Porterhouse Blue (25 page)

‘Porterhouse has always been a sporting college. In the past we have tried to achieve a balance between scholarship and sport,’ the Dean replied.

‘He never put that question to me,’ yelled the real Dean. ‘He’s taking my words out of context.’

‘You don’t see this as an act of sexual aberration?’ Carrington interrupted.

‘Sexual promiscuity plays no part in college life,’ the Dean asserted.

‘You’ve certainly changed your tune, Dean,’ shouted the Chaplain. ‘The first time I’ve heard you say that.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ screamed the Dean. ‘I said …’

‘Hush,’ said Sir Godber, ‘I’m trying to hear what you did say.’

The Dean turned purple in the darkness as Carrington continued.

‘I interviewed the Chaplain of Porterhouse in the Fellows’ Garden,’ he told the world. The Dean and Bishop Firebrace had disappeared to be replaced by the rockeries and elms and two tiny figures walking on the lawn.

‘I never realized the Fellows’ Garden was so large,’ said the Chaplain, peering at his remote figure.

‘It’s distorted by the wide-angle lens …’ Sir Cathcart began to explain.

‘Distorted?’ snarled the Dean. ‘Of course it’s distorted, the whole bloody programme’s a distortion.’

The camera zoomed in on the Chaplain.

‘The College used to have a brothel, you know. People like to pretend it was a nunnery but it was actually a whorehouse. In the fifteenth century it was quite the normal thing,’ the Chaplain’s voice echoed across the lawn. ‘Burnt down in 1541. A great pity really. Mind you I’m not saying there weren’t nuns. The Catholics have always been broadminded about such things.’

‘So much for the ecumenical movement,’ muttered the Senior Tutor.

‘So you don’t agree with the Dean that …’ Carrington began.

‘Agree with the Dean, dear me no,’ the Chaplain shouted. ‘Never did. Peculiar fellow, the Dean. All those photographs of young men in his room. And he’s getting on in years now. We all are. We all are.’ The camera moved away slowly, leaving the Chaplain a distant figure in a landscape with his voice growing fainter like the distant cawing of rooks.

The Chaplain turned to the Senior Tutor. ‘That was rather nice. Seeing oneself on the screen like that. Most enlightening.’ In the corner a strangled sound issued from the Dean. The Senior Tutor was breathing hard too, and staring at the river at Fen Ditton. An eight was
swinging round Grassy Corner and an aged youth in a blazer and cap cycled busily after them. As the eight approached and disappeared the screen filled with the perspiring face of the Senior Tutor. He stopped and dismounted his bicycle. Carrington’s voice interrupted his panting.

‘You’ve been coach now for twenty years and in that time you must have seen some extraordinary changes in Porterhouse. What do you think of the type of young man coming up to Cambridge today?’

‘I’ve seen some lily-livered swine in my time,’ the Senior Tutor bawled, ‘but nothing to equal this. A more disgraceful exhibition of gutlessness I’ve never seen.’

‘Would you put this down to pot-smoking?’ Carrington enquired.

‘Of course,’ said the Senior Tutor, and promptly disappeared from the screen.

In the Combination Room the Senior Tutor was speechless with rage. ‘He didn’t ask me any questions like that. He wasn’t even there,’ he managed to gasp. ‘He told me they were simply going to film me on the river.’

‘It’s poetic licence,’ said the Chaplain, and relapsed into silence as Carrington and the Senior Tutor reappeared in Hall and strolled between the tables. The camera focused on the several portraits of obese Masters before returning to the Senior Tutor.

‘Porterhouse has enjoyed a long reputation for good living,’ Carrington said. ‘Would you say that the sort of
expense involved in providing caviar and truffled duck pâté was really necessary for scholastic achievement?’

‘I think much of our success has been due to the balanced diet we provide in Porterhouse,’ said the Senior Tutor. ‘You can’t expect people to do well unless they are adequately fed.’

‘But I understand that you spend fairly large sums on the annual Feast. Would you say that £2,000 on a single meal was a fair estimate?’ Carrington enquired.

‘We do have an endowed kitchen,’ the Senior Tutor admitted.

‘And I suppose the College makes a large contribution to Oxfam,’ said Carrington.

‘That’s none of your damned business,’ shouted the Senior Tutor. The camera followed his figure out of Hall.

