by Tom Sharpe
The explanation had to lie elsewhere. His feelings for the bedder deviated from every known norm. So for that matter did Mrs Biggs. She bulged where she should have dimpled and bounced when she should have been still. She was gross, vulgar, garrulous and, Zipser had no doubt in his mind, thoroughly insanitary. To find himself irresistibly attracted to her was the worst thing he could think of. It was perfectly all right to be queer. It was positively fashionable. To have constant and insistent sexual desires for French au pair girls, Swedish language students, girls in Boots, even undergraduates at Girton, was normality itself, but Mrs Biggs came into the category of the unmentionable. And the knowledge that but for the fortuitous intervention of the vacuum-cleaner he would have revealed his true feelings for her threw him into a panic. He left his table and went downstairs and walked back into town.
As he reached Great St Mary’s the clock was striking twelve. Zipser stopped and studied the posters on the railings outside the church which announced forthcoming sermons.
CHRIST AND THE GAY CHRISTIAN Rev. F. Leaney.
HAS SALT LOST ITS SAVOUR? Anglican attitudes to disarmament. Rev. B. Tomkins.
JOB, A MESSAGE FOR THE THIRD WORLD Right Reverend Sutty, Bishop of Bombay.
JESUS JOKES Fred Henry by permission of ITA & the management of the Palace Theatre, Scunthorpe.
BOMBS AWAY A Christian’s attitude to Skyjacking by Flight Lieutenant Jack Piggett, BOAC.
Zipser stared at the University Sermons with a sudden sense of loss. What had happened to the old Church, the Church of his childhood, the friendly Vicar and the helping hand? Not that Zipser had ever been to church, but he had seen them on television and had been comforted by the knowledge that they were still there in Songs of Praise and Saints Alive and All Gas and Gaiters. But now when he needed help there was only this pale parody of the daily paper with its mishmash of politics and sensationalism. Not a word about evil and how to cope with it. Zipser felt betrayed. He went back into Porterhouse in search of help. He’d go and see the Senior Tutor. There was just time before lunch. Zipser climbed the stairs to the Tutor’s rooms and knocked on the door.
*
‘The trouble with the Feast,’ said the Dean, munching a mouthful of cold beef, ‘is that it does tend to run on. Cold beef today. Cold beef tomorrow. Cold beef on Thursday. After that I suppose we’ll have stewed beef on Friday and Saturday and cottage pie on Sunday. By next week we should be getting back to normal.’
‘Difficult to eat an entire ox at one sitting,’ said the Bursar. ‘One suspects our predecessors had, shall we say, grosser appetites.’
‘I always said it was a mistake to make him Prime Minister,’ said the Chaplain.
The Senior Tutor took his place at table. He was looking more than usually austere.
‘Talking of gross appetites,’ he said grimly. ‘I have the gravest doubts about some of our younger members. I have just had a visit from a young man who claims to be under some compulsion to sleep with his bedder.’ He helped himself to horseradish.
The Bursar sniggered. ‘Which one?’ he asked.
‘Zipser,’ said the Senior Tutor.
‘Which bedder?’
‘I didn’t enquire,’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘It didn’t seem a particularly relevant question.’
The Bursar considered the problem.
‘Isn’t he in the Tower?’ he asked the Dean.
‘Who?’
‘Zipser.’
‘Yes. I think he is,’ said the Dean.
‘Then it must be Mrs Biggs.’
The Senior Tutor, who had been debating what to do with a long piece of gristle, swallowed it.
‘Dear me. Mrs Biggs. I must say I did young Zipser an injustice,’ he said with alarm.
‘Impossible to do an injustice to anyone with such depraved taste,’ said the Dean firmly.
‘Mrs Biggs hardly comes within the category of forbidden fruit,’ tittered the Bursar.
‘Thank you,’ answered the Chaplain, ‘I think I will have an apple.’
‘Mrs Biggs,’ muttered the Tutor. ‘No wonder the poor fellow imagined he was going mad.’
‘Not really,’ said the Chaplain. ‘This one is all right at any rate.’
‘What advice did you give him?’ the Bursar asked.
