'No, of course not. A very good one,' said the Dean.

'Lost all my bloody money though. Can't think how. It just stopped coming in. It was Mummy's, of course. Copper and stuff like that in Northern Rhodesia and places like that. Just stopped. Couldn't pay the butler. Bugger took to drink. And I thought, that's not a bad idea, so we used to make Dog's Noses and have some laughs together I can tell you but I had to give it all up. Polo ponies. Used to like polo and then some blokes came along. Called themselves bailiffs or receivers or some such. Never seen them before in my life. Offered them a Dog's Nose. Don't really know what happened after that. Live by myself now with Scab of course. Bloody loyal friend, Scab. Old Barney Furbelow's wife comes in and does for me now three times a week and I do for her when I can. Used to be the Under-Gardener Barney did. And his father before him. The good old days, Dean, bloody good old days.'

Somehow they went into the cottage and Pimpole tried to show the Dean up the stairs to his room and failed. The Dean helped him to his feet.

'Sleep on the sofa in the front room,' Pimpole muttered. 'Lavatory is out the back when you want it.'

The Dean went up to his room and, having undressed, got into bed. It was an iron bedstead of a sort the Dean had forgotten existed and the mattress was thin and lumpy. His hands still stung from the nettles, his face did too, and the sheets smelt peculiar, but he was glad to be alone and under a roof. It had been an appalling day.

It wasn't a very pleasant night. A sleepless hour later he needed to pee and the lavatory was out in the back garden. The wall-eyed dog wasn't. It was sleeping with Pimpole in the front room and as the Dean came down the stairs it poked its horrid head out of the door and growled. The Dean stopped and the dog came further out and growled again. The Dean backed miserably up the stairs and shut his bedroom door hoping that a room equipped with such an ancient bed might also contain a chamber pot. It didn't, and in desperation he was forced to piss out of the window, from the sounds of things onto the metal lid of a dustbin. Then he got back into bed and fell asleep for another hour, woke, shuddered and thought about death and the dying of the England he had loved and how squalid it had all become and longed to be back in Porterhouse where he would be safe and need never again have to experience the horrors attached to drinking a Dog's Nose in a public bar with the ghastly Pimpole.

How many hours, if they were hours, he managed to sleep he didn't know but at 6 a.m. he could stand the bed no longer. He got up and went in search of the bathroom to wash and shave. There wasn't one or if there was it was downstairs and that damned dog…He dressed, thanked God that he'd only brought an overnight bag into the house and that the rest of his luggage was in the boot of his old Rover, and with a murderous courage in his heart went downstairs, braved the growls of Scab, and walked out of the cottage.

By the time he got back to Cambridge the Dean had experienced more of the horrors of modern England. Eschewing the narrow lanes and country roads he had so enjoyed on his drive north, he had stuck resolutely to motorways, only to be held up by an accident involving a chemical spill outside Lancaster and an enormous tailback; the old Rover had overheated; the RAC man who arrived to get it started again had been amazed it went at all and wanted to know how it had ever got its MOT certificate; the Service Area he had stopped at for coffee and something to eat had been occupied by eight coachloads of Liverpool football supporters with several police vans in attendance; the sausage and chips he had chosen to fill the vacuum in his stomach disagreed with him and made him wonder if the sausages had been well past their sell-by date; and, to complete his humiliation, he had been called a stupid old wanker by a young lout he had bumped into in a public lavatory near Birmingham. To round off the horrors of the day he had missed the turn-off on the Ml and had had to drive for miles before finally managing to back-track to Cambridge.

By the time he arrived at Porterhouse the Dean was not in a bad temper. He was too exhausted and disenchanted to be in any temper at all. He hadn't had a bath for forty-eight hours and was unshaven and was just glad to be back in a world he understood and could to some extent control. And go to bed in something that did not have quite so much in common with cobbles as the mattress in Pimpole's spare bedroom. Handing the keys of the old Rover to Walter, he slunk up to his rooms and lay down. His guts were telling him something again and this time there was no mistaking their meaning. He would have supper sent up to his room and not go down to dinner that night. He wasn't fit company for anyone.

17

Something of the sort could be said for both the Bursar and Kudzuvine, though in Kudzuvine's case he hankered for the Bursar. It was Skullion's company he was so particularly anxious to avoid. The Bursar on the other hand had come out of his first little chat, as the Praelector insisted on calling it, in such a state of shock and terror that, like Kudzuvine, he had to be given something calming by Dr MacKendly before he could be induced to go into the bedroom a second time.

'This will put some lead in your pencil,' the doctor said before administering the injection. 'They tried it out on some conscientious objectors in America before the war with Iraq and it turned them into some of the finest fighting men in the world.'

The Bursar pointed out that he didn't want to be a fine fighting man, while the Praelector wondered aloud how there could have been any conscientious objectors in the US Army because they were all volunteers and professionals. 'And I'd still like to know the names of the two gunship pilots who shot up two well-identified British armoured vehicles,' he said. 'Our dear transatlantic allies refused to let them give evidence at the enquiry or reveal their identity. Friendly fire my foot. No such thing.'

But it was the Bursar who objected most strongly. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with Americans, especially ones like Kudzuvine who came from Bibliopolis, Alabama, and who told him with such evident relish awful stories about people they'd known who'd been used as shark bait. He particularly didn't want to hear one word more about Edgar Hartang. As he put it in language reminiscent of his last interview with Kudzuvine (the drug was having some curious side-effects), 'Hell, man, that man Hartang is a fucking walking death machine He finds out I been asking questions about him he's going to have me Calvied by some fucking independents or down the tube from twenty thousand feet the Bermuda fucking Triangle like.'

'There is that to be said for Hartang,' said the Senior Tutor but the Praelector wasn't quite so happy.

'Are you sure you've given him the correct dose?' he asked Dr MacKendly. 'I mean we don't want him going in there and alienating the bloody man by talking like him. It will make it extremely difficult to identify who is saying what when we come to transcribe the tape.'

'Probably just a temporary side-effect,' the doctor assured him. 'Must take people different ways of course but I daresay he'll steady down in a bit and be as right as rain. I got it from one of the medical chaps out at the US airbase at Mildenhall at the time of the raid on Libya. They gave it to some of the pilots who had the habdabs about being shot down and skinned alive by Arab women. Can't say I blame them. Arab women do that, you know. Pilots went off as happy as sandlarks and perfectly normal.'

'Perhaps that explains why they only managed to kill Gaddafi's children and missed him,' mused the Praelector.