in high places. There was only one thing that puzzled Skullion as he rode home. Something Sir Cathcart had said about learning more between the thighs of a good woman than … but Sir Cathcart had never married. Skullion wondered how an unmarried man got between the thighs of a good woman.
*
Zipser’s interview with the Senior Tutor had left him with a sense of embarrassment that had unnerved him completely. His attempt to explain the nature of his compulsion had been fraught with difficulties. The Senior Tutor kept poking his little finger in his ear and wriggling it around and examining the end of it when he took it out while Zipser talked, as if he held some waxy deposit responsible for the flow of obscene information that was reaching his brain. When he finally accepted that his ears were not betraying him and that Zipser was in fact confessing to being attracted by his bedder, he had muttered something to the effect that the Chaplain would expect him for tea that afternoon and that, failing that, a good psychiatrist might help. Zipser had left miserably and had spent the early part of the afternoon in his room trying to concentrate on his thesis without success. The image of Mrs Biggs, across between a cherubim in menopause and a booted succubus, kept intruding. Zipser turned for escape to a book of photographs of starving children in Nagaland but in spite of this mental flagellation Mrs Biggs prevailed. He tried Hermitsch on
Fall Out & the Andaman Islanders
and even
Sterilization, Vasectomy and Abortion
by Allard, but these holy writs all failed against the pervasive fantasy of the bedder. It was as if his social conscience, his concern for the plight of humanity at large, the universal and collective pity he felt for all mankind, had been breached in some unspeakably personal way by the inveterate triviality and egoism of Mrs Biggs. Zipser, whose life had been filled with a truly impersonal charity – he had spent holidays from school working for SOBB, the Save Our Black Brothers campaign – and whose third worldliness was impeccable, found himself suddenly the victim of a sexual idiosyncrasy which made a mockery of his universalism. In desperation he turned to
Syphilis, the Scourge of Colonialism
, and stared with horror at the pictures. In the past it had worked like a charm to quell incipient sexual desires while satisfying his craving for evidence of natural justice. The notion of the Conquistadores dying of the disease after raping South American Indians no longer had its old appeal now that Zipser himself was in the grip of a compulsive urge to rape Mrs Biggs. By the time it came for him to go to the Chaplain’s rooms for tea, Zipser had exhausted the resources of his theology. So too, it seemed, had the Chaplain.
‘Ah my boy,’ the Chaplain boomed as Zipser negotiated the bric-à-brac that filled the Chaplain’s sitting-room. ‘So good of you to come. Do make yourself comfortable.’ Zipser nudged past a gramophone with a papier-mâché horn, circumvented a brass-topped table with fretsawed legs, squeezed beneath the fronds of a castor-oil plant and finally sat down on a chair by the fire. The Chaplain scuttled backwards and forwards between his bathroom and the tea table muttering loudly to himself a liturgy of things to fetch. ‘Teapot hot. Spoons. Milk jug. You do take milk?’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Zipser. ‘Good. Good. So many people take lemon, don’t they? One always forgets these things. Tea-cosy. Sugar basin.’ Zipser looked round the room for some indication of the Chaplain’s interests but the welter of conflicting objects, like the addition of random numbers to a code, made interpretation impossible. Apart from senility the furnishings had so little in common that they seemed to indicate a wholly catholic taste.
‘Crumpets,’ said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. ‘Just the thing. You toast them.’ He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the
*
Zipser’s interview with the Senior Tutor had left him with a sense of embarrassment that had unnerved him completely. His attempt to explain the nature of his compulsion had been fraught with difficulties. The Senior Tutor kept poking his little finger in his ear and wriggling it around and examining the end of it when he took it out while Zipser talked, as if he held some waxy deposit responsible for the flow of obscene information that was reaching his brain. When he finally accepted that his ears were not betraying him and that Zipser was in fact confessing to being attracted by his bedder, he had muttered something to the effect that the Chaplain would expect him for tea that afternoon and that, failing that, a good psychiatrist might help. Zipser had left miserably and had spent the early part of the afternoon in his room trying to concentrate on his thesis without success. The image of Mrs Biggs, across between a cherubim in menopause and a booted succubus, kept intruding. Zipser turned for escape to a book of photographs of starving children in Nagaland but in spite of this mental flagellation Mrs Biggs prevailed. He tried Hermitsch on
Fall Out & the Andaman Islanders
and even
Sterilization, Vasectomy and Abortion
by Allard, but these holy writs all failed against the pervasive fantasy of the bedder. It was as if his social conscience, his concern for the plight of humanity at large, the universal and collective pity he felt for all mankind, had been breached in some unspeakably personal way by the inveterate triviality and egoism of Mrs Biggs. Zipser, whose life had been filled with a truly impersonal charity – he had spent holidays from school working for SOBB, the Save Our Black Brothers campaign – and whose third worldliness was impeccable, found himself suddenly the victim of a sexual idiosyncrasy which made a mockery of his universalism. In desperation he turned to
Syphilis, the Scourge of Colonialism
, and stared with horror at the pictures. In the past it had worked like a charm to quell incipient sexual desires while satisfying his craving for evidence of natural justice. The notion of the Conquistadores dying of the disease after raping South American Indians no longer had its old appeal now that Zipser himself was in the grip of a compulsive urge to rape Mrs Biggs. By the time it came for him to go to the Chaplain’s rooms for tea, Zipser had exhausted the resources of his theology. So too, it seemed, had the Chaplain.
‘Ah my boy,’ the Chaplain boomed as Zipser negotiated the bric-à-brac that filled the Chaplain’s sitting-room. ‘So good of you to come. Do make yourself comfortable.’ Zipser nudged past a gramophone with a papier-mâché horn, circumvented a brass-topped table with fretsawed legs, squeezed beneath the fronds of a castor-oil plant and finally sat down on a chair by the fire. The Chaplain scuttled backwards and forwards between his bathroom and the tea table muttering loudly to himself a liturgy of things to fetch. ‘Teapot hot. Spoons. Milk jug. You do take milk?’ ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Zipser. ‘Good. Good. So many people take lemon, don’t they? One always forgets these things. Tea-cosy. Sugar basin.’ Zipser looked round the room for some indication of the Chaplain’s interests but the welter of conflicting objects, like the addition of random numbers to a code, made interpretation impossible. Apart from senility the furnishings had so little in common that they seemed to indicate a wholly catholic taste.
‘Crumpets,’ said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. ‘Just the thing. You toast them.’ He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the
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