Despite the Darkness, page 33
‘Anybody can teach,’ the Principal declared. ‘It is research I am interested in. It is my ambition as Principal of this university to see us become the top research university in the country. I am making that the university’s main strategic aim. For just as long as nobody is going to publish your research you can no longer contribute anything to that strategic aim.’
‘But I can still teach…’ Cameron objected.
‘Anybody can teach,’ the Principal repeated, ‘but to do so they need to have students in their classes. You will be aware that the students decided at their meeting yesterday that they would no longer attend your classes. Brighton, Dr Beaumont, is not the only place where people can agree that they don’t want to listen to anything you have to say.’
Cameron wasn’t aware. He had been too preoccupied with the thousand miles that separated him from his children, and had been waiting too anxiously for the right time to phone them, to worry about what the students might have been agreeing at their mass meeting.
‘The long and short of it,’ the Principal continued, ‘is that you are no longer any use to this university either as a researcher or as a teacher. Very foolishly in the circumstances, you have also committed a serious offence in terms of the Staff Code of Conduct. Taking an unauthorized holiday during term time is a dismissible offence. The Director of Personnel is with me to witness our discussion and he will now give you a letter giving notice that I am terminating your service with us.’
‘But…but…you can’t do that,’ Cameron faltered, entirely at a loss.
‘Of course I can do that,’ the Principal said, ‘I’ve consulted with my Director of Personnel. I can do that Donald, can’t I?’
‘Yes, Principal.’
Cameron was unconvinced – Donald Compton would meekly have said ‘Yes’ to anything the Principal said.
‘You can’t do that,’ Cameron repeated, gathering himself together and speaking more confidently. ‘The University’s disciplinary processes are clearly laid down. There has to be a formal disciplinary hearing.’
‘This is the hearing,’ the Principal replied. ‘I’m listening to what you have to say. I’m the Principal, Dr Beaumont. I can do what I like. Who precisely do you think is going to stop me?’
‘The University’s governing body that employs you, for a start,’ Cameron said.
‘Don’t be naïve, Dr Beaumont,’ the Principal responded. ‘Who do you think decides who gets onto the University’s governing body? Any Principal worth his salt has his University Council eating out of his hand. I will just tell them that there has been an irretrievable breakdown of trust, which they will accept without question. That is perfectly good grounds for termination of your contract, as I am sure you are aware. Besides which, I have decided not to dismiss you with immediate effect, even though I could. I am giving you the three months notice written into your contract, which takes you to the end of December. Lectures will be winding down soon but I’m sure your Head of Department will appreciate your continued usefulness where exam marking is concerned.’
‘Who else can we think of who might want to stop me?’ the Principal went on, clearly enjoying himself. ‘Ah yes, the Staff Association on whose Executive you sit. While I would normally expect strong opposition from that quarter, and from the staff unions, to anything that looked like arbitrary action on my part, I somehow think that there won’t be any opposition on this occasion. I think you will find, Dr Beaumont, that there will be very little protest even from those relatively few members of staff who are wholly convinced that you are not working for the Special Branch. They will be very reluctant to offer public support to a member of staff who is said to be a police spy.’
The Principal sat back. On the basis of his experience of Cameron in the Senate and at other meetings, he appeared to be anticipating a vigorous defence. But Cameron felt too tired and shell-shocked to say anything. The odds were overwhelmingly stacked against him – there wasn’t any point in carrying on trying to fight them.
‘Incidentally,’ the Principal added as an afterthought, ‘in case you wanted to try to make anything of it, the breakdown of trust has nothing whatever to do with you being a police spy … or not being a police spy, as the case may be.’
The distinct pause before he concluded his last sentence was clearly designed to signal which way the Principal would bet.
‘I have nothing further to say,’ the Principal declared, ‘and I have a busy day ahead of me. If you don’t have anything more to say for yourself, Dr Beaumont, Mr Compton here will give you your letter of notice and I will inform your Head of Department that he should start thinking about finding someone with a good publication record to fill your post from January.’
Standing up to go, and accepting the letter from Compton without dignifying them with any further argument, seemed the only thing to do. Arguing would imply that he thought there might be a possibility of the Principal listening to what he had to say and changing his mind. It was absolutely clear that that wasn’t going to happen. Anyway, what was there to say that hadn’t been said already?
The picket line was in good voice when Cameron left the building. Its numbers had nearly doubled – thanks, presumably, to late-comers who hadn’t got their act together in time for a 9.00 start. There was a back exit to the building he could have used to avoid them, but he was damned if he was going to slink away as though he had something to be ashamed of. The chants of “Out! Out! Out!’ started up again as soon as he appeared in the doorway. The press photographer had waited to get her scoop – he could see her clicking away to one side. The student wanting to know ‘What happened to Mirambo?’ stepped forward and thrust the placard aggressively towards him. It would have to be that one.
‘I wish to God I knew,’ Cameron muttered as he ran the gauntlet back towards his office. ‘I wish I knew.’
