The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  The door opened and Emily found herself looking at a teenage girl who was holding a small kitchen knife in one hand and a packet of baby sweet corn in the other. The girl was smiling at her as though she hadn’t a care in the world. She had seen that look through just-opened doors so many times. She couldn’t remember ever seeing it on the way out.

  “Hi,” said the girl, standing there without moving. She flicked a piece of her fringe out of her eye with the tip of her knife, revealing an inch of black roots under the harsh red dye. She still didn’t seem to have registered anything. She didn’t even seem as worried as Emily would have expected if she and Rosie had been Jehovah’s Witnesses. I wonder who she thinks we are, Emily thought.

  “Becky Shaw?”

  “Mm,” the girl nodded, still smiling.

  “I’m Detective Chief Inspector Emily Harris. This is Detective Sergeant Rosie Lu. Is your mother in?”

  Becky scrutinised their badges. “Yeah, come in.” She motioned for them to follow with the hand that was holding the corn. “We’re just making dinner”.

  Perhaps she knows it’s something bad and her head has shut down in denial, Emily thought. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the reaction she normally got from teenagers. Most teenagers who weren’t shouting the odds about their rights or telling her to “fuck off outa my face” forgot the bravado and went back to being obedient little kids when they saw the badge. Then again most of the teenagers she spoke to weren’t chopping stir fry with their mothers.

  The cottage was laid out very traditionally, at odds with the crisp, modern décor. The kitchen was down a corridor, behind the reception room. Emily followed Becky, shoes clanking on the blonde wood; as she looked at Becky’s rolled-down socks she tried not to think what kind of mess her heels were making of the floor. On the inside it was the kind of place that makes you nervous, the kind of house where everything was both expensive and fragile, and where any mark would stick out like a boil. The pale spearmint walls were decorated with occasional pieces of Chinese calligraphy framed in black. By the door was a round maroon lacquer table with a display of honesty and bamboo in an asymmetrically curved white vase.

  Dr Haydn Shaw was in the kitchen. She still hadn’t looked up when Emily first saw her. She was working away at something in a giant stone pestle and mortar. Emily waited for a moment, wondering if she should allow a few more seconds of normality before she delivered the blow that would scar their lives; wondering when they would next have any normal time. Then again, the Martha Stewart perfection of it all was making her nervous. Or maybe there was just a part of her that couldn’t handle normal. The part that had been attracted by Tommy, she thought, surprising herself that his name came up so easily.

  “Dr Shaw?” said Rosie. Emily snapped back to alertness.

  “Hello.” Haydn put the pestle and mortar down and rinsed off her hands under a giant swan-necked tap. If she was apprehensive then Emily couldn’t sense it.

  “It’s the police, mum,” said Becky, before they could introduce themselves. “Detective Chief Inspector Harris and Detective Sergeant Lu.”

  “Death or handcuffs?” Haydn said completely evenly. So evenly that Emily wondered if she was on lithium. Whether they both were, come to that.

  “Is there somewhere we can sit down, Dr Shaw?” said Rosie.

  “It must be death then,” Haydn concluded. “Who is it? Let me guess. It’s Charles.”

  “Dr Shaw.” Emily reached out a hand and turned her shoulder to try and get Haydn to the sitting room. Or somewhere she could sit down. If the nonchalance is because she’s in shock, she thought, then she’ll faint and smash her head on one of those thick, expensive granite worktops any moment.

  “It is Charles.” Haydn sat down on a barstool. “What happened? Did the goose liver and truffles finally set up an impassable picket line in his aorta?”

  It began to dawn on Emily that perhaps this wasn’t shock or denial but absolute blind indifference. “We think Professor Shaw was poisoned.”

  “Someone’s killed Dad?” said Becky.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Shaw, we think your father killed himself.”

  “Mum?” Becky looked at her mother. As though she wants to ask permission to be sorry, thought Emily.

  “It’s OK,” said Haydn, holding out her hand to her daughter. “It’s OK.” Becky stood behind her mother, one hand on her shoulder, the other in her hand. Emily watched her shuffle closer as though for warmth, and close her eyes as she felt her mother’s clothing against her own. She wondered when the last time was that the Shaws had had any contact. She felt irritation building again and had to swallow it down.

