Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe Read Free Book Online

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 which 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 metender, 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 lookdown 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