Tim Connor Hits Trouble

by Frank Lankaster

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So have the evil powers won?’

  Henry looked annoyed.

  Tim realised that he was handling matters ineptly. Henry might or might not be bullshitting, but it was a mistake to risk provoking him. Henry hated losing. The last thing Tim wanted was to re-ignite his fight to the death impulse. He quickly steered the conversation back in a more positive direction.

  ‘Sorry, Henry, that was a stupid question. Tell me more about your sessions with the counsellor if you’re happy to? What was it that has helped you into a better frame of mind?’

  Surprisingly Henry responded calmly and reflectively. ‘Tim, it became obvious that the only form of heroism still available to me is martyrdom. I’ve failed at everything else. But I’ve decided to fail at that as well. I don’t want to self-destruct. I accept that I can’t change the system. I didn’t manage to do it in thirty years and now I’m not even part of the fucking thing. If I want to survive I’ve got to settle down, cultivate my own garden.’

  ‘So that’s what you’re going to do?’

  ‘Yeah, like any other loser, I guess I’m stuck with whatever’s left. I might as well enjoy myself or try to.’

  ‘Now I see where the enthusiasm for travel comes in. It sounded a bit far-fetched when you first mentioned it. It seemed to come out of nowhere.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a vote of confidence then.’

  Tim was still less than half convinced by Henry’s ‘shrink’ explanation. The disconnection between Henry’s high mood and his unexpectedly conventional plans for the future persuaded Tim to remain vigilant. Counselling may have revived Henry’s self-confidence and released his energy, but what Tim was witnessing seemed closer to a personality transplant. He was dubious. The whole thing could be an elaborate act or perhaps just a passing high mood. It was in these moods that Henry was most likely to rip into action mode, maximising his vast potential for chaos and disaster.

  To keep an eye on Henry, Tim suggested they set up a game of golf some time in the next few days. It would give him an opportunity to get a clearer sense of Henry’s state of mind and real intentions. Tim’s doubts increased when Henry was unexpectedly off-hand about arranging a date for the game. Almost dismissively he agreed to give Tim a call about it. Nothing quite seemed to fit. Henry was different but perhaps not in the way he was presenting himself. The weekend game of golf never materialised.

  After his conversation with Henry, Tim decided to walk to campus where he had some work to finish. Henry’s unconvincing volte-face had thrown him into a mood of uneasy reflection. The pace and turmoil of the last few months had given him little time to consider how he might begin to shape his late-start career in higher education. He had gleaned few clues from Henry Jones or Howard Swankie in that respect. But role-models aside, it was in his blood to prefer a fighter like Henry to an effete careerist like Howard. He thought he knew from where his preference for the pugilist over the diplomat came: from his father through his mother’s memories and stories about him. She had always presented Dominic as independent and assertive, a tough and intelligent working class Scot who could hold his own with the football authorities even in those more paternalistic days. So Tim conceded to himself that there was more than a touch of gut feeling in his support for Henry over Swankie. Still, he had no intention of following in Henry’s footsteps any more than Swankie’s although perhaps he could learn something from both.

  He liked Henry, but only partly admired him. He respected Henry’s intellect and ideas, but was unimpressed by his failure to get them into print and, though less so, to practise them. After all, Henry was a desperado. Perhaps his mad desperation came from self-dissatisfaction at his crucial lack of discipline and hard work. Perhaps it was due to frustration. But for all his practical irrelevance Henry had stuck to his beliefs in good times and bad. In the end, under siege he had the courage not to submit, to remain unbroken, bloodied but unbowed. Tim could aspire to those qualities, but had no wish to exercise them in the form of hopeless gestures extending, in Henry’s case, over thirty years. It was not so much that Henry was a rebel without a cause as, in terms of making any constructive impact, a rebel without a clue.

