Porterhouse Blue

Chapter 5

Skullion cycled out along the Barton Road towards Coft. His bowler hat set squarely on his head, his cycle clips and his black overcoat buttoned against the cold gave him an intransigently episcopalian air in the snow-covered landscape. He cycled slowly but relentlessly, his thoughts as dark as his habit and as bitter as the wind blowing unchecked from the Urals. The few bungalows he passed looked insubstantial beside him, transient and rootless in contrast to the black figure on the bicycle in whose head centuries of endured servitude had bred a fierce bigotry nothing would easily remove. Independence he called it, this hatred for change whether for better or worse. In Skullion’s view there was no such thing as change for the better. That came under the heading of improvement. He was prepared to give his qualified approval to improvements provided there was no suggestion that it was the past that had been improved upon. That was clearly out of the question and if at the back of his mind he recognized the illogicality of his own argument, he refused to admit it even to himself. It was one of the mysteries of life which he accepted as unquestioningly as he did the great metal spiders’ webs strung out across the fields beside the road to catch the radio evidence of stars that had long since ceased to exist. The world of Skullion’s imagination was as remote as those stars but it was enough for him that, like the radio telescopes, he was able to catch echoes of it in men like General the Honourable Sir Cathcart D’Eath, KCMG, DSO.

The General had influence in high places and Royalty came to stay at Coft Castle. Skullion had once seen a queen mother dawdling majestically in the garden and had heard royal laughter from the stables. The General could put in a good word for him and more importantly a bad one for the new Master and, as an undergraduate, the then just Hon Cathcart D’Eath had been one of Skullion’s Scholars.

Skullion never forgot his Scholars and there was little doubt that though they might have liked to, none of them forgot him. They owed him too much. It had been Skullion who had arranged the transactions and had acted as intermediary. On the one hand idle but influential undergraduates like the Hon Cathcart and on the other impecunious research graduates eking out a living giving supervision and grateful for the baksheesh Skullion brought their way. The weekly essay regularly handed in and startlingly original for undergraduates so apparently ill-informed. Two pounds a week for an essay had served to subsidize some very important research. More than one doctorate owed everything to those two pounds. And finally Tripos by proxy, with Skullion’s Scholars lounging in a King Street pub while in the Examination School their substitutes wrote answers to the questions with a mediocrity that was unexceptional. Skullion had been careful, very careful. Only one or two a year and in subjects so popular that there would be no noticing an unfamiliar face in the hundreds writing the exams. And it had worked. “No one will be any the wiser,” he had assured the graduate substitutes to allay their fears before slipping five hundred, once a thousand, pounds into their pockets. And no one had been any the wiser. Certainly the Honourable Cathcart D’Eath had gone down with a two two in History with his ignorance of Disraeli’s influence on the Conservative Party unimpaired in spite of having to all appearances written four pages on the subject. But what he had gained on the roundabout he had also gained on the swings and the study of horseflesh he had undertaken during those three years at Newmarket served him well in the future. His use of cavalry in the Burmese jungle had unnerved the Japanese by its unadulterated lunacy and, combined with his name, had suggested a kamikaze element in the British army they had never suspected. Sir Cathcart had emerged from the campaign with twelve men and a reputation so scathed that he had been promoted to General to prevent the destruction of the entire army and the loss of India. Early retirement and his wartime experience of getting horses to attempt the impossible had encouraged Sir Cathcart to return to his first love and to take up training. His stables at Coft were world-famous. With what appeared to be a magical touch but owed in fact much to Skullion’s gift for substitution. Sir Cathcart could transform a broken-winded nag into a winning two-year-old and had prospered accordingly. Coft Castle, standing in spacious grounds, was surrounded by a high wall to guard against intruding eyes and cameras and by an ornate garden in a remote corner of which was a small canning factory where the by-products of the General’s stables were given discreet anonymity in Cathcart’s Tinned Catfood. Skullion dismounted at the gate and knocked on the lodge door. A Japanese gardener, a prisoner of war, whom Sir Cathcart kept carefully ignorant of world news and who was, thanks to the language barrier, incapable of learning it for himself, opened the gate for him and Skullion cycled on down the drive to the house.

In spite of its name there was nothing remotely ancient about Coft Castle. Staunchly Edwardian, its red brick bespoke a lofty disregard for style and a concern for comfort on a grand scale. The General’s Rolls-Royce, RIP 1, gleamed darkly on the gravel outside the front door. Skullion dismounted and pushed his bicycle round to the servants’ entrance.

