by Tom Sharpe
‘It’s Skullion, isn’t it?’ he asked. Skullion looked up at him doubtfully. ‘What if it is?’ he asked, adopting the impersonal pronoun as if to avoid an intrusion on his privacy.
‘I thought I recognized you,’ Carrington went on. ‘You probably wouldn’t remember me, Carrington. I was up at Porterhouse in the thirties.’
‘Yes, I remember you. You had rooms over the Hall.’
‘Let me get you another drink. Guinness, isn’t it?’ And before Skullion could say anything Carrington had returned back to the barman and was ordering a Guinness. Skullion regarded him morosely. He remembered Carrington all right. Bertie they used to call him. Flirty Bertie. Not a gentleman. He’d been something in the Footlights. Skullion hadn’t approved of him.
Carrington brought the glasses across and sat down. ‘I suppose you’ve retired now,’ he asked presently.
‘Not what you might call retired,’ Skullion said grimly.
‘You mean you’re still Head Porter after all these years? My goodness, you have been there a long time.’ He spoke with the affected eagerness of an interviewer, and indeed something about Skullion had awoken in him the feeling that there was a story here. Carrington had a nose for these things.
‘Forty-five years,’ said Skullion and drank his stout.
‘Forty-five years,’ echoed Carrington. ‘Remarkable.’
Skullion grunted and lifted a bushy eyebrow. There was nothing remarkable about it to him.
‘And now you’ve retired?’ Carrington persisted. Skullion sucked his pipe slowly and said nothing. Carrington drank another mouthful of beer, and changed the subject.
‘I don’t suppose they have the King Street Run any more,’ he said. ‘Now that they’ve knocked down so many of the old pubs.’
Skullion nodded. ‘Used to be fourteen and a pint in every one in half an hour. Took some doing.’ He relapsed into silence. Carrington had caught the mood. The old ways were passed and with them the Head Porter. That partially explained the old man’s grim expression but there was something more behind it. Carrington changed his tack.
‘The College doesn’t seem to have changed much anyway.’
Skullion’s scowl deepened. ‘Changed more than you know,’ he grunted. ‘Going to change out of recognition now.’ He made a move as if to spit on the floor but turned back and smelt the bowl of his pipe.
‘You mean the new Master?’ Carrington enquired.
‘Him and all the rest of them. Women in College. Self-service canteen in Hall. And what about us as served the College all our lives! Out on the street like dogs.’ Skullion drank his beer and banged the glass down on the table. Carrington was silent. He sat still almost invisible with interest like a predator that sees its prey. Skullion lit his pipe and blew smoke.
‘Forty-five years I’ve been a porter,’ he said presently. ‘A lifetime, wouldn’t you say?’ Carrington nodded solemnly. ‘I’ve sat in that Lodge and watched the world go by. When I was a boy we used to wait at the Catholic church for the young gentlemen’s cabs to come by from the station. “Carry your bags, sir,” we’d shout and run beside the horses all the way to the College and carry their trunks up to their rooms for sixpence. That’s how we earned some money in those days. Running a mile and carrying trunks into College. For sixpence.’ Skullion smiled at the memory and for a moment it seemed to Carrington that the intensity had gone out of him. But there was something more than mere memory there, a sense of wrong that Carrington could sense and which in a remote way matched his own feelings. And his own feelings? It was difficult to define them, to say precisely what it was that he had found so monstrous in the Dean’s delicate contempt. Except an insufferable arrogance that viewed him distantly as if he had been a microbe squirming convulsively upon a slide. Carrington acknowledged his own infirmity of spirit but his anger remained. He turned to Skullion as to an ally.
‘And now they’ve turned you out?’ he asked.
‘Who said they had?’ Skullion asked belligerently. Carrington prevaricated. ‘I thought you said something about being made redundant,’ he murmured.
‘Got no right to do it,’ he said almost to himself. ‘They wouldn’t have done it in the old days.’
‘I seem to remember in my day that the College had rather a good reputation among the servants.’
Skullion looked at him with new respect. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘Porterhouse was known for its fairness.’
‘That’s what I thought,’ said Carrington, adopting the lordly manner which was evidently what Skullion required of him.
‘Old Lord Wurford wouldn’t have dreamt of turning the Head Porter into the streets,’ Skullion continued. ‘When he died he left me a thousand pounds. Offered it to the Bursar, I did, to help the College out. Turned me down. Would you believe it? Turned my offer down.’
‘You offered him a thousand pounds to help the College out?’ Carrington asked.
Skullion nodded. ‘I did that. “Oh no,” he says, “wouldn’t dream of taking it,” and the next second he gives me notice. It’s not credible, is it?’
To Carrington credibility hardly mattered. The story was enough.
‘They’re selling Rhyder Street too,’ Skullion went
on.
‘Rhyder Street?’
‘Where all the College servants live. Turning us all out.’
‘Turning you out? They can’t do that.’
‘They are,’ Skullion said. ‘Chef, the head gardener, Arthur, all of us.’
