The Principals

by Bill James

  ‘Oh?’ Moss said.

  ‘I’m sure it will activate memories although we are going to move back more than a quarter of a century.’

  ‘Oh?’ Moss said.

  Lucy bent down and took what seemed to Moss like a large cardboard covered scrapbook from her briefcase. ‘Victor Tane kept a kind of log of events in Charter Mill in 1987 and before and after, in what became the new Sedge,’ Lucy said. She opened the book at around halfway. ‘I think the fact that he did this tells us something about him. The log starts only from 1986, although Tane was in post at Charter several years prior to this. I could find no earlier log. I think his decision to begin the record when he did shows he realized something extremely major was happening, or was about to happen, and that a personal account of it day-to-day could be very to the point. He is perceptive. He is methodical. He is forward-looking. He is intelligently alert and, perhaps, self-protective.

  ‘I’ll pass the book around in a moment but I can tell you that it shows Principal Lawford Chote and our Professor Martin Moss in a red Volvo saloon on a piece of road which I thought I recognized. I went out to confirm it as being close to what was then Charter Mill, now one of the Sedge campuses. Chote is driving, Mart has the passenger seat. Although Chote is at the wheel his eyes are off the road ahead at the moment of the photograph. He is gazing at the Charter buildings in what seems to me an almost imperial style, noble and dauntless in its way, but, of course, hindsightedly poignant, ludicrous.’

  Ollam said, ‘If you’re driving a Volvo the only hindsight available is through the rear-view mirror.’

  ‘Imperial in which sense, Lucy?’ Angela Drape asked.

  ‘In the sense of colonising, in the sense of taking, of taking over.’

  ‘“Veni vidi vici”?’ Elvira said.

  ‘“I came, I saw, I mean to conquer”, and today I’ll give Marty a briefing on it. “Veni vidi vici”, Moss.’ Lucy replied, laboriously deadpan. ‘Chote’s lips are apart and I think he might have been talking to Martin. No froth visible, but the tone of the messaging looks intense. This is something he should be able to clarify for the meeting soon.’

  ‘What you seem to be telling us, Lucy, is that any statue of Lawford Chote must capture what you term the nobility and dauntlessness, while also suggesting that this seeming nobility, this seeming dauntlessness, are both, in fact, pathetically inappropriate and deeply frail when retrospectively viewed,’ Theo Bastrolle (Business Studies) said. He’d be used to seeking a balance. ‘I’ve been doing some archive research myself and have a similar impression,’ Theo said.

  ‘That complex mixture will be difficult to get in stone,’ Upp said.

  ‘Yes, how exactly does sculpting work?’ Angela Drape asked. ‘My training is in the actualities, the practicalities. Before he/she starts a bout of shaping does she/he say to himself/herself over breakfast, I’ll do some work on the nobility and dauntlessness aspects of the subject this morning? She/he sets off for the studio, gets into dungarees and begins. If we were present would we note that he/she was holding the chisel at a recommended special angle for nobility and dauntlessness and hammering it with a likewise particularly stipulated force for nobility and dauntlessness – perhaps greater than usual, perhaps less – so that after a couple of hours, or days, or even weeks, carving like this she/he has knocked one area into a palpable noble and/or dauntless area, ready to be slotted eventually into the completed statue? Would he/she require a particular type of stone, capable of being banged and chivvied into a nobility and dauntlessness identity? And, even if the stone were absolutely OK for the task, would the noble and dauntless sector have to lie alongside another area or other areas, whose purpose is to show that the incorporated chunks of sculpted nobility and dauntlessness are of only limited account although she/he has spent at least hours and possibly much longer battering and chipping then into that wedge of stone?’

  ‘Was Chote talking to you about take-over potential then, Mart?’ Bill Davey replied.

  ‘I think of the devil showing Christ all the glories of the world and declaring that the whole caboodle was there for the taking if only Christ would bow down to him,’ Elvira said. ‘Gospel of St Matthew.’

  ‘It’s a long time ago,’ Moss answered.

  ‘Which, the forty days in the wilderness or the cherry-picking trip to what was then Charter?’ Jed said.

  ‘In the pic, Martin, you look slightly bemused, guarded, sceptical,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Well, if there’s ever a statue of me it will have to show that three-layered mélange of attitudes,’ Moss said.