  But Henry was at least principled. Tim was unsure whether Howard Swankie subscribed to any binding principles, binding, that is, on himself as well as others. Swankie was some kind of pragmatic liberal. He believed in liberal democracy, modernisation and progress, more or less in line with the consensus in most Western nation states, at least amongst the political classes. Whenever Tim had heard them arguing the case, Swankie recoiled at Henry’s ideas of extending democracy into everyday institutions. Swankie rarely swore, but made an exception when referring to Henry’s ‘notions’, the phrase ‘infantile bull-shit’ being one of his choicer descriptions. As far as Tim could see Swankie had no interest in democratising the governance of universities, but operated comfortably within a management structure reformed to mimic closely that of business corporations. Swankie’s elitism was well suited to the way the sector had been remoulded. Tim found it difficult to judge how much of an opportunist Swankie might be but if self-advancement was only one game in town, Swankie played it with an eagle’s eye. No doubt he also sought to be effective even if within carefully calculated terms. Tim found it impossible to be enthused or inspired by Swankie. Perhaps Max Weber had the ‘Swankies’ of the world in mind when he spoke of modernity’s ‘loss of enchantment.’ Tim was anything but ‘enchanted’ by Swankie.

  But if he was much closer to Henry on values and ideas, he recognised that Swankie was far more skilful in acquiring and exercising power even, if only within pre-defined rules and objectives. As Tim saw it the price to pay for such ‘realism’ was high. Once people surrendered to the system, to the machine, it was difficult to see how they could find the resources not to be personally shaped by its instrumental culture. If Swankie was a model practitioner then there had to be something wrong with the model. At the heart of the new model -- its functional principle -- was the competitive market, the fulcrum on which the production of mass higher education would now be forged. The danger was that the pursuit of efficiency through competition plus technology would bleed humanity from the system.

  It was a danger and challenge that Tim had decided simultaneously to live with and work against: a small part Swankie, a larger part Jones, and the rest his own alchemy. How the hell to turn the juggernaut around? Tim mused, as he approached the campus. It would be easier to climb the north face of the Eiger with bare hands. That was too bold and heroic an image! Grappling with an octopus gets closer to it.

  But the system had been changed and it could be changed again. It had to be re-humanised. Human and qualitative values, not bureaucratic and quantitative ones should drive and control the battery of modern organisation and technology. He had no alternative but to rebel, but he would not indulge in futile self-sacrifice. He would find a way. With a jolt he realised that he might be looking at the project of a lifetime, over-arching his professional and personal life. Of course, he was neither alone nor unique in his thinking. Therein lay hope. Alone he could do little. There were many that felt and thought as he did. That was what made the project possible. He would draw strength from the others, and they from him. It is the cause, the cause, my soul.

  As he walked up the wide campus driveway he turned his attention to the activity around him. He paused for a few moments to take in the scene.

  The campus was resplendent with youth, stretched out with their laptops and mobiles on the grass or under trees in the cool of the shade. Summer term brings a mildly schizoid mood to higher education: the joys of the season jostle with the anxieties of examinations and assessment. The long, warmer days open up the physical world. Students and academics ease up, stop hunching and scurrying against the wet and cold and if they choose, slow down to enjoy nature revitalised. They begin to pay more attention to each other, pausing to chat and pass time together. Suddenly the campuses come to li
fe again with the young and lovely, enjoying and flaunting what only they have and least appreciate. But youthful pleasure has to be matched off against the need to work: to finish essays, projects and dissertations and to revise for exams. Looking about him, Tim observed both work and pleasure going on side by side. Mostly it was impossible to tell which was which. The world of instant communication had collapsed access to work and leisure into the single medium of the Internet.

  The scene around Tim was at once similar but different from his own experience as a student twenty years ago. He acknowledged it all with affection but recognised that he was no longer at its innocent heart. Times change and the dream of youth passes. He turned and walked on, wondering what the young people around him would make of their lives. The pattern of his own life was already heavily sketched in, but he sensed the definitive struggles lay ahead. A cool wind ruffled his hair as he squared his shoulders and walked briskly to his office.

