Later he asked her, ‘What is it we have, if it isn’t love?’
‘It is what it is,’ she replied.
When it was cooler, nearly midnight, the tower light had become quite dim. Connie and Ben sat on the back seat of the Lexus watching the car’s television with the sound turned low and the doors closed. Ben’s arm was around Connie’s shoulders. The news cycle had been continuous. The announcers were simply repeating the same film clip of the Prime Minister’s interview, mixing it with so-called expert opinions and fanciful speculations.
The spokesman at Number Ten: ‘Obviously we need the details from the forensic examination of the incident at Hampton College. But so far as the interview is concerned, this is quite a simple, although certainly a spectacular, piece of hacking. Completely false sounds and images created in an animation studio were hacked into the BBC’s news feed. The Prime Minister, who is entirely safe, has insisted on a full inquiry, but at no stage has there been any risk to national security, and at no stage did the Prime Minister say any of the ridiculous things attributed to him.’
The reporter on the scene: ‘Well, Carol, here at the tower the police have confirmed the death of one 45-year-old male, a member of the college faculty. Apart from shock, we know now that there were no other injuries, although there is one unconfirmed report of a heart attack. It is important to emphasise that no-one here sees any risk to the public whatsoever.
‘That said, the police are offering no explanation at this time either for this man’s death or for the light which continues to shine, even though the tower’s power supply was cut off at 7.45pm. Scientists from the National Physical Laboratory are arriving as we speak, with some urgency because the light is fading. Indeed, from the amount by which it has faded just in the last two hours, the prediction is that it will be totally extinguished by 4am.’
The newsreader in the studio: ‘Meanwhile, this unusual story is continuing to spread around the world, with the clip which may be the Prime Minister and a bodyguard jumping into the lake stirring enormous interest on Japanese breakfast television.’
Connie whistled. A new headline started running across the bottom of the screen. ‘First Improvident poised to expand with £10 billion capital injection from the China Financial and Monetary Corporation.’
Connie reached across to unbuckle Ben’s belt. He lay back. She bent over him. Then, above her head the rear window shattered under a blow that rocked the car on its suspension. Covered in glass, they both screamed and drops of blood fell onto Ben’s shirt from Connie’s cheek.
---
Whatever it lacked in consistency, ‘Stop fucking swearing or I’ll leave you to drown’ made up for in effect. The Prime Minister stopped taking water into his lungs and Greg made more progress lugging his catch to shore, where two sets of flashing lights raced to meet them. As soon as the Prime Minister was out of earshot Haddrill scowled, ‘Help me. Should we shoot you or give you a medal?’
After 20 minutes inside, Greg’s shivering became less frenetic. After another 20, his feet were still in the puddles of water called his shoes but other parts of his body were starting to believe in the possibility of getting dry. Henderson remained unreachable and Greg had given up trying to explain the glaringly obvious, the classic one-two. He had worked it out as soon as he had discovered Ben’s rapid departure from the scene. Even on a good day, Vanish had had the disposition of a rabbit with a weak bladder – it would have been a piece of cake for Frank to push him over the edge a few weeks before the big event and switch Ben into the crucial vacant space.
Clearly, Ben had tipped Frank off to empty the boathouse, and authorised the ludicrous woman singer. God alone knew how Ed Lens fitted in, but the scorched tyre marks behind the departing Lexus (Greg’s Lexus!) with Ben at the wheel spelled out the truth in neon lights. Those with eyes to see, could see. Unfortunately, Greg counted their number on the thumbs of one hand.
Greg headed to his place to lick his wounds. He lived on campus in a studio flat – well, a cupboard with a balcony in the janitorial block. On the balcony he lit neroli incense for the aroma of bitter oranges, and pondered the way modern uses of ‘incense’ overlooked its meaning – to make angry. He changed out of his sopping clothes and showered. His laundry had not come back so his only clean underpants were lilac, which was hardly fit for purpose. He chose a dark cotton sweatshirt and – after a moment’s hesitation – black leather trousers. He touched them and they felt like revenge.
