The Bromsgrove Business: a Novel by Steve Ellis

By Steve Ellis

The narrator of The Bromsgrove Business, beset by hapless marital and familial relationships, is writing a novel about academic life which is gradually taken over by spirit communicators revealing the solution to the murder of a local cricketer in Bromsgrove in the 1930s…
 
This intriguing mixture of the fantastic with the poignantly plausible will test your powers of deduction and keep you chortling!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781803139692

Steve Ellis

Steve Ellis has an established reputation and presence in the Knowledge Based Working field. He has been an invited speaker in leading business schools and international KM conferences. He works as an international KM specialist in the financial services sector, having moved there from academia.

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Copyright © 2022 Steve Ellis

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 978 1803132 679

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To my family pictured within

Contents

Part I

1

2

3

Part II

1

2

3

4

5

Part III

1

2

3

4

Part IV

1

2

3

4

5

Part I

1

That morning there was some bad news for Jake from the College Research Committee. His application: ‘The Early Career of Archangelo da Bologna, c. 1325-1340’ had been rejected for funding on the grounds that it was insufficiently ‘cutting edge’, and also, as Jake knew, because of the inadequacy of his previous research record. He felt a kind of mitigated despair: at 60, he’d hoped for a few more years in post to maximise his pension pot, but given his own lack of belief in the project he was quite pleased to be spared the pretence of being research-active. He read the letter again, which also suggested an appointment with the Dean to discuss Jake’s future in the light of this ‘disappointing news’. Jake knew what form this discussion would take: the Dean would um and ah in his roundabout way before finally hinting that Jake might consider taking early retirement.

He wondered if he could have made the application stronger. He had counted too much, perhaps, on his standing as the world authority on Archangelo, the author indeed of the sole, if short, monograph on him which had appeared thirty years ago, and which had failed to trigger a wider take-up of its subject. This study, evolving from Jake’s PhD, focussed on the painter’s maturity (c. 1340-1360), aiming to show he was something more than a pale imitator of Giotto, as was usually assumed. Since then Jake had published a few meticulously researched articles on Archangelo, appearing at cautious intervals, because certainty on such a faint figure—only a very few panels by him survived—was impossible. The rejected proposal broke new ground in Jake’s eyes because the painter’s early career was almost completely un-investigated. Perhaps he should have made more of being called in as expert by the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Bologna five years ago to advise on the authenticity of a recently discovered altarpiece. His conclusion, in another carefully circumspect piece, was ‘probably workshop of’. He knew the Dean would imply, in his polite, circuitous way, that Jake’s mistake had been to stick throughout his career to this obscure and minor figure, and Jake would find it difficult to reply how Archangelo had suited him just fine: he sympathised with obscurity, hated attention, and would be happy to slip from the historical record himself. He felt a kinship with neglect.

He began to cheer up, picturing the benefits of failure. No more trawling through the dusty Emilian archives in the summer heat, no more fagging over to Stansted for flights (though admittedly he’d done very little of either in the past ten years). Would enforced retirement be so bad? He knew his teaching wouldn’t rescue him, especially in these days when student satisfaction was so important. His classes were always well-prepared, efficient and able to reach quota, though with students who lost out on over-subscribed options elsewhere. But too often adjectives like ‘uninspiring’, or even ‘boring’, featured on the student evaluations; the patient, unsensational analysis the late-medieval period required would always only appeal to a select few, unlike German Expressionism or ‘The Self-Harming Body in Modern Portraiture’. As Jake’s classes, increasingly thinly attended, progressed, he could often hear down the corridor whoops of laughter and innuendo from the rooms of more popular colleagues. Jake would shake his head at this lecturer-student frisson and return to his minute explanations of triptych and predella.

The fact was he had never had much sexual or, as it were, corporeal presence. This physical tepidity had worked surprisingly well in his thirty years’ marriage with Mo, given she was an extremely fastidious workaholic, always at her desk first thing in the morning and never wanting to lie around under soiled sheets. Except for a very few post-party or alcohol-fuelled instances, at Christmas say, the couple had had very little sex for a long time, and this suited the calm of their relationship as it slid from qualified attraction into companionship. Retirement alongside Mo would continue, not unpleasantly, on its even-keeled way, and they wouldn’t encroach upon each other since for Mo there was no question of retiring. Much of the time she’d be away at conferences and festivals, making key-note speeches and even television appearances in her own area of expertise, Post-War European Cinema. He never accompanied her to these, not wanting to be someone anonymous trailing in her purposeful wake. While she was getting up to speak in New Mexico, say, he’d be half a globe away in the place he’d now be able to give more time to, his allotment.

