“Mr Zipser, are you decent?” she called.
“Hang on. I’m coming,” Zipser called back.
“I shouldn’t be at all surprised,” Mrs Biggs muttered audibly.
Zipser opened the door.
“I haven’t got all day,” Mrs Biggs said brushing past him provocatively.
“I’m sorry to have kept you,” said Zipser sarcastically.
“Kept me indeed. Listen to who’s talking. And what makes you think I’d mind being kept?”
Zipser blushed. “That’s hardly what I meant,” he said hotly.
“Very complimentary I’m sure,” said Mrs Biggs, regarding him with arch disapproval. “Got out of bed the wrong side this morning, did we?”
Zipser noted the plural with a delicious shudder and lowered his eyes. Mrs Biggs’ boots, porcinely tight, entranced him.
“Mr Skullion’s got a black eye this morning,” the bedder continued. “A right purler. Not before time either. I says to him, ‘Somebody’s been taking a poke at you.’ You know what he says?” Zipser shook his head. “He says, ‘I’ll thank you to keep your comments to yourself, Mrs Biggs.’ That’s what he says. Silly old fool. Don’t know which century he’s living in.” She went into the other room and Zipser followed her. He put a kettle on to make coffee while Mrs Biggs bustled about picking things up and putting them down again in a manner which suggested that a great deal of work was being done but which merely helped to emphasize her feelings. All the time she rattled on with her daily dose of inconsequential information while Zipser dodged about the room like a toreador trying to avoid a talkative bull. Each time she brushed past him he was aware of an animal magnetism that overrode considerations of taste and that aesthetic sensibility his education was supposed to have given him. Finally he stood in the corner, hardly able to contain himself, and watched her figure as it walloped about the room. Her words lost all meaning, became mere soothing sounds, waves of accompaniment to the surge of her thighs and the great rollers of her buttocks dimpled and shimmering beneath her skirt. “Well I says, ‘You know what you can do…’” Mrs Biggs’ voice echoed Zipser’s terrible thought. She bent over to plug in the vacuum-cleaner and her breasts plunged in her blouse and undulated with a force of attraction Zipser found almost irresistible. He felt himself moved out of his corner like a boxer urged forward by unnatural passion for an enormous opponent. Words crowded into his mouth. Unwanted words. Unspeakable words.
“I want you,” he said and was saved the final embarrassment by the vacuum-cleaner which roared into life.
“What’s that you said?” Mrs Biggs shouted above the din. She was holding the suction pipe against a cushion on the armchair. Zipser turned purple.
“Nothing,” he bawled, and fell back into his corner.
“Bag’s full,” said Mrs Biggs, and switched the machine off.
In the silence that followed Zipser leant against the wall, appalled at his terrible avowal. He was about to make a dash for the door when Mrs Biggs bent over and undid the clips on the back of the vacuum-cleaner. Zipser stared at the backs of her knees. The boots, the creases, the swell of her thighs, the edge of her stockings, the crescent…
“Bag’s full,” Mrs Biggs said again. “You can’t get any suction when the bag’s full.”
She straightened up holding the bag grey and swollen… Zipser shut his eyes. Mrs Biggs emptied the bag into the waste-paper basket. A cloud of grey dust billowed up into the room.
“Are you feeling all right, dearie?” she asked, peering at him with motherly concern. Zipser opened his eyes and stared into her face.
“I’m all right,” he managed to mutter trying to take his eyes off her lips. Mrs Biggs’ lipstick gleamed thickly. “I didn’t sleep well. That’s all.”
