Grantchester Grind (18 page)

It was late afternoon before the Dean left the Praelector’s study to visit the Master
and see for himself what this monstrous gangster Kudzuvine looked like in the flesh. He had
spent the intervening hours listening to the Praelector explain how he had consulted
Mr Retter and Mr Wyve about damage repair and compensation and he had been impressed by
the Praelector’s reasoning. All the same he had his reservations. ‘I take your point
about the cost of repairs and compensation,’ he said, ‘though frankly I cannot conceive
of this dreadful fellow Hartang paying up without a struggle. If what is on that tape is
halfway true the man is in the drug trade.’

‘Which is precisely why he will pay up,’ said the Praelector. ‘I don’t think he will
have any alternative.’

‘But money from a drug dealer? I mean the swine should be in jail. How can we possibly
justify receiving money made in such a way?’

‘It is a matter I have given some thought to,’ said the Praelector. ‘And I have come to
the conclusion that we must follow College precedent.’

For a moment the Dean could hardly believe his ears. ‘Precedent? Precedent? You’re not
suggesting for one moment anyone in the College has ever been involved in the drug
trade, surely?’

‘Not to my knowledge, though statistically I should have thought it was highly
likely. No, I was thinking of one of our Masters. Long dead now, though not so long when one
comes to think of it. 1749. Jonathan Riderscombe made his money in the Slave Trade. Now I
don’t know which you think is worse, drugs or slaves. I must say I consider the Slave Trade
to have been an abomination. But we benefited from it. I am too old to be entirely
sentimental.’

The Dean kept his thoughts on the subject to himself. He disliked being reminded of
the dark origins of great fortunes. He was also extremely surprised, and not at all
pleased, that a new Fellow had been appointed in his absence. ‘The Sir Godber Evans
Memorial Fellowship?’ he said. ‘I don’t like the sound of this at all. The damned man Evans
didn’t deserve a memorial of any sort. He was one of the worst Masters we’ve ever had.
Except for Fitzherbert, of course, but that is another story. I think I ought to have been
consulted before any decision was reached.’

‘Unfortunately we couldn’t reach you,’ said the Praelector.

‘Cathcart knew where I had gone. You could have asked him.’

‘We could have, had we known you were not visiting a dying relative,’ said the
Praelector with some slight acerbity. ‘You could hardly expect us to phone every
hospital and nursing home in Wales, and in any case there were other cogent reasons for
making the decision very quickly.’

‘Were there indeed? And what might those reasons be?’ asked the Dean, who disliked being
faulted.

‘Six million pounds,’ said the Praelector, which took the Dean’s breath away. ‘I think
you would describe that sum as a sufficiently cogent reason. We were faced with
something of an ultimatum. But the Senior Tutor knows more about the matter than I do.
He was the person the donor’s lawyers approached. Don’t ask me why.’

‘Not the Bursar?’

‘Not the Bursar.’

‘And who exactly is this quite remarkably munificent donor? Do we know that?’

The Praelector shook his head. ‘No, we don’t, but I think I can make an educated guess.
The Senior Tutor would have us believe it to be a group of City financiers who admired Sir
Godber Evans’ efforts on their behalf. I don’t.’

The Dean didn’t either. ‘City financiers, my eye,’ he said, ‘the bloody man did terrible
harm to the financial interests of the country. Hopeless Keynesian,’ he said.

‘Quite,’ the Praelector agreed. ‘On the other hand, a certain woman, I won’t call her a
lady because in my opinion she isn’t one, though she does have the title…You take my
meaning?’

‘I do indeed, and let me make an educated guess as to the name of the solicitors. It
wouldn’t be Lapline and Goodenough by any chance?’

‘That I don’t know. The Senior Tutor was holding his cards very close to his chest. All
the same six million pounds is not to be sneezed at. It gives us a fighting fund against this
monster Hartang.’

He smiled slightly and the Dean acknowledged the truth of the statement with a nod of
the head. ‘Unfortunately it also gives us a new Fellow whose antecedents I think we
should examine more closely. Where does he come from? I suppose the Senior Tutor was
prepared to divulge that information to the College Council?’

‘Kloone University. His speciality seems to be in researching crimes and
punishments. His main work is a large tome on hanging called The Long Drop. I have not read
it myself but I am told it is authoritative by those who read such books.’

