Porterhouse Blue

by Tom Sharpe

  *

  Zipser’s interview with the Senior Tutor had left him with a sense of embarrassment that had unnerved him completely. His attempt to explain the nature of his compulsion had been fraught with difficulties. The Senior Tutor kept poking his little finger in his ear and wriggling it around and examining the end of it when he took it out while Zipser talked, as if he held some waxy deposit responsible for the flow of obscene information that was reaching his brain. When he finally accepted that his ears were not betraying him and that Zipser was in fact confessing to being attracted by his bedder, he had muttered something to the effect that the Chaplain would expect him for tea that afternoon and that, failing that, a good psychiatrist might help. Zipser had left miserably and had spent the early part of the afternoon in his room trying to concentrate on his thesis without success. The image of Mrs Biggs, a cross between a cherubim in menopause and a booted succubus, kept intruding. Zipser turned for escape to a book of photographs of starving children in Nagaland but in spite of this mental flagellation Mrs Biggs prevailed. He tried Hermitsch on Fall Out & the Andaman Islanders and even Sterilization, Vasectomy and Abortion by Allard, but these holy writs all failed against the pervasive fantasy of the bedder. It was as if his social conscience, his concern for the plight of humanity at large, the universal and collective pity he felt for all mankind, had been breached in some unspeakably personal way by the inveterate triviality and egoism of Mrs Biggs. Zipser, whose life had been filled with a truly impersonal charity – he had spent holidays from school working for SOBB, the Save Our Black Brothers campaign – and whose third worldliness was impeccable, found himself suddenly the victim of a sexual idiosyncrasy which made a mockery of his universalism. In desperation he turned to Syphilis, the Scourge of Colonialism, and stared with horror at the pictures. In the past it had worked like a charm to quell incipient sexual desires while satisfying his craving for evidence of natural justice. The notion of the Conquistadores dying of the disease after raping South American Indians no longer had its old appeal now that Zipser himself was in the grip of a compulsive urge to rape Mrs Biggs. By the time it came for him to go to the Chaplain’s rooms for tea, Zipser had exhausted the resources of his theology. So too, it seemed, had the Chaplain.

  ‘Ah my boy,’ the Chaplain boomed as Zipser negotiated the bric-à-brac that filled the Chaplain’s sitting-room. ‘So good of you to come. Do make yourself comfortable.’ Zipser nudged past a gramophone with a papier-mâché horn, circumvented a brass-topped table with fretsawed legs, squeezed beneath the fronds of a castor-oil plant and finally sat down on a chair by the fire. The Chaplain scuttled backwards and forwards between his bathroom and the tea table muttering loudly to himself a liturgy of things to fetch. ‘Teapot hot. Spoons. Milk jug. You do take milk?’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Zipser. ‘Good. Good. So many people take lemon, don’t they? One always forgets these things. Tea-cosy. Sugar basin.’ Zipser looked round the room for some indication of the Chaplain’s interests but the welter of conflicting objects, like the addition of random numbers to a code, made interpretation impossible. Apart from senility the furnishings had so little in common that they seemed to indicate a wholly catholic taste.

  ‘Crumpets,’ said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. ‘Just the thing. You toast them.’ He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the fork into Zipser’s hand. Zipser poked the crumpet at the fire tentatively and felt once again that dissociation from reality that seemed so much a part of life in Cambridge. It was as if everyone in the College sought to parody himself, as if a parody of a parody could become itself a new reality. Behind him the Chaplain stumbled over a footrest and deposited a jar of honey with a boom on the brass-topped table. Zipser removed the crumpet, blackened on one side and ice cold on the other, and put it on a plate. He toasted another while the Chaplain tried to spread butter on the one he had half done. By the time they had finished Zipser’s face was burning from the fire and his hands were sticky with a mixture of melted butter and honey. The Chaplain sat back in his chair and filled his pipe from a tobacco jar with the Porterhouse crest on it.

  ‘Do help yourself, my dear boy,’ said the Chaplain, pushing the jar towards him.

