Grantchester Grind

26

For the Dean the next few days were as hellish as any he had known. He sat in his room trying to come to terms with Skullion's threat. Everything he had ever believed in had been put in jeopardy by that confession. He was confronted by a disgustingly brutal world in which the traditional virtues he held dear had been swept aside. Duty, deference, honour and justice had all gone. Or were in conflict with one another. 'It is my duty to inform the police,' he said to himself, only to hear another part of his mind tell him not to be such a fool. 'After all, the fact that Skullion told you he killed Sir Godber is no proof that he did. He has only to deny it and then where would you be?' The Dean could find no answer to the question. Then again there was the honour of the College to take into account. Even an unsubstantiated accusation would create a scandal and Porterhouse had had too many scandals in recent years to withstand another. A fresh crisis would only provide an excuse for those who wanted to change the whole character of the College and the Dean and the Senior Tutor would be ousted by the likes of Dr Buscott and brash young Fellows. The Prime Minister would appoint a new Master and Porterhouse would become nothing more than an academic forcing-house like Selwyn or Fitzwilliam. The Dean put his duty to one side and with it went his belief in justice.

There were other consequences. All his life the Dean had seen Skullion as a servant, a social inferior whose deference was living proof that the old order had not fundamentally been changed. Skullion had destroyed that comforting illusion. 'Don't you Skullion me,' he had said. 'It's Master from now on.' With that command, and there could be no other term for it, the Dean's world had been turned upside down. Coming so shortly after his encounter with the drunken Jeremy Pimpole living in squalor in the gamekeeper's cottage, Skullion's assertion of his own authority had shattered the Dean's dream of society. Little islands of the old order, where deference was due, undoubtedly remained but the tide of egalitarian vulgarity was rising and in time would swamp them all. The Dean had seen that barbarism in action at the motorway service areas and had been appalled. To encounter it in Porterhouse was more than he could bear. To add to his sense of disillusionment there was also the knowledge that he had been wrong about Sir Godber's death and Lady Mary had been right. Her husband had been murdered. And to compound that awful realization, the Dean had misunderstood the meaning of the dying man's last words and had interpreted them to make his murderer the Master of Porterhouse. There was a horrible irony about that error but the Dean was in no mood to appreciate it. Instead he kept to his rooms and thought the darkest thoughts, dined silently in Hall and took long melancholy walks to Grantchester debating what on earth to do.

It was on one of these walks that he encountered the Praelector. He too seemed preoccupied. Ah, Dean, I see you too have taken to doing the Grantchester Grind,' the old man said.

The Dean did his best to smile. 'I take my constitutional,' he said. 'I find it helps my rheumatism to get some exercise.'

'That too,' the Praelector agreed. 'Though in my case I come to try to clarify my thoughts about the state of the College. It is not good.'

'In what respect?' enquired the Dean cautiously.

'I do not know precisely. Though in the Bursar's absence I have had occasion to examine the accounts and our expenses and I have to say they are as bad as the poor man has always maintained. Even to my untrained eye the situation looks desperate. I fear we are facing bankruptcy.'

'Bankruptcy? But the College can't go bankrupt: Such things don't happen. We are not some sort of business company or any individual. Porterhouse is an institution, one of the oldest in Cambridge. They won't allow us to go bankrupt.'

'They, Dean, they? May I enquire who this, or more precisely, these ubiquitous "They" might be?' The Praelector paused to allow the Dean to pass through a kissing gate first.

The Dean went through and stopped. He had never before had to face such a direct question about the nature of society. To his mind, a mind as drilled in deference as Skullion's, 'They' were anonymous and all-powerful and at the very heart of Britain, an unperceived amalgam of, to use one of his clichés, the Great and the Good who ran the City and Whitehall and gathered together at the Athenaeum and the Carlton and the better clubs and in the House of Lords and were united in allegiance to the Crown. To be asked who "They' were was to put in question the very existence of authority itself and render nebulous unspoken certainties. 'I cannot answer that,' he said finally and stared out across the meadows to a pollarded willow on the river bank.

