Grantchester Grind (23 page)

But the doctor excused himself and hurried away. The Praelector went into the
Bursar’s room, where he found him studying an immigration form for New Zealand. ‘You’re
not seriously thinking of leaving us, are you?’ he asked. ‘At the very moment of your
greatest achievement? Besides, they tell me it is an exceedingly dull country.’

‘That’s why I’m going there,’ said the Bursar. ‘I’d go somewhere even duller if I could
think of it.’

‘But my dear Bursar, you can be as dull as ditchwater in College. And besides, it is
precisely now that we have forty million pounds from Transworld due to us that we need your
expertise.’

‘Like a hole in the head,’ said the Bursar bitterly. The anti-depressants he was on
had slowed his thinking. ‘I…Did you say forty million pounds?’

The Praelector nodded. ‘I did. Mr Hartang has very generously doubled the amount of
compensation in return for a promise that there be no publicity. He has for his own good
reasons undergone what I believe is known as a change of heart.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said the Bursar. ‘He hasn’t got a heart. He’s got a beating bank
vault. And even if he had, what about that bloody man Kudzuvine? If he is stall in the
Master’s Lodge, there is no way I am coming back to Porterhouse.’

The Praelector smiled benignly at him and patted his shoulder. ‘I give you my word of
honour that Mr Kudzuvine is no longer with us,’ he said. ‘He is immersed in–’

‘The Bermuda Triangle tubewise. Don’t tell me,’ squawked the Bursar.

‘I was going to say in a totally different occupation and one in which he can
exercise his talents to the full and find complete satisfaction.’

‘Like he’s killing things,’ said the Bursar.

But the Praelector was not to be drawn. ‘He is engaged in work that is utterly removed
from anything he has done previously,’ he said. ‘You will never see or hear from him
again. And no, he is not dead. He is very much alive and, I am told, happy. Now then, I have a
taxi waiting…’

The Bursar was finally convinced. Something quite astonishing must have happened to
the College finances for the Praelector to keep a taxi waiting with the meter running
all this time. ‘You’ve really been very good to me,’ he said emotionally as they went down
the corridor and out into the open air. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without
you.’

‘I’m sure you would have done just as well,’ said the Praelector, ‘but I really don’t
think you’d have found life in New Zealand to your taste. All that lamb.’

The Bursar agreed. He’d gone off lamb.

For the Dean the next few days were as hellish as any he had known. He sat in his room
trying to come to terms with Skullion’s threat. Everything he had ever believed in had
been put in jeopardy by that confession. He was confronted by a disgustingly brutal
world in which the traditional virtues he held dear had been swept aside. Duty,
deference, honour and justice had all gone. Or were in conflict with one another. ‘It is
my duty to inform the police,’ he said to himself, only to hear another part of his mind
tell him not to be such a fool. ‘After all, the fact that Skullion told you he killed Sir
Godber is no proof that he did. He has only to deny it and then where would you be?’ The
Dean could find no answer to the question. Then again there was the honour of the College
to take into account. Even an unsubstantiated accusation would create a scandal and
Porterhouse had had too many scandals in recent years to withstand another. A fresh
crisis would only provide an excuse for those who wanted to change the whole character
of the College and the Dean and the Senior Tutor would be ousted by the likes of Dr
Buscott and brash young Fellows. The Prime Minister would appoint a new Master and
Porterhouse would become nothing more than an academic forcing-house like Selwyn or
Fitzwilliam. The Dean put his duty to one side and with it went his belief in justice.

There were other consequences. All his life the Dean had seen Skullion as a servant, a
social inferior whose deference was living proof that the old order had not
fundamentally been changed. Skullion had destroyed that comforting illusion. ‘Don’t
you Skullion me,’ he had said. ‘It’s Master from now on.’ With that command, and there could
be no other term for it, the Dean’s world had been turned upside down. Coming so shortly
after his encounter with the drunken Jeremy Pimpole living in squalor in the
gamekeeper’s cottage, Skullion’s assertion of his own authority had shattered the
Dean’s dream of society. Little islands of the old order, where deference was due,
undoubtedly remained but the tide of egalitarian vulgarity was rising and in time
would swamp them all. The Dean had seen that barbarism in action at the motorway service
areas and had been appalled. To encounter it in Porterhouse was more than he could bear. To
add to his sense of disillusionment there was also the knowledge that he had been wrong
about Sir Godber’s death and Lady Mary had been right. Her husband had been murdered. And
to compound that awful realization, the Dean had misunderstood the meaning of the
dying man’s last words and had interpreted them to make his murderer the Master of
Porterhouse. There was a horrible irony about that error but the Dean was in no mood to
appreciate it. Instead he kept to his rooms and thought the darkest thoughts, dined
silently in Hall and took long melancholy walks to Grantchester debating what on earth to
do.