“Come to see the General,” he told the cook. Presently he was ushered into the drawing-room where Sir Cathcart was lolling in an armchair before a large coal fire.

“Not your usual afternoon, Skullion,” he said as Skullion came in, bowler hat in hand.

“No, sir. Came special,” said Skullion. The General waved him to a kitchen chair the cook brought in on these occasions and Skullion sat down and put his bowler hat on his knees.

“Carry on smoking,” Sir Cathcart told him. Skullion took out his pipe and filled it with black tobacco from a tin. Sir Cathcart watched him with grim affection.

“That’s filthy stuff you smoke, Skullion,” he said as blue smoke drifted towards the chimney. “Must have a constitution like an elephant to smoke it.”

Skullion puffed at his pipe contentedly. It was at moments like this, moments of informal subservience, that he felt happiest. Sitting smoking his pipe on the hard kitchen chair in Sir Cathcart D’Eath’s drawing-room he felt approved. He basked in the General’s genial disdain.

“That’s a nice black eye you’ve got there,” Sir Cathcart said. “You look as if you’ve been in the wars.”

“Yes, sir,” said Skullion. He was quite pleased with that black eye.

“Well, out with it, man, what have you come about?” Sir Cathcart said.

“It’s the new Master. He made a speech at the Feast last night,” Skullion told him.

“A speech? At the Feast?” Sir Cathcart sat up in his chair.

“Yes, sir. I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

“Disgraceful. What did he say?”

“Says he’s going to change the College.”

Sir Cathcart’s eyes bulged in his head. “Change the College? What the devil does he mean by that? The damned place has been changed beyond all recognition already. Can’t go in the place without seeing some long-haired lout looking more like a girl than a man. Swarming with bloody poofters. Change the College? There’s only one change that’s needed and that’s back to the old ways. The old traditions. Cut their hair off and duck them in the fountain. That’s what’s needed. When I think what Porterhouse used to be and see what it’s become, it makes my blood boil. It’s the same with the whole damned country. Letting niggers in and keeping good white men out. Gone soft, that’s what’s happened. Soft in the head and soft in the body.” Sir Cathcart sank back in his chair limp from his denunciation of the times. Skullion smiled inwardly. It was just such bitterness he had come to hear. Sir Cathcart spoke with an authority Skullion could never have but which charged his own intransigence with a new vigour.

“Says he wants Porterhouse to be an open college,” he said, stoking the embers of the General’s fury.

“Open college?” Sir Cathcart responded to the call. “Open? What the devil does he mean by that? It’s open enough already. Half the scum of the world in as it is.”

“I think he means more scholars,” Skullion said.

Sir Cathcart grew a shade more apoplectic.

“Scholars? That’s half the trouble with the world today, scholarship. Too many damned intellectuals about who think they know how things should be done. Academics, bah! Can’t win a war with thinking. Can’t run a factory on thought. It needs guts and sweat and sheer hard work. If I had my way I’d kick every damned scholar out of the College and put in some athletes to run the place properly. Anyone would think Varsity was some sort of school. In my day we didn’t come up to learn anything, we came up to forget all the damned silly things we’d had pumped into us at school. My God, Skullion, I’ll tell you this, a man can learn more between the thighs of a good woman than he ever needs to know. Scholarship’s a waste of time and public money. What’s more, it’s iniquitous.” Exhausted by his outburst, Sir Cathcart stared belligerently into the fire.

“What’s Fairbrother say?” he asked finally.

“The Dean, sir? He doesn’t like it any more than you do, sir,” Skullion said, “but he’s not as young as he used to be, sir.”

“Don’t suppose he is,” Sir Cathcart agreed.

“That’s why I came to tell you, sir,” Skullion continued. “I thought you’d know what to do.”

Sir Cathcart stiffened. “Do? Don’t see what I can do,” he said presently. “I’ll write to the Master, of course, but I’ve no influence in the College these days.”

“But you have outside, sir,” Skullion assured him.

“Well perhaps,” Sir Cathcart assented. “All right I’ll see what I can do. Keep me informed, Skullion.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Get Cook to give you some tea before you go,” Sir Cathcart told him and Skullion went out with his chair and took it back to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later he cycled off down the drive, spiritually resuscitated. Sir Cathcart would see there were no more changes. He had influence in high places. There was only one thing that puzzled Skullion as he rode home. Something Sir Cathcart had said about learning more between the thighs of a good woman than… but Sir Cathcart had never married. Skullion wondered how an unmarried man got between the thighs of a good woman.