Carrington finished his beer and bought two more. He had the human touch he had been seeking and with it the knowledge that his visit had not been wasted after all. He had his story now.
15
The Dean smiled. He had enjoyed his tea with Carrington. It was seldom nowadays that he had the opportunity to put his gifts for malice to good use. ‘Nothing like a goad for making a man prove himself,’ he thought, recalling his happy days as coach to the Porterhouse crew, and the insults he had used to drive the VIII to victory. And Carrington had suffered the gibes in silence. They would fester in him and give him the edge that was needed. He would do the programme on Porterhouse. His coming to Cambridge had proved his interest in the College in spite of his refusal of Sir Cathcart’s invitation. And that refusal was an advantage too. Nobody could say now that he had been put up to it. As for the content of the programme, the Dean felt secure in the knowledge that Carrington was the high priest of nostalgia. Sir Godber’s plans would be the bait. Tradition sullied. The old and proven ways under threat. The curse of modernism. The Dean could hear the clichés now, rolling off Carrington’s tongue to stir the millions hungry for the good old days. And what of Sir Godber himself? Carrington would make mincemeat of the man’s pretensions. The Dean helped himself to sherry with the air of a man well content, if not with the world, at least with that corner of it over which he was guardian. He went down to dinner in high spirits. They were having Caneton à l’Orange and the Dean was fond of duck. He entered the Combination Room and was surprised to find the Master already there talking to the Senior Tutor. The Dean had forgotten that Sir Godber dined in Hall occasionally.
‘Good evening, Master,’ he said.
‘Good evening, Dean,’ Sir Godber replied. ‘I have just been discussing this business of the restoration fund with the Senior Tutor. It seems that we’ve had an offer for Rhyder Street from Mercantile Properties. They’ve offered one hundred and fifty thousand. I must say I’m inclined to accept. What’s your opinion?’
The Dean grasped his gown and frowned. His objections to the sale of Rhyder Street were tactical. He opposed what Sir Godber proposed on principle but now it was useful that the Master should commit himself to an act whose lack of charity Cornelius Carrington could emphasize.
‘Opinion? Opinion?’ he said finally. ‘I have no opinions on the matter. I regard the sale of Rhyder Street as a betrayal of our trust to the College servants. That is not an opinion. It is a matter of fact.’
‘Ah well,�
� said Sir Godber, ‘we shall just have to differ, won’t we?’
The Senior Tutor was conciliatory. ‘It’s a hard decision to make. I do see that,’ he said. ‘On the one hand the servants have to be considered and on the other there is no doubt that the restoration fund needs the money. A difficult decision.’
‘Not one that I apparently am called to make,’ said the Dean. They trooped into Hall and in the absence of the Chaplain, whose deafness had in no way improved since the explosion in the tower, the Dean said grace. They ate in silence for a while, Sir Godber munching his duck and congratulating himself on the change in the Senior Tutor’s attitude, due possibly to the poor showing of the College in the Bumps, and one or two unfortunate remarks by the Dean. Eager to exploit the rift, Sir Godber set out to cultivate the Senior Tutor. He passed the salt without being asked for it. He told two amusing stories about the Prime Minister’s secretary and finally, when the Senior Tutor ventured the opinion that he thought such goings-on were due to the entry into the Common Market, launched into a detailed account of an interview he had once had with de Gaulle. Throughout it all the Dean remained patently uninterested, his eyes fixed on tables where the undergraduates sat talking noisily, and his mind entertained by the fuse that had been lit in Cornelius Carrington. Towards the end of the meal the Master, having exhausted the eccentricities of de Gaulle, turned the monologue to matters nearer home.
‘My wife is most anxious that you should dine with us one evening,’ he fabricated. ‘She is concerned to know your views on the question of lady tutors for our female undergraduates.’
‘Lady tutors?’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘Lady tutors?’
‘Naturally as a coeducational college we shall require some female Fellows,’ the Master explained.
‘Charming,’ said the Dean nastily.
‘This comes as something of a shock, Master,’ said the Senior Tutor.
Sir Godber helped himself to Stilton. ‘There are some matters, Senior Tutor, that are essentially feminine if you see what I mean. You would hardly want a young woman coming to you for advice about an abortion.’
The Senior Tutor disengaged himself from a mango precipitately. ‘Certainly not,’ he spluttered.
‘It’s an eventuality we have to consider, you know,’ continued Sir Godber. ‘These things do happen, and since they do it would be as well to have a Lady tutor.’
Down the table the Dean smiled happily. ‘And possibly a resident surgeon?’ he suggested.
The Master flushed. ‘You find the topic amusing, Dean?’ he enquired.
‘Not the topic, Master, so much as the contortions of the liberal conscience,’ said the Dean, settling back in his chair with relish. ‘On the one hand we have an overwhelming urge to promote the equality of the sexes. We admit women to a previously all-male college on the grounds that their exclusion is clearly discriminatory. Having done so much we find it necessary to provide a contraceptive dispenser in the Junior lavatory and an abortion centre doubtless in the Matron’s room. Such a splendid prospect for parents to know that the welfare of their daughters is so well provided for. No doubt in time there will be a College crèche and a clinic.’
