by Tom Sharpe
Alone in his study Sir Cathcart D’Eath sat with a revolver and a bottle of Chivas Regal and thought about shooting Myrtle fucking Ransby. And possibly some policemen at the same time.
38
As the end of term drew near and the Porterhouse Eights, no longer near the Head of the River, rowed over or moved up one, and as the marquees for the May Ball arrived and preparations were made for erecting them, Hartang came almost unnoticed to Porterhouse. His car, no stretch limo with black windows but a three-year-old Ford as nondescript as Hartang himself, slipped into the Old Coach House and the Master-to-be climbed out and stared around at the motley of old cars, the Dean’s humpbacked Rover and the Chaplain’s ancient Armstrong Siddeley and Professor Pawley’s even older Morris. In the space of sixty miles he had stepped from the safety and sterile modernity of Transworld Centre into a mausoleum of antique machinery. Even the large iron bolts on the Coach House doors alarmed him by their simplicity while on the whitewashed wall at one end a wooden hay-rack spoke of even older means of transport. And the floor was cobbled and stained with oil. Hartang looked at it all distrustfully and with a sense of defeat.
‘If you’ll just follow me, sir,’ said the taller of the two men who had driven up with him. ‘We can walk across to the Master’s Lodge unobserved.’ He opened a side door and stepped outside. Hartang followed nervously and blinked in the bright sunshine. Without his dark blue glasses the light hurt his weak eyes and he walked with head down to avoid the glare until they were in the hall of the Master’s Lodge. Here evidence of the past was all too apparent. The furniture he had seen on his previous visits had been comparatively modern but in its place there was solid black oak and dark mahogany and even an old curved wooden hatstand. On the wall the portrait of Humphrey Lombert, Master 1852–83, stared through small metal spectacles sternly into the distance over his head. The floor was shining parquet with a dark red Afghan rug. Behind him the smaller man shut the door quietly and they went through into the drawing-room where a woman with permed hair and wearing a brown tweed suit was sitting on a chintz sofa looking through a copy of The Field. ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘I do hope you had an uneventful drive.’
Hartang tried to smile and said it had been all right. ‘Well, now that you’re safely here,’ she said without introducing herself, ‘you can make yourself at home. Your luggage is upstairs and everything has been unpacked. You’ll find it in the wardrobes and the chests of drawers. I’ll show you that in a moment. In the meantime here are your new passport and birth certificate. And your curriculum vitae. There is nothing in it that should cause you any difficulties. We have tried to keep as close to your natural characteristics as possible. You are an obsessional recluse with very few outside interests. A number of suggested hobbies have been listed. There is, for instance, the collection of eighteenth-century American law books that you might like to have. Or there’s …’
Hartang sat in an armchair and knew he was trapped. Until this moment and until this woman with the plump legs and the permed hair he hadn’t been sure. He knew he’d been in deep shit, but you might get out of deep shit if you thought enough about it and had people out front. This was different. He was alone and in an environment he didn’t begin to understand and she was telling him how he was going to live his life and what he was going to think and all she was allowing him to do was to choose some hobbies. Worst of all, she was doing it all with an air of absolute certainty that he had to do exactly what she was telling him. Even in prison all those years ago Hartang had felt freer than he did now. And even when they took him up in the elevator and explained how the doors and the roof and floor were bullet-proof and if he ever felt threatened all he had to do was get in there fast and press the yellow button, he could find no comfort in the knowledge. Quite the opposite. The metal walls were like a cell, they weren’t even like: they were a cell. The bedroom was full of old-fashioned furniture too and it was only when they went through it to a small room with no windows that Hartang began to feel in surroundings that he was used to – computer screens and printers and white wood tables and comfortable executive chairs.
‘You have your communications centre here and you can get all the information you need and talk to whoever you want to worldwide,’ the woman told him. Hartang doubted it. Whatever he said and whatever messages he sent or came in would be recorded. The information he wanted was what the fuck was going on.
