Tim Connor Hits Trouble Read online

  His thoughts slipped back to Annette. They had first met over twenty years ago when both had arrived in Wash, she as a postgraduate student and he as an academic. He had been appointed as research supervisor to her thesis on gender in the work of Marx and Engels. Back then the institution was a large college rather than the small university it had become and attracted only a handful of research students. Few staff could plausibly claim adequate credentials for research supervision. Henry was at least thought to be ‘brilliant’ and on the cusp of making a name for himself. Even so he was a little insecure in the role of research supervisor and compensated by playing the charismatic don with his new student. And in those days he was attractive in a chunky De Niro kind of way. More importantly from Annette’s point of view, they clicked academically. Their tutorials fizzed along as they contested the merits of radical feminism, Annette’s perspective, with the socialist communitarianism that Henry favoured. These days he was less certain of what he did believe, although emotionally and in public he clung on to his radical image. If he was less sure of solutions, he was certain that all manner of evils flowed from the triumph of global capitalism already re-establishing itself, as he saw it, after the financial crash of 2008. Once in a while in the lecture room he could still produce a bravura critique of ‘the system’ but the charisma that used to draw his young audience to him was gone. Most students liked him well enough and found him entertaining, but few related much to the content of what he said.

  It had all been utterly different a quarter of a century ago. His lectures were invariably well attended and he was in great demand among students for small group and individual tuition. Most of all he looked forward to his tutorials with Annette. Their energy and intensity spilled over into sessions in the coffee bars and pubs of the city. Ideas and events seemed all important then – from wrestling with the subtleties of structuralism to celebrating the deliciously heartless dumping of Thatcher. Then they believed that somehow they could change things or be part of change. Now he doubted it. And he was beginning to feel his age. Time had been called on his personal hopes and political dreams. Things were falling apart and he could not see how to put them together again. A cultural ethos of dynamism and expectation had somehow transformed into one of confusion and uncertainty. If he understood it, he certainly did not like it. Much of what he had believed in had become a standard political and media reference point for irrelevance and feeble idealism and was perceived as such in the popular mind.

  Despite their growing mutual attraction, Henry held off from making a definitive move towards Annette. He did not particularly buy the conventional wisdom that academics should avoid becoming personally and sexually involved with students although he had more than once witnessed the emotional mayhem and professional disruption this could cause. As he debated and flirted with Annette he was not even sure that he wanted to take their relationship to a more intimate personal and physical level. Was he being cautious, playing a waiting game or perhaps not playing any game at all? He had some notion, half-baked he admitted, that if you stood outside the power games, things came more easily to you. Yet almost two years passed and, for all their pleasure in each other’s company, nothing of a romantic or sexual nature occurred.

  In the end it was Annette who made the decisive move although he was a willing enough accomplice. Late one night they had gone to her flat after seeing a movie. In her no-messing-about way, she had asked him whether it wasn’t time that they slept together. Taken by surprise he found himself readily agreeing that it was. Yet the sudden prospect of transition from friends to lovers momentarily seemed to non-plus them. They undressed separately and got into bed. From then things slowly gathered momentum. He still remembered her cool nakedness as their bodies closed together, first awkwardly and then eagerly. They made love with tenderness and affection into the quiet of the morning. That was a long time ago.

  Sometimes Henry persuaded himself that he had not changed much from those days; that his ‘real self’ was still intact, that he was still worthy of attention and affection. As much as ever, he needed to share his love with Annette. But he knew that she did not feel the same. He might persuade himself that there was no good reason why their relationship should have changed but he could not persuade her. How often had she told him ‘to stop kidding’ himself? As he stuttered and declined she had grown in confidence and found fresh challenges. Their lives arched off into divergent directions. What they had imagined to be their future together proved simply to be an illusion spawned at a point when their trajectories had crossed. She had now begun to articulate their early relationship almost in psychoanalytic terms. At first she had mocked her mother’s sharp comment, offered without the aid of Freudian theory, that he was ‘nothing but a father figure.’ Even now, she could not accept that their relationship could be reduced to such a banal proposition, but she had come to realise that Henry had been something of an archetype for her, the intellectual as sage and fearless iconoclast. The reality was a straw man, a vacuous old windbag. How could she have been so fooled?

  She made no attempt to keep her disappointment to herself but occasionally even she was shocked at how harsh she could be. The best she could do was to pity him. Poor Henry. She had endowed him with far more heroic qualities than he possessed. Yet he had once had a certain presence and conviction and even now could occasionally cut the figure of the ancient savant, especially when he was drunk. But that was about the size of it. She conceded that there was an element of tragedy in his decline. His failure, as she saw it, was due to flaws of character rather than lack of talent. His ability to analyse ‘the system’, albeit with little reference to leading thinkers of the last twenty years, was at times still dazzling. But not only had he become almost completely politically inactive, he was unable even to manage his own career effectively. When she was twenty-seven and he was in his early forties his title of ‘Senior Lecturer’ had seemed rather grand. Now the same title was annoyingly unimpressive. At first she had assumed the world of academe would rise to Henry’s brilliance. When this didn’t happen she encouraged him to publish and otherwise put himself about. As he seemed unable to respond, doubt slowly began to set in. Finally she lost faith that he would fulfil his potential and loss of interest followed. She could perhaps have lived with his career failure and physical decline, repellent though she now found him, but she could not bear the sense that he was a wasted man, a pathetic human being. Love, if that was what it was, had turned first into doubt and anxiety and then into disillusion and contempt. She could barely look at him without wishing she didn’t have to. Increasingly she saved herself the trouble.

