Porterhouse Blue

Chapter 4

Zipser overslept. His exertions, both mental and physical, had left him exhausted. By the time he woke, Mrs Biggs was already busy in his outer room, moving furniture and dusting. Zipser lay in bed listening to her. Like something out of Happy Families, he thought. Mrs Biggs the Bedder. Skullion the Head Porter. The Dean. The Senior Tutor. Relics of some ancient childish game. Everything about Porterhouse was like that. Masters and Servants.

Lying there listening to the ponderous animality of Mrs Biggs’ movements, Zipser considered the curious turn of events that had forced him into the role of a master while Mrs Biggs maintained an aggressive servility quite out of keeping with her personality and formidable physique. He found the relationship peculiar, and further complicated by the sinister attractions she held for him. It must be that in her fullness Mrs Biggs retained a natural warmth which in its contrast to the artificiality of all else in Cambridge made its appeal. Certainly nothing else could explain it. Taken in her particulars, and Zipser couldn’t think of any other way of taking her, the bedder was quite remarkably without attractions. It wasn’t simply the size of her appendages that was astonishing but the sheer power. Mrs Biggs’ walk was a thing of menacing maternity, while her face retained a youthfulness quite out of keeping with her volume. Only her voice declared her wholly ordinary. That and her conversation, which hovered tenuously close to the obscene and managed to combine servility with familiarity in a manner he found unanswerable. He got out of bed and began to dress. It was one of the ironies of life, he thought, that in a college that prided itself on its adherence to the values of the past, Mrs Biggs’ manifest attractions should go unrecognized. In paleolithic times she would have been a princess and he was just wondering at what particular moment of history the Mrs Biggses had ceased to represent all that was finest and fairest in womanhood when she knocked on the door.

“Mr Zipser, are you decent?” she called.

“Hang on. I’m coming,” Zipser called back.

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised,” Mrs Biggs muttered audibly.

Zipser opened the door.

“I haven’t got all day,” Mrs Biggs said brushing past him provocatively.

“I’m sorry to have kept you,” said Zipser sarcastically.

“Kept me indeed. Listen to who’s talking. And what makes you think I’d mind being kept?”

Zipser blushed. “That’s hardly what I meant,” he said hotly.

“Very complimentary I’m sure,” said Mrs Biggs, regarding him with arch disapproval. “Got out of bed the wrong side this morning, did we?”

Zipser noted the plural with a delicious shudder and lowered his eyes. Mrs Biggs’ boots, porcinely tight, entranced him.

“Mr Skullion’s got a black eye this morning,” the bedder continued. “A right purler. Not before time either. I says to him, ‘Somebody’s been taking a poke at you.’ You know what he says?” Zipser shook his head. “He says, ‘I’ll thank you to keep your comments to yourself, Mrs Biggs.’ That’s what he says. Silly old fool. Don’t know which century he’s living in.” She went into the other room and Zipser followed her. He put a kettle on to make coffee while Mrs Biggs bustled about picking things up and putting them down again in a manner which suggested that a great deal of work was being done but which merely helped to emphasize her feelings. All the time she rattled on with her daily dose of inconsequential information while Zipser dodged about the room like a toreador trying to avoid a talkative bull. Each time she brushed past him he was aware of an animal magnetism that overrode considerations of taste and that aesthetic sensibility his education was supposed to have given him. Finally he stood in the corner, hardly able to contain himself, and watched her figure as it walloped about the room. Her words lost all meaning, became mere soothing sounds, waves of accompaniment to the surge of her thighs and the great rollers of her buttocks dimpled and shimmering beneath her skirt. “Well I says, ‘You know what you can do…’” Mrs Biggs’ voice echoed Zipser’s terrible thought. She bent over to plug in the vacuum-cleaner and her breasts plunged in her blouse and undulated with a force of attraction Zipser found almost irresistible. He felt himself moved out of his corner like a boxer urged forward by unnatural passion for an enormous opponent. Words crowded into his mouth. Unwanted words. Unspeakable words.

“I want you,” he said and was saved the final embarrassment by the vacuum-cleaner which roared into life.

“What’s that you said?” Mrs Biggs shouted above the din. She was holding the suction pipe against a cushion on the armchair. Zipser turned purple.

