'If he goes on like that at his age, he will have one and no mistake,' Walter said, and emerged from the little office with an obsequious grimace that Purefoy hoped was a smile. 'I'm very sorry about this, sir. I wasn't told you were coming today and I had strict orders about them others. But I've found you in the book and you're all right. The Bursar's allotted you rooms overlooking the Fellows' Garden so here's the keys. Henry will carry your bags, sir, and show you the way.'
Purefoy bent to pick up his suitcases but Walter stopped him. 'Sorry, sir,' he said with another grovelling grimace that managed in some mysterious way to combine extreme servility with something distinctly threatening, 'but gentlemen Fellows don't carry their own bags in Porterhouse. Don't set a proper example. That's what Mr Skullion what's the Master now told me. Tradition, he said it was, going ever so far back.'
For a moment Purefoy felt like telling the man he didn't give a damn about Porterhouse tradition and always carried his own bags, but he had travelled a long way and he was exhausted. 'What do I do with my car?' he asked. 'It's on a parking meter down the road.'
'You give me the keys, sir, and I'll have it driven round to the Old Coach House which is where the Fellows' cars are kept. You wouldn't happen to know what make it is, would you, sir?'
To Purefoy Osbert it seemed obvious the Head Porter was taking the piss out of him but Walter's next remark changed his mind. 'I only ask, sir, because a lot of the Fellows don't know. The Dean's been driving an old Rover since I don't know when and he still calls it a Lanchester and they don't make them any more. Leastways I don't think they do. And the Chaplain's got an Armstrong Siddeley, though he don't drive any longer and I don't think he even knows it's there.'
Purefoy gave him the keys and told him it was a Renault and was green and had an A registration. 'I think it's 5555 OGF,' he said.
'Very good, sir, and I'll put the keys in your pigeonhole That way you'll know where to find them.'
'But I don't know which my pigeonhole is,' said Purefoy.
'Ah, but I do, sir. All you'll have to do is ask me, sir.' And with another terrible grimace he disappeared into the back where he could be heard telling someone that that new Fellow, Dr Oswald, had a foreign car and a Frenchie one at that which wouldn't go down well with the Senior Tutor because he didn't like…Having a shrewd idea what was coming, Purefoy followed Henry and his two suitcases round Old Court and behind a very old block of blackened clunch and up a path to another building, this, time of blackened brick. On the way they passed a number of students, all of whom looked rather too respectably dressed for Purefoy's liking. He was used to people in boots and with torn and patched jeans and with hair that was either very, very long and unwashed, or hardly existed at all. He was suspicious of clean young people with neat haircuts and a great many of the young men he saw seemed to be very large and muscular and to laugh too loudly. And the one young woman he met smiled agreeably, which he found most peculiar. At Kloone women didn't smile. On the whole they scowled and practised assertiveness on him.
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.