in search of holiness. Instead of which … Well, never mind. You just stick to certainties and you won’t go far wrong.’
Purefoy had done his best to follow her advice. All the same, he had inherited his father’s tendency to seek for meaning in abstractions. At Kloone University he had been particularly affected by Professor Walden Yapp, who had once been wrongly convicted of murder. The Professor’s account of his time in prison and the psychological trauma resulting from a sense of his own innocence had affected Purefoy deeply and had influenced his choice of a doctoral thesis. Professor Yapp’s innocence could not be doubted. Had capital punishment still been in existence when the Professor was sentenced, he would certainly have been hanged. ‘From my own experience I can say with absolute assurance that other men, as innocent as I am, have undoubtedly gone to the gallows.’
Professor Yapp’s statement had inspired Purefoy Osbert to spend five years working on his next book, The Long Drop. He acknowledged his debt to Professor Yapp in his dedication and then went on to do further research into innocent victims of the criminal system and the brutalizing effect of prison life on prisoners and prison officers alike, for a book he intended to call This Punished Breed. It was a work he hoped would put an end once and for all to the pernicious and positively mediaeval public belief in crime as a punishable offence. He went further. He did not subscribe to Professor Yap
p’s belief that theft, murder, muggings or any other criminal activity were the products of poverty and social deprivation. He blamed the law itself. As he never tired of telling his students, ‘Crime is the consequence of the system of law and order established to root out the social disease it creates. By defining that which is unlawful we ensure that the law will be broken.’ It was a concept that naturally found favour with his students and had the merit of forcing the more intelligent ones to argue vehemently with one another, and even occasionally to think. This was a notable achievement at Kloone, and added to Dr Osbert’s already considerable reputation. But for the most part he spent his time in libraries or at the Public Record Office going through box after box of documents in pursuit of the information he needed.
But if his father and mother had influenced him, so too had his cousin Vera. From his earliest childhood he had always done what she wanted. She was five years older than he was and, being a kindly if slightly promiscuous girl, had been only too ready to show him the certainty of her sex. From that moment of adolescent revelation Purefoy had been ambiguously devoted to Vera. He had spent many hours thinking about her and had been sure he was in love with her. But she had gone her own way and Purefoy had pursued other less uncertain quantities. It was only much later, when he met Mrs Ndhlovo, that he knew himself to be truly in love.
One evening, in the mistaken belief that he was going to hear a lecture by a leading authority on Prison Reform in Sierra Leone, he found himself sitting in the front row of an evening class Mrs Ndhlovo was giving on Male Infertility and Masturbatory Techniques. The class was well attended and while Purefoy had learnt some of the facts of life from Vera, he learnt a great many more from Mrs Ndhlovo. She was particularly interesting on coitus interruptus and means of avoiding ejaculatio praecox. Above all she was beautiful. It was not solely her physical beauty that appealed to him so much: she had a beautiful mind. In a curiously unnecessary pidgin English she spoke in detail about clitoral stimulation and fellatio with a calm assurance that left him almost breathless with admiration. And desire. Within the course of that first hour he had found his true love and when the following week he was there in the same seat looking adoringly up at her splendid lips and eyes while she showed some particularly horrible slides of the effects of female circumcision on mature women in East Africa, he was certain he was in love. After the lecture he introduced himself and their relationship began.
Unfortunately for Purefoy Mrs Ndhlovo, while fond of him, did not reciprocate his feelings. Her first marriage in Kampala had not been an entirely happy one. The discovery that Mr Ndhlovo already had three wives and that the first wife had been the one to suggest that he marry again had rather spoilt the honeymoon. All the same she had loved him in her own way and felt genuine sorrow when he disappeared and was rumoured to be among the other contents of General Idi Amin’s freezer. The fact that they were no longer there when the General was ousted and fled to Saudi Arabia had done nothing to set her suspicions to rest. By then she had left Uganda and had come to Britain to start a new career in education. Within a few months she had gained a considerable reputation at Kloone by stating openly at parties that her Johnny had almost certainly been part of ‘that black bastard Idi Amin’s late-night snack’. Such outspokenness on interracial matters had until then been unheard at the University, but no one could find fault with Mrs Ndhlovo. She obviously had every right in the world to talk like that about the man who had murdered and consumed her husband. She had been there in Uganda and she had suffered terribly. The fact that she was very attractive and knew so much about sexual practices in Africa and, it seemed, just about everywhere else in the world also helped to make her a popular figure. Besides which, she was a very practical woman.
‘All very well you say you love me,’ she said, maintaining the curious English Purefoy found so delightful, ‘you don’t earn enough to keep two and have kids too. You got no ambition either, Purefoy. No money, no ambition, no Mrs Ndhlovo.’
‘But Ingrid, you know –’ Purefoy began.
‘And don’t call me that name. I no like it. I Mrs Ndhlovo. Different.’
‘You can say that again,’ Purefoy said. ‘But one of these days I’m bound to get a professorship and –’
‘One of these days too late,’ said Mrs Ndhlovo adamantly. ‘I don’t have kids by that time. Get the pause.’
‘The paws?’ said the mystified Purefoy.
