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“Jump at the opportunity. I’ll see to that. Same club. Can’t think why. Should have been blackballed,” said the General. “Fix it tomorrow.”
By the time the Dean left Coft Castle that evening he was a happier man. As he tottered out of his car in time for di
“Ah, Skullion,” he said as the porter got to his feet, “I wasn’t able to be at the Bumps this afternoon. How did it go?”
“Rowed over, sir,” said Skullion dejectedly.
The Dean shook his head sadly.
“What a pity,” he said, “I was rather hoping we’d do better today. Still there is always a chance in May.”
“Yes, sir,” Skullion said, but without, it seemed to the Dean, the enthusiasm that had been his wont.
“Getting old, poor fellow,” the Dean thought as he stumbled past the red lanterns that guarded the fallen debris of Zipser’s climacteric.
Chapter 13
Cornelius Carrington travelled to Cambridge by train. It accorded with the discriminating nostalgia which was the hallmark of his programmes that he should catch the Fenman at Liverpool Street and spend the journey in the dining-car speculating on the sudde
As he sat in the dining car savouring the desultory landscape of Broxbourne, Carrington’s thoughts turned from teacakes to the ostensible reasons for his visit. Sir Cathcart’s invitation had come too abruptly both in ma
By the time the train reached Cambridge, he had already begun to organize the programme in his mind. The railway station would make a good starting point and one that pointed a moral. It had been built so far from the centre of the town on the insistence of the University Authorities in 1845 who had feared its malign influence. Foresight or the refusal to accept change? The viewer could take his pick. Carrington was impartial. Then shots of College gateways. Eroded statues. Shields. Heraldic animals. Chapels and gilded towers. Gowns. Undergraduates. The Bridge of Sighs. It was all there waiting to be explored by Carrington at his most congenial.
He took a taxi and drove to the Belvedere Hotel. It was not what he remembered. The old hotel, charming in a quiet opulent way, was gone and in its place there stood a large modern monstrosity, as tasteless a monument to commercial cupidity as any he had ever seen. Cornelius Carrington’s fury was aroused. He would definitely make the series now. Rejecting the anonymous amenities of the Belvedere, he cancelled his room and took the taxi to the Blue Boar in Trinity Street. Here too things had changed, but at least from the outside the hotel looked what it had once been, an eighteenth-century hostelry, and Carrington was satisfied. After all, it is appearances that matter, he thought as he went up to his room.
At any previous time in his life Skullion would have agreed with him but now that his house in Rhyder Street was up for sale, and the College’s reputation threatened by the Master’s flirtation with the commercial aspects of birth control, Skullion was less concerned with appearances. He skulked in the Porter’s Lodge with a new taciturnity in marked contrast to the gruff deference he had accorded callers in the past. No longer did he appear at the door to greet the Fellows with a brisk “Good morning, sir” and anyone calling for a parcel was likely to be treated to a surly indifference and a churlishness which defeated attempts at conversation. Even Walter, the under-porter, found Skullion difficult. He had never found him easy but now his existence was made miserable by Skullion’s silence and his frequent outbursts of irritation. For hours Skullion would sit staring at the gas fire mulling over his grievances and debating what to do. “Got no right to do it,” he would suddenly say out loud with a violence that made Walter jump.
“No right to do what?” he asked at first.
“None of your business,” Skullion snapped back and Walter gave up the attempt to discuss whatever it was that had put the Head Porter’s back up. Even the Dean, never the most sensitive of men when it came to other people’s feelings, noticed the change in Skullion when he called each morning to make his report. There was a hangdog look about the Porter that caused the Dean to wonder if it wasn’t time he was put down before recalling that Skullion was after all a human being and that he had been misled by the metaphor. Skullion would sidle into the room with his hat in his hand and mutter, “Nothing to report, sir,” and sidle out again leaving the Dean with a sense of having been rebuked in some unspoken way. It was an uncomfortable feeling after so many years of approval and the Dean felt aggrieved. If Skullion couldn’t be put down, it was perhaps time he retired before this new churlishness tarnished his previously unspotted reputation for deference. Besides, the Dean had enough to worry about in Sir Godber’s plans without being bothered with Skullion’s private grievances.