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.