‘And I take it he is against hanging,’ said the Dean.

‘I imagine so. The widow would not have sponsored him if he’d been in favour of capital
punishment,’ said the Praelector. ‘But you’ll meet him tonight. It is his Induction
Dinner. I haven’t spoken to him myself so we shall just have to see what we have on our
hands. In the meantime we have the Bursar in the lunatic asylum where he properly
belongs and we have six million pounds in the kitty. And unless Retter and Wyve are
totally misjudging the situation we have…’

‘The gangster Hartang by the scrotum,’ said the Dean.

The Praelector acknowledged that this had been his thought though he would have put it
more delicately himself. And what is more,’ he went on, ‘we have the man Kudzuvine at our
convenience. I think the expression is that we have taken a hostage to fortune.’

Even the Dean had to smile. ‘I must congratulate you Praelector. For a man of your age
you have done splendidly.’

‘I don’t think age has anything to do with it, Dean, except in one regard. I had the good
fortune to be born at a time when Britain was the most powerful nation on earth and the
Slave Trade a thing of the past. It was a brief moment in history, I daresay, but the
saying “An Englishman’s word is his bond” wasn’t entirely meaningless in those days.
Alas, it is today. Men like Maxwell–though of course his real name was Hoch and the scum that
Wilson ennobled and Mrs Thatcher spawned have made that guarantee derisory.’

‘My own recent experiences have convinced me that something has gone terribly
wrong,’ said the Dean miserably. “There has been a dreadful deterioration in
standards.’

‘Yes, there has,’ the Praelector went on. ‘When I was young and we had to pretend to be
gentlemen of honour, we had to act honourably to maintain the pretence That was the
greatest virtue hypocrisy conferred on us. And hypocrisy has always been a particularly
English quality.’

The Dean left him sitting and contemplating with sad perception that great past when
corruption and lying were not accepted social norms. Such evils had always been there
and they always would be but they had not become endemic and socially acceptable. It
had taken war, two Great Wars in which millions had died fighting for promises that had
never been kept, to bring England to its moral knees. And men like Hartang to the top. The
Praelector would readily die to prevent Hartang and his ilk destroying Porterhouse and
the romantic virtues it had stood for. Even so he smiled. Englishmen had been clever in
their time and he himself was still no fool. He just left it to other people to think he
was.

The Dean approached the Master’s Lodge with more trepidation than he had expected. His
nerve hadn’t failed him but he had been subjected to so many shocks and humiliations in
the past few days that his confidence had been badly shaken. Besides that, he had been
truly alarmed by the violence and disgusting imagery of Kudzuvine’s language on the
tapes. Even during his time in the Navy he had never heard anything quite like the filth and
violence that seemed to be Kudzuvine’s natural way of expressing himself. And it was not
only the manner in which the creature spoke, it was more the callous acceptance of a
world without sense or meaning that had been so shocking, shocking and alarming. For once
he felt some sympathy for the Bursar and could understand why he was in the mental
hospital, though that was as far as his sympathy went. The man must have been mad to begin
with to get mixed up with creatures like Kudzuvine and the even more appalling Hartang with
his phobia about being eaten by pigs and his insistence on being unidentifiable.
Listening to the tapes the Dean had been confronted by hell on earth and he did not
really want to meet one of its habitués. Still, it had to be done, so he straightened his
short back and marched across the lawn and was rather surprised to find the French windows
locked. He had to go round to the side door and ring the bell.

The door was opened on the chain by Arthur. Behind him stood Henry, the Under-Porter.
Ah, it’s you, sir,’ Arthur said. ‘If you’ll just wait a mo, I’ll undo the chain.’

‘Why is it on a chain?’ asked the Dean. ‘Nobody is going to break in. Nothing much to
steal.’

‘It’s on account of the American gentleman upstairs, though I don’t consider him any
sort of gentleman myself if you know what I mean.’

‘I do,’ said the Dean, ‘I do indeed, Arthur, and I entirely agree with you. And where’s
the Master?’

‘Mr Skullion is in with him, sir. He spends most of his time in there though what he sees
listening to that horrible language I can’t think, sir. But it do keep the American
under control. Does everything the Master tells him.’

