The Principals

by Bill James

  ‘Yes, I had that outlined for me,’ Mart said.

  Chote was in shirtsleeves. He had on the waistcoat, but not the jacket, of a grey suit, with a gold watch chain across half his midriff. The shirt was white with narrow crimson stripes. It was open-necked, with no tie. What looked like a couple of inches of cream thermal vest showed behind it. His face radiated combativeness as it often did, but Mart also saw there a lurking sadness, even despair. Perhaps that was to be expected, though Mart wouldn’t have expected it from him.

  Chote said, ‘At this meeting which didn’t take place there was a discussion which didn’t take place, either, as Professor Moss could explain to you all if the meeting and discussion had occurred.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Mart said.

  ‘One of the points that couldn’t have been made at this non-meeting was a warning from a Ministry of Education official that if I did not give up my principalship of Sedge at once all funding to the university would cease. We would be put into a state of siege. Obviously, this would have been worrying if the threat had been voiced. I would have rejected it and subsequently decided to ask a typical Sedge group – say, Professor Moss’s class and Professor Moss himself, whether I would have done the right thing in dismissing that proposal and threat with maximum, principal-style disdain.’

  ‘Disdain is the only possible response,’ Samantha Colley, a red-haired girl at the end of a row, said. ‘Oxford showed it to Thatcher. We have a precedent.’ Sandra had been in one of his seminar groups last year.

  ‘Could I call for a vote: Stay or Go?’ Lawford said.

  Every student in the room raised a hand for Stay.

  ‘Thank you,’ Chote said.

  ‘But the professor didn’t vote,’ the girl said.

  ‘I think he should go,’ Mart said.

  THIRTY-THREE

  1987

  Among the student attack group that broke commando-style into the centenary banquet at Standfast Fort’s mahogany panelled, high-windowed, historic Plain Parlour, Mart spotted a few of his own English Literature undergraduates, including Sandra Colley, the red-haired girl, today wearing a turquoise jogging outfit and almost matching green mountaineering boots. Mart wondered if they’d had cooperation from someone in the Parlour work force – a cook, a waiter, a sommelier. This, after all, was a fortress and built to keep enemies out. Had someone deliberately left a door unlocked? But why? Perhaps there were Sedge students doing part-time jobs in the kitchen or around the tables and sympathetic to the Lawford cause, grateful for his expansionism that had given them a university place.

  The timing of the inrush struck Mart as suspiciously perfect. They entered, yelling and baying, a few minutes into a speech by Victor Tane as newly appointed principal of the combined institutions of Sedge and Charter Mill, following the well-earned retirement of Principal Chote from Sedge.

  It would have been kindly, Mart thought, if they could have left two empty chairs at the top table for Rowena and Lawford. Had they been invited? Was there a forwarding address for them? Judging by what Martin knew of Tane, such an invitation seemed the sort of decent, commiserating gesture he might have made. After all, they were a legitimate, renowned part of Sedge’s centenary; in some ways more legitimate and renowned than the Tanes. It occurred to Mart that in the future there might be a proposal for some sort of memorial to honour Lawford; say, a statue. If so, a complementary or counter proposal would probably emerge: another statue, but this one, Victor Tane. The duality would almost certainly lead to endless debate about which statue should get the more prominent site; would the Tane statue dominate if the two were close because of his height; would it be necessary to shift the statues around the city so that each had a spell in the Charter campus and a spell in the Sedge; would it be mere sentimentality to give Chote a statue although he’d sunk Sedge in its previous form? But if a plan for two statues went ahead would they be on a shared plinth or each have his own? Mart had a feeling that the plinth allocation question would entail profound, lengthy disputation. Although some might regard plinths as neutral, uncontroversial slabs, Mart suspected they could become of towering significance then.

  Of course, the Chotes would not have accepted an invitation to the Plain Parlour banquet. Lawford would imagine Tane was crowing over him, lording it and being magnanimous in victory. Lawford would probably phrase it as ‘being sodding magnanimous in victory the gaping-nostrilled, Latin versifying prat’, though.

  There were fourteen or fifteen in the assault party, Mart reckoned, nine men, five or six women. They came in four units of four, four, three, three or four. That could mean they’d been smuggled in by instalment as opportunities appeared. It took about two minutes for them to assemble at the far end of the Parlour. Mart thought he could detect clever tactical organisation, like troops in street fighting advancing in small formations, maximising cover. Many of the diners failed to notice the build-up, their attention on Tane’s vacuous celebratory words. At first, before things went destructive and dangerous, the students seemed satisfied to stand at the far end of the Parlour and shout and wave cardboard banners with ‘Bring Back Lawford’, ‘Lawford’s The Lad’, ‘Lawford We Love You’ in crimson letters. ‘Hail to Lawford’, they shouted. ‘We want Lawford’.