Ah, his allotment. This had been the real scene of his infidelity to Archangelo da Bologna over the last few years. It may be unsurprising that Jake had the neatest, best-tended, most ordered allotment of any on the swathe of land dedicated to these near his home. He grew an enterprising mix of flowers and middle-class vegetables like capiscums and courgettes, in neat beds bordered by trellises of sweet peas and runner beans. Recently, he’d been establishing a brick-bordered cinder path that ran down and across to divide his territory into four equal quarters. It made the adjoining plots, mostly given over to potatoes and ramshackle wooden dens, look semi-abandoned, not to mention those which actually were reverting to a ghostly, unvisited wilderness like terrestrial Marie Celestes. The allotment was Jake’s refuge, doubly so since he only worked it in weekday intervals when he bunked off from College, or in the very early morning or last thing on summer nights; he had no interest in swapping small-talk, even organic small-talk, with his fellow gardeners, so he avoided the place when it was busy. He never went there on weekends.

In the last couple of months, however, Jake had had to share the place at unexpected times: one of the abandoned plots on the far side was being reclaimed by a figure he could make out was a woman, too distant to be further specified. But when they happened to visit the communal compost-dump at the same time, contact and the exchange of greetings couldn’t be avoided, and Jake was surprised at the faint stirring of pleasure—in the loins, as D. H. Lawrence would say—this gave him. The woman, introducing herself as Bella, was the agreeable side of middle age, early 40s he’d say, and dressed in a way Jake found oddly fetching. The tight jeans tucked into wellingtons revealed a pair of trim thighs, ditto buttocks; she had long fair hair, flowing from under a man’s checked cap, and a stole of soft blue fake-fur over her waterproof that nestled against her chin in a tactilely appealing way. She looked, overall … ‘cuddly’; that was the best word he could come up with, but a cuddliness spiced by two direct, wonderfully and obscurely coloured eyes—jade, topaz?—that looked full on you in concentration while you spoke. After a while Jake timed his visits to the allotment when he hoped she’d be there; luckily, she was an early morning and late evening person too, but he never saw her during the day. Presumably she had a job and/or kids to attend to.

Speculating about this, it occurred to him that their increasing contact hadn’t led to his knowing anything about her: with some shame he realised that their talk, once beyond the weather and seed-packet stage, had been all about him, even if that ‘all’ was still very preliminary. This surprised Jake, since usually in conversation he ceded to people who obviously felt, and probably with good reason, that their lives were more important or interesting than his. He always found it difficult to talk about himself—he regarded himself as an unpromising subject—so perhaps this allotment nymph was allowing a long-standing repression to break free. In any case, he knew nothing about her, but she knew he was a university lecturer in Art History and if they hadn’t progressed beyond this it was because she seemed genuinely interested in staying on the topic. It must be wonderful, she said, being paid to spend your life studying art in the company of colleagues who shared your passion and bright, intelligent young people who wanted to join in—wonderful, she repeated. Jake demurred, privately wondering why he didn’t feel this, but basking in the vocational halo she projected onto him. It’s not all earnest talk over paintings and coffee, he intimated, outlining the grit in the oyster made up of admin duties and research targets. But Bella seemed as much charmed by the idea of research—how wonderful to develop a topic that really interested you, to get to the bottom of this project of your own and come up with nuggets of knowledge and be paid for it too—even get financed for spells of research leave! Jake had a glimpse from their talk of a lifetime of missed opportunity.

Normally, when he explained he was an Art History lecturer, he was very much on the defensive, and in his own eyes made a poor show of defending the job against overt or implied attacks on its social and economic utility—at the taxpayer’s expense too. He knew and rather feebly advanced the standard rationales: that helping to perpetuate and disseminate the importance of the cultural heritage enriched society for the benefit of all; that, in aiding a minority to develop their aesthetic interests, any fulfilment for the individual has a positive knock-on effect, ‘whole’ units contributing to a ‘whole’ society. Even that international understanding, the flow of knowledge across borders, indeed, ‘civilisation’ itself, was bolstered by those working in a field like his. All this burden rested on the fragile, faintly discernible shoulders of Archangelo da Bologna. But he soon faltered trotting this out in the face of unimpressed common-sense, and of course the sarcasm about the six months’ holiday he had every year (in the form of freebies to Italy too!). He soon learned to call himself generically an ‘art lecturer’ and hope that conversation stopped there, and beyond that he had an air of not encouraging conversation and in any case led an increasingly solitary life. About his only act of self-advertisement was having ‘Dr’ put on his cheque-book when he got his PhD, and this occasionally caused misunderstandings with people he made out cheques to. After explaining things, both he and the cheques’ recipients came to the happy conclusion that he wasn’t a proper doctor. But Bella was not only non-judgmental but seemed thrilled by his profession. There was only one sticky patch when he was aware of making a predictably poor outline of what was supposedly his current research which got entangled with some irrelevancies about research-led teaching: even Bella’s eyes looked doubtful at the prospect of a module on lost late-medieval altar panels (‘You mean art that isn’t actually there?’) which she erroneously thought he was intending to teach.

