'I suppose you'd better come in, sir,' Walter said, switching from the threatening to the positively servile. And I'll carry your bags, sir.' Purefoy Osbert stepped through the wicket gate carrying them himself. If this cretin-and he wasn't going to waste time on euphemisms now-got hold of the suitcase containing his notes and manuscripts he'd probably never see them again.

'I'm ever so sorry, sir, but we've had a bit of trouble here today and my orders were not to let anyone who wasn't a member of College in or out. Praelector was very strict about it. I do apologize, sir. If you'll just step this way, sir…'

Purefoy followed him into the Porter's Lodge. It was unlike that of any other Cambridge college he had visited. Here there were no signs of the late twentieth century and a great many of the early nineteenth and even eighteenth. The pigeonholes looked as though generations of birds had actually nested there instead of letters and messages. But everything was clean and highly polished. Even the brass hooks on which keys hung were brightly polished and the sheen on Walter's bowler hat suggested that he treated it with reverence. Purefoy put his suitcases down and felt slightly better. The smell of beeswax was having a calming effect on his nerves.

All the same his reception had been so extraordinary and alarming that he kept a watchful eye on the Head Porter and on Henry, the junior one who wasn't getting through to the Senior Tutor on the ancient telephone in the far office. 'It's no use,' he said. 'He isn't in.'

'He is. Just not answering,' said Walter. 'And no wonder, state he was in last night when he come in from Corpus. Looked like a corpus himself, he did. What he must have been like this morning doesn't bear thinking about Oh, he did look horrible.'

Purefoy listened to this exchange and found it disturbing. If the Head Porter, who was hardly a pleasant man to look at-he had a twisted and unnaturally gruesome way of eyeing people out of the corner of a strangely coloured left eye-could describe someone as looking horrible, the man must be utterly hideous. Henry's next remark was hardly reassuring either.

'Matron says he threw up all over the bedroom floor,' he said. 'Bollock naked he was too. Said she thought he was dead first of all. Had a Porterhouse Blue was what she thought.'

'If he goes on like that at his age, he will have one and no mistake,' Walter said, and emerged from the little office with an obsequious grimace that Purefoy hoped was a smile. 'I'm very sorry about this, sir. I wasn't told you were coming today and I had strict orders about them others. But I've found you in the book and you're all right. The Bursar's allotted you rooms overlooking the Fellows' Garden so here's the keys. Henry will carry your bags, sir, and show you the way.'

Purefoy bent to pick up his suitcases but Walter stopped him. 'Sorry, sir,' he said with another grovelling grimace that managed in some mysterious way to combine extreme servility with something distinctly threatening, 'but gentlemen Fellows don't carry their own bags in Porterhouse. Don't set a proper example. That's what Mr Skullion what's the Master now told me. Tradition, he said it was, going ever so far back.'

For a moment Purefoy felt like telling the man he didn't give a damn about Porterhouse tradition and always carried his own bags, but he had travelled a long way and he was exhausted. 'What do I do with my car?' he asked. 'It's on a parking meter down the road.'

'You give me the keys, sir, and I'll have it driven round to the Old Coach House which is where the Fellows' cars are kept. You wouldn't happen to know what make it is, would you, sir?'

To Purefoy Osbert it seemed obvious the Head Porter was taking the piss out of him but Walter's next remark changed his mind. 'I only ask, sir, because a lot of the Fellows don't know. The Dean's been driving an old Rover since I don't know when and he still calls it a Lanchester and they don't make them any more. Leastways I don't think they do. And the Chaplain's got an Armstrong Siddeley, though he don't drive any longer and I don't think he even knows it's there.'

Purefoy gave him the keys and told him it was a Renault and was green and had an A registration. 'I think it's 5555 OGF,' he said.

'Very good, sir, and I'll put the keys in your pigeonhole That way you'll know where to find them.'

'But I don't know which my pigeonhole is,' said Purefoy.

'Ah, but I do, sir. All you'll have to do is ask me, sir.' And with another terrible grimace he disappeared into the back where he could be heard telling someone that that new Fellow, Dr Oswald, had a foreign car and a Frenchie one at that which wouldn't go down well with the Senior Tutor because he didn't like…Having a shrewd idea what was coming, Purefoy followed Henry and his two suitcases round Old Court and behind a very old block of blackened clunch and up a path to another building, this, time of blackened brick. On the way they passed a number of students, all of whom looked rather too respectably dressed for Purefoy's liking. He was used to people in boots and with torn and patched jeans and with hair that was either very, very long and unwashed, or hardly existed at all. He was suspicious of clean young people with neat haircuts and a great many of the young men he saw seemed to be very large and muscular and to laugh too loudly. And the one young woman he met smiled agreeably, which he found most peculiar. At Kloone women didn't smile. On the whole they scowled and practised assertiveness on him.

At the bottom of a staircase marked O Henry stopped and pointed at a blank space at the top of a black name-board. 'That's you, sir. Very nice rooms too. Next to the Senior Tutor's. Very fond of the young gentlemen is the Senior Tutor, sir.'

He climbed the staircase and Purefoy followed with a sinking feeling. The porter's statement had put him in mind of the ghastly evening he had spent with Goodenough and if he was going to have to endure the attentions of another bugger-for the second time in his life he dispensed with political correctness-he was going to insist on having rooms elsewhere. But as in the case of Goodenough he was proved entirely wrong. There was nothing in the least gay about the man who emerged from the doorway opposite Purefoy's rooms and demanded to know if they had to make that confounded din.

'Only dropped the keys, sir,' said Henry, 'and this gentleman's bag, sir.'

'Keys? Bags?' muttered the Senior Tutor. 'Sounded more like a troop of elephants with tambourines to me.'

He went back into his rooms and shut the door very gently. In the darkness Henry searched for the keyhole and chuckled. 'Loves his little joke, the Senior Tutor does. And of course his port. Regular port drinker he is, sir. You can always tell from the complexion. Now the Dean likes a tawny port and that is why he looks the way he does but the Senior Tutor is more a crusted man, likes his dregs I daresay, and of course that's what makes him look the way he is.'

But at least the rooms Purefoy had been allocated were very comfortable ones with a large study and sitting-room and a smaller bedroom with a window that looked out at a large Jacobean house across some lawns and past what appeared to be a large square block of yew.

'That's the Master's Lodge where the Master lives and that down there on the lawn is the Master's Maze. People have gone in there and never come out, they say. But that's just a little joke I'm sure, sir, though I wouldn't go in it myself. Best to be on the safe side, isn't it? And I don't suppose I'm allowed to. Can't walk on the grass, servants can't. Only Fellows can.'

Purefoy Osbert went back into the study and looked out of the window there. Again he was looking onto gardens but this time there were formal rosebeds as well as lawns and a rockery with a pond and something that looked like enormous rhubarb growing by it.