Porterhouse Blue (23 page)

‘Told whom?’ Carrington asked, grammatically influenced by his surroundings.

‘Sir Cathcart and the Dean.’

Carrington breathed a sigh of relief. ‘They should certainly see that you’re reinstated,’ he said, ‘but just in case they don’t, you can always find me at the Blue Boar.’

He left the office and made his way to the hotel. There was really nothing to worry about. An appeal by the Dean to Sir Godber’s better feelings was hardly likely to advance the Porter’s cause but, just in case, Carrington phoned the
Cambridge Evening News
and announced that the Head Porter of Porterhouse had been dismissed for objecting to the proposed installation of a contraceptive dispenser in the Junior lavatory. ‘You can confirm it with the Domestic Bursar,’ he told the sub-editor, and replaced the receiver.

A second call to the Students Radical Alliance announcing the victimization of a college servant for joining a trade union, and a third to the Bursar himself, conducted this time in pidgin English, and complaining that the UNESCO expert on irrigation in Zaire expected his diplomatic immunity to protect him from
being ejected with obscenities by the guardian of the Porterhouse gate, completed the process of ensuring that Skullion’s dismissal should become public knowledge, the centre of left-wing protest, and irrevocable. Feeling fully justified, Carrington lay back on his bed with a smile. It had been a long time since he had been ducked in the fountain in New Court but he had never forgotten it. In the Bursar’s office the telephone rang and rang again. The Bursar answered, refused to comment, demanded to know where the sub-editor had got his information, denied that a contraceptive dispenser had been installed in the Junior lavatory, admitted that one was going to be, refused to comment, denied any knowledge of sexual orgies, agreed that Zipser’s death had been caused by the explosion of gas-filled prophylactics, asked what that had to do with the Head Porter’s dismissal, admitted that he had been sacked and put the phone down. He was just recovering when the Students Radical Alliance phoned. This time the Bursar was brief and to the point. Having relieved his feelings by telling the Radical Students what he thought of them he replaced the receiver with a bang only to hear it ring again. The ensuing conversation with the delegate from Zaire, marked as it was by frequent references to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and the Race Relations Board and punctuated by apologies from the Bursar and the assurance that the porter in question had been dismissed, completed his demoralization. He put the phone down, picked it up again and
sent for Skullion. He was waiting for him when the Dean entered.

‘Ah, Bursar,’ he said, ‘just wanted a word with you. What’s all this I hear about Skullion being sacked?’ The Bursar looked at him vindictively. He had had about all he could take of Skullion for one afternoon.

‘It would appear that you have been misinformed,’ he said with considerable restraint, ‘Skullion has not been sacked. I have merely suggested to him that it is time he looked around for other employment. He’s getting on and he’s due for retirement shortly. If he can find another job in the meantime it would be sensible for him to take it.’ He paused for a moment to allow the Dean to digest this version before continuing. ‘However, that was yesterday. What has happened today puts the matter in an entirely different light. I have sent for Skullion and I do intend to sack him.’

‘You do?’ said the Dean, who had never before seen the Bursar so forthright.

‘I have just received a complaint from a diplomat from Zaire who says that he was thrown out of the College by Skullion, who, if I understood him aright, called him among other things a nigger.’

‘Quite right and proper,’ said the Dean, who had been trying to figure out where Zaire was. ‘The College is private property and Skullion doubtless had good reasons for chucking the blighter out. Probably committing a public nuisance.’

‘He called him a nigger,’ said the Bursar.

‘If the man is a nigger, I see no reason why Skullion shouldn’t call him one.’

‘The Race Relations Board might not view the matter quite so leniently.’

‘Race Relations Board? What the devil has it got to do with them?’ asked the Dean.

‘The fellow said he was going to complain to them. He also mentioned the Foreign Secretary.’

The Dean capitulated. ‘Dear me,’ he muttered, ‘we can’t have the College involved in a diplomatic incident.’

‘We certainly can’t,’ said the Bursar. ‘Skullion will just have to go.’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ said the Dean, and took his leave. Outside in the Court he found the Porter waiting in the rain.

‘This is a bad business, Skullion,’ he said mournfully. ‘A very bad business. There’s nothing I can do for you now I’m afraid. A bad business,’ and still shaking his head he made his way across the lawn to his staircase. Behind him Skullion stood in the falling dusk with a new and terminal sense of betrayal. There was evidently no point in seeing the Bursar. He turned and plodded back to the Porter’s Lodge and began to pack his odds and ends.

The Bursar sat on in his office waiting. He phoned the Porter’s Lodge but there was no reply. Finally he
typed a letter to Skullion and posted it on the way home.