  ‘Tane, get back to your fucking Mill,’ Sandra Colley screamed. The lettered message on her banner read: ‘Chote IS Sedge, and Sedge is Chote’, like Rod Steiger as Napoleon in the film, Waterloo: ‘I am France and France is me’. ‘Foul Betrayal’, another banner mourned and another said: ‘Down with the Thatcher Lapdogs’.

  Apart from a pause or two and a few sentences that didn’t quite add up to good sense, Tane bravely kept going. At the end, there was unfervent but respectful applause. Then, while they waited for the desserts and toasts, Tane, at the top table with the minister, the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, Ursula Tane, editor Alan Norton-Hord and other persons of interest, seemed to fall into vigorous conversation, possibly about the grand prospects for the new double-unit Sedge. Somehow, Tane seemed even stringier in formal garb. The polarities of black jacket and bow tie on a white shirt appeared too definite and strong for his wispy frame. But he had doggedness and, for a moment, Martin thought that by ignoring the bellows and snarls, he might have triumphed. The banners were lowered suddenly and chucked aside.

  Martin soon saw why, though: the protesters wanted their hands free to snatch missiles from the feast remnants and, crockery, cutlery, glass on the guest tables. These opening salvoes were reasonably harmless items – fruit, various types of cheese, leftover slices of sticky toffee pudding, and gateaux, bread rolls. The targets were all on the top table. Again Mart sensed a battle briefing pre the offensive, its objective clearly stated. Geraldine, in an elegant navy blue boardroom suit was hit by a half orange on her lapel. Something wettish and murky lodged itself in Tane’s scarce hair. Ursula got half a ripe Camembert under her right eye and clawed the bits off and hurled them back, hissing, ‘I’ll kill the rioting jerk.’

  Despite Roy Gormand’s forecast that Mart would be on the top table, he was, in fact, seated in the body of the hall at a very ordinary spot and remained untroubled.

  Standfast had security staff, male and female, and several of them came into the Parlour at a rush now and moved fast towards the invaders. This was when the missiles became more dangerous as some serious fighting began as security tried to drive the students out. Crockery, cutlery, glass and even chairs were hurled. A china tureen shattered on the flagged floor when half a dozen wrestling guards and intruders barged against it. Several diners, some of the students and some of the security posse, were cut about face and head, and Sandra fell, concussed by a flying chair. Someone phoned for the police and ambulance service.

  After about half an hour the Parlour was in something like working order again. Sandra recovered, the rest of the intruders were cleared from the big, handsome room, some possibly arrested, some possibly treated by paramedics from the ambulances. Tane, still with whatever it was dark
ening his hair, resumed his speech, saying that some birth pangs were unavoidable during the creation of the changed institution and that the ‘little recent unfortunate turmoil was, in fact, a heartening sign of vigorous life’.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  2014

  ‘“Dear Professor Moss”.’

  Mart read aloud to the statues committee a handwritten letter he’d received from Rowena Chote apparently living now in Hastings on the south coast. She’d obviously decided in view of what was coming to say that she should shun the familiarity of his first name.

  Word has reached me here of a proposal to erect a statue of my late husband, Lawford Chote, at Sedge University. Information is sometimes slow in arriving to this area and I hope I am not too late to declare in the strongest terms that the proposal should be rejected outright. Lawford would detest the idea. He was devastated when, Professor Moss, you announced that you thought he should step down at once from his post as principal. He regarded this as incontrovertible evidence of his defeat. He laid great store on your opinion in any controversy following the happy incident at your inaugural lecture upon being promoted to a professorship. Lawford would maintain, if still alive, that vanquished leaders should not be commemorated in any form. He’d consider such a seeming accolade as meaningless and grossly hypocritical. He would find it especially obnoxious, Professor Moss, that you, after your base defection, should now have the unholy impertinence to chair a committee whose ostensible purpose is to decide the form of a monument to him.

  Whatever his faults might have been – and there certainly were some – Lawford believed in absolute honesty in all aspects of his life. He was made of truth. He would want no statue, of himself. I, similarly, do not want it and abhor the suggestion. May I ask you, please, to do all you can to get this fart-arseing fucking idea negated. I address my appeal to you because you were the one who brought him down and therefore should be aware of the notion’s absurdity more than anyone else, though I’m not sure you are aware of it or ever will be.

  Yours faithfully, R. Chote.

  ‘Blimey,’ Elvira said.

  ‘What incident at your inaugural, Mart?’ Lucy said.

  ‘So we go for Tane only, do we?’ Gordon Upp said.

  ‘Do we?’ Mart replied.