Porterhouse Blue (17 page)

The Bursar sympathized with Sir Godber. ‘Not a very likeable fellow but he’s very conscientious and he is a great favourite of the Dean.’

‘I can imagine that they get on well together,’ said Sir Godber. ‘All the same, Porterhouse may be the
name of the College but it doesn’t mean that the Head Porter is in charge. On the night of the … er … accident Skullion was distinctly disrespectful. I told him to open the main gates for the ambulancemen and he refused. One of these days I daresay I shall have to ask you to give him notice.’

The Bursar blanched at the thought. ‘I think that would be most inadvisable, Master,’ he said. ‘The Dean would be most upset.’

‘Well,’ said Sir Godber, ‘the next time I have any insolence from him out he goes and no mistake.’ With the silent thought that it was time such relics of the past got their marching orders, the Master led the way into the Lodge.

Lady Mary was waiting in the drawing-room. ‘I’ve asked the Bursar to lunch, my dear,’ said Sir Godber, his voice a shade less authoritative in the presence of his wife.

‘I’m afraid you’ll just have to take pot luck,’ Lady Mary told the Bursar. ‘My husband tells me that you treat yourselves lavishly at High Table.’

The Bursar simpered apologetically. Lady Mary ignored these signs of submission. ‘I find it quite deplorable that so much good money should be wasted on maintaining the ill-health of a number of elderly scholars.’

‘My dear,’ Sir Godber intervened, ‘you’ll be glad to hear that the Council has accepted our proposals.’

‘And not before time,’ said Lady Mary, studying the Bursar with distaste. ‘One of the most astonishing
things about the educational institutions of this country is the way they have resisted change. When I think how long we’ve been urging the abolition of private education I’m amazed. The public schools seem to go from strength to strength.’

To the Bursar, himself the product of a minor public school on the South Downs, Lady Mary’s words verged on the blasphemous. ‘You’re surely not suggesting public schools should be abolished,’ he said. From the table where Sir Godber was pouring sherry there came the sound of rattled glass. Lady Mary assumed a new hauteur.

‘Am I to infer from that remark that you are in favour of private education?’ she asked.

The Bursar groped for a conciliatory reply. ‘Well, I think there is something to be said for it,’ he mumbled finally.

‘What?’ asked Lady Mary.

But before the Bursar could think of anything to recommend the public school system without offending his hostess, Sir Godber had come to his rescue with a glass of sherry. ‘Very good of you, Master,’ he said gratefully and sipped his drink. ‘And a very pleasant sherry, if I may say so.’

‘We don’t drink South African sherry,’ Lady Mary said. ‘I hope the College doesn’t keep any in stock.’

‘I believe we have some for the undergraduates,’ said the Bursar, ‘but I know the Senior Members don’t touch the stuff.’

‘Quite right too,’ said Sir Godber.

‘I was not thinking of the question of taste,’ Lady Mary continued, ‘so much as the moral objections to buying South African products. I have always made a point of boycotting South African goods.’

To the Bursar, long accustomed to the political opinions expressed at High Table by the Dean and the Senior Tutor, Lady Mary’s views were radical in the extreme and the fact that they were expressed in a tone of voice which suggested that she was addressing a congregation of unmarried mothers unnerved him. He stumbled through the thorny problems of world poverty, the population explosion, abortion, the Nicaraguan earthquake, strategic arms limitation talks, and prison reform until a gong sounded and they went into lunch. Over a sardine salad that would have served as an
hors d’oeuvre
in Hall his discomfiture took a more personal turn.

‘You’re not by any chance related to the Shropshire Shrimptons?’ Lady Mary asked.

The Bursar shook his head sorrowfully.

‘My family came originally from Southend,’ he said.

‘How very unusual,’ said Lady Mary. ‘I only asked because we used to stay with them at Bognorth before the war. Sue Shrimpton was up with me at Somerville and we served together on the Needham Commission.’

The Bursar acknowledged Lady Mary’s social distinction in silence. He would put his present humiliation to
good use in the future. At sherry parties for years to come he would be able to say ‘Lady Mary was saying to me only the other day …’ or ‘Lady Mary and I …’ and establish his own superiority over lesser men and their wives. It was in such small achievements that the Bursar’s satisfactions were found. Sir Godber ate his sardines in silence too. He was grateful to the Bursar for providing a target for his wife’s conversation and moral rectitude. He dreaded to think what would happen if the injustices on which Lady Mary vented her moral spleen ever disappeared. ‘The poor are always with us, thank God,’ he thought and helped himself to a piece of Cheddar.