“Nothing,” he bawled, and fell back into his corner.

“Bag’s full,” said Mrs Biggs, and switched the machine off.

In the silence that followed Zipser leant against the wall, appalled at his terrible avowal. He was about to make a dash for the door when Mrs Biggs bent over and undid the clips on the back of the vacuum-cleaner. Zipser stared at the backs of her knees. The boots, the creases, the swell of her thighs, the edge of her stockings, the crescent…

“Bag’s full,” Mrs Biggs said again. “You can’t get any suction when the bag’s full.”

She straightened up holding the bag grey and swollen… Zipser shut his eyes. Mrs Biggs emptied the bag into the waste-paper basket. A cloud of grey dust billowed up into the room.

“Are you feeling all right, dearie?” she asked, peering at him with motherly concern. Zipser opened his eyes and stared into her face.

“I’m all right,” he managed to mutter trying to take his eyes off her lips. Mrs Biggs’ lipstick gleamed thickly. “I didn’t sleep well. That’s all.”

“Too much work and not enough play makes Jack a dull boy,” said Mrs Biggs holding the bag limply. To Zipser the thing had an erotic appeal he dared not analyse. “Now you just sit down and I’ll make you some coffee and you’ll feel better.” Mrs Biggs’ hand grasped his arm and guided him to a chair. Zipser slumped into it and stared at the vacuum-cleaner while Mrs Biggs, bending once again and even more revealingly now that Zipser was sitting down and closer to her, inserted the bag into the back of the machine and switched it on. A terrible roar, and the bag was sucked into the interior with a force which corresponded entirely to Zipser’s feelings. Mrs Biggs straightened up and went through to the gyp room to make coffee while Zipser shifted feebly in the chair. He couldn’t imagine what was happening to him. It was all too awful. He had to get away. He couldn’t go on sitting there while she was in the room. He’d do something terrible. He couldn’t control himself. He’d say something. He was about to get up and sneak out when Mrs Biggs came back with two cups of coffee.

“You do look funny,” she said, putting a cup into his hand. “You ought to go and see a doctor. You might be going down with something.”

“Yes,” said Zipser obediently. Mrs Biggs sat down opposite him and sipped her coffee. Zipser tried to keep his eyes off her legs and found himself gazing at her breasts.

“Do you often get taken queer?” Mrs Biggs enquired.

“Queer?” said Zipser, shaken from his reverie by the accusation. “Certainly not.”

“I was only asking,” said Mrs Biggs. She took a mouthful of coffee with a schlurp that was distinctly suggestive. “I had a young man once,” she continued, “just like you. Got took queer every now and then. Used to throw himself about and wriggle something frightful. Took me all my time to hold him down, it did.”

Zipser stared at her frenziedly. The notion of being held down while wriggling by Mrs Biggs was more than he could bear. With a sudden lurch that spilt his coffee Zipser hurled himself out of the chair and dashed from the room. He rushed downstairs and out into the safety of the open air. “I’ve got to do something. I can’t control myself. First Skullion and now Mrs Biggs.” He walked hurriedly out of Porterhouse and through Clare towards the University Library.

Alone in Zipser’s room, Mrs Biggs switched on the vacuum-cleaner and poked the handle round the room. As she worked she sang to herself loudly, “Love me tender, love me true.” Her voice, raucously off key, was drowned by the roar of the Electrolux.

