“This is a gentleman’s college,” he had said, and Zipser, who didn’t claim to be even a putative gentleman, had been a marked man ever since. Skullion had it in for him.
As he crossed Market Hill he glanced at the Guildhall clock. It was twelve thirty-five. The main gate would be shut and Skullion in bed. Zipser slackened his pace. There was no point in hurrying now. He might just as well stay out all night now. He certainly wasn’t going to knock Skullion up and get cursed for his pains. It wouldn’t have been the first time he had wandered about Cambridge all night. Of course there was Mrs Biggs the bedder to be taken care of. She came to wake him every morning and was supposed to report him if his bed hadn’t been slept in but Mrs Biggs was accommodating. “A pound in the purse is worth a flea in the ear,” she had explained after his first stint of night wandering, and Zipser had paid up cheerfully. Mrs Biggs was all right. He was fond of her. There was something almost human about her in spite of her size.
Zipser shivered. It was partly the cold and partly the thought of Mrs Biggs. The snow was falling heavily now and it was obvious he couldn’t stay out all night in this weather. It was equally clear that he wasn’t going to wake Skullion. He would have to climb in. It was an undignified thing for a graduate to do but there was no alternative. He crossed Trinity Street and went past Caius. At the bottom he turned right and came to the back gate in the lane. Above him the iron spikes on top of the wall looked more threatening than ever. Still, he couldn’t stay out. He would probably freeze to death if he did. He found a bicycle in front of Trinity Hall and dragged it up the lane and put it against the wall. Then he climbed up until he could grasp the spikes with his hands. He paused for a moment and then with a final kick he was up with one knee on the wall and his foot under the spikes. He eased himself up and swung the other leg over, found a foothold and jumped. He landed softly in the flowerbed and scrambled to his feet. He was just moving off down the path under the beech-trees when something moved in the shadow and a hand fell on his shoulder. Zipser reacted instinctively. With a wild flurry he struck out at his attacker and the next moment a bowler hat was in midair and Zipser himself, ignoring the College rules which decreed that only Fellows could walk on the lawns, was racing across the grass towards New Court. Behind him on the gravel path Skullion lay breathing heavily. Zipser glanced over his shoulder as he dashed through the gate into the Court and saw his dark shape on the ground. Then he was in O staircase and climbing the stairs to his rooms. He shut the door and stood in the darkness panting. It must have been Skullion. The bowler hat told him that. He had assaulted a College porter, bashed his face and chopped him down. He went to the window and peered out and it was then that he realized what a fool he had been. His footsteps in the snow would give him away. Skullion would follow them to the Bull Tower. But there was no sign of the Porter. Perhaps he was still lying out there unconscious. Perhaps he had knocked him out. Zipser shuddered at this fresh indication of his irrational nature, and its terrible consequences for mankind. Sex and violence, the speaker had said, were the twin poles of the world’s lifeless future, and Zipser could see now what she had meant.
Anyway, he could not leave Skullion lying out there to freeze to death even if going down to help him meant that he would be sent down from the University for “assaulting a college porter”, his thesis on the Pumpernickel as A Factor in the Politics of 16th-century Westphalia uncompleted. He went to the door and walked slowly downstairs.
Skullion got to his feet and picked up his bowler, brushed the snow off it and put it on. His waistcoat and jacket were covered with patches of snow and he brushed them down with his hands. His right eye was swelling. Young bastard had caught him a real shiner. “Getting too old for this job,” he muttered, muddled feelings of anger and respect competing in his mind. “But I can still catch him.” He followed the footsteps across the lawn and down the path to the gate into New Court. His eye had swollen now so that he could hardly see out of it, but Skullion wasn’t thinking about his eye. He wasn’t thinking about catching the culprit. He was thinking back to the days of his youth. “Fair’s fair. If you can’t catch ’em, you can’t report ’em,” old Fuller, the Head Porter at Porterhouse had said to him when he first came to the College and what was true then was true now. He turned left at the gate and went down the Cloister to the Lodge and went through to his bedroom. “A real shiner,” he said examining the swollen eye in the mirror behind the door. It could do with a bit of beefsteak. He’d get some from the College kitchen in the morning. He took off his jacket and was unbuttoning his waistcoat when the door of the Lodge opened. Skullion buttoned his waistcoat again and put on his jacket and went out into the office.
Zipser stood in the doorway of O staircase and watched Skullion cross the Court to the Cloisters. Well, at least he wasn’t lying out in the snow. Still he couldn’t go back to his room without doing something. He had better go down and see if he was all right. He walked across the Court and into the Lodge. It was empty and he was about to turn away and go back to his room when the door at the back opened and Skullion appeared. His right eye was black and swollen and his face, old and veined, had a deformed lop-sided look about it.
“Well?” Skullion asked out of the side of his mouth. One eye peered angrily at Zipser.
“I just came to say I’m sorry,” Zipser said awkwardly.
“Sorry?” Skullion asked as if he didn’t understand.
“Sorry about hitting you.”
“What makes you think you hit me?” The lop-sided face glared at him.
Zipser scratched his forehead.
“Well, anyway I’m sorry. I thought I had better see if you were all right.”
“You thought I was going to report you, didn’t you?” Skullion asked contemptuously. “Well, I’m not. You got away.”
Zipser shook his head.
“It wasn’t that. I thought you might be… well… hurt.”
Skullion smiled grimly.
“Hurt? Me hurt? What’s a little hurt matter?” He turned and went back into the bedroom and shut the door. Zipser went out into the Court. He didn’t understand. You knocked an old man down and he didn’t mind. It wasn’t logical. It was all so bloody irrational. He walked-back to his room and went to bed.
Chapter 3
The Master slept badly. The somatic effects of the Feast and the psychic consequences of his speech had combined to make sleep difficult. While his wife slept demurely in her separate bed. Sir Godber lay awake reliving the events of the evening with an insomniac’s obsessiveness. Had he been wise to so offend the sensibilities of the College? It had been a carefully calculated decision and one which his political eminence had seemed to warrant. Whatever the Fellows might say about him, his reputation for moderate and essentially conservative reform would absolve him of the accusation that he was the advocate of change for change’s sake. As the Minister who had made the slogan “Alteration without Change” so much a part of the recent tax reforms, Sir Godber prided himself on his conservative liberalism or, as he had put it in a moment of self-revelation, authoritarian permissiveness. The challenge he had thrown down to Porterhouse had been deliberate and justified. The College was absurdly old-fashioned. Out of touch with the times, and to a man whose very life had been spent keeping in touch with the times there could be no greater dereliction. An advocate of comprehensive education at no matter what cost, chairman of the Evans Committee on Higher Education which had introduced Sixth Form Polytechnics for the Mentally Retarded, Sir Godber prided himself on the certain knowledge that he knew what was best for the country, and he was supported in this by Lady Mary, his wife, whose family, now staunchly Liberal, still retained the Whig traditions enshrined in the family motto Laisser Mieux. Sir Godber had taken the motto for his own, and associating it with Voltaire’s famous dictum had made himself the enemy of the good wherever he found it. “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever” had no appeal for Sir Godber’s crusading imagination. What sweet maids required was a first-rate education and what sleeping dogs needed was a kick up the backside. This was precisely what he intended to administer to Porterhouse.