So, if Jake had to leave the university, he had the allotment as his haven, sharing it, of late, with a strangely beautiful woman. But surely he couldn’t spend all day and every day there? And the unconfined expanse of retirement, for someone who long ago had got used to living without initiative, spread before his eyes and made him quail …

***

So there it was, my twenty minutes’ worth, read aloud, which it was the convention of our writers’ group to allow presenters every month. This, I’d told them before I began, was the opening of a work-in-progress, possibly a novel, possibly short story, which I’d been promising to let them see for some time—not that they’d been pestering me with impatient anticipation. In this passage, I was just sketching the general outline of the characters, I said. At present, our group consists of three people, me, Jackie and Ronan, in whose house we always meet. The numbers have been up to nine, but have dwindled in the last year—we used to take it in turns to host but Ronan has become increasingly indisposed with some unspecified invalidism, and told us he could only carry on by avoiding going out on an evening. So we’ve settled regularly into meeting at his place—the idea of a creative writing group of only two would be an absurdity, and the thought of greater proximity to Jackie alone alarming. At the end of the summer, with the group seeming on its last legs, we took the decision to meet more often, between now and Christmas, in the effort to give it some preservative momentum. I was already dimly regretting this, specifically the thought of spending more time in the company of Jackie and Ronan.

The routine is the reading of someone’s work, then twenty minutes of ‘initial reactions’ from the others (almost entirely these days comments from Jackie and/or me since Ronan rarely says anything—another function of his uncertain health, I suppose), followed by a break for a cup of tea, then usually half-an-hour’s general conversation which can go anywhere but is supposed to stay more or less on the text in question. There are less respectable ways of spending an hour and a half of an evening. Jackie, who’s a secondary school English teacher, has a formidable assurance about her, and even though I’m a university lecturer in English Literature and therefore higher up the educational ladder, she treats me—treats us all, when there was an all to treat—with a disdainful air of self-assurance.

‘I think it’s got some decent bits’, she said, ‘but it’s a bit hackneyed? You know, a novel about a frustrated academic, especially one called Jake?’

‘What’s wrong with Jake?’ I asked, though in fact I understood her misgivings about the name. ‘Anyway, I thought we’d agreed you have to write about the world you know?’

‘Yes, but Jake’, she smirked. ‘And the failed academic thing—it just seems too familiar’.

‘Well, it’s not altogether familiar to me—fair enough, it is my world, but Jake’—for some reason I emphasised the name too—‘isn’t really like me. For one thing, he doesn’t teach my subject, and for another’ (how can I put this? I thought) ‘I’d like to think I’m not a failure—I do have more than one academic book to my name and get invitations to speak at conferences and such’.

‘Presumably if you’re not like him you fuck your students too’, Jackie said smilingly. (She suddenly comes out with these things, unembarrassedly—we’ve learned somehow to accept it).

‘Mucky bugger’, Ronan unexpectedly contributed, though whether as an imputation against me, or suspecting Jake of being a fraud, wasn’t clear.

‘In any case’, Jackie continued, ‘this Bella piece, in the tight pants and man’s cap, she’s a bit two-dimensional, don’t you think? A bit of an ageing man’s ideal of, what d’you call it, totty?’

‘Well, she’s only a start’, I said. ‘I haven’t filled her in yet’.

A suppressed snort from Ronan.

At this point Ronan’s wife Margaret came in, earlier than usual, with the teapot and a plate of digestives, looking as always immensely protective towards her husband and lightly smoothing his head as she went past—the ‘poor love’, she explained, hadn’t been feeling too well today and would benefit from an earlier tea-break (and an early night, she implied). Without being explicit, Margaret always implies the futility of our writerly endeavours whilst smiling tolerantly on them, especially since they give her ‘poor love’ such harmless pleasure. But did they? You had to wonder. As I said, Ronan’s verbal contributions were minimal, nor did he contribute much work to be discussed. A few months ago, with our numbers so short and material so scanty, he’d dug out a few pages of a diary he’d kept of a tour round north Devon as a young man. It was one of our worst evenings as a group, and apart from a paragraph or two of well-directed savagery at Westward Ho! every entry was on the ‘Nice fish-and-chips for supper’ level. I don’t think we went on much beyond the digestives that evening—even Jackie, never lost for comment, dried up early.