The Dean spent the morning writing letters to members of the Porterhouse Society. As the Society’s secretary he attended the annual dinners in London and Edinburgh and corresponded regularly with members, a great many of whom lived in Australia or New Zealand, and for whom the Dean’s letters formed a link with their days at Porterhouse on which they had traded socially ever since. For the Dean himself the very remoteness of most of his correspondents, and particularly their tendency to assume that nothing had changed since their undergraduate days, was a constant reassurance. It allowed him to pretend to an omnipotent conservatism that had little connection with reality. After the new Master’s speech it was not easy to maintain that pretence, and the Dean’s pen held in his mottled hand crawled slowly across the paper like some literate but decrepit tortoise. Every now and then he would lift his head and look for inspiration into the clear-cut features of the young men whose photographs cluttered his desk and stared with sepia arrogance from the walls of his room. The Dean recalled their athleticism and youthful indiscretions, the shopgirls they had compromised, the tailors they had bilked, the exams they had failed, and from his window he could look down on to the fountain where they had ducked so many homosexuals. It had all been so healthy and naturally violent, so different from the effete aestheticism of today. They hadn’t fasted for the good of the coolies in India or protested because an anarchist was imprisoned in Brazil or stormed the Garden House Hotel because they disapproved of the government in Greece. They’d acted in high spirits. Wholesomely. The Dean sat back in his chair remembering the splendid riot on Guy Fawkes Night in 1948. The bomb that blew the Senate House windows out. The smoke bomb down the lavatory in Market Square that nearly killed an old man with high blood pressure. The lamp glass littering the streets. The bus being pushed backwards. The coppers’ helmets flying. The car they’d overturned in King’s Parade. There’d been a pregnant woman in it, the Dean recalled, and afterwards they’d all chipped in to pay her for the damage. Good-hearted lads. They didn’t make them like that any more. Quickened by the recollection, his pen scrawled swiftly across the page. It would take more than Sir Godber Evans to change the character of Porterhouse. He’d see to that. He had just finished a letter and was addressing the envelope when there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” the Dean called. The door opened and Skullion came in, holding his bowler hat in one hand.

“Morning, sir,” Skullion said.

“Good morning, Skullion,” the Dean said. The ritual of twenty years, the porter’s daily report, always began with pleasantries. “Heavy fall of snow during the night.”

“Very heavy, sir. Three inches at least.”

The Dean licked the envelope and fastened it down.

“Nasty eye you’ve got there, Skullion.”

“Slipped on the path, sir. Icy,” Skullion said. “Very slippery.”

“Slippery? Got away, did he?” the Dean asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good for him,” said the Dean. “Nice to know there are still some undergraduates with spirit about. Nothing else to report?”

“No, sir. Nothing to report. Nothing except Cheffy, sir.”

“Cheffy? What’s the matter with him?”

“Well, it’s not just him, sir. It’s all of us. Very upset about the Master’s speech,” Skullion said carefully, treading the tightrope between speaking out of turn and rightful protest. There were things you could say to the Dean and there were things you couldn’t. Reporting the Chef’s sense of outrage seemed a safe way of expressing his own feelings.

The Dean swung his chair round and looked out of the window to evade the difficulty. He relied on Skullion’s information but there was always the danger of condoning insubordination or at least encouraging a familiarity detrimental to good discipline. But Skullion wasn’t the man to take advantage of the situation. The Dean trusted him.

“You can tell the Chef there’ll be no changes,” he said finally. “The Master was just feeling his way. He’ll learn.”

“Yes sir,” said Skullion doubtfully. “Very upsetting that speech, sir.”

“Thank you, Skullion,” said the Dean dismissively.

“Thank you, sir,” Skullion said and left the room.

The Dean swung his chair round to his desk and took up his pen again. Skullion’s resentment had inspired him with a new determination to block Sir Godber’s schemes. There were all the OPs, for instance. Their opinion and influence could be decisive properly organized. It might be as well to inform that opinion now.

Skullion went back to the Lodge and sorted out the second mail. His conversation with the Dean had only partially restored his confidence. The Dean was getting old. His voice didn’t carry the same weight any more in the College Council. It was the Bursar who was listened to, and Skullion had his doubts about him. He took the New Statesman and the Spectator and read The Times, not the Telegraph like the other dons. “Neither fish, flesh, fowl nor good red herring,” Skullion summed him up with his usual political acumen. If the Master got at him there was no saying which way he’d jump. Skullion began to think it might be time for him to pay a visit to General Sir Cathcart D’Eath at Coft. He usually went there on the first Tuesday of every month, a ritual visit with news of the College and also to have a word with a reliable stable boy in Sir Cathcart’s racing stables whose information had in the past done much to supplement Skullion’s meagre income. Sir Cathcart had been one of Skullion’s Scholars and the debt had never been wholly repaid. “Taking the afternoon off,” he told Walter the under-porter when he finished sorting the mail and Walter had put Dr Baxter’s weekly issue of The Boy back into its plain envelope.

“What? Going fishing?” Walter asked.

“Never you mind where I’m going,” Skullion told him. He lit his pipe and went into the back room to fetch his coat and presently was cycling with due care and attention over Magdalene Bridge towards Coft.

