Tim Connor Hits Trouble (19 page)

Tim was surprised to find himself telling the two older men what to talk about, particularly Swankie, whose highly developed sense of status usually discouraged humbler souls from offering him suggestions. And Tim's proposed topic,
though likely to lighten the mood, was, as he admitted to himself as he went to check out Maria, on the clunky side.

The party was still crowded although he noticed that the children playing with Maria and Ali had now gone, perhaps taken home. He was pleased to see Maria and Ali still playing together, the more so as she was carefully helping him to move his lame leg as he attempted to mount a small climbing frame. It was good to see that his daughter had inherited some of her mother's kindness as well as her brittle sensitivity.

He re-entered the extension and paused for a moment. Gina seemed preoccupied with a couple of guests he did not know and he opted to head for the group Aisha had directed him to earlier. As he approached he noticed that Brad Purfect had joined it and judging from the blank faces around him, was holding forth in typically drone-like manner. Still he could put up with Purfect for a few minutes. A trickier problem was Rachel Steir. He'd begun to notice that whenever he sat near her, she had a habit of abruptly leaving her seat. On a couple of occasions he had made the mistake of sitting next to her. She had shot off like a nun suddenly confronted by a flasher. He decided to sit well away from her in the hope that she would stay put. He was curious to see how she exercised her pull on others, not least on Erica who was sitting next to her. Annette, who had come to the party independently of Henry was still with the group and there were also a couple of middle-aged women he hadn't seen before.

‘Mind if I join you?'

There was a murmur of assent. However it did not include Rachel, who was out of her seat before Tim was in his. He exchanged a mild look of concern with Erica.

‘I was just about to say…' Brad Purfect did not reach the end of his sentence. He was interrupted by the sound of a loud splash followed by shouts of alarm.

‘Shit!' Tim feared the worst. Without bothering to make his excuses he was out of the extension and running along
the edge of the pool. He cursed at the sight of Howard Swankie, fully clothed, threshing around in the water.

‘Help… help… I can't swim.'

The situation was simultaneously dangerous and comic. Suppressing an impulse to laugh, Tim tore off his jacket, preparing to launch himself towards his panic-stricken boss. He was beaten to it. Henry, stripped down to his under clothes, emerged from the crowd gathering around the edge of the pool and leapt towards the unfortunate Swankie. He landed plum on top of his senior colleague striking him on the head with his right buttock. Swankie sank under the impact. As he resurfaced rage briefly conquered fear. He lashed out at Henry who nimbly blocked the intended blow. Unbalanced Swankie dipped again. He reappeared looking desperate.

‘Aah… Stop trying to drown me. Help someone! Save me from this oaf.'

Henry was in his element.

‘Stop talking, stop struggling. Leave it to me. Bloody stay still or I'll have to knock you out.' He managed to turn Swankie round, grabbed the top of his braces and tugged him the few yards to the side of the pool. Several pairs of hands lifted Swankie onto the pool's edge. Amongst the sound of concerned voices there was a ripple of applause for Henry who swam a swift length of honour before emerging beaming from the pool. He was swiftly handed a towel as his sodden underpants dropped to his feet. A couple of jokers in the crowd applauded again.

‘You deserve a medal,' shouted one of them.

Henry gave a nonchalant wave before gathering up his clothes and retreating to a wooden changing hut set back from the pool. He emerged a couple of minutes later to be greeted by the sound of Swankie's protesting voice. He was sat, draped in towels, on a poolside chair seemingly unharmed by his misadventure but indignant and embarrassed. He pointed an accusing finger at Henry.

‘You did that on purpose. You deliberately tripped me.'

‘Nonsense. That's a serious accusation. It was your own fault. For some reason you suddenly changed direction when we left our chairs and tripped over me. You struck my foot with your shin. Calm down. You should be grateful I rescued you especially after you attacked me in the pool.'

Tim was watching Henry closely for any sign of piss taking. For once Henry was playing it straight, milking his moment as local hero.

By now Aisha and Waqar Khan were fully engaged with the situation.

‘Professor Swankie, I'm sure this was an accident. Surely it must have been,' said Waqar Khan. ‘If you're certain you've recovered why don't we take you inside and we'll find you a decent change of clothes?'

Aisha Khan chipped in.

‘I'm sure my husband's right, Professor. Let's get you a hot drink as well.'

Swankie was somewhat mollified by the attention of his hosts. With a vicious look at Henry he got up and was led off into the house.

