“Porterhouse College, one of Cambridge’s socially more exclusive colleges, has been in the habit of selling pass degrees to unqualified sons of wealthy parents, according to the college porter, Mr James Skullion.”
“Well?” said Lady Mary before Sir Godber could read any further.
“Well what?” said the Master.
“You’ve got to do something about it. It’s outrageous.”
The Master peered vindictively at his wife. “If you would give me time to read the article I might be able to think of something to do about it. As it is I have had time neither to digest its import nor what little breakfast -”
“You must issue a press statement denying the allegations,” said Lady Mary.
“Quite,” said Sir Godber. “Which, since as far as I have been able to read, seem to be perfectly true, would do nobody, least of all me, any good whatsoever. I suppose Skullion might benefit by being awarded damages for being called a liar.”
“Are you trying to tell me that you’ve been condoning the sale of degrees?”
“Condoning?” shouted the Master. “Condoning? What the hell do you -”
“Godber,” said Lady Mary threateningly. The Master lapsed into a stricken silence and tried to finish the article while Lady Mary launched into a sermon on the iniquities of bribery and corruption, public schools and the commercial ethics, or lack of them, of the middle classes. By the end of breakfast the Master was feeling like a battered baby.
“I think I’ll take a walk,” he said, and left the table. Outside the sun was shining and in the Fellows’ Garden the daffodils were out. So were the pickets. Outside the main gate several youths were sitting on the pavement with placards which read REINSTATE SKULLION. The Master walked past them with his head lowered and headed for the river wondering why it was that his well-meaning efforts to effect radical change should always provoke the opposition of those in whose interests he was acting. Why should Skullion, whose ideas were archaic in the extreme and who would have chased those long-haired youths away from the main gate, elicit their sympathy now? There was something perverse about English political attitudes that defeated logic. Looking back over his lifetime Sir Godber was filled with a sense of injustice. “It’s the Right wot gets the power. It’s the Left wot gets the blame,” he thought. “Ain’t it all a blooming shame?” He wandered on along the path across Sheep’s Green towards Lammas Land, dreaming of a future in which all men would be happy and all problems solved. Lammas Land. The land of the day that would never come.
The Dean didn’t read the Observer. He found its emphasis on the malfunction of the body politic and the body physical not at all to his taste. In fact none of the Sunday papers appealed to him. He preferred his agnosticism straight and accordingly attended morning service in the College chapel where the Chaplain could be relied upon to maintain the formalities of religious observance in a tone loud enough to make good the deficiency of his congregation and with an irrelevance to the ethical needs of those few who were present that the Dean found infinitely reassuring. He was therefore somewhat surprised to find that the Chaplain had chosen his text from Jeremiah 17:11. “As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.” Fortunately for the Dean, he was so preoccupied with the problem of the continuing existence of partridges in spite of their evident shortcomings as parents that he missed a great deal of what the Chaplain had to say. He awoke from his reverie towards the end of the sermon to find the Chaplain in a strangely outspoken way criticizing the college for admitting undergraduates whose only merit was that they belonged to wealthy families. “Let us remember our Lord’s words, ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God’,” shouted the Chaplain. “We have too many camels in Porterhouse.” He climbed down from the pulpit and the service ended with “As pants the hart…” The Dean and the Senior Tutor left together.
“A most peculiar service,” said the Dean. “The Chaplain seemed obsessed with various forms of wild life.”
“I think he misses Skullion,” said the Senior Tutor.
They walked down the Cloisters with a speculative air. “After that dreadful programme I would hardly go so far as to say that I missed him,” the Dean said, “though I daresay he’s a great loss to the College.”
“In more ways than one,” said the Senior Tutor. “I dined in Emmanuel last night.” He shuddered at the recollection.
“Very commendable,” said the Dean. “I try to avoid Emmanuel. I had some cutlets there once that disagreed with me.”
“I hardly noticed the food,” said the Senior Tutor. “It was the conversation I found disagreeable.”
“Carrington, I suppose?”
“There was some mention,” said the Senior Tutor, “I did my best to play it down. No, what I really had in mind was something old Saxton there told me. Apparently there is a not unsubstantial rumour going round that Skullion’s assertion that he offered the College his life savings was not without foundation.”
Ths Dean waded through the morass of double negatives towards some sort of assertion. “Ah,” he said finally, uncertain how far to commit himself.
“I understood Saxton to say he had it on the highest authority that Skullion was worth a good deal more than one might have supposed.”
“I always said Skullion was invaluable,” said the Dean.
“The sum mentioned was in the region of a quarter of a million pounds,” said the Senior Tutor.
“Out of the question to accept… What?” said the Dean.
“A quarter of a million pounds.”
“Good God!”
“Lord Wurford’s legacy to him,” explained the Senior Tutor.
“And the bloody Bursar turned it down,” stuttered the Dean.
“It puts a rather different complexion on the matter, doesn’t it?”
It had certainly put a different complexion on the Dean who stood in the Cloister trying to get his breath.
“My God, a quarter of a million pounds. And the Master sacked him,” he gasped. The Senior Tutor helped him down the Cloisters.
“Come and have a little something in my rooms,” he said. They passed the main gate where a youth was holding a placard.
“Reinstate Skullion,” said the Dean. “For once I think the protestors are right.”
“The danger is that some other college will bag him before we get the chance,” said the Senior Tutor.
“Do you really think so?” asked the Dean anxiously. “The dear old fellow was… is such a loyal College servant.” Even to the Dean’s ears the word “servant” had a hollow ring to it now.
In the Senior Tutor’s rooms the bric-a-brac of a rowing man hung like ancient weapons on the walls, an arsenal of trophies. The Dean sipped his sherry pensively.
“I blame Carrington entirely,” he said. “The programme was a travesty. Cathcart should never have invited him.”
“I had no idea he had,” said the Senior Tutor. The Dean changed direction.
“As a matter of fact I found myself agreeing with a great deal of what Skullion had to say. Most of his accusations applied only to the Master. And Sir Godber is entirely responsible for the whole disgraceful affair. He should never have been nominated. He has done irreparable damage to the reputation of the College.”
The Senior Tutor stared out of the window at the damage done to the Tower. The animosity he had felt for the Dean, an antagonism which had taken the place of the transitory attachments of his youth, had quite left him. Whatever the Dean’s faults, and over the years the Senior Tutor had catalogued them all meticulously, no one could accuse him of being an intellectual. Together, though never in unison, they had steered Porterhouse away from the academic temptations to which all other Cambridge colleges had succumbed and had preserved that integrity of ignorance which gave Porterhouse men the confidence to cope with life’s complexities which men with more educated sensibilities so obviously lacked. Unlike the Dean, whose lack of scholarship was natural and unforced, the Senior Tutor had once possessed a mind and it had only been by the most rigorous discipline that he had suppressed his academic leanings in the interests of the College spirit. His had been an intellectual decision founded on his conviction that if a little knowledge was a dangerous thing, a lot was lethal. The damage done to the Tower by Zipser’s researches confirmed him in his belief.