Zipser sat on the third floor of the north wing of the University Library trying to bring his mind to bear on The Influence of Pumpernickel on the Politics of 16th-Century Osnabruck but without success. He no longer cared that it had been known as bonum paniculum and his interest in Westphalian local politics had waned. The problem of his feelings for Mrs Biggs was more immediate.

He had spent an hour in the stacks browsing feverishly through textbooks of clinical psychology in search of a medical explanation of the symptoms of irrational violence and irrepressible sexuality which had manifested themselves in his recent behaviour. From what he had read it had begun to look as if he were suffering from a multitude of different diseases. On the one hand his reaction to Skullion suggested paranoia, “violent behaviour as a result of delusions of persecution”, while the erotic compulsion of his feelings for Mrs Biggs was even more alarming and seemed to indicate schizophrenia with sadomasochistic tendencies. The combination of the two diseases, paranoid schizophrenia, was apparently the worst possible form of insanity and quite incurable. Zipser sat staring out of the windows at the trees in the garden beyond the footpath and contemplated a lifetime of madness. He couldn’t imagine what had suddenly occasioned the outbreak. The textbooks implied that heredity had a lot to do with it, but apart from an uncle who had a passion for concrete dwarves in his front garden and who his mother had said was a bit touched in the head, he couldn’t think of anyone in the family who was actually and certifiably insane.

The explanation had to lie elsewhere. His feelings for the bedder deviated from every known norm. So for that matter did Mrs Biggs. She bulged where she should have dimpled and bounced when she should have been still. She was gross, vulgar, garrulous and, Zipser had no doubt in his mind, thoroughly insanitary. To find himself irresistibly attracted to her was the worst thing he could think of. It was perfectly all right to be queer. It was positively fashionable. To have constant and insistent sexual desires for French au pair girls, Swedish language students, girls in Boots, even undergraduates at Girton, was normality itself, but Mrs Biggs came into the category of the unmentionable. And the knowledge that but for the fortuitous intervention of the vacuum-cleaner he would have revealed his true feelings for her threw him into a panic. He left his table and went downstairs and walked back into town.

As he reached Great St Mary’s the clock was striking twelve. Zipser stopped and studied the posters on the railings outside the church which announced forthcoming sermons.

CHRIST AND THE GAY CHRISTIAN. Rev. F. Leaney.

HAS SALT LOST ITS SAVOUR? Anglican attitudes to disarmament. Rev. B. Tomkins.

JOB, A MESSAGE FOR THE THIRD WORLD. Right Reverend Sutty, Bishop of Bombay.

JESUS JOKES. Fred Henry by permission of ITA & the management of the Palace Theatre, Scunthorpe.

BOMBS AWAY. A Christian’s attitude to Skyjacking by Flight Lieutenant Jack Piggett, BOAC.

Zipser stared at the University Sermons with a sudden sense of loss. What had happened to the old Church, the Church of his childhood, the friendly Vicar and the helping hand? Not that Zipser had ever been to church, but he had seen them on television and had been comforted by the knowledge that they were still there in Songs of Praise and Saints Alive and All Gas and Gaiters. But now when he needed help there was only this pale parody of the daily paper with its mishmash of politics and sensationalism. Not a word about evil and how to cope with it. Zipser felt betrayed. He went back into Porterhouse in search of help. He’d go and see the Senior Tutor. There was just time before lunch. Zipser climbed the stairs to the Tutor’s rooms and knocked on the door.

“The trouble with the Feast,” said the Dean, munching a mouthful of cold beef, “is that it does tend to run on. Cold beef today. Cold beef tomorrow. Cold beef on Thursday. After that I suppose we’ll have stewed beef on Friday and Saturday and cottage pie on Sunday. By next week we should be getting back to normal.”

“Difficult to eat an entire ox at one sitting,” said the Bursar. “One suspects our predecessors had, shall we say, grosser appetites.”

“I always said it was a mistake to make him Prime Minister,” said the Chaplain.

The Senior Tutor took his place, at table. He was looking more than usually austere.

“Talking of gross appetites,” he said grimly, “I have the gravest doubts about some of our younger members. I have just had a visit from a young man who claims to be under some compulsion to sleep with his bedder.” He helped himself to horseradish.