Chapter 26
As he walked back to the Arts block, Cameron’s back felt almost as exposed as it had when he walked away from Venter’s 9mm automatic, and again when he drove away from the three men in Edendale. This time it wasn’t guns he had to worry about, just that bloody press-photographer’s camera. He needed to prepare himself for promotion from page three to page one.
Patrick should be the first to know – if only because he needed to start looking for someone else to take over Cameron’s lectures in a few months time. Pain in the butt though he might be at times, particularly with his prissy aversion to swearing, Patrick could be relied on to be genuinely taken aback by the letter of notice. The sycophantic Mr Compton had presented it to Cameron on his way out of the Principal’s office with the expression of studied distaste one might expect from a judge at Crufts demanding the removal of a mongrel from the parade ring.
Taken aback was an understatement – Patrick was outraged by the letter. He was also clearly irritated by the protesters who had followed Cameron across from the Administration building and were now chanting outside the main door of the Arts block, which happened to be directly adjacent to Patrick’s office.
As far as Patrick was concerned, Cameron had been summarily dismissed – the three-month delay was irrelevant. What had happened – specific agency being avoided – flew in the face of natural justice and was a flagrant abuse of proper procedure. Cameron knew that Patrick’s instinctive deference to authority would inhibit him from saying as much to the Principal, but there was no doubt that he would do his best to intervene. Not that any intervention by Patrick was likely to make the slightest difference to the Principal’s determination.
Cameron thanked Patrick and headed for his office, the chants of ‘Out! Out! Out!’ fading into the distance as he made his way towards the far end of the building. How long would the students feel it worthwhile to carry on with their protest once they discovered that they had got what they wanted? The Principal would make sure that it wouldn’t be long before the news reached them. He would be anxious to get any lingering press-photographers off campus as soon as possible. The Principal’s worst nightmares would feature the demonic figures of news reporters and cameramen in whispered conversations with his staff and students in shadowy corners of his campus.
There was still half an hour to go before tea. The prospect of sitting by himself in his office trying to come to terms with the implications of the Principal’s letter held no appeal whatever. Lynn would be teaching, but it would be worth going across to the Social Sciences block to see if John was free. John sat with him on the Executive Committee of the Staff Association and should be able to mobilise protest from that quarter.
John was in his office. He provided an indignantly sympathetic ear and promised to contact the chair of the Staff Association to set up an emergency meeting of the Executive. Anyone who espoused traditional Liberal values would instinctively react against arbitrary and authoritarian treatment of any individual; things got much more complicated when it was a whole people who were suffering from authoritarian abuse and all attempts to find a constitutional remedy had crashed and burned against a brick wall.
The half hour Cameron spent at tea before going back for his 11.00am tutorial was another out-of-body experience, very like his plenary presentation at the conference, though less immediately stressful. He watched himself talking to colleagues who didn’t yet know, and whom he didn’t feel inclined to tell, that he had been fired.
There should have been fifteen students in the tutorial, but only five had turned up. They were the five he would have picked if he had been asked to identify the students least likely to have bothered to read what they had been asked to read by way of preparation. They weren’t there, he was sure, out of any love for, or desire to learn about, history. They were there only because they needed a History credit for their degrees.
So this would be his future as a university teacher, not just for the few remaining weeks of the year but for as long as he stayed in South Africa – assuming he could ever get a job in another English-language university. All the lively, intelligent and politically savvy students would boycott his classes. He would be left trying to kindle a spark of enthusiasm in the proto-fascists who were too conservative to bother about a boycott.
The Department meeting was strong on indignation and weak on strategy. Patrick kicked off with an elegant denunciation of the travesty of due process that had resulted in Cameron’s being given three months notice, in the course of which he somehow managed to avoid articulating a single word that could be deemed to be critical of the man responsible. Cameron’s brief account of his conversation with the Principal required no embellishment to produce strong reactions from those around the table.
Lynn looked shocked and upset – partly, Cameron suspected, because he hadn’t been able to forewarn her before the meeting. Pauline responded with a level of indignation Cameron would have expected to be reserved for a tree on whose bark she had spotted the painted cross that signalled the axe-man’s impending arrival. Even Derek expressed indignation untainted by his usual cynicism.
Cameron detected an underlying unease about the implications of the Principal’s new strategic aim. The irony whereby the most productive researcher in the department had become the first victim of the Principal’s freshly minted strategy was clearly not lost on his colleagues.
The rest of the day passed in a daze. Cameron found it impossible to sit still in his office and concentrate on marking or preparing his classes for the rest of the week. He dropped by Lynn’s office, went over to talk to John again to see whether there had been any progress where the Staff Association was concerned – an Executive meeting had been called for the next day – and took Kali for an early, long and unaccompanied walk. The neighbourhood watch had preferred to remain in the relative comfort of the white car on the pavement.
Long walks always allowed space for thinking. There was a strong likelihood that he wouldn’t ever get a job at another university anywhere – that he would have to change direction altogether. He needed to start from scratch in thinking about his future – a future that was bound to be determined by what happened in the country as a whole. There seemed to be three distinct possibilities.