As the devastating disclosures continued the Fellows sat dumbfounded in the Combination Room. Carrington waxed eloquent on Porterhouse’s academic shortcomings, interviewed several undergraduates who sat with their backs to the camera to preserve their anonymity and claimed that they were afraid they would be sent down if their identities were known to the Senior Members of the College. They accused the College authorities of being hidebound and violently reactionary in their politics, and … On and on it went. Sir Godber put his case for social compassion as the hallmark of the educated mind and suddenly the scene changed. The images of Cambridge disappeared and
the Fellows found themselves staring lividly at Skullion who sat firmly in his seat in the studio. The camera switched to Carrington. ‘In the interviews we have already shown tonight we have heard a good deal to justify, and some would say to condemn, the role of institutions such as Porterhouse. We have heard the old traditions defended. We have heard privilege attacked by the progressive young and we have heard a great deal about social compassion, but now we have in the studio a man who more than any other has an intimate knowledge of Porterhouse and whose knowledge extends over four decades. Now you, Mr Skullion, have been for some forty years the Porter of Porterhouse.’

Skullion nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘You first became a porter in 1928?’

‘Yes.’

‘And in 1945 you were made Head Porter?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So really you’ve been in the College long enough to have seen some quite remarkable changes?’ Skullion nodded obediently.

‘And now I understand you’ve been sacked?’ said Carrington. ‘Have you any idea why this has happened?’

Skullion paused while the camera moved in for a close-up.

‘I have been dismissed because I objected to the installation of a contraceptive dispenser in the College for the use of the young gentlemen,’ Skullion told three
million viewers. There was a pause while the camera swung back to Carrington, who was looking suitably shocked and surprised.

‘A contraceptive dispenser?’ he asked. Skullion nodded. ‘A contraceptive dispenser. I don’t think it’s right and proper for Senior Members of a college like Porterhouse to encourage young men to behave like that.’

‘Oh my God,’ said the Master. Beside him the Senior Tutor was staring at the screen with bulging eyes while the Dean appeared to be in the throes of some appalling paroxysm. Throughout the Combination Room the Fellows gazed at Skullion as if they were seeing him for the first time, as if the caricature that they had known had suddenly come alive by virtue of the very apparatus which separated him from them. Skullion’s presence filled the room. Even Sir Cathcart took note of the change and sat rigidly to attention. Beside him the Bursar whimpered. Only the Chaplain remained unmoved. ‘Skullion’s remarkably fluent,’ he said, ‘and making some interesting points too.’

Carrington too seemed to have shrunk to a less substantial role. ‘You think the attitude of the authorities is wrong?’ he asked lamely.

‘Of course it’s wrong,’ said Skullion. ‘Young people shouldn’t be taught to think that they’ve a right to do what they want. Life isn’t like that. I didn’t want to be a porter. I had to be one to earn my living. Just because a man’s been to Cambridge and got a degree doesn’t
mean life’s going to treat him any different. He’s still got to earn a living, hasn’t he?’

‘Quite,’ said Carrington, desperately trying to think of some way of getting the discussion back to the original topic. ‘And you think—’

‘I think they’ve lost their nerve,’ said Skullion. ‘They’re frightened. They call it permissiveness. It isn’t that. It’s cowardice.’

‘Cowardice?’ Carrington had begun to dither.

‘It’s the same all over. Give them degrees when they haven’t done any work. Let them walk about looking like unwashed scarecrows. Don’t send them down when they take drugs. Let them come in at all hours of the night and have women in their rooms. When I first started as a porter they’d send an undergrad down as soon as look at him and quite right too, but now, now they want them to have an FL machine in the gents to keep them happy. And what about queers?’ Carrington blanched.

‘You ought to know about that,’ said Skullion. ‘Used to duck them in the fountain, didn’t they? Yes, I remember the night they ducked you. And quite right too. It’s all cowardice. Don’t talk to me about permissiveness.’ Carrington gazed frantically at the programme controller behind the dark glass but the programme remained on the air.

‘And what about me?’ Skullion asked the camera in front of him. ‘Worked for a pittance for forty years and they sack me for nothing. Is that fair? You want
permissiveness? Well, why can’t I be permitted to work? A man’s got a right to work, hasn’t he? I offered them money to keep me on. You ask the Bursar if I didn’t offer him my savings to help the College out.’