Like any luxury car the Lexus had a satellite tracker to monitor its location in the event of theft. By entering a 10-digit identifier and a password into the manufacturer’s website, Greg would be able to access the car’s location over the web. But first there were security procedures. Lexus would not hand out the whereabouts of their cars lightly. They would call and verify identity over the phone, but on a Thursday evening after 8pm there was a skeleton staff. As the incense burned, Greg listened to Wagner’s Siegfried, the young hero who grows to manhood without knowing fear and sets off to kill the evil Fafner.
Lexus called back an hour later, after which Greg could locate the car on his computer screen. Oh the happiness, oh the deepest sense of righteousness, once he saw where the Lexus was! According to the tracker it had been motionless for nearly two hours. He pondered whether the car could have been abandoned – but abandoned within the college grounds, at a lookout point where it would easily be seen in the morning? No. Even now the culprit was betraying his guilt. Ben’s sick and impudent mind had returned to the scene of the crime to survey his handiwork.
Through the windows of the maintenance workshop came more than enough of the tower’s light for Greg to find a crowbar and a length of rope. He blacked up his face, his hands and his trainers with boot polish. Just before he slipped into the shadows between the college buildings and the woods on Crassock hill, for a few seconds Greg caught sight of himself in a mirror. Erotic in moonlit war-paint, he felt a stiffening in his pants. Tonight the spirits were with him and he would triumph.
As he climbed, his eyes got worse. The last milligrammes of antihistamine gave up, turned tail and bolted after half an hour spent crouching and crawling with his face in the night grass. Even as the leaves reached out to touch him like admiring fans, perfidiously they stabbed his eyeballs. So his eyes wept, making the shoe polish on his cheeks run.
It was well into his climb when Greg noticed that the stiffening in his pants was his pants. Then the hardening had got worse and spread, beginning to cramp his right leg. He tried to take off the offending garment, but had no luck; slowly it was turning into a mediaeval torturer’s vice. He had first put on Ben’s spare pair of SmartPants a week previously, but had never logged on to register them. Thus the lake wreaked its harm: if Greg had not had to jump in, he would not have had to change underpants.
By the time he glimpsed the Lexus Greg was unable to walk and barely able to see, gritting his teeth together against the increasing pain. But he pushed on and then deployed his most practised skill, waiting.
He was lying on the ground on his side about 10 paces behind the car. Ben and Connie had closed the doors and he was taking advantage of this, his chest beating out a strenuous rhythm while twigs and small stones were crushed underneath. He left behind a wake of black smears, like an irregular tyre track. Despite cramping pain in his right hamstring, he pushed forward. With each push, the crowbar clipped to his belt above his left hip slid off and got in his way again.
In the three-quarters night, the light of the moon was contending strongly with the fading light from the tower. The light of the television inside the car went out and the silver Lexus was completely dark. From it an occasional noise escaped, an indistinguishable word or the car moving on its suspension.
Greg’s line of approach had the car’s exhaust coming up directly in his eyeline. But this was not a problem because the engine was off. Earlier, while he had still been able to walk, he ha
d heard the hooting of a pair of owls excited about prey. Now he was as excited about his own prey.
On his iPod Touch Greg selected the track which Wagner wrote for the actions which he now had to perform – when Siegfried’s hammer blows forge anew the sword which will defeat Fafner. Now was the hour for revenge. Now was the hour when he would be unstoppable. He forced himself to his feet, resolved to overcome all possible resistance. He smashed the crowbar down on the back window above the courting couple. He would tie them up and drive them to Alderley police station to heroic acclaim. Now was the moment when Greg screamed and fell to the ground, clutching his groin in agony.
The agony could have been avoided had Greg complied with the instructions on the SmartPants card and registered them online within one week of first use. But to a right-thinking person, such things served only to confirm life’s inexcusable and lamentable unfairness.
