The Principals

by Bill James

  ‘No, it says that the conference area was engaged for a measured period,’ Mart said.

  ‘Engaged with what, if it wasn’t a meeting?’ Wayne asked.

  Mart said, ‘What I was present at felt like a meeting – four people coming together to talk, two having travelled from London specifically to be there – but I was told with great firmness that reference to a meeting having taken place was perverse and foolishly deluded.’

  Gordon Upp said, ‘This reminds me of that nonsense poem by Hughes Mearns:

  “Yesterday upon the stair

  I met a man who wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there again today.

  I wish, I wish, he’d go away.”’

  ‘But Martin was there,’ Elvira said.

  ‘And because I was it couldn’t have taken place,’ Mart said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  1987

  ‘Good legs,’ Ursula Tane said.

  Vic Tane didn’t much like this. His own legs were not good – between bony and emaciated – and they’d been displayed on the Bounty Week float. ‘Hell, Ursula, if I said that, but about a woman, you’d go into a flaming jealous spasm.’

  ‘When a man praises a woman’s legs he’s not really thinking about the legs but where they start from or lead up to, and how welcoming they would be when apart. A woman’s legs might be lovely, but they are not the complete agenda.’

  Ursula had lovely legs, but Tane would admit they were not the complete agenda.

  ‘Whereas,’ she told him, ‘when I note Lawford Chote’s “good legs” it just means what it says, legs that seem strong and well shaped. Normally, his legs wouldn’t be on show, but when he’s doing a Macbeth in breastplate over short jerkin, there they are, bare and obviously serviceable.’

  They were watching the late evening local TV news coverage of the Bounty Week parade, and Chote’s sudden, all-out, frenzied attack with his scabbarded sword on one of the witches. The film showed most of the tussle including the tip-up of the cauldron, dowsing some onlookers with what looked like very mucky water. They were obviously cursing and threatening Chote and the witch, but viewers needed to lip-read because the sound had been edited out on grounds of hygiene.

  Vic Tane adored television. They had four sets in Kule House, the eighteenth-century, semi-rural, six-bedroomed mansion that came with the job at Charter Mill. It had been already furnished but Tane added more. This signalled a kind of compulsion. They were in what was called the East Study where the largest TV stood, a very over-furnished, small room. As well as the television it contained a three-piece suite of two ample easy chairs and a lengthy settee in pale mauve velveteen, a sideboard, a round, rosewood table, two nests of small mahogany tables, an archery target on its stand for use in the grounds fairly often when Ursula and Victor competed against each other, Victor almost always the winner. This was important to him, even vital. Ursula could sometimes make Tane seem stupid in argument, but he had the drop on her as to bull’s eyes. He would mock her: ‘We’d never have won at Agincourt if our longbow troops were like you, Urs.’ She liked this ugly shortening of her name because it sounded similar to the French for a female bear – ourse – and made her feel cuddlesome, like a teddy.

  ‘The other two witches don’t do anything to help their sister,’ Ursula said. ‘Poltroons. Where’s solidarity?’

  ‘Despite the rope wig and rough garments, I think I recognize one of them from a photograph taken a while ago, a non-witch picture. He was in Chote’s Volvo then, not on the back of a lorry, and seemingly a new member of Lawford’s special clique. He probably wouldn’t side against Macbeth here.’

  ‘He can’t survive this,’ Ursula said, pointing at the screen.

  ‘Who? The witch? Lawford’s sword and scabbard are only toys. The witch hits back. He’s taking most of the blows on his arm.’

  ‘Chote.’

  ‘Survive it?’

  ‘This publicity will finish him. I mean, Vic, this is the principal of a university. OK, a provincial university but still a university with a boss who ought to behave with some decorum. The police are sure to be involved and the safety people – antics on the back of a lorry and chucking hot water over what are known as innocent bystanders, that is, bystanders whose innocence means they don’t need a wash, especially not in foul water. Was he drunk, or high on something? In a way it’s hilarious, of course: a procession admirably in support of charities becomes a venue for thuggery.’

  ‘But in a way it’s also sad, of course,’ Victor said.