Carrington grasped at the straw. ‘You offered the Bursar your life savings to help the College out?’ he asked with as much enthusiasm as the recent revelations about his sex life had left him.

‘He said they couldn’t afford to keep me on as Porter,’ Skullion explained. ‘He said they were having to sell Rhyder Street to pay for the repairs to the Tower.’

‘And Rhyder Street is where you live?’

‘It’s where all the College servants live. They’ve got no right to turn us out of our own homes.’

In the Combination Room the Master and Fellows of Porterhouse watched the reputation of the College disintegrate as Skullion pressed on with his charges. This was no longer Carrington on Cambridge. Skullion had taken over with a truer and more forceful nostalgia. While Carrington sat pale and haggard beside him, Skullion ranged far and wide. He spoke of the old virtues, of courage and loyalty, with an inarticulate eloquence that was authentically English. He praised gentlemen long dead and castigated men still alive. He asserted the value of tradition in college life against the shoddy innovations of the present. He expressed his admiration for scholarship and deplored research. He extolled wisdom and refused to confuse it with knowledge.
Above all he claimed the right to serve and with it the right to be treated fairly. There was no petulant whine about Skullion’s appeal. He held a mirror up to a mythical past and in a million homes men and women responded to the appeal.

By the time the programme ended, the switchboard at the BBC was jammed with calls from people all over the country supporting Skullion in his crusade against the present.

In the Combination Room the Fellows sat looking at the blank screen long after Skullion’s terrible image had disappeared and the Bursar had switched the set off. It was the Chaplain who finally broke the appalled silence.

‘Very interesting point of view, Skullion’s,’ he said, ‘though I must admit to having some doubts about the effect on the restoration fund. What did you think of the programme, Master?’

Sir Godber suppressed a torrent of oaths. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he said with a desperate attempt at composure, ‘that many people will take much note of what a college porter has to say. The public have very short memories, I’m glad to say.’

‘Damned scoundrel,’ snarled Sir Cathcart. ‘Ought to be horsewhipped.’

‘What? Skullion?’ asked the Senior Tutor.

‘That swine Carrington,’ shouted the General.

‘It was your idea in the first place,’ said the Dean.

‘Mine?’ screamed Sir Cathcart. ‘You put him up to this.’

The Chaplain intervened. ‘I always thought it was a mistake to duck him in the fountain,’ he said.

‘I shall consult my solicitor in the morning,’ said the Dean. ‘I think we have adequate grounds for suing. There’s such a thing as slander.’

‘I must say I can hardly see any justification for going to law,’ said the Chaplain. Sir Godber shuddered at the prospect.

‘He deliberately fabricated questions to answers I had already given,’ said the Senior Tutor.

‘He may have done that,’ the Chaplain agreed, ‘but I think you’ll have difficulty in proving it. In any case if I were asked I should have to say that he did manage to convey the spirit of our opinions if not the actual letter. I mean you do think the modern generation of undergraduates are … what was the expression?… a lot of lily-livered swine. The fact that you have now said it in public may be regrettable but at least it’s honest.’

They were still fulminating an hour later when the Master, exhausted by the programme and by the terrible animosity it had provoked among his colleagues, finally left the Combination Room and made his way across the Fellows’ Garden to the Master’s Lodge. As he stumbled across the lawn he was still uncertain what effect the programme would have. He tried to console himself with the thought that public opinion was essentially progressive and that his record as a reforming politician would carry him safely through the outcry that was bound to follow. He tried to recall what it was about his own appearance on the screen that had so alarmed him. For the first time in his life he had seen
himself as others saw him, an old man mouthing clichés with a conviction that was wholly unconvincing. He went into the Lodge and shut the door.

Upstairs in the bedroom Lady Mary disembarked from her corset languidly. She had watched the programme by herself and had found it curiously stimulating. It had confirmed her opinion of the College while at the same time she had been aroused once again by the warm hermaphroditism of Cornelius Carrington himself. Age and the Rubicon of menopause had stimulated Lady Mary’s appetite for such men and she found herself moved by his vulnerable mediocrity. As ever with Lady Mary’s affections, distance lent enchantment to the view, and for one brief self-indulgent moment she saw herself the intimate patroness of this idol of the media. Sir Godber, she had to admit, was a spent force whereas Carrington was still an influence. She smothered the impulse with cold cream but there was enough vivacity left to surprise Sir Godber when he came to bed.