  Her own academic career had developed as his stagnated. She had found a job at South of England University, a more established and higher status institution than Wash University. By the time she was thirty she had published a couple of articles in highly rated journals, followed a few years later by a book based on her research thesis. There had been other publications and she had recently been appointed to a Readership with a brief to promote feminist research. Currently she was working with a joint group from Wash University and South of England University on a collection of essays on the theme of ‘why feminism is relevant to the current generation of young women.’ Later in the day she had a meeting planned with the Wash section of the collective. Feminism aside she had come to prefer working on publishing projects with women rather than men. Her experience was that women were more cooperative and more supportive: friendship and work seemed to integrate more easily.

  Still in bed, Henry stared bleakly at the ceiling. Dark blotches and thin spidery lines danced before him. Lurching forward in an attempt to grab a dense looking giant floater, he was left squinting into his empty hand. He let loose a fart, strident with discontent but faintly comforting as it wafted across his backside. Suddenly conscious of his half-addled state he felt a surge of frustration. It was time he asserted himself. If he did intend to steal into his wife’s bed he better do so soon. On
ce fully awake she would certainly repel him. Even if he succeeded in getting into her bed he realised that his options would be limited. She called the shots between the sheets these days and they were few and far between. What he really wanted was a cuddle, some affection. You sad old fart. He stumbled out of bed again. He briefly considered taking off his pyjamas, contemplating a tour de passion. Instead he opted for caution, leaving his pyjama trousers on and replacing the top with his cleanest dirty shirt. Fortified by this compromise he stumbled towards his wife’s bedroom.

  He opened Annette’s bedroom door softly. She was still asleep and conveniently facing the wall on the far side of the room. Defying his hangover Henry managed to cross the room unheard and slip unnoticed into bed beside her. For fully fifteen minutes he was able to gaze at the back of her head: the blond hair shading in places to grey, the slim, vulnerable neck and the lean, determined shoulders. Should he seize the moment and gently wake her or stretch out his fragile fantasy of intimacy for as long as possible. As ever the choice was taken from him. Abruptly Annette spun to face him her hazel eyes cold.

  ‘Henry, what the hell are you doing? Separate beds remember. Otherwise it just leads to complications. We’ve both got to function at work today. I don’t want another row. They exhaust me.’

  ‘I don’t want a row either. I still have feelings… I just thought,’ Henry knew he sounded desperate and pathetic. He attempted to embrace Annette. She jerked away from him.

  ‘Henry, you stink. You’re probably still drunk. Where’s your pride? We can’t go on like this.’

  ‘Annette, please. Let’s talk. Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Why am I doing this? You’ve got to be bloody joking. Go and take a look at yourself in the mirror.’

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what? I can’t help getting older?’

  ‘You know quite well it’s not that. Henry you’re an alcoholic. You’re a fucking shambles.’

  Annette paused, softening slightly.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I really am. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. It upsets me to see you like this. But it’s been upsetting me for years now. You won’t change. I need to live my own life. I’m only just waking up to what I can do, to what I want to do.’

  ‘But Annette, I’m not stopping you. I want you to do your own thing. Haven’t I supported you in building up your career?’

  ‘You are stopping me. Things are completely different from the way they used to be. You know that.’

  She focused again on the dishevelled and demoralised figure of her husband. The spectacle confirmed that there was not an iota of hope for them. Better to seize this unsought for moment to end their relationship, definitely, finally and no going back.

  ‘Henry. I’m sorry. This is it. I’ve already decided that we should split up. At least we don’t have kids to worry about. We can sell the house. Rachel has said that I can move into her spare room whenever I need to. But I want fifty percent of the value of the house, no messing about.’

  ‘The cunt.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  Henry flinched.

  ‘Not you, her… I’m sorry I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry.’

  ‘You better be. Now please leave me to get ready for work. You ought to do the same. And I suggest a shower. Wash your mouth out while you’re at it.’

  ‘Annette.’

  ‘I mean it. Leave me alone. I’ve got to get ready. Please go.’

  Still unsteady Henry heaved to his feet. As he reached the bedroom door he turned to plead again. His partner lifted her hand to silence him.

  ‘No… no more.’ For a fleeting moment she was caught by the sadness of unfulfilled hope and expectation and added in a softer tone, ‘I’m really sorry Henry, no more.’

