by Tom Sharpe
At the bottom of a staircase marked O Henry stopped and pointed at a blank space at the top of a black name-board. ‘That’s you, sir. Very nice rooms too. Next to the Senior Tutor’s. Very fond of the young gentlemen is the Senior Tutor, sir.’
He climbed the staircase and Purefoy followed with a sinking feeling. The porter’s statement had put him in mind of the ghastly evening he had spent with Goodenough and if he was going to have to endure the attentions of another bugger – for the second time in his life he dispensed with political correctness – he was going to insist on having rooms elsewhere. But as in the case of Goodenough he was proved entirely wrong. There was nothing in the least gay about the man who emerged from the doorway opposite Purefoy’s rooms and demanded to know if they had to make that confounded din.
‘Only dropped the keys, sir,’ said Henry, ‘and this gentleman’s bag, sir.’
‘Keys? Bags?’ muttered the Senior Tutor. ‘Sounded more like a troop of elephants with tambourines to me.’
He went back into his rooms and shut the door very gently. In the darkness Henry searched for the keyhole and chuckled. ‘Loves his little joke, the Senior Tutor does. And of course his port. Regular port drinker he is, sir. You can always tell from the complexion. Now the Dean likes a tawny port and that is why he looks the way he does but the Senior Tutor is more a crusted man, likes his dregs I daresay, and of course that’s what makes him look the way he is.’
But at least the rooms Purefoy had been allocated were very comfortable ones with a large study and sitting-room and a smaller bedroom with a window that looked out at a large Jacobean house across some lawns and past what appeared to be a large square block of yew.
‘That’s the Master’s Lodge where the Master lives and that down there on the lawn is the Master’s Maze. People have gone in there and never come out, they say. But that’s just a little joke I’m sure, sir, though I wouldn’t go in it myself. Best to be on the safe side, isn’t it? And I don’t suppose I’m allowed to. Can’t walk on the grass, servants can’t. Only Fellows can.’
Purefoy Osbert went back into the study and looked out of the window there. Again he was looking onto gardens but this time there were formal rosebeds as well as lawns and a rockery with a pond and something that looked like enormous rhubarb growing by it.
‘That’s the Dean’s own garden, that is. Tends it himself when he hasn’t got the arthritis or rheumatism or whatever it is he gets from the damp coming up from the river and the wind blowing from the east. Comes across the North Sea all the way from Russia that wind does and there’s not an hill between the Gogs and some mountains they’ve got with a funny name like the public toilets they’ve got by the bus station. Ur …’
‘The Urals,’ said Purefoy, and wondered if all porters were so talkative in Porterhouse.
Finally, after showing him how to light the gas fire and work the little stove in the gyp room and where to find the bathroom, Henry left and Purefoy sat down and wondered if he had done the right thing in coming to Porterhouse. It was all quite unbelievably anachronistic and cut off from the world in which he had lived for thirty years. Porterhouse wasn’t simply a Cambridge college: it was some sort of museum.
12
The same thought might have crossed Kudzuvine’s mind when he came to the next morning, if Kudzuvine had had anything of a mind. In any case, because of his concussion and Dr MacKendly’s medication, what little mind he had was working with the greatest difficulty.
‘I think we’ll give him something mildly soporific and hypnotic, Matron,’ the doctor had said when he first examined the unconscious American. ‘No need for an X-ray or anything like that. Waste of money. Chap’s obviously got a skull like a steel ball and if he hasn’t …’ He left Kudzuvine’s future well-being in the balance.