The Bursar sniggered. “Which one?” he asked.

“Zipser,” said the Senior Tutor.

“Which bedder?”

“I didn’t enquire,” said the Senior Tutor. “It didn’t seem a particularly relevant question.”

The Bursar considered the problem.

“Isn’t he in the Tower?” he asked the Dean.

“Who?”

“Zipser.”

“Yes. I think he is,” said the Dean.

“Then it must be Mrs Biggs.”

The Senior Tutor, who had been debating what to do with a long piece of gristle, swallowed it.

“Dear me. Mrs Biggs. I must say I did young Zipser an injustice.” he said with alarm.

“Impossible to do an injustice to anyone with such depraved tastes,” said the Dean firmly.

“Mrs Biggs hardly comes within the category of forbidden fruit,” tittered the Bursar.

“Thank you,” answered the Chaplain, “I think I will have an apple.”

“Mrs Biggs,” muttered the Tutor. “No wonder the poor fellow imagined he was going mad.”

“Not really,” said the Chaplain. “This one is all right at any rate.”

“What advice did you give him?” the Bursar asked.

The Senior Tutor looked at him disbelievingly. “Advice?” he asked. “It is hardly my position to offer advice on such questions. I am the Senior Tutor, not a Marriage Guidance Counsellor. As a matter of fact I advised him to see the Chaplain.”

“It’s a noble calling,” said the Chaplain, helping himself to a pear. The Senior Tutor sighed and finished his cold beef.

“It only goes to show what happens when you open the doors of the College to research graduates. In the old days such a thing would have been unheard of,” said the Dean.

“Unheard of perhaps but not I think unknown,” said the Bursar.

“With bedders?” the Dean asked angrily. “With bedders? Maintain some sense of proportion, I beg you.”

“No thank you, Dean. I’ve had quite enough already,” the Chaplain replied.

The Dean was about to say something about old fools when the Senior Tutor intervened. “In the case of Mrs Biggs,” he said, “it is precisely the question of proportion that is at stake.”

“We had that last night,” said the Chaplain.

“Oh for God’s sake,” the Senior Tutor snarled. “How the hell can one conduct a serious discussion with him around.”

“My dear fellow,” the Praelector sighed, “that is a question that has been bothering me for years.”

They finished the meal in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts. It was only when they were assembled in the Combination Room for coffee and the Chaplain had been persuaded to go to his room to write a note inviting Zipser to tea that the discussion began again.

“I think that we should view this matter in the wider context,” the Dean said. “The Master’s speech last night indicated only too clearly that he has in mind an extension of precisely that permissiveness of which this latest incident is indicative. I understand. Bursar, that you had a tête-à-tête with Sir Godber this morning.”

The Bursar looked at him unpleasantly. “The Master phoned to ask me to discuss the College finances with him,” he said. “I think you might give me credit for having done my best to disabuse him of the changes his speech suggested.”

“You explained that our resources do not allow us to indulge in the liberal extravagances of King’s or Trinity?” the Senior Tutor asked. The Bursar nodded.

“And was the Master satisfied?” the Dean asked.

“Stunned, I think, would be the more accurate description of his reaction,” said the Bursar.

“Then we are all agreed that whatever he suggests at the meeting of the College Council tomorrow we shall oppose on principle,” said the Dean.

“I think it would be best to wait to hear what he proposes before deciding on a definite policy,” the Praelector said.

The Senior Tutor nodded. “We must not appear too inflexible. An appearance of open-mindedness has in my experience a tendency to disarm the radical left. They seem to feel the need to reciprocate. I’ve often wondered why but it has worked to keep the country on the right lines for years.”

“Unfortunately this time we are dealing with a politician,” the Dean objected. “I have a shrewd idea the Master is rather more experienced in these affairs than we give him credit for. I still think an undivided front is the best policy.”

They finished their coffee and went about their business. The Senior Tutor went down to the Boathouse to coach the first boat, the Dean slept until teatime, and the Bursar spent the afternoon doodling in his office wondering if he had been wise to tell Sir Godber about the endowment subscriptions. There had been a strength of feeling in the Master’s reaction that had surprised the Bursar and had made him wonder if he had gone too far. Perhaps he had misjudged Sir Godber and the vehemence of his ideals.