‘Manopause. Don’t know why they call it manopause. Have to pause now once a month. After manopause, no pause at all. No kids either. I go find proper man. Ambition. Money. Not just sit ass on chair reading books. Make some big thing. Got to have ambition.’
From these grim discussions Purefoy came away disheartened but he still attended her evening classes and had watched in an agonizing ecstasy her demonstration of the use of the double-strength condom as a means of delaying the male orgasm. The sight of her long tapering fingers sliding the thing over the plaster-of-Paris penis and then stroking the scrotum left him limp and wishing to hell he’d taken the precaution of wearing one himself. The following week he had come better prepared, only to find that her lecture was purely theoretical and dealt entirely with an historical review of medical and religious objections to so-called self-abuse or onanism. There had been none of those practical demonstrations that had made the condom necessary and, far from saving Purefoy Osbert embarrassment, the thing had been the cause of it. His efforts to prevent the device making its way down his trouser leg had caught the attention of the women on either side of him, who were evidently as bored as he was by historical objections to masturbation. Purefoy’s spasmodic movements were far more intriguing. Purefoy smiled bleakly at the woman on his right and was misunderstood. ‘Can’t you wait until afterwards?’ she asked in a whisper that was audible several rows behind. For the rest of the hour he sat staring rigidly at Mrs Ndhlovo and hardly moved at all, but at the end of the class he was forced to stand up. ‘After you,’ said the woman on his left. The one on his right had already hurried off.
‘No, please, after you,’ said Purefoy and squeezed back against the chair.
The woman shook her head. She had no intention of passing at all closely to a man whose sudden attention to his upper leg had been so peculiarly spasmodic and intense. She hadn’t liked his bleak smile either. ‘Look,’ she said, rather unpleasantly. ‘You go out first. All right?’
It wasn’t all right, but Purefoy went. So did the condom. For a moment it clung to his knee but only for a moment. As he stepped forward it dropped out of the bottom of his trouser-leg and lay supine on the toe of his shoe. Purefoy tried to kick it off but again his movements were too peculiar to ignore. Conscious that he was the object of amused interest he hurried down the hall and out into the comparative anonymity of the parking lot where he could deal with the thing in private. After that Purefoy abandoned the condom method and took matters into his hands before attending Mrs Ndhlovo’s classes.
*
It was shortly after this and several more vain attempts to get Mrs Ndhlovo, if not to marry him, at least to become his partner, that Vera phoned to tell him about the Fellowship at Porterhouse. Purefoy Osbert was not interested. ‘I am perfectly happy here and I have no interest in going to Cambridge. And anyway why should anyone offer me a Fellowship at Porterhouse just like that? You have to apply and explain your special area of research and –’
‘Purefoy, darling, of course you’ve had to apply. That is all taken care of, and your application has almost certainly been accepted.’
‘It can’t have been. I haven’t made it.’
‘But I have,’ said Vera sweetly. ‘On your behalf.’
‘You can’t go round making applications on other people’s behalf. You’ve got to get their consent and anyway you don’t even know what I’ve published or my curriculum vitae. Or what my present studies are.’
‘Of course I do. I got it from your Faculty secretary. She was extremely helpful.’
‘W
hat?’ squawked Purefoy, now thoroughly alarmed and angry. ‘She had absolutely no right to give confidential information away like that. I’ve a good mind –’
‘A very good mind,’ Vera interrupted. ‘In fact an excellent one, which is why you are going to Porterhouse.’
‘I’m most definitely not,’ said Purefoy. ‘I want to know why Mrs Pitch gave you details of my curriculum vitae. You can’t go round revealing –’
‘Oh, do hush up. She didn’t do anything of the sort. I’m your cousin, remember, and I know just about everything about you. Besides, it’s all on the Kloone University computer and I know your password so I went straight in and had it all printed out.’
‘My password? You don’t know it. You can’t have got it from Mrs Pitch either because she doesn’t know it.’
‘I’m certain she doesn’t, but I most certainly do.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’ Purefoy demanded.
Vera giggled. ‘Purefoy, dear, you’re so transparent. “Certainty” is your password. I knew it had to be something like that. You’re obsessed with it.’
Purefoy Osbert groaned. Vera had always been smarter than he was. ‘In that case I’m going to change it,’ he said. ‘And I am definitely not going anywhere near Porterhouse College. It’s got a dreadful reputation for snobbery and all sorts of other things.’
‘Which is why you have been given a Fellowship there. To change things for the better,’ said Vera. ‘They need some serious scholarship, and you are going to provide it. Your salary will be more than three times what you’re getting at the moment and you will be free to do your own research work with no obligation to do any teaching.’
Purefoy Osbert’s silence was significant. Only that day he had had to attend an extremely boring Finance Committee meeting at which the possibility of financial cuts had been discussed with the mention of a freeze on salaries, and that had been followed by a seminar on Bentham with several students who were convinced that prisons built like Dartmoor on the panopticon principle were far more suitable for murderers and sex-offenders than the more modern open prisons Purefoy advocated. Some of them had even argued that child molesters ought to be castrated and murderers executed. Purefoy had found the seminar most distressing, particularly the way the more prejudiced students had refused to accept the facts he had given them. And now suddenly he was being offered a Fellowship that involved no teaching and with a salary that would surely satisfy Mrs Ndhlovo.