  ‘Has he flipped because of the Sedge troubles?’

  ‘Flipped?’

  ‘Overheated brain, trying to think of a way out of the Sedge agonies when there probably isn’t one – or not one he could accept,’ she replied. ‘The only one he would accept, most probably, is Sedge’s debts written off and a new tranche of Education Ministry boodle for him to squander.’

  ‘I think the witch must have said something to him. They seemed to be chatting normally near the cauldron, the way any two people might chat near a witches’ cauldron, and then abruptly he goes ape.’

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘Obviously, something offensive.’

  ‘What sort of something?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, about Sedge and the mess he’s made of it. They’d be doom-laden words and coming from a witch who, don’t forget, Urs, has second-sight into the future.’

  ‘It’s not a witch, it’s a bloke doing a turn for Bounty Week, as you did.’

  ‘But Chote’s in a bad state,’ Victor replied.

  ‘Pissed?

  ‘Has strain made him deluded, so he can’t tell the difference between street-theatre and fact, fantasy and the back of a lorry?’ Victor found some of it unbearably embarrassing to watch and let his eyes wander from the screen and move around the East Study. What he liked about cramming so much furniture in was the way this corrected how things had been at home when he was a youngster. His mother and father were minimalists by nature, long before the word and style became commonplace. Some rooms in the house had only a couple of basic items in them, though they were used daily, not abandoned.

  ‘Victor, I must have space!’ his mother had bawled at him one day, when standing in the middle of what she and Tane’s father referred to as the Nominal Room, because they’d gone in there during Mrs Tane’s pregnancy to decide on what the coming child should be called. The room could offer then, as it probably could until the house was sold, two straight-backed kitchen chairs and an ottoman with a padded hinged lid where sheets were kept.

  His mother had told Vic that she and his father sat opposite each other on the chairs for hours going through names. Eventually they’d settled on Victor Horace, and Madge Emily for a girl. ‘So you see, Victor Horace, what I mean when I state in all humility I must, absolutely must, have space,’ his mother had said that day when he was in his teens, touching with a kind of awe and reverence the chair she’d been on when choosing Victor Horace and Madge Emily.

  Vic Tane hadn’t, in fact, seen why she should demand space because of the naming slog and to counter what he saw as the barminess of his mother’s supposed logic he went in for loading rooms at Kule with gear so that he could prove to himself, and to anyone else who inquired, that he was not for ever bound by his mother’s thinking, even though she and his father had spent so long in an uncomfortable, mean-looking room naming him and the girl who didn’t come.

  Tane enjoyed sending her photographs of the East Study and descriptions of the layout there. Of course, she was dead and no effective retaliation from him to her was possible, but taking the pictures and listing any new stuff, such as a flagrantly surplus nest of mahogany tables, gave him an authentic, malicious pleasure. Sometimes the letters and photographs would come back to the return address he’d put on the back of the envelope, and sometimes they disappeared, presumably thrown away by the people now in the house. He liked to imagine them, perhaps angered beyond by the continuing flow of mail for her, opening
the envelope in protest and reading the furniture inventory and enjoying the back-up photographs of, say, a bookcase, hatstand, pouffe.

  That kind of unintended, random contact with people whom he didn’t know delighted Tane. It gave him the same sort of thrill as television. Watching programmes, he often felt a kind of link between him and performers on the screen. He had the conviction that if one of those professional broadcasters stepped out into the East Study, as the actor does in that Woody Allen film, The Purple Rose Of Cairo, he/she would warm to all the homely clutter and excess. This was a lived-in room not some poky, inhospitable cubicle for picking babe names.

  He liked to make love to Ursula on the mauvish settee while the television was on a couple of metres away. It was part of that longing for a link with the great outside and elsewhere. He had bought the mauve suite because of its long settee. He was six foot four inches tall. The settee had to provide a suitable and safe site. He’d read somewhere that Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress, used to have a good giggle when distinguished visitors came and sat on a sofa that only recently she and Adolf had used for romance. Tane felt the same when they had guests and some of them took places on the convenient settee.