But the so-called soporific and hypnotic drug he injected twice into him exceeded the doctor’s expectations. The effect was not in the least mild. When Kudzuvine came to he was virtually catatonic. He could see and hear and feel but that was about all. What he couldn’t do was move. And what he saw made him extremely anxious to move. It did more. It filled him with the utmost dread. Close beside the bed, a bed Kudzuvine had never been in before and in a room he didn’t begin to recognize, there sat the most malevolent creature he had ever seen since Quasimodo in a reshowing of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In Kudzuvine’s condition this creature was infinitely worse to look at and it was far, far worse to be looked at by it, whatever it was. Kudzuvine had no idea. Worst of all, he was incapable of shutting his eyes and cutting out the sight of this thing that sat looking at him so malignantly. Not only couldn’t he shut his eyes but he seemed to be paralysed. And naked. In a huge bed and bedroom he had never been in before. In a desperate attempt to find out if he was able to speak or had been struck dumb into the bargain, Kudzuvine struggled to find words. So, quite evidently, did the ghastly creature in the chair and now that he came to look at it more closely, not that he wanted to in the least, he could see that it was Quasimodo, updated to a clinically chromed chair that had been provided by the Mayo Clinic or some other hospital for the Mobilely Challenged. Not that the expression was at all adequate even if he had been able to bring it into play. What was sitting a yard away from him didn’t just have a Mobility Challenge Problem. It had the fucking works. It was, as Kudzuvine would have put it had he been able to, man, but Totally Challenged, Mentally, Physically, Vocally and Morally, extremely Morally Challenged. Or, to put it in the sort of language Kudzuvine personally preferred but hadn’t got the courage to use, this thing was fucking evil, man, like the fucking Devil in a bowler hat. And it was only two yards away from him and making noises. In the ordinary way Kudzuvine would have been relieved to know that he could hear and hadn’t gone deaf to add to all the other system failures that had evidently occurred since he didn’t know quite when. But not now. Now all he wanted to do was to cut out the sounds emanating with such evident effort and inarticulacy from the thing in the chair.
‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ Skullion said. He had to repeat the sentence several times to make sure Kudzuvine got the message but Kudzuvine was way ahead of him. He knew that whatever he had done he shouldn’t have done it. That was fucking obvious. Like he’d taken the wrong sort of dope, man, like crack cocktailed with LSD and Toad and fucking nerve gas. It had to be something catastrophic like that, it just had to be. But why the fucking bedroom with fat, very fat, white babies flying around the fucking ceiling and the Quasimodo update sitting there like he was waiting for fucking tenderloin to fry just right for eating?
‘You damaged the Chapel,’ said Skullion after another struggle. ‘You damaged the Chapel.’
Some part of Kudzuvine’s neural network stirred and died away. He knew the word ‘Chapel’, and he sure as hell knew the word ‘Damage’, though he usually used it with ‘Limitation’ and ‘Exercise’ and neither of the latter had the slightest relevance to his present situation. Kudzuvine stuck to ‘Chapel’ and was still hanging onto it when the Matron came into the room and said, ‘Now, Master, you mustn’t wear the gentleman out. Let him rest in peace.’ Which would have been fine except that for a large woman in a nurse’s uniform to call the Thing in the chair ‘Master’ gave rise to such appalling notions in Kudzuvine about the nature of the Thing’s colossal power and influence that he knew with absolute certainty that it had to be the Devil. ‘Rest in peace’ didn’t do much for him either. He put it together with Chapel and came up with Chapel of Rest, which explained his condition, the huge bed and the room and those fucking angel babies flying around the ceiling.
It also explained why he was stark naked. He was in a morticians’ funeral home waiting to be buried or cremated and maybe embalmed first. That would explain why the Thing in the wheelchair had been looking at him like that. It had been measuring him up for the coffin or calculating how best to cosmeticize him for embalming. Above all it explained that black bowler hat and the fact that the Thing had been wearing a vest
with a gold chain across it. If anything was needed to send Kudzuvine into a frenzy of terror, it was the notion that he was going to be buried alive. Or cremated. Or embalmed. Kudzuvine didn’t know much about embalming people but he was certain it involved opening them up and taking all the organs out and then putting something else back inside. And all this was going to take place with him fully conscious – well, for part of the time, the first part, which was undoubtedly the nastiest. It wasn’t. It mustn’t happen. He had to show them he was still alive. Somehow.
Kudzuvine made gurgling noises and said ‘Fuck’ several times quite loudly and then made up for it by getting ‘God’ out quite a few more and ‘Help’ a great many. Then he lay back and went to sleep again, only to be woken some time later to find a tall thin and positively cadaverous old man and a shorter stumpier middle-aged man with ginger hair standing on one side of the bed. The big woman in the nurse’s uniform stood on the other. But at least the Thing wasn’t with them.
