‘A one-way mirror, eh? And a video camera. Well, well. Someone is into porno by the
look of things. I think we are going to need a photographer and the print man,’ the
Inspector said, and suggested they wait outside in the car. The General went downstairs
and ran the gauntlet of the architects’ office and sat in the police car. He’d changed his
mind about his solicitor.
‘You can use the car phone, sir,’ he was told. An hour later with the solicitor, a very
respectable solicitor who, if he had known General Sir Cathcart D’Eath in happier
circumstances, didn’t show it, they all climbed the stairs and inspected the rooms once
again. The leather straps and the inflatable gag were placed in plastic bags.
‘There is no need for you to say anything, and I strongly advise you not to,’ the
solicitor informed Sir Cathcart and requested that his client be allowed to go home. The
General had to wait for a taxi and the Inspector said he would make an appointment to see
him when they needed to ask him any further questions. Or perhaps he would prefer to come
to the police station instead when they let him know. The solicitor said his client would
prefer to be interviewed at home. Sir Cathcart went back to Coft Castle and was
photographed by a young newspaperman who just happened to be there.
Alone in his study Sir Cathcart D’Eath sat with a revolver and a bottle of Chivas Regal
and thought about shooting Myrtle fucking Ransby. And possibly some policemen at the
same time.
As the end of term drew near and the Porterhouse Eights, no longer near the Head of the
River, rowed over or moved up one, and as the marquees for the May Ball arrived and
preparations were made, for erecting them, Hartang came almost unnoticed to
Porterhouse. His car, no stretch limo with black windows but a three-year-old Ford as
nondescript as Hartang himself, slipped into the Old Coach House and the Master-to-be
climbed out and stared around at the motley of old cars, the Dean’s humpbacked Rover and the
Chaplain’s ancient Armstrong Siddeley and Professor Pawley’s even older Morris. In
the space of sixty miles he had stepped from the safety and sterile modernity of
Transworld Centre into a mausoleum of antique machinery. Even the large iron bolts on the
Coach House doors alarmed him by their simplicity while on the whitewashed wall at one end a
wooden hay-rack spoke of even older means of transport. And the floor was cobbled and
stained with oil. Hartang looked at it all distrustfully and with a sense of defeat.
‘If you’ll just follow me, sir,’ said the taller of the two men who had driven up with
him. ‘We can walk across to the Master’s Lodge unobserved.’ He opened a side door and
stepped outside. Hartang followed nervously and blinked in the bright sunshine. Without
his dark blue glasses the light hurt his weak eyes and he walked with head down to avoid the
glare until they were in the hall of the Master’s Lodge. Here evidence of the past was all
too apparent. The furniture he had seen on his previous visits had been comparatively
modern but in its place there was solid black oak and dark mahogany and even an old curved
wooden hatstand. On the wall the portrait of Humphrey Lombert, Master 1852-83, stared
through small metal spectacles sternly into the distance over his head. The floor was
shining parquet with a dark red Afghan rug. Behind him the smaller man shut the door
quietly and they went through into the drawing-room where a woman with permed hair and
wearing a brown tweed suit was sitting on a chintz sofa looking through a copy of The
Field. Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘I do hope you had an uneventful drive.’
Hartang tried to smile and said it had been all right ‘Well, now that you’re safely here,’
she said without introducing herself, ‘you can make yourself at home. Your luggage is
upstairs and everything has been unpacked. You’ll find it in the wardrobes and the chests
of drawers. I’ll show you that in a moment. In the meantime here are your new passport and
birth certificate. And your curriculum vitae. There is nothing in it that should cause
you any difficulties. We have tried to keep as close to your natural characteristics as
possible. You are an obsessional recluse with very few outside interests. A number of
suggested hobbies have been listed. There is, for instance, the collection of
eighteenth-century American law books that you might like to have. Or there’s…’
Hartang sat in an armchair and knew he was trapped. Until this moment and until this
woman with the plump legs and the permed hair he hadn’t been sure. He knew he’d been in deep
shit, but you might get out of deep shit if you thought enough about it and had people out
front. This was different. He was alone and in an environment he didn’t begin to
understand and she was telling him how he was going to live his life and what he was going
to think and all she was allowing him to do was to choose some hobbies. Worst of all, she
was doing it all with an air of absolute certainty that he had to do exactly what she
was telling him. Even in prison all those years ago Hartang had felt freer than he did now.
And even when they took him up in the elevator and explained how the doors and the roof and
floor were bullet-proof and if he ever felt threatened all he had to do was get in there
fast and press the yellow button, he could find no comfort in the knowledge. Quite the
opposite. The metal walls were like a cell, they weren’t even like: they were a cell. The
bedroom was full of old-fashioned furniture too and it was only when they went through it
to a small room with no windows that Hartang began to feel in surroundings that he was
used to–computer screens and printers and white wood tables and comfortable executive
chairs.
‘You have your communications centre here and you can get all the information you
need and talk to whoever you want to worldwide,’ the woman told him. Hartang doubted it.
Whatever he said and whatever messages he sent or came in would be recorded. The
information he wanted was what the fuck was going on.
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.’
‘And what about the Praelector?’ Purefoy asked. ‘Is he a nice man?’
‘Nice? The Praelector? No, I wouldn’t say he was nice. Nice isn’t the word for him. He’s a
strange old stick, he is. Didn’t say boo to a goose for years and then suddenly he’s
something you’ve never expected. English, if you know what I mean. Lost his wife when she
was only forty-five and for several years he was a broken man. Took rooms in College and
never looked at another woman. Something in anti-tank during the war though you’d
never think it to look at him. Was a military historian and wrote books on the First World
War and what fools the generals were. I ought to know. Lost my dad the second day of the
Somme and two uncles at some muddy place where they had to use duckboards and if you fell
off you drowned.’
That evening in the digs in City Road Mrs Ndhlovo wondered how they were going to
organize the mass of material Skullion had provided in such a disorganized way.
“There’s a tremendous amount and half of it is overload.’
‘Once we have the transcript, then I’ll edit it,’ Purefoy said. ‘I won’t cut too much
out, but he does repeat himself. It must be a unique account of life in a college from an
entirely different point of view.’
‘And what about Lady Mary?’
‘I’m not thinking about her at the moment, and anyway she’ll get a full report. I don’t
really care if she likes it. I’m doing what she asked me to.’