by Dan Holloway
THE COMPANY OF FELLOWS
Dan Holloway
Copyright © 2009 Dan Holloway
Cover design by Sessha Batto
The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Author’s Note
There is a city called Oxford, and it does have a University. In fact, it has two. That aside, the people, places, and events in this story are entirely fictitious, or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Today’s good secular parent will happily declare, as a good secularist, that belief in life after death is nonsense; so forego your qualms and live for today. And as a good parent they will happily declare it a moral absolute to preserve the world for their children’s children’s children; so forego your cars and live for tomorrow. Yet when I point out that there is an inconsistency here, it is I who am held to be mad. Well, after whose death do they believe there is no more life? And who is the madman – the one who points out the inconsistencies, or the one who lives by them?”
Charles Shaw, European Symposium on Theology and the Environment, Vienna, 2006
JUNE 1995
37 BANE’S AVENUE, OXFORD
Theologians had been known to time their lecture tours, research trips, and examining duties to coincide with Charles Shaw’s parties. It went without saying that the conversation and entertainment was exceptional. But it was the sheer Busby Berkeley theatricality, as well as the quality of the food that people would clear their diaries for. There was always just the right mix of signature dishes, such as the little spoons moulded from ice that Charles used for serving caviar, and surprises. The party to celebrate radical theology’s brightest new star, Tommy West, had attracted visitors from as far afield as Harvard and the Sorbonne.
“So where is our guest of honour,” asked Professor Bonnard, who had made the trip from Paris. He put one of the tiny spoons in his mouth, and felt the salty pop of beluga on his palate. “He has finished, hasn’t he?”
“Oh yes, he’s finished,” said Dr Ellison.
“And they gave him the doctorate?”
“Indeed. Very few questions; no corrections required, I gather.” Ellison took a peach from a silver tray and held it up to the light. He could just see the perfect circle of a cut around its middle. The two halves came apart in his hands to reveal a golden egg where the stone should be.
Bonnard clapped his hands together in delight. “Drink me,” he said, reading the copperplate engraving in the gold. “Our host reminds us of Alice in Wonderland?”
“Smart arse,” whispered Ellison under his breath. It wasn’t clear at whom he had aimed the remark.
Bonnard picked the golden object out of the peach, his fingers flinching from the cold as they touched it. Shrugging, he placed it in his mouth.
“You approve of my little amuse bouche?” Charles Shaw had appeared in silence by the side of the man from the Sorbonne. Ellison went pale.
“Marvellous!” the Frenchman declared.
“Eiswein,” said Shaw. “Frozen on the vine in the first frost of the German winter; and frozen again in Oxford; wrapped first in grape skin, and then in gold leaf.”
“And where is the new Dr West?”
Shaw raised a hand in the direction of the grand piano. Jane Ellison stopped playing. There was a disturbance downstairs, garbled voices. They listened closely. It was just one voice.
“What’s that?” asked Bonnard.
“That,” said Ellison with tangible relish, “is our guest of honour, Mr West.”
The bonhomie drained from Bonnard’s face.
“Technically he is not a doctor until he has had the title conferred,” Ellison took great delight in elaborating.
Shaw looked at the door onto the landing, his eyes following the source of the noise. “It’s a tragedy,” he said. “I had intended, when I planned this party, to use it as a chance to suggest he apply for the new University Lecturership in Gender Studies.” He paused.
“Two months ago,” Ellison filled the silence. “The day after he had handed his thesis over to the examiners, Tommy wrote to Charles.”
“He said he was giving up theology to become an interior designer,” said Charles.
“Now he’s knocking back malt by the bottle and lecturing anyone who gets in his way about soft furnishings and wallpaper. He’s gone quite mad.”
“He may be ill,” said Charles. “But that has done nothing to impair his taste. I gather he is already as much a success in his new field as he was in his old one.”
“A terrible waste,” said Bonnard.
Charles took a sip of dark Sercial Madeira and stared at the doorway. He cocked his head slightly to one side, smiled, and motioned for Jane to continue playing.
“Of the government’s money and our time,” said Ellison as the sonata began and drowned out his voice.
“That depends entirely on your perspective,” mouthed Charles as he moved into the crowd for another effortless round of mingling. “But I suspect, Barnard, that my perspective is very different from yours.”
And then heads turned. There was silence. For a moment. Then the sound of sobbing, and cries that sounded like words from unknown languages, and words that sounded like animal cries.
Charles rushed to the doorway, put a hand on Tommy’s shoulder, caught him as he crumpled to the floor. “It’s OK,” the Professor whispered in his ear. “It’ll be OK.”
“Make it stop,” Tommy sobbed. His salty, blooded cries echoed round the room; but nothing would make it stop.
Until the lithium. And then everything stopped.
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 4, 2007
___
1
It was a game he’d played almost every day for the past twelve years. He’d blow on the glass, and as the steam cleared he’d picture the window opening up onto every kind of world imaginable. Each time, of course, he found himself looking back out at the same stretch of the Woodstock Road.
