Porterhouse Blue (2 page)

‘A bone for the eight in front,’ they used to shout.

‘What eight? There ain’t no eight in front.’

‘A bone for the fish in front.’ And over their shoulders the bones would go and if it was a good evening there was meat on them still and damned glad we was to get it. And it was true too. There was no eight in front in those days. Only the fish. In the darkness of the Musicians’ Gallery Skullion smiled at his memories of his youth. All different now. The young gentlemen weren’t the same. The spirit had gone out of them since the war. They got grants now. They worked. Who had ever heard of a Porterhouse man working in the old days? They were too busy drinking and racing. How many of this lot took a cab to Newmarket these days and came back five hundred to the bad and didn’t turn a hair? The Honourable Mr Newland had in ’33. Lived on Q staircase and got himself killed at Boulogne by the Germans. Skullion could remember a score or more like him. Gentlemen they were. No nonsense damn-my-soul gentlemen.

Presently when the main courses were finished and the Stilton had made its appearance, the Chef climbed
the stairs from the kitchen and took his seat next to Skullion.

‘Ah, Chef, a fine Feast. As good as any I can remember,’ Skullion told him.

‘It’s good of you to say so, Mr Skullion,’ said the Chef.

‘Better than they deserve,’ said Skullion.

‘Someone has to keep up the old traditions, Mr Skullion.’

‘True, Chef, very true,’ Skullion nodded. They sat in silence watching the waiters clearing the dishes and the port moving ritually round.

‘And what is your opinion of the new Master, Mr Skullion?’ the Chef asked.

Skullion raised his eyes to the painted timbers of the ceiling and shook his head sadly.

‘A sad day for the College, Chef, a sad day,’ he sighed.

‘Not a very popular gentleman?’ the Chef hazarded.

‘Not a gentleman,’ Skullion pronounced.

‘Ah,’ said the Chef. Sentence on the new Master had been passed. In the kitchen he would ever be the victim of social obloquy. ‘Not a gentleman, eh? And him with his knighthood too.’

Skullion looked at him sternly. ‘Gentlemen don’t depend on knighthoods, Cheffy. Gentlemen is gentlemen,’ Skullion told him, and the Chef, suitably rebuked, nodded. Mr Skullion wasn’t somebody you argued with, not about matters of social etiquette, not
in Porterhouse. Not if you knew what was good for you. Mr Skullion was a power in the College.

They sat silently mourning the passing of the old Master and the debasement of college life which the coming of a new Master, who was not a gentleman, brought with it.

‘Still,’ said Skullion finally, ‘it was a fine Feast. I can’t remember a better.’ He said it half-grudgingly, out of respect for the past, and was about to go downstairs when the Master rapped on the High Table for silence and stood up. In the Musicians’ Gallery Skullion and the Chef stared in horror at the spectacle. A speech at the Feast? No. Never. The precedence of five hundred and thirty-two Feasts forbade it.

Sir Godber stared down at the heads turned towards him so incredulously. He was satisfied. The stunned silence, the stares of disbelief, the tension were what he had wanted. And not a single snigger. Sir Godber smiled.

‘Fellows of Porterhouse, members of College,’ he began with the practised urbanity of a politician, ‘as your new Master I feel that this is a suitable occasion to put before you some new thoughts about the role of institutions such as this in the modern world.’ Calculated, every insult delicately calculated, Porterhouse an institution, new, modern, role. The words, the clichés defiled the atmosphere. Sir Godber smiled. His sense of
grievance was striking home. ‘After such a meal’ (in the gallery the Chef shied), ‘it is surely not inappropriate to consider the future and the changes that must surely be made if we are to play our part in the contemporary world …’

The platitudes rolled out effortlessly, meaninglessly but with effect. Nobody in the hall listened to the words. Sir Godber could have announced the Second Coming without demur. It was enough that he was there, defying tradition and consciously defiling his trust. Porterhouse could remember nothing to equal this. Not even sacrilege but utter blasphemy. And awed by the spectacle, Porterhouse sat in silence.

