Porterhouse Blue Read Online Free PDF

matter what other economies were made in the kitchen. Yes, the Senior Tutor could be persuaded to support expansion. Sir Godber balanced him against the Dean and turned his attention to the Bursar. Here was the key, he thought. If the Bursar could be enlisted on the side of change, his assistance would be invaluable. His advocacy of the financial benefits to be gained from an increase of undergraduate contributions, his demand for frugality in the kitchens, would carry immense weight. Sir Godber considered the Bursar’s character and, with that insight into his own nature which had been the cornerstone of his success, recognized opportunism when he saw it. The Bursar, he had no doubt, was an ambitious man and unlikely to be content with the modest attainments of College. The opportunity to serve on a Royal Commission – Sir Godber’s retirement from the Cabinet was sufficiently recent for him to know of several pending – would give him a chance to put this nonentity at the service of the public and give him the recognition which would make amends for his lack of achievement. Sir Godber had no doubt that he could arrange his invitation. There was always a place for a man of the Bursar’s contingent character on Royal Commissions. He would concentrate his attention on the Bursar. Satisfied with this plan of campaign, the Master turned on his side and fell asleep.
    At seven he was woken by his wife whose insistence that early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, comfortably off and wise had never ceased to irritate him. As she bustled about the bedroom with a lack of concern for the feelings of other people which characterized her philanthropy, Sir Godber studied once more those particulars of his wife which had been such a spur to his political ambitions. Lady Mary was not an attractive woman. Her physical angularity made manifest the quality of her mind.
    ‘Time to get up,’ she said, spotting Sir Godber’s open eye.
    ‘Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die,’ thought the Master, sitting up and fumbling for his slippers.
    ‘How did the Feast go?’ Lady Mary asked, adjusting the straps of her surgical corset with a vigour that reminded Sir Godber of a race meeting.
    ‘Tolerably, I suppose,’ he said with a yawn. ‘We had swan stuffed with some sort of duck. Very indigestible. Kept me awake half the night.’
    ‘You should be more careful about what you eat.’ Lady Mary sat down and swung one leg over the other to put on her stockings. ‘You don’t want to have a stroke.’
    ‘It’s called Porterhouse Blue.’
    ‘What is?’
    ‘A stroke,’ said Sir Godber.
    ‘I thought it was something you got for rowing,’ saidLady Mary. ‘That, or a cheese. Something on the order of a Stilton – blue and veined—’
    Sir Godber lowered his eyes from her legs. ‘Well, it isn’t,’ he said hurriedly, ‘it’s an apoplectic fit brought on by overindulgence. An old College tradition, and one I intend to eradicate.’
    ‘And about time too,’ said Lady Mary. ‘I think it’s utterly disgraceful in this day and age that all this good food should go to waste just to satisfy the greed of some old men. When I think of all those …’
    Sir Godber went into the bathroom and shut the door and turned the tap on in the hand basin. Dimly through the door and through the noise of running water he could hear his wife lamenting starving children in India. He looked at himself in the mirror and sighed. Just like the bloody cockcrow, he thought. Starts the day with a dirge. Wouldn’t be happy if someone wasn’t dying of starvation or drowning in a hurricane or dropping dead of typhus.
    He shaved and dressed and went down to breakfast. Lady Mary was reading the
Guardian
with an avidity that suggested a natural disaster of considerable magnitude. Sir Godber refrained from enquiring what it was and contented himself with reading one or two bills.
    ‘My dear,’ he said when he had finished, ‘I shall be