Porterhouse Blue

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘Sacked,’ he said, with a hiss of air that sounded as if he were expiring with disbelief.

  The Bursar turned reassuringly.

  ‘Not sacked, Skullion,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Not sacked, just … well … for your own sake, for everyone’s sake it would be better if you looked around for another job.’

  Skullion stared at him with an intensity that alarmed the Bursar. ‘You can’t do it,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘You’ve got no right. No right at all.’

  ‘Skullion,’ the Bursar began warningly.

  ‘You’ve sacked me,’ Skullion roared, and his face which had been briefly pale flushed to a new and terrible red. ‘After all these years I’ve given to the College you’ve sacked me.’

  To the Bursar it seemed that Skullion had swollen to a fearful size which filled his office and threatened him. ‘Now, Skullion,’ he began, as the Porter loomed at him, but Skullion only stared a moment and then turned on his heel and rushed from the office slamming the door behind him. The Bursar subsided into his chair limp and exhausted.

  *

  To Skullion, stumbling blindly across the Court, the Bursar’s words were impossible. Forty-five years. Forty-five years he had served the College. He reeled into the Screens and stood clutching the lintel of the Buttery counter for support. The sense of being needed, of being as much a support to the College as the stone lintel he clutched was to the wall above it, all this had left him or was leaving him as waves of realization swept over him and eroded his absolute conviction that he was still and would for ever be the Porter of Porterhouse. Breathing deeply Skullion heaved himself on down the steps into the Old Court and walked woodenly towards the Porter’s Lodge and the consolation of his gas fire. There he brushed past Walter and sat slumped in his chair, unable even now to accept the enormity of the Bursar’s words. There had been Skullions at Porterhouse since the College was founded. He had Lord Wurford’s word for it and with such a continuity of possession behind him, it was as though he stood upon the edge of the world with only an abyss before him. Skullion recoiled from the oblivion. It was impossible to conceive. In a state of numbed disbelief he heard Walter moving about the Lodge as if it were somehow distant.

  ‘Gutterby and Pimpole,’ Skullion muttered, invoking the saints of his calendar almost automatically in his agony.

  ‘Yes, Mr Skullion?’ said Walter. ‘Did you say something?’ But Skullion said nothing and presently Walter went out leaving the Head Porter muttering dimly to himself.

  ‘Going off his head, old bugger,’ he thought without regret. But Skullion was mad only in a figurative sense. As the full extent of his deprivation dawned on him, the anger which had been gathering in him since Sir Godber became Master broke through the barrier of his deference and swept like a flash flood down the arid watercourse of his feelings. For years, for forty-five years, he had suffered the arrogance and the impertinent assumptions of privileged young men and had accorded them in turn a quite unwarranted respect and now at last, released from all his obligations, the anger he had suppressed at so many humiliations added to the momentum of his present fury. It was almost as though Skullion welcomed the ruin of his pretensions, had secretly hoarded the memories of his afflictions against such an eventuality so that his freedom, when and if it came, should be complete and final. Not that it was or could be. The habits of a lifetime remained unaltered. An undergraduate came in for a parcel and Skullion rose obediently and brought it to the counter but without the rancour that had been the emblem of his servitude. His anger was all internal. Outwardly Skullion seemed subdued and old, shuffling about his office in his bowler hat and muttering to himself, but inwardly all was altered. The deep divisions in his mind, like the two separate lobes of his brain, his allegiance to the College and his self-interest, were sundered and Skullion’s anger at his lot in life could run unchecked.

  When Walter returned at six o’clock, Skullion put on his overcoat.

  ‘Going out,’ he said and left Walter dumbfounded. It wasn’t his night on duty. Skullion went out of the gate and turned down Trinity Street towards the Round Church. On the corner he hesitated and looked down towards the Baron of Beef but it wasn’t the pub for his present mood. He wanted something less tainted by change. He walked on down Sidney Street towards King Street. The Thames Boatman was better. He hadn’t been there for some time. He went in and ordered a Guinness and sat at a table in the corner and lit his pipe.

