Porterhouse Blue (3 page)

He went back into the Porter’s Lodge and sat down again with his pipe. Around him the paraphernalia of his office, the old wooden clock, the counter, the rows of pigeonholes, the keyboard and the blackboard with ‘Message for Dr Messmer’ scrawled on it, were reassuring relics of his tenure and reminders that he was still needed. For forty-five years Skullion had sat in the Lodge watching over the comings and goings of Porterhouse until it seemed he was as much a part of the College as the carved heraldic beasts on the tower above. A lifetime of little duties easily attended to while the world outside stormed by in a maelstrom of change had bred in Skullion a devotion to the changelessness
of Porterhouse traditions. When he’d first come there’d been an Empire, the greatest Empire that the world had known, a Navy, the greatest Navy in the world, fifteen battleships, seventy cruisers, two hundred destroyers, and Skullion had been a keyboard sentry on the
Nelson
with her three for’ard turrets and her arse cut off to meet the terms of some damned treaty. And now there was nothing left of that. Only Porterhouse was still the same. Porterhouse and Skullion, relics of an old tradition. As for the intellectual life of the College, Skullion neither knew nor cared about it. It was as incomprehensible to him as the rigmarole of a Latin mass to some illiterate peasant. They could say or think what they liked. It was the men he worshipped, some at least and fewer these days, their habits and the trappings he associated with that old assurance. The Dean’s, ‘Good morning, Skullion,’ Dr Huntley’s silk shirts, the Chaplain’s evening stroll around the Fellows’ Garden, Mr Lyons’ music evening every Friday, the weekly parcel from the Institute for Dr Baxter. Chapel, Hall, the Feast, the meeting of the College Council, all these occasions like internal seasons marked the calendar of Skullion’s life and all the time he looked for that assurance that had once been the hallmark of a gentleman.

Now sitting there with the gas fire hissing before him he searched his mind for what it was those old men signified. It wasn’t that they were clever. Some were, but half were stupid, more stupid than the young men
coming up these days. Money? Some had a lot and others hadn’t. That wasn’t what had made the difference. To him at least. Perhaps it had to them. A race apart they were. Helpless half of them. Couldn’t make their beds, or wouldn’t. And arrogant. ‘Skullion this and Skullion that.’ Oh, he’d resented it at the time and done it all the same and hadn’t minded afterwards because … because they’d been gentlemen. He spat into the fire affectionately and remembered an argument he’d had once with a young pup in a pub who’d heard him going on about the good old days.

‘What gentlemen?’ the lad had said. ‘A lot of rich bastards with nothing between their ears who just exploited you.’

And Skullion had put down his pint and said, ‘A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be. And that’s something you will never know.’ Not what they were but what they ought to be, like some old battle standard that you followed because it was a symbol of the best. A ragged tattered piece of cloth that stood for something and gave you confidence and something to fight for.

He got up and walked across the Court and through the Screens and down the Fellows’ Garden to the back gate. Everywhere the snow had submerged the details of the garden. Skullion’s feet on the gravel path were soundless. In a few rooms lights still burned. The Dean’s windows were still alight.

‘Brooding on the speech,’ Skullion thought and glanced reproachfully at the Master’s Lodge where all was dark. At the back gate he stood looking up at the rows of iron spikes that topped the wall and the gate. How often in the old days he had stood there in the shadow of the beech-trees watching young gentlemen negotiate those spikes only to step out and take their names. He could remember a good many of those names still and see the startled faces turned towards his as he stepped out into the light.

‘Good morning, Mr Hornby. Dean’s report in the morning, sir.’

‘Oh damn you, Skullion. Why can’t you go to bed sometimes?’

‘College regulations, sir.’

And they had gone off to their rooms cursing cheerfully. Now no one climbed in. Instead they knocked you up at all hours. Skullion didn’t know why he bothered to come and look at the back wall any more. Out of habit. Old habit. He was just about to turn and trudge back to his bed in the Lodge when a scuffling noise stopped him in his tracks. Someone in the street was trying to climb in.