Zipser’s interview with the Senior Tutor had left him with a sense of embarrassment that had unnerved him completely. His attempt to explain the nature of his compulsion had been fraught with difficulties. The Senior Tutor kept poking his little finger in his ear and wriggling it around and examining the end of it when he took it out while Zipser talked, as if he held some waxy deposit responsible for the flow of obscene information that was reaching his brain. When he finally accepted that his ears were not betraying him and that Zipser was in fact confessing to being attracted by his bedder, he had muttered something to the effect that the Chaplain would expect him for tea that afternoon and that, failing that, a good psychiatrist might help. Zipser had left miserably and had spent the early part of the afternoon in his room trying to concentrate on his thesis without success. The image of Mrs Biggs, a cross between a cherubim in menopause and a booted succubus, kept intruding. Zipser turned for escape to a book of photographs of starving children in Nagaland but in spite of this mental flagellation Mrs Biggs prevailed. He tried Hermitsch on Fall Out & the Andaman Islanders and even Sterilization, Vasectomy and Abortion by Allard, but these holy writs all failed against the pervasive fantasy of the bedder. It was as if his social conscience, his concern for the plight of humanity at large, the universal and collective pity he felt for all mankind, had been breached in some unspeakably personal way by the inveterate triviality and egoism of Mrs Biggs. Zipser, whose life had been filled with a truly impersonal charity – he had spent holidays from school working for SOBB, the Save Our Black Brothers campaign – and whose third worldliness was impeccable, found himself suddenly the victim of a sexual idiosyncrasy which made a mockery of his universalism. In desperation he turned to Syphilis, the Scourge of Colonialism, and stared with horror at the pictures. In the past it had worked like a charm to quell incipient sexual desires while satisfying his craving for evidence of natural justice. The notion of the Conquistadores dying of the disease after raping South American Indians no longer had its old appeal now that Zipser himself was in the grip of a compulsive urge to rape Mrs Biggs. By the time it came for him to go to the Chaplain’s rooms for tea, Zipser had exhausted the resources of his theology. So too, it seemed, had the Chaplain.

“Ah my boy,” the Chaplain boomed as Zipser negotiated the bric-a-brac that filled the Chaplain’s sitting-room. “So good of you to come. Do make yourself comfortable.” Zipser nudged past a gramophone with a papier-mâché horn, circumvented a brass-topped table with fretsawed legs, squeezed beneath the fronds of a castor-oil plant and finally sat down on a chair by the fire. The Chaplain scuttled backwards and forwards between his bathroom and the teatable muttering loudly to himself a liturgy of things to fetch. “Teapot hot. Spoons. Milk jug. You do take milk?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Zipser.

“Good. Good. So many people take lemon, don’t they? One always forgets these things. Tea-cosy. Sugar basin.” Zipser looked round the room for some indication of the Chaplain’s interests but the welter of conflicting objects, like the addition of random numbers to a code, made interpretation impossible. Apart from senility the furnishings had so little in common that they seemed to indicate a wholly catholic taste.

“Crumpets,” said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. “Just the thing. You toast them.” He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the fork into Zipser’s hand. Zipser poked the crumpet at the fire tentatively and felt once again that dissociation from reality that seemed so much a part of life in Cambridge. It was as if everyone in the College sought to parody himself, as if a parody of a parody could become itself a new reality. Behind him the Chaplain stumbled over a footrest and deposited a jar of honey with a boom on the brass-topped table. Zipser removed the crumpet, blackened on one side and ice cold on the other, and put it on a plate. He toasted another while the Chaplain tried to spread butter on the one he had half done. By the time they had finished Zipser’s face was burning from the fire and his hands were sticky with a mixture of melted butter and honey. The Chaplain sat back in his chair and filled his pipe from a tobacco jar with the Porterhouse crest on it.

“Do help yourself, my dear boy,” said the Chaplain, pushing the jar towards him.

“I don’t smoke.”

The Chaplain shook his head sadly. “Everyone should smoke a pipe,” he said. “Calms the nerves. Puts things in perspective. Couldn’t do without mine.” He leant back, puffing vigorously. Zipser stared at him through a haze of smoke.

“Now then where were we?” he asked. Zipser tried to think. “Ah yes, your little problem, that’s right,” said the Chaplain finally. “I knew there was something.”

Zipser stared into the fire resentfully.

“The Senior Tutor said something about it. I didn’t gather very much but then I seldom do. Deafness, you know.”

Zipser nodded sympathetically.