The apartheid government could carry on into the future getting more and more brutally oppressive as internal and international opposition increased. A minority could never carry on oppressing a majority forever, as Jules had pointed out so succinctly to Venter. But, regardless of what the outside world could do by way of boycotts, the Nationalists could probably sustain a war of attrition, locking up and killing the people who disagreed with them, for another thirty years or so. The prospect of having to carry on the struggle until somewhere around 2015 didn’t bear thinking about, nor did the legacy of bitterness and hatred that would be left when they eventually capitulated.
A second possibility was that there could still be a negotiated settlement of some kind sometime well short of 2015, once enough blood had been shed to make both sides think it worthwhile. Someone in government might conceivably see the writing on the wall before too many more people had been murdered. But that would require a miracle of some sort, and miracles were the intellectual property of the Godly.
A third alternative seemed much the most likely. A very bloody revolution long before 2015 could see the tables turned. Brutal oppression doesn’t breed peaceful settlements – and South Africa could look back on over three hundred years of oppression. A good outcome was even less likely in South Africa than it was in Israel and Palestine or in Northern Ireland. The more convinced people were that God was on their side, the more improbable a peaceful outcome became. Why would people in South Africa, or Israel, or anywhere else, ever put their weapons down if they were convinced that their God had singled them out from the beginning of time for possession of the land they had appropriated?
Cameron had lost his job; he had lost the confidence and trust of his comrades in the struggle; he had, for the time being at least, lost Jules and Hilton and Nicky. Only one of those losses had any real chance of being redeemed. If he couldn’t patch things up with Jules he was going to find himself standing alone at a fork in the road where the direction he chose needed to be determined by which of those three possible futures seemed the most likely.
Cameron phoned Jules as soon as he got home to tell her what had happened. She seemed genuinely shocked at the injustice. Ever practical, she queried possible lines of recourse. Could he appeal directly to the Chancellor or the University Council? He could, but it would be a waste of time – the Principal was confident he had them in his pocket. What about an emergency meeting of the Senate? That would require dozens of signatures of members of the Senate, few of whom, he suspected, would be prepared to go out on a limb to support him. Concerted pressure from the Staff Association seemed the only hope.
Somewhere around halfway through his third glass of whisky, the one avenue that hadn’t been explored suddenly crystallised out of the mist of Cameron’s uncertainty about what he should do. In a moment of desperation when Jules was talking about leaving him, he had said he would go to talk to Venter’s superiors in the Special Branch to get them to warn him off harassing her. Venter’s pot-smoking would be the trump card. If Venter could be called off, Jules might be persuaded to come back. Venter’s immediate boss was a shadowy figure nobody seemed to know much about called van Zyl. What was there to lose now by trying to meet him?
Cameron’s anxiety about the tramp of boots on the verandah and the banging on the door had been much less immediate since his fortnight away. Mirambo was either safely across the border or he’d been silenced. If he had been caught they would surely have made him talk by now. But that didn’t mean that sleep came easily. When finally it did come, it washed over him and pushed him deeply under. So when the phone rang it took him a while to surface. There was no hurry – there was nobody else in the house to be disturbed.
‘So you have finally been terminated. About time too.’
It was a different voice – but it sounded oddly familiar. The speaker’s home language was English. That was a first. Cameron checked the alarm clock beside the bed – 2.58.
‘As a historian, Dr Beaumont,’ the voice went on, ‘you will know there is more than one way to skin a cat. The same applies to termination – there are different degrees of termination.’
There was a pause. Perhaps he thought Cameron was slow and needed time to put two and two together when death threats were subtle enough not to mention dum-dum bullets. The pause gave Cameron time to place the voice – it was familiar because it sounded very like his own.
‘Of course it is sometimes less trouble just to shoot the cat,’ the voice added before the phone went dead.
What kind of mind-game were they trying to play now? Why enlist the man who had impersonated him to Pistorius and the estate agents into the death-threat brigade? And why would they want to make it clear that it was they who had killed Mrs Scheepers’ cat?
Even in the cold and much more sober light of day, the idea of trying to speak to van Zyl didn’t seem a bad one. He could ask van Zyl what had happened to Mirambo and even ask him to let it be known that Cameron wasn’t working for him. It was obvious what van Zyl’s answers would be, but it was just possible that he might let something slip. What was there to lose? If he could get an appointment with van Zyl it was highly unlikely that anyone would see him going into the Special Branch offices. Even if somebody did see him, anybody who wasn’t two sandwiches short of a picnic would appreciate that, if he really were an SB agent, walking into the SB offices in the centre of the city in broad daylight would be the last thing he would want to be seen doing.
Cameron hadn’t expected it to be easy to get through to van Zyl’s office, but he hadn’t anticipated being given the run-around to quite such an extent. For a start, the Special Branch wasn’t listed in the telephone directory, so he had to go via the main police station. He was put through to various extensions, being asked each time why he wanted to speak to van Zyl, before getting through to a desk that announced itself in Afrikaans as the Special Branch enquiries desk. Cameron suspected that most SB enquiries were not, in fact, conducted at a desk.