Finally, just before the woman left, he asked about Transworld Television Productions. ‘How are they going to run without me being there and telling them what projects to do? They need me to make decisions. There’s no one down there can make them except me.’
‘I’m sure they’ll manage somehow. They understand you’ve got a serious health problem and in the past when you’ve been away in Thailand or Bali things have gone on very well.’
‘You mean I can’t communicate with them?’ said Hartang.
‘Of course you can. You’ve got all the equipment you need upstairs and Mr Skundler will take whatever instructions you want to give him every morning. When you have settled in you’ll find it works extremely well. Is there anything else?’
‘Yes,’ said Hartang. ‘I want to talk with Schnabel.’
‘That is no problem. The telephone is in the study,’ said the woman and walked out the front door.
Hartang went through to the study and dialled Schnabel’s office. He got an answerphone. ‘Mr Schnabel is not available to take messages,’ a man’s voice said, and the phone went dead. It was the same in the case of Feuchtwangler and Bolsover. Hartang knew he had something more than a health problem. Like being in solitary confinement. He looked at the collection of books on the shelves. They all dealt with American law.
For a while he sat at the desk and stared out through the window at the Master’s Maze. From somewhere near by there came the sound of people playing croquet. Someone had once told him that croquet, for all its apparent gentility, was a vicious game, and the sound gave him no comfort. In the kitchen the shorter of the two men was sitting at the deal table helping Arthur peel potatoes. In the cellar the tall man, Bill, was watching a bank of television screens which showed the road, the drive, and views of the garden and the doors.
*
In the front room of the house in Onion Alley Skullion was explaining why Dr Vertel had had to go to Porterhouse Park in a hurry. He had already talked about Lord Wurford and how the College money had been lost by Fitzherbert when he was Bursar. For three days he had sat in a chair talking about Porterhouse and what it had been like in the old days while Mrs Ndhlovo took notes and the tape recorder ran silently beside him. In the past Skullion had glorified those days when Porterhouse had been a gentleman’s college. Now he saw things differently. The years he had spent in the Master’s Lodge confined to a wheelchair had given him time to think and reflect on the way he had been treated. He had always accepted the patronizing attitude of the Dean and Fellows and even the undergraduates as a necessary evil and had put up with it because that was part of the job of being a porter and because it gave him a curious sense of his own superiority. He wasn’t educated, didn’t know anything about science or history or any of the subjects they were interested in. Instead he had made a study of the men who passed through the College or stayed and became Fellows. As Head Porter he had been proud of Porterhouse and had accepted his role because he was serving gentlemen. It had been a necessary illusion but a partial one. He had never succumbed to it entirely and, as he explained through many digressions and byways of memories suddenly recalled, he had seen the illusion slowly dissolve until only the shell of the College remained and the gentlemen were dead and gone.
‘They stopped dressing properly and getting their hair cut, not that some of them, especially the real scholars, had ever really known what they were wearing. There was that chemist Strekker, brilliant reputation he had and we’d heard him called a genius, F.R.S. and all that, and his gyp, name of Landon, had to lay his shirts and unde
rpants out and tell him to wash his neck or have a bath or he wouldn’t have from one year’s end to the next. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose, Strekker wouldn’t, but he’d been what they called a boffin during the war and he’d gone to America and ended up at some College in Oxford. Funny thing was he wasn’t in Who’s Who because I looked him up but I heard the Senior Tutor say once that often the very best people didn’t want to and only the nouveaus made a point of getting in. Strekker would be like that. It wouldn’t concern him being known or clean. But a gentleman for all that. Never rude though that wasn’t always a sign. No, where it went wrong was after the war. A lot of ex-servicemen and half of them only National Service who’d never been in the war but were older in their twenties when they came up and couldn’t be taught to be proper Porterhouse men. On grants too. You’ve no idea, you youngsters, what it was like then. Grim. With whalemeat in Hall and snoek, and all some of them seemed to have learnt was to skive in the army. I rate the rot from then with their something-for-nothing attitude. And even the ones who could afford to pay going to the NHS for nothing. Not that the National Health Service was a bad idea. It was the fact that everyone even the rich got everything free and they came to think life was like that.’