It was still raining when Skullion left the Porter’s Lodge with his few belongings in a battered suitcase. The rain gathered in his bowler and flecked his face so that it was difficult even for him to know if there were tears running down his nose or not. If there were they were not for himself but for the past whose representative he had ceased to be. He stopped every now and then to make sure that none of the labels on the suitcase had come off in the rain. The bag had belonged to Lord Wurford and the stickers from Cairo and Cawnpore and Hong Kong were like relics from some Imperial pilgrimage. He crossed the Market Square, where the stalls were empty for the night. He went down Petty Curie and through Bradwell’s Court and across Christ’s Piece towards Midsummer Common. It was already dark and his feet squelched in the mud of the cycle track. Like the wind that blew in his face, swerved to left and right and suddenly propelled him forward, Skullion’s feelings seemed to have no fixed direction. There was no calculation in them; the years of his subservience had robbed him of self-interest. He was a servant with nothing left to serve. No Master, no Dean, not even an undergraduate to whom he could attach himself, grudgingly, rudely, to disguise from himself the totality of his dependence. Above all, no College to
protect him from the welter of experience. It wasn’t the physical college that mattered. It was the idea and that had gone with his dismissal and the betrayal it represented.

Skullion crossed the iron footbridge and came to Rhyder Street. A tiny street of terraced houses hidden among the large Victorian villas of Chesterton so that even here Skullion could feel himself not far removed from the boathouses and the homes of professors. He went inside and took off his coat and put the suitcase on the kitchen table. Then he sat down and took his shoes off. He made a pot of tea and sat at the kitchen table wondering what to do. He’d go and see the bank manager in the morning about his legacy from Lord Wurford. He fetched a tin of boot polish and a duster and began to polish the toecaps of his shoes. And slowly, as each toecap began to gather lustre under the gentle circling of his finger, Skullion lost the sense of hopelessness that had been with him since the Dean had left him standing in New Court. Finally, taking a clean duster, he gave a final polish to the shoes and held them up to the light and saw reflected in their brilliance something remote that he knew to be his face. He got up and put the duster and the tin of polish away and made himself some supper. He was himself again, the Porter of Porterhouse, and with this restoration of his own identity there came a new stubbornness. He had his rights. They couldn’t turn him out of his own home and his job. Something would happen to stop them. As
he moved about the house his mind became obsessed with Them. They had always been there hedged with respect and carrying an aura of authority and trust so that he had felt himself to be safe from Them but it was different now. The old loyalty was gone and Skullion had lost all sense of obligation to Them. Looking back over the years since the war he could see that there’d been a steady waning of respect. There’d been no real gentlemen since then, none that he’d had much time for, but if each succeeding year had disillusioned him a little more with the present, it had added a deal of deference to the more distant past. It was as though the war had been the fulcrum of his regard. Lord Wurford, Dr Robson, Professor Dunstable, Dr Montgomery, they had gained in lustre out of sheer contrast with the men who had come after them. And Skullion himself had been exalted with them because he had known and served them.

At ten o’clock he went to bed and lay in the darkness unable to sleep. At midnight he got up and shuffled downstairs almost automatically and opened the front door. It had stopped raining and Skullion shut the door again after peering up and down the street. Then, reassured by this act of commemoration, he lit the gas fire in the front room and made himself a pot of tea. At least he had still got his legacy. He’d go to the bank in the morning.

The bank manager saw Skullion at ten o’clock. ‘Shares?’ he said. ‘We have an investment department and we could advise you of course.’ He looked down at the details of Skullion’s deposit account. ‘Yes, five thousand pounds is quite sufficient but don’t you think it would be wiser to put the money into something less speculative?’

Skullion shifted his hat on his knees and wondered why no one seemed to listen to what he said. ‘I don’t want to buy any shares. I want to buy a house,’ he said.

The manager looked at him approvingly. ‘A much better idea. Put your money in property especially in these days of inflation. You have a property in mind?’

‘It’s in Rhyder Street,’ said Skullion.

‘Rhyder Street?’ The manager raised his eyebrows and pursed his mouth. ‘That’s a different matter. It’s being sold as a lot, you know. You can’t buy individual houses in Rhyder Street, and quite frankly I don’t suppose your five thousand would match some of the other bids.’ He permitted himself a chuckle. ‘In fact it’s doubtful if five thousand would get you anything in Cambridge. You’d have to raise a mortgage, and at your age that’s not an easy matter.’

Skullion produced the envelope containing his shares. ‘I know that,’ he said. ‘That’s why I want to sell these shares. There are ten thousand. I think they’re worth a thousand pounds.’

The manager took the envelope. ‘We must just hope they’re worth a little more than that,’ he said. ‘Now
then …’ His condescendingly cheerful tone stuttered out. ‘Good God!’ he said, and stared at the sheaf of shares before him. Skullion shifted guiltily on his chair, as if he personally took the blame for whatever it was about the pieces of paper that caused the manager to stare in such amazement. ‘Amalgamated Universal Stores. But this is quite extraordinary. How many did you say?’ The manager was on his feet now twittering.

‘Ten thousand,’ said Skullion.

‘Ten thousand?’ The manager sat down again. He picked up the phone and rang the investment department. ‘Amalgamated Universal Stores. What’s the current selling price?’ There was a pause while the manager studied Skullion with a new incredulous respect. ‘Twenty-five and a half?’ He put the phone down and stared at Skullion.