He’d been successful. He’d been more than successful, in fact, if you measured success in money. He didn’t; but he knew that was easy for him to say from the solitude of the vast house he now owned in north Oxford, where as a student he’d rented a room in the top flat. He had made his fortune designing other people’s lives; but all he’d designed for himself, despite the beautiful trinkets and the techie toys, was a grey husk of a world where he managed to survive. Not that he expected sympathy from anyone. All he wanted was, well, it was a long time since he’d really asked himself that. It was one of the questions he filed away under too big to manage for the time being.
If someone had told him what he wanted was excitement, more than he wanted to go through life keeping his nose clean, more than he wanted to cling onto the fragile shell of sanity he’d made for himself, he’d have smiled and told them to leave him be. He’d have told them that was the old Tommy West. That was Tommy before the breakdown. That was the Tommy who took the kind of risks that caused his breakdown in the first place.
But that was before John died in front of him.
It was one of Oxford’s spectacular September storms that overload the ancient drain system and flood the city’s Victorian basements, so the bell took him by surprise. There was no hurry, though. The garden was in such a mess there was enough elderflower and ivy an
d God knows what else to offer shelter somewhere, even from a downpour like this. He ambled down the three flights of what had been the servants’ stairs from the top floor, where he still actually lived.
Tommy opened the door and recognised his old boss at once. He’d done lunchtime reception work for John Charteris when he was a student. John was one of Oxford’s top conveyancing lawyers. He’d been enormous then. Twelve years later he was positively gigantic.
Even over the rain he could hear the rasping of John’s breath. A mist of sweat steamed off the man’s red face. He was straining under the weight of a vast cardboard box that looked like it would fall apart in the wet. Tommy reached out to take it, but as he did so John stumbled backwards, coming to rest against the wall that separated the snicket at the side of the house from the college buildings next door.
“Professor Shaw,” gasped John as Tommy supported the weight of the box with his arms. “Wanted you to have these.”
Suddenly John released his grip and Tommy felt the force of sodden cardboard, and whatever was inside, wrench his shoulders in their sockets. He staggered inside the door, spilling the box on the hard tiled floor, and turned to John, whose right hand was squeezing his left shoulder as though he were milking it for breath.
Tommy tried to shake his head clear, tried to pump some kind of urgency into his brain, but nothing would come. That’s what happens when you spend twelve years without ever leaving your comfort zone, he thought. Now John was having a heart attack and his pathetic attempts to protect himself from the outside world would cost a man his life.
Already John was lying flat on the soaking gravel. Tommy crouched down and finally the autopilot kicked in. Help. He needed help.
He pulled open John’s saturated tweed jacket to look for a mobile. He dipped his hand in the inside left pocket, but couldn’t feel past an enormous envelope. He struggled to fish it out. The manila flap drew back to reveal the vast wad of used £50 notes.
Without noticing it, another feeling, one he couldn’t place, had slipped into his head and taken the place of the urgency. He went through John’s pockets hurriedly, but he was no longer desperate to get help. By the time he’d cleared all the pockets there was still no sign of a phone; just ten envelopes each as fat as the lawyer lying dead outside his door.
How do you react when someone dies in front of you? Is there a right way? Does the way you react define the kind of person you are? God, he hoped not. Is the way we behave at a moment like this just one of those uncontrollable idiosyncrasies, he wondered, like fancying redheads, or whether we’re allergic to shell fish? His head shot in a hundred different directions, and he struggled to pull the threads of his thoughts back together. He was sure it was too late for John. His first aid impulses had turned off. For the first time, he knew what the feeling was that had crept inside him. It was something he hadn’t felt in a long time: curiosity.
Life was here if he grabbed it now. There was no time to weigh things up. There was no time to consider whether his head could cope. Someone he had once known, not well but well enough to have admired and respected, was dead. John had died in front of him and he knew there were a hundred things he should be thinking, but he wasn’t. All he knew was that he had a choice. Call the ambulance, give some policeman his statement, hand over the money and the papers, let them take John away, and carry on as before; or find out what on earth the former supervisor he hadn’t seen in over a decade was doing sending a lawyer round with thousands of pounds, before anyone else knew John was dead and took over.
For the moment that he allowed himself to make the decision, Tommy watched the rain bouncing off John, hitting fabric and skin with indiscriminate force. He thought of the man he’d known with his deep, friendly laugh and his courteous but driven manner; who always had a minute to say hello to his staff, but never two. He tried to connect the old animated face with the ball of sopping skin that was still and uncomplaining as it took its pummelling like a punchball. For a second he thought of the rivulets running down the pathway washing away John’s soul, and tasted the salt of a tear mixed with the water pouring into his mouth. Then he thought of the water washing away any forensic evidence that there had ever been a box full of goodness knows what, and a pile of envelopes stuffed with money.
The decision was made. John was dead. Tommy couldn’t help him; he’d call an ambulance later, but there were things he needed to do now.