Purefoy almost argued about that, but he stayed silent and let Skullion keep talking and having the cups of tea Mrs Charlie brought in to whet his whistle. And give Mrs Ndhlovo time to rest her writing hand. By the third day she couldn’t keep it up and bought a second tape recorder to back up the first. ‘It’s going to cost a fortune to have all this typed out,’ she said and Skullion said they mustn’t have it done in Cambridge. Someone in London who wouldn’t know what he was talking about.
He thought Purefoy had been wise to move into digs too. ‘They’d question you otherwise. Or even have you followed and we don’t want that. I’ll go back in my own good time when you’ve got everything you need down.’
So they went through the story of Sir Godber wanting to sell the College servants’ houses in Rhyder Street and the sense of betrayal when Skullion was sacked and how they had made him Master after he’d killed Sir Godber and he’d had a Porterhouse Blue with the Dean and the Senior Tutor there in the room and they hadn’t realized what it was and he might have died if Cheffy hadn’t come round later that night and sent for the ambulance. And then the years in the wheelchair and how he had stayed sane remembering who lived in what room and in which years. ‘I sat and thought about it all and that’s what you’re getting now so it won’t go to waste or get doctored up to look nice because it wasn’t.’
Purefoy’s interest waxed and waned with the topics. He found Skullion’s assessment of the Senior Fellows most fascinating. ‘Dean’s not the man he was. The spirit has gone out of him and he’s only left with his deviousness which he’s always had. Made up for his lack of scholarship. Never published anything the Dean hasn’t. Just run the College and he can’t do that any more. Senior Tutor’s different. He got a Two One and he did have a brain. Published a doctoral thesis on tides or rivers or something a long time back but he gave it up and became a Hearty. Wasn’t Porterhouse being a scholar and he wanted to be one of them. Now I don’t suppose he can think properly. Lost the habit cycling up and down the towpath with the Eights. But he fitted in which is what he wanted though he and the Dean used to fight like cat and dog. Hated one another which is what most of them do if you ask me. Spend hours thinking up things to say to one another that’ll be like pinpricks. Only natural having to live on top of one another like that. Chaplain’s deaf, or pretends to be. He’s the one that’s human. Likes the girls, the Chaplain does, girls in Woolworths and Boots. I’ve seen him sniffing around the perfume counter many a time just to size them up. Used to take photographs of them too. Not their bodies, just their faces when they’d let him. He loves a pretty face and who can blame him. Never did anyone any harm, the Chaplain.’
‘And what about the Praelector?’ Purefoy asked. ‘Is he a nice man?’
‘Nice? The Praelector? No, I wouldn’t say he was nice. Nice isn’t the word for him. He’s a strange old stick, he is. Didn’t say boo to a goose for years and then suddenly he’s something you’ve never expected. English, if you know what I mean. Lost his wife when she was only forty-five and for several years he was a broken man. Took rooms in College and never looked at another woman. Something in anti-tank during the war though you’d never think it to look at him. Was a military historian and wrote books on the First World War and what fools the generals were. I ought to know. Lost my dad the second day of the Somme and two uncles at some muddy place where they had to use duckboards and if you fell off you drowned.’
*
That evening in the digs in City Road Mrs Ndhlovo wondered how they were going to organize the mass of material Skullion had provided in such a disorganized way. ‘There’s a tremendous amount and half of it is overload.’
‘Once we have the transcript, then I’ll edit it,’ Purefoy said. ‘I won’t cut too much out, but he does repeat himself. It must be a unique account of life in a college from an entirely different point of view.’
‘And what about Lady Mary?’