“The affliction of the elderly. That and rheumatism. It’s the damp, you know. Comes up from the river. Very unhealthy living so close to the Fens.” His pipe percolated gently. In the comparative silence Zipser tried to think what to say. The Chaplain’s age and his evident physical disabilities made it difficult for Zipser to conceive that he could begin to understand the problem of Mrs Biggs.

“I really think there’s been a misunderstanding,” he began hesitantly and stopped. It was evident from the look on the Chaplain’s face that there was no understanding at all.

“You’ll have to speak up,” the Chaplain boomed. “I’m really quite deaf.”

“I can see that,” Zipser said. The Chaplain beamed at him.

“Don’t hesitate to tell me,” he said. “Nothing you say can shock me.”

“I’m not surprised,” Zipser said.

The Chaplain’s smile remained insistently benevolent. “I know what we’ll do,” he said, hopping to his feet and reaching behind his chair. “It’s something I use for confession sometimes.” He emerged holding a loudhailer and handed it to Zipser. “Press the trigger when you’re going to speak.”

Zipser held the thing up to his mouth and stared at the Chaplain over the rim. “I really don’t think this is going to help,” he said finally. His words reverberated through the room and set the teapot rattling on the brass table.

“Of course it is,” shouted the Chaplain, “I can hear perfectly.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Zipser said desperately. The fronds of the castor-oil plant quivered ponderously. “I meant I don’t think it’s going to help to talk about…” He left the dilemma of Mrs Biggs unspoken.

The Chaplain smiled in absolution and puffed his pipe vigorously. “Many of the young men who come to see me,” he said, invisible in a cloud of smoke, “suffer from feelings of guilt about masturbation.”

Zipser stared frantically at the smoke screen. “Masturbation? Who said anything about masturbation?” he bawled into the loudhailer. It was apparent someone had. His words, hideously amplified, billowed forth from the room and across the Court outside. Several undergraduates by the fountain turned and stared up at the Chaplain’s windows. Deafened by his own vociferousness, Zipser sat sweating with embarrassment.

“I understood from the Senior Tutor that you wanted to see me about a sexual problem,” the Chaplain shouted.

Zipser lowered the loudhailer. The thing clearly had disadvantages.

“I can assure you I don’t masturbate,” he said.

The Chaplain looked at him incomprehendingly. “You press the trigger when you want to speak,” he explained. Zipser nodded dumbly. The knowledge that to communicate with the Chaplain at all he had to announce his feelings for Mrs Biggs to the world at large presented him with a terrible dilemma made no less intolerable by the Chaplain’s shouted replies.

“It often helps to get these things into the open,” the Chaplain assured him. Zipser had his doubts about that. Admissions of the sort he had to make broadcast through a loudhailer were not likely to be of any help at all. He might just as well go and propose to the wretched woman straightaway and be done with it. He sat with lowered head while the Chaplain boomed on.

“Don’t forget that anything you tell me will be heard in the strictest confidence,” he shouted. “You need have no fears that it will go any further.”

“Oh sure,” Zipser muttered. Outside in the Quad a small crowd of undergraduates had gathered by the fountain to listen.

Half an hour later Zipser left the room, his demoralization quite complete. At least he could congratulate himself that he had revealed nothing of his true feelings and the Chaplain’s kindly probings, his tentative questions, had elicited no response. Zipser had sat silently through a sexual catechism only bothering to shake his head when the Chaplain broached particularly obscene topics. In the end he had listened to a lyrical description of the advantages of au pair girls. It was obvious that the Chaplain regarded foreign girls as outside the sexual canons of the Church.

“So much less danger of a permanently unhappy involvement,” he had shouted, “and after all I often think that’s what they come here for. Ships that pass in the night and not on one’s own doorstep you know.” He paused and smiled at Zipser salaciously. “We all have to sow our wild oats at some time or other and it’s much better to do it abroad. I’ve often thought that’s what Rupert Brooke had in mind in that line of his about some corner of a foreign field. Mind you, one can hardly say that he was particularly healthy, come to think of it, but there we are. That’s my advice to you, dear boy. Find a nice Swedish girl, I’m told they’re very good, and have a ball. I believe that’s the modern idiom. Yes, Swedes or French, depending on your taste. Spaniards are a bit difficult, I’m told, and then again they tend to be rather hairy. Still, buggers can’t be choosers as dear old Sir Winston said at the queer’s wedding. Ha, ha.”

Zipser staggered from the room. He knew now what muscular Christianity meant. He went down the dark staircase and was about to go out into the Court when he saw the group standing by the fountain. Zipser turned and fled up the stairs and locked himself in the lavatory on the top landing. He was still there an hour later when First Hall began.