Zipser walked down Free School Lane past the black clunch walls of Corpus. The talk on ‘Population Control in the Indian Subcontinent’ had gone on longer than he had expected, partly due to the enthusiasm of the
speaker and partly to the intractable nature of the problem itself. Zipser had not been sure which had been worse, the delivery, if that was an appropriate word to use about a speech that concerned itself with abortion, or the enthusiastic advocacy of vasectomy which had prolonged the talk beyond its expected limits. The speaker, a woman doctor with the United Nations Infant Prevention Unit in Madras, who seemed to regard infant mortality as a positive blessing, had disparaged the coil as useless, the pill as expensive, female sterilization as complicated, had described vasectomy so seductively that Zipser had found himself crossing and recrossing his legs and wishing to hell that he hadn’t come. Even now as he walked back to Porterhouse through the snow-covered streets he was filled with foreboding and a tendency to waddle. Still, even if the world seemed doomed to starvation, he had had to get out of Porterhouse for the evening. As the only research graduate in the College he found himself isolated. Below him the undergraduates pursued a wild promiscuity which he envied but dared not emulate, and above him the Fellows found compensation for their impotence in gluttony. Besides he was not a Porterhouse man, as the Dean had pointed out when he had been accepted. ‘You’ll have to live in College to get the spirit of the place,’ he had said, and while in other colleges research graduates lived in cheap and comfortable digs, Zipser found himself occupying an exceedingly expensive suite of rooms in Bull Tower and
forced to follow the regime of an undergraduate. For one thing he had to be in by twelve or face the wrath of Skullion and the indelicate inquiries next morning of the Dean. The whole system was anachronistic and Zipser wished he had been accepted by one of the other colleges. Skullion’s attitude he found particularly unpleasant. The Porter seemed to regard him as an interloper, and lavished a wealth of invective on him normally reserved for tradesmen. Zipser’s attempts to mollify him by explaining that Durham was a university and that there had been a Durham College in Oxford in 1380 had failed hopelessly. If anything, the mention of Oxford had increased Skullion’s antipathy.

‘This is a gentleman’s college,’ he had said, and Zipser, who didn’t claim to be even a putative gentleman, had been a marked man ever since. Skullion had it in for him.

As he crossed Market Hill he glanced at the Guildhall clock. It was twelve thirty-five. The main gate would be shut and Skullion in bed. Zipser slackened his pace. There was no point in hurrying now. He might just as well stay out all night now. He certainly wasn’t going to knock Skullion up and get cursed for his pains. It wouldn’t have been the first time he had wandered about Cambridge all night. Of course there was Mrs Biggs the bedder to be taken care of. She came to wake him every morning and was supposed to report him if his bed hadn’t been slept in but Mrs Biggs was accommodating. ‘A pound in the purse is worth a flea in the
ear,’ she had explained after his first stint of night wandering, and Zipser had paid up cheerfully. Mrs Biggs was all right. He was fond of her. There was something almost human about her in spite of her size.

Zipser shivered. It was partly the cold and partly the thought of Mrs Biggs. The snow was falling heavily now and it was obvious he couldn’t stay out all night in this weather. It was equally clear that he wasn’t going to wake Skullion. He would have to climb in. It was an undignified thing for a graduate to do but there was no alternative. He crossed Trinity Street and went past Caius. At the bottom he turned right and came to the back gate in the lane. Above him the iron spikes on top of the wall looked more threatening than ever. Still, he couldn’t stay out. He would probably freeze to death if he did. He found a bicycle in front of Trinity Hall and dragged it up the lane and put it against the wall. Then he climbed up until he could grasp the spikes with his hands. He paused for a moment and then with a final kick he was up with one knee on the wall and his foot under the spikes. He eased himself up and swung the other leg over, found a foothold and jumped. He landed softly in the flowerbed and scrambled to his feet. He was just moving off down the path under the beech-tree when something moved in the shadow and a hand fell on his shoulder. Zipser reacted instinctively. With a wild flurry he struck out at his attacker and the next moment a bowler hat was in mid-air and Zipser himself, ignoring the College rules which decreed that only
Fellows could walk on the lawns, was racing across the grass towards New Court. Behind him on the gravel path Skullion lay breathing heavily. Zipser glanced over his shoulder as he dashed through the gate into the Court and saw his dark shape on the ground. Then he was in O staircase and climbing the stairs to his rooms. He shut the door and stood in the darkness panting. It must have been Skullion. The bowler hat told him that. He had assaulted a College porter, bashed his face and chopped him down. He went to the window and peered out and it was then that he realized what a fool he had been. His footsteps in the snow would give him away. Skullion would follow them to the Bull Tower. But there was no sign of the Porter. Perhaps he was still lying out there unconscious. Perhaps he had knocked him out. Zipser shuddered at this fresh indication of his irrational nature, and its terrible consequences for mankind. Sex and violence, the speaker had said, were the twin poles of the world’s lifeless future, and Zipser could see now what she had meant.

