by Tom Sharpe
Hartang’s mind went back to the occasion. ‘Ate like a pig,’ he said involuntarily, and went into spasms. When he had finally got several pills into his mouth and had washed them down with mineral water, he corrected himself. The pig phobia was subdued by another thought. He was being stung to the tune of twenty millions by some broken-down professors. ‘Grotesque,’ he muttered, meaning the Bursar. ‘Gets his suits from the Salvation Army, thrift shop, some place like that. But dumb he ain’t.’
‘No sir, I guess not,’ said Skundler, wishing to hell he could avoid mentioning the Bursar’s next visit with the ledgers.
‘Don’t guess, Skundler. Tell it like it is.’
‘So I told Kudzuvine we had to see the print-out on account we needed to know their financial situation. Like we’re not buying a pig in a poke. Jesus, Mr Hartang, you all right? I mean you want me to call the medication team?’
Hartang shook his head – or it shook him. Everything about him shook for a minute and beads of sweat broke out on his face. When he finally pulled himself together again, his voice was shaky but his meaning was unmistakable. ‘I am all right, Skundler. You use that word again and you aren’t. Next time I’ll be putting a long-distance through.’
Skundler tried to swallow. His throat was desert-dry. He knew Hartang’s long-distance calls. Like ‘Fax me Death’. ‘The Professor brings these ledgers, sir, like … like they’re from before printing.’
‘Yes, they would be,’ said Hartang. ‘Ever know a fucking ledger had printing in it? Because I haven’t. Not in a lifetime doing accounts I’ve ever seen a ledger that’s been printed in.’
‘No, sir, I didn’t mean that. I meant like they were way back. Used quills and all. I said to the Professor –’
‘Skundler,’ said Hartang very quietly and eyeing him through slits, ‘Skundler, are you out of your fucking little mind? Or are you trying to tell me you are way off your trolley? Because I don’t believe you. I don’t believe one lousy fucking word you are telling me. You are lying, Skundler. And I don’t like liars one dead cent. I used to like you, Skundler. Skundler’s one of the team, I said. Not now. Not now you tell me they still use quills to do the books at this Porterhouse College of yours.’
‘I didn’t say that, Mr Hartang, sir,’ Skundler managed to get out, ‘I said like they used to. I said to the Professor, “Do you still use quills?” And he said –’
‘Yes, we use quills is what he told you. Like they got a million fucking geese running round they can rely on. No way, asshole. You’ll be telling me next they don’t do double-entry even.’
Skundler seized a final opportunity. ‘They do, sir. But with figures that bad nothing coming in and it is all out I don’t know why. I said to the Professor –’
‘I’ll tell you why, Skundler. I’ll tell you. Because that fucking Limey shit in the shiny suit like hand-me-downs was pegging you to the ground for the fucking ants to eat. He try and sell you any equity in a New fucking Jersey gold-mine too? Because if he did, you bought. As sure as shit you bought. Well, you and Kudzuvine have bought me twenty million sterling’s worth of trouble.’ He pressed a button underneath the huge glass-topped desk. ‘Get me Schnabel, Feuchtwangler and Bolsover. And fast,’ he shouted. Skundler hurried towards the door. ‘Not you, Skundler, not you. I want to enjoy your company a little longer. Not much but just a little. Okay.’ He paused and the lizard eyes studied Ross Skundler. ‘Want a drink, Ross?’ he asked. ‘Because I sure as hell do. And I don’t drink.’
‘Yes sir, I could do with one.’
‘Well, you’re not getting one. Now get me the Chivas Regal. Where you and Kudzuvine are going you’ll have plenty to drink. Like fathoms.’
Skundler crossed to the major bar and fetched the Scotch and one glass. They rattled on the desk top when he put them down.
Edgar Hartang was reading the letter again. He wanted his lawyers’ opinion and very fast indeed. It looked real bad to him. Like he’d been screwed.