  Ursula had unzipped his trousers and eased her hand inside. Tane said, ‘Yes, Lawford might have lost touch with the actual. He was hallucinating? Think of Macbeth seeing the ghost of Banquo just after Macbeth has had him murdered. Lawford believes that if he can beat the witch into silence he’ll have some peace. Perhaps he sees the witch as Satan. The trio do come across as evil in the play, don’t they?’

  The TV news finished and a food programme built around some smirking, amiable chef began. Tane reckoned that a lot of TV shows were obviously constructed to encourage a special sense of intimacy. In many of them, the people taking part worked damn hard to make themselves really likeable. They charmed via the camera. This was how they got to be on the screen at all. They’d have undergone tests in likeability and were then let loose to practise their happy flair in transmission. Programmes that broadsheet critics would label rubbish often had this special matiness and geniality towards the viewer. Tane loved Top Of The Pops for instance, presented by that ever-smiling, brilliantly chirpy Jimmy Savile.

  Television brought life to Vic and also took him into life. He hadn’t ever got that sensation from his time with the classics at Oxford. There was even less chance of it happening now. Who the fuck cared about Apollo wandering around the world looking for somewhere to leave his oracle? No wonder the nymph of the spring at Telphusa tells him to scram and take it to Pytho. He saw staff and students, of course, but felt this was a very enclosed corner.

  Ursula had been quiet for a little while concentrating on intelligent finger movements. ‘Chote hallucinating?’ she said now. ‘But does he realize that witches can be vengeful if badly treated? There’s one in the play who’s so enraged because a woman munching chestnuts tells her to aroint – meaning sod off – when the witch asks her for one that she’s going to take it out on the woman’s husband who’s over Aleppo way. Distance no object, see, when it comes to payback from a witch?’

  Vic said, ‘There might be some special, transcendental link between witches and chestnuts. Shakespeare knew a lot about that kind of folklore thing. If the witches foresee disaster they’ve got it right for Macbeth, haven’t they, and that’s what scares Lawford into antic action?’ He paused, knowing that what he intended saying next might be dangerous. ‘I feel a kind of shame, Ursula, having watched the awfulness, the deranged, tormented behaviour of Chote in that clip.’

  ‘Shame? How so?’

  ‘Am I one of the causes?’

  ‘Causes of what?’

  ‘Have I helped drive him crazy?’

  ‘Of course you’re not and of course you haven’t,’ she snarled. ‘He’s done it solo, and gloried in doing it solo. You just happen to be there at the other end of the city. You’ve done nothing to damage him. In fact some would say you’ve been insipidly docile. Your only fault is no fault at all – you just happen to be there.’

  ‘Being there is what I mean. By being there I scare him. Whitehall might look on me as a possible top man in a merger. Has this pushed him towards mental breakdown?’

  ‘Oh, stop being so fucking noble and selfless, Vic.’ She pulled her hand back. ‘This is a kind of grandiosity: you imagine you’re so influential.’

  ‘While he’s engaged in that idiocy with the sheathed sword and the upset cauldron, I’m calm and safe on another float, surrounded by imported, here-today-gone-tomorrow figures who ensure I get lots of lovely attention and reflected prestige. There’s something disgusting about it, something shoddy and sly. Yes, shame, I’m ashamed, Urs. I feel like going over to Sedge in the morning and telling Lawford we should consider proposing the two institutions must join, he the Number One, me his deputy. He’s older and I could move up when he retires. He was probably thinking of that kind of change when he came prospecting in the Volvo with the witch. I think the idea would be very acceptable to him.’

  ‘Of course it bloody would. But if you do anything like that you can say goodbye to me, Vic. Or you won’t have time to say goodbye, I’ll be gone. Screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll do OK out of this crisis. I’m a lawyer and I’m trained to win. I wouldn’t want to be linked with some soft-centred, infirm-of-purpose prat who’s too decent and limp to grab a chance when it’s offered on a plate. All hail Victor Horace Tane! That has to be our battle slogan.’

  ‘You remind me of someone when you talk like this and with those kinds of words,’ Tane replied. ‘You know how much I hate quotations.’

