Tom Sharpe - Grantchester Grind

The Praelector made his way through the gate and stepped aside to let a jogging undergraduate go by. 'The powers that be,' he said, 'are no longer on our side. They have been supplanted by purely mercenary men who have no social interest. My lifetime has encompassed our decline. A sad, dispiriting epoch and one that leaves us wholly at the mercy of the market. We've fought two wars and won a hollow victory at the cost of millions dead and all our independence lost. Sparta and Athens went that way and Greece's greatness perished. Like them we have nothing to sell but ourselves.'

'I do not follow you,' said the Dean. 'How can we sell ourselves? I have nothing to offer a buyer. I am an old man and everything I hold dear is in the College.'

'I was speaking in more general terms. Personally I daresay we are all provided for by pensions and small private means. I have in mind the College. It is ourselves collectively.'

'But that is out of the question,' said the Dean. 'The College cannot be put up for sale. We are not some marketable commodity.'

The Praelector poked a molehill with his walking stick. 'I shouldn't be too sure of that. In the present climate of opinion it would be a brave man who would predict what was a commodity that might be up for sale. Who would have thought a few years ago that water would be sold to private companies, some of them foreign at that, and that each English family would have to pay for a necessity of life and put a profit in the hands of individual shareholders? And water is a monopoly as well. We cannot pick and choose which tap to use. And if water, why not air?'

'But that's absurd,' said the Dean. Air is for everyone to breathe. It's everywhere. It needs no pipes or reservoirs, no pumping stations or filtration plants as water does.'

'Can you be sure? I can't,' said the Praelector. 'There's talk of air pollution all the time. The fumes from car exhausts and factory chimneys and even the boilers for domestic central heating. A perfectly valid case could be made out for processing the air and making it fit for human consumption. The men who think only of money could make out that case. "Clean air," they'd say. And what needs cleaning costs money and must be paid for. And where there's money to be paid there must accordingly be profit to be made. One has to have material incentive if market forces are to work. That is the principle our masters in the "powers that be" apply. They recognize no other.'

'It is an obnoxious one,' said the Dean heatedly. 'I fail to see how it can be applied so generally. Some things cannot be quantified in terms of money.'

'Name me one,' said the Praelector.

The Dean stood still and tried to think of something beyond price. 'A man's life,' he said. 'I defy you to calculate a human life in monetary terms. It can't be done.'

'It can and is,' replied the Praelector and pointed his stick at a distant concrete tower. Addenbrooke's Hospital, the new one over there. Go there and ask the doctors in the geriatric wards or in intensive care what determines when they turn a life-support machine off or why some patients are deemed not to warrant certain complicated operations? Or better still, ask them why foreign patients who can pay vast sums for liver transplants are given preferential treatment over English ones who've paid their taxes all their lives into the National Health Service. They'll tell you why, those doctors will. Because the Treasury uses all those NHS payments for other things like roads and civil servants' salaries. It goes into the general fund and only a portion goes to nursing British patients. So now the surgeons charge rich foreigners to raise the funds they need to operate on us.'

They walked in silence for a while and the Dean's thoughts grew darker still. The old man's arguments had served to reinforce his own conviction that something had to be done about Skullion. If the Praelector could face the grim realities of life without recourse to comforting pretence, the Dean felt he ought to take up the challenge himself and say what was preying on his mind. And if the College finances were in such a terrible way, and for the first time he did not doubt it, the question of the Master became more urgent still. 'I wonder if you would come down to the river with me,' he said when they reached the last gate. 'It is more private there and what I have to say must be said in absolute confidence.'

They turned off the path and made their way down to the river bank. There, standing by the water and the waving weeds swept by the river's flow, the Dean told the story of Skullion's confession and his threat to make it public. The Praelector stared at the water weeds for some time before he spoke.

'It fits,' he said at last, 'it fits the facts. I can't say I'm entirely surprised. There is a streak of violence in us all and Godber Evans had sacked Skullion who had more violence in him than most of us. Still has it, by the sound of things. You say he threatened you?'

The Dean nodded. 'Skullion was drunk. He said he had us by the short and curlies and by the balls, the bloody balls he said, and when I asked him why or what he meant he said he knew that Lady Mary had sent this Dr Osbert to find out who had murdered her husband. God knows how he finds out these things.'

'Because he's clung to his authority,' the Praelector said. 'In his own mind he is still Head Porter. All the servants know that too. They tell him everything they hear. The Chef, the waiters, the gyps and bedders doing our rooms. They don't miss much, and what they don't tell Skullion he deduces for himself. What words exactly did he use about Dr Osbert? Can you remember them?'

The Dean searched back to that bad night. 'He asked a question,' he said. 'I remember that. Something to this effect, "Who put up six million pounds to send the new Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow here?" That's what he said and when I said I did not know he said, "That bloody Lady Mary did because she wanted to know who'd murdered her husband and this Fellow is here to nose about." Yes, that was what he said. In just those words. "To nose about."'

'And then?'

Then he said he could tell him,' the Dean went on. '"Because I did. And if you try to sweep me under the carpet to the Park, I'll tell him. Because I murdered the bastard." He told me to put that in my pipe and smoke it.'

The Praelector sighed a long sigh. 'He said to sweep him under the carpet, did he? He's got a long memory, has Skullion. I made a joke once along those lines.'

'And he remembered it,' said the Dean. 'He said you'd called it under the Parket.'

'And that's the truth,' the Praelector said and whacked a tuft of grass with his stick. 'That was when Vertel had to go away before the police arrived.' He paused for a moment. 'So Master Skullion has us by the short and curlies, has he? I think not.'

He turned and led the way up to the tarmac path and the Dean followed. He was relieved to have confided in the Praelector. There was a strength in the older man he knew he'd somehow lost himself, a strength of purpose and a terrible clarity of thought. And this time the Praelector led the way through all the gates.

They neither of them spoke for a long while and it was only when they had crossed Laundress Green and reached the Mill that the Praelector turned aside. 'You have told no one else, not even the Senior Tutor?' he asked.

'No one, Praelector, not a soul.'

'Good. And now we'll go separate ways into the College. We don't want to be seen together going in. I'll speak to you later. Things cannot rest like this.' And with what appeared to the Dean to be surprising energy, the Praelector strode off down the lane towards Silver Street.

For a moment the Dean lingered by the Mill looking at the water churning over the weir and under the bridge beneath him, remembering nostalgically the time a South African undergraduate had swum the Mill Pond in midwinter for a five-pound bet. That had been in 1950, and the young man's name had been Pendray. A Cat's man, the Dean seemed to recall, and wondered what had become of him. He looked up in time to see the Praelector disappear down the public lavatory on the far side, which explained his sudden hurry. With a fresh sense of disillusionment the Dean turned away and went the other way down Little St Mary's Passage. He would have a cup of tea in the Copper Kettle before going back to Porterhouse. There, sitting unhappily, he understood now why in earlier times the Praelector had been known as the 'Father of the College'. The term 'Grantchester Grind' had taken on a new meaning for him too.