7 SAS Survival Guide, op. cit.
AFTERWORD
(three years later, in November)
Ben
Pearl says ‘Boo’, addressing her balloon on a stick. Connie reckons she’ll be all right for 10 minutes and then I’ll take her downstairs.
Pearl is our joy, our 18-month-old bundle of trouble and smiles. She fiddles with my silver neck chain. The grey clouds are light, high and skidding by fast, and the winter afternoon sun visits from time to time. But it’s too blustery to walk by the lake. So when the big people get talking, Pearl and I will head for a corner of reception where there is plenty of furniture to cling onto while she stands up and bumps around.
Connie wants me to say hello to people but I’m here for the views. It’s my first time in the tower since the opening. How creepy to hear the lift announcements, now voiced by a poor man’s Hugh Grant but working fine. Carrying Pearl, I thread my way through the thickening crowd to enjoy the range of views from different spots.
This month’s storms have been vicious and a dozen trees lie flattened, but the main newcomer is the new Frank Jones student accommodation block (Gyro is no slouch at re-positioning: in The Sunday Times three days after the opening, the exit pay-off Frank had given to his brother had become ‘an exceptional bonus’).
With three floors laid out in a 120-degree arc, each studio bedroom has a view of the tower. Since the arc is centred where I am standing, I can see into the lives of 60 MBA students at a glance. When I was one, my fellow students were mostly British; now the chances are I’m looking at posters, photographs and travel bags from three or four continents.
Not that I would be accepted now: the average GMAT test score to get into Hampton has risen more than 90 points. Hampton is a much more luminous star in the firmament, its light firing up the dreams of new crabs in new rockpools. This is the light that remains after the fading of Frank’s fierce incandescence.
Did Frank mean to propel Hampton into the top global division of capitalist madrassas? I imagine not. Madrassa is an even more apt term now that Hampton is synonymous around the world for uncompromising truth and honesty. The competition has also been busy manufacturing and marketing their own versions of extra ethical vitamins – values, integrity, sustainability, even an MBA oath from Harvard.
Seeing the lectern makes me do an abrupt 360-degree swivel but there’s no singer today, no amplification system.
We find a small space and I crouch down beside Pearl on the glass floor. ‘Look,’ I say, pointing downwards. ‘Birds. Down there.’
She’s mildly curious but no more, which on reflection hits the nail on the head. ‘Boo!’ she says.
‘No wonder we couldn’t see you down there! Say hello to Dorothy!’ Connie pulls me up. She’s with Dorothy Lines, the deputy dean. Dorothy didn’t throw her hat into the ring for the top job when (slightly to my surprise) Gyro handed in his resignation bang on Connie’s private schedule. His successor arrived the same week as Pearl. He is a full-time academic, a scholar in the best sense (so they say): a Malaysian whose route to Hampton came via Stanford and Shanghai. According to Connie he has much of Gyro’s energy and ambition but is house-trained, organisationally and academically, which lets the governors sleep at night.
Of course the main factor affecting the quality of their sleep is rocketing student numbers and fees, which mean that Hampton can afford a dean who costs 285,000 a year (pounds or dollars, whichever has the greater value – he is the head of a business school, after all).
Who would say boo to that? Pearl, naturally.
Dorothy is beaming. ‘It’s wonderful to see you again, Ben!’ Dorothy has already met Pearl because these days Connie is a big cheese. She was the driving force on the governors’ committee which found the new dean. ‘Did you know that this will be Gyro’s first speech back at the school since leaving? And it’s particularly good that you’re here because we’ve got a writer wandering around with a recorder. I need to send him in your direction. Did Connie tell you about the book?’
If I needed another reason to skedaddle downstairs, I’ve just got one.
‘What business are you doing these days?’ Lines asks. ‘ I see a lot of your wife but I feel embarrassingly out of touch with one of Hampton’s most celebrated alumni.’
‘I did get a few offers three years ago, but in the end I set up a small management consultancy with two friends – not writing reports but getting hands-on with small businesses which are scaling up. Talk about shit timing with the economy! We joke that we’re a private equity fund without any money.’