  ‘Accompanying the pic is a note by Victor Tane,’ Lucy said. ‘It’s economical to the point of terseness, as though he felt there was no call to explain the photograph, other than to record rock-bottom details – names, origin, date, time – because the faces and the background location would tell everyone that this was some sort of prospecting jaunt. “Care for a little trek Charter Millwards in the Volvo, Mart?”’

  ‘I wonder if the word lebensraum was mentioned at any stage,’ Nelmes said.

  ‘If Tane detected in Chote such an aggressive impulse we might have expected signs of resentment, anger, fear in the handwriting. But no,’ Lucy said. ‘The captions are very neatly done, label-like, no emotional swirls in the lettering, no screaming triple exclamation marks, no furious dashes or mid-sentence capitalisations. If he felt any menace he does not show it. Is this an indicator of Tane’s confidence that, although Chote might turn up to remind himself of the plus elements in Charter, and to show a younger colleague the treats on offer, nothing would ever come of it? Or not that nothing would ever come of it, but that something would come of it, but this “something”, the utter opposite of Lawford Chote’s plan.’

  Bill Davey said, ‘Tane’s statue, then, should radiate his calmness, self belief and contempt for Chote’s dream, and Mart’s dream, too, if he had become absorbed into Lawford’s inner clique.’

  ‘Had you been, Martin?’ Jed asked.

  ‘There was no need to take me out to have a stare at Charter. I’d often driven past it,’ Moss replied.

  ‘Yes, yes, but this time he probably wanted you to look at it as a possible target, as a potential prize,’ Elvira said.

  ‘Well, I can’t say what he wanted,’ Moss replied. ‘You’d have to ask him.’

  ‘It seems to me that ambiguity will be a required facet of the Tane statue,’ Angela said. ‘Can stone or brass do ambiguity?’

  ‘Provenance?’ Jed asked.

  ‘Of what?’ Lucy replied.

  ‘The photograph. Why was it taken?’ Jed said.

  ‘They had a crime and detection department at Charter Mill,’ Lucy replied. ‘It might just be an exercise and the Chote inclusion simply a fluke.’

  ‘So Tane is loved by Lady Luck,’ Nelmes said. ‘No wonder he won. Can statues be made to look lucky?’

  ‘What’s remarkable about this picture and the log,’ Bastrolle (Business Studies) said, ‘is that Tane left it for the archive. As you’ve described it, Lucy, this was a private journal kept by him for his own purposes. I would have expected Tane to take it with him on retirement, instead of which he makes it very accessible to posterity.’

  ‘That’s us,’ Nelmes said.

  ‘Of course, by the time of his retirement, he was Principal of the enhanced, enlarged Sedge,’ Angela said. ‘There’s a subtle, crowing over Chote in Tane’s making the pic, and, presumably, other material, open to inspection at the archive. The seeming neutrality and restraint are a front only, aren’t they? He’s really saying to anyone using the archive, to Lucy and via Lucy to the rest of us, “Get a look at this barmy, would-be invasive, Volvo-borne braggart, will you please?”’

  ‘He’s branding Chote a cunt, would you say, Ange?’ Elvira (Classics) said.

  ‘There’ll be a need to get irony into the Tane statue, as well as all his other components,’ Davey said.

  ELEVEN

  1987

  ‘What we have to a
sk, Martin, isn’t it, is who had availability at the specific time this morning?’ Chote said.

  In his head, Moss tried to analyse the principal’s diktat. Mart reckoned he could have led a two-hour seminar deconstructing it. Which ‘we’ had to do the asking? Ask whom? Why the compulsion of ‘have to ask’? Why the awkward ‘is’ tangle in ‘isn’t it, is’? Which ‘specific time’? Which ‘availability’?

  Chote had spoken in a very measured, matter-of-fact, calm, untroubled tone. Probably this meant the principal didn’t feel at all calm and was severely troubled, Moss thought. Lawford had put in some excellent work on imitating normality. However, normality was not normal for him: normally he was abnormal. He seemed to sense that what he intended saying next might suggest unease or even paranoia, and he would guard against this. Did he suspect he must have sounded momentarily panicked and crazed about the photographer as they drove back from Charter earlier today and wanted to correct that? After lunch Chote’s PA had phoned Mart in his departmental office and asked him to look in at the principal’s suite as soon as he could.

