The Principals

by Bill James

  ‘At least one statue would have to be parked outside the main building, surely,’ Bill Davey said. ‘A valuable identifying marker to the people passing in the street, some of whom will not be familiar with the city. The caption plate would give the appropriate name and then, “Principal of Sedge University” and his dates.’

  ‘“Main” is rather a loaded term, isn’t it?’ Wayne Ollam replied. ‘This is, indeed, a university. That title doesn’t come without deep implications: all its buildings are of universal significance. If we speak of a “main” building we speak also by irresistible implication of a “main” statue and of another building that is not “main”, is less than main. This is to cave in to the kind of ranking of the two principals that I think it’s accepted we should skirt.’

  ‘If the statues were sited on separate campuses, which I take to be the hinted suggestion by Lucy, taking into account her down on proximity, there wouldn’t seem to be much doubt about what Bill calls the “main” part of the university – its proper designation “Humanities” – and the other out at what was Charter Mill, now re-christened as “Life Sciences”,’ Upp said.

  Lucy asked, ‘Why do you say—?’

  ‘I know what you’re going to query,’ Upp cut in.

  ‘What?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Why do I say “out” at Charter Mill?’ Upp answered. ‘What constitutes its “outness”? I was very aware, believe me, of the provocative nature of the word. Yet there is some truth involved, is there not? The Life Sciences block is out, in the sense that it’s out on the edge of the city, not central, as is Sedge. The watermill has been removed, yes, so that further student accommodation could be constructed on that spot, but there is still something bucolic, something agricultural – perhaps pleasantly bucolic and agricultural, comfortingly rural – about that area. However, if one of the statues were consigned to there, malicious folk might see in it something yokel-like, no matter which of the principals it might be: village idiots could be short or tall.’

  ‘“Consigned”?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Freighted,’ Upp said.

  ‘If a plurality of statue locations were preferred,’ Elvira said, ‘it would almost certainly mean the Tane figure must go to that erstwhile Charter Mill, now Life Sciences, spread.’

  ‘Why do you say so?’ Jed replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘This was Tane’s home ground,’ Elvira said.

  ‘Yes, it was his home ground, but he could play away,’ Jed replied. ‘He very evidently did not remain restricted to that home ground. In due course he was able to make both campuses his home grounds, in fact.’

  ‘He did “bestride the narrow world like a Colossus”,’ Wayne Ollam said.

  ‘That is why Sedge still exists and comprises the two components; and why we are undertaking these discussions on the duality of statues,’ Jed said.

  ‘There’s a C.P. Snow novel based on an actual situation called The Masters,’ Elvira replied, ‘about the election of a new head at a Cambridge college – in reality, Christ’s. I feel if anyone were writing a tale about our proceedings it should be titled The Principals.’

  ‘It would be inaccurate, misconceived, unjust, wouldn’t it, to send Tane “out” – if I might take Gordon’s word for a moment – out to this far-flung region?’ Jed said. ‘I think of Napoleon being transported to St Helena. I think of the leper forced to take himself off to the wilderness.’

  ‘Well, that’s fucking ludicrous,’ Upp replied.

  ‘Would you want the Chote statue, instead, put at Charter, now Life Sciences. Jed?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘I’m saying only that it would be an error to ship Tane there, merely on account of his earlier connection,’ Jed said.

  ‘Wasn’t there some rumour about Tane needing to use staff from the Organized Crime And Its Defeat department at Charter Mill to protect himself when the 1987 situation was at its worst?’ Theo Bastrolle (Business Studies) asked. It was the first time he’d spoken at any of the C.S.C. meetings. Mart came to think that Theo often seemed to follow a personal brand of thoughts, not much related to any of the other comments and debates.

  ‘Yes, I heard something along those lines,’ Davey said.

  ‘Occasionally, I feel we are ignoring one of the chief sources of information potentially available to us,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Oh, which?’ Upp said.

  ‘Can I be alone in thinking this?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Which?’ Upp said.

