Tom Sharpe - Grantchester Grind

Finally, just before the woman left, he asked about Transworld Television Productions. 'How are they going to run without me being there and telling them what projects to do? They need me to make decisions. There's no one down there can make them except me.'

'I'm sure they'll manage somehow. They understand you've got a serious health problem and in the past when you've been away in Thailand or Bali things have gone on very well.'

'You mean I can't communicate with them?' said Hartang.

'Of course you can. You've got all the equipment you need upstairs and Mr Skundler will take whatever instructions you want to give him every morning. When you have settled in you'll find it works extremely well. Is there anything else?'

'Yes,' said Hartang. 'I want to talk with Schnabel.'

'That is no problem. The telephone is in the study,' said the woman and walked out the front door.

Hartang went through to the study and dialled Schnabel's office. He got an answerphone. 'Mr Schnabel is not available to take messages,' a man's voice said, and the phone went dead. It was the same in the case of Feuchtwangler and Bolsover. Hartang knew he had something more than a health problem. Like being in solitary confinement. He looked at the collection of books on the shelves. They all dealt with American law.

For a while he sat at the desk and stared out through the window at the Master's Maze. From somewhere near by there came the sound of people playing croquet. Someone had once told him that croquet, for all its apparent gentility, was a vicious game, and the sound gave him no comfort. In the kitchen the shorter of the two men was sitting at the deal table helping Arthur peel potatoes. In the cellar the tall man, Bill, was watching a bank of television screens which showed the road, the drive, and views of the garden and the doors.

In the front room of the house in Onion Alley Skullion was explaining why Dr Vertel had had to go to Porterhouse Park in a hurry. He had already talked about Lord Wurford and how the College money had been lost by Fitzherbert when he was Bursar. For three days he had sat in a chair talking about Porterhouse and what it had been like in the old days while Mrs Ndhlovo took notes and the tape recorder ran silently beside him. In the past Skullion had glorified those days when Porterhouse had been a gentleman's college. Now he saw things differently. The years he had spent in the Master's Lodge confined to a wheelchair had given him time to think and reflect on the way he had been treated. He had always accepted the patronizing attitude of the Dean and Fellows and even the undergraduates as a necessary evil and had put up with it because that was part of the job of being a porter and because it gave him a curious sense of his own superiority. He wasn't educated, didn't know anything about science or history or any of the subjects they were interested in. Instead he had made a study of the men who passed through the College or stayed and became Fellows. As Head Porter he had been proud of Porterhouse and had accepted his role because he was serving gentlemen. It had been a necessary illusion but a partial one. He had never succumbed to it entirely and, as he explained through many digressions and byways of memories suddenly recalled, he had seen the illusion slowly dissolve until only the shell of the College remained and the gentlemen were dead and gone.

'They stopped dressing properly and getting their hair cut, not that some of them, especially the real scholars, had ever really known what they were wearing. There was that chemist Strekker, brilliant reputation he had and we'd heard him called a genius, F.R.S. and all that, and his gyp, name of Landon, had to lay his shirts and underpants out and tell him to wash his neck or have a bath or he wouldn't have from one year's end to the next. Wouldn't say boo to a goose, Strekker wouldn't, but he'd been what they called a boffin during the war and he'd gone to America and ended up at some College in Oxford. Funny thing was he wasn't in _Who's Who_ because I looked him up but I heard the Senior Tutor say once that often the very best people didn't want to and only the nouveaus made a point of getting in. Strekker would be like that. It wouldn't concern him being known or clean. But a gentleman for all that. Never rude though that wasn't always a sign. No, where it went wrong was after the war. A lot of ex-servicemen and half of them only National Service who'd never been in the war but were older in their twenties when they came up and couldn't be taught to be proper Porterhouse men. On grants too. You've no idea, you youngsters, what it was like then. Grim. With whalemeat in Hall and snoek, and all some of them seemed to have learnt was to skive in the army. I rate the rot from then with their something-for-nothing attitude. And even the ones who could afford to pay going to the NHS for nothing. Not that the National Health Service was a bad idea. It was the fact that everyone even the rich got everything free and they came to think life was like that.'

Purefoy almost argued about that, but he stayed silent and let Skullion keep talking and having the cups of tea Mrs Charlie brought in to whet his whistle. And give Mrs Ndhlovo time to rest her writing hand. By the third day she couldn't keep it up and bought a second tape recorder to back up the first. 'It's going to cost a fortune to have all this typed out,' she said and Skullion said they mustn't have it done in Cambridge. Someone in London who wouldn't know what he was talking about.

He thought Purefoy had been wise to move into digs too. 'They'd question you otherwise. Or even have you followed and we don't want that. I'll go back in my own good time when you've got everything you need down.'

So they went through the story of Sir Godber wanting to sell the College servants' houses in Rhyder Street and the sense of betrayal when Skullion was sacked and how they had made him Master after he'd killed Sir Godber and he'd had a Porterhouse Blue with the Dean and the Senior Tutor there in the room and they hadn't realized what it was and he might have died if Cheffy hadn't come round later that night and sent for the ambulance And then the years in the wheelchair and how he had stayed sane remembering who lived in what room and in which years. 'I sat and thought about it all and that's what you're getting now so it won't go to waste or get doctored up to look nice because it wasn't.'

Purefoy's interest waxed and waned with the topics. He found Skullion's assessment of the Senior Fellows most fascinating. 'Dean's not the man he was. The spirit has gone out of him and he's only left with his deviousness which he's always had. Made up for his lack of scholarship. Never published anything the Dean hasn't. Just run the College and he can't do that any more. Senior Tutor's different. He got a Two One and he did have a brain. Published a doctoral thesis on tides or rivers or something a long time back but he gave it up and became a Hearty. Wasn't Porterhouse being a scholar and he wanted to be one of them. Now I don't suppose he can think properly. Lost the habit cycling up and down the towpath with the Eights. But he fitted in which is what he wanted though he and the Dean used to fight like cat and dog. Hated one another which is what most of them do if you ask me. Spend hours thinking up things to say to one another that'll be like pinpricks. Only natural having to live on top of one another like that. Chaplain's deaf, or pretends to be. He's the one that's human. Likes the girls, the Chaplain does, girls in Woolworths and Boots. I've seen him sniffing around the perfume counter many a time just to size them up. Used to take photographs of them too. Not their bodies, just their faces when they'd let him. He loves a pretty face and who can blame him. Never did anyone any harm, the Chaplain.'