  Moss searched for enlightenment. ‘“Availability” in which regard, Principal?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, availability,’ Chote replied. ‘The very word! You’ve hit it exactly, Martin! The crux, surely.’

  ‘Available to do what, though? “Availability” suggests there is some task or commitment which the available person, she or he, is available for.’ He gave that some really dogged, plonking force. ‘Availability’ was getting the interrogation treatment.

  ‘I’d like to take this matter very step-by-step and very logically, Mart,’ Chote replied.

  Which sodding matter? But Moss said, ‘It’s what people would expect of you, I’m certain.’ And, yes, there might be some who would.

  ‘This is a university,’ Chote said.

  Although the principal gave this a slight rise in intonation at the end, Moss took the words to be as a statement, not a question. ‘Very true,’ he replied. And it plainly was. Eu-fucking-reka!

  ‘That might seem a barmily obvious comment but here’s the point, Mart: proper, rational procedures are to be expected in such a setting. Are, in fact, de rigueur.’

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Thus, applying such rational procedures, I can state that if there were no availability there could be no action arising out of the availability,’ Chote explained. ‘There cannot be both availability and absence, one word cancelling out the other; and making the idea of possible shoulder-to-shoulderness absurd.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I’ve referred to step-by-step progress, and this recognition of the vital importance of availability is the first of these steps. Availability is a pre-requisite.’

  ‘Understood,’ Moss said.

  ‘But you’ll reproach me and say this is mere theorising and wind-baggery. Where is the example of this availability? A fair point, Martin. I admire your vigilance and clarity of thought.’

  ‘Some disputation moves from the particular to the general, some from the general to the particular,’ Moss said. ‘Each is valid. I think you are applying the second of these, Principal.’

  ‘Absolutely, Mart. What this comes down to, finally, is of course, who? This is a wonderfully brief summation. Who?’

  ‘Who in which particular?’

  ‘Who had this availability that we’ve so far been discussing only as an abstract notion. The “who?” which we now ask, sharpens the topic, makes it specific. “Who”, we inquire, “had this availability at the precise moment, moments.” I don’t say the answer to the “who?” is simple. We have to try to decide who among several possible whos. Here, then, comes the seminal question: who was available to see us move off in the Volvo this morning and give a call to that aspiring, window-dresser, Tane, informing him we were on our way, so he could get his damn filthy spy camera into place, ready to infringe on us?’

  ‘Ah,’ Moss replied, ‘I get it, now: by “available” or “availability”, you mean someone happened to be in a position to see us leaving in the Volvo.’

  Chote’s lips went into snarl mode, curling back over his teeth and showing entirely healthy, richly red, unbulbous gums. ‘You can say “happened” to be present and therefore available, Mart. That’s not how I see it.’ Lawford’s voice was still mild and controlled, but Moss could detect a slight tremor there, perhaps from anger, perhaps from a fixation, perhaps from self-pity.

  ‘We spoke about this in the car,’ Moss said. ‘No matter who saw us go, he/she wouldn’t know to where. This is not like a bus with its destination shown in a frame up front. There’d be no apparent cause to phone Tane. What was there to say? “Principal Chote and Professor Moss have hit the road together in the same car.” Well, hold the front page!’

  ‘Let’s put it like this, Martin. There was a ruthless plot to film us casing Charter Mill. Right?’

  ‘Principal, this has not been totally established – not whether there was a plot at all, and, if so, a ruthless plot.’

  ‘The creepy photographer is established, isn’t he? You say you didn’t see him. I did.’

  ‘I accept that,’ Mart replied. ‘What isn’t established is why he was there.’

  ‘He’s a photographer. He’s there to take photographs.’

  ‘But we cannot be sure why, Principal.’ They had courses involving camera work over at Charter. A student might have been told to take some pics of traffic, as an exercise. By coincidence, the Volvo and its driver and passenger were possibly included in that traffic. From this, perhaps, flowed Chote’s fierce suspicions.

  ‘Tane told him to be there,’ Lawford said, ‘and to get shots of me, of us. Tane having been given the word that we’re en route to do the casing. That’s what Tane would call it. We might regard it simply as an innocent visit to look at Charter in, so to speak, situ. He’d say to the photographer – probably a student on one of their Dumbo courses, “Get into position near the entrance to the campus and, if you want to be given a degree here, don’t come back without a picture of them – of them both, mind – both gawping at Charter and licking their sickeningly greedy lips.”’