The Senior Tutor looked at him disbelievingly. ‘Advice?’ he asked. ‘It is hardly my position to offer advice on such questions. I am the Senior Tutor, not a Marriage Guidance Counsellor. As a matter of fact I advised him to see the Chaplain.’
‘It’s a noble calling,’ said the Chaplain, helping himself to a pear. The Senior Tutor sighed and finished his cold beef.
‘It only goes to show what happens when you open the doors of the College to research graduates. In the old days such a thing would have been unheard of,’ said the Dean.
‘Unheard of perhaps but not I think unknown,’ said the Bursar.
‘With bedders?’ the Dean asked angrily. ‘With bedders? Maintain some sense of proportion, I beg you.’
‘No thank you, Dean. I’ve had quite enough already,’ the Chaplain replied.
The Dean was about to say something about old fools when the Senior Tutor intervened. ‘In the case of Mrs Biggs,’ he said, ‘it is precisely the question of proportion that is at stake.’
‘We had that last night,’ said the Chaplain.
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ the Senior Tutor snarled. ‘How the hell can one conduct a serious discussion with him around.’
‘My dear fellow,’ the Praelector sighed, ‘that is a question that has been bothering me for years.’
They finished the meal in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts. It was only when they were assembled in the Combination Room for coffee and the Chaplain had been persuaded to go to his room to write a note inviting Zipser to tea that the discussion began again.
‘I think that we should view this matter in the wider context,’ the Dean said. ‘The Master’s speech last night indicated only too clearly that he has in mind an extension of precisely that permissiveness of which this latest incident is indicative. I understand, Bursar, that you had a tête-à-tête with Sir Godber this morning.’
The Bursar looked at him unpleasantly. ‘The Master phoned to ask me to discuss the College finances with him,’ he said. ‘I think you might give me credit for having done my best to disabuse him of the changes his speech suggested.’
‘You explained that our resources do not allow us to indulge in the liberal extravagances of King’s or Trinity?’ the Senior Tutor asked. The Bursar nodded.
‘And was the Master satisfied?’ the Dean asked.
‘Stunned, I think, would be the more accurate description of his reaction,’ said the Bursar.
‘Then we are all agreed that whatever he suggests at the meeting of the College Council tomorrow we shall oppose on principle,’ said the Dean.
‘I think it would be best to wait to hear what he proposes before deciding on a definite policy,’ the Praelector said.
The Senior Tutor nodded. ‘We must not appear too inflexible. An appearance of open-mindedness has in my experience a tendency to disarm the radical left. They seem to feel the need to reciprocate. I’ve often wondered why but it has worked to keep the country on the right lines for years.’
‘Unfortunately this time we are dealing with a politician,’ the Dean objected. ‘I have a shrewd idea the Master is rather more experienced in these affairs than we give him credit for. I still think an undivided front is the best policy.’
They finished their coffee and went about their business. The Senior Tutor went down to the Boat-house to coach the first boat, the Dean slept until teatime, and the Bursar spent the afternoon doodling in his office wondering if he had been wise to tell Sir Godber about the endowment subscriptions. There had been a strength of feeling in the Master’s reaction that had surprised the Bursar and had made him wonder if he had gone too far. Perhaps he had misjudged Sir Godber and the vehemence of his ideals.
Skullion cycled out along the Barton Road towards Coft. His bowler hat set squarely on his head, his cycle clips and his black overcoat buttoned against the cold gave him an intransigently episcopalian air in the snow-covered landscape. He cycled slowly but relentlessly, his thoughts as dark as his habit and as bitter as the wind blowing unchecked from the Urals. The few bungalows he passed looked insubstantial beside him, transient and rootless in contrast to the black figure on the bicycle in whose head centuries of endured servitude had bred a fierce bigotry nothing would easily remove. Independence he called it, this hatred for change whether for better or worse. In Skullion’s view there was no such thing as change for the better. That came under the heading of improvement. He was prepared to give his qualified approval to improvements provided there was no suggestion that it was the past that had been improved upon. That was clearly out of the question and if at the back of his mind he recognized the illogicality of his own argument, he refused to admit it even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of life which he accepted as unquestioningly as he did the great metal spiders’ webs strung out across the fields beside the road to catch the radio evidence of stars that had long since ceased to exist. The world of Skullion’s imagination was as remote as those stars but it was enough for him that, like the radio telescopes, he was able to catch echoes of it in men like General the Honourable Sir Cathcart D’Eath, KCMG, DSO.
