“I understood from the Senior Tutor that you wanted to see me about a sexual problem,” the Chaplain shouted.
Zipser lowered the loudhailer. The thing clearly had disadvantages.
“I can assure you I don’t masturbate,” he said.
The Chaplain looked at him incomprehendingly. “You press the trigger when you want to speak,” he explained. Zipser nodded dumbly. The knowledge that to communicate with the Chaplain at all he had to announce his feelings for Mrs Biggs to the world at large presented him with a terrible dilemma made no less intolerable by the Chaplain’s shouted replies.
“It often helps to get these things into the open,” the Chaplain assured him. Zipser had his doubts about that. Admissions of the sort he had to make broadcast through a loudhailer were not likely to be of any help at all. He might just as well go and propose to the wretched woman straightaway and be done with it. He sat with lowered head while the Chaplain boomed on.
“Don’t forget that anything you tell me will be heard in the strictest confidence,” he shouted. “You need have no fears that it will go any further.”
“Oh sure,” Zipser muttered. Outside in the Quad a small crowd of undergraduates had gathered by the fountain to listen.
Half an hour later Zipser left the room, his demoralization quite complete. At least he could congratulate himself that he had revealed nothing of his true feelings and the Chaplain’s kindly probings, his tentative questions, had elicited no response. Zipser had sat silently through a sexual catechism only bothering to shake his head when the Chaplain broached particularly obscene topics. In the end he had listened to a lyrical description of the advantages of au pair girls. It was obvious that the Chaplain regarded foreign girls as outside the sexual canons of the Church.
“So much less danger of a permanently unhappy involvement,” he had shouted, “and after all I often think that’s what they come here for. Ships that pass in the night and not on one’s own doorstep you know.” He paused and smiled at Zipser salaciously. “We all have to sow our wild oats at some time or other and it’s much better to do it abroad. I’ve often thought that’s what Rupert Brooke had in mind in that line of his about some corner of a foreign field. Mind you, one can hardly say that he was particularly healthy, come to think of it, but there we are. That’s my advice to you, dear boy. Find a nice Swedish girl, I’m told they’re very good, and have a ball. I believe that’s the modern idiom. Yes, Swedes or French, depending on your taste. Spaniards are a bit difficult, I’m told, and then again they tend to be rather hairy. Still, buggers can’t be choosers as dear old Sir Winston said at the queer’s wedding. Ha, ha.”
Zipser staggered from the room. He knew now what muscular Christianity meant. He went down the dark staircase and was about to go out into the Court when he saw the group standing by the fountain. Zipser turned and fled up the stairs and locked himself in the lavatory on the top landing. He was still there an hour later when First Hall began.
Chapter 6
Sir Godber dined at home. He was still recovering from the gastric consequences of the Feast and in any case the Bursar’s revelations had disinclined him to the company of the Fellows until he had formulated his plans more clearly. He had spent the afternoon considering various schemes for raising money and had made several telephone calls to financial friends in the City to ask their advice and to put up proposals of his own but without success. Blomberg’s Bank had been prepared to endow several Research Fellowships in Accountancy but even Sir Godber doubted if such generosity would materially alter the intellectual climate of Porterhouse. He had even considered offering the American Phosgene Corp. facilities for research into nerve gas, facilities they had been denied by all American universities, in return for a really large endowment but he suspected that the resultant publicity and student protest would destroy his already tenuous liberal reputation. Publicity was much on his mind. At five o’clock the BBC phoned to ask if he would appear on a panel of leading educationalists to answer questions on financial priorities in Education. Sir Godber was sorely tempted to agree but refused on the grounds that he had hardly acquired much experience. He put the phone down reluctantly and wondered what effect his announcement to several million viewers that Porterhouse College was in the habit of selling degrees to rich young layabouts would have had. It was a pleasing thought and gave rise in the Master’s mind to an even more satisfying conclusion. He picked up the phone again and spoke to the Bursar.
“Could we arrange a College Council meeting for tomorrow afternoon? Say two-thirty?” he asked.