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  The Chaplain shook his head sadly. ‘Everyone should smoke a pipe,’ he said. ‘Calms the nerves. Puts things in perspective. Couldn’t do without mine.’ He leant back, puffing vigorously. Zipser stared at him through a haze of smoke.

  ‘Now then where were we?’ he asked. Zipser tried to think. ‘Ah yes, your little problem, that’s right,’ said the Chaplain finally. ‘I knew there was something.’

  Zipser stared into the fire resentfully.

  ‘The Senior Tutor said something about it. I didn’t gather very much but then I seldom do. Deafness, you know.’

  Zipser nodded sympathetically.

  ‘The affliction of the elderly. That and rheumatism. It’s the damp, you know. Comes up from the river. Very unhealthy living so close to the Fens.’ His pipe percolated gently. In the comparative silence Zipser tried to think what to say. The Chaplain’s age and his evident physical disabilities made it difficult for Zipser to conceive that he could begin to understand the problem of Mrs Biggs.

  ‘I really think there’s been a misunderstanding,’ he began hesitantly and stopped. It was evident from the look on the Chaplain’s face that there was no understanding at all.

  ‘You’ll have to speak up,’ the Chaplain boomed. ‘I’m really quite deaf.’

  ‘I can see that,’ Zipser said. The Chaplain beamed at him.

  ‘Don’t hesitate to tell me,’ he said. ‘Nothing you say can shock me.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ Zipser said.

  The Chaplain’s smile remained insistently benevolent. ‘I know what we’ll do,’ he said, hopping to his feet and reaching behind his chair. ‘It’s something I use for confession sometimes.’ He emerged holding a loudhailer and handed it to Zipser. ‘Press the trigger when you’re going to speak.’

  Zipser held the thing up to his mouth and stared at the Chaplain over the rim. ‘I really don’t think this is going to help,’ he said finally. His words reverberated through the room and set the teapot rattling on the brass table.

  ‘Of course it is,’ shouted the Chaplain, ‘I can hear perfectly.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Zipser said desperately. The fronds of the castor-oil plant quivered ponderously. ‘I meant I don’t think it’s going to help to talk about …’ He left the dilemma of Mrs Biggs unspoken.

  The Chaplain smiled in absolution and puffed his pipe vigorously. ‘Many of the young men who come to see me,’ he said, invisible in a cloud of smoke, ‘suffer from feelings of guilt about masturbation.’

  Zipser stared frantically at the smoke screen. ‘Masturbation? Who said anything about masturbation?’ he bawled into the loudhailer. It was apparent someone had. His words, hideously amplified, billowed forth from the room and across the Court outside. Several undergraduates by the fountain turned and stared up at the Chaplain’s windows. Deafened by his own vociferousness, Zipser sat sweating with embarrassment.

  ‘I understood from the Senior Tutor that you wanted to see me about a sexual problem,’ the Chaplain shouted.

  Zipser lowered the loudhailer. The thing clearly had disadvantages.

  ‘I can assure you I don’t masturbate,’ he said.

  The Chaplain looked at him incomprehendingly. ‘You press the trigger when you want to speak,’ he explained. Zipser nodded dumbly. The knowledge that to communicate with the Chaplain at all he had to announce his feelings for Mrs Biggs to the world at large presented him with a terrible dilemma made no less intolerable by the Chaplain’s shouted replies.

  ‘It often helps to get these things into the open,’ the Chaplain assured him. Zipser had his doubts about that. Admissions of the sort he had to make broadcast through a loudhailer were not likely to be of any help at all. He might just as well go and propose to
the wretched woman straightaway and be done with it. He sat with lowered head while the Chaplain boomed on.

  ‘Don’t forget that anything you tell me will be heard in the strictest confidence,’ he shouted. ‘You need have no fears that it will go any further.’

  ‘Oh sure,’ Zipser muttered. Outside in the Court a small crowd of undergraduates had gathered by the fountain to listen.