‘And how has he been, Matron?’ the man with the red hair asked. ‘Any trouble?’
‘None whatsoever, doctor,’ said the woman. ‘Slept like the dead.’
‘Help, help,’ Kudzuvine managed to gurgle.
‘He seems to be trying to say something,’ commented the tall thin man. But the doctor had sat down on the edge of the bed and was shining a torch into Kudzuvine’s eye. He obviously didn’t like what he was seeing. ‘That new stuff I tried on him last night has done rather more than I’d expected,’ he said. ‘It’s a synergistic combination of several major anti-psychotic tranquillizers with some muscle-relaxant drug in case there are any violent tendencies. Very new on the market and it certainly lives up to the maker’s claim. You’d think to look at him …’
‘Help. God. Help,’ Kudzuvine tried to scream but failed pathetically.
‘I’m sure he’s trying to say something,’ said the cadaverous old man.
‘Yes, you’d think so, wouldn’t you?’ said the doctor. ‘But it’s merely some sort of reflex action. He’s not with us at all. Ah well, I don’t think I need give him another shot. He’ll keep just as he is. Has he passed water or anything like that?’
The Matron lifted the bedclothes and shook her head.
‘Well, just to be on the safe side,’ he said and took out a tube. ‘I always carry a spare one for the Master.’
The Praelector turned away and looked out of the window to avoid having to watch the distasteful process of feeding a catheter into Kudzuvine’s penis. And Kudzuvine wasn’t enjoying it at all.
The Praelector’s next observation horrified him too. ‘Ah, here comes the Chaplain,’ he said. ‘He’ll be coming to have a chat with the Master. He usually comes over once a day. A curious relationship, I’ve always thought.’
But Dr MacKendly and the Matron were discussing the possibility of seepage from the back passage. ‘It happens fairly frequently,’ he said. ‘I should put a piece of plastic under him. One of those black garbage bags will do nicely, and it will be very appropriate too.’
They looked at Kudzuvine one last time and left the room while he was still muttering, ‘Help. God. Help.’ It didn’t do him any good at all.
*
His colleagues at Transworld Television weren’t helping him either.
‘Yeah, so Kudzuvine’s in some kind of shit. Ever known when he wasn’t?’ was Skundler’s comment when told about the incident at Porterhouse. ‘So he’s got to paddle his own. Not my business. You work in the media business you got to take risks. Some come back, some don’t. That’s the way it is.’ And no one else argued with the Assessmentation Officer’s judgement. As someone else said, as it happened with more prescience than she dreamed, ‘So K.K.’s gone. So he’s gone. What’s new?’
*
In Bangkok Edgar Hartang sat with a six-year-old boy on his lap. That was new for the boy, but not for E.H. He tweaked the child’s nipple and giggled and took off his blue glasses and his toupee. Good old E.H. He was having one hell of a time.
So was the boy. It was just a different sort of hell.
13
The Bursar’s sort of hell was of an entirely different variety. He hadn’t enjoyed having to explain his role in the Transworld invasion of Porterhouse, but at least he had been spared the presence of the Dean and the Senior Tutor. He hadn’t seen the Senior Tutor and the Dean, thankfully, was away but he knew what paroxysms of rage Kudzuvine and his Transworld team would have induced in both men and what their attitude to him would have been. He’d have been out of his job and out of Porterhouse and he’d have been lucky not to have been horsewhipped into the bargain. The Senior Tutor was found of saying he’d horsewhip some swine or other and, while these threats had been empty ones in the past, the Bursar was in absolutely no doubt that in the present case, and with the Dean egging him on, the Senior Tutor would have put the words into action. Instead the Praelector had treated him with tea and quite astonishing sympathy and had seemed to find his story of how he had met Kudzuvine and later had lunch with Edgar Hartang more and more interesting as it went along.
