‘The “O.T.O.”, Ro? What were Mr or Mrs or Miss or Ms’s Jurbb’s first names?’
‘“Only This Once”. The gender and family ranking are immaterial.’
TWENTY-ONE
2014
A couple of weeks later they had a vote on Wayne Ollam’s proposal to recommend a no-statue, no-statues policy, and he was the only one in favour He took the thrashing without any obvious sign of disbelief or rage. He was a philosopher and knew about stoicism and the dominance of naffdom and knee-jerk in others. Wryly, almost graciously, he said, ‘So sodding be it.’
But some of the committee seemed sorry for him, embarrassed for him. Ollam had a round, jolly-looking, schoolboyish, snub-nosed face under blondish curls, and Mart could see that some committee members felt it brutal having to humiliate him. As a sort of compensation several people became more bolshy-aggressive than usual, perhaps to prove they were no pushovers; not slavishly choosing to carry on with the project because they thought the principal wanted it. The sniping began after Theo Bastrolle had floated a new idea.
He said, ‘Something at first sight extraneous, but actually quite to the point, I think, has startled me. Startled and baffled me. I wondered if other members had felt the same.’
‘The same as what?’ Angela Drape (Environmental Engineering) said in her curt, barrack-square bellow.
‘It’s very simply put,’ Theo replied.
‘Put it,’ Angela said.
‘Here goes then. I suddenly noticed that we have no member of the music department among our number,’ Theo said. ‘Am I the only one who has spotted this grave lack? I doubt it.’
‘Grave?’ Lucy Lane (History) said.
Theo said, ‘Oh, I recognize that someone might reply, “So what, there are several departments unrepresented here. No Chemistry. No Geography. No Maths. Omissions are inevitable or the meetings would become unwieldy.” Fair enough. But I regard Music as very much a special case.’
‘In what respect, Theo?’ Jed Laver (Industrial Relations) asked. ‘I don’t see it. What is so precious and unusual about Music?’
‘A building,’ Theo replied.
‘Yes, yes, there’s a building, d’Brindle Hall,’ Jed said. ‘Nobody can deny that. Yet I still ask, why should we give particular attention to Music, d’Brindle or no?’
‘It’s not “or no,” though, is it, Jed? It is very much an emphatic “Yes”.’ Theo said.
‘Why “emphatic”?’ Bill Davey (French) said.
‘I lived through that period here, so think I might see what Theo means,’ Martin Moss said.
‘Oh?’ Lucy Lane replied.
‘Thank you, Chair,’ Theo said.
‘Thank him for what?’ Davey said.
‘To do with d’Brindle,’ Mart said.
‘What about it?’ Jed replied.
‘We have to think of our purpose here. Our raison d’être as a committee,’ Theo said.
Gordon Upp (Linguistics) said, ‘Oh, d’être and d’Brindle! What is this?’
‘Remember that old song, “It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s d’lovely”?’ Elvira (Classics) asked. ‘Cole Porter?’
‘What it is, Gordon, and what we are,’ Theo stated, ‘is a committee established to discuss and eventually recommend the most suitable – in our view – the most suitable siting for, and nature of, a statue or, more likely, statues, as a tribute to two distinguished past principals. We act at the behest of our present distinguished principal who may or may not be thinking of how his own period of office might be commemorated when his time at Sedge is done one way or the other.’
Mart said, ‘Theo, like the majority here, has moved away from the option that there should be no statue, Gordon. He has returned to the basic requirement of our committee – to choose a site or sites. And, since the d’Brindle is a building with some lawn in front – is, in fact, potentially a statue site – he is wondering why this has not come previously into our reckoning.’
‘Thank you, Chair,’ Theo said.
‘Oh, is this a put-up job?’ Claud Nelmes (Physics) said.
‘Is what a put-up job?’ Mart replied.
‘You two.’ Claud made his voice slimy, grovelling. ‘“Thank you, Chair.” Have you agreed sub rosa beforehand that you’d back each other up – tout the Music department’s case jointly?’
‘There’s no backing up, Claud. I summarized what I took to be Theo’s standpoint,’ Martin said.
‘Summarized it favourably,’ Jed replied. ‘Where’s the chair’s impartiality, Chair? Why can’t Theo speak for himself? You’ve pre-worked out a scenario between you, yes? You’ve decided that from now on all major decisions should be made by the chair, because that will seem unbiased and, authoritative?’