  “What makes you think he killed himself?” Haydn asked.

  “We found a note,” said Rosie. “It wasn’t signed, but it seems to be his writing.”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you some questions, Dr Shaw; Miss Shaw.”

  “Of course,” said Haydn.

  “Is that OK with you, Becky?” Emily asked, pointedly, but by now the smile had returned to Becky’s face.

  “Of course it is.”

  “The note was rather cryptic. It said There’s nothing left to wait for. That was all.”

  Haydn was already laughing before Emily could ask if it meant anything to her.

  “I’m sorry?” Emily said, aware that by now her annoyance was showing in her voice. Fortunately Rosie was obviously aware too, and took a step forward as though to indicate that she would take over for the time being.

  “Well, my ex-husband certainly wrote that. Dear Charles,” said Haydn, “devoted his career. No, he devoted his life to waiting.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Rosie.

  “My husband, Sergeant Lu, was a theologian. An ethicist. He was paid to teach people about right and wrong, if you can imagine anything quite so absurd. Strictly in the theoretical sense, thank God.”

  This isn’t the first time this invective has been wheeled out, I’ll wager, thought Emily. It had the whiff of polish about it, and Emily wondered if Dr Shaw rehearsed it every time she met someone new. Or whether she just practised it to herself as she lay in bed.

  “His area of speciality was pleasure,” Haydn continued. “What gives us pleasure? How can we increase the pleasure something gives us? Should we allow or deny ourselves pleasure? His big idea, if you can call it that, was that the greatest pleasure comes from the things we wait for longest. He essentially spent his whole career trying to justify his predilections, old wine and seduction, the only two things he ever cared about.” Haydn stopped for a moment.

  Emily wondered if she had physically shivered, or if she had only felt the ice jumping in her spine. It was as though Haydn was pausing for dramatic effect before delivering a punch line.

  “It all boils down to the Tristan myth,” Haydn continued. “A cliché as old as his so-called idea.”

  “The what?” Emily asked, no longer bothered whether or not she let her irritation show.

  “Tristan and Isolde, Chief Inspector Harris. It’s a story that goes back a thousand years. It’s the story of a love that cannot be fulfilled, a desire that can only be consummated in death.”

  “Wagner wrote an opera about it,” Rosie chipped in, surprising Emily again.

  “Indeed, Detective Sergeant Lu. The point is that you spend your whole life yearning for someone, build yourself into a frenzy, to the point where your body and soul are about to burst and then you die together in an almighty climax that brings your whole life to a grand apotheosis.” She paused again. “It’s about never getting round to having a fuck because you’re worried it’ll be a let down.”

  “Did your husband have many affairs, Dr Shaw?” Emily asked curtly. Old wine and seduction. There had been empty wine glasses by Charles’ hand. Emily went over the image in her head. There were bottles on the table. Two bottles. One larger, one smaller. One was French; she wasn’t sure about the other one, but she remembered that the label had said it was from the 1970s. Old wine
.

  “I was one of many,” said Haydn. “Some of them were his students; some of them weren’t. He was pretty indiscriminate, but they were always top of their year in whatever their subject was, and they were never, for all his charm and importance, a pushover.”

  Old wine and seduction. Emily put the words together with Professor Shaw’s beautiful house and the feast laid out where she had seen the body, and she began to form a picture of Charles Shaw the sensualist. No wonder they got divorced, she thought.

  “And where were you this afternoon between two and four? I’m sorry, I have to ask.” She wasn’t sorry at all.

  “We were here,” said Becky, and Emily felt herself flush. She had allowed herself to get so wrapped up in Dr Shaw that she had forgotten about her daughter. She wondered how often that happened when people met the Shaws, and regretted her tone. “We were getting antsy, waiting for the rain to stop so we could go for a run.”

  “Thank you. I think that’s all for now,” said Emily, wondering how quickly she could wrap this up. “I really am sorry.” She looked over Haydn’s shoulder to Becky who smiled back. It was the same smile she had worn when she answered the door. She’s right on the cusp of adulthood, Emily thought. A year from now and that coldness will make you as callous as your mother. A year ago and it would have made you another rather sad victim. But now, sometimes you’re one, and sometimes you’re the other, and I’ll bet even you don’t know which is which.