“Too much work and not enough play makes Jack a dull boy,” said Mrs Biggs holding the bag limply. To Zipser the thing had an erotic appeal he dared not analyse. “Now you just sit down and I’ll make you some coffee and you’ll feel better.” Mrs Biggs’ hand grasped his arm and guided him to a chair. Zipser slumped into it and stared at the vacuum-cleaner while Mrs Biggs, bending once again and even more revealingly now that Zipser was sitting down and closer to her, inserted the bag into the back of the machine and switched it on. A terrible roar, and the bag was sucked into the interior with a force which corresponded entirely to Zipser’s feelings. Mrs Biggs straightened up and went through to the gyp room to make coffee while Zipser shifted feebly in the chair. He couldn’t imagine what was happening to him. It was all too awful. He had to get away. He couldn’t go on sitting there while she was in the room. He’d do something terrible. He couldn’t control himself. He’d say something. He was about to get up and sneak out when Mrs Biggs came back with two cups of coffee.
“You do look funny,” she said, putting a cup into his hand. “You ought to go and see a doctor. You might be going down with something.”
“Yes,” said Zipser obediently. Mrs Biggs sat down opposite him and sipped her coffee. Zipser tried to keep his eyes off her legs and found himself gazing at her breasts.
“Do you often get taken queer?” Mrs Biggs enquired.
“Queer?” said Zipser, shaken from his reverie by the accusation. “Certainly not.”
“I was only asking,” said Mrs Biggs. She took a mouthful of coffee with a schlurp that was distinctly suggestive. “I had a young man once,” she continued, “just like you. Got took queer every now and then. Used to throw himself about and wriggle something frightful. Took me all my time to hold him down, it did.”
Zipser stared at her frenziedly. The notion of being held down while wriggling by Mrs Biggs was more than he could bear. With a sudden lurch that spilt his coffee Zipser hurled himself out of the chair and dashed from the room. He rushed downstairs and out into the safety of the open air. “I’ve got to do something. I can’t control myself. First Skullion and now Mrs Biggs.” He walked hurriedly out of Porterhouse and through Clare towards the University Library.
Alone in Zipser’s room, Mrs Biggs switched on the vacuum-cleaner and poked the handle round the room. As she worked she sang to herself loudly, “Love me tender, love me true.” Her voice, raucously off key, was drowned by the roar of the Electrolux.
The Dean spent the morning writing letters to members of the Porterhouse Society. As the Society’s secretary he attended the annual dinners in London and Edinburgh and corresponded regularly with members, a great many of whom lived in Australia or New Zealand, and for whom the Dean’s letters formed a link with their days at Porterhouse on which they had traded socially ever since. For the Dean himself the very remoteness of most of his correspondents, and particularly their tendency to assume that nothing had changed since their undergraduate days, was a constant reassurance. It allowed him to pretend to an omnipotent conservatism that had little connection with reality. After the new Master’s speech it was not easy to maintain that pretence, and the Dean’s pen held in his mottled hand crawled slowly across the paper like some literate but decrepit tortoise. Every now and then he would lift his head and look for inspiration into the clear-cut features of the young men whose photographs cluttered his desk and stared with sepia arrogance from the walls of his room. The Dean recalled their athleticism and youthful indiscretions, the shopgirls they had compromised, the tailors they had bilked, the exams they had failed, and from his window he could look down on to the fountain where they had ducked so many homosexuals. It had all been so healthy and naturally violent, so different from the effete aestheticism of today. They hadn’t fasted for the good of the coolies in India or protested because an anarchist was imprisoned in Brazil or stormed the Garden House Hotel because they disapproved of the government in Greece. They’d acted in high spirits. Wholesomely. The Dean sat back in his chair remembering the splendid riot on Guy Fawkes Night in 1948. The bomb that blew the Senate House windows out. The smoke bomb down the lavatory in Market Square that nearly killed an old man with high blood pressure. The lamp glass littering the streets. The bus being pushed backwards. The coppers’ helmets flying. The car they’d overturned in King’s Parade. There’d been a pregnant woman in it, the Dean recalled, and afterwards they’d all chipped in to pay her for the damage. Good-hearted lads. They didn’t make them like that any more. Quickened by the recollection, his pen scrawled swiftly across the page. It would take more than Sir Godber Evans to change the character of Porterhouse. He’d see to that. He had just finished a letter and was addressing the envelope when there was a knock on the door.