‘I’ve been looking at the d’Brindle papers in the Sedge archive,’ Theo replied.
‘To what purpose?’ Angela said.
‘We’ve heard from various sections of both archives, Charter’s and Sedge’s, or Sedge’s and Tane’s, but I don’t think anyone has looked at the d’Brindle file,’ Theo said. ‘The Sedge papers show very clearly that Lawford Chote was the main force in getting the d’Brindle built,’ Theo said.
‘I can endorse that,’ Mart said. ‘Many of us at Sedge then knew it.’
‘Ah!’ Lucy said. ‘Deduction: he should have his statue placed in front of the d’Brindle. That your argument, Theo?’ Her thin face seemed to grow even sharper when she reached this question.
‘A sort of Euterpe figure,’ Elvira said.
‘A what?’ Angela said.
‘The muse of music,’ Jed said. ‘My parents were going to call me that if I’d been a girl. But I wanted to go for industrial relations, anyway.’
‘Chote himself was an amateur musician, apparently,’ Theo said.
‘Playing what?’ Lucy said.
‘Cymbals,’ Theo said.
‘Do we recommend a statue of Chote banging a couple of them together in front of his chest?’ Davey asked.
‘There’s a review of a centenary concert in the file,’ Theo replied. ‘Chote actually took part. A piece from Tannhauser required cymbals. The review’s slightly snooty – implies Lawford didn’t quite get the timing right during the performance.’
‘Cymbals sticking in a shattering sound at the wrong spot could fuck up the whole item,’ Angela said.
‘The New Testament has a “tinkling” cymbal,’ Nelmes said.
‘Tannhauser would want something stronger than a tinkle,’ Davey said.
‘Who wrote the notice?’ Jed asked.
‘An O.T.O Jurbb,’ Theo said.
‘Otto, do you mean?’ Davey said. ‘Like Klemperer and Bismark.’
‘No, O.T.O.,’ Theo said. ‘He or she makes a meal of the contrast between the glittering social occasion and Sedge’s desperate lack of funds. There are comparisons with the Titanic.’
‘The Titanic? That’s cruel, heartless,’ Claud Nelmes said. ‘The reviewer would know the Titanic went down. He or she couldn’t have the same certainty at the time of the concert that Sedge was about to sink. At least, Sedge as it had existed for a hundred years up till then.’
‘This was supposed to be a critique of some music, wasn’t it, not an attempt at clairvoyance,’ Elvira said.
‘What you said, Claud – “cruel”, “heartless” – is possibly correct but it was also a warning. I think, and a disguised cry for help,’ Theo replied.
‘A very subtle piece of journalism,’ Bill Davey said.
‘I’ll have it copied and circulated,’ Theo replied. ‘Tucked in with the newspaper review I found two reports by accountants showing a debt on the d’Brindle building and fitments of between £9 and £10 million,’ Theo said. ‘Incidentally, other considerable unpaid bills were for new student accommodation blocks as part of Chote’s expansion programme. But, regardless of these enormous shortfalls, what comes over in the concert review, and what the contemporary reader would sense, is the fine, positive, determined, effort
through this concert to take forward Sedge’s reputation as a top-class creative, cultural university. One feels these debts were … would it be foolishly exaggerated to say noble debts? I get the feeling that Lawford had contempt for the strictures of finance.’
‘“Tax not the royal saint with vain expense”,’ Lucy replied.
‘Who said that?’ Angela asked.
‘Wordsworth, a sonnet, about King’s college chapel, Cambridge, founded by Henry VI,’ Lucy said. ‘“High-heaven rejects the lore/ Of nicely calculated less or more”.’
‘Whitehall didn’t though,’ Angela snarled.
‘The review ends with a powerful accolade to Chote’s and Sedge’s charisma,’ Theo said.
‘How do we get the sculptor to give us charisma in stone or brass?’ Upp asked. ‘We’ve already fretted over how to portray ambiguity.’
‘Are we talking now about a Chote statue either with or without cymbals installed at the d’Brindle?’ Nelmes asked.
‘Victor Tane would have nothing to balance,’ Jed said.
‘Balance how, what?’ Theo asked.