  Emily sat back down in the car and looked at Rosie. There was no need to say anything. They both knew what the other was thinking – what the hell kind of family were the Shaw women?

  There was one thing they both knew did need saying. Emily wondered who would say it first when Rosie spoke. “Drink?”

  ____

  4

  Evening service at St Saviour’s Chapel was fuller than it had been since the students went home three months earlier. Members of the Senior Common Room, who would normally rather smash their port glasses and chew on the pieces than be seen at anything as irrational as a religious service, had gathered like pack dogs, ostensibly to pay their respects to Professor Shaw. In truth they had, of course, come for the same reason swarms of human beings form in any workplace: gossip.

  They left disappointed. Reverend Dr Hedley Sansom, the Warden of the College himself, had spoken. Then again his name had already been on the rota. There was absolutely nothing for them other than an announcement of the forthcoming Memorial Service. An invitation for that would appear in their pigeonholes tomorrow morning anyway.

  Standing amidst the pillars at the chapel door, Dr Sansom shook the hands of the congregation one by one, annoying them further by slowing down their exit and cutting short their drinking time before dinner. This may well have been his intention. He had no reason to curry their favour any longer. He had already announced that he would be retiring at the end of the year although he hadn’t yet found anywhere he particularly wanted to go. This had irritated the senior academics immensely, especially the ones who had wanted the job when he was appointed. Many still hoped their names might be thrown into the ring at some stage in the future. This meant they couldn’t afford to be seen to be resentful, which irritated them even more. Being Warden of St Saviour’s should be the pinnacle of anyone’s career. Coveted for a lifetime, it was a post usually prised away from the incumbent’s hooked grip only by retirement (at as late an age as family pressure and the onset of dementia would permit) or death. But Sansom was leaving aged 53, with at least 15 good years ahead of him, as though it had been just another step on the ladder. And not even a step on the way to anything. They would have hated it, but if he was going to Harvard they could at least have understood it. But he was retiring so that he could look around for something else, casual as anything. They seethed behind their rictus grins.

  One of the last smiles belonged to Barnard Ellison, Professor of Old Testament History.

  “Good evening, Barnard,” said the Warden.

  “Hedley.” Ellison took the outstretched hand.

  “Could I have a quick word before dinner?” Sansom steered Ellison further into the shadows. There was palpable relief amongst the remaining stragglers as the Warden unblocked their way, and they streamed quickly out into the evening sunlight of Martyr’s Quad.

  “What is it?” Ellison asked, shifting from foot to foot like a shopper trapped by the village busybody.

  “Look, I know you and Charles had your disagreements.”

  Ellison smiled noncommittally.

  “OK, let’s face it, he rubbed everyone up the wrong way at one time or another.”

  “He had strong opinions.”

  “And an equally strong personality. I’m aware of that.”

  “So, did you just want to chew over Charles’ traits and peccadilloes, or did you have a favour to ask?”

  “I was just getting to that.” Sansom leant back against the cold stone of the chapel, his face disappearing into the blackness.

  “I thought so.” Ellison turned to leave.

  “We go back a long way, Barnard, the three of us,” called Sansom out of the shadow.

  Ellison turned back to him, the evening sun framing his silhouette, masking his expression. “Do it yourself, Hedley.”

  “Yes. I would.” His even tone signposted the but that followed. “It wouldn’t really be appropriate though, would it?”

  “You mean it wouldn’t do to be seen taking sides when you’re hawking around for a new job?”

  There may have been a snort or a sigh; or it may have just been the verger closing a door somewhere inside the chapel. “I mean I’m not doing it,” said Sansom.

  “Don’t you think it would look better if the Warden spoke up for one of the college’s brightest lights? Showed more, what’s the right word? Solidarity. But then the college’s interests never have been your top priority, have they?”

  It was impossible to see if Sansom reacted at all, but his voice remained absolutely level. “I’ll say a few words at his funeral. For Haydn. But I’m afraid you’re speaking at the Memorial Service.”

  “And if I say no?”

  “The invitations have already been printed with your name on. They’ll be in people’s pigeonholes tomorrow morning. Besides, I’m sure you’d be much better placed than me to compose something suitably solemn.” Hedley pushed himself up from the