Porterhouse Blue

Chapter 6

Sir Godber dined at home. He was still recovering from the gastric consequences of the Feast and in any case the Bursar’s revelations had disinclined him to the company of the Fellows until he had formulated his plans more clearly. He had spent the afternoon considering various schemes for raising money and had made several telephone calls to financial friends in the City to ask their advice and to put up proposals of his own but without success. Blomberg’s Bank had been prepared to endow several Research Fellowships in Accountancy but even Sir Godber doubted if such generosity would materially alter the intellectual climate of Porterhouse. He had even considered offering the American Phosgene Corp. facilities for research into nerve gas, facilities they had been denied by all American universities, in return for a really large endowment but he suspected that the resultant publicity and student protest would destroy his already tenuous liberal reputation. Publicity was much on his mind. At five o’clock the BBC phoned to ask if he would appear on a panel of leading educationalists to answer questions on financial priorities in Education. Sir Godber was sorely tempted to agree but refused on the grounds that he had hardly acquired much experience. He put the phone down reluctantly and wondered what effect his announcement to several million viewers that Porterhouse College was in the habit of selling degrees to rich young layabouts would have had. It was a pleasing thought and gave rise in the Master’s mind to an even more satisfying conclusion. He picked up the phone again and spoke to the Bursar.

“Could we arrange a College Council meeting for tomorrow afternoon? Say two-thirty?” he asked.

“It’s rather short notice. Master,” the Bursar replied.

“Good. Two-thirty it is then,” Sir Godber said with iron geniality and replaced the receiver. He sat back and began to draw up a list of innovations. Candidates to be chosen by academic achievement only. The kitchen endowment to be cut by three-quarters and the funds reallocated to scholarships. Women undergraduates to be admitted as members. Gate hours abolished. College playing fields open to children from the town. Sir Godber’s imagination raced on compiling proposals with no thought for the financial implications. They would have to find the money somewhere and he didn’t much care where. The main thing was that he had the Fellows over a barrel. They might protest but there was nothing they could do to stop him. They had placed a weapon in his hands. He smiled to himself at the thought of their faces when he explained the alternatives tomorrow. At six-thirty he went through to the drawing-room where Lady Mary, who had been chairing a committee on Teenage Delinquency, was writing letters.

“Be with you in a minute,” she said when Sir Godber asked her if she would like a sherry. He looked at her dubiously. There were times when he wondered if his wife was ever with him. Her mind followed a wholly independent course and was ever concentrated on the more distressing aspects of other people’s lives. Sir Godber poured himself a large whisky.

“Well, I think I’ve got them by the short hairs,” he said when she finally stopped tapping at her typewriter.

Lady Mary’s lean tongue lubricated the flap of an envelope. “Non-specific urethritis is reaching epidemic proportions among school-leavers,” she said. Sir Godber ignored the interjection. He couldn’t for the life of him see what it had to do with the College. He pursued his own topic. “I’m going to show them that I’m not prepared to be a cipher.”

“Surveys show that one in every five children has…”

“I haven’t ended my career in politics only to be pushed into a sinecure,” Sir Godber contended.

“That’s not the problem,” Lady Mary agreed.

“What isn’t?” Sir Godber asked momentarily interested by her assertion.

“Cure. Easy enough. What we’ve got to get at is the moral delinquency…”

Sir Godber drank his whisky and tried not to listen. There were times when he wondered if he would ever have succeeded as a politician without the help of his wife. Without her incessant preoccupation with unsavoury statistics and sordid social problems, late-night sittings in the House might have had less appeal and committees less utility. Would he have made so many passionate speeches or spoken with such urgency if Lady Mary had been prepared to listen to one word he said at home? He rather doubted it. They went in to dinner and Sir Godber passed the time as usual by counting the number of times she said Must and Our Duty. The Musts won by fifty-four to forty-eight. Not bad for the course.