  ‘Several imponderables here, if I may say, Principal,’ Moss replied.

  ‘Bugger imponderables.’ Chote gazed about his office suite, as if seeking a spot uncorrupted by Mart’s niggles and quibbles. It was a large room, with dark green wall-to-wall carpeting. The wallpaper also was mainly dark green, a kind of jungle theme: dense vegetation, stalks, fronds, branches, shrubs, possibly William Morris influenced. Chote sat at a long desk, one end of it containing his computer. Moss had a dark green leather armchair, near him. He felt it was like being in a bower, except for Chote who, to Mart, didn’t seem a bower sort of person, even though he’d probably ordered the colour scheme.

  ‘Yes, a plot,’ Lawford said. ‘And it worked, didn’t it? How? Because there was a message from someone here saying that I and Profesor Martin Moss had gone journeying together in the principal’s red Volvo. The recipient of that tip-off makes a guess, or a calculation, and decides the pair could be coming to Charter. It would be natural for someone like Tane to suspect this. He’s jumpy. He’s fearful. Rightly, he feels menaced by circumstances. Nerves savage him. He wants a record of the visit and as extra might get an identifying picture of a possibly new Lawford Chote associate – you, Mart. Tane orders the photo-surveillance and, we must suppose, achieves what he wanted. I would say – and I believe, Mart, that you will come to think the same – I would say that this completeness, this culmination, is the fruit of not just someone who “happened” by sweet fluke to be where she/he could observe our departure, but a someone who was uniquely “available” for that scheme, that plot, through the power of his/her instincts and magical opportunism. Hence my wish, Mart, my resolve, to check on availability.’

  Martin Moss saw no ‘hence’, if hence meant, as it generally did, a reasonable, sane, deduction from what had gone before. Did Chote’s apparent trust in instinct and mag
ical opportunism indicate that he had gone full-out unhinged?

  ‘Now, I think you’ll grasp why I’m so concerned about availability, Mart,’ the principal said. He picked up three A4 sheets of paper from his desk. ‘I’ve done some private research.’ He leaned forward and handed the pages to Moss. ‘I believe you’ll find them thought-provoking,’

  Martin studied the top one. It had what appeared to be initials at the head: R.S.G.

  Beneath these letters was today’s date and then a column of figures:

  0920–0940

  0940–1000

  10.00–10.20

  10.20–1040

  10.40–1100

  Against 0920-0940 a typed note said: ‘Room 17A, scheduled meeting with Estates Management Representatives.’ Alongside the next two sets of figures, 0940-1000 and 1000-1020 was typed: ‘Ditto, continuing.’ Then, against 10.20 to 1040 and 1040 to 1100 a note said: ‘No scheduled entries.’ Moss glanced at the other two pages. They were set out in similar format, though the notation alongside the figures was different, and the capital letters at the top also varied.

  ‘Do you see what they are, Mart?’ Chote said.

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ Moss said.

  ‘Which one are you looking at?’

  ‘R.S.G.’

  ‘Royston Stanley Gormand,’ Chote replied. ‘Roy.’

  ‘What about him?’ Moss asked.

  ‘That’s as near to timetabling his movements this morning as we can get. He had the diaried meeting with some estates people in 17A, diaried meaning it was entered in the departmental Appointments section. Availability you see, Mart. We can work out Roy Gormand’s availability to some degree at least from his timetable. Such availability could begin at 1020.’

  ‘Roy Gorman’s availability as a traitor? But I thought Roy was one of your special—’

  ‘I’m not sure of exactly what time we set out, you and I,’ Chote replied, ‘so I’ve tried to cover the complete 0920-1100 hours. I think we might have left at about 1025 or 30. I don’t know if you can make it more precise than that. If you look on page 2, you’ll see that C.L.M. – Carl Ivor Medlicott – lectured in B7 on ‘Climate Irregularities In The Tundra’ from 10 until 11, so, palpably, has no availability in the sense that interests us here. He can be eliminated from our survey, Martin. Contrariwise, Flora Dane Dinah Ellison had a pre-planned meeting with one of her post-grad students from 1000 until 1020, the rest of the period unaccounted for and therefore a possible as to the said availability.’