The Praelector made his way through the gate and stepped aside to let a jogging undergraduate go by. 'The powers that be,' he said, 'are no longer on our side. They have been supplanted by purely mercenary men who have no social interest. My lifetime has encompassed our decline. A sad, dispiriting epoch and one that leaves us wholly at the mercy of the market. We've fought two wars and won a hollow victory at the cost of millions dead and all our independence lost. Sparta and Athens went that way and Greece's greatness perished. Like them we have nothing to sell but ourselves.'

'I do not follow you,' said the Dean. 'How can we sell ourselves? I have nothing to offer a buyer. I am an old man and everything I hold dear is in the College.'

'I was speaking in more general terms. Personally I daresay we are all provided for by pensions and small private means. I have in mind the College. It is ourselves collectively.'

'But that is out of the question,' said the Dean. 'The College cannot be put up for sale. We are not some marketable commodity.'

The Praelector poked a molehill with his walking stick. 'I shouldn't be too sure of that. In the present climate of opinion it would be a brave man who would predict what was a commodity that might be up for sale. Who would have thought a few years ago that water would be sold to private companies, some of them foreign at that, and that each English family would have to pay for a necessity of life and put a profit in the hands of individual shareholders? And water is a monopoly as well. We cannot pick and choose which tap to use. And if water, why not air?'

'But that's absurd,' said the Dean. Air is for everyone to breathe. It's everywhere. It needs no pipes or reservoirs, no pumping stations or filtration plants as water does.'

'Can you be sure? I can't,' said the Praelector. 'There's talk of air pollution all the time. The fumes from car exhausts and factory chimneys and even the boilers for domestic central heating. A perfectly valid case could be made out for processing the air and making it fit for human consumption. The men who think only of money could make out that case. "Clean air," they'd say. And what needs cleaning costs money and must be paid for. And where there's money to be paid there must accordingly be profit to be made. One has to have material incentive if market forces are to work. That is the principle our masters in the "powers that be" apply. They recognize no other.'

'It is an obnoxious one,' said the Dean heatedly. 'I fail to see how it can be applied so generally. Some things cannot be quantified in terms of money.'

'Name me one,' said the Praelector.

The Dean stood still and tried to think of something beyond price. 'A man's life,' he said. 'I defy you to calculate a human life in monetary terms. It can't be done.'

'It can and is,' replied the Praelector and pointed his stick at a distant concrete tower. Addenbrooke's Hospital, the new one over there. Go there and ask the doctors in the geriatric wards or in intensive care what determines when they turn a life-support machine off or why some patients are deemed not to warrant certain complicated operations? Or better still, ask them why foreign patients who can pay vast sums for liver transplants are given preferential treatment over English ones who've paid their taxes all their lives into the National Health Service. They'll tell you why, those doctors will. Because the Treasury uses all those NHS payments for other things like roads and civil servants' salaries. It goes into the general fund and only a portion goes to nursing British patients. So now the surgeons charge rich foreigners to raise the funds they need to operate on us.'

They walked in silence for a while and the Dean's thoughts grew darker still. The old man's arguments had served to reinforce his own conviction that something had to be done about Skullion. If the Praelector could face the grim realities of life without recourse to comforting pretence, the Dean felt he ought to take up the challenge himself and say what was preying on his mind. And if the College finances were in such a terrible way, and for the first time he did not doubt it, the question of the Master became more urgent still. 'I wonder if you would come down to the river with me,' he said when they reached the last gate. 'It is more private there and what I have to say must be said in absolute confidence.'

They turned off the path and made their way down to the river bank. There, standing by the water and the waving weeds swept by the river's flow, the Dean told the story of Skullion's confession and his threat to make it public. The Praelector stared at the water weeds for some time before he spoke.

'It fits,' he said at last, 'it fits the facts. I can't say I'm entirely surprised. There is a streak of violence in us all and Godber Evans had sacked Skullion who had more violence in him than most of us. Still has it, by the sound of things. You say he threatened you?'

The Dean nodded. 'Skullion was drunk. He said he had us by the short and curlies and by the balls, the bloody balls he said, and when I asked him why or what he meant he said he knew that Lady Mary had sent this Dr Osbert to find out who had murdered her husband. God knows how he finds out these things.'

