Tom Sharpe - Porterhouse Blue

“My wife is most anxious that you should dine with us one evening,” he fabricated. “She is concerned to know your views on the question of lady tutors for our female undergraduates.”

“Lady tutors?” said the Senior Tutor. “Lady tutors?”

“Naturally as a coeducational college we shall require some female Fellows,” the Master explained.

“Charming,” said the Dean nastily.

“This comes as something of a shock. Master,” said the Senior Tutor.

Sir Godber helped himself to stilton. “There are some matters. Senior Tutor, that are essentially feminine if you see what I mean. You would hardly want a young woman coming to you for advice about an abortion.”

The Senior Tutor disengaged himself from a mango precipitately. “Certainly not,” he spluttered.

“It’s an eventuality we have to consider, you know,” continued Sir Godber. “These things do happen, and since they do it would be as well to have a Lady Tutor.”

Down the table the Dean smiled happily. “And possibly a resident surgeon?” he suggested.

The Master flushed. “You find the topic amusing. Dean?” he enquired.

“Not the topic, Master, so much as the contortions of the liberal conscience,” said the Dean, settling back in his chair with relish. “On the one hand we have an overwhelming urge to promote the equality of the sexes. We admit women to a previously all-male college on the grounds that their exclusion is clearly discriminatory. Having done so much we find it necessary to provide a contraceptive dispenser in the Junior lavatory and an abortion centre doubtless in the Matron’s room. Such a splendid prospect for parents to know that the welfare of their daughters is so well provided for. No doubt in time there will be a College crèche and a clinic.”

“Sex is not a crime, Dean.”

“In my view pre-marital intercourse comes into the category of breaking and entering,” said the Dean. He pushed back his chair and they stood while he said grace.

As he walked back through the Fellows’ Garden the Master felt again that sense of unease which dining in Hall always seemed to give him. There had been a confidence about the Dean that he distrusted. Sir Godber couldn’t put his finger on it exactly but the feeling persisted. It wasn’t simply the Dean’s manner. It had something to do with the Hall itself. There was something vaguely barbarous about the Hall, as if it were a shrine to appetite and hallowed by the usage of five hundred years. How many carcases had been devoured within its walls? And what strange manners had those buried generations had? Pre-Renaissance men, pre-scientific men, medieval men had sat and shouted and thought… Sir Godber shuddered at the superstitions they had entertained as if he could undo the thread of time that linked him to their animality. He willed his separation from them. He was a rational man. The contradiction in the phrase alarmed him suddenly. A rational man, free of the absurd and ignorant restrictions that had limited those men whose speculations on the nature of angels and devils, on alchemy and Aristotle, seemed now to verge on the insane. Sir Godber halted in the garden, astonished at the idea that he was the product of such a strange species. They were as remote to him as prehistoric animals and yet he inhabited buildings which they had built. He ate in the same Hall in which they had eaten and even now was standing on ground where they had walked. Alarmed at this new apprehension of his pedigree. Sir Godber peered around him in the darkness and hurried down the path to the Master’s Lodge. Only when he had closed the door and was standing in the hall beneath the electric light did he feel reassured. He went into the drawing-room where Lady Mary was watching a film on television about the problems of senility. Sir Godber allowed himself to be conducted through several geriatric wards before becoming uncomfortably aware that his simple equation of progress with improvement did not apply to the ageing process of the human body. With the silent thought that if that was what the future held in store for him he would prefer a return to the past, he took himself up to bed.

Skullion returned from the Thames Boatman at closing time. He had had no supper and eight pints of Guinness had done nothing to improve his opinion that he had been shamefully treated. He staggered into the Porter’s Lodge and, ignoring Walter’s protest that his wife had been expecting him home for supper at seven o’clock and it was now eleven and what was he supposed to tell her, stumbled through to the back room and lay on the bed. It was a long time since he had had eight pints of anything and it was this more than his innate sense of duty that got him off the bed to close the front gate at twelve o’clock. In the intervals between tottering through to the lavatory Skullion lay in the darkness, while the room revolved around him, trying to sort out what he should do from what that television chap had said to him. Go and see the General in the morning. Appear on the box with Carrington. Programme on Cambridge. Finally he got to sleep and woke late for the first time in forty-five years. It no longer mattered. His days as Head Porter of Porterhouse were over. By the time Walter arrived Skullion had made up his mind. He took his coat down from the hook and put it on. “Going out,” he told the astonished under-porter (Skullion hadn’t been known to go out in the morning since he had been his assistant) and fetched his bicycle. The thaw had set in and this time as Skullion pedalled out to Coft the fields around him were piebald. Head bent against the wind, Skullion concentrated on what he was going to say and failed to notice the Dean’s car as it swept past him. By the time he reached Coft Castle the bitterness that had been welling in him since his interview with the Bursar had bred in him an indifference to etiquette. He left his bicycle beside the front door of the house and knocked heavily on the door knocker. Sir Cathcart answered the door himself and was too astonished to find Skullion glowering at him from the doorstep to remind him that he was expected to use the kitchen door. Instead he found himself following the Porter into his drawing-room where the Dean, already ensconced in an armchair in front of the fire, had been telling him the news about Cornelius Carrington. Skullion stood inside the door and stared belligerently at the Dean while Sir Cathcart wondered if he should ring for the cook to bring a kitchen chair.

“Skullion, what on earth are you doing here?” asked the Dean. There was nothing hangdog about the Porter now.

“Come to tell the General about being sacked,” said Skullion grimly.

“Sacked? What do you mean? Sacked?” The Dean rose to his feet, and stood with his back to the fire. It was a good traditional stance for dealing with truculent servants.

“What I say,” said Skullion, “I’ve been sacked.”

“Impossible,” said the Dean. “You can’t have been sacked. Nobody’s told me anything about this. What for?”

“Nothing,” said Skullion.

“There must be some mistake,” said the General. “You’ve got hold of the wrong end of…”

“Bursar sent for me. Told me I’d got to go,” Skullion insisted.

“Bursar? He’s got no authority to do a thing like that,” said the Dean.

“Well, he’s done it. Yesterday afternoon,” Skullion continued. “Told me to find other employment. Says the College can’t afford to keep me on. Offered him money too, to help out. Wouldn’t take it. Just gave me the sack.”

“This is scandalous. We can’t have College servants treated in this high-handed fashion,” said the Dean. “I’ll have a word with the Bursar when I get back.”

Skullion shook his head sullenly. “That won’t do any good. The Master put him up to it.”