Grantchester Grind (35 page)

For the next four days the Praelector was a busy man. He consulted Mr Retter and Mr
Wyve; he telephoned a number in London and met a plump woman with a Liberty shopping bag
in Grantchester and had a long talk with her walking in the meadows; he even went to Coft
Castle and had a most distasteful hour with Sir Cathcart who wept maudlin tears about
Skullion and finally agreed to go to a Spa. He also spoke to Kentucky Fry who said Shit he
wasn’t going to do any such fucking thing. The General had bought him some weaners and he
was going in for hog raising in a big way. Guy he’d met said they were selling off land from
the airbases for Transcendental Meditation but he reckoned hogs was better like fifty
thousand piglets rootling would give a good living and living was what he was into,
staying living. The Praelector agreed it was a good idea but in the meantime all he
wanted him to do was think about it. Kentucky Fry said he couldn’t think about anything else
except…

‘How about deportation? To Singapore,’ said the Praelector and switched his
attention away from hog raising. Kudzuvine said he didn’t want to be deported. Hadn’t
done nothing wrong in Singapore. The Praelector smiled and gave him two days to go on
thinking about it. Kudzuvine didn’t need two days. No sir, if that was what they wanted,
like a ceremonial role and he didn’t have to do anything else, his answer was in the
affirmative. The Praelector took his taxi back to Porterhouse and spoke to the Chef who
said it wasn’t usual but he didn’t see why not. And finally the Praelector visited Onion
Alley by appointment and talked to Skullion for a long time.

But his hardest task was one he put off to the end waiting until the May Ball was in full
swing and the telephone in the Porter’s Lodge was being deluged with calls from people in
the neighbourhood who couldn’t stand the appalling din and at the same time weren’t able to
make their complaints audible to Walter.

‘A word in your ear,’ he shouted at the Dean who was standing mesmerized by a band from
the Caribbean who didn’t need the loudspeakers to make life intolerable for anyone
within earshot. In front of them on the dance floor undergraduates hurled themselves about
in an ecstasy of savagery under pulsating multi-coloured strobes in a way which so
disgusted the Dean that even if he had been able to hear the Praelector, and he couldn’t,
he would have been unable to reply at all rationally. The Praelector shouted some more
but the Dean himself, affected by the insistent beat, only nodded.

‘Anything you say,’ he yelled back after the Praelector’s third attempt to
communicate.

‘Thank you,’ bellowed the Praelector. ‘I am delighted you agree.’ And he went away in
the direction of the Master’s Lodge and was promptly admitted by the shorter and more
intimidating of the two men on duty.

‘He’s up in the communications room,’ the man said when he’d shut the door. ‘He never
seems to sleep. Spends his time surfing the Internet for stuff I didn’t know existed and I
used to be on the Porn Squad before I joined this outfit. I’ll buzz him you’re corning.’

The Praelector waited in the drawing-room staring out into the pulsating night and
thinking about the May Balls he had known in his youth. They had been sedate affairs and he
had enjoyed them enormously, swinging round the Hall doing the quickstep or a fox-trot
and, most daringly of all, the tango with a polished liveliness and delight that was a
world away from the mechanical Bacchanalia the young now seemed to crave. Not that he
blamed them. They were drowning out a world that seemed to have no structure to it and no
meaning for them, a monstrous bazaar in which the only recognized criteria were money
and sex and drugs and the pursuit of moments of partial oblivion. Perhaps it was a better
world than the one he had known when Europe had gone to war and discipline was everything.
He didn’t know and wouldn’t live long enough to find out.

He was interrupted in his reverie by the arrival of Hartang. He was smaller than the
Praelector had remembered him, seemed to have shrunk and had a haggard look about him.
‘You wanted to see me?’ he asked almost humbly, his weak eyes blinking in the bright light
of the drawing-room.

The Praelector nodded deferentially. ‘Good evening, Master,’ he said. ‘I trust I am
not disturbing you. I’m afraid our May Ball this year is unusually noisy. The students
are celebrating the change in the College fortunes and your appointment.’

Hartang smiled slightly. He was never too sure about the Praelector. ‘It’s nice to hear
kids enjoying themselves,’ he said. He indicated a chair and the Praelector sat
down.

‘I have come, Master, to say that your Inauguration Feast has been fixed for Thursday
and to find out if this suits you.’

‘Inauguration Feast?’ Hartang sounded uncertain.