All the same, the Bursar had been conscious that the College Secretary was taking it all down in shorthand and that the research graduate Gilkes was making copious notes. By the time the questioning was over the Bursar felt very much better. ‘You’ve been very, very kind to me,’ he told the Praelector emotionally. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘There’s no need to blub, my dear fellow. And it is our business to thank you. You have no idea what you have done for the College. And you need not worry about Mr Kudzuvine. He’s in safe hands.’
‘Did you hand him over to the police?’ the Bursar asked.
‘Of course not. He’s in safer hands than that. Now you go home and have a good night’s rest. We are going to need you at your intellectual best in the days to come.’
At the time the Bursar hadn’t realized the full implications of that remark. He had gone home, hurrying out through the back gate for fear of running into the Senior Tutor on the way to the Main Gate, and had drunk several very stiff whiskies before taking twice the recommended dose of his wife’s sleeping pills and going to bed. On Monday he had stayed at home and it was only on Tuesday, on his return to his office in Porterhouse, that he learnt what the Praelector had meant about Kudzuvine being in a pair of very safe hands. ‘You mean he’s laid up in the Master’s Lodge?’ he asked Walter in the Porter’s Lodge. ‘What? With Skullion?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that, sir. He’s more laid out than laid up, if you take my meaning.’
The Bursar didn’t. The Master’s Lodge at Porterhouse was beginning to sound like a charnel-house rather than any sort of Lodge. First the late Sir Godber and now Kudzuvine. ‘What did he die of, for God’s sake? Did the Senior Tutor hit him …?’
‘No, sir, nothing like that. Senior Tutor wasn’t in any condition to hit anything. He’d already hit the bottle and wasn’t very well himself. No, the American basta … gentleman had some sort of accident in the Chaplain’s rooms and it was felt best if Dr MacKendly attended to him with the Matron. She’s there now and Mr Skullion … the Master has been sitting by his bedside just to make sure he doesn’t do himself any more mischief. After all, the College doesn’t want no bad publicity, does it, sir?’
‘No, I’m sure it doesn’t,’ said the Bursar doubtfully and wondered just how much publicity Transworld Television was going to give the assault – he didn’t for a moment believe that Kudzuvine had had an accident – and battery of one of its Vice-Presidents. Presumably as far away as Easter Island they’d be seeing a bandaged Kudzuvine being carried from the College. They were bound to have satellite TV there, and it had just been installed on St Helena. The Bursar went off to his office and found the College Secretary waiting for him.
‘Ah, there you are,’ she said. ‘Feeling better? No? Well, these things take time to get over, don’t they? Anyway the Praelector asked me to tell him when you came in. He wants to come down and t
alk it over.’
‘I don’t really think I’m up …’ the Bursar began but it was too late. Mrs Morestead had gone through to her office and had phoned the Praelector. ‘They’ll be down in a moment,’ she said brightly when she came back and sat down with her pad and pencil.
‘They? Who’s coming with him?’
‘I don’t really know, though I did see Mr Retter and Mr Wyve crossing the Court just now.’
‘Mr Retter and Mr Wyve?’ said the Bursar, with a resurgence of panic. Things must be simply awful for both the College solicitors to have arrived. It had never happened before. Mrs Morestead’s next remark increased his dread. ‘And yesterday we had the men from the Ancient Monuments Commission up from London and Mr Furness the architect with them. Stayed all day, and the structural engineers have been shoring up the Chapel roof with great girders. They say the whole thing may have to come down.’
The Bursar covered his face with his hands and waited for the worst. It came in the shape of the Senior Tutor, the Praelector, Dr Buscott and the Chaplain. The Senior Tutor was looking particularly ferocious. He still hadn’t got over his hangover and the ‘hair of the dog’ he’d taken in the shape of a glass of neat rum had given an even sharper edge to his temper. All the same, the Praelector remained in charge. He was far older and senior in Porterhouse rank to the Tutor, and with both Mr Retter and Mr Wyve in attendance it seemed unlikely the horsewhip would come into play. ‘I don’t think this office is large enough to hold us all,’ said the Praelector. ‘Perhaps we should adjourn to the Fellows’ Private Dining Room.’