‘And so let me end with this promise,’ Sir Godber wound up his appalling peroration, ‘Porterhouse will expand. Porterhouse will become what it once was – a house of learning. Porterhouse will change.’ He stopped and for the last time smiled and then, before the tension broke, turned on his heel and swept out into the Combination Room. Behind him with a sudden expiration of breath the Feast broke up. Someone laughed nervously, the short bark of the Porterhouse laugh, and then the benches were pushed back and they flooded out of the hall, their voices flowing out before them into the Court, into the cold night air. It had begun to snow. On the Fellows’ lawn Sir Godber Evans increased his pace. He had heard that bark and the sounds of the benches and the nervous energy he had expended had left him weak. He had challenged the College
deliberately. He had said what he wanted to say. He had asserted himself. There was nothing they could do now. He had risked the stamping feet and the hisses and they had not come but now, with the snow falling round him on the Fellows’ lawn, he was suddenly afraid. He hurried on and closed the door of the Master’s Lodge with a sigh of relief.

As the hall emptied and as even the Fellows drifted through the door of the Combination Room, the Chaplain rose to say Grace. Deaf to the world and the blasphemies of Sir Godber, the Chaplain gave thanks. Only Skullion, standing alone in the Musicians’ Gallery, heard him and his face was dark with anger.

In the Combination Room the Fellows digested the Feast dyspeptically. Sitting in their high-backed chairs, each with an occasional table on which stood coffee cups and glasses of brandy, they stared belligerently into the fire. Gusts of wind in the chimney blew eddies of smoke into the room to mingle with the blue cirrus of their cigars. Above their heads grotesque animals pursued in plaster evidently plastered nymphs across a pastoral landscape strangely formal, in which flowers and the College crest, a Bull Rampant, alternated, while from the panelled walls glowered the gross portraits of Thomas Wilkins, Master 1618–39, and Dr Cox, 1702–40. Even the fireplace, itself surrounded by an arabesque of astonishing grapes and well-endowed bananas, suggested excess and added an extra touch of flatulence to the scene. But if the Fellows found difficulty in coming to terms with the contents of their stomachs, the contents of Sir Godber’s speech were wholly indigestible.

‘Outrageous,’ said the Dean, discreetly combining protest with eructation. ‘One might have imagined he was addressing an electoral meeting.’

‘It was certainly a very inauspicious start,’ said the
Senior Tutor. ‘One would have expected a greater regard for tradition. When all is said and done we are an old college.’

‘All may have been said, though I doubt your optimism,’ said the Dean, ‘but it has certainly not been done. The Master’s infatuation with contemporary fashions of opinion may lead him to suppose that we are flattered by his presence. It is an illusion the scourings of party politics too naturally assume. I for one am unimpressed.’

‘I must admit that I find his nomination most curious,’ said the Praelector. ‘One wonders what the Prime Minister had in mind.’

‘The Government’s majority is not a substantial one,’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘I should imagine he was ridding himself of a liability. If this evening’s lamentable speech was anything to go by, Sir Godber’s statements in the Commons must have raised a good many hackles on the back benches. Besides, his record of achievement is not an enviable one.’

‘It still seems odd to me,’ said the Praelector, ‘that we should have been chosen for his retirement.’

‘Perhaps his bark is worse than his bite,’ said the Bursar hopefully.

‘Bite?’ shouted the Chaplain. ‘But I’ve only just finished dinner. Not another morsel, thank you all the same.’

‘One must assume that it was a case of any port in a storm,’ said the Dean.

The Chaplain looked appalled.

‘Port?’ he screamed. ‘After brandy? I can’t think what this place is coming to.’ He shuddered and promptly fell asleep again.

‘I can’t think what the Chaplain is coming to, come to that,’ said the Praelector sadly. ‘He gets worse by the day.’

‘Anno domini,’ said the Dean, ‘anno domini, I’m afraid.’

‘Not a particularly happy expression, Dean,’ said the Senior Tutor, who still retained some vestiges of a classical education, ‘in the circumstances.’

The Dean looked at him lividly. He disliked the Senior Tutor and found his allusions distinctly trying.

‘The year of our Lord,’ the Senior Tutor explained. ‘I have the notion that our Master sees himself in the role of the creator. We shall have our work cut out preventing him from overexerting himself. We have our faults I daresay but they are not ones I would wish to see Sir Godber Evans remedy.’

‘I am sure the Master will allow himself to be guided by our advice,’ said the Praelector. ‘We have had some obdurate Masters in the past. Canon Bowel had some ill-advised notions about altering the Chapel services, I seem to recall.’

‘He wanted compulsory Compline,’ said the Dean.