  ‘Martin,’ Lucy replied. ‘Our chair. I realize he has to avoid bias in this role, but perhaps that shouldn’t prevent him offering some neutral, informal guidance. After all, he has the kind of first-hand experience of the period which most of us lack. I have in mind extra light on the two principals’ characters, which might help us with the physical style – styles – we recommend for the statues. For instance, I was away in Cardiff a little while ago and in the shopping centre saw a statue of the great Welsh politician, Aneurin Bevan, and the sculptor had managed to get the impish, belligerent forward crouch I’m told Bevan would adopt when making one of his fierce speeches. I’ll have a trawl through the Sedge and Charter archives looking for material that might be useful in this regard. It’s quite common knowledge, isn’t it, Mart, that you and Lawford Chote were buddies during the crisis months? Nothing reprehensible or even surprising about that. But it could be relevant. I’m not suggesting cronyism, though I expect there was some of that: it’s endemic in any organisation.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Elvira said. ‘The disciples.’

  Moss said, ‘He chaired the panel that appointed me to a professorship. Some contact was inevitable. And then Rowena Chote fell ostentatiously asleep at my inaugural. Comical, really, though I probably didn’t think so at the time. I believe Lawford felt he had to compensate – show some extra friendliness.’

  ‘I expect all of us have had snoozers in our lectures now and then,’ Elvira said. ‘I find the zonk-out rate for Cicero highest.’

  ‘None of it has any bearing on our present task,’ Mart said.

  EIGHT

  1987

  On the way back from their sightseeing visit to Charter Mill, Lawford Chote said, ‘That bastard.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘Tane.’

  ‘What’s annoyed you, Principal?’

  ‘Annoyed? That sounds like a carer to some half-witted antique wreck.’

  ‘Angered, then,’ Moss replied.

  ‘Enraged,’ Chote said.

  ‘What’s enraged you, Dr Chote?’

  ‘Damn photography.’

  ‘Photography? Which?’

  ‘He had a photographer out at Charter recording the car. Didn’t you see him?’

  No, Moss hadn’t seen him, if the photographer existed. In any case, if Mart had seen him he probably wouldn’t have mentioned it. He didn’t want to feed any of Lawford’s obsessions. ‘How could he know we’d be passing Charter to do our survey of the buildings and so on?’

  ‘People at Sedge would have seen us leaving. Some traitor gets on his mobile to Tane.’

  ‘People might have observed us leaving, but they wouldn’t know where to, would they, Dr Chote?’

  ‘Why else would he get a photographer in place with a damn sneaky camera? Someone at Sedge saw the departure and made a guess as to destination. It’s a fairly obvious guess, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Moss replied.

  ‘But I know. Oh, yes – he can’t fool me.’

  Moss sought some sanity. Had Chote tipped over? ‘What would be the point in photographing us, anyway, Principal?’

  ‘Don’t ask me to read his damn twisted mind. He gets a picture of you and you’re with me. That might suggest to his poisonous brain some sort of complicity.’

  ‘But which sort?’ Moss asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, he’d be alert in his scheming head to signs of that category – or to what he could imagine were signs of that category. He’s creating some kind of dossier.’

  ‘But whi
ch kind?’

  ‘Quite,’ Chote replied.

  NINE

  1987

  In the projection room at Charter Mill, Gloria Sondial, head of Organized Crime And Its Defeat, said, ‘Principal, as part of our final year course we get students to carry out a covert surveillance exercise – one of the fundamental skills they’ll need in a career with the police or security services.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Victor Tane replied.

  ‘I’ve asked you kindly to spare some moments this morning, Principal, to look at a film one of our undergraduates took yesterday while carrying out that kind of work.’

  ‘Delighted to, as it were, take part,’ Tane said.

  Gloria switched off the lights. ‘First sequence, please, Alec. This is what we call “a situationer”, Dr Tane,’ Gloria said. ‘It gives us a location, is a kind of context. In a surveillance operation, background can often tell plenty.’

  ‘Right,’ Tane said.