  14

  Cornelius Carrington spent the day in rehearsal. With a cultivated eccentricity he wandered through the colleges singling out the architectural backdrops against which his appearance would be most effective. He adored King’s College Chapel though only briefly. It was too well-known, hackneyed he thought and, more important, it dwarfed his personality. Conscious of his own limitations he sought the less demanding atmosphere of Corpus Christi and stood in the Old Court admiring its medieval charms. He pottered on through St Catherine’s and Queens’ over the wooden bridge and shuddered at the desecration of concrete that had been erected over the river. In Pembroke he lamented Waterhouse’s library for its Victorian vulgarity before changing his mind and deciding that was an ornamental classic of its time. Glazed brick was preferable to concrete after all, he thought, as he made his way down Little St Mary’s Lane towards the Graduate Centre.

  He had morning coffee in the Copper Kettle, lunch in the Whim, and all the time his mind revolved around the question which had been bothering him since his arrival. The programme as he visualized it lacked the human touch. It was not enough to conduct a million viewers on a guided tour of Cambridge colleges. There had to be a moral in it somewhere, a human tragedy that touched the heart and raised the Carrington Programme from the level of aesthetic nostalgia to the heights of drama. He’d find it somewhere, somehow. He had a nose for the undiscovered miseries of life.

  In the afternoon he continued his pilgrimage through Trinity and John’s and fulminated at the huge new building there. He minced through Magdalene and it wasn’t until half-past three that he found himself in Porterhouse. Here, if anywhere in Cambridge, time stood still. No hint of concrete here. The blackened walls of brick and clunch were as they had been in his day. The cobbled court with its chapel in the Gothic style, its lawns and the great Hall through whose stained-glass windows the winter sun glowed richly: all was as he remembered. And with the memory there came the uneasy feeling of his own inadequacy, which had been his mood in those days, and which, in spite of his renown, he had never wholly eradicated. Steeling himself against this recrudescence of inferiority he climbed the worn steps to the Screens and stood for a moment studying the notices posted in the glass cases there. Here too nothing had changed. The Boat Club. Rugger. Squash. Fixture lists. With a shudder Carrington turned away from this reminder that Porterhouse was a rowing college and stood in the archway looking down into New Court with astonishment. Here things had changed. Plastic sheeting covered the front of the Tower and broken masonry lay heaped on the flags below. Carrington gaped at the extent of the destruction and was about to go down to make a closer examination when a small figure, heavily muffled in an overcoat, panted up the steps behind him and he turned to find himself face to face with the Dean.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Carrington said, relapsing suddenly into a deference he thought he had outgrown. The Dean stopped and looked at him.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, suppressing the glint of recognition in his eye. Carrington’s face was familiar from the hoardings, but the Dean preferred to pretend to an infallible memory for Porterhouse men. ‘We haven’t seen you for a long time, have we?’

  Carrington shrank a little at the supposition that his viewers, however numerous elsewhere, did not include the Senior Members of his old college.

  ‘To my knowledge you haven’t been back since … um … er,’ the Dean fabricated a tussle with his memory, ‘nineteen … er thirty-eight, wasn’t it?’

  Carrington agreed humbly that it was, and the Dean, secure
now in his traditional role as the ward of an ineffable superiority, led the way towards his rooms.

  ‘You’ll join me for tea,’ he asked and Carrington, already reduced to a submissiveness that infuriated him, thanked him for the offer.

  ‘I’m told,’ said the Dean as they climbed the narrow staircase, ‘by those who know about these things, that you have made something of a name for yourself in the entertainment industry.’

  Carrington found himself simpering a polite denial.

  ‘Come, come, you’re too modest,’ said the Dean, rubbing salt into the wound. ‘Your opinion matters, you know.’

  Carrington doubted it.

  ‘You must be one of the few distinguished members the College has produced in recent years,’ the Dean continued, leading the way down the corridor from whose walls there stared the faces of Porterhouse men whose expressions left Carrington in little doubt that whatever they might think of him distinguished was not the word.

  ‘You just sit down while I put the kettle on,’ said the Dean and Carrington left for a moment tried hard to restore the dykes of his self-esteem. The room did not help. It was filled with reminders of past excellence in which he had no share. As an undergraduate Carrington had shone at nothing and even the knowledge that these peers of his youth who stared unwrinkled from their frames, singly or in teams, had failed to sustain the promise of their early brilliance did nothing to console him. They were probably substantial men, if hardly known, and Carrington for all his assumed arrogance was conscious of the ephemeral nature of his own reputation. He was not and would never be a substantial man, a man with Bottom, as the eighteenth century and no doubt the Dean would phrase it, and Carrington was enough of an Englishman to resent his inadequacy. It was probably this sense of having failed as a good fellow, a solid dependable sort of a chap, which gave to his practised nostalgia for the twenties and thirties its quality of genuine emotion as if he pined for a time as mediocre as himself. He was rescued from his self-pity by the Dean who emerged with a tray from his tiny kitchen.