‘Nothing equivalent to the cymbals held by Chote, if they were,’ Jed said. ‘Tane might appear deprived, comparatively untalented as to cymbals and possibly music generally.’
‘If we go for two statues on the one plinth, Chote and Tane will look not so much like muses as a couple of duetists because of the d’Brindle Hall, Music department background,’ Upp said.
‘Ah, such as the old Bing Crosby-Bob Hope record?’ Elvira said. She would often go out of her way to show she could handle more than the Classics and other heavy stuff, such as the Book of Amos. Mart learned today that Cole Porter and Bing and Bob were also on call when it suited, or, as now, when it didn’t.
Elvira crooned effortlessly, in two different voices, one tenor, one alto, beating time with her small hands, her pale blue eyes alight with joy as she fondled the irrelevant melody: ‘We’re off on the road to Morocco, de-dum-de-dum, I’ll lay you eight to four we’ll meet Dorothy Lamour, de-dum-de-dum, Like Webster’s dictionary we’re Morocco bound.’
‘Tane, of course, has no real connection with the d’Brindle,’ Lucy said.
‘Tane helped turn its finances around,’ Angela replied. ‘And so the d’Brindle is still there, still housing good concerts.’
‘I went online to the Newspaper Archive in London and Googled for an O.T.O. Jurbb around in the 1980s. Nothing,’ Theo said. ‘I tried anagrams in case this was a pen name only: Rob Jobut, Jo Burbot, but blank.’
‘No, I’d never read anything previously by him or her at the time,’ Mart said.
‘Rob Jobut – there’s a name to conjure with,’ Davey said.
‘And what do you get when you conjure?’ Theo asked.
‘O.T.O. Jurbb,’ Davey replied.
TWENTY-TWO
1987
Victor Tane read the review of last night’s Sedge centenary concert a couple of times at breakfast and then passed it to his wife, Ursula. She was a lawyer, trained to see behind what people said and wrote. She had a lively, squarish face very ready to go into a grin but ready, also, to turn combative if antagonized by something or somebody. She was middle-height, neat-breasted, and slim. She’d gone auburn lately, a good, restrained but rich shade, worn as a fringe across her forehead and gathered into a clasped bunch at the back. ‘O.T.O?’ she muttered. ‘Is that supposed to be Otto, like Klemperer and Bismark?’
‘Not sure. I’ve never heard of a writer called O.T.O Jurbb, nor Otto Jurbb.’
‘Nor me. Weird surname, too. Might the two bits – O.T.O. and Jurbb – be an anagram of the writer’s real moniker?’
‘I’ve considered that.’
‘Jo Burbot?’ Ursula said.
‘Rob Jobut?’ Tane replied. ‘Names to conjure with.’
‘What do you get when you conjure, Vic?’
‘O.T.O. Jurbb.’
Ursula forked in scrambled egg while she read. She was thirty-five, Tane’s third wife. He was her second husband. Tane had an adult son, a TV director, by his first wife. ‘Clever,’ Ursula said. She swallowed carefully, thoroughly, then grinned one of her big, jolly grins, no egg traces on her teeth or lips; Ursula was not the sort to allow that kind of facial unkemptness. Tane thought her grin would be part in admiration of the cleverness, whatever it was, and part in admiration of her own cleverness in seeing through the cleverness, whatever it was. Ursula had a flair for making him feel stupid. He’d wondered sometimes whether she’d done the same to her previous husband, which might have helped towards the divorce. He had been an MP. The job itself could have made him feel stupid and he wouldn’t want that at home as well. Anyway, if Tane wished to ponder the reasons for a divorce he realized he should consider his own two; and he didn’t fancy this.
‘Clever?’ he replied.
‘The Titanic pushed up to the front like that. Necessary first sentence to tell us where we’re at, then straight into catastrophe.’
‘Tactical?’
‘The sea-worm,’ Ursula replied.
‘Which?’
‘The one in the Convergence poem. We did it at school. The Titanic is on the seabed and over its luxury bits and pieces “The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.”’
‘Dumb? Don’t sea-worms talk to one another?’
‘Sets a tone from the outset.’
‘What tone?’
‘Hardy’s a nasty piece of work, isn’t he?’ she replied.
‘Is he?’