It was on one of these walks that he encountered the Praelector. He too seemed
preoccupied. Ah, Dean, I see you too have taken to doing the Grantchester Grind,’ the old
man said.

The Dean did his best to smile. ‘I take my constitutional,’ he said. ‘I find it helps my
rheumatism to get some exercise.’

‘That too,’ the Praelector agreed. ‘Though in my case I come to try to clarify my
thoughts about the state of the College. It is not good.’

‘In what respect?’ enquired the Dean cautiously.

‘I do not know precisely. Though in the Bursar’s absence I have had occasion to
examine the accounts and our expenses and I have to say they are as bad as the poor man
has always maintained. Even to my untrained eye the situation looks desperate. I fear we
are facing bankruptcy.’

‘Bankruptcy? But the College can’t go bankrupt: Such things don’t happen. We are not some
sort of business company or any individual. Porterhouse is an institution, one of the
oldest in Cambridge. They won’t allow us to go bankrupt.’

‘They, Dean, they? May I enquire who this, or more precisely, these ubiquitous “They”
might be?’ The Praelector paused to allow the Dean to pass through a kissing gate
first.

The Dean went through and stopped. He had never before had to face such a direct
question about the nature of society. To his mind, a mind as drilled in deference as
Skullion’s, ‘They’ were anonymous and all-powerful and at the very heart of Britain, an
unperceived amalgam of, to use one of his clichés, the Great and the Good who ran the City
and Whitehall and gathered together at the Athenaeum and the Carlton and the better clubs
and in the House of Lords and were united in allegiance to the Crown. To be asked who “They’
were was to put in question the very existence of authority itself and render nebulous
unspoken certainties. ‘I cannot answer that,’ he said finally and stared out across the
meadows to a pollarded willow on the river bank.

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.

At Kloone University Purefoy Osbert finished his day of Continuous Assessment, the
monthly process of reading his students’ essays, appending a short commentary to each
of them and giving them grades. He had driven up from Cambridge with the satisfying
feeling that he had something to tell Mrs Ndhlovo that would surely convince her he was a
proper man. It had taken him some days to get over his cold and the fear he had
experienced in the maze but during that time his view of himself had changed. He had come
to Porterhouse to find out who had murdered Sir Godber Evans and in the space of a few weeks
he had succeeded where lawyers and trained private detectives, who had spent months and
even years, had failed. He had recorded the time and place, the Dean’s presence and the
circumstances surrounding the event most carefully and had even gone to the expense of
hiring a safety deposit box in Benet Street in which to keep these documents. On the other
hand he had rejected his first impulse to go down to London to tell Goodenough and his
cousin Vera, on the grounds that they would either consider his findings inconclusive
or take immediate and, in his opinion, precipitate action. He needed time to think
things over, and besides his own theories about the causes of crime and the role of the
police and law as being responsible for criminal behaviour had been thrown in doubt.
Worse still, for the first time in his life Purefoy had, if not met a murderer face to face,
seen his shape and heard the violence in his voice. There’d been no reasoned argument, no
plausible excuse or even explanation for his action, only the threat to tell Purefoy
that he had murdered Sir Godber if the Dean and Fellows tried to send him to Porterhouse
Park. Purefoy Osbert had never heard of Porterhouse Park before. Now he knew it was where
old Fellows went when they became a nuisance or got in trouble with the police. That much
he had learnt. But basically the mystery of Skullion’s motive remained unsolved. There
was a lot of groundwork still to do before he could submit convincing findings to Lady
Mary and to Goodenough and Lapline.