'Because he's clung to his authority,' the Praelector said. 'In his own mind he is still Head Porter. All the servants know that too. They tell him everything they hear. The Chef, the waiters, the gyps and bedders doing our rooms. They don't miss much, and what they don't tell Skullion he deduces for himself. What words exactly did he use about Dr Osbert? Can you remember them?'

The Dean searched back to that bad night. 'He asked a question,' he said. 'I remember that. Something to this effect, "Who put up six million pounds to send the new Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow here?" That's what he said and when I said I did not know he said, "That bloody Lady Mary did because she wanted to know who'd murdered her husband and this Fellow is here to nose about." Yes, that was what he said. In just those words. "To nose about."'

'And then?'

Then he said he could tell him,' the Dean went on. '"Because I did. And if you try to sweep me under the carpet to the Park, I'll tell him. Because I murdered the bastard." He told me to put that in my pipe and smoke it.'

The Praelector sighed a long sigh. 'He said to sweep him under the carpet, did he? He's got a long memory, has Skullion. I made a joke once along those lines.'

'And he remembered it,' said the Dean. 'He said you'd called it under the Parket.'

'And that's the truth,' the Praelector said and whacked a tuft of grass with his stick. 'That was when Vertel had to go away before the police arrived.' He paused for a moment. 'So Master Skullion has us by the short and curlies, has he? I think not.'

He turned and led the way up to the tarmac path and the Dean followed. He was relieved to have confided in the Praelector. There was a strength in the older man he knew he'd somehow lost himself, a strength of purpose and a terrible clarity of thought. And this time the Praelector led the way through all the gates.

They neither of them spoke for a long while and it was only when they had crossed Laundress Green and reached the Mill that the Praelector turned aside. 'You have told no one else, not even the Senior Tutor?' he asked.

'No one, Praelector, not a soul.'

'Good. And now we'll go separate ways into the College. We don't want to be seen together going in. I'll speak to you later. Things cannot rest like this.' And with what appeared to the Dean to be surprising energy, the Praelector strode off down the lane towards Silver Street.

For a moment the Dean lingered by the Mill looking at the water churning over the weir and under the bridge beneath him, remembering nostalgically the time a South African undergraduate had swum the Mill Pond in midwinter for a five-pound bet. That had been in 1950, and the young man's name had been Pendray. A Cat's man, the Dean seemed to recall, and wondered what had become of him. He looked up in time to see the Praelector disappear down the public lavatory on the far side, which explained his sudden hurry. With a fresh sense of disillusionment the Dean turned away and went the other way down Little St Mary's Passage. He would have a cup of tea in the Copper Kettle before going back to Porterhouse. There, sitting unhappily, he understood now why in earlier times the Praelector had been known as the 'Father of the College'. The term 'Grantchester Grind' had taken on a new meaning for him too.

At Kloone University Purefoy Osbert finished his day of Continuous Assessment, the monthly process of reading his students' essays, appending a short commentary to each of them and giving them grades. He had driven up from Cambridge with the satisfying feeling that he had something to tell Mrs Ndhlovo that would surely convince her he was a proper man. It had taken him some days to get over his cold and the fear he had experienced in the maze but during that time his view of himself had changed. He had come to Porterhouse to find out who had murdered Sir Godber Evans and in the space of a few weeks he had succeeded where lawyers and trained private detectives, who had spent months and even years, had failed. He had recorded the time and place, the Dean's presence and the circumstances surrounding the event most carefully and had even gone to the expense of hiring a safety deposit box in Benet Street in which to keep these documents. On the other hand he had rejected his first impulse to go down to London to tell Goodenough and his cousin Vera, on the grounds that they would either consider his findings inconclusive or take immediate and, in his opinion, precipitate action. He needed time to think things over, and besides his own theories about the causes of crime and the role of the police and law as being responsible for criminal behaviour had been thrown in doubt. Worse still, for the first time in his life Purefoy had, if not met a murderer face to face, seen his shape and heard the violence in his voice. There'd been no reasoned argument, no plausible excuse or even explanation for his action, only the threat to tell Purefoy that he had murdered Sir Godber if the Dean and Fellows tried to send him to Porterhouse Park. Purefoy Osbert had never heard of Porterhouse Park before. Now he knew it was where old Fellows went when they became a nuisance or got in trouble with the police. That much he had learnt. But basically the mystery of Skullion's motive remained unsolved. There was a lot of groundwork still to do before he could submit convincing findings to Lady Mary and to Goodenough and Lapline.