He took the stairs 3 at a time, cradling the cardboard box. He laid it down in the bath and rinsed off both his arms before he took off his shirt and went to the kitchen. He fetched two large black bin-liners and laid one on the black marble of the bathroom floor. He paused to think for a moment. John had clearly run to get here like he was being chased by a frenzy of real or imagined demons. That was good. If fibres from his jacket were anywhere they were only on the outside of the box, not whatever was inside. There was nothing to connect him to its contents if anyone did start asking questions.
Tommy fetched his sharpest filleting knife, slit down what was left of the four vertical corners of the box, and spread out the sides. The mush slopped its bowels out with a sigh. There was no time to be nosy. He brought an empty R-Kive box and scooped the mix of papers, disks, files, flash drives into it, along with the envelopes full of money. Luckily everything on the inside appeared to be dry. He rinsed off his arms, and the knife, bundled the maché into the bin-liner, put it all into the other liner, and rinsed his arms again.
His heart was jumping in his throat. He took a breath and closed his eyes. Cold marble against his feet, soothing under a cloudless Andalucian sky. Paganini playing on a single violin behind olive trees. The scent of jasmine. His heart was back somewhere near its usual 42 beats a minute and his brain slipped into the slow rhythm needed to input information. He reached into the R-Kive box, to where his memory said there would be a padded ivory envelope with his name on it. The crisp fibres fuzzed as he ran the filleting knife along the edge and he enjoyed the sharp crack as he opened out the thick folds of woven paper.
He stopped for a moment, sitting cross-legged on the fine velvet carpet in the hallway. He patted the point of the knife on his front teeth and then placed it on the middle of the letter, and ran it quickly down the page as a guide for his eyes, without making a tear. He turned the paper and did the same on the reverse. In a single movement he went into the kitchen, took a cook’s match, and lit the corner over the stainless steel sink. He made sure that every piece was ash before he washed it away, and lit an incense cone to mask the smell.
With a sandwich bag over his hand, he went back to the R-Kive box and took out the second thick ivory envelope, the one he remembered was addressed in Professor Shaw’s handwriting to “Thomas West”. Shaw had always called him Tommy. The Professor even spelt it Tommi with an “i” when he used that as the name for his interior design company, so this had to be a hint. Opening it up to take a look wasn’t an option. He thought about calling the Professor, but ruled it out straightaway. It wasn’t a number he wanted on his billing records, pinning down the time of the call to the second. No, somehow he knew exactly what this envelope was for. He was sliding into the rhythm of adventure with barely a jolt. Adrenalin had shot his heart rate back up. He could almost feel the Professor, his old mentor, laying out clues like gingerbread crumbs, leading him out of a forest he’d been hiding in for years, and had long forgotten how he’d gotten into. The white noise of the rain outside roared in his ears.
He put the bin-liner in his Gladstone bag and went out of the door with his umbrella in his pocket at the ready. He was pleased to see the rain looked like it would continue for some time. No-one would be out for a while yet. It was less than ten minutes since he had heard the bell.
Tommy stepped over John’s body, stopping to slide the unopened envelope into an empty jacket pocket. He took off the sandwich bag and slung it into the liner, along with the other soaking detritus, which he tied tightly inside his bag. At the end of the overgrown path,
he looked back over his shoulder. Even straining hard, and knowing what he was looking for, he could see nothing of John except the shine of his patent shoes. He stopped and bit his lip. It wasn’t too late to change his mind. But there was no choice to make. He’d made it already.
Leaving his umbrella down for the time being, he let the water flatten his hair. Walking briskly into town, he looked just like any other sodden figure scurrying for shelter in the rain. If anyone had been watching through the curtains of water they would never have recognized the person dumping yet another black liner into the overripe belly of the skips outside the old Lucy’s factory.
As he approached Professor Shaw’s college house on Bane’s Avenue, Tommy put the umbrella up to cover his face, just in case someone else was looking out of the window on a damp afternoon like he had been a few minutes ago, wondering why life always happened outside.
He slipped on his gloves. There was no need to knock. The door was always open when Shaw was at home. He was the University’s Professor of Ethics. In particular he worked on pleasure. In his private life as well as his books if one believed the stories. He wrote about the delight of anticipation, about how to increase pleasure by waiting for it. It was his joke that he devoted his life to the joy of waiting but that he didn’t extend the pleasure to waiting on his students.
He was inside Professor Shaw’s intricately ordered world for the first time in over a decade. The standard issue cord carpet on the floor was the only thing in the house the Professor hadn’t chosen himself; but Shaw had covered most of the hallway with Aubusson weaves and exquisite silk rugs in the intricately detailed Ispahan style. Tommy wiped the claggy Oxford rain from his nose and the smell of game overwhelmed him. Venison, exquisitely larded with goose fat and speck; mutton and caper forcemeat; fierce groundnotes of juniper and mace. He didn’t have to follow the smell far.