Porterhouse Blue Read Online Free Page B

there was no sign of the Porter. Perhaps he was still lying out there unconscious. Perhaps he had knocked him out. Zipser shuddered at this fresh indication of his irrational nature, and its terrible consequences for mankind. Sex and violence, the speaker had said, were the twin poles of the world’s lifeless future, and Zipser could see now what she had meant.
    Anyway, he could not leave Skullion lying out there to freeze to death even if going down to help him meant that he would be sent down from the University for ‘assaulting a college porter’, his thesis on The Pumpernickel as A Factor in the Politics of Sixteenth- Century Westphalia uncompleted. He went to the door and walked slowly downstairs.
*
    Skullion got to his feet and picked up his bowler, brushed the snow off it and put it on. His waistcoat and jacket were covered with patches of snow and he brushed them down with his hands. His right eye was swelling. Young bastard had caught him a real shiner. ‘Getting too old for this job,’ he muttered, muddled feelings of anger and respect competing in his mind. ‘But I can still catch him.’ He followed the footsteps across the lawn and down the path to the gate into New Court. His eye had swollen now so that he could hardly see out of it, but Skullion wasn’t thinking about his eye. He wasn’t thinking about catching the culprit. He was thinking back to the days of his youth. ‘Fair’s fair. If you can’t catch ’em, you can’t report ’em,’ old Fuller, the Head Porter at Porterhouse had said to him when he first came to the College and what was true then was true now. He turned left at the gate and went down the Cloister to the Lodge and went through to his bedroom. ‘A real shiner,’ he said examining the swollen eye in the mirror behind the door. It could do with a bit of beefsteak. He’d get some from the College kitchen in the morning. He took off his jacket and was unbuttoning his waistcoat when the door of the Lodge opened. Skullion buttoned his waistcoat again and put on his jacket and went out into the office.
*
    Zipser stood in the doorway of O staircase and watched Skullion cross the Court to the Cloisters. Well, at leasthe wasn’t lying out in the snow. Still he couldn’t go back to his room without doing something. He had better go down and see if he was all right. He walked across the Court and into the Lodge. It was empty and he was about to turn away and go back to his room when the door at the back opened and Skullion appeared. His right eye was black and swollen and his face, old and veined, had a deformed lopsided look about it.
    ‘Well?’ Skullion asked out of the side of his mouth. One eye peered angrily at Zipser.
    ‘I just came to say I’m sorry,’ Zipser said awkwardly.
    ‘Sorry?’ Skullion asked as if he didn’t understand.
    ‘Sorry about hitting you.’
    ‘What makes you think you hit me?’ The lopsided face glared at him.
    Zipser scratched his forehead.
    ‘Well, anyway I’m sorry. I thought I had better see if you were all right.’
    ‘You thought I was going to report you, didn’t you?’ Skullion asked contemptuously. ‘Well, I’m not. You got away.’
    Zipser shook his head.
    ‘It wasn’t that. I thought you might be … well … hurt.’
    Skullion smiled grimly.
    ‘Hurt? Me hurt? What’s a little hurt matter?’ He turned and went back into the bedroom and shut thedoor. Zipser went out into the Court. He didn’t understand. You knocked an old man down and he didn’t mind. It wasn’t logical. It was all so bloody irrational. He walked back to his room and went to bed.

3
    The Master slept badly. The somatic effects of the Feast and the psychic consequences of his speech had combined to make sleep difficult. While his wife slept demurely in her separate bed, Sir Godber lay awake reliving the events of the evening with an insomniac’s obsessiveness. Had he been wise to so offend the sensibilities of the College? It had been a carefully