‘Yes, it is a necessary part of the formal ceremonies which are traditional in
Porterhouse with the appointment of a new Master. We take sherry in the Combination
Room and then proceed to the Hall where you will take your place in the Master’s chair.’

‘I’ve got to do this?’ Hartang asked.

‘No Master has ever been known to absent himself,’ said the Praelector. ‘It is
considered a great honour. The College is closed for the evening and no guests are
invited. It is a purely private Porterhouse function.’

Hartang considered the matter for a moment. ‘I guess it’ll be all right,’ he said at
last. ‘Yes, I guess so. Thursday?’

‘We gather at 7.30 and the Senior Fellows will escort you to the Combination Room.
You will not be required to make a speech.’

‘Sounds fine with me. 7.30?’

‘Thank you, Master, we will be honoured by your presence.’

The Praelector left the Lodge well satisfied, and Hartang went back to his
communications room. He wanted to find out what the yen was doing. It was up and the
Tokyo Stock Exchange was down 100 points. He’d got it right again.

Purefoy and Mrs Ndhlovo sat on the bank of the river on the way to Grantchester
watching the punts go by. It was 6 a.m. and the revellers were going happily up to the
Orchard Tea Garden for breakfast before drifting wearily back to Cambridge and bed. It
was the custom and in their evening dresses and dinner jackets they struck a
discordantly gay note against the pollarded willows and the flat farm fields on the far
bank. ‘Not our scene,’ said Purefoy. ‘But worth seeing. Like going back fifty years and
probably much more. Weird.’

But Mrs Ndhlovo was a little envious. She would have liked to dance the night away and
be lying in a punt while Purefoy poled it up the river with the one-handed twist some of
the young men affected before leaving the punt pole dragging in the water for a moment
to steer. All the same she knew what Purefoy meant. Even at their dances the English lacked
the vivacity of the people she had seen in South America and Africa. Their laughter was
different too and hadn’t the same joyfulness about it. To her ear it didn’t seem
spontaneous, merely an awkwardly conventional response that was required of them. But
these were young people whose year had been spent in pursuit of academic excellence and
in serious discussions and the world weighed heavily upon them. They were recruits in
the army of the intellect, drilled and disciplined in thinking. And after a week
listening to Skullion she was confused. Behind the facade of convention so many dark
inhibitions found expression in the weirdest ways. Nothing was what it seemed. She and
Purefoy had been taken behind the scenes into a little world full of the strangest
inconsistencies and disguised animosities that was both sad and alarming and full of
hidden unhappiness. It was not her world.

She turned over and looked down at the grass. Some ants were busily going to and fro along
a path of their own devising, never deviating for more than a moment from some unknown
and interminable purpose. Mrs Ndhlovo wondered if she looked like that seen perhaps from
a satellite. It was certainly how Purefoy behaved, busily pursuing his facts and
placing so much reliance on the written word. Skullion had shaken that solid confidence
with his oral history of forty-odd years in Porterhouse and perhaps Purefoy would change.
It wouldn’t be enough. He was already working furiously, editing the typescript that had
cost so much, cutting a digression here and noting it for future use, removing
unnecessary repetitions and even once–and in her eyes unforgivably–removing a double
negative ‘in the interest of clarity’. Mrs Ndhlovo sighed and rolled over again to look up
at some passing clouds in the blue summer sky.

‘Purefoy my love,’ she said, ‘you aren’t the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow any
longer. You’re the James Skullion Memorial Fellow. You’ll write a book from what he’s
given you and with all the checking; of cross-references it will be your life’s work. Your
opus dei."

But Purefoy Osbert didn’t get the allusive pun. His had been a strictly Protestant
upbringing. ‘Ours,’ he said and lay down beside her. Mrs Ndhlovo smiled but said nothing.
She wasn’t going to stay in Cambridge and she wasn’t going to stay with Purefoy, but she
had no intention of telling him that now. He was too happy. It would be soon enough when he
had his nose in the book to give him a sense of real achievement and lessen his feelings of
loss. Besides, it would never have worked. Purefoy was far too easy to lie to and far too
gentle, to hurt. She would find an improper man who would understand her.

In Porterhouse the marquees were gone and only the marks on the lawn remained where the
dance floors and the pegs had been. The courts were silent again and the tables and benches
had been brought back into the Hall when Kudzuvine presented himself nervously at the
Porter’s Lodge and was admitted.

