'I suppose it doesn't matter what happens once he's been appointed,' he told Vera. 'All the same I can foresee some extremely heated arguments.'
'Which Purefoy will win,' said Vera, 'because he is obsessed with facts and certainties.'
'Not the only thing he's obsessed with. And anyway, it is not a fact that Crippen didn't murder his wife. It's an assumption, and a false one.'
But Vera wasn't prepared to argue. 'He is an excellent researcher and a genuine scholar. You'll see that when you meet him.'
'I don't intend to,' said Goodenough.
Nor, it seemed, did Lady Mary. The strain of interviewing the previous applicants for the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellowship had told on her failing health. Never a very sexual person herself, she had found the interview with the psycho-anal-erotic fantasist from Grimsby deeply disturbing. Owing to an extremely painful attack of sciatica she had had to conduct it while lying on a chaise longue, and Dr MacKerbie had arrived smelling very strongly of beer and whisky. In fact he was plainly drunk at ten o'clock in the morning and had evidently got the impression that she was lying there waiting to enjoy his particular fantasies and even to experience anal eroticism herself. She had been saved by the housekeeper who heard her screams and by Dr MacKerbie, whose drunkenness made the business of undoing his trousers altogether too hazardous.
After that nightmare interview, Lady Mary invariably sat behind a substantial desk with a tape recorder running and the housekeeper's husband standing in a corner of the room for protection. The interview with Dr Lamprey Yeaster went fairly well to begin with. The historian was at least sober and his knowledge of Historical Research into Industrial Relations in Bradford before the War was impressive. So in a way, though in an entirely different way, were his opinions on postwar immigration policies and the consequences of allowing hundreds of thousands of West Indians and Pakistanis into Britain. Lady Mary Evans had him hustled out of the house after twenty minutes and had to lie down on the chaise longue again, this time with nervous prostration.
The next six applicants all failed to satisfy her and the only one who appealed to her at all said he'd changed his mind and wouldn't go near Porterhouse because it was a bloody snob college and anyway he was quite happy doing research into potato pathology at Strathclyde and Cambridge didn't have anything to offer him. By the time she reached the vivisectionist from Southampton and had had to listen to a perfectly foul account of his work with cats, Lady Mary was on the point of abandoning the entire project. But her sense of duty prevailed. She phoned Mr Lapline, and was put through instead to Goodenough.
'I do see the problem,' he said when she complained bitterly about the quality of the applicants and wanted to know why she had been sent a man who made it his life's work to torture cats to death when she was particularly fond of cats and…'I really do, Lady Mary, but the fact of the matter is that Porterhouse has a perfectly dreadful reputation, as you are probably aware, and-'
Lady Mary pointed out that as her late husband had been Master of Porterhouse and had been murdered there of course she knew it had a dreadful reputation and what had that got to do with sending her a lot of psychopaths.
'The thing is,' said Goodenough, 'that it has proved extremely difficult to find genuine scholars who want to go near the place.'
'So far you haven't found a single scholar. That awful man from Bristol who wants to send every black person back to countries they've never come from…'
'You mean Dr Lamprey Yeaster? I had no idea he held such disgraceful political views. My remit was to-'
'From now on your remit, as you choose to call it, is to vet the applicants yourself. I am not a well person, and I refuse to have to meet people who are either mad or thoroughly repulsive in some other way. Is that clear? And anyway, why are you dealing with the matter? I have always dealt with Mr Lapline.'
Goodenough sighed audibly into the phone. 'I'm afraid Mr Lapline is undergoing medical treatment for his gall bladder. A temporary condition but a very painful one, I'm told. In the meantime please be assured that I shall do everything necessary…'
He put the phone down and went through to Vera. "Well, that has simplified things,' he said. 'You can tell Cousin Purefoy he has the Fellowship. She doesn't want to see any of the others. I suppose I'll have to meet him after all.'
3
In Purefoy Osbert at Kloone University the news that he was about to become the Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow at Porterhouse aroused mixed emotions, though only slightly. He was perfectly happy at Kloone where he had first studied and, having graduated, had gone on to his doctoral thesis, 'The Crime of Punishment', on the inequities of the penal system in Britain. On the other hand he had no doubt he would be perfectly happy in Cambridge. And the move would have its advantages. The University Library there had many more books than that at Kloone and to Purefoy it was in libraries that he could acquire certainties. Certainty was essential to him and the written word had a certainty about it that everything else in life lacked. Like an intellectual sniffer-dog, Purefoy Osbert kept his nose close to documents, collected information and felt confident in the certainty of his conclusions. Theories and certainties protected him from the chaos that was the universe. They also helped him to cope with the chaotic inconsistencies of his late father's opinions.
The Reverend Osbert had been of the eclectic persuasion. Brought up as a Presbyterian, he had in his teens switched to Methodism, then to Unitarianism and from that to Christian Science before being persuaded by a reading of Newman's _Apologia_ that Rome was his spiritual home. The homecoming did not last long, although it contributed to Purefoy's naming. Tolstoyan pacifism was more manifestly the answer and for a while the Rev. Osbert toyed with Buddhism. In other words Purefoy's childhood was spent on a roller-coaster of changing philosophies and uncertain opinions. He would go to school one morning knowing that his father believed in one God, only to come home in the afternoon to learn that God didn't exist.
Mrs Osbert, on the other hand, was entirely consistent. So long as her husband paid the bills-he had inherited a row of small houses and rented them to reliable tenants-and provided the family with a comfortable living, she did not mind what opinions he held or for how long. 'Just stick to the facts,' she would say when one of his digressions went on too long, and she was frequently telling young Purefoy, 'The trouble with your father is that he is never certain about anything. He never knows what to believe. If only he could be certain about something, we'd all be a lot happier. You just bear that in mind and you won't go the same way.' Not wanting to go the same way as his father, who had died quite terribly on his return from a pilgrimage to a Buddhist shrine in Sri Lanka where he had made the mistake of attempting to befriend a rabid dog, Purefoy had never forgotten her words. 'I told him one of those days he would go too far,' she explained to Purefoy after the funeral. 'And he did. To Sri Lanka. And all in search of holiness. Instead of which…Well, never mind. You just stick to certainties and you won't go far wrong.'