It was left to Skullion to represent the College on the towpath that afternoon. The Dean had driven over to Coft to see Sir Cathcart and Skullion stood alone in the biting wind watching Porterhouse row over for the second day running. The terrible sense of wrong that he had felt in the boiler-room when he heard the proposed sale of Rhyder Street had not left him. It had been augmented by the news Arthur had brought him from High Table after lunch.

‘He’s put the cat among the pigeons now, the Master has,’ Arthur said breathlessly. ‘He’s got under their skin something terrible this time.’

‘I don’t wonder,’ said Skullion, thinking bitterly of Rhyder Street.

‘I mean you wouldn’t want one in your own home, would you? Not one of them things.’

‘What things?’ Skullion asked, all too conscious of the fact that he was unlikely to have a home to put anything in if Sir Godber had his way.

‘Well I don’t rightly know what they’re called,’ Arthur said. ‘Not exactly, that is. You put your money in and …’

‘And what?’ Skullion asked irritably.

‘And you get these things out. Three I think. Not that I’ve ever had occasion to use them.’

‘What things?’

‘Frenchies,’ said Arthur, looking round to make sure no one was listening.

‘Frenchies?’ said Skullion. ‘What Frenchies?’

‘The Frenchies that Zipser gentleman exploded himself with,’ Arthur explained. Skullion looked at him in disgust. ‘You mean to tell me they’re going to bring one of those filthy things into the College?’

Arthur nodded. ‘In the men’s toilet. That’s where it’s going.’

‘Over my dead body,’ said Skullion. ‘I’m not staying here as Head Porter with one of those things in the toilet. This isn’t a bloody chemist’s shop.’

‘Some of the other colleges have them,’ Arthur told him.

‘Some of the other colleges may have them. Doesn’t mean we’ve got to. It isn’t right. Encourages immorality, French letters do. You’d have thought they’d have
learnt that from what happened to that Zipser bloke. Preyed on his mind, all those FLs did.’

Arthur shook his head sorrowfully. ‘’Tisn’t right,’ he said, ‘’tisn’t right, Mr Skullion. I don’t know what the College is coming to. Senior Tutor is particularly upset. He says it will affect the rowing.’

Standing on the towpath Skullion agreed with the Senior Tutor. ‘All this business about sex,’ he muttered. ‘It doesn’t do anybody any good. It isn’t right.’

When the Porterhouse VIII rowed past Skullion raised a feeble cheer and then stumped off after them. Around him bicycles churned the muddy puddles as they overtook him but, like the Dean the day before, Skullion was lost in thought and bitterness.

His anger, unlike the Dean’s, was tainted with a sense of betrayal. The College whose servant he was and his ancestors before him had let him down. They had no right to let Sir Godber sell Rhyder Street. They should have stopped him. That was their duty to him, just as his duty to the College had been for forty-five years to sit in the Porter’s Lodge all day and half the night for a miserable pittance a week, the guardian of privilege and of the indiscretions of the privileged young. How many drunken young gentlemen had Skullion helped to their rooms? How many secrets had he kept? How many insults had he suffered in his time? He could not begin to recall them but in the back of his mind the debits had balanced the credits and he had been secure in the knowledge that the College would
always look after him now and in his old age. He had been proud of his servility, the Porter of Porterhouse, but what if the College’s reputation was debased? What would he be then? A homeless old man with his memories. He wasn’t having it. They’d got to see him right. It was their duty.

In the library at Coft Castle, the Dean put the same point to Sir Cathcart.

‘It’s our duty to see these damnable innovations are stopped,’ he said. ‘The man seems intent on changing the entire character of the College. For years, damn it for centuries, we’ve been famous for our kitchens and now he’s proposing a self-service canteen and a contraceptive dispenser.’

‘A what?’ Sir Cathcart gasped.

‘A contraceptive dispenser.’

‘Good God, the man’s insane!’ shouted Sir Cathcart. ‘Can’t have one of those damned things in College. When I was an undergraduate you got sent down if you were caught riveting a dolly!’

‘Quite,’ said the Dean, who had a shrewd suspicion that in his time the General had been a steam-hammer if the imagery of his language was anything to go by. ‘What you don’t seem to appreciate, Cathcart,’ he continued, before the General could indulge in any further mechanical memories, ‘is that the Master is undermining something very fundamental. I’m not thinking simply of the College now. The implications are rather wider than that. Do you take my meaning?’

Sir Cathcart shook his head. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said bluntly.