‘A fearful thought,’ the Senior Tutor agreed. ‘It would have interfered with the digestive process.’

‘The point was made to him,’ the Dean continued,
‘after a particularly good dinner. We had had devilled crabs with jugged hare to follow. I think it was the cigars that did it. That and the zabaglione.’

‘Zabaglione?’ shouted the Chaplain. ‘It’s a little late but I daresay …’

‘We were talking about Canon Bowel,’ the Bursar explained to him.

The Chaplain shook his head. ‘Couldn’t abide the man,’ he said. ‘Used to live on poached cod.’

‘He had a peptic ulcer.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said the Chaplain. ‘With a name like that he should have known better.’

‘To return to the present Master,’ the Senior Tutor said, ‘I am not prepared to sit back and allow him to alter our present admissions policy.’

‘I don’t see how we can afford to,’ the Bursar agreed. ‘We are not a rich college.’

‘The point will have to be made to him,’ the Dean said. ‘We look to you, Bursar, to see that he understands it.’ The Bursar nodded dutifully. His was not a strong constitution and the Dean overawed him.

‘I shall do my best,’ he said.

‘And as far as the College Council is concerned I think the best policy will be one of … er … amiable inertia,’ the Praelector suggested. ‘That has always been one of our strong points.’

‘There’s nothing like prevarication,’ the Dean agreed, ‘I have yet to meet a liberal who can withstand the attrition of prolonged discussion of the inessentials.’

‘You don’t think the Bowel treatment, to coin a phrase?’ the Senior Tutor asked.

The Dean smiled and stubbed out his cigar.

‘There are more ways of killing a cat than stuffing it with …’

‘Hush,’ said the Praelector, but the Chaplain slept on. He was dreaming of the girls in Woolworths.

They left him sitting there and went out into the Court, their gowns wrapped round them against the cold. Like so many black puddings, they made their way to their rooms. Only the Bursar lived out with his wife. Porterhouse was still a very old-fashioned college.

In the Porter’s Lodge Skullion sat in front of the gas fire polishing his shoes. A tin of black polish stood on the table beside him and every few minutes he would dip the corner of his yellow duster into the tin and smear the polish on to the toe of his shoe with little circular movements. Round and round his finger would go inside the duster while the toecap dulled momentarily and grew to a new and deeper shine. Every now and then Skullion would spit on the cap and then rub it again with an even lighter touch before picking up a clean duster and polishing the cap until it shone like black japan. Finally he would hold the shoe away from him so that it caught the light and he could see deep in the brilliant polish a dark distorted reflection of himself.
Only then would he put the shoe to one side and start on the other.

It was something he had learnt to do in the Marines so many years ago and the ritual still had the satisfying effect it had had then. In some obscure way it seemed to ward off the thought of the future and all the threats implicit in that future, as if tomorrow was always a regimental sergeant-major and an inspection and change could be propitiated by a gleaming pair of boots. All the time his pipe smoked out of the corner of his mouth and the mantles of the gas fire darkened or glowed in the draught and the snow fell outside. And all the time Skullion’s mind, protected by the ritual and the artefacts of habit, digested the import of the Master’s speech. Change? There was always change and what good did it do? Skullion could think of nothing good in change. His memory ranged back over the decades in search of certainty and found it only in the assurance of men. Men no longer living or, if not dead, distant and forgotten, ignored by a world in search of effervescent novelty. But he had seen their assurance in his youth and had been infected by it so that now, even now, he could call it up like some familiar from the past to calm the seething uncertainties of the present. Quality, he had called it, this assurance that those old men had. Quality. He couldn’t define it or fix it to particulars. They had had it, that was all, and some of them had been fools or blackguards come to that but when they’d spoken there’d been a harshness in their
voices as if they didn’t give a damn for anything. No doubts, that’s what they’d had, or if they had them kept them to themselves instead of spreading their uncertainties about until you were left wondering who or where you were. Skullion spat on his shoe in memory of such men and their assurance and polished his reflection by the fire. Above him the tower clock whirred and rumbled before striking twelve. Skullion put on his shoes and went outside. The snow was falling still and the Court and all the College roofs were white. He went to the postern gate and looked outside. A car slushed by and all the way up King’s Parade the lamps shone orange through the falling snow. Skullion went in and shut the door. The outside world was none of his affair. It had a bleakness that he didn’t want to know.