‘Getting a smirk out of the disaster. This was a fine ship. Brave funnels. OK, it had luxurious, lavishly, ostentatiously costly fittings and good deckchairs, but so what? Is it an offence to do things in style? Yes, he gets a smirk and/or a snigger at the thought of all this flagrant privilege going to the bottom because of a ripening berg. That title.’
‘Convergence? Bad?’
‘It’s loaded with septic irony, Vic. Normally, it would be a neutral, map-reading term. Here it means two mighty big items both trying to get on the same spot at the same time. Procrastinated doom: for ages, the berg has been preparing itself for this jostle by making sure the deadly seven eighths of itself below the surface is all present and malicious. In other words, Vic, those Titanic references seem to mock Sedge but actually indict others – Whitehall, the Ministry – for threatening to bring destruction to it. And then the Forster quote tacked on: the prose of the review wants to highlight Sedge’s poverty and induce those able to put all that right, to put it all right – Whitehall, the Ministry. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone close to Chote wrote this, with his connivance.’
‘I gather he’s got a new acolyte over there. We have a picture of them in a Volvo. Him perhaps? If he’s on the Humanities staff he might have the literary allusions ready – Hardy, E.M. Forster.’
‘Maybe. Or possibly Rowena. She would have to seem detached, even harsh, but the real intent is something different. She’d use unfriendly phrases like “devilishly pricey expansionism” and “vindictive pack of hatreds” as a kind of camouflage to conceal her authorship.’
‘Rowena?’
‘She’s smart enough and had an education. She gets in a slab of praise for Lawford Chote – creating the d’Brindle, his “brain-child and darling”, but then has to spout a virtual retraction so as to seem objective – the “millions sterling bill” which “Sedge can’t pay”. Doesn’t someone who could conceive the d’Brindle deserve a handout? That’s the message. And then that brilliant contrast.’
‘Which, Ursula?’
‘Between Harvey d’Brindle and Lawford Chote, of course.’
‘How does that work?’
‘We have Harvey d’Brindle, more or less a genius, known worldwide, especially for his gigues e.g., Cumulus Resurgent; as against Chote doing his approximate best with the cymbals but not at all a gifted star like d’Brindle. Chote makes his well-meant but faulty contribution to Tannhauser, an opera about a singing competition, and one he’d ruin with
his mistimed cymbals. interventions. But the review is saying that as an undergraduate and graduate even the natural prodigy, H. d’Brindle, needed opportunities to develop those in-born qualities, such opportunities being provided by somewhere like Sedge, headed by one of Chote’s predecessors as principal. This is a debt d’Brindle acknowledged by joining Sedge’s staff and making some of his talent available to new generations of students.
‘The review’s point, surely, Vic, is that even a wonderful composer and performer like d’Brindle, can do with the guidance and backing of a Sedge-type apprenticeship. To let the university dwindle and perhaps die because of a temporary shortage of boodle is, O.T.O. Jurbb believes, an example of idiotic, short-sighted vandalism. He/she is telling the Education Minister, “Cough up, you fucking philistines.” Those benighted Whitehall people would send in duns and bums because – to go poetic – Lawford Chote has no regard for sums. But not even those low-grade, disgusting terms can do irreparable harm to Sedge and Chote because their “charisma” still works, and will go on working for as long as the miserable, workaday banalities of special funding are taken care of. The fact that the musicians agreed to play even though they might not get paid showed the pulling power exercised by Sedge and Chote.’
Ursula went off to appear in a court case. Tane could linger for another half hour. He washed up and took a cup of coffee to his study. He felt like writing to his mother. ‘Ursula sees a real crisis for the other university here at Sedge, Ma. She sort of deconstructed a review in the local paper and found it to be a rather sneaky, roundabout demand for more money from central government to keep Sedge afloat, saving it from foundering like the Titanic. I don’t believe the money will arrive. This has obvious implications for Charter Mill and myself. Part of me feels quite sorry for the principal over there, Lawford Chote.’
If his mother had still been alive and received this he thought she would probably reply something like: ‘Which part of you feels quite sorry, you gaunt and gangling twerp? Remember, I’m the one who gave you all your parts and none of them should show weakness. Stop patronising. Be a winner. Come out from between your goalposts, surge through the astonished opposition and score the clinching goal that ensures promotion.’