‘This country,’ said the Dean with a new intensity, ‘has been run for the past three hundred years by an oligarchy.’ He paused to see if the General understood the word.

‘Quite right, old boy,’ said Sir Cathcart. ‘Always has been, always will be. No use denying it. Good thing.’

‘An elite of gentlemen, Cathcart,’ continued the Dean. ‘Now don’t mistake me, I’m not suggesting they started off as gentlemen. They didn’t, half of them, they came from all walks of life. Take Peel, for instance, grandson of a mill hand, ended up a gentleman, though, and a damned fine Prime Minister. Why?’

‘Can’t think,’ said Sir Cathcart.

‘Because he had a proper education.’

‘Ah. Went to Porterhouse, eh?’

‘No,’ said the Dean. ‘He was an Oxford man.’

‘Good God. And still a gentleman? Extraordinary.’

‘The point I’m trying to make, Cathcart,’ said the Dean solemnly, ‘is that the two Universities have been the forcing-house of an intellectual aristocracy with tastes and values that had nothing whatever to do with their own personal backgrounds. How many of our Prime Ministers over the last hundred and seventy years have been to Oxford or Cambridge?’

‘Good Lord, don’t ask me,’ said the General. ‘Got no idea.’

‘Most of them,’ said the Dean.

‘Quite right too,’ said Sir Cathcart. ‘Can’t have any Tom, Dick or Harry running the affairs of state.’

‘That is precisely the point I have been trying to make,’ said the Dean. ‘The business of the older Universities is to take Toms and Dicks and Harrys and turn them into gentlemen. We have been doing that very successfully for the past five hundred years.’

‘Mind you,’ said Sir Cathcart doubtfully, ‘I knew some bounders in my time.’

‘I daresay you did,’ said the Dean.

‘Used to duck ’em in the Fountain. Did them no end of good,’ Sir Cathcart reminisced cheerfully.

‘What Sir Godber proposes,’ the Dean continued, ‘means the end of all that. In the name of so-called social justice the man intends to turn Porterhouse into a run-of-the-mill college like Selwyn or Fitzwilliam.’

Sir Cathcart snorted.

‘Take more than Godber Evans to do that,’ he said. ‘Selwyn! Full of religious maniacs in my time, and Fitzwilliam wasn’t a college at all. A sort of hostel for townies.’

‘And what do you think Porterhouse will be with a self-service canteen instead of Hall and a contraceptive dispenser in every lavatory? There won’t be a decent family prepared to pay a penny towards the Endowment Fund, and you know what that means.’

‘Oh come now, can’t be as bad as that,’ said Sir
Cathcart, ‘I mean to say we’ve survived worse crises in the past. There was the business over the Bursar … what was his name?’

‘Fitzherbert.’

‘Enough to ruin another college, that was.’

‘Enough to ruin us,’ said the Dean. ‘If it hadn’t been for him we wouldn’t be dependent on wealthy parents now.’

‘But we got over it all the same,’ Sir Cathcart insisted, ‘and we’ll get over this present nonsense. Just fashion, all this equality. Here today, gone tomorrow. Have a drink.’ He got up and went over to the Waverley Novels. ‘Scotch?’ The Dean regarded the set in some bewilderment.

‘Scott?’ he asked. He had never regarded Sir Cathcart as a man with even remotely literary tastes and this sudden change in the conversation seemed unduly inconsequential.

‘Or sherry? If you prefer,’ said Sir Cathcart, indicating a handsomely bound copy of
Lavengro
. The Dean shook his head irritably. There was something extraordinarily vulgar about Sir Cathcart’s travesty of a library.

‘
Romany Rye
perhaps?’ The Dean shook his head. ‘Nothing, thank you,’ he said. Sir Cathcart helped himself to
Rob Roy
and sat down.

‘Proust,’ he said, raising his glass. The Dean stared at him angrily. Sir Cathcart’s flippancy was beginning to get on his nerves. He hadn’t come out to Coft Castle to be regaled with the liquid contents of the library.

‘Cathcart,’ he said firmly, ‘we have got to do something to stop the rot.’

The General nodded. ‘Absolutely. Couldn’t agree more.’

‘It needs more than agreement to stop Sir Godber,’ continued the Dean. ‘It needs action. Public pressure. That sort of thing.’

‘Difficult to get any public sympathy when you’ve got undergraduates running round blowing up buildings. Extraordinary thing to do really. Fill all those contraceptives with gas. Practical joke I suppose. Went wrong.’