Actually, we knew that Ronan was engaged on some sort of novel about a man who alternates between two lives, every twenty-four hours, on the stroke of midnight, switching from one to the other—a suburban wage-slave with a large family in one, a bachelor concert-pianist travelling the world and having any woman he likes (Ronan’s words) in the other. Apparently, in the intervening twenty-four hours of existence A, when the protagonist is leading existence B (and vice versa), life carries on as normal, so that the protagonist resumes it on his return without any break in his memory or recall of the other life he’s conducting. Does this sound bonkers?—I may not have it quite right. Ronan noted that life B is a fantasy act of compensation for the banality of the other, and where repressions can be given free rein, though as we pointed out, if the drudge was never aware of the intervening life (and vice versa), it wouldn’t offer him much compensation, an objection Ronan said he’d ‘have to think about’. What the outcome of this thinking was we never heard, since after only one appearance we never saw anything of the novel again. What we did see made me think that Ronan hadn’t really grasped the opportunities for liberation that being a world-travelling maestro provided—both lives seemed full of a large amount of tedious detail, as if end-of-day fish-and-chips was a consummation in both. Still, it seemed in principle an interesting concept, and from one or two rare comments we got the impression the project remained ongoing, whether or not it would ever surface at the group again.

So now we entered the post-tea stage, after Margaret came back to collect the plates and, after what seemed an age, we heard the door close quietly and considerately across the far side of the lush pile carpet as she left.

‘I think you’ll have to work at giving these people more substance’, Jackie was saying, ‘especially the women.’ She eyed me doubtfully, as if my managing this was unlikely. ‘You know what Virginia Woolf said’—I’d been waiting for the all-trumping Woolf card to be played—‘about going into the past to dig out depths behind the present, which was her way of doing substance, as with Mrs Dalloway’.

‘Not really’, I said dully. I’ve never read Mrs Dalloway, Woolf not being one of my specialisms—in fact, apart from To the Lighthouse, which we all teach on a first-year course, Woolf is largely unknown to me. As if sensing this (since I could never admit to it), Jackie seems to bring up a different Woolf novel every meeting to browbeat me with. Most unfair—do I ever accost her with, as far as her talk suggests, being totally ignorant of Wordsworth’s Prelude?

‘You mean providing my characters with a past to make them more believable?’ I clarified.

‘More or less—take Jake, for instance’ (I was relieved the belittling emphasis on the name seemed to be disappearing). ‘Maybe it’s part of your plan, but you’re going to have to explain why he’s so sexually tepid, and flinches from anything gritty and challenging. It must be something in his upbringing—his parents most likely. So providing him with a past would be a good idea’.

‘Okay’. I pondered. I’d no real idea where I was taking the narrative anyway after these first few pages, beyond a rather hazy consummation of the ‘Love on the allotment’ theme. ‘But I’d set yourself a bit of a challenge’, Jackie continued. ‘That is, no more comfort zone of the world you know. Where were you brought up? Clacton, wasn’t it?’

‘Weston-super-Mare’.

‘Exactly! And I imagine your parents were solidly middle-class, that everything in the house was decent and controlled—passion and disturbance outlawed, and you lukewarmly adored as an only child.’

I have to admit Jackie can be very perceptive, and telling in her phrasing. She’d be an excellent novelist, in fact, if she ever wrote anything. ‘Lukewarmly adored’ describes my upbringing exactly, the only child of a solidly prosperous auctioneer and his dutiful housewife, my rather wan mother. However, I wasn’t keen to air this publicly. ‘But wouldn’t that be the perfect childhood environment to explain Jake, and his cautious attitude to life?’ I asked.

‘I think it’s far more likely he’d rebel against it—become a homosexual or a violent activist. Besides, you can’t give him a boring past as well as a boring present’ (I winced). ‘Think of your readers! What do you think, Ronan?’

Ronan started, but it was clear he’d fallen asleep. It was time to take ourselves off, and give him his early night. As I started to walk home, and Jackie her cycle-ride, I caught a final comment floating over her shoulder: ‘And anyway, the parents you’re thinking of wouldn’t be likely to come up with a name like Jake’.

***

So Jake was thinking, as crisis-points in your life make you, of how he ended up as an ineffectual 60-year-old facing dismissal. And the more he went into his past to see where his career had faltered, the more he was led even further back, to his childhood and upbringing. He was a Yorkshireman, in fact, born in the 1950s, when the North started to become glamorous, at a stretch, and it’s true that when he thought of his boyhood a picture formed of beer-glasses and men in braces with strong accents and decided opinions, factory hooters and footballers with huge boots. He grew up on a council estate at the edge of a small