  Half an hour later Zipser left the room, his demoralization quite complete. At least he could congratulate himself that he had revealed nothing of his true feelings and the Chaplain’s kindly probings, his tentative questions, had elicited no response. Zipser had sat silently through a sexual catechism only bothering to shake his head when the Chaplain broached particularly obscene topics. In the end he had listened to a lyrical description of the advantages of au pair girls. It was obvious that the Chaplain regarded foreign girls as outside the sexual canons of the Church.

  ‘So much less danger of a permanently unhappy involvement,’ he had shouted, ‘and after all I often think that’s what they come here for. Ships that pass in the night and not on one’s own doorstep you know.’ He paused and smiled at Zipser salaciously. ‘We all have to sow our wild oats at some time or other and it’s much better to do it abroad. I’ve often thought that’s what Rupert Brooke had in mind in that line of his about some corner of a foreign field. Mind you, one can hardly say that he was particularly healthy, come to think of it, but there we are. That’s my advice to you, dear boy. Find a nice Swedish girl, I’m told they’re very good, and have a ball. I believe that’s the modern idiom. Yes, Swedes or French, depending on your taste. Spaniards are a bit difficult, I’m told, and then again they tend to be rather hairy. Still, buggers can’t be choosers as dear old Sir Winston said at the queer’s wedding. Ha, ha.’

  Zipser staggered from the room. He knew now what muscular Christianity meant. He went down the dark staircase and was about to go out into the Court when he saw the group standing by the fountain. Zipser turned and fled up the stairs and locked himself in the lavatory on the top landing. He was still there an hour later when First Hall began.

  6

  Sir Godber dined at home. He was still recovering from the gastric consequences of the Feast and in any case the Bursar’s revelations had disinclined him to the company of the Fellows until he had formulated his plans more clearly. He had spent the afternoon considering various schemes for raising money and had made several telephone calls to financial friends in the City to ask their advice and to put up proposals of his own but without success. Blomberg’s Bank had been prepared to endow several Research Fellowships in Accountancy but even Sir Godber doubted if such generosity would materially alter the intellectual climate of Porterhouse. He had even considered offering the American Phosgene Corp. facilities for research into nerve gas, facilities they had been denied by all American universities, in return for a really large endowment but he suspected that the resultant publicity and student protest would destroy his already tenuous liberal reputation. Publicity was much on his mind. At five o’clock the BBC phoned to ask if he would appear on a panel of leading educationalists to answer questions on financial priority in Education. Sir Godber was sorely tempted to agree but refused on the grounds that he had hardly acquired much experience. He put the phone down reluctantly and wondered what effect his announcement to several million viewers that Porterhouse College was in the habit of selling degrees to rich young layabouts would have had. It was a pleasing thought and gave rise in the Master’s mind to an even more satisfying conclusion. He picked up the phone again and spoke to the Bursar.

  ‘Could we arrange a College Council meeting for tomorrow afternoon? Say two-thirty?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s rather short notice, Master,’ the Bursar replied.

  ‘Good. Two-thirty it is then,’ Sir Godber said with iron geniality and replaced the receiver. He sat back and began to draw up a list of innovations. Candidates to be chosen by academic achievement only. The kitchen endowment to be cut by three-quarters and the funds reallocated to scholarships. Women undergraduates to be admitted as members. Gate hours abolished. College playing fields open to children from the town. Sir Godber’s imagination raced on compiling proposals with no thought for the financial implications. They would have to find the money somewhere and he didn’t much care where. The main thing was that he had the Fellows over a barrel. They might protest but there was nothing they could do to stop him. They had placed a weapon in his hands. He smiled to himself at the thought of their faces when he explained the alternatives tomorrow. At six-thirty he went through to the drawing-room where Lady Mary, who had been chairing a committee on Teenage Delinquency, was writing letters.

  ‘Be with you in a minute,’ she said when Sir Godber asked her if she would like a sherry. He looked at her dubiously. There were times when he wondered if his wife was ever with him. Her mind followed a wholly independent course and was ever concentrated on the more distressing aspects of other people’s lives. Sir Godber poured himself a large whisky.

