Grantchester Grind (13 page)

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.

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 mat 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.

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 talk 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.’

They trooped out across the Court, Mrs Morestead following with her pad and pencil, and
it was only when they were seated round a mahogany table in the Private Dining Room that
the Praelector explained the purpose of the meeting. He did so in a decidedly
sepulchral manner.

‘We are gathered here today,’ he said, ‘to take measures to deal with what can only be
described as a major catastrophe both for the College itself and for the architectural
heritage of the entire country. The Porterhouse Chapel is one of the finest examples of
late mediaeval neo-Romanesque religious architecture in Britain. Its style is unique
in owing very little to the influence of the Gothic. Constructed at a time when the
Gothic style was predominant, it speaks volumes for the conservative nature of the
College even in those days that our predecessors chose to celebrate the faith in the most
traditional fashion. Porterhouse has always prided itself on being, in the truest
sense of the expression, “behind the times” or, to be even more precise, to exist in a
timeless world. It is therefore supremely important in an age in which change seems
all-conquering, and the future seems to hold nothing but the stultification of the
human spirit by the endless watching of television and the proliferation of appalling
programmes to satisfy man’s baser–desires, that we should fight the company that has
deliberately and criminally done such terrible damage to our Chapel. It is our
bounden duty to extract the maximum in compensation from these people at Transworld
Television not only for the physical damage done to the entire fabric of the College
but for the mental suffering they have inflicted on members of the College. I for one
will never recover from the shock…’

While the Praelector’s peroration rambled on the Bursar tried to think what other
bits of the College buildings had recently become unsafe and whose condition Transworld
Television Productions could be forced to make good. There was a length of gutter behind
the Cox Block that had recently dropped into the road, fortunately when no one was
underneath. Not that any of those awful young men could have reached it, the pitch of the
roof was far too steep for that and they’d have needed ropes, but all the same. Then there was
the entire section of the Library that required repointing, and all the chimneys were in
a dangerous state…The Bursar occupied himself by making an inventory of repairs
needed.

Opposite him Mr Retter and Mr Wyve sat side by side and said nothing. They had
inherited their position as legal advisers to Porterhouse with the firm Waxthorne,
Libbott and Chaine, when they had joined it. They had been regretting the connection ever
since. Waxthorne, Libbott and Chaine had all been dead a great many years before, but Mr
Retter and Mr Wyve, being sound legal men, had insisted on keeping their names. It
provided them with an adequate cover for their own legal inadequacies by allowing
them to say that Mr Waxthorne had given it as his opinion that…Since Mr Waxthorne had been
lying in the cemetery on the Newmarket Road for sixty-five years he could be said to act
only in a consultancy role, and it was perfectly reasonable and indeed proper for Mr
Retter and/or Mr Wyve to explain that he was unable to see any of their clients
personally. Exactly the same could be said on behalf of Messrs Libbott and Chaine, the
former having chosen to be cremated rather than share the same earth even approximately
close to the partner he had loathed for years, and the latter having bequeathed his body to
the University Medical Faculty for research purposes and dissection, less out of a
desire to advance medical knowledge than to make absolutely sure he was well and truly
dead before he went to the crematorium on the Huntingdon Road. Up to a point his wishes
had been fulfilled, though his skull was still used as a wine bumper by a rather effete
Drinking Club in King’s called the Chaine Males. And up to a point Mr Retter and Mr Wyve had
prospered. They had always specialized in work for colleges and had never been known to
undertake any case that required them to appear in court, although Mr Retter had had to
appear once before the magistrates for driving under the influence and had lost his
licence for a year. Faced with anything involving litigation they invariably briefed
other solicitors in London who in turned briefed counsel.

In short, the fees of Waxthorne, Libbott and Chaine were extortionate. This was hardly
surprising. They were the solicitors for Porterhouse and were forced to work for the
College for nothing. There were days when they cursed the Praelector. He had known Mr
Waxthorne as a young man and had attended his funeral and had for many years kept in touch
with his widow and knew perfectly well that Libbott had been cremated and Chaine had gone
to that part of the Medical School from which only bits and pieces return. Now, however,
they felt they could be taking on a case which might just be so rewarding for Porterhouse
that they would be paid. After all we’ve nothing to lose,’ Mr Wyve had said. ‘If they win
against Transworld, an unlikely outcome I agree, they’ll be in a position to make good
some of our losses on their behalf…’

‘But if they lose, as surely they must against such a vast company, the costs will be
enormous.’

‘Theirs, not ours,’ said Mr Wyve, and the matter was settled.

All the same they said nothing at the meeting, and left it to the Praelector and the
Senior Tutor to explain to the Bursar what they wanted him to do. They also felt it
wiser to leave the meeting before the facts were placed before him. As Mr Retter put it to
Mr Wyve, ‘We cannot be party to any dubious actions they may take. It would invalidate
our role in the case and do our reputation no good at all. I did not like the look in the
Senior Tutor’s eye. However, having read the Bursar’s statement, I’m beginning to
think they do stand a chance. Transworld Television Productions did make the approach to
the Bursar, and he has lunched with this Hartang man. I cannot say I like the sound of any
of them.’

Behind them in the Private Dining Room the Bursar was appalled. ‘Go and sit with
Kudzuvine?’ he gasped. ‘Go and sit with him? I don’t want to go anywhere near him. I won’t do
it. I won’t.’

The Senior Tutor stood up slowly. The neat rum was really eating into him now. ‘Mrs
Morestead, if you wouldn’t mind leaving us,’ he said with a terrible menace. ‘We do not
need a transcript of what is going to be a private discussion,’

For a moment the College Secretary hesitated. She was slightly fond of the Bursar,
largely because he never shouted at her whereas the Senior Tutor almost always did.
But she gave in and left the room. Dr Buscott didn’t like either the Bursar or the Senior
Tutor, but he was interested to see what was going to happen. He sat back in his chair
and waited.

The Bursar didn’t. He made a dash for the door but the Praelector, who had been sitting
beside it, had already locked it and pocketed the key.

‘Just let me get my hands on that bastard…’ the Senior Tutor began but the Praelector
stopped him.

‘If you will be so good as to sit down,’ he said. ‘We need the Bursar in one piece if he is
to sit with the man Kudzuvine and get him to answer the questions necessary for our case
against his company. If you start knocking the Bursar about we’ll merely have three sick
men in the Master’s Lodge. Besides, his own evidence is vital.’

‘Oh, all right,’ the Senior Tutor grumbled but he returned to his chair. The Bursar
didn’t. He stood ready to dash round the table if the Senior Tutor got up again.

The situation was calmed once more by the Chaplain. ‘I must say that our guest, Mr
Kudzuvine, did not strike me as being in much of a condition to answer questions when I
visited him the other day. He made some most peculiar noises, especially when I asked
him if he wanted to make his Confession before taking Communion.’

‘The man is a fanatical teetotaller,’ said the Praelector, and was surprised by the
Senior Tutor’s suddenly expressed wish that he was too. ‘I don’t suppose Holy Communion
is up his street.’

‘Something is up somewhere,’ said the Chaplain. ‘He’s got the same filthy pipe and bag
that Skullion wears. Do you suppose everybody who stays at the Master’s Lodge is obliged
to wear one?’

‘Let us get back to the original point of discussion,’ said Dr Buscott, ‘in other words
that the Bursar is going to use his influence with this Kudzuvine person–’