The General had influence in high places and Royalty came to stay at Coft Castle. Skullion had once seen a queen mother dawdling majestically in the garden and had heard royal laughter from the stables. The General could put in a good word for him and more importantly a bad one for the new Master and, as an undergraduate, the then just Hon. Cathcart D’Eath had been one of Skullion’s Scholars.
Skullion never forgot his Scholars and there was little doubt that though they might have liked to, none of them forgot him. They owed him too much. It had been Skullion who had arranged the transactions and had acted as intermediary. On the one hand idle but influential undergraduates like the Hon. Cathcart and on the other impecunious research graduates eking out a living giving supervision and grateful for the baksheesh Skullion brought their way. The weekly essay regularly handed in and startlingly original for undergraduates so apparently ill-informed. Two pounds a week for an essay had served to subsidize some very important research. More than one doctorate owed everything to those two pounds. And finally Tripos by proxy, with Skullion’s Scholars lounging in a King Street pub while in the Examination School their substitutes wrote answers to the questions with a mediocrity that was unexceptional. Skullion had been careful, very careful. Only one or two a year and in subjects so popular that there would be no noticing an unfamiliar face in the hundreds writing the exams. And it had worked. ‘No one will be any the wiser,’ he had assured the graduate substitutes to allay their fears before slipping five hundred, once a thousand, pounds into their pockets. And no one had been any the wiser. Certainly the Honourable Cathcart D’Eath had gone down with a II.ii in History with his ignorance of Disraeli’s influence on the Conservative Party unimpaired in spite of having to all appearances written four pages on the subject. But what he had gained on the roundabout he had also gained on the swings and the study of horseflesh he had undertaken during those three years at Newmarket served him well in the future. His use of cavalry in the Burmese jungle had unnerved the Japanese by its unadulterated lunacy and, combined with his name, had suggested a kamikaze element in the British Army they had never suspected. Sir Cathcart had emerged from the campaign with twelve men and a reputation so scathed that he had been promoted to General to prevent the destruction of the entire army and the loss of India. Early retirement and his wartime experience of getting horses to attempt the impossible had encouraged Sir Cathcart to return to his first love and to take up training. His stables at Coft were world-famous. With what appeared to be a magical touch but owed in fact much to Skullion’s gift for substitution, Sir Cathcart could transform a broken-winded nag into a winning two-year-old and had prospered accordingly. Coft Castle, standing in spacious grounds, was surrounded by a high wall to guard against intruding eyes and cameras and by an ornate garden in a remote corner of which was a small canning factory where the by products of the General’s stables were given discreet anonymity in Cathcart’s Tinned Catfood. Skullion dismounted at the gate and knocked on the lodge door. A Japanese gardener, a prisoner of war, whom Sir Cathcart kept carefully ignorant of world news and who was, thanks to the language barrier, incapable of learning it for himself, opened the gate for him and Skullion cycled on down the drive to the house.
In spite of its name there was nothing remotely ancient about Coft Castle. Staunchly Edwardian, its red brick bespoke a lofty disregard for style and a concern for comfort on a grand scale. The General’s Rolls-Royce, RIP I, gleamed darkly on the gravel outside the front door. Skullion dismounted and pushed his bicycle round to the servants’ entrance.
‘Come to see the General,’ he told the cook. Presently he was ushered into the drawing-room where Sir Cathcart was lolling in an armchair before a large coal fire.
‘Not your usual afternoon, Skullion,’ he said as Skullion came in, bowler hat in hand.
‘No, sir. Came special,’ said Skullion. The General waved him to a kitchen chair the cook brought in on these occasions and Skullion sat down and put his bowler hat on his knees.
‘Carry on smoking,’ Sir Cathcart told him. Skullion took out his pipe and filled it with black tobacco from a tin. Sir Cathcart watched him with grim affection.