  ‘Well, I think I’ve got them by the short hairs,’ he said when she finally stopped tapping at her typewriter.

  Lady Mary’s lean tongue lubricated the flap of an envelope. ‘Non-specific urethritis is reaching epidemic proportions among school-leavers,’ she said. Sir Godber ignored the interjection. He couldn’t for the life of him see what it had to do with the College. He pursued his own topic. ‘I’m going to show them that I’m not prepared to be a cipher.’

  ‘Surveys show that one in every five children has …’

  ‘I haven’t ended my career in politics only to be pushed into a sinecure,’ Sir Godber contended.

  ‘That’s not the problem,’ Lady Mary agreed.

  ‘What isn’t?’ Sir Godber asked, momentarily interested by her assertion.

  ‘Cure. Easy enough. What we’ve got to get at is the moral delinquency …’

  Sir Godber drank his whisky and tried not to listen. There were times when he wondered if he would ever have succeeded as a politician without the help of his wife. Without her incessant preoccupation with unsavoury statistics and sordid social problems, late-night sittings in the House might have had less appeal and committees less utility. Would he have made so many passionate speeches or spoken with such urgency if Lady Mary had been prepared to listen to one word he said at home? He rather doubted it. They went into dinner and Sir Godber passed the time as usual by counting the number of times she said Must and Our Duty. The Musts won by fifty-four to forty-eight. Not bad for the course.

  *

  After he had heard the Chaplain go down to Hall, Zipser slipped out of the lavatory and went to his room. There was no sign of the little crowd of undergraduates who had been gathered in the Court when he first went down and he hoped no one would find out who had been talking, if that was the right word, to the Chaplain. The tendency he shared with the Master’s wife to think in wholly impersonal terms about world issues had quite deserted him. During his hour in the lavatory he had taken the Chaplain’s advice and had attempted to interpose the image of a Swedish girl between himself and Mrs Biggs. Every time Mrs Biggs intruded he concentrated on the slim buttocks and breasts of a Swedish actress he had seen once in Playboy and to some extent the practice had worked. Not entirely. The Swede tended to swell and to assume unnatural proportions until she was displaced by a smiling Mrs Biggs, but the series of little respites was encouraging and suggested that a substantial Swede might be even more effective. He would take the Chaplain’s advice and find an au pair girl or a language student and … and … well … and. Zipser’s lack of sexual experience prevented him from formulating at all clearly what he would do then. Well, he would copulate with her. Having arrived at this neat if somewhat abstract conclusion he felt better. It was certainly preferable to raping Mrs Biggs, which seemed the only alternative. As usual Zipser had no doubts about rape. It was a brutal, violent act of assertive masculinity, a loosening of savage instinctual forces, passionate a
nd bestial. He would hurl Mrs Biggs to the floor and thrust himself … With an effort of will he dragged his imagination back from the scene and thought aseptically about copulating with a Swede.

  A number of difficulties immediately presented themselves. First and foremost he knew no Swedes, and secondly he had never copulated with anyone. He knew a great many intense young women who shared his concern for the fate of mankind and who were prepared to talk about birth control into the early hours of the morning but they were all English and their preoccupation with mankind’s problems had seemed to preclude any interest in him. In any case Zipser had scruples on aesthetic grounds about asking any of them to act as a substitute Mrs Biggs, and rather doubted their efficacy in the role. It would have to be a Swede. With the abstract calculation that was implicit in his whole approach Zipser decided that he would probably be able to find a promiscuous Swede in the Cellar Bar. He wrote it down and put as an alternative the Ali Baba Discothèque. That dealt with the first problem. He would fill her up with wine, Portuguese white would do, and bring her back to his room. All quite simple. With her cooperation the sexual spectre of Mrs Biggs would lose its force. He went to bed early having set the alarm for seven o’clock so as to be up and out before the bedder arrived – and before he fell asleep realized that he had forgotten an important detail. He would need some contraceptives. He’d go and have his hair cut in the morning and get some.