20
It was late afternoon before the Dean left the Praelector’s study to visit the Master and see for himself what this monstrous gangster Kudzuvine looked like in the flesh. He had spent the intervening hours listening to the Praelector explain how he had consulted Mr Retter and Mr Wyve about damage repair and compensation and he had been impressed by the Praelector’s reasoning. All the same he had his reservations. ‘I take your point about the cost of repairs and compensation,’ he said, ‘though frankly I cannot conceive of this dreadful fellow Hartang paying up without a struggle. If what is on that tape is halfway true the man is in the drug trade.’
‘Which is precisely why he will pay up,’ said the Praelector. ‘I don’t think he will have any alternative.’
‘But money from a drug dealer? I mean the swine should be in jail. How can we possibly justify receiving money made in such a way?’
‘It is a matter I have given some thought to,’ said the Praelector. ‘And I have come to the conclusion that we must follow College precedent.’
For a moment the Dean could hardly believe his ears. ‘Precedent? Precedent? You’re not suggesting for one moment anyone in the College has ever been involved in the drug trade, surely?’
‘Not to my knowledge, though statistically I should have thought it was highly likely. No, I was thinking of one of our Masters. Long dead now, though not so long when one comes to think of it. 1749. Jonathan Riderscombe made his money in the Slave Trade. Now I don’t know which you think is worse, drugs or slaves. I must say I consider the Slave Trade to have been an abomination. But we benefited from it. I am too old to be entirely sentimental.’
The Dean kept his thoughts on the subject to himself. He disliked being reminded of the dark origins of great fortunes. He was also extremely surprised, and not at all pleased, that a new Fellow had been appointed in his absence. ‘The Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellowship?’ he said. ‘I don’t like the sound of this at all. The damned man Evans didn’t deserve a memorial of any sort. He was one of the worst Masters we’ve ever had. Except for Fitzherbert, of course, but that is another story. I think I ought to have been consulted before any decision was reached.’
‘Unfortunately we couldn’t reach you,’ said the Praelector.
‘Cathcart knew where I had gone. You could have asked him.’
‘We could have, had we known you were not visiting a dying relative,’ said the Praelector with some slight acerbity. ‘You could hardly expect us to phone every hospital and nursing home in Wales, and in any case there were other cogent reasons for making the decision very quickly.’
‘Were there indeed? And what might those reasons be?’ asked the Dean, who disliked being faulted.
‘Six million pounds,’ said the Praelector, which took the Dean’s breath away. ‘I think you would describe that sum as a sufficiently cogent reason. We were faced with something of an ultimatum. But the Senior Tutor knows more about the matter than I do. He was the person the donor’s lawyers approached. Don’t ask me why.’
‘Not the Bursar?’
‘Not the Bursar.’
‘And who exactly is this quite remarkably munificent donor? Do we know that?’
The Praelector shook his head. ‘No, we don’t, but I think I can make an educated guess. The Senior Tutor would have us believe it to be a group of City financiers who admired Sir Godber Evans’ efforts on their behalf. I don’t.’
The Dean didn’t either. ‘City financiers, my eye,’ he said, ‘the bloody man did terrible harm to the financial interests of the country. Hopeless Keynesian,’ he said.
‘Quite,’ the Praelector agreed. ‘On the other hand, a certain woman, I won’t call her a lady because in my opinion she isn’t one, though she does have the title … You take my meaning?’
‘I do indeed, and let me make an educated guess as to the name of the solicitors. It wouldn’t be Lapline and Goodenough by any chance?’
‘That I don’t know. The Senior Tutor was holding his cards very close to his che
st. All the same six million pounds is not to be sneezed at. It gives us a fighting fund against this monster Hartang.’
He smiled slightly and the Dean acknowledged the truth of the statement with a nod of the head. ‘Unfortunately it also gives us a new Fellow whose antecedents I think we should examine more closely. Where does he come from? I suppose the Senior Tutor was prepared to divulge that information to the College Council?’
‘Kloone University. His speciality seems to be in researching crimes and punishments. His main work is a large tome on hanging called The Long Drop. I have not read it myself but I am told it is authoritative by those who read such books.’
‘And I take it he is against hanging,’ said the Dean.
