Grantchester Grind

15

To Purefoy Osbert the comings and goings at the Master's Lodge were of only visual interest. He had no idea what was going on over there but from the window of his room he watched the Senior Tutor and the Praelector and the Chaplain come and go across the lawn and past the Master's Maze in their various ways. The Senior Tutor strode now that he felt better, the Praelector stalked slowly and meditatively with his head bent like some long-legged water bird, possibly a heron, watching for a fish. The Chaplain trotted, and the Bursar had to be helped. But the strangest figure to emerge from the Lodge was the Master himself who came, usually at dusk, though occasionally, when his presence by Kudzuvine's bedside was not required, in the morning or afternoon to sit by the Back Gate as he had done when he had been Head Porter, watching and waiting for the young gentlemen, as he still called the students, to climb in after hours. Not that 'after hours' could be said to exist any longer. The College gates, when not closed against intruders, were left unlocked all the time. But traditional ways persisted at Porterhouse to the point where the Night Porter kept a list of every undergraduate who came in after midnight and the list went to the Dean who would summon persistent late-nighters and threaten them with fines or even rustication if they continued staying out late. Not that the Dean really objected. As he put it many times to culprits, 'There is a right way of doing things and a wrong way. And the right way after midnight is over the back wall next to the Master's Lodge.' The fact that the back wall was topped with a double bank of revolving spikes to prevent undergraduates climbing in provided the sort of challenge the Dean approved of.

'Besides, it provides the Master with an interest and something to concentrate his mind on,' he had said at a meeting of the College Council when one of the younger dons had proposed that the spikes be removed as constituting a dangerous relic from the past. That proposal had been defeated and the spikes remained along the top of the wall and the great wooden gates. Below them Skullion did too, sitting in his wheelchair or sometimes managing to hobble across to lean where he had leant so many years before against the trunk of an old beech tree with the words 'Dean's report in the morning, sir' ready on his lips. With the full moon Purefoy Osbert could make out that dark shape even at one o'clock in the morning when he turned his lights out, and he found it sinister. He couldn't begin to fathom what went on in the former Head Porter's mind, or the sheer persistence of the man. But then Porterhouse baffled him completely. It wasn't simply that it was unlike any other college in Cambridge. It was that Porterhouse seemed to refuse to accept that any changes had occurred since…well, since before the First World War, or to recognize the astonishing achievements in science and medicine that were being made year after year by people in Pembroke and Christ's, in Queens' and Sidney Sussex, in fact in every college in Cambridge. Except Porterhouse. In Porterhouse the emphasis was always on the Arts and, if the War Memorial was anything to go by, on the Martial Arts. Hundreds of Porterhouse men had gone to their deaths obediently on the Somme and at Loos and again in the Second World War. And everywhere he went in his exploration of the College he encountered large muscular undergraduates who greeted him politely or, in the case of those who hadn't heard he was the new Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow, as though he were one of the College servants.

'Hey, you with the face,' one young lout had called out to him, 'come and help me shift the desk in my room. It's too damned heavy for me.' And Purefoy had obliged him, only to point out most coldly and politely that he was in future to be addressed as Dr Osbert and not as The Face, if you don't mind. But his main interest lay in fulfilling his mandate and doing his research into the life and times of Sir Godber Evans. As usual his first visit was to the College Library, an oddly shaped octagonal structure of stone standing apart from the other buildings in its own walled garden behind the Chapel. Inside, a central iron circular staircase went up from floor to floor and the shelves radiated out from it. At the very top a lantern let in the light.

Purefoy Osbert recognized the system immediately. 'Bentham's Panopticon,' he said to the Librarian, who ought to have been sitting at the circular desk under the staircase but who had made himself more comfortable in a small side office.

'Quite right, but, since no one ever bothers to read in here or to take books out, it seems an unnecessary precaution,' the Librarian told him. 'I can't imagine that it crosses anyone's mind to steal a book. The only thing I have to do round here is dust the shelves occasionally and turn the lights on and off in winter.'

'But how do you occupy your time? I see you are writing something,' Purefoy said. An ancient black enamel typewriter with glass panels on the sides stood to one side of the desk, and there were typed pages in a wire basket.

'Oh, I'm mucking about trying to revise Romley's _History of Porterhouse,_ which is completely out of date-it was published in 1911-and full of the most dreadful inaccuracies. For instance, he actually goes so far as to claim that Porterhouse predates Peterhouse which was the first college in Cambridge as everyone knows. Not the late Mr Romley. No, he's convinced the original foundation was Porterhouse and that a school for Franciscan monks was established here in 1095.'