Following the incident the crowd at the party began rapidly to thin out. Tim noticed that Gina had left the extension to be with Maria and Ali. She held both hands up, fingers spread wide, signalling to him that she wanted to leave in ten minutes. He swiftly did the rounds saying goodbye to colleagues and a thank you to the Khans who were still fussing over Swankie.

Finally he went over for a word with Henry.

‘You alright Henry?'

‘Sure, fine, I enjoy a dip.'

‘I don't think our Dean feels the same way. But he seems ok. Mainly a case of wounded pride I think.' Tim looked at Henry thoughtfully. ‘Quite the athlete, aren't you?'

‘There's still a bit left in the tank.'

‘Yeah, I can see.'

Henry, tell me something.

‘Maybe. Go ahead.'

‘
Did
you do that on purpose?'

‘Tim, what do you think?'

‘Henry, it's an effing good job you're not looking for promotion.'

Later they had a laugh together at Swankie's expense. But for Henry the journey on the long road down to the bad times picked up pace after the swimming pool fiasco. Swankie played a cool hand. He didn't make a public issue of the incident or even mention it again. He knew he had quite enough evidence to bury Henry without using this embarrassing episode. In any case it was one man's word against another's and if he was going to nail Henry he better not appear to do so on the back of a personal vendetta. It was much cleaner to rely on the complaints of Henry's peers and the students although to his surprise few were prepared to make unqualified criticisms. Nevertheless he was confident that the dossier he had painstakingly put together on Henry would do the job. He was a fan of carefully compiled dossiers.

Academic conferences are not exactly holidays but they can provide a welcome change of scene and a chance to recharge the batteries. Tim needed both. His energy auto-renewal system was beginning to falter and life seemed static on all fronts. For the moment work had settled into a tough routine and for a couple of weeks he and Erica had barely managed to get together. Banging his head against a brick wall understated things: he recalled the standard advice - it feels good when you stop.

The annual subject conference of the British Sociological Association offered the possibility of a brief distraction. The London School of Economics was not the most novel venue for a sociology conference but it was easily accessible and located in the centre of one of the great world cities. Tim was happy to leave his car behind and travel comfortably on a non-too-crowded train. It was a glorious sunny day. Interrupted only by the dull beige of Swindon and Reading the hundred or so miles of gleaming, green countryside to the capital flashed by in little over an hour. From
Paddington it was a short trip on the tube to the University. Once in the big city a sense of freedom gusted anarchically through the canyons of his mind. A good time might not be the purpose of the conference but that was what he intended to have.

As always he felt a frisson of excitement approaching the main entrance to LSE in Houghton Street. In his youth he imagined LSE as a citadel of pure learning, uncontaminated by worldly imperatives of practicality and compromise. He now wondered from where he had got that idea. Perhaps it was simply adolescent romanticism. But he still thought of LSE as his spiritual home, his
alma mater
that never was. An explanation for this imagined belonging lay in an incident of his school days. During the second year of his A levels he had been blocked from applying to take a degree at LSE by the head teacher at Whitetown College, an authoritarian Jesuit named Father Hannon. The bigoted cleric insisted that the university was ‘dangerous and irreligious,’ a description that sharpened Tim’s desire to go there. It was to no avail. Instead he was directed across the Aldwych to King’s College, considered by Hannon to be ‘safer and more respectable.’ He assured Tim that in twenty years time he would be thankful for this ‘wise guidance.’ Like most assurances given to him by Catholic priests Tim found this one to be as substantial as a yard of piss. As it turned out the priest’s knowledge of the two universities was dated and inaccurate. King’s had niches of radicalism and LSE was becoming less so. Nevertheless Tim still believed that his intellectual development had been delayed by a lack of radical ambience during a formative period. But he wasn’t nursing a grievance. It had all helped him to define what he disagreed with. Discovering what he agreed with took a little longer.