After he had heard the Chaplain go down to Hall, Zipser slipped out of the lavatory and went to his room. There was no sign of the little crowd of undergraduates who had been gathered in the Court when he first went down and he hoped no one would find out who had been talking, if that was the right word, to the Chaplain. The tendency he shared with the Master’s wife to think in wholly impersonal terms about world issues had quite deserted him. During his hour in the lavatory he had taken the Chaplain’s advice and had attempted to interpose the image of a Swedish girl between himself and Mrs Biggs. Every time Mrs Biggs intruded he concentrated on the slim buttocks and breasts of a Swedish actress he had seen once in Playboy and to some extent the practice had worked. Not entirely. The Swede tended to swell and to assume unnatural proportions until she was displaced by a smiling Mrs Biggs, but the series of little respites was encouraging and suggested that a substantial Swede might be even more effective. He would take the Chaplain’s advice and find an au pair girl or a language student and… and… well… and. Zipser’s lack of sexual experience prevented him from formulating at all clearly what he would do then. Well, he would copulate with her. Having arrived at this neat if somewhat abstract conclusion he felt better. It was certainly preferable to raping Mrs Biggs, which seemed the only alternative. As usual Zipser had no doubts about rape. It was a brutal, violent act of assertive masculinity, a loosening of savage instinctual forces, passionate and bestial. He would hurl Mrs Biggs to the floor and thrust himself… With an effort of will he dragged his imagination back from the scene and thought aseptically about copulating with a Swede.

A number of difficulties immediately presented themselves. First and foremost he knew no Swedes, and secondly he had never copulated with anyone. He knew a great many intense young women who shared his concern for the fate of mankind and who were prepared to talk about birth control into the early hours of the morning but they were all English and their preoccupation with mankind’s problems had seemed to preclude any interest in him. In any case Zipser had scruples on aesthetic grounds about asking any of them to act as a substitute Mrs Biggs, and rather doubted their efficacy in the role. It would have to be a Swede. With the abstract calculation that was implicit in his whole approach Zipser decided that he would probably be able to find a promiscuous Swede in the Cellar Bar. He wrote it down and put as an alternative the Ali Baba Discotheque. That dealt with the first problem. He would fill her up with wine, Portuguese white would do, and bring her back to his room. All quite simple. With her cooperation the sexual spectre of Mrs Biggs would lose its force. He went to bed early having set the alarm clock for seven o’clock so as to be up and out before the bedder arrived – and before he fell asleep realized that he had forgotten an important detail. He would need some contraceptives. He’d go and have his hair cut in the morning and get some.