‘I’m not thinking about her at the moment, and anyway she’ll get a full report. I don’t really care if she likes it. I’m doing what she asked me to.’
39
‘I’ve had a very peculiar letter from the Senior Tutor,’ Goodenough told Mr Lapline over coffee one morning.
Mr Lapline said he wasn’t in the least surprised. ‘Disgusting business. You’d think a man in D’Eath’s position would have more sense. If he wants to tie women up in black latex, he could at least have maintained some degree of anonymity. It makes the worst sort of impression on the public.’
‘I wasn’t actually talking about that,’ said Goodenough who was surprised Mr Lapline read the Sun. ‘It’s about that silly fellow Purefoy Osbert.’
Mr Lapline shuddered. ‘I always knew that was a terrible mistake. What’s the filthy brute done now?’
‘I think if you read the letter yourself, you’ll get a better picture of the situation,’ said Goodenough and put the letter gingerly on the desk. The solicitor read it through twice.
‘Abducted the Master? Abducted the Master from Porterhouse Park? Is the man completely insane? And where the devil is Porterhouse Park? I’ve never heard of it,’ said Mr Lapline at last.
‘I’ve no idea. He merely says that Skullion, that’s the Master, was convalescing there and that Dr Osbert turned up with some woman –’
‘I know what the Senior Tutor says. Not that it’s a coherent letter for a supposedly educated man. But to abduct the Master, who’s in a wheelchair? And what’s all this about locking the whole place up so no one can call the police? And the man’s gone a week and neither of them have been seen? It’s utterly appalling. Goodenough, I hold you responsible for ever letting this damned swine loose on Porterhouse. I do indeed.’
‘Steady on,’ said Goodenough grimly. ‘If you remember, you were the one who insisted on keeping Bloody Mary’s account and then you went sick with that wretched gall bladder you won’t have out and handed the problem over to me.’
‘You volunteered,’ said Mr Lapline, who still hadn’t had his gall bladder out: it was playing up again. ‘You specifically said you could handle the matter and keep Lady Mary happy. You then sent her a collection of sexual psychopaths and neo-Nazis knowing full well she’d reject them out of hand and finally you offer her a blighter who is into the most disgusting details of hanging and who’s convinced Crippen was innocent.’
‘Now wait a moment –’ Goodenough began but Mr Lapline hadn’t finished.
‘Anyone in his right mind could have seen catastrophe coming and, as a matter of fact, you did. You said it was called putting the cat among the pigeons and now we have this bloody man abducting – I wonder he didn’t call it kidnapping – the Master from his sickbed and for all we know hanging the poor chap.’
‘Actually, Purefoy is very much agai
nst hanging. That’s one of his pet aversions.’
‘I’ll tell you one of my pet aversions,’ said Mr Lapline viciously, but stopped himself just in time. After all, Goodenough was a partner and very successful at handling the clients Mr Lapline least liked. ‘Anyway the damage is done and you’ll just have to tell Lady Mary –’
‘Not yet, for God’s sake,’ said Goodenough. ‘I mean there may have been some mistake.’
‘May?’ said Mr Lapline.
But in the end it seemed better to wait on events and hope for the best.
*
At Coft Castle General Sir Cathcart D’Eath had lost hope entirely. All the women servants had walked out, including his American secretary, and only the Japanese butler and Kudzuvine were left, though there was nothing for Kudzuvine to do now that the Cathcart’s Catfood had been closed down. The knowledge that Sir Cathcart made a habit of having old racehorses slaughtered and consigned to tins, cats for the consumption of, had alienated everyone in the district. He had been cut in Newmarket by old friends and there had been a disturbance outside the house when some Animal Rights activists broke in and had to be dispersed by the police. Worst of all the rumour had spread that he had been breeding horses simply to satisfy the nation’s cats and because horses grew faster than cows. Even his milder neighbours had been so enraged that on one occasion his Range Rover had been pelted with rotten eggs as he drove through Coft.