Although he had arrived an hour or so before the President’s welcoming address, the venue was already becoming crowded. He queued for several minutes before being able to register and pick up his conference pack – a bulky
cloth bag disappointingly full, mainly of publishers catalogues. More usefully it also included a list of ‘conference delegates.’ He knew that several of his Wash colleagues were attending, including Erica. He had suggested travelling with her but she insisted that she couldn’t just dump Rachel as the two of them always went to conferences together. He was beginning to tire not of Erica, far from it, but of the game of hide-and-seek that they had slipped back into. He knew, though, that this was not the moment to insist that they go public with their relationship. Too many stressful things were going on without adding another. He could put up with the ‘now you see me, now you don’t’ routine for some time longer if it kept Erica happy. Checking through the delegate list he noted that Annette was attending and he knew that Aisha was hoping to join them later. Brad Purfect’s name was also on the list. He felt a minor pang of guilt about Purfect. Despite the American’s bombastic manner he was a guest of the department and Tim had done little so far to make his stay more worthwhile. Perhaps the next few days would present an opportunity for a friendly gesture without risking any extended entanglement. Finally he checked to confirm that Henry had kept to an early decision not to attend. He needed a break from the intransigent Welshman and his bunch of problems.

The introductory speeches followed by a plenary session on ‘inequality and global finance’ offered little new but at least got Tim into the swing of the conference. When they were over he made his way through a tangle of corridors to find his chosen ‘theme stream,’
Youth and Protest
that had been located in a remote part of the main building. The group was a motley collection. Several of the thirty or so who had opted to join the stream would have made a good advert for its title, parading styles from post-punk to electro-hippie. A couple of urban anarchists contributed a darker presence. Roughly half the group were about Tim’s age or older, most having subsided into the low maintenance comfort of tea-shirts and jeans. An older man, perhaps
in his sixties stood out. He was wearing a kaftan and bandana. For a moment Tim thought he might be Henry: he had the same stocky shape and thinning, straggly hair. As he got closer he was reassured. The man was taller than Henry and had a leaner, fresher face. Tim mused that he was beginning to let Henry haunt him.

The group turned out to be lively and combative. The topics covered ranged from papers on ‘the meaning or meaninglessness of youthful styles’ to ‘the recruitment methods of Al Qaeda among the young’. Eventually the theme of revolt morphed into a rolling debate on
intergenerational
justice. At times the sessions got fractious, dividing more or less along generational lines. ‘You boomed, we bust,’ shouted one youngster pointing an accusing finger at a couple of startled older members of the group. By the penultimate session of the second day Tim was beginning to feel that the discussions were becoming circular with the younger element fixated on expressing anger at the legacy left by the over forties and the later claiming that the current crisis was not entirely of their making, and cautioning that young people alone would struggle to change things. His own attempt to argue that the problems of contemporary youth were an important part of the still bigger issue of burgeoning global economic and social inequality failed to redirect the debate. As the arguments began to repeat themselves he contemplated skipping a session or two.

During a late afternoon break between sessions Tim found himself stood next in the coffee queue to the retro hippie he had briefly mistaken for Henry. The older man had sat listening quietly during the cross-generational debate but Tim sensed he might have something interesting to say. He introduced himself and suggested that they sit down together. The response was friendly.

‘Thanks. I’m Calvin Frazier, Cal for short. Yeah, I noticed you, too. You were looking at me like you thought you might know me. I’m pretty sure we’ve never met.’

‘No… no, we haven’t. Well, I guess we have now.’

‘Cool.’ Cal reached out, catching Tim’s hand in an awkward vertical grip. For a moment it looked like Cal was setting himself for a follow-through hug but a quick step backwards took Tim safely out of distance. This guy might look vaguely like Henry but he certainly didn’t act like him. Henry was not the hug a stranger type. As they passed through the checkout Cal complimented the young female cashier on her beautiful brown eyes and expressed the hope that she wasn’t finding her job too boring. The dark eyes smiled in amused surprise. She assured Cal that he needn’t be concerned - she was a PhD student filling in at the checkout to make some pin money. She was confident that better opportunities lay ahead.

Cal looked ready to extend the conversation but thought better of it as impatient noises from the queue rose in volume. Queues are great places for impromptu chit-chat during the waiting phase but hopeless at the business end.

Aware that the next session was due shortly, Tim led Cal to an empty table. As they sat down Tim dived in with a question on the generational guilt theme.

‘So are you on the side of those that blame the older generation for the plight of the current one?’

‘You mean the boomers? My own generation? Some of them are pretty greedy and selfish but you can’t generalise. A fair number are quite radical. Anyway, whole generations don’t think and act collectively. No, I agree with what you were saying. It’s the minority of the powerful and wealthy that control things and by no means all of them come from a single generation. Besides, many born in the decade or so after the Second-World-War are now quite poor and needy and were never particularly well off anyway.’

Cal’s response was more down-to-earth than the ‘peace and love’ stuff Tim had half expected. Not that he was against peace and love. In fact he was curious to know more about where Cal was coming from philosophically. He was about to probe when he was interrupted by a familiar voice.