  The technician started the film. A string of cars moved at speed limit pace across the screen, and then the camera swung away and showed some buildings. ‘Oh, we’re at Charter Mill, are we? There’s the porter’s lodge,’ Tane said.

  ‘Yes, we give the student a very familiar setting first and then, if he/she deals OK with that we’ll put her/him in other, perhaps more complex, surroundings for subsequent tests. We know there are some good, semi-hidden spots to operate from here. Our people have to remain unobserved by the targets. The photos of the vehicles will show us whether the driver or passengers, if there are any, have spotted the camera and are gazing at it. If they do, the student is referred and must have another go at a later date before trying the more difficult stages. This exercise required the student to get a photographic record of six vehicles sequentially. Obviously, in a reality situation the camera would be aimed at one known vehicle only. That’s not so in our present version. We go for a random six.’

  Tane watched the screen as, first, a silver Ka with a woman driver passed, then a black Mercedes estate, an elderly male driving and a woman in the passenger seat, also elderly. A white Mazda 6 saloon, no passengers, a male driver, followed. None of the drivers or passengers seemed to notice the camera. After a pause a dark red Volvo, two men in the front seats, travelling very slowly appeared on the screen.

  ‘Hold it there, Alec, would you please?’ Gloria said, and the film froze.

  ‘Ah, yes, I see,’ Tane said.

  ‘I wasn’t sure I recognized either of them at first,’ Gloria said, ‘but I thought I might have seen media pictures of the driver. I know now it was when the TV news showed the Sedge principal with one of their ex-undergrads, later a decorated Falkland war hero, who came back to give a talk to students.’

  ‘Yes, that’s Lawford Chote,’ Tane said.

  ‘What struck me most about this view of the Volvo and its occupants wasn’t so much the half-memory in my mind of one of them, but the way they both seemed to be examining the Charter Mill buildings and grounds – Chote less so than the passenger, of course, since Chote had the wheel, but I got the feeling that he was talking to the passenger, telling him where to look – as though they were on a sort of reconnaissance, sizing up the campus. The passenger is younger than Chote and it seemed to me that the Sedge principal might be introducing a subordinate to the kind of asset Charter Mill is, and accompanying this with some sort of commentary. They move slowly so as to take in as much detail as possible.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tane said. He leaned forward in his seat, studying the two faces in the Volvo.

  The lights came on. Gloria was holding a clipboard. ‘I asked two of our students to discover who the passenger is,’ she said. ‘This kind of tracking is another skill they’ll most probably need in their careers – contributing to dossiers. They’ve come up with quite a full portrait.’ She began to read from notes on the clipboard. ‘He is Martin Calhoun Moss, born 1952 in Preston, married 1975 to Grace Shell, divorced 1980, no children. Graduated Cambridge 1973 (First, English Literature). Schoolmaster 1973-9, lecturer at Sedge 1979, prof 1987 – modern Eng and US lit. Address 4A Maliphant Close. Lives alone. Doesn’t appear to be in any sexual relationship since divorce seven years ago. Drives a Vauxhall Astra, navy blue, 1981 model. Banks at Lloyd’s. Is regarded by other staff at Sedge as a good and reliable colleague; not part of the clique known at Sedge as Chote’s Chipper Chums, a kind of elite kitchen cabinet of unswerving henchmen and women, some of whom have been placed in newly created, executive posts by Chote to increase his clout. This does not seem applicable to Moss. His promotion to a chair is the outcome of much published research on Wilde, Lawrence and Auden.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve read some of his stuff. Bordering on the intelligible.’

  Gloria said, ‘It’s speculation, not fact, Principal, but I’d guess that this Volvo trip is a preliminary to inviting Moss into that elite Chumdom.’

  ‘I wondered about it,’ Tane said. ‘But what do you make of this trip, this “reconnaissance”, apart from that?’

  ‘I thought it looked like window shopping,’ Gloria replied.

  ‘How I saw it, too,’ Tane replied.