  They made their way separately into the university: Henry to teach and Annette for her pre-arranged meeting with Rachel Steir and whoever else from the writing group that could make it. Somehow Henry managed to deliver his lecture. Playing the lovable old soak he even exchanged light repartee with a couple of students. One of them pushed it a bit, asking if Henry could confirm that Marx frequently used to get drunk after a hard day’s work in the British Museum Library. Henry replied that as far as he knew Marx started drinking at lunch time and his work was all the better for it. He backtracked from this piece of fiction when he noticed that some of the more diligently literal students were writing it down.

  Once he had finished his lecture, Henry went over to the new senior common room. The term ‘senior common room’ was something of a misnomer because very few senior academics and managers ever went there. The old common room was a haven of deep leather chairs and solid wooden tables, where newspapers and magazines were provided and tea and cake breaks put on two afternoons each week. That would now seem like unacceptable luxury to the cost-cutters thought Henry but the old common room had served as a popular meeting place for staff from across the university: at times a buzzing forum of informal democracy and ideas. It was no surprise to Henry when the Estate and Planning Committee had claimed the room for conversion into a lecture theatre. The replacement was a small converted seminar room barely able to accommodate more than a twenty people at a time. The plate on the door of the old common room bore the initials ‘SCR’ whereas the new plate sported the number ‘119a’ in shiny aluminium. It had been furnished, if that was the word, with a strident collection of bright carrot coloured plastic seats and tables that would not have looked out of place in a primary school classroom. Drinks and snacks were now delivered from a machine or not, depending on whether it worked or had been stocked or whether ‘customers’ happened to have the right change.

  In his politer moods Henry referred to these developments and others like them as ‘reverse progress.’ At first most of his colleagues found his attitudes amusingly droll if distractingly irrelevant. But as ‘efficiencies of scale’ slowly proliferated at the expense of small freedoms and comforts, more began to see Henry’s point. But most of them were too busy or quiescent to support his sporadic protests to and about the management. ‘Mogadon men,’ Henry once called some of them to their faces, but that didn’t persuade them to his way of thinking either.

  Henry found himself doing less and less to oppose ‘reverse progress.’ But he diligently continued to make a nuisance of himself to the university hierarchy and occasionally to carry the fight to the wider society, known to ‘the suits,’ he ironically observed, as ‘the real world.’ He still supported union actions and turned up at any available local anti-capitalist protest, but he did so with diminishing belief that any of this would make the slightest difference. He was more pessimistic than at any time since the early days of Thatcherism. Now what little impetus he could muster came as much from his gut as his brain. Like the time he took a swing at Swankie during a clash about the marketisation of higher education. He had got away with that because it had happened off-campus but Swankie smoothly won the practical argument in terms of university power politics.

  Swankie could play and even manipulate the fast changing university system whereas Henry offered sweeping suggestions for reform that had little or no chance of being taken up. At the everyday level, Henry struggled to cope with change, surviving as best he could. Some innovations he sidestepped or took at his own pace, like PowerPoint, whilst others he let bounce off him, like the down-grading of staff room facilities. A plastic sofa was much like a leather sofa to his sainted arse and he was more than happy to provide his own liquid refreshment. He was relieved rather than offended that the remoter echelons of the hierarchy ignored the new staff room although he resented their expensively refurbished private offices and conference rooms in the main building. Still he didn’t miss their self-important and patronising presence. They could ‘fuck off’ and the further off the better.

  Having cajoled himself into just such a mood of intransigence, Henry entered 119a in a better state of mind than he had started the day.
His spirits were raised another couple of notches on finding that Tim Connor and Aisha Khan were there.

  ‘Hi Henry, good to see you. We’re just working together on some teaching issues. How are you, anyway?’ said Tim.

  ‘Hello Henry,’ smiled Aisha.

  ‘Hi Tim, Aisha, I’m fine, rarely been better. I’ve just had a good session with the third years. They’re quite eager, lots of questions, most of them daft admittedly. Can I get you two a drink, tea or coffee or something else?’

  ‘I’ll have a tea if that’s ok,’ said Aisha, ‘milk, or powder to be more precise, and no sugar.’

  ‘Sweet enough,’ murmured Henry, instantly cursing himself for his crassness. For him flirtation, especially with junior members of his department or what had been his department belonged to another era.

  ‘Nothing for me please, Henry. I have to leave soon. I’ve got to get across the country tonight, preferably before the weekend rush gets really under way,’ said Tim.

  ‘That’s to see your daughter? Quite a journey. Let me pull a bottle of water for you. Not that I touch the stuff myself.’

  Tim and Aisha smiled at each other, resigned more than amused.

  ‘Don’t bother, Henry, I’ve got plenty in the car.’ Tim looked at his watch.

  Turning quickly to Aisha he said ‘relax about the psychology lecture. I’ll fill in for you next week. It’ll be basic introductory stuff… Listen, I must go now, otherwise I’ll end up spending most of the rest of the day becalmed between Swindon and Reading.’