‘Tim, you son of an Englishman, can I join you?’

It was Brad Purfect. He sat down without waiting for an invitation.

‘Scottish, actually.’

‘Scottish what?’

‘My dad was Scottish not English.’

‘My apologies. We Americans forget that you guys still have your local rivalries. You’d think the country was too small to cope with them. Anyway Tim how about introducing me to your friend?’

‘Sure. Cal, meet Brad Purfect, he’s visiting with us at Wash University from the States. Brad, this is Calvin Frazier, we’re in the same theme stream.’

The two men exchanged brief gestures of acknowledgement.

‘Brad, I’ve just met Cal,’ continued Tim, ‘we were just chatting for a few minutes before going into the next session.’

‘Don’t make assumptions, Tim. In the States hardly anybody attends the last session of the day. The best part of conferences are the breaks between sessions, and in the evenings when the formal stuff is over. And I’m not just talking about professional networking. What’s the point of coming to these great cities if you don’t take a look around? Anyway I…’

‘Hang on a minute, Brad. We’ve only just sat down. Let’s forget about re-timetabling the conference to suit our own whims for the moment. I was just asking Cal here…’

‘Sure, let’s talk now but it means we’ll be late for the next session. Or, better still we can miss it altogether,’ Brad persisted, ‘How about…’

‘Ok we can skip the next session as long as Cal is ok about it.’ Cal gave a nod of assent. ‘But let’s relax for a few minutes. I was just asking Cal about his opinions on the current crisis.’

‘Sure, of course, I was only…’

Tim cut Brad off. He wanted to hear more from Cal.

‘Cal, I was interested in what you were saying about the
economic and financial crisis? Even as we speak the rich are getting richer, and the richer they are the quicker it’s happening. And, of course, the gap between the very rich and the rest of us is widening. But what I’m really interested in is your moral take on the whole thing. How do you see things changing? You have the look of someone who might have thought about that side of it.’

‘Well, thanks. I’ll take that as a compliment. You’re
half-right
in trying to second-guess me. Moral and cultural change has to be part of the picture. That won’t come from the elites, the perpetrators and beneficiaries of inequality. Real change will have to be rooted in the actions of ordinary people. So, yes, there has to be a collective change of mind and heart, a change of culture. You do get such changes. Systems, regimes, empires, can be changed when enough people want it and are able to make their feelings count. The underlying process of change takes time but there are catalytic shifts and symbolic moments. For instance the freeing of Mandela accelerated the end of apartheid but the moral as well as the practical opposition to it across the globe had already underlined its credibility. Generally there have to be deep cultural shifts to prepare the way for radical institutional change. And the change in peoples’ values and the way they relate to each other has to be sustained otherwise a reversion to elitism or even authoritarianism is likely. Maintaining genuinely democratic and humanistic systems can be as hard as establishing them in the first place.’

By now Brad was interested.

‘As you say, the elites, I still prefer to call them the ruling class, cling on to their power as long as they can. They even resist the implementation of weak forms of liberal democracy until it becomes less trouble to implement than resist. When it comes to demands for real equality the wealthy and powerful will always resist because turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Or as Sartre put it more elegantly ‘no man can condemn himself.’ Very few do, anyway. Cal, no amount of
cultural change will persuade these guys to share things out more fairly. They won’t do it. They’ll have to be removed by one means or another. Violence could play a role, maybe a crucial role. If a regime really does lose credibility, the armed forces, or some of them, sometimes defect to the popular cause, to the people. Sometimes violence is necessary.’

Cal waited patiently for Brad to finish before responding.

‘The difficulties rule violent revolution out in technologically advanced democracies. Modern states have centralised the means of violence as well as increased their effectiveness. And the other part of the equation is that, however gross their inequalities, liberal democracies do allow for some expression of opinion, including dissenting ones. That decreases pressure for violent change and can even lead to some progressive social reform, although nothing much has been introduced by the neo-liberal regimes of the last thirty years. So, no; the bottom line is that if you want long-term change there has to be a change not only in people’s values but in how they relate to each other.’

‘You sound a bit like a preacher man,’ said Brad half mockingly.

Cal looked at Brad sceptically but gave him the benefit of a serious reply. ‘Not at all. I don’t preach at people, I’m no priest. I have a philosophy of this life but not the next. If there is any conscious life after death I imagine it will be some kind of continuation of this one. That would seem logical but I don’t know.’