Skullion sat in front of the gas fire in the Porter’s Lodge and smoked his pipe. His visit to Coft Castle had eased his mind. The General would use his influence to see that the Master didn’t make any changes. You could rely on the General. One of the old brigade, and rich too. The sort that always gave you a big tip at the end of term. Skullion had had some big tips in his time and he had put them all away in his bank with the shares old Lord Wurford had left him in his will and had never touched them. He lived off his salary and what he earned on his night off as a steward at the Fox Club. There had been some big takings there too in his time; the Maharajah of Indpore had once given him fifty quid after a day at the races, when a tip from Sir Cathcart’s stable-boy had paid off. Skullion considered the Maharajah quite a gent, a compliment he paid to few Indians, but then a Maharajah wasn’t a proper Indian, was he? Maharajahs were Princes of the Empire and as far as Skullion was concerned wogs in the Empire were quite different from wogs outside it and wogs in the Fox Club wasn’t wogs at all or they wouldn’t be members. The intricate system of social classification in Skullion’s mind graded everyone. He could place a man within a hair’s breadth in the social scale by the tone of his voice or even the look in his eye. Some people thought you could depend on the cut of a man’s coat but Skullion knew better. It wasn’t externals that mattered, it was something much more indefinable, an inner quality which Skullion couldn’t explain but which he recognized immediately. And responded to. It had something to do with assurance, a certainty of oneself which nothing could shake. There were lots of intermediate stages between this ineffable superiority and the manifest inferiority of, say, the kitchen staff, but Skullion could sense them all and put them in the right place. There was money by itself, brash and full of itself but easily deflated. There was two-generation money with a bit of land. Usually a bit pompous, that was. There was County rich and poor. Skullion noted the distinction but tended to ignore it. Some of the best families had come down in the world and so long as the confidence was there, money didn’t count, not in Skullion’s eyes anyway. In fact confidence without money was preferable, it indicated a genuine quality and was accordingly revered. Then there were various degrees of uncertainty, nuances of self-doubt that went unnoticed by most people but which Skullion spotted immediately. Flickers of residual deference immediately suppressed – but too late to be missed by Skullion. Doctors’ and lawyers’ sons. Professional classes and treated respectfully. Still public school anyway, and graded from Eton and Winchester downwards. Below public school Skullion lost all interest, according only slight respect if there was money in it for him. But at the top of the scale above all these distinctions there was an assurance so ineffable that it seemed almost to merge into its opposite. Real quality, Skullion called it, or even the old aristocracy to distinguish it from mere titular nobility. These were the saints of his calendar, the touchstone against which all other men were finally judged. Even Sir Cathcart was not of their number. In fact Skullion had to admit that he was fundamentally of the fourth rank, though near the top of it, and that was high praise considering how many ranks Skullion had in his mind. No, the real quality were without Sir Cathcart’s harshness. There was often an unassuming quality about the saints which less perceptive porters than Skullion mistook for timidity and social insecurity but which he knew to be a sign of breeding, and not to be taken advantage of. It accorded his servility the highest accolade, this helplessness that was quite unforced, and gave him the sure knowledge that he was needed. Under the cover of that helplessness Skullion could have moved mountains, and frequently had to in the way of luggage and furniture, humping it up staircases and round corners and arranging it first here and then there while its owner, graciously indecisive, tried to make up what there was of his mind where it would look best. From such expeditions Skullion would emerge with a temporary lordliness as if touched by grace and would recall such services rendered in years to come with the feeling that he had been privileged to attend an almost spiritual occasion. In Skullion’s social hagiography two names stood out as the epitome of the effeteness he worshipped. Lord Pimpole and Sir Launcelot Gutterby, and at moments of contemplation Skullion would repeat their names to himself like some isepetitive prayer. He was in the process of this incantation and had reached his twentieth “Pimpole and Gutterby” when the Lodge door opened and Arthur, who waited at High Table, came in.

“Evening, Arthur,” said Skullion condescendingly.

“Evening,” said Arthur.

“Going off home?” Skullion enquired.

“Got something for you,” Arthur told him, leaning confidentially over the counter.

Skullion looked up. Arthur’s attendance at High Table was a source of much of his information about the College. He rose and came over to the counter. “Oh ah,” he said.

“They’re in a tizzwhizz tonight,” Arthur said. “Proper tizzwhizz.”

“Go on,” said Skullion encouragingly.

“Bursar come in to dinner all flushed and flummoxy and the Dean’s got them high spots on his cheeks he gets when his gander’s up and the Tutor don’t eat his soup. Not like him to turn up his soup,” Arthur said. Skullion grunted his agreement. “So I know something’s up.” Arthur paused for effect. “Know what it is?” he asked.

Skullion shook his head. “No. What is it?” he said.

Arthur smiled. “Master’s called a College Council for tomorrow. The Bursar said it wasn’t convenient and the Master said to call it just the same and they don’t like it. They don’t like it at all. Put them off their dinner it did, the new Master acting all uppity like that, telling them what to do just when they thought they’d got him where they wanted him. Bursar said he’d told the Master they hadn’t got the money for all the changes he has in mind and the Master seemed to have taken it, but then he rings the Bursar up and tells him to call the meeting.”

“Can’t call a College Council all of a sudden,” Skullion said, “Council meets on the first Thursday of every month.”

“That’s what the Dean said and the Tutor. But the Master wouldn’t have it. Got to be tomorrow. Bursar rang him up and said Dean and Tutor wouldn’t attend like they’d told him and Master said that was all right with him but that the meeting would be tomorrow whether they were there or not.” Arthur shook his head mournfully over the Master’s wilfulness. “It ain’t right all this telling people what to do.”

Skullion scowled at him. “The Master come to dinner?” he asked.

“No,” said Arthur, “he don’t stir from the Lodge. Just telephones his orders to the Bursar.” He glanced significantly at the switchboard in the corner. Skullion nodded pensively.

“So he’s going ahead with his changes,” he said at last.

“And they thought they’d got him where they wanted him, eh?”