The more he thought about the problem the more he found fresh snags. He had disclosed his reasons for being the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow to the Dean and to the other Fellows in the Combination Room and they would be on their guard. Purefoy cursed himself for his drunken indiscretion. It meant that every question that he asked would meet with silence or a deliberately misleading answer. In short, he had learnt what he had come to learn, but could do nothing with it. There was another reason for not knowing what to do, and one that weighed upon him all the time. Skullion was old and crippled, a tragic figure in his wheelchair and his ancient bowler hat, and to expose him now would do no good to anyone. Only Lady Mary's sense of vengeance would be satisfied and Purefoy had come to feel no sympathy for her. The murderer would never kill again and, even if the case against him could be proved, what good would prison do? Not that, in Purefoy's informed opinion, prisons did any good to anyone. They were the symptoms of society's failure and infected what they were supposed to cure. Skullion was already punished and imprisoned by his immobility. With so many conflicting thoughts colliding in his mind Purefoy Osbert sought escape by concentrating on his love for Mrs Ndhlovo. He would explain it all to her and, being a woman who had seen so much of life, she would be bound to know exactly what to do.

Having finished his marking and made arrangements to meet all fourteen students the following day for lunch in the University Canteen to discuss any problems they might be having with their reading list, he went off rather more cheerfully to visit Mrs Ndhlovo. On his way he bought some red roses. Mrs Ndhlovo's flat was on the first floor of a large Edwardian house. Purefoy climbed the stairs and was about to knock on the door when it was opened and he found himself looking at a woman who resembled Mrs Ndhlovo, but wasn't, and who didn't seem surprised to see him. She was dark-haired, wore glasses and was dressed rather formally in a skirt and a high-necked sweater. 'Oh my God, it's you,' she said. 'I might have guessed it. You don't give up do you?'

With a feeling that something was very wrong, though for the life of him he couldn't think what except that he had somehow come to the wrong house and that the woman must suppose he was a rent collector, or someone who looked like him and who had been making a nuisance of himself or even sexually harassing her, Purefoy stammered his apologies. 'I'm terribly sorry,' he said. 'I was looking for a Mrs Ndhlovo.'

'Mrs Ndhlovo doesn't live here any more,' said the woman.

'I see,' said Purefoy. 'Do you happen to know her new address?'

'You want to know Mrs Ndhlovo's new address? Is that what you're asking?' said the woman with what Purefoy could only consider rather gratuitous repetition and an almost sinister emphasis. He had a feeling too that her voice had changed.

'Yes, that is what I'm asking for,' he said staring at her blue eyes behind the thick lenses of her glasses. 'I'm an old friend of hers from the University.'

'So,' said the woman, and looked him up and down rather rudely. 'How old?'

'How old?' said Purefoy, feeling even more peculiar. The woman's accent had changed with that 'so'. It sounded middle-European. 'Oh, you mean how long have I known her? Well, actually I've known her-'

'Not vot I meant,' said the woman. 'I vant your age.'

Purefoy stared at her. Something was terribly wrong now. Her accent changed from relatively normal if upper-class English to something he had only heard before in movies featuring KGB interrogators. He glanced past her into the room. Mrs Ndhlovo's clothes were scattered on the sofa and an empty suitcase was lying open on the floor. 'Now look here-' he began, but the woman interrupted him.

'Mrs Ndhlovo has disappeared,' she said. 'Do you know where she has gone?'

'Of course I don't,' said Purefoy. 'I wouldn't be here if I did, would I?' Again the feeling hit him that whatever was going on made no sense. The woman's accent had changed once more. It was distinctly English.

'But you could identify her body?'