  Chapter 26

  The Great Disappearing Acts

  Following Tim’s conversation with Henry there were several days of what turned out to be a phoney calm. He was glad enough of a quieter period allowing him to get on with his work. A few weeks into summer term lectures began to wind down and there was more of the face-to-face individual and small group work that he enjoyed. His teaching was beginning to gain real traction as he got used to his new environment. Joining the lunchtime queue after a session advising a final-year student on his dissertation, he spotted Rachel Steir. She was sat alone on one of a handful of smaller tables tucked inside an alcove half secluded from the general noise and chatter.

  Tim was beginning to feel that he had not been fair to Rachel. The personalised politics of the department were so intense that he had been drawn into them with little time for reflection. Even at his interview he had picked up on the fractious relationship between Henry and Rachel. It was fortunate that he had. His ability to exploit the torturous dynamics of the panel revolving around these two had helped him get the job. Quickly realising that Henry and Fred were his natural allies and that Rachel and Erica were apparently hostile, had enabled him to tilt his pitch towards Swankie whom, ironically, as it turned out, he didn’t especially like or respect. Rebel he may be, but he did not regret this moment of compromise.

  After seeing Rachel in action for a few months, Tim began to appreciate her hard work and commitment to students and younger staff. She was stubborn in pursuit of what she wanted, as he had discovered to his chagrin at the London conference. True, her efforts were selective and coloured by her radical feminist beliefs and tastes. Her blind spot was a failure to realise that in building up a coterie in her own image, she excluded those less like herself. There were many in the latter category and Tim was certainly one of them. The part-time appointments that the department now depended on to save money - or to make efficiency gains as the jargon had it - tended to be either female or gay, or remarkably often, both and the same was true of the students Rachel was closest to. Tim happened to fit neither category. It irked him that Erica had come to Rachel through this questionable filtering process. Even so, he appreciated that senior academics tend to seek and promote people with kindred ideas and ideals to their own. It was a way of developing research capacity and momentum in their area of interest. He hardly expected Rachel to search out academic equivalents of Hemingway or, for that matter, academics like himself. Group identity is demarcated in terms of difference from ‘the other’ and in this case he was content to be ‘the other.’ In contrast he found Henry interesting and amusing, an endless source of knowledge and anecdote. But he could see why he and Henry struggled to match Rachel in the increasingly over-determined micro-politics of academia: a pair of mavericks out-manoeuvred by a pragmatic enforcer willing to submit to and master the bureaucratic machine. He could not yet warm to Rachel but he had learnt not underestimate her.

  As he put together his health-conscious meal of tuna, mixed salad and blueberry yogurt, he weighed up whether or not to join her. He had begun to seek a thaw in their relations. Virtual non-communication was impractical given how much their lives over-lapped. Apart from work, there was the matter of where each stood in relation to Erica. A sociable gesture on his part might provide a catalyst to better communication. Rachel had not been quite so hostile to him of late and a one to one chat in a safely impersonal public space might move things forward. She had just started her meal, so she could hardly barrel off as soon as he sat down without hitting record heights of rudeness.

  In the event Rachel looked startled, but not particularly annoyed when he put down his tray of food on the table’s small surface, almost touching hers. She shifted her own tray a couple of inches back. Tim sat down carefully making sure that his knees didn’t collide with hers. Instead they thudded into the top of the table, causing her glass of water to spill and a couple of tomatoes to leap from her plate onto her lap. To his surprise she smiled indulgently, more relaxed now that she could enter the conversation with a mild put-down.

  ‘Co-ordination isn’t quite your thing, is it, Tim? Do mind where you put your feet I’m wearing a rather flimsy pair of shoes.’

  Tim dropped his napkin over the spill of water, swiftly mopping it up. ‘Apologies Rachel, I guess I shouldn’t have interrupted you.’

  ‘Don’t worry I was going to get in touch with you in the next few days anyway.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, now that Henry’s gone we need to get together and plan for next year. I know he’s a friend of yours but he wasn’t exactly…’

  Rachel’s threatened rehearsal of Henry’s deficiencies was abruptly interrupted by the sound of her mobile phone, a raucously up-beat rendition of the first few bars of Walzing Matilda. She quickly plucked the phone from her bag excusing herself as she pressed connect. She greeted the caller familiarly but without mentioning a name.

