Tom Sharpe - Porterhouse Blue

“Ah my boy,” the Chaplain boomed as Zipser negotiated the bric-a-brac that filled the Chaplain’s sitting-room. “So good of you to come. Do make yourself comfortable.” Zipser nudged past a gramophone with a papier-mâché horn, circumvented a brass-topped table with fretsawed legs, squeezed beneath the fronds of a castor-oil plant and finally sat down on a chair by the fire. The Chaplain scuttled backwards and forwards between his bathroom and the teatable muttering loudly to himself a liturgy of things to fetch. “Teapot hot. Spoons. Milk jug. You do take milk?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Zipser.

“Good. Good. So many people take lemon, don’t they? One always forgets these things. Tea-cosy. Sugar basin.” Zipser looked round the room for some indication of the Chaplain’s interests but the welter of conflicting objects, like the addition of random numbers to a code, made interpretation impossible. Apart from senility the furnishings had so little in common that they seemed to indicate a wholly catholic taste.

“Crumpets,” said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. “Just the thing. You toast them.” He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the fork into Zipser’s hand. Zipser poked the crumpet at the fire tentatively and felt once again that dissociation from reality that seemed so much a part of life in Cambridge. It was as if everyone in the College sought to parody himself, as if a parody of a parody could become itself a new reality. Behind him the Chaplain stumbled over a footrest and deposited a jar of honey with a boom on the brass-topped table. Zipser removed the crumpet, blackened on one side and ice cold on the other, and put it on a plate. He toasted another while the Chaplain tried to spread butter on the one he had half done. By the time they had finished Zipser’s face was burning from the fire and his hands were sticky with a mixture of melted butter and honey. The Chaplain sat back in his chair and filled his pipe from a tobacco jar with the Porterhouse crest on it.

“Do help yourself, my dear boy,” said the Chaplain, pushing the jar towards him.

“I don’t smoke.”

The Chaplain shook his head sadly. “Everyone should smoke a pipe,” he said. “Calms the nerves. Puts things in perspective. Couldn’t do without mine.” He leant back, puffing vigorously. Zipser stared at him through a haze of smoke.

“Now then where were we?” he asked. Zipser tried to think. “Ah yes, your little problem, that’s right,” said the Chaplain finally. “I knew there was something.”

Zipser stared into the fire resentfully.

“The Senior Tutor said something about it. I didn’t gather very much but then I seldom do. Deafness, you know.”

Zipser nodded sympathetically.

“The affliction of the elderly. That and rheumatism. It’s the damp, you know. Comes up from the river. Very unhealthy living so close to the Fens.” His pipe percolated gently. In the comparative silence Zipser tried to think what to say. The Chaplain’s age and his evident physical disabilities made it difficult for Zipser to conceive that he could begin to understand the problem of Mrs Biggs.

“I really think there’s been a misunderstanding,” he began hesitantly and stopped. It was evident from the look on the Chaplain’s face that there was no understanding at all.

“You’ll have to speak up,” the Chaplain boomed. “I’m really quite deaf.”

“I can see that,” Zipser said. The Chaplain beamed at him.

“Don’t hesitate to tell me,” he said. “Nothing you say can shock me.”

“I’m not surprised,” Zipser said.

The Chaplain’s smile remained insistently benevolent. “I know what we’ll do,” he said, hopping to his feet and reaching behind his chair. “It’s something I use for confession sometimes.” He emerged holding a loudhailer and handed it to Zipser. “Press the trigger when you’re going to speak.”

Zipser held the thing up to his mouth and stared at the Chaplain over the rim. “I really don’t think this is going to help,” he said finally. His words reverberated through the room and set the teapot rattling on the brass table.

“Of course it is,” shouted the Chaplain, “I can hear perfectly.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Zipser said desperately. The fronds of the castor-oil plant quivered ponderously. “I meant I don’t think it’s going to help to talk about…” He left the dilemma of Mrs Biggs unspoken.

The Chaplain smiled in absolution and puffed his pipe vigorously. “Many of the young men who come to see me,” he said, invisible in a cloud of smoke, “suffer from feelings of guilt about masturbation.”

Zipser stared frantically at the smoke screen. “Masturbation? Who said anything about masturbation?” he bawled into the loudhailer. It was apparent someone had. His words, hideously amplified, billowed forth from the room and across the Court outside. Several undergraduates by the fountain turned and stared up at the Chaplain’s windows. Deafened by his own vociferousness, Zipser sat sweating with embarrassment.

“I understood from the Senior Tutor that you wanted to see me about a sexual problem,” the Chaplain shouted.

Zipser lowered the loudhailer. The thing clearly had disadvantages.

“I can assure you I don’t masturbate,” he said.

The Chaplain looked at him incomprehendingly. “You press the trigger when you want to speak,” he explained. Zipser nodded dumbly. The knowledge that to communicate with the Chaplain at all he had to announce his feelings for Mrs Biggs to the world at large presented him with a terrible dilemma made no less intolerable by the Chaplain’s shouted replies.

“It often helps to get these things into the open,” the Chaplain assured him. Zipser had his doubts about that. Admissions of the sort he had to make broadcast through a loudhailer were not likely to be of any help at all. He might just as well go and propose to the wretched woman straightaway and be done with it. He sat with lowered head while the Chaplain boomed on.

“Don’t forget that anything you tell me will be heard in the strictest confidence,” he shouted. “You need have no fears that it will go any further.”

“Oh sure,” Zipser muttered. Outside in the Quad a small crowd of undergraduates had gathered by the fountain to listen.

Half an hour later Zipser left the room, his demoralization quite complete. At least he could congratulate himself that he had revealed nothing of his true feelings and the Chaplain’s kindly probings, his tentative questions, had elicited no response. Zipser had sat silently through a sexual catechism only bothering to shake his head when the Chaplain broached particularly obscene topics. In the end he had listened to a lyrical description of the advantages of au pair girls. It was obvious that the Chaplain regarded foreign girls as outside the sexual canons of the Church.

“So much less danger of a permanently unhappy involvement,” he had shouted, “and after all I often think that’s what they come here for. Ships that pass in the night and not on one’s own doorstep you know.” He paused and smiled at Zipser salaciously. “We all have to sow our wild oats at some time or other and it’s much better to do it abroad. I’ve often thought that’s what Rupert Brooke had in mind in that line of his about some corner of a foreign field. Mind you, one can hardly say that he was particularly healthy, come to think of it, but there we are. That’s my advice to you, dear boy. Find a nice Swedish girl, I’m told they’re very good, and have a ball. I believe that’s the modern idiom. Yes, Swedes or French, depending on your taste. Spaniards are a bit difficult, I’m told, and then again they tend to be rather hairy. Still, buggers can’t be choosers as dear old Sir Winston said at the queer’s wedding. Ha, ha.”