  *

  Skullion sat in front of the gas fire in the Porter’s Lodge and smoked his pipe. His visit to Coft Castle had eased his mind. The General would use his influence to see that the Master didn’t make any changes. You could rely on the General. One of the old brigade, and rich too. The sort that always gave you a big tip at the end of term. Skullion had had some big tips in his time and he had put them all away in his bank with the shares old Lord Wurford had left him in his will and had never touched them. He lived off his salary and what he earned on his night off as a steward at the Fox Club. There had been some big takings there too in his time; the Maharajah of Indpore had once given him fifty quid after a day at the races, when a tip from Sir Cathcart’s stable-boy had paid off. Skullion considered the Maharajah quite a gent, a compliment he paid to few Indians, but then a Maharajah wasn’t a proper Indian, was he? Maharajahs were Princes of the Empire and as far as Skullion was concerned wogs in the Empire were quite different from wogs outside it and wogs in the Fox Club wasn’t wogs at all or they wouldn’t be members. The intricate system of social classification in Skullion’s mind graded everyone. He could place a man within a hair’s breadth in the social scale by the tone of his voice or even the look in his eye. Some people thought you could depend on the cut of a man’s coat but Skullion knew better. It wasn’t externals that mattered, it was something much more indefinable, an inner quality which Skullion couldn’t explain but which he recognized immediately. And responded to. It had something to do with assurance, a certainty of oneself which nothing could shake. There were lots of intermediate stages between this ineffable superiority and the manifest inferiority of, say, the kitchen staff, but Skullion could sense them all and put them in the right place. There was money by itself, brash and full of itself but easily deflated. There was two-generation money with a bit of land. Usually a bit pompous, that was. There was County rich and poor. Skullion noted the distinction but tended to ignore it. Some of the best families had come down in the world and so long as the confidence was there, money didn’t count, not in Skullion’s eyes anyway. In fact confidence without money was preferable, it indicated a genuine quality and was accordingly revered. Then there were various degrees of uncertainty, nuances of self-doubt that went unnoticed by most people but which Skullion spotted immediately. Flickers of residual deference immediately suppressed – but too late to be missed by Skullion. Doctors’ and lawyers’ sons. Professional classes and treated respectfully. Still public school anyway, and graded from Eton and Winchester downwards. Below public school Skullion lost all interest, according only slight respect if there was money in it for him. But at the top of the scale above all these distinctions there was an assurance so ineffable that it seemed almost to merge into its opposite. Real quality, Skullion called it, or even the old aristocracy to distinguish it from mere titular nobility. These were the saints of his calendar, the touchstone against which all other men were finally judged. Even Sir Cathcart was not of their number. In fact Skullion had to admit that he was fundamentally of the fourth rank, though near the top of it, and that was high praise considering how many ranks Skullion had in his mind. No, the real quality were without Sir Cathcart’s harshness. There was often an unassuming quality about the saints which less perceptive porters than Skullion mistook for timidity and social insecurity but which he knew to be a sign of breeding, and not to be taken advantage of. It accorded his servility the highest accolade, this helplessness that was quite unforced, and gave him the sure knowledge that he was needed. Under the cover of that helplessness Skullion could have moved mountains, and frequently had to in the way of luggage and furniture, humping it up staircases and round corners and arranging it first here and then there while its owner, graciously indecisive, tried to make up what there was of his mind where it would look best. From such expeditions Skullion would emerge with a temporary lordliness as if touched by grace and would recall such services rendered in years to come with the feeling that he had been privileged to attend an almost spiritual occasion. In Skullion’s social hagiography two names stood out as the epitome of the effeteness he worshipped. Lord Pimpole and Sir Launcelot Gutterby, and at moments of contemplation Skullion would repeat their names to himself like some repetitive prayer. He was in the process of this incantation and had reached his twentieth ‘Pimpole and Gutterby’ when the Lodge door opened and Arthur, who waited at High Table, came in.