‘That’s filthy stuff you smoke, Skullion,’ he said as blue smoke drifted towards the chimney. ‘Must have a constitution like an elephant to smoke it.’
Skullion puffed at his pipe contentedly. It was at moments like this, moments of informal subservience, that he felt happiest. Sitting smoking his pipe on the hard kitchen chair in Sir Cathcart D’Eath’s drawing-room he felt approved. He basked in the General’s genial disdain.
‘That’s a nice black eye you’ve got there,’ Sir Cath-cart said. ‘You look as if you’ve been in the wars.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Skullion. He was quite pleased with that black eye.
‘Well, out with it, man, what have you come about?’ Sir Cathcart said.
‘It’s the new Master. He made a speech at the Feast last night,’ Skullion told him.
‘A speech? At the Feast?’ Sir Cathcart sat up in his chair.
‘Yes, sir. I knew you wouldn’t like it.’
‘Disgraceful. What did he say?’
‘Says he’s going to change the College.’
Sir Carthcart’s eyes bulged in his head. ‘Change the College? What the devil does he mean by that? The damned place has been changed beyond all recognition already. Can’t go in the place without seeing some long-haired lout looking more like a girl than a man. Swarming with bloody poofters. Change the College? There’s only one change that’s needed and that’s back to the old ways. The old traditions. Cut their hair off and duck them in the fountain. That’s what’s needed. When I think what Porterhouse used to be and see what it’s become, it makes my blood boil. It’s the same with the whole damned country. Letting niggers in and keeping good white men out. Gone soft, that’s what’s happened. Soft in the head and soft in the body.’ Sir Cathcart sank back in his chair limp from his denunciation of the times. Skullion smiled inwardly. It was just such bitterness he had come to hear. Sir Cathcart spoke with an authority Skullion could never have but which charged his own intransigence with a new vigour.
‘Says he wants Porterhouse to be an open college,’ he said, stoking the embers of the General’s fury.
‘Open college?’ Sir Cathcart responded to the call. ‘Open? What the devil does he mean by that? It’s open enough already. Half the scum of the world in as it is.’
‘I think he means more scholars,’ Skullion said.
Sir Cathcart grew a shade more apoplectic.
‘Scholar
s? That’s half the trouble with the world today, scholarship. Too many damned intellectuals about who think they know how things should be done. Academics, bah! Can’t win a war with thinking. Can’t run a factory on thought. It needs guts and sweat and sheer hard work. If I had my way I’d kick every damned scholar out of the College and put in some athletes to run the place properly. Anyone would think Varsity was some sort of school. In my day we didn’t come up to learn anything, we came up to forget all the damned silly things we’d had pumped into us at school. My God, Skullion, I’ll tell you this, a man can learn more between the thighs of a good woman than he ever needs to know. Scholarship’s a waste of time and public money. What’s more, it’s iniquitous.’ Exhausted by his outburst, Sir Cathcart stared belligerently into the fire.
‘What’s Fairbrother say?’ he asked finally.
‘The Dean, sir? He doesn’t like it any more than you do, sir,’ Skullion said, ‘but he’s not as young as he used to be, sir.’
‘Don’t suppose he is,’ Sir Cathcart agreed.
‘That’s why I came to tell you, sir,’ Skullion continued. ‘I thought you’d know what to do.’
Sir Cathcart stiffened. ‘Do? Don’t see what I can do,’ he said presently. ‘I’ll write to the Master, of course, but I’ve no influence in the College these days.’
‘But you have outside, sir,’ Skullion assured him.
‘Well perhaps,’ Sir Cathcart assented. ‘All right. I’ll see what I can do. Keep me informed, Skullion.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘Get Cook to give you some tea before you go,’ Sir Cathcart told him and Skullion went out with his chair and took it back to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later he cycled off down the drive, spiritually resuscitated. Sir Cathcart would see there were no more changes. He had influence in high places. There was only one thing that puzzled Skullion as he rode home. Something Sir Cathcart had said about learning more between the thighs of a good woman than … but Sir Cathcart had never married. Skullion wondered how an unmarried man got between the thighs of a good woman.