  Gloria gave him a couple of stills from the surveillance film and, back in his office, he gummed these into a log book he kept of his years as Principal of Charter Mill. He added a short caption for the pictures: names, location, source and date only. He felt that future developments could make any commentary he might have added look very off-beam and foolish. Of course, he had views about the Volvo and its crew – had agreed with Gloria’s verdict – but backed off from writing anything down. It would be too committing. Careful, perhaps cagey, that was Tane. Occasionally, his caution bored even himself, but he was stuck with it, and knew this. Tall and unrobust-looking, he walked in a very tentative, doubting style, as if afraid there would be no floor for his next step.

  Mart wondered whether Tane had been horrified as a kid by that scene in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘boy’ novel, Kidnapped, where David Balfour, the hero, is climbing a staircase in absolute darkness and suddenly finds there is no further stair, only emptiness, into which he might have plunged. Perhaps that terror still affected Tane.

  His receding, mousy coloured hair was brushed back hard over his ears. For someone who seemed so frail he had a surprisingly craggy face, though, with a wide-nostrilled Roman nose. Mart had heard that Tane spent plenty of mental energy trying to make sure his parents’ quirks and foibles didn’t in any fashion affect his present outlook on life.

  TEN

  2014

  At the next statues meeting, Gordon Upp (Linguistics) said, ‘I hope I’m not running ahead into quite complex, tricky matters before we’ve properly dealt with all the basics, but I wonder whether we should give some thought to what we might term the psychology – or, rather, psychologies, plural – of our two subjects, Chote, Tane – Tane, Chote – as they should be depicted in the statues. By psychologies I mean their mental make-up, their personalities, their spirits, their individual selfhoods.’

  Upp would be under thirty years old, probably the youngest member of the committee. His moods swung about between extreme politeness and over-the-top pugnacity. He had a wide, heavy-jawed face. His gingerish eyebrows were much too sparse for this big area, like slivers of garden vegetation in a valiant but hopeless battle against some pesticide. His head hair, of the same colour, seemed comparatively healthy and worn long. He said, ‘Lucy’s very timely reference to the Aneurin Bevan statue over there in Wales goes some way towards what I’m getting at – trying to get at – Bevan’s bodily stance as a kind of adjunct to his speechifying. But that is only what the Eng Lit people would term a persona, rather than his true unique personality: a pose, an assumed, theatrical-like, thesp-like, role, in harmony with one specific act – the speech – in one specific place – a political public meeting. Moments after doing his platform bit, he’d become someone else, not a spiel performer, but a bloke among other blokes and blokesses. I feel sure that each of us would wish the p
rincipals’ statues to tell us something more profound, more fundamental, more, as it were, inborn than, for instance, Bevan’s temporary, ad hoc, for-the-occasion, fighting posture. Somehow – and I certainly don’t underestimate the difficulty of conveying this in a lump of stone or brass – but somehow the sculptor has to tell us of the differing, discrete qualities of these two men, not evaluations of them – this man good, or goodish, this one bad or baddish – but simply their abiding, congenital essences, their very fibre.

  ‘I say “simply”, but it is not at all a simple process. It is a massive challenge, or a pair of massive challenges in this instance. Although we are very wisely concerned to ensure equality between the statues – Tane, Chote – Chote, Tane – and although, also, each statue must tell the world of certain common qualities possessed by the two principals, crucial for men in their kind of leadership jobs – I mean, positivism, creative energy, devotion to learning – I feel it would be a mistake to make their facial expressions identical – both benignly smiling, for instance. A double helping of benign smiles if the statues are close to each other might be read by spectators as the result of a shared spliff or a heavy two-man session on the Jack Daniels. We need, rather, a comprehensive search into their very natures, and a due reflection of such in the statues. The character of Sedge itself should, to an extent, be blazoned in these statues.’

  Lucy Lane (History) said, ‘I promised last time to do a little browsing in the archives and I think I might have come across something with a bearing on what Gordon has just been talking about in his acute fashion. It is an item which rather directly involves Martin, our chair, too, and he will possibly be able to comment on it in a purely informative, unbiased fashion, without compromising his present office.’