Anyway, he could not leave Skullion lying out there to freeze to death even if going down to help him meant that he would be sent down from the University for ‘assaulting a college porter’, his thesis on The Pumpernickel as A Factor in the Politics of Sixteenth- Century Westphalia uncompleted. He went to the door and walked slowly downstairs.

Skullion got to his feet and picked up his bowler, brushed the snow off it and put it on. His waistcoat and jacket were covered with patches of snow and he brushed them down with his hands. His right eye was swelling. Young bastard had caught him a real shiner. ‘Getting too old for this job,’ he muttered, muddled feelings of anger and respect competing in his mind. ‘But I can still catch him.’ He followed the footsteps across the lawn and down the path to the gate into New Court. His eye had swollen now so that he could hardly see out of it, but Skullion wasn’t thinking about his eye. He wasn’t thinking about catching the culprit. He was thinking back to the days of his youth. ‘Fair’s fair. If you can’t catch ’em, you can’t report ’em,’ old Fuller, the Head Porter at Porterhouse had said to him when he first came to the College and what was true then was true now. He turned left at the gate and went down the Cloister to the Lodge and went through to his bedroom. ‘A real shiner,’ he said examining the swollen eye in the mirror behind the door. It could do with a bit of beefsteak. He’d get some from the College kitchen in the morning. He took off his jacket and was unbuttoning his waistcoat when the door of the Lodge opened. Skullion buttoned his waistcoat again and put on his jacket and went out into the office.

Zipser stood in the doorway of O staircase and watched Skullion cross the Court to the Cloisters. Well, at least
he wasn’t lying out in the snow. Still he couldn’t go back to his room without doing something. He had better go down and see if he was all right. He walked across the Court and into the Lodge. It was empty and he was about to turn away and go back to his room when the door at the back opened and Skullion appeared. His right eye was black and swollen and his face, old and veined, had a deformed lopsided look about it.

‘Well?’ Skullion asked out of the side of his mouth. One eye peered angrily at Zipser.

‘I just came to say I’m sorry,’ Zipser said awkwardly.

‘Sorry?’ Skullion asked as if he didn’t understand.

‘Sorry about hitting you.’

‘What makes you think you hit me?’ The lopsided face glared at him.

Zipser scratched his forehead.

‘Well, anyway I’m sorry. I thought I had better see if you were all right.’

‘You thought I was going to report you, didn’t you?’ Skullion asked contemptuously. ‘Well, I’m not. You got away.’

Zipser shook his head.

‘It wasn’t that. I thought you might be … well … hurt.’

Skullion smiled grimly.

‘Hurt? Me hurt? What’s a little hurt matter?’ He turned and went back into the bedroom and shut the
door. Zipser went out into the Court. He didn’t understand. You knocked an old man down and he didn’t mind. It wasn’t logical. It was all so bloody irrational. He walked back to his room and went to bed.

The Master slept badly. The somatic effects of the Feast and the psychic consequences of his speech had combined to make sleep difficult. While his wife slept demurely in her separate bed, Sir Godber lay awake reliving the events of the evening with an insomniac’s obsessiveness. Had he been wise to so offend the sensibilities of the College? It had been a carefully calculated decision and one which his political eminence had seemed to warrant. Whatever the Fellows might say about him, his reputation for moderate and essentially conservative reform would absolve him of the accusation that he was the advocate of change for change’s sake. As the Minister who had made the slogan ‘Alteration without Change’ so much a part of the recent tax reforms, Sir Godber prided himself on his conservative liberalism or, as he had put it in a moment of self-revelation, authoritarian permissiveness. The challenge he had thrown down to Porterhouse had been deliberate and justified. The College was absurdly old-fashioned. Out of touch with the times, and to a man whose very life had been spent keeping in touch with the times there could be no greater dereliction. An advocate of comprehensive education at no matter what
cost, chairman of the Evans Committee on Higher Education which had introduced Sixth Form Polytechnics for the Mentally Retarded, Sir Godber prided himself on the certain knowledge that he knew what was best for the country, and he was supported in this by Lady Mary, his wife, whose family, now staunchly Liberal, still retained the Whig traditions enshrined in the family motto
Laisser Mieux
. Sir Godber had taken the motto for his own, and associating it with Voltaire’s famous dictum had made himself the enemy of the good wherever he found it. ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ had no appeal for Sir Godber’s crusading imagination. What sweet maids required was a first-rate education and what sleeping dogs needed was a kick up the backside. This was precisely what he intended to administer to Porterhouse.