  ‘Harrison,’ said the Dean of the photograph Carrington had been studying self-critically.

  ‘Ah,’ he agreed noncommittally.

  ‘Brilliant scrum-half. Scored that try at Twickenham in … now when was it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ said Carrington.

  ‘Thirty-six? About your time. I’m surprised you don’t remember.’

  ‘I was never a great rugby man.’

  The Dean looked at him critically. ‘No, now I come to think of it you weren’t, were you? Was it rowing you were interested in?’

  ‘No,’ said Carrington, uncomfortably aware that the Dean knew it already.

  ‘You must have done something in your years in College. Mind you, a lot of the young fellows who come up these days don’t do anything very much. I sometimes wonder what they come to University for. Sex, I suppose, though why they can’t indulge their sordid appetites somewhere else I can’t imagine.’ He shuffled into his kitchen and returned with a plate of rock cakes.

  ‘I was looking at the damage to the Tower,’ Carrington began when the Dean had poured tea.

  ‘Come to make capital out of our misfortunes, I suppose,’ said the Dean. ‘You journalist fellows seem to be the carrion crows of contemporary civilization.’ He sat back smiling at the happy alliteration of his insult.

  ‘I wouldn’t really regard myself as a journalist,’ Carrington demurred.

  ‘Wouldn’t you? How very interesting,’ said the Dean.

  ‘I see myself more as a commentator.’

  The Dean smiled. ‘Of course. How stupid of me. One of the lords of the air. A maker of opinion. How very interesting.’ He paused to allow Carrington to savour his indifference. ‘Don’t you often feel embarrassed at the amount of influence you wield? I know I should. But then of course nobody listens to what I have to say. I suppose you might say I lack the common touch. Do have some more tea.’

  In his chair Carrington regarded the old man angrily. He had had enough of the Dean’s hospitality, the polite insults and the delicate depreciation of everything he had achieved. Porterhouse had not changed. Not one iota. The place, the man, were anachronisms beyond the compassion of his nostalgia.

  ‘One of the things that amazes me,’ he said finally, ‘is to find that in a University that prides itself on scholarship and research, Porterhouse remains so resolutely a sporting college. I was glancing at the notices just now. No mention of scholarships or academic work. Just the old rugby lists …’

  ‘And what did you get? A double first, was it?’ the Dean enquired sweetly.

  ‘A two two,’ said Carrington.

  ‘And look where it’s got you,’ said the Dean. ‘It speaks for itself really. Let’s just say that we haven’t succumbed to the American infection yet.’

  ‘The American infection?’

  ‘Doctoratitis. The assumption that a man’s worth is to be measured by mere diligence. A man spends three years minutely documenting documents if you understand my meaning, anyway, investigating issues that have escaped the notice of more discriminating scholars, and emerges from the ordeal with a doctorate which is supposed to be proof of his intelligence. Than which I can think of nothing more stupid. But there you are, that’s the modern fashion. It comes, I suppose, from a literal acceptance of the ridiculous dictum that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains. These fellows seem to think that if you can demonstrate an appetite for indigestible and trivial details for three years you must be a genius. In my opinion, genius is by definition a capacity to jump the whole process of taking infinite pains, but then as I say, nobody listens to me. I mean there must be millions of people taking whatever these infinite pains are without a spark of intelligence let alone genius between them. And then again you have a silly fellow like Einstein who can’t even count … it depresses me, it really does, but it’s the fashion.’

  The Dean waved his hands as if to exorcize the evil spirit of his time and Carrington ventured to intervene.

  ‘But surely research does pay off …’ he suggested.

  ‘Pay?’ said the Dean. ‘I daresay it does. It certainly earns some colleges a great deal of money. Again you have this absurd assumption that provided you purchase enough sows’ ears one of them is bound to turn into a silk purse. Utter nonsense, of course. It’s the quality that counts not the quantity but then I don’t expect you to sympathize with my old-fashioned point of view. When all’s said and done it’s quantity that’s made your reputation, isn’t it?’

