Tom Sharpe - Grantchester Grind

'But why are his obsessions centred on pigs and turtles and-'

'Simple,' said the Praelector. At our annual Founder's Feast we do tend to do ourselves very well and sometimes a little too exotically. I don't know if you realize the cost of genuine turtles these days. And sharks are by no means cheap and of course we always have a wild boar. It was all too much for the Bursar.'

'I'm not in the least surprised,' said the doctor. 'I cannot think of a more breathtakingly indigestible menu. And you really have piranhas too?'

'Only as a savoury at the end of the meal. Served on toast with a slice of lemon they make a very fine digestive. If you'd feel like accepting an invitation one of these days…'

But the doctor excused himself and hurried away. The Praelector went into the Bursar's room, where he found him studying an immigration form for New Zealand. 'You're not seriously thinking of leaving us, are you?' he asked. 'At the very moment of your greatest achievement? Besides, they tell me it is an exceedingly dull country.'

'That's why I'm going there,' said the Bursar. 'I'd go somewhere even duller if I could think of it.'

'But my dear Bursar, you can be as dull as ditchwater in College. And besides, it is precisely now that we have forty million pounds from Transworld due to us that we need your expertise.'

'Like a hole in the head,' said the Bursar bitterly. The anti-depressants he was on had slowed his thinking. 'I…Did you say forty million pounds?'

The Praelector nodded. 'I did. Mr Hartang has very generously doubled the amount of compensation in return for a promise that there be no publicity. He has for his own good reasons undergone what I believe is known as a change of heart.'

'I don't believe it,' said the Bursar. 'He hasn't got a heart. He's got a beating bank vault. And even if he had, what about that bloody man Kudzuvine? If he is stall in the Master's Lodge, there is no way I am coming back to Porterhouse.'

The Praelector smiled benignly at him and patted his shoulder. 'I give you my word of honour that Mr Kudzuvine is no longer with us,' he said. 'He is immersed in-'

'The Bermuda Triangle tubewise. Don't tell me,' squawked the Bursar.

'I was going to say in a totally different occupation and one in which he can exercise his talents to the full and find complete satisfaction.'

'Like he's killing things,' said the Bursar.

But the Praelector was not to be drawn. 'He is engaged in work that is utterly removed from anything he has done previously,' he said. 'You will never see or hear from him again. And no, he is not dead. He is very much alive and, I am told, happy. Now then, I have a taxi waiting…'

The Bursar was finally convinced. Something quite astonishing must have happened to the College finances for the Praelector to keep a taxi waiting with the meter running all this time. 'You've really been very good to me,' he said emotionally as they went down the corridor and out into the open air. 'I don't know what I should have done without you.'

'I'm sure you would have done just as well,' said the Praelector, 'but I really don't think you'd have found life in New Zealand to your taste. All that lamb.'

The Bursar agreed. He'd gone off lamb.

For the Dean the next few days were as hellish as any he had known. He sat in his room trying to come to terms with Skullion's threat. Everything he had ever believed in had been put in jeopardy by that confession. He was confronted by a disgustingly brutal world in which the traditional virtues he held dear had been swept aside. Duty, deference, honour and justice had all gone. Or were in conflict with one another. 'It is my duty to inform the police,' he said to himself, only to hear another part of his mind tell him not to be such a fool. 'After all, the fact that Skullion told you he killed Sir Godber is no proof that he did. He has only to deny it and then where would you be?' The Dean could find no answer to the question. Then again there was the honour of the College to take into account. Even an unsubstantiated accusation would create a scandal and Porterhouse had had too many scandals in recent years to withstand another. A fresh crisis would only provide an excuse for those who wanted to change the whole character of the College and the Dean and the Senior Tutor would be ousted by the likes of Dr Buscott and brash young Fellows. The Prime Minister would appoint a new Master and Porterhouse would become nothing more than an academic forcing-house like Selwyn or Fitzwilliam. The Dean put his duty to one side and with it went his belief in justice.

There were other consequences. All his life the Dean had seen Skullion as a servant, a social inferior whose deference was living proof that the old order had not fundamentally been changed. Skullion had destroyed that comforting illusion. 'Don't you Skullion me,' he had said. 'It's Master from now on.' With that command, and there could be no other term for it, the Dean's world had been turned upside down. Coming so shortly after his encounter with the drunken Jeremy Pimpole living in squalor in the gamekeeper's cottage, Skullion's assertion of his own authority had shattered the Dean's dream of society. Little islands of the old order, where deference was due, undoubtedly remained but the tide of egalitarian vulgarity was rising and in time would swamp them all. The Dean had seen that barbarism in action at the motorway service areas and had been appalled. To encounter it in Porterhouse was more than he could bear. To add to his sense of disillusionment there was also the knowledge that he had been wrong about Sir Godber's death and Lady Mary had been right. Her husband had been murdered. And to compound that awful realization, the Dean had misunderstood the meaning of the dying man's last words and had interpreted them to make his murderer the Master of Porterhouse. There was a horrible irony about that error but the Dean was in no mood to appreciate it. Instead he kept to his rooms and thought the darkest thoughts, dined silently in Hall and took long melancholy walks to Grantchester debating what on earth to do.

It was on one of these walks that he encountered the Praelector. He too seemed preoccupied. Ah, Dean, I see you too have taken to doing the Grantchester Grind,' the old man said.

The Dean did his best to smile. 'I take my constitutional,' he said. 'I find it helps my rheumatism to get some exercise.'

'That too,' the Praelector agreed. 'Though in my case I come to try to clarify my thoughts about the state of the College. It is not good.'

'In what respect?' enquired the Dean cautiously.

'I do not know precisely. Though in the Bursar's absence I have had occasion to examine the accounts and our expenses and I have to say they are as bad as the poor man has always maintained. Even to my untrained eye the situation looks desperate. I fear we are facing bankruptcy.'

'Bankruptcy? But the College can't go bankrupt: Such things don't happen. We are not some sort of business company or any individual. Porterhouse is an institution, one of the oldest in Cambridge. They won't allow us to go bankrupt.'

'They, Dean, they? May I enquire who this, or more precisely, these ubiquitous "They" might be?' The Praelector paused to allow the Dean to pass through a kissing gate first.

The Dean went through and stopped. He had never before had to face such a direct question about the nature of society. To his mind, a mind as drilled in deference as Skullion's, 'They' were anonymous and all-powerful and at the very heart of Britain, an unperceived amalgam of, to use one of his clichés, the Great and the Good who ran the City and Whitehall and gathered together at the Athenaeum and the Carlton and the better clubs and in the House of Lords and were united in allegiance to the Crown. To be asked who "They' were was to put in question the very existence of authority itself and render nebulous unspoken certainties. 'I cannot answer that,' he said finally and stared out across the meadows to a pollarded willow on the river bank.