He went back into the Porter’s Lodge and sat down again with his pipe. Around him the paraphernalia of his office, the old wooden clock, the counter, the rows of pigeonholes, the keyboard and the blackboard with “Message for Dr Messmer” scrawled on it, were reassuring relics of his tenure and reminders that he was still needed. For forty-five years Skullion had sat in the Lodge watching over the comings and goings of Porterhouse until it seemed he was as much a part of the College as the carved heraldic beasts on the tower above. A lifetime of little duties easily attended to while the world outside stormed by in a maelstrom of change had bred in Skullion a devotion to the changelessness of Porterhouse traditions. When he’d first come there’d been an Empire, the greatest Empire that the world had known, a Navy, the greatest Navy in the world, fifteen battleships, seventy cruisers, two hundred destroyers, and Skullion had been a keyboard sentry on the Nelson with her three for’ard turrets and her arse cut off to meet the terms of some damned treaty. And now there was nothing left of that. Only Porterhouse was still the same. Porterhouse and Skullion, relics of an old tradition. As for the intellectual life of the College, Skullion neither knew nor cared about it. It was as incomprehensible to him as the rigmarole of a Latin mass to some illiterate peasant. They could say or think what they liked. It was the men he worshipped, some at least and fewer these days, their habits and the trappings he associated with that old assurance. The Dean’s “Good morning, Skullion”, Dr Huntley’s silk shirts, the Chaplain’s evening stroll around the Fellows’ Garden, Mr Lyons’ music evening every Friday, the weekly parcel from the Institute for Dr Baxter. Chapel, Hall, the Feast, the meeting of the College Council, all these occasions like internal seasons marked the calendar of Skullion’s life and all the time he looked for that assurance that had once been the hallmark of a gentleman.
Now sitting there with the gas fire hissing before him he searched his mind for what it was those old men signified. It wasn’t that they were clever. Some were, but half were stupid, more stupid than the young men coming up these days. Money? Some had a lot and others hadn’t. That wasn’t what had made the difference. To him at least. Perhaps it had to them. A race apart they were. Helpless half of them. Couldn’t make their beds, or wouldn’t. And arrogant. “Skullion this and Skullion that.” Oh, he’d resented it at the time and done it all the same and hadn’t minded afterwards because… because they’d been gentlemen. He spat into the fire affectionately and remembered an argument he’d had once with a young pup in a pub who’d heard him going on about the good old days.
“What gentlemen?” the lad had said. “A lot of rich bastards with nothing between their ears who just exploited you.”
And Skullion had put down his pint and said, “A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be. And that’s something you will never know.” Not what they were but what they ought to be, like some old battle standard that you followed because it was a symbol of the best. A ragged tattered piece of cloth that stood for something and gave you confidence and something to fight for.
He got up and walked across the Court and through the Screens and down the Fellows’ Garden to the back gate. Everywhere the snow had submerged the details of the garden. Skullion’s feet on the gravel path were soundless. In a few rooms lights still burned. The Dean’s windows were still alight.
“Brooding on the speech,” Skullion thought and glanced reproachfully at the Master’s Lodge where all was dark. At the back gate he stood looking up at the rows of iron spikes that topped the wall and the gate. How often in the old days he had stood there in the shadow of the beech-trees watching young gentlemen negotiate those spikes only to step out and take their names. He could remember a good many of those names still and see the startled faces turned towards his as he stepped out into the light.
“Good morning, Mr Hornby. Dean’s report in the morning, sir.”
“Oh damn you, Skullion. Why can’t you go to bed sometimes?”
“College regulations, sir.”
And they had gone off to their rooms cursing cheerfully. Now no one climbed in. Instead they knocked you up at all hours. Skullion didn’t know why he bothered to come and look at the back wall any more. Out of habit. Old habit. He was just about to turn and trudge back to his bed in the Lodge when a scuffling noise stopped him in his tracks. Someone in the street was trying to climb in.
Zipser walked down Free School Lane past the black clunch walls of Corpus. The talk on “Population Control in the Indian Subcontinent” had gone on longer than he had expected, partly due to the enthusiasm of the speaker and partly to the intractable nature of the problem itself. Zipser had not been sure which had been worse, the delivery, if that was an appropriate word to use about a speech that concerned itself with abortion, or the enthusiastic advocacy of vasectomy which had prolonged the talk beyond its expected limits. The speaker, a woman doctor with the United Nations Infant Prevention Unit in Madras, who seemed to regard infant mortality as a positive blessing, had disparaged the coil as useless, the pill as expensive, female sterilization as complicated, had described vasectomy so seductively that Zipser had found himself crossing and recrossing his legs and wishing to hell that he hadn’t come. Even now as he walked back to Porterhouse through the snow-covered streets he was filled with foreboding and a tendency to waddle. Still, even if the world seemed doomed to starvation, he had had to get out of Porterhouse for the evening. As the only research graduate in the College he found himself isolated. Below him the undergraduates pursued a wild promiscuity which he envied but dared not emulate, and above him the Fellows found compensation for their impotence in gluttony. Besides he was not a Porterhouse man, as the Dean had pointed out when he had been accepted. “You’ll have to live in College to get the spirit of the place,” he had said, and while in other colleges research graduates lived in cheap and comfortable digs, Zipser found himself occupying an exceedingly expensive suite of rooms in Bull Tower and forced to follow the regime of an undergraduate. For one thing he had to be in by twelve or face the wrath of Skullion and the indelicate enquiries next morning of the Dean. The whole system was anachronistic and Zipser wished he had been accepted by one of the other colleges. Skullion’s attitude he found particularly unpleasant. The Porter seemed to regard him as an interloper, and lavished a wealth of invective on him normally reserved for tradesmen. Zipser’s attempts to mollify him by explaining that Durham was a university and that there had been a Durham College in Oxford in 1380 had failed hopelessly. If anything, the mention of Oxford had increased Skullion’s antipathy.