The Dean climbed the staircase and met the Matron on the landing. ‘Very nasty business
this, Matron,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry we’re having to submit you to this dreadful ordeal.
Very sorry,’

‘It’s no ordeal to me,’ said the Matron, ‘not at all. I find it a pleasant change from
dealing with coughs and colds and things. This is much more interesting and I’ve heard so
many weird stories, and I have to say that my vocabulary has been broadened.’

‘Yes,’ said the Dean doubtfully. He had no wish to have a Matron in Porterhouse whose
language had more of the lower deck than was entirely pleasant. ‘Yes, I daresay it has.
And the Master is in good health?’

‘I can’t remember when I’ve seen him looking better, sir. Happier and more like his
old self, if you know what I mean.’

‘Splendid,’ said the Dean. ‘Well, I mustn’t keep you from your duties, Matron.’

He opened the bedroom door and paused in astonishment. A naked man was kneeling on the
floor in front of Skullion’s wheelchair with his hands raised in supplication. ‘You gotta
help me, Master. You got to. You send me away from here I going to die. Like he’s passed a
death sentence on me. Jesus fuck, what I done, man, he’s going to take his time with me too
like the slow roast or the charcoal grill and you know about these things, Master, anyone
does got to be you. Please, please you got to say you going to help old Kudzuvine. I’ll do
anything you ask, Master, I’ll do it. You just say the word.’

Kudzuvine prostrated himself at the foot of the wheelchair.

Strange sounds were coming from its occupant. Even the Dean, used as he was to
Skullion’s inarticulacy immediately following his Porterhouse Blue, found the sounds
incomprehensible and alarming. It was all very well the Matron saying she couldn’t
remember when she had seen Skullion looking better and more like his old self, but the
Dean found her optimism distinctly perverse. True, he could only see his back now with
the bowler hat pulled well down on his head but if the series of grunts and gurgling noises
emanating from him were anything to go by, the Master had never been worse. Even just
after his stroke Skullion had been faintly comprehensible, but now whatever he was
trying to utter was without any decipherable meaning at all. It sounded like
strangulated gobbledygook. And the man prostrating himself on the floor didn’t make
much sense either, though at least part of what he had been saying was perfectly true. If
half the things he had heard about Hartang on the tapes were true, he would undoubtedly
have Kudzuvine tortured to death.

All the same, to grovel before Skullion showed such an abject lack of moral fibre that
the Dean was disgusted. ‘For goodness’ sake, get off the floor, man,’ he said and strode
into the room. Kudzuvine scrambled to his feet and hurriedly got back into bed and sat
there huddled up staring at this new dark apparition that had come into his life. The Dean
ignored him. He was giving his attention to Skullion and, now that he could see the
Master’s face, was surprised to see a smile appear and one eye wink at him. And the noises,
those dreadful sounds, had stopped.

‘If you don’t mind, Master, I think we ought to have a little chat in private,’ he said,
and wheeled Skullion out of the room. Behind them Kudzuvine shook his head. Whatever he
had walked into like a fucking monastery with the man in the wheelchair with the hat who made
sounds at him had to be in some fucking world he’d never been in before. And it was his
only hope.

Tell me, Skullion, if you can of course,’ said the Dean, ‘and if you haven’t had another
Blue, tell me why do you make those awful noises?’

‘Called me Quasimodo he did. Quasimodo and some bloody hunchback. Now I don’t know what
Quasimodo means, must be Italian or Spanish or something. Rude anyway. So I thought I’d
quasimodo him back and see how he likes it. Well, that buggered him proper, if you’ll
pardon the expression. He don’t like my gobbledygook any more than I like his bloody
quasimodo,’ Skullion explained. ‘Not when I go on hour after hour and half the night
gobbledygooking the sod. I just sit there and watch him like a hawk and he can’t stand it.
Broke his spirit I have. Not that he’s got much to break. He’s one of them Yanks thinks they
own the world. Told the Praelector one time he was a true-born American and could whip the
hide off the rest of the world. Praelector didn’t like it any more than I did. So I thought,
“You’ve come to the wrong place to say a thing like that and I’ll whip you into shape, my lad,
even if I am in a wheelchair and can’t move much.” And I have, sir, I have. I’ve got the
bugger gibbering. Another few days and they’ll have him in Fallboard for the rest of his
natural, certified insane which is what he is by my book.’