“It’s rather short notice. Master,” the Bursar replied.
“Good. Two-thirty it is then,” Sir Godber said with iron geniality and replaced the receiver. He sat back and began to draw up a list of innovations. Candidates to be chosen by academic achievement only. The kitchen endowment to be cut by three-quarters and the funds reallocated to scholarships. Women undergraduates to be admitted as members. Gate hours abolished. College playing fields open to children from the town. Sir Godber’s imagination raced on compiling proposals with no thought for the financial implications. They would have to find the money somewhere and he didn’t much care where. The main thing was that he had the Fellows over a barrel. They might protest but there was nothing they could do to stop him. They had placed a weapon in his hands. He smiled to himself at the thought of their faces when he explained the alternatives tomorrow. At six-thirty he went through to the drawing-room where Lady Mary, who had been chairing a committee on Teenage Delinquency, was writing letters.
“Be with you in a minute,” she said when Sir Godber asked her if she would like a sherry. He looked at her dubiously. There were times when he wondered if his wife was ever with him. Her mind followed a wholly independent course and was ever concentrated on the more distressing aspects of other people’s lives. Sir Godber poured himself a large whisky.
“Well, I think I’ve got them by the short hairs,” he said when she finally stopped tapping at her typewriter.
Lady Mary’s lean tongue lubricated the flap of an envelope. “Non-specific urethritis is reaching epidemic proportions among school-leavers,” she said. Sir Godber ignored the interjection. He couldn’t for the life of him see what it had to do with the College. He pursued his own topic. “I’m going to show them that I’m not prepared to be a cipher.”
“Surveys show that one in every five children has…”
“I haven’t ended my career in politics only to be pushed into a sinecure,” Sir Godber contended.
“That’s not the problem,” Lady Mary agreed.
“What isn’t?” Sir Godber asked momentarily interested by her assertion.
“Cure. Easy enough. What we’ve got to get at is the moral delinquency…”
Sir Godber drank his whisky and tried not to listen. There were times when he wondered if he would ever have succeeded as a politician without the help of his wife. Without her incessant preoccupation with unsavoury statistics and sordid social problems, late-night sittings in the House might have had less appeal and committees less utility. Would he have made so many passionate speeches or spoken with such urgency if Lady Mary had been prepared to listen to one word he said at home? He rather doubted it. They went in to dinner and Sir Godber passed the time as usual by counting the number of times she said Must and Our Duty. The Musts won by fifty-four to forty-eight. Not bad for the course.
After he had heard the Chaplain go down to Hall, Zipser slipped out of the lavatory and went to his room. There was no sign of the little crowd of undergraduates who had been gathered in the Court when he first went down and he hoped no one would find out who had been talking, if that was the right word, to the Chaplain. The tendency he shared with the Master’s wife to think in wholly impersonal terms about world issues had quite deserted him. During his hour in the lavatory he had taken the Chaplain’s advice and had attempted to interpose the image of a Swedish girl between himself and Mrs Biggs. Every time Mrs Biggs intruded he concentrated on the slim buttocks and breasts of a Swedish actress he had seen once in Playboy and to some extent the practice had worked. Not entirely. The Swede tended to swell and to assume unnatural proportions until she was displaced by a smiling Mrs Biggs, but the series of little respites was encouraging and suggested that a substantial Swede might be even more effective. He would take the Chaplain’s advice and find an au pair girl or a language student and… and… well… and. Zipser’s lack of sexual experience prevented him from formulating at all clearly what he would do then. Well, he would copulate with her. Having arrived at this neat if somewhat abstract conclusion he felt better. It was certainly preferable to raping Mrs Biggs, which seemed the only alternative. As usual Zipser had no doubts about rape. It was a brutal, violent act of assertive masculinity, a loosening of savage instinctual forces, passionate and bestial. He would hurl Mrs Biggs to the floor and thrust himself… With an effort of will he dragged his imagination back from the scene and thought aseptically about copulating with a Swede.