  Listening to Rachel’s side of the conversation, Tim struggled to make sense of it. From her brief interjections it was clear this was more than just a social call.

  ‘But this has happened before hasn’t it?’

  Her voice grew more concerned as the call continued.

  ‘Have you had a serious quarrel? I mean worse than usual?’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry too much just yet.’

  ‘As it happens I’m with him now. Hang on a second and I’ll ask him.’

  She put her hand over her mobile.

  ‘Tim, it’s Annette. Henry didn’t go home last night and he’s not turned up this morning. Did he spend the night at your place? Or, have you any idea where he might be? Annette’s checked every other possibility.’

  Tim dumped a large fork-full of tuna and salad back onto his plate, his alarm laced with frustration that his efforts to help Henry might have been thwarted. His scepticism at Henry’s re-branding of himself as an enthusiastic senior citizen gagging to embark on a life of cruises and golf tours seemed about to be vindicated. It sounded like the real Henry had now turned up or, rather, not turned up. Perhaps he should have confronted Henry instead of humouring him. He found himself reacting defensively to Rachel’s question.

  ‘Rachel, Henry has never spent the night at my place. Look, I see a fair bit of him but there’s no way I can keep tabs on him all the time. No, I don’t know where he is.’

  ‘Ok, Tim, obviously nobody’s blaming you. But the fact is Henry’s missing. It might just be his idea of a joke but he’s not even answering his mobile. Mind you, it wouldn’t surprise me if he doesn’t know how to work it.’

  They urgently discussed the situation for a few minutes. Rachel maintained that it was still too early to panic and that Henry would probably ‘show up like a bad penny’ in the next few hours. Tim suppressed an impulse to tell Rachel to stop damning Henry with worn clichés and instead suggested that they join together to search for their delinquent colleague. Tim would scour the city in case Henry had met some mishap. Rachel offered to do what she could through calls and texts. They agreed to re-establish con
tact as necessary.

  Tim had little idea of where in Wash Henry might have spent the night. Annette had already checked out the obvious possibilities. Twenty or thirty years ago Henry might have bumped into some friendly soul and ended up with an offer of warmth and shelter and in those days perhaps even more. Given the attrition of age and alcohol that was unlikely now. Deciding that speculation was pointless, Tim headed straight into Wash leaving Rachel to do what she could from campus. He was impressed that she was so willing to involve herself.

  He began his search in the Mitre. In early afternoon the pub was almost empty. It was soon obvious that Henry was not there. Unusually the bartender had no recollection of having seen him for a couple of days. With diminishing conviction Tim tried several other pubs frequented by Henry. It was the same story: no Henry and no recent sighting of him. Plan A had been to look for him in the pubs, plan B was to look anywhere else. Tim quickly skimmed through the main public squares and a handful of cafes and snack bars. No joy. It was the same outcome as he tried less and less likely places, including even the Cathedral where there was just a chance that Henry might have repaired for a rest.

  Tim’s concern grew as his search continued fruitless. Images of Henry, bloodied and disoriented, flickered across his mind. He tried to ignore them, struggling to stay focused. Unsure of where to look next, he decided to check out some of the city’s more downbeat back streets. Two hours later he had still found nothing and come up with no clues or information. Depressed and weary he returned to the river area, this time to search it.

  As he walked along its pathway his eyes scanned the river’s opaque waters and the shrubs and overgrown grass of its banks. The river was no more than two or three feet deep, but that was enough for someone to drown in if they were determined and desperate enough to try, or if they fell in helplessly drunk. Hot and sweaty, he gave a cold shudder as he caught sight of what might be a floating body several feet off the riverbank. With the help of a broken off branch he poked the bloated mass first tentatively and then more firmly, lurching forward as he did so. It swirled and collapsed under his efforts, a swollen bundle of discarded clothes. He breathed a sigh of relief. The bundle reformed and ballooned again above the water.