“That’s what they said,” Arthur assured him. “Bursar said he wasn’t going to do nothing and then he suddenly calls the meeting.”

“What’s the Dean say to all this?” Skullion asked.

“Says they’ve all got to stick together. Mind you, he didn’t have much to say tonight. Too upset by the look of him. But that’s what he’s said before.”

“Don’t suppose the Tutor agrees with him,” Skullion suggested.

“He do now. Didn’t before but this being told to attend the meeting has got him on the raw. Don’t like that at all, the Tutor don’t.”

Skullion nodded. “Ah well, that’s something,” he said. “It isn’t like him to side with the Dean. Bursar agree?”

“Bursar says he does but you never can tell with him, can you?” Arthur said. “He’s a slippery sod, he is. One moment this, the next moment something else. You can’t rely on him.”

“Got no bottom, the Bursar,” said Skullion, drawing on the language of the late Lord Wurford for his judgement.

“Ah, is that what it is?” Arthur said. He gathered up his coat. “Got to be getting along now.”

Skullion saw him to the door. “Thank you, Arthur,” he said. “Very useful that is.”

“Glad to be of service,” Arthur said, “besides I don’t want any changes in the College any more than you do. Too old for changes, I am. Twenty-five years I’ve waited at High Table and fifteen years before that I was…”

Skullion shut the door on old Arthur’s reminiscences and went back to the fire. So the Master was going ahead with his plans. Well it wasn’t a bad thing he’d ordered the College Council for tomorrow. It had got the Dean and the Senior Tutor to agree for the first time in years. That was something in itself. They had hated one another’s guts for years, ever since the Dean had preached a sermon on the text, “Many that are first shall be last”, when the Tutor had first begun to coach the Porterhouse Boat. Skullion smiled to himself at the memory. The Tutor had come storming out of Chapel with his gown billowing behind him like the wrath of God and had worked the eight so hard they were past their peak by the time of the May Bumps. Porterhouse had been bumped three times that year and had lost the Head of the River. He’d never forgiven the Dean that sermon. Never agreed with him about anything since and now the Master had got their backs up. Well, it was an ill wind that blew no good. And anyway there was always Sir Cathcart in the wings to put his oar in if the Master went too far. Skullion went out and shut the gate and went to bed. Outside it was snowing again. Damp flakes flicked against the windows and ran in runnels of water down the panes. “Pimpole and Gutterby,” murmured Skullion for the last time, and fell asleep.

Zipser slept fitfully and was awake before the alarm clock went off at seven. He dressed and made himself some coffee before going out and he was just cutting himself some bread in the gyp room when Mrs Biggs arrived.

“You’re up early for a change,” she said, easing herself through the door of the tiny gyp room.

“What are you doing here now?” Zipser demanded belligerently. “You shouldn’t come till eight.”

Mrs Biggs, fulsome in a red mackintosh, smiled dreadfully. “I can come any time I want to,” she said with quite unnecessary emphasis. Zipser needed no telling. He writhed against the sink and stared helplessly into the acres of her smile. Mrs Biggs unbuttoned her mac slowly with one hand like a gargantuan stripper and Zipser’s eyes followed her down. Her breasts swarmed in her blouse as she slipped the mac over her shoulders. Zipser’s eyes salivated over them.

“Here, help me with the arms,” Mrs Biggs said, wedging herself round so that she had her back to him. Zipser hesitated a moment and then, impelled by a fearful and uncontrollable urge, lunged forward.

“Here,” said Mrs Biggs somewhat surprised by the frenzy of his assistance and the unusual whinnying sounds Zipser was making, “the arms I said. What do you think you’re doing?” Zipser floundered in the folds of her mac unable to think at all let alone what he was doing. His mind was ablaze with overwhelming desire. As he thrust himself into the red inferno of Mrs Biggs’s raincoat, the bedder hunched herself and then heaved. Zipser fell back against the sink and Mrs Biggs issued in the hall. Between them on the gyp-room floor, like the plastic afterbirth of some terrible delivery, the disputed raincoat slowly subsided.

“Goodness gracious me,” said Mrs Biggs recovering her composure, “you want to be more careful. You might give people the wrong idea.”