‘Sex is not a crime, Dean.’
‘In my view pre-marital intercourse comes into the category of breaking and entering,’ said the Dean. He pushed back his chair and they stood while he said grace.
*
As he walked back through the Fellows’ Garden the Master felt again that sense of unease which dining in Hall always seemed to give him. There had been a confidence about the Dean that he distrusted. Sir Godber couldn’t put his finger on it exactly but the feeling persisted. It wasn’t simply the Dean’s manner. It had something to do with the Hall itself. There was something vaguely barbarous about the Hall, as if it were a shrine to appetite and hallowed by the usage of five hundred years. How many carcasses had been devoured within its walls? And what strange manners had those buried generations had? Pre-Renaissance men, pre-scientific men, medieval men had sat and shouted and thought … Sir Godber shuddered at the superstitions they had entertained as if he could undo the thread of time that linked him to their animality. He willed his separation from them. He was a rational man. The contradiction in the phrase alarmed him suddenly. A rational man, free of the absurd and ignorant restrictions that had limited those men whose speculations on the nature of angels and devils, on alchemy and Aristotle, seemed now to verge on the insane. Sir Godber halted in the garden, astonished at the idea that he was the product of such a strange species. They were as remote to him as prehistoric animals and yet he inhabited buildings which they had built. He ate in the same Hall in which they had eaten and even now was standing on ground where they had walked. Alarmed at this new apprehension of his pedigree, Sir Godber peered around him in the darkness and hurried down the path to the Master’s Lodge. Only when he had closed the door and was standing in the hall beneath the electric light did he feel reassured. He went into the drawing-room where Lady Mary was watching a film on television about the problems of senility. Sir Godber allowed himself to be conducted through several geriatric wards before becoming uncomfortably aware that his simple equation of progress with improvement did not apply to the ageing process of the human body. With the silent thought that if that was what the future held in store for him he would prefer to return to the past, he took himself up to bed.
Skullion returned from the Thames Boatman at closing time. He had had no supper and eight pints of Guinness had done nothing to improve his opinion that he had been shamefully treated. He staggered into the Porter’s Lodge and, ignoring Walter’s protest that his wife had been expecting him home for supper at seven o’clock and it was now eleven and what was he supposed to tell her, stumbled through to the back room and lay on the bed. It was a long time since he had had eight pints of anything and it was this more than his innate sense of duty that got him off the bed to close the front gate at twelve o’clock. In the intervals between tottering through to the lavatory Skullion lay in the darkness, while the room revolved around him, trying to sort out what he should do from what that television chap had said to him. Go and see the General in the morning. Appear on the box with Carrington. Programme on Cambridge. Finally he got to sleep and woke late for the first time in forty-five years. It no longer mattered. His days as Head Porter of Porterhouse were over.
By the time Walter arrived Skullion had made up his mind. He took his coat down from the hook and put it on. ‘Going out,’ he told the astonished under-porter (Skullion hadn’t been known to go out in the morning since he had been his assistant) and fetched his bicycle. The thaw had set in and this time as Skullion pedalled out to Coft the fields around him were piebald. Head bent against the wind, Skullion concentrated on what he was going to say and failed to notice the Dean’s car as it swept past him. By the time he reached Coft Castle the bitterness that had been welling in him since his interview with the Bursar had bred in him an indifference to etiquette. He left his bicycle beside the front door of the house and knocked heavily on the door knocker. Sir Cathcart answered the door himself and was too astonished to find Skullion glowering at him from the doorstep to remind him that he was expected to use the kitchen door. Instead he found himself following the Porter into his drawing-room where the Dean, already ensconced in an armchair in front of the fire, had been telling him the news about Cornelius Carrington. Skullion stood inside the door and stared belligerently at the Dean while Sir Cathcart wondered if he should ring for the cook to bring a kitchen chair.
‘Skullion, what on earth are you doing here?’ asked the Dean. There was nothing hangdog about the Porter now.
‘Come to tell the General about being sacked,’ said Skullion grimly.
‘Sacked? What do you mean? Sacked?’ The Dean rose to his feet, and stood with his back to the fire. It was a good traditional stance for dealing with truculent servants.
‘What I say,’ said Skullion, ‘I’ve been sacked.’
‘Impos
sible,’ said the Dean. ‘You can’t have been sacked. Nobody’s told me anything about this. What for?’
‘Nothing,’ said Skullion.
‘There must be some mistake,’ said the General. ‘You’ve got hold of the wrong end of …’
‘Bursar sent for me. Told me I’d got to go,’ Skullion insisted.
‘Bursar? He’s got no authority to do a thing like that,’ said the Dean.
‘Well, he’s done it. Yesterday afternoon,’ Skullion continued. ‘Told me to find other employment. Says the College can’t afford to keep me on. Offered him money too, to help out. Wouldn’t take it. Just gave me the sack.’
‘This is scandalous. We can’t have College servants treated in this high-handed fashion,’ said the Dean. ‘I’ll have a word with the Bursar when I get back.’