‘I imagine so. The widow would not have sponsored him if he’d been in favour of capital punishment,’ said the Praelector. ‘But you’ll meet him tonight. It is his Induction Dinner. I haven’t spoken to him myself so we shall just have to see what we have on our hands. In the meantime we have the Bursar in the lunatic asylum where he properly belongs and we have six million pounds in the kitty. And unless Retter and Wyve are totally misjudging the situation we have …’
‘The gangster Hartang by the scrotum,’ said the Dean.
The Praelector acknowledged that this had been his thought though he would have put it more delicately himself. ‘And what is more,’ he went on, ‘we have the man Kudzuvine at our convenience. I think the expression is that we have taken a hostage to fortune.’
Even the Dean had to smile. ‘I must congratulate you, Praelector. For a man of your age you have done splendidly.’
‘I don’t think age has anything to do with it, Dean, except in one regard. I had the good fortune to be born at a time when Britain was the most powerful nation on earth and the Slave Trade a thing of the past. It was a brief moment in history, I daresay, but the saying “An Englishman’s word is his bond” wasn’t entirely meaningless in those days. Alas, it is today. Men like Maxwell – though of course his real name was Hoch – and the scum that Wilson ennobled and Mrs Thatcher spawned have made that guarantee derisory.’
‘My own recent experiences have convinced me that something has gone terribly wrong,’ said the Dean miserably. ‘There has been a dreadful deterioration in standards.’
‘Yes, there has,’ the Praelector went on. ‘When I was young and we had to pretend to be gentlemen of honour, we had to act honourably to maintain the pretence. That was the greatest virtue hypocrisy conferred on us. And hypocrisy has always been a particularly English quality.’
The Dean left him sitting and contemplating with sad perception that great past when corruption and lying were not accepted social norms. Such evils had always been there and they always would be but they had not become endemic and socially acceptable. It had taken war, two Great Wars in which millions had died fighting for promises that had never been kept, to bring England to its moral knees. And men like Hartang to the top. The Praelector would readily die to prevent Hartang and his ilk destroying Porterhouse and the romantic virtues it had stood for. Even so he smiled. Englishmen had been clever in their time and he himself was still no fool. He just left it to other people to think he was.
*
The Dean approached the Master’s Lodge with more trepidation than he had expected. His nerve hadn’t failed him but he had been subjected to so many shocks and humiliations in the past few days that his confidence had been badly shaken. Besides that, he had been truly alarmed by the violence and disgusting imagery of Kudzuvine’s language on the tapes. Even during his time in the Navy he had never heard anything quite like the filth and violence that seemed to be Kudzuvine’s natural way of expressing himself. And it was not only the manner in which the creature spoke, it was more the callous acceptance of a world without sense or meaning that had been so shocking, shocking and alarming. For once he felt some sympathy for the Bursar and could understand why he was in the mental hospital, though that was as far as his sympathy went. The man must have been mad to begin with to get mixed up with creatures like Kudzuvine and the even more appalling Hartang with his phobia about being eaten by pigs and his insistence on being unidentifiable. Listening to the tapes the Dean had been confronted by hell on earth and he did not really want to meet one of its habitués. Still, it had to be done, so he straightened his short back and marched across the lawn and was rather surprised to find the French windows locked. He had to go round to the side door and ring the bell.
The door was opened on the chain by Arthur. Behind him stood Henry, the Under-Porter. ‘Ah, it’s you, sir,’ Arthur said. ‘If you’ll just wait a mo, I’ll undo the chain.’
‘Why is it on a chain?’ asked the Dean. ‘Nobody is going to break in. Nothing much to steal.’
‘It’s on account of the American gentleman upstairs, though I don’t consider him any sort of gentleman myself if you know what I mean.’
‘I do,’ said the Dean, ‘I do indeed, Arthur, and I entirely agree with you. And where’s the Master?’
‘Mr Skullion is in with him, sir. He spends most of his time in there though what he sees listening to that horrible language I can’t think, sir. But it do keep the American under control. Does everything the Master tells him.’
The Dean climbed the staircase and met the Matron on the landing. ‘Very nasty business this, Matron,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we’re having to submit you to this dreadful ordeal. Very sorry.’