Zipser huddled in the corner of the gyp room breathing heavily hoped desperately that Mrs Biggs didn’t get the right idea.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled, “I must have slipped. Don’t know what came over me.”

“Wonder you didn’t come all over me,” Mrs Biggs said coarsely. “Throwing yourself about like that.” She plummeted over and picked up the raincoat and, trailing it behind her like a bull fighter’s cape, marched into the other room. Zipser stared at her boots with a fresh surge of longing and hurried downstairs. The need for a girl his own age to take his body off the bedder had become imperative. He had to do something to escape the temptation presented by Mrs Biggs’s extensive charms or he would find himself before the Dean. Zipser could think of nothing worse than being sent down from Porterhouse for “the attempted rape of a bedder”. Or only one thing. The successful accomplishment of rape. That would be a police-court matter. He would kill himself sooner than face that humiliation.

“Good morning, sir,” Skullion called out as he passed the Lodge.

“Good morning,” said Zipser and went out of the gate. He had over an hour to wait before the barbers’ shops opened. He walked along the river to kill time and envied the ducks, sleeping on the banks, their uncomplicated existence.

Mrs Biggs tucked the sheets under the mattress of Zipser’s bed with a practised hand and plumped his pillow with a mitigated force that was almost tender. She was feeling rather pleased with herself. It had been some years since Mr Biggs had passed on, consigned to an early grave by his wife’s various appetites, and even longer since anyone had paid her the compliment of finding her attractive. Zipser’s clumsy advances had not escaped her attention. The fact that he followed her about from room to room as she worked and that his eyes were seldom off her were signs too obvious to be ignored. “Poor boy misses his mum,” she had thought at first and had noted Zipser’s solitariness as an indication of homesickness. But his recent behaviour had suggested less remote causes for his interest. The bedder’s fancy ignored the weather and lumbered to thoughts of love. “Don’t be silly,” she told herself. “What would he see in you?” But the notion remained and Mrs Biggs’ sense of propriety began to adapt itself to the incongruities of the situation. She had begun to dress accordingly and to pay more attention to her looks and even, as she went from room to room and bed to bed, to indulge her imagination a little. The episode in the gyp room had confirmed her best suspicions. “Fancy now,” she said to herself, “and him such a nice young fellow too. Who’d have guessed?” She looked at herself in the mirror and primped her hair with a heavy hand.

At nine-fifteen Zipser took his seat in the barber’s chair.

“Just a trim,” he told the barber.

The man looked at his head doubtfully.

“Wouldn’t like a nice short back and sides, I don’t suppose?” he asked mournfully.

“Just a trim, thank you,” Zipser told him.

The barber tucked the sheet into his collar. “Don’t know why some of you young fellows bother to have your hair cut at all,” he said. “Seem determined to put us out of business.”

“I’m sure you still get lots of work,” Zipser said.

The barber’s scissor clicked busily round his ears. Zipser stared at himself in the mirror and wondered once again at the disparity between his innocent appearance and the terrible passion which surged inside him. His eyes moved sideways to the rows of bottles, Eau de Portugal, Dr Linthrop’s Dandruff Mixture, Vitalis, a jar of Pomade. Who on earth used Pomade? Behind him the barber was chattering on about football but Zipser wasn’t listening. He was eyeing the glass case to his left where a box in one corner suggested the reason for his haircut. He couldn’t move his head so that he wasn’t sure what the box contained but it looked the right sort of box. Finally when the man moved forward to pick up the clippers Zipser turned his head and saw that he had been eyeing with quite pointless interest a box of razor blades. He turned his head further and scanned the shelves. Shaving creams, razors, lotions, combs, all were there in abundance but not a single carton of contraceptives.

Zipser sat on in a trance while the clippers buzzed on his neck. They must keep the damned things somewhere. Every hairdresser had them. His face in the mirror assumed a new uncertainty. By the time the barber had finished and was powdering his neck and waving a handmirror behind him, Zipser was in no mood to be critical of the result. He got out of the chair and waved the barber’s brush away impatiently.

“That’ll be thirty pence, sir,” the barber said, and made out a ticket. Zipser dug into his pocket for the money. “Is there anything else?” Now was the moment he had been waiting for. The open invitation. That “anything else” of the barber had covered only too literally a multitude of sins. In Zipser’s case it was hopelessly inadequate not to say misleading.