‘How is it working out?’
‘So-so. Often it’s been more hours and more worry for less money than a corporate job. But we get to choose our clients and our business practices. We could eventually make a reasonable whack if the economy can get over its hangover.’
Connie looks over my Pearl-free shoulder and grins. ‘If there’s one man who can get the economy to do that, he’s here.’
‘Ben!’ William C Gyro CBE, deputy governor of the Bank of England, comes up all effusive. I appear to be a long-lost buddy with no personal space needs. ‘And this must be?’
Pearl hovers on the edge of boo but decides to spit in Gyro’s eye instead. Connie is all ‘Oh Pearl!’ and tissues to the rescue, while giving me a sly wink. After all, Connie insisted Gyro move on because of a dodgy loan, so it’s only reasonable that he becomes deputy governor of the Bank of England. Gyro’s role is a new one, specially created to make sure that we learn the right lessons from the financial crisis.
‘Welcome back, Professor,’ says Lines. ‘We miss you.’
Gyro frowns. ‘Now then, Dorothy – don’t get any smudges on Hampton’s untouchable reputation for truth and honesty.’
The perfect opportunity to take my daughter in the lift back down to sanity approaches, in the form of the writer with a digital recorder trying to catch Gyro’s eye.
‘But we should see more of you,’ Lines continues. ‘Don’t forget you’re a professor here – the inaugural Julia Bakhtin Professor of Selfless Leadership, no less.’ Then her face crumples like the rear bumper of a resprayed car wreck.
Connie giggles. I busy myself with a health-and-safety check on Pearl’s balloon.
Then everyone including Lines is laughing like a gang of teenage girls trying to walk in stilettos, doubled up and falling over. Give him credit, Gyro is laughing by far the loudest, and he doesn’t appear to be faking it.
The chair in question is the first anywhere in the world to renominate automatically each time Bakhtin acquires a new wife. So while Lines described Gyro’s title correctly at the point it was bestowed, William C Gyro CBE is now the Dianne, Lady Bakhtin Professor of Selfless Leadership. As I have good reason to remember, the award comes complete with a very splendid glass chair.
Acknowledgements
Diana Nyad was the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida. She did it aged 64. Her TED talk ‘Never, ever give up’ hammers home this point: solo long-distance swi
mming is not something to do alone. As night followed day followed night, Diana’s crew were there for her in a boat. Since then I’ve constantly asked clients who face the difficult and apparently solitary challenge of changing careers, ‘Who’s in your boat?’
In my boat for MBA were Rosemary and Peter Drew, Guy Meredith, C M (Craig) Taylor and the crew at EyeStorm Media and Lightning Books: editor Martha Ellen Zenfell, co-publisher Dan Hiscocks and collaborator Kathy Jones. Thank you for the feeding, the navigation, the encouragement and the correction. Thanks, Trish, for so much love and inspiration. If in some way, at some time, my late father and my nephew Ben accept the dedication made herewith to them, I will be delighted. The inadequacies which remain after so much help are exclusively mine.
There is a scholarly critique of business schools and their role in financial capitalism, originating in part from business schools themselves. In 2004 Henry Mintzberg wrote Managers Not MBAs8. "In 2005 Sumantra Ghoshal argued that ‘by propagating ideologically inspired amoral theories, business schools have actively freed their students from any sense of moral responsibility’9. In 2007 Rakesh Khurana delivered his highly readable and thorough critical history of business schools in the land of their birth, the United States10. Ralph Stacey11 has offered an essential post-crisis perspective. I owe Ralph, Doug Griffin and my other doctoral faculty and fellow students special thanks.
The aims of this book are different, but I hope kindred.
8Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development, Barrett-Koehler, San Francisco CA (2004)
9Bad Management Theories are Destroying Good Management Practices, Academy of Management Learning and Education, (2005), vol. 4 no. 1
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