'Body?' said Purefoy, horribly alarmed. Within a very few minutes he had been assailed by the conviction that he had come to the wrong address, had met a total stranger who seemed to have been expecting him and who had then changed from talking normal English to something guttural and who had now switched back to English with a question that implied Mrs Ndhlovo was dead and if she hadn't entirely disappeared was in such a mutilated state that it required an old acquaintance to identify her. 'Body? You don't mean…'

'How often vere you intimate viz ze voman? You vere her loffer, ja?'

'Jesus,' said Purefoy, and clutched the side of the doorway for support. The beastly woman's changing accents, not to mention the appalling implications of her questions, had him reeling. And now she had taken him by the arm and was dragging him into the room. Purefoy Osbert clung to the doorway. 'Look,' he squawked. 'I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't a clue-'

'Ah, that was what I was waiting for. Clue,' said the woman. 'We rely on these little mistakes in cases of this sort, Dr Osbert. You said "Clue. "'

Purefoy Osbert's hand left the doorway partly as a result of the woman dragging him but far more because she had just called him Dr Osbert, and had added to his sense of utter horror by speaking about cases of this kind and clues. He staggered into the room and leaned against the wall. The woman locked the door and pocketed the key, then, with a distinctly sinister movement which involved keeping her eyes on him, sidled across the room to the bedroom door and shut that too.

'Sit down,' she said. Purefoy remained standing and tried to marshal some reasonable thoughts. They didn't come easily. In fact they didn't come at all. 'I don't,' he tried to say, only to find that his voice wasn't responding properly, It sounded extraordinarily high-pitched and tiny. He tried again. 'How do you know my name? And what's going on? And why are Mrs Ndhlovo's clothes all over the place?'

'I said sit down,' said the woman. She pulled a chair from Mrs Ndhlovo's desk, turned it round so that its back faced Purefoy, then straddled it, showing a good deal of leg in the process. Purefoy Osbert crept away from the wall and sat on the arm of the sofa.

'Right. Now then, Dr Osbert, I want you to start at the beginning and tell me in your own words how you first became acquainted with Mrs Ndhlovo.'

From the arm of the sofa Purefoy eyed her and tried desperately to think. It was almost clear to him that he was either in the presence of some sort of plainclothes police person or, since she was apparently alone and had multiple accents, most of them foreign, a member of a secret intelligence service. Either way she was alarming. 'How do you know my name?' he asked in an attempt to get some bearings.

'You will answer my questions,' she said. 'I am not here to answer yours. If you are not prepared to cooperate with me, I will have to call my assistants.' She glanced significantly at the door into the bedroom.

Purefoy shook his head. The woman was bad enough without any assistance. He looked miserably round the room at all the familiar African ornaments and knick-knacks Mrs Ndhlovo had decorated it with, but they gave him as little comfort as her clothes and the empty suitcase. 'I just met her at the University,' he said. 'In the Common Room or the Canteen. Somewhere like that.'

The woman reached across the desk for a notebook and opened it. 'We have reason to believe that is not the truth,' she said. 'You attended her evening class on Male Infertility and Masturbatory Techniques in Room Five in the Scargill Block. The excuse you gave at a later date was that you mistook it for a lecture on Prison Reform in Sierra Leone.'

Purefoy Osbert swallowed drily. This was infinitely more awful. The woman shut the book and put it back on the desk. 'That is what happened,' he admitted. 'It was a genuine mistake.'

'The following week you returned. Would you please explain why?'

Purefoy looked round the room again and tried to think of a suitable answer. 'I just-' he began and stopped.

'You just what? You just wanted to learn how to masturbate?'

'No, of course not,' said Purefoy angrily. 'This is insufferable.'

'Insufferable? How you mean insufferable?' said the woman, lapsing into middle or eastern European English again. 'Like you don't suffer from von Klubhausen's Syndrome mit der hairy hands?'

'Jesus,' said Purefoy, breaking out into a cold sweat and beginning to think, in so far as he was able to think at all, that he was going mad. The next question convinced him.

'Tell me, Dr Osbert, tell me about your interest in clitoral circumcision. Have you ever had any experience of it personally?'

'What?' Purefoy shouted, and for a moment it looked as though the woman hesitated herself. 'What did you say?'

'You heard me,' she snarled. Answer the question.'