'But the Franciscan Order wasn't founded until the thirteenth century,' said Purefoy. 'That can't be right. He must have meant some other Order, like the Benedictines who were founded much earlier.'

'In AD 529, to be precise,' said the Librarian, and immediately won Purefoy's heart. The Librarian was obviously a man who placed a special emphasis on certainties.

'But surely this man Romley must have known that?'

'Heaven alone knows what he knew. From what I've seen of the older Fellows he probably thought Benedictine was only a liqueur.'

'Well, if all his facts are as bad as that I should forget the revision and write your own history of the College, warts and all.'

'I have more or less decided to, though I think I won't mention warts. That's what really brought me here. Warts and eczema and skin diseases in general. Actually I graduated from Glasgow as a medical doctor. It was a great mistake. I wasn't cut out for the contemplation of skin conditions and I wasn't any good in any case. I saw this post advertised and I thought it would be a much pleasanter life and I've always loved reading and I cannot stand inaccuracies. That was another reason for not staying in medicine. Diagnosis is largely guesswork and while the effect is obvious the cause very seldom is. No one really knows what causes eczema and I don't think they understand very much about warts either. Some people can charm the things away. Well, I just wasn't prepared to be a medical water-diviner. Or I suppose I should say a blood-diviner.'

They talked on and Purefoy told him about the work he was supposed to be going to do on the life of the late Master, Sir Godber Evans. 'Actually, I was meaning to ask you if you knew where any of his papers are,' he said.

'I suppose they might be in the archives,' the Librarian said with a derisory laugh. 'Though knowing what the Dean and the Senior Tutor thought of him, it wouldn't surprise me if they had burned them.'

Purefoy was shocked beyond belief. 'What?' he exclaimed. 'But you can't do things like that. It's sacrilege to destroy documents. That's the only stuff of history there is, and the facts…You can't destroy knowledge like that.'

'You can in Porterhouse. You try reading Romley's _History_ and you'll see what he thought about facts. I don't suppose he'd have known one if he'd had it handed him on a plate' He paused and thought for a moment. "Though come to think of it, the only fact he'd be likely to recognize would be on a plate with lots of sautéed potatoes round it and a glass of excellent claret to go with it. Anyway we can go down into the Crypt and have a look.'

'The Crypt? Under the Chapel?'

'No, under here. It's really just an enormous cellar but they call it the Library Crypt. Don't ask me why. They call everything in Porterhouse by some peculiar name. Have you seen the Dossery?'

Purefoy said he hadn't, and had never heard of such a place.

'It was part of the original lodgings where the scholars used to sleep. Now they've split it up into separate rooms but they still call it the Dossery.'

He unlocked a door in the wall and they went down a steep flight of stone steps. The Librarian tried to switch the light on but nothing happened. It's the damp,' he explained. 'The whole place practically drips and the wiring hasn't been replaced since God knows when. That's why I wear rubber-soled shoes and keep those heavy industrial gloves here. It's safer and, if you're going to come down here, I'd advise you to use them. You don't want to get electrocuted.'

He tried the old metal switch several times more and finally the lights came on. They were very dim. 'The Bursar insists on fifteen-watt bulbs to save money but if you need more light I've got some one-fifties in my office, though frankly I don't know what they'd do to the wiring. Probably set it alight and burn the place down.'

But Purefoy was looking in horrified amazement at the enormous pile of old tea-chests with which the cellar was filled. 'These are the archives? These are really the College archives? It's insane, it's criminally insane. Look at the mould.' He pointed to some fungal growth on the side of one of the boxes.

'I know. I've tried to do something about it but every time it rains we get several inches of water down here because some drain is blocked and they won't spend money unblocking it. I've tried putting bricks under some of the boxes but it doesn't seem to help very much.'

They went along the great pile and Purefoy felt inside some of the boxes and touched damp paper. He shook his head in disbelief. Even if the Librarian was right and the Dean and the Senior Tutor had burnt Sir Godber Evans' papers they'd have been wasting their time. All they had to do was leave them down here. The damp would do the rest. Anyway he had found something to do. He would go through these tea-chests and take their contents up into the Library and dry them out one by one. He wasn't going to see facts turn into mould and he'd have something to say to the Bursar and the Dean when he got a chance. He was going to insist that some part of Lady Mary's benefaction was spent creating a proper and dry and temperature-controlled archive for the Porterhouse Papers.