‘It’s no ordeal to me,’ said the Matron, ‘not at all. I find it a pleasant change from dealing with coughs and colds and things. This is much more interesting and I’ve heard so many weird stories, and I have to say that my vocabulary has been broadened.’
‘Yes,’ said the Dean doubtfully. He had no wish to have a Matron in Porterhouse whose language had more of the lower deck than was entirely pleasant. ‘Yes, I daresay it has. And the Master is in good health?’
‘I can’t remember when I’ve seen him looking better, sir. Happier and more like his old self, if you know what I mean.’
‘Splendid,’ said the Dean. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you from your duties, Matron.’
He opened the bedroom door and paused in astonishment. A naked man was kneeling on the floor in front of Skullion’s wheelchair with his hands raised in supplication. ‘You gotta help me, Master. You got to. You send me away from here I going to die. Like he’s passed a death sentence on me. Jesus fuck, what I done, man, he’s going to take his time with me too like the slow roast or the charcoal grill and you know about these things, Master, anyone does got to be you. Please, please you got to say you going to help old Kudzuvine. I’ll do anything you ask, Master, I’ll do it. You just say the word.’
Kudzuvine prostrated himself at the foot of the wheelchair.
Strange sounds were coming from its occupant. Even the Dean, used as he was to Skullion’s inarticulacy immediately following his Porterhouse Blue, found the sounds incomprehensible and alarming. It was all very well the Matron saying she couldn’t remember when she had seen Skullion looking better and more like his old self, but the Dean found her optimism distinctly perverse. True, he could only see his back now with the bowler hat pulled well down on his head but if the series of grunts and gurgling noises emanating from him were anything to go by, the Master had never been worse. Even just after his stroke Skullion had been faintly comprehensible, but now whatever he was trying to utter was without any decipherable meaning at all. It sounded like strangulated gobbledygook. And the man prostrating himself on the floor didn’t make much sense either, though at least part of what he had been saying was perfectly true. If half the things he had heard about Hartang on the tapes were true, he would undoubtedly have Kudzuvine tortured to death.
All the same, to grovel before Skullion showed such an abject lack of moral fibre that the Dean was disgusted. ‘For goodness’ sake, get off the floor, man,’ he said and strode into the room. Kudzuvine scrambled to his feet and hurriedly got back into bed and sat there huddled up staring at this
new dark apparition that had come into his life. The Dean ignored him. He was giving his attention to Skullion and, now that he could see the Master’s face, was surprised to see a smile appear and one eye wink at him. And the noises, those dreadful sounds, had stopped.
‘If you don’t mind, Master, I think we ought to have a little chat in private,’ he said, and wheeled Skullion out of the room. Behind them Kudzuvine shook his head. Whatever he had walked into like a fucking monastery with the man in the wheelchair with the hat who made sounds at him had to be in some fucking world he’d never been in before. And it was his only hope.
*
‘Tell me, Skullion, if you can of course,’ said the Dean, ‘and if you haven’t had another Blue, tell me why do you make those awful noises?’
‘Called me Quasimodo he did. Quasimodo and some bloody hunchback. Now I don’t know what Quasimodo means, must be Italian or Spanish or something. Rude anyway. So I thought I’d quasimodo him back and see how he likes it. Well, that buggered him proper, if you’ll pardon the expression. He don’t like my gobbledygook any more than I like his bloody quasimodo,’ Skullion explained. ‘Not when I go on hour after hour and half the night gobbledygooking the sod. I just sit there and watch him like a hawk and he can’t stand it. Broke his spirit I have. Not that he’s got much to break. He’s one of them Yanks thinks they own the world. Told the Praelector one time he was a true-born American and could whip the hide off the rest of the world. Praelector didn’t like it any more than I did. So I thought, “You’ve come to the wrong place to say a thing like that and I’ll whip you into shape, my lad, even if I am in a wheelchair and can’t move much.” And I have, sir, I have. I’ve got the bugger gibbering. Another few days and they’ll have him in Fulbourn for the rest of his natural, certified insane which is what he is by my book.’