Tom Sharpe - Grantchester Grind

He was saved by a new and extraordinarily vivid illusion. Or delusion. There was another ghastly figure at the Chapel door and as he gazed in utter horror there was a sudden eruption of people from the Chapel who fought their way out and over the ghastly figure. The Senior Tutor shut his eyes and crawled back to his bed. At least in there he couldn't see anything very much. He lay with his head under the covers and prayed for death.

He was in this condition when the Praelector arrived in a state of alarm himself. 'Senior Tutor, Senior Tutor, are you there?' he called out from the passage. The Senior Tutor whimpered and pretended not to be anywhere, but the Praelector was not to be misled. What was happening in the College was so dreadful he had to consult someone and none of the Junior Fellows was about and the Dean was absent and Professor Pawley, who had been doing something astronomical during the night, had sported his oak and refused to be woken. Only the Senior Tutor was available to help cope with the crisis. 'Senior Tutor, for Heaven's sake do get up. The most dreadful things are happening.'

The Senior Tutor knew that but he didn't want to talk about it. 'Go away, please go away,' he called weakly from the bedroom. 'I am very unwell.'

'Unwell? Oh dear, I am sorry. Do you want to have the doctor or Matron? I'll go and…'

But the thought that first the Matron and then Dr MacKendly should see him before he died roused the Senior Tutor. 'No, for God's sake, no,' he pleaded, emerging from under the bedclothes. 'And on no account turn on the light.'

Framed in the doorway, the Praelector hesitated. He had heard rumours about the Senior Tutor's sex life and he was afraid he might be intruding upon it in some way. 'When you say you are unwell…' he began.

'I am…I am the Senior Tutor struggled to find words for his state without mentioning the DTs and men in dark glasses and white socks. 'I am not quite myself.'

For a moment the Praelector, a man who was not easily affected by events and took things as they came, was distracted from his own recent experiences. 'So few of us are,' he said. 'I know that at times I am not entirely sure of my own real nature. It is a question of philosophical interest that-'

'It isn't,' the Senior Tutor protested. 'It has nothing to do with philosophy. I am beside myself.'

'Ah,' said the Praelector, reverting to his previous sexual theory that the Senior Tutor might actually be beside someone else. 'Now do you mean that literally or metaphorically?'

It was not a question the Senior Tutor felt in the least like answering. 'What the hell does it matter whether I mean…Oh God, the agony…Can't you tell I am out of my mind,' he almost shouted.

'Well, I can certainly tell you are not entirely in it,' said the Praelector. 'But then so few Cambridge dons are entirely in their minds all the time. In fact I'd go so far as to say some of them appear to have no minds to be in. That is surely where the expression "to be in two minds" comes from.'

'Does it fuck!' screamed the Senior Tutor, driven even further towards dementia by the abstract nature of the argument. 'I am out of the only mind I've got. Or had. I am mad. I am insane. Don't you understand simple language?'

'If you put it like that, I can't say I am entirely surprised,' said the Praelector, whose goodwill had reached its limit. 'To tell the truth I never believed you to be entirely normal. All that rowing and riding up and down the towpath shouting obscenities…'

The Senior Tutor shouted some more and provoked the Praelector to switch the light on. He had almost entirely forgotten why he had come to see the Senior Tutor. What he saw now served to convince him that his original premise had been the right one. Clearly the Senior Tutor had done something very nasty to himself sexually. The face that glowered at him from the bed was that of a man in extremis. The Praelector's concern came back. 'My dear fellow, what have you been doing to yourself? At your age masturbation can be very dangerous. Have you been using some-'

'Masturbation,' screamed the Senior Tutor. 'Bugger masturbation.' Again it was an unfortunate expression to use.

'Well, there is that,' said the Praelector, glancing round the bedroom to see if there was some young man there, but he could only see the Senior Tutor's clothes all over the floor and what looked like a very full bottle of Californian Chardonnay beside the bed. Something about the aroma in the room suggested he was mistaken about its contents. All the same…'

But the Senior Tutor had been driven beyond the bounds of endurance by the suggestion that he had been masturbating. He didn't exactly leap from the bed-he was incapable of leaping anywhere-but he certainly staggered from it.

The Praelector looked at his naked body with disgust. And fear. The Senior Tutor hadn't been exaggerating. He was extremely mad and extremely dangerous. All right, I'll go,' the Praelector said, backing through the doorway and now remembering why he had come in the first place. 'But before I do I think you ought to know that the College is filled with dreadful young men in dark glasses and polo-neck sweaters and white socks and…' To his amazement a change came over the Senior Tutor. From being very obviously a homicidal maniac he had suddenly switched to being something else.

It would have been going too far to say that he was looking happy. The '47 crusted port and the Benedictine were still having their effects on just about every part of his body and his eyes didn't look at all healthy but his relief had turned him back into something almost human. 'What did you say?' he whimpered. 'What was that you said?'

'I said the College is filled with dreadful young men in dark glasses and polo-neck sweaters-'

In front of him the Senior Tutor sank to his knees and raised his bloodshot eyes to the ceiling. 'Alleluia, praise be to God,' he moaned, and expressed his feelings by throwing up.

The Praelector left him there and went down into the Court to find that Walter, three other porters, Arthur, the Chef and the entire kitchen staff plus the gardeners supported by dozens of undergraduates, had rounded up the Transworld team and had hustled them out into the street. 'You come back in here like that and you'll get more than a bloody nose,' Walter told one of the team whose glasses had been broken and who was minus a moccasin. 'Next time you won't know what's fucking hit you.'

In the Chaplain's rooms Kudzuvine still didn't. The Matron, a heavy woman with large hands, had had a look at him and had advised calling Dr MacKendly. 'You never know, do you?' she told the Chaplain who was rather partial to her. 'Not with blows to the head, you don't. I daresay he'll be all right but it's best to be on the safe side.'

'I'm not sure that I want to be,' said the Praelector, who had joined the little group at the bedside. 'Anyone who can do what those men did to the Chapel doesn't come into any category I want to preserve alive.' He thought for a moment and then added, 'Oh, and by the way, Matron, I think it might be advisable for you to pay the Senior Tutor a visit. He's been acting very peculiarly and I think he could do with some assistance.'

Muttering to herself that he always did act peculiar, she left on the Praelector's mission of revenge. He still hadn't got over the Senior Tutor's disgusting behaviour or his language. The Matron would do him good. In any case he wanted to ask this awful gangster with the swollen nose what he and his mob had been doing in the College. 'It's not as though there is anything worth stealing, or we'd have sold it,' he told the Chaplain, who was trying to treat Kudzuvine's suspected concussion or fractured skull with brandy. Kudzuvine wasn't having any. He lay there staring up at the Chaplain in a glazed way.