‘Shoot, what’s happened to the grass?’ he asked Walter as they went through to the
Buttery. ‘That stuff has been there hundreds of years. Like it’s a protected species. How
come it’s all fucked up?’

‘It was the May Ball last week.’

In Kudzuvine’s head the words had a sinister ring to them. ‘Last week? Last week was
June.’

‘Yes sir,’ said Walter. ‘Last week was June.’ He wasn’t going to bother explaining
things to the Yank. He’d had them up to the eyeballs. Only Mr Skullion knew how to handle
them and he was in the Combination Room sitting in his wheelchair with his bowler hat still
defiantly on and eyeing the Fellows with a hard unyielding authority. Even the Dean
was solemnly deferential now. He knew when he was beaten.

Only the Chaplain’s bonhomie remained unchanged. ‘Ah, Skullion, my dear old fellow,
how splendid to see you again. It seems ages since we had a chat. What have you been
doing?’

‘Oh, this and that,’ Skullion said. ‘Mostly this, but a bit of that.’

‘A bit of that, eh? And at your age! How I envy you. I remember once years ago now…’ But
he stopped himself in time and looked puzzled. A bit of this and that, eh? Well I
never.’

Presently, when everyone was assembled, the Praelector and the Dean and the Senior
Tutor in their festal gowns and silk hoods walked slowly across the Garden to fetch the new
Master. Hartang walked back between them. In the background the two men kept a discreet
watch on the procession and then followed.

‘We are deeply honoured…’ the Dean was saying but the words meant something else to the
security men. They had no time for Hartang and would be glad to get back to some real
work. They took their places in the Hall, the shorter one in the Musicians’ Gallery and the
older man in the shadows behind High Table where Arthur was lighting the candles and the
silver gleamed. They didn’t have long to wait. The new Master said he didn’t drink
amontillado and no one offered him whisky. Then the door of the Combination Room opened
and the Fellows filed in. This time the Dean and the Praelector preceded Skullion in the
wheelchair and Hartang followed. He was feeling really awful. This was it, his future
life and it was his idea of hell.

The Chaplain said Grace and Hartang was offered the Master’s Chair. On either side of
him the Fellows took their seats and at the very end Skullion sat in his wheelchair looking
down the table with approval. At least the standards he had known were being kept up. The
silver had been polished and the old oak table gleamed with wax. That gave him some sense of
accomplishment but he had greater cause for satisfaction. All the same he was still
afraid. The Fellows of Porterhouse, of Porterhouse past, had not been men who gave way to
threats not easily at any rate and there was still the danger that they would deceive him.
Even the Hall played a part in his apprehension by calling up memories of feasts and great
occasions when he had been a servant of the College and proud of his position. Skullion
closed his mind to the siren call of that past with its deference and its social wiles and
steeled himself with a contempt for the present. He was helped by the occasional anxious
look the Dean gave him. They were all as old and feeble as he was in his body but theirs was a
worse weakness: they had lost their spirit. They were going to see that he hadn’t.

‘I hope we are not going to have anything too rich,’ Hartang said to the
Praelector.

‘I can assure you, Master, that the menu has been carefully chosen with your
constitution in mind. I trust you like German wine. We start with Vichyssoise and we have
a delicate Rhein wine to go with it. Then there is the cold salmon, one of the Chefs
specialities and a great favourite with the Queen Mother.’ He broke off to allow the Dean
to tell the story of his meeting with the Queen Mother or the Queen as she then was and the
King on the battleship, the Duke of York, then Flagship of the Home Fleet during the Fleet
Review on the Clyde in 1947 and how when the Prime Minister, Mr Attlee, was piped on board
he didn’t know whether to take his hat off or leave it on and he held it sort of hovering
above his head. To make matters worse, King George VI and the Queen and, of course, the young
Princesses with Prince Philip in tow had been round the Fleet on a motor torpedo boat which
made a terrible din and was so loud when it came alongside that the Royal Marine Guard of
Honour on the quarterdeck had barely heard the order to Present Arms. The Senior Fellows
knew the story off by heart and Hartang wasn’t interested in kings and queens unless he
held them in his hand, but the story saw them through the soup and the salmon. All Hartang
was thinking was that he was safe. Safe and bored. His thoughts drifted to Thailand and the
beach house he owned there and what he would do if he were there instead of sitting with
these stuffed shirts.