  ‘Quantity?’

  ‘Megaviewers,’ said the Dean. ‘It seems an appropriate if nasty expression.’

  By the time Cornelius Carrington left the Dean’s rooms the erosion of his self-respect was almost complete and the comfortable acceptance of himself as the spokesman of a wholesome public concern quite gone. In the Dean’s eyes he was clearly a parvenu, a jack in the box, he had suggested with a smile, and Carrington had found himself sharing the Dean’s opinion. He walked out of Porterhouse envying the man his assurance and cursing himself for his inability to cope. What concrete and system-built housing was for him, he clearly was for the Dean, evidence of a facile and ugly commercialism. What had the Dean said? That he found the ephemeral distasteful, and there had been no doubt that of all ephemera he found television commentators the least to his liking. Carrington walked down Senate House Lane debating the source of the Dean’s assurance. The man’s lifetime spanned the coming of pebble-dash and the mock-Tudor suburbs Carrington found so appealing. He belonged to an earlier tradition. The Toby Jug Englishman, Squarsons and squires who didn’t give a tuppenny damn what the world thought of them and bloodied the world’s nose when it got in their way. In this mood of self-recrimination at his unalterable deference to such men, Carrington found himself in King Street. He wasn’t at all sure how he had got there and at first found it difficult to recognize. King Street had changed more than any other part of Cambridge. The houses and shops that had stoo
d huddled together down the narrow street were gone. A concrete multi-storeyed car park, a row of ugly brick arcades. And where were all the pubs? Walking down the street Carrington forgot his own demolition. Now it was bleak, impersonal and grim. A little further on he came to some remnants. An antique shop that had odds and ends of vases and bad paintings in its window. A coffee-shop cluttered with percolators and the more intricate jugs that undergraduates still evidently cultivated. But for the most part the developers had done their damnedest. Finally he came to the Thames Boatman and grateful to find it still standing he went inside.

  ‘A pint of bitter, please,’ he told the barman with his usual sense of place. Gin and tonic in a King Street pub would have been unthinkable. He took his beer to a table by the window.

  ‘Seem to have been a lot of changes since I was here last,’ he said, having taken a large swig from his beer glass. He didn’t usually take large swigs. In fact he didn’t usually drink beer at all, but beer in large swigs was, he remembered, customary in King Street.

  ‘Knocking the whole street down,’ said the barman laconically.

  ‘Must be bad for business,’ Carrington suggested.

  ‘’Tis and it isn’t,’ the barman agreed.

  Carrington gave up the attempt to make conversation and turned his attention to the more responsive decorations of the bar-room.

  A short time later a man in a bowler hat entered the bar and ordered a Guinness. Carrington studied his back and found a vague familiarity there. The dark overcoat, the highly polished shoes, the solid neck and above all the square set of the bowler hat, all these were tokens of a college porter. But it was the pipe, the jutting bulldog pipe, that woke his memory and told him this was Skullion. The porter paid for his Guinness and took it to the table in the corner and lit his pipe. A waft of blue smoke reached Carrington. He sniffed, and in that sniff the years receded and he was back in the Porter’s Lodge in Porterhouse. Skullion. He had forgotten the man and his stiff, wooden, almost military ways. Skullion standing like some heraldic beast at the College gate or seen from his rooms above the Hall, a dark helmeted figure marching across the Court in the early morning, his attendant shadow jutting above the crenellations cast by the morning sunlight on the lawn. The pipe at the gates of dawn, Carrington had once called him, but there was nothing of the dawn about the Porter now. He sat over his Guinness and sucked his pipe and scowled unseeingly. Carrington studied the heavy features and was struck by the grim strength of the face below the brim of the bowler hat. If the Dean had prompted the thought of Toby Jugs, Skullion called to mind an older type than that. Something almost Chaucerian about the man, Carrington thought, relying for his assessment on vague memories of The Prologue. Certainly medieval. But above all it was the impressiveness of the man that struck him most. Impressive was the word for the face that stared out across the bar. Carrington drank his beer and ordered another. As he waited for it he crossed to the table where Skullion sat.