‘Mr Skullion,’ he said at last, ‘this may come as something of a shock to you. I don’t quite know how to put it, but you are worth a quarter of a million pounds.’

Skullion heard the words, but they had no visible effect upon him. He sat unmoved upon his chair and stared numbly at the bank manager. It was the manager himself who seemed most affected by the sudden change in Skullion’s status. He laughed nervously and with a slight hysteria.

‘I don’t think there’s much doubt that you can make a bid for Rhyder Street now,’ he said at last but Skullion wasn’t listening. He was a rich man. It was something he had never dreamed of being.

‘There must have been dividends,’ said the manager. Skullion nodded. ‘In the building society.’ He got up and put the chair back against the wall. He looked at the shares which represented his fortune. ‘You’d better put them back into the safe,’ he said.

‘But …’ began the manager. ‘Now Mr Skullion, sit down and let’s discuss this matter. Rhyder Street? There’s no need to think of Rhyder Street now. We can sell these shares and … or at least some of them and you can purchase a decent property and settle down to a new life.’

Skullion considered the suggestion. ‘I don’t want a new life,’ he said grimly. ‘I want my old one back.’

He left the manager standing behind his desk and went out into Sydney Street. In his office the bank manager sat down, his mind crowded with cheap images of wealth, cruises and cars and bright suburban bungalows, ideas he had thought disreputable before. To Skullion, standing on the pavement, such things meant nothing. He was a rich man and the knowledge did nothing to ease his resentment. If anything it increased it. He had been cheated somehow. Cheated by his own ignorance and the loyalty he had given Porterhouse. The Master, the Dean, even General Sir Cathcart D’Eath, were the legatees of his new bitterness. They had misused him. He was free now, without the fear of dismissal or unemployment to mitigate his hatred. He went down Green Street towards the Blue Boar.

During the next two days Cornelius Carrington was intensely busy. His dapper figure trotted across lawns and up staircases with a retinue of cameramen and assistants. Corners of Porterhouse that had remained obscure for centuries were suddenly illuminated by the brightest of lights as Carrington adorned his commentary with architectural trimmings. Everyone cooperated. Even the Dean, convinced that he was heaping coals of fire on the Master’s head, consented to discuss the need for conservatism in the intellectual climate of the present day. Standing beneath a portrait of Bishop Firebrace, Master 1545–52, who had, as Carrington was at some pains to point out in his added commentary, played a notable role in suppressing Kett’s Rebellion, the Dean launched into a ferocious attack on permissive youth and extolled the celibacy of previous generations of undergraduates. In contrast, the Chaplain was driven to admit that what many supposed to have been a nunnery before it was burnt down in 1541 had in fact been a brothel during the fifteenth century. The camera dwelt at length on foundations of the ‘nunnery’ still visible in parts in the Fellows’ Garden while Carrington expressed surprise that a college like Porterhouse
should have allowed such sexual laxity so many centuries before. The Senior Tutor was filmed cycling along the towpath by Fen Ditton coaching an eight, and was then interviewed in Hall on the dietary requirements of athletes. Carrington wheedled out of him the fact that the annual Feast cost over £2,000 and then went on to ask if the College made any contribution to Oxfam. At this point, forgetful of his electronic audience, the Senior Tutor told him to mind his own business and stalked out of the Hall trailing the broken lead of his throat microphone. Sir Godber was treated more gently. He was allowed to stroll across New Court and through the Screens discoursing on the need for a progressive and humanitarian role for Porterhouse. Pausing to look far-sightedly across the thirty feet that separated him from the end wall of the Library, the Master spoke of the emotional–intellectual symbiosis that was a part of university experience, he lowered his head and addressed a crocus on the catharsis of sexual union, he raised his eyes to a fifteenth-century chimney and esteemed the compassion of the young, their energetic concern and the rightness of their revulsion at the outmoded traditions that … He waxed eloquent on meaningful relationships and urged the abolition of exams. Above all he praised youth. The elderly, by which he evidently meant anyone over thirty-five, must not stand in the way of young men and women whose minds and bodies were open … Even Sir Godber faltered at this point and Carrington steered him back
to the subject of social compassion, which he saw as the true benefit of a university education. The Master agreed that a sense of social justice was indeed the hallmark of the educated mind. Carrington stopped the cameras and Sir Godber made his way back to the Master’s Lodge, certain that he had ended on the right note. Carrington thought so too. While his cameramen took close-ups of the heraldic beasts on the front of the main gate and panned along the spikes that guarded the back wall, Carrington drove over to Rhyder Street and spent an hour closeted with Skullion. ‘All I want you to do is to come back to the College and talk about your life as Head Porter,’ he told him. Skullion shook his head. Carrington tried again. ‘We’ll take some shots of you outside the main gate and then you can stand in the street and I’ll ask you a few questions. You don’t have to go into the College itself.’ Skullion remained adamant.