“I’ll have five packets of Durex,” Zipser said with a strangled bellow.

“Afraid we can’t help you,” said the man. “Landlord’s a Catholic. It’s in the lease we’re not allowed to stock them.”

Zipser paid and went out into the street, cursing himself for not having looked in the window to see if there were any contraceptives on display. He walked into Rose Crescent and stared into a chemist’s shop but the place was full of women. He tried three more shops only to find that they were all either full of housewives or that the shop assistants were young females. Finally he went into a barber’s shop in Sidney Street where the window display was sufficiently broad-minded.

Two chairs were occupied and Zipser stood uncertainly just inside the door waiting for the barber to attend to him. As he stood there the door behind him opened and someone came in. Zipser stepped to one side and found himself looking into the face of Mr Turton, his supervisor.

“Ah, Zipser, getting your hair cut?” It seemed an unnecessarily inquisitive remark to Zipser. He felt inclined to tell the wretched man to mind his own business. Instead he nodded dumbly and sat down.

“Next one,” said the barber. Zipser feigned politeness.

“Won’t you…?” he said to Mr Turton.

“Your need is greater than mine, my dear fellow,” the supervisor said and sat down and picked up a copy of Titbits. For the second time that morning Zipser found himself in a barber’s chair.

“Any particular way?” the barber asked.

“Just a trim,” said Zipser.

The barber bellied the sheet out over his knees and tucked it into his collar.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, sir,” he said, “but I’d say you’d already had your hair cut this morning.”

Zipser, staring into the mirror, saw Mr Turton look up and his own face turn bright red.

“Certainly not,” he muttered. “What on earth makes you think that?” It was not a wise remark and Zipser regretted it before he had finished mumbling.

“Well, for one thing,” the barber went on, responding to this challenge to his powers of observation, “you’ve still got powder on your neck.” Zipser said shortly that he’d had a bath and used talcum powder.

“Oh quite,” said the barber sarcastically, “and I suppose all these clipper shavings…”

“Listen,” said Zipser conscious that Mr Turton had still not turned back to Titbits and was listening with interest, “if you don’t want to cut my hair…” The buzz of the clippers interrupted his protest. Zipser stared angrily at his reflection in the mirror and wondered why he was being dogged by embarrassing situations. Mr Turton was eyeing the back of his head with a new interest.

“I mean,” said the barber putting his clippers away, “some people like having their hair cut.” He winked at Mr Turton and in the mirror Zipser saw that wink. The scissors clicked round his ears and Zipser shut his eyes to escape the reproach he saw in them in the mirror. Everything he did now seemed tinged with catastrophe. Why in God’s name should he fall in love with an enormous bedder? Why couldn’t he just get on with his work, read in the library, write his thesis and go to meetings of CUNA?

“Had a customer once,” continued the barber remorselessly, “who used to have his hair cut three times a week. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Regular as clockwork. I asked him once, when he’d been commg for a couple of years mind you, I said to him, ‘Tell me, Mr Hattersley, why do you come and have your hair cut so often?’ Know what he said? Said it was the one place he could think. Said he got all his best ideas in the barber’s chair. Weird when you think about it. Here I stand all day clipping and cutting and right in front of me, under my hand you might say, there’s all those thoughts going on unbeknown to me. I mean I must have cut the hair on over a hundred thousand heads in my time. I’ve been cutting hair for twenty-five years now and that’s a lot of customers. Stands to reason some of them must have been having some pretty peculiar thoughts at the time. Murderers and sex maniacs I daresay. I mean there would be, wouldn’t there in all that number? Stands to reason.”

Zipser shrank in the chair. Mr Turton had lost all interest in Titbits now.

“Interesting theory,” he said encouragingly. “I suppose statistically you’re right. I’ve never thought of it that way before.”

Zipser said it took all sorts to make a world. It seemed the sort of trite remark the occasion demanded. By the time the barber had finished, he had given up all thought of asking for contraceptives. He paid the thirty pence and staggered out of the shop. Mr Turton smiled and took his place in the chair.

It was almost lunchtime.