'Personally?' yelled Purefoy. 'How the fuck can I have had any personal experience of female circumcision? I haven't got a bloody clitoris for God's sake.'

'Yes, zere is zat,' the woman admitted switching to Lubianka 1948. 'Afterwards, of course not, but before…'

'Afterwards? Before?' yelled Purefoy. 'Any time I couldn't have a clitoris. I'm not a woman.'

'You think not?' said the woman doubtfully. 'To go to evening classes on Clitoral Stimulation and Female Circumcision and you're not a woman? We can see about that at a different stage of the investigation.'

Purefoy was about to say she could see about it now, but he thought better of it.

'So,' said the woman, 'when did you last see Mrs Ndhlovo alive?'

Purefoy Osbert felt sick. The significance of that 'alive' had not been lost on him. 'You mean she's dead?' he stammered.

The woman stood up. 'You should know, Dr Osbert, in what condition she was when you last saw her. Was she alive, Dr Osbert? Or was she already…All right, I will rephrase the question.' She stopped and said nothing for half a minute. It seemed longer to Purefoy. Like half an hour. 'Well?' she snapped at him suddenly. 'What is your answer to that?'

Purefoy blinked. 'To what?' he asked shakily. 'You said you were going to rephrase the question.'

'Rephrase the question, Dr Osbert? Why should I do that?' Purefoy's fingers tightened on the back of the sofa. It was the nearest he could get to keeping a grip on reality. Whatever he was involved in didn't begin to have anything real about it. To make matters worse, he thought he could hear someone sobbing at the back of the flat. 'I don't know why you said you were going to rephrase the question,' he said. 'How could I know? I didn't even know what question you were talking about.'

'Very clever,' said the woman. 'Your evasive technique is psychologically interesting. You have evidently prepared yourself for just this sort of interrogation. And the flowers are not without significance. You brought them as an indication that you did not know what had happened. Is that it?'

'I didn't. I brought them for Mrs-'

'Not true,' snarled the woman, her pale eyes glinting behind the spectacles. 'Not true. It is time you were brought face to face with the facts.' She got off the chair and moved towards the door into the bedroom, and for a moment Purefoy's hopes rose.

At the door the woman paused and looked back at him. 'It is not nice vot you vill see,' she said thickly. 'Three veeks viz ze central heating turned up high and ze refrigerator door open iz not nice. But then you will know about deliquescence, the liquefaction that takes place when…'

Purefoy had gone ashen and he was sweating profusely. 'For God's sake, get it over with,' he squeaked. The sound of sobbing was clearly audible now. The woman opened the door with a flourish and pushed Purefoy Osbert into the room. Mrs Ndhlovo was lying on the bed with a handkerchief pushed into her mouth, and she was red in the face with tears running down her cheeks and with her knees doubled up in a spasm. For a moment Purefoy gaped at her and a surge of relief swept over him. It was a brief moment. There was absolutely nothing the matter with her. It was simply that she was howling with laughter.

With a final spasm she rolled off the bed and took the handkerchief out of her mouth. 'Oh Purefoy,' she said weakly, 'you were delicious.'

But Purefoy Osbert hardly heard her. The other woman was doubled up with laughter too. In blind fury he pushed past her and out of the flat and was presently striding angrily down the street. He had had Mrs Ndhlovo and Kloone University and the whole damned lot. They could stuff themselves for all he cared. Without even bothering to collect his papers from the University he made for the car park and began the long drive back to Cambridge. And as he drove he composed in his mind a letter that would say exactly how he now felt about Mrs Bloody Ndhlovo.

Behind him in the apartment the woman he had thought of as Mrs Ndhlovo, and who had insisted on being called by that name, looked up from the red roses still lying on the floor and said sadly to her sister, 'We seem to have gone too far this time. Poor Purefoy. I suppose he's never going to forgive me. And you have to admit that he did face the facts terribly well.'

'If he's really in love with you, he'll get over it,' said her sister. And he has to have, a sense of humour somewhere or he wouldn't be worth marrying anyway.'

'It's not going to be easy to explain,' Ingrid said. 'Oh dear. How the past comes back to haunt us.'