  ‘They’re not from Hamlet.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  1987

  Probably because Neddy Lane-Hinkerton almost always came over as such an amiable, good-humoured type, Geraldine must have told him to do the introductory bit at this Preparatory Parameters Survey (U) meeting. Mart could see and understand that a friendly tone, at least as starters to such a difficult conference, was vital. It could be a softening-up tactic. But, also, a university, more than any other brand of institution, ought surely to offer a decent show of tolerance, politeness and civility. Geraldine would probably feel it only proper to abide by some sort of token respect for that kind of pious thinking. Neddy wore a pale green summer-weight jacket, a bow tie, one wing purple, the other yellow with silver stars, and scarlet trousers, also summer weight. His shoes were costly looking black lace-ups; Mart thought Neddy appeared relaxed, unreproachful, light-hearted.

  Getting unhurried, joyous stress on to each key word, and speaking from the decidedly left side of his mouth, Ned told Chote, ‘On the train, Principal, Geraldine and I realized we both revelled in the chance to get away from London, and come to spend an all too short a time, but welcome, nonetheless, in this gorgeous part of the country where Sedge lies.’ He lingered especially on the two different ‘g’ sounds in ‘gorgeous’. There was a nice rhythm to the whole statement. Ned might look flashy in his gear, but he knew how to manage a complicated sentence.

  ‘Yes, Sedge fits in to its good surrounds very well,’ Chote said.

  To Mart, this seemed sweet and banal enough, yet he thought he detected some Lawford-style arson there, too.

  ‘Oh, certainly,’ Geraldine said, with a sort of congratulatory smile, her sort of congratulatory smile, meaning it might or might not be truly congratulatory.

  ‘That bastard Dunning deserved what he got, and he knows it,’ Chote replied. ‘I wish I could have done more. Bruises suit him.’ It sounded as though he were answering a reproach, though none had been made. There was no forerunner. He would choose the agenda and decide what came first.

  ‘You mean the incident on the lorry?’ Geraldine said. ‘We heard something of that – a moment or two of it on television news.’

  ‘They networked it – regarding it as so funny and quaint,’ Chote said.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that, Principal,’ Ned replied.

  ‘Wouldn
’t you, wouldn’t you?’ Chote barked.

  ‘When you tell us he deserved it, what exactly do you mean, Lawford?’ Geraldine said.

  ‘Did he go to the police?’ Chote said. ‘No, he didn’t. The police went to him, though, and he sent them away, said he didn’t want to make any charges. The police themselves told me this. They’d asked him about what you call the incident and he’d said it was all part of the Bounty Week show, with me as Macbeth, the great warrior, acting as great warriors did in those ancient times, wielding their sword. The police said there were still red marks on his neck and the side of his face, and probably on the clothed parts of his body, but he insisted these were all according to the scenario and for the sake of authenticity in the Macbeth sketch. The sergeant termed it “virtual reality” and commented that we’d both taken our roles excellently in the interests of charity.’

  ‘But that’s not really what the onslaught was about?’ Geraldine asked.

  ‘Of course it’s not what it was about,’ Chote said. He spoke crisply, like one who lived among great spiritual and visionary matters and who knew very few others capable of such insights. His pallor seemed to intensify, as though he wanted to assure people that he felt no red rage at Geraldine’s need to ask her superfluous question. Mart thought Lawford probably did feel the red rage, but he wouldn’t want his skin suffused and mottled at this point. ‘It was about something profound, something of massive significance,’ Chote said. ‘This is what I’m getting at when I say he deserved the beating. He’s ashamed, and rightly ashamed, about how he provoked it. We should note what Lane-Hinkerton said during his intro.’

  ‘Which part of what I said, Principal?’ Neddy asked.

  ‘The way Sedge has made itself an integral part of this city, part of its, as it were, fine context,’ Chote said.

  ‘Well, yes indeed, I definitely stand by that,’ Neddy said with slow earnestness.

  ‘And I definitely agree,’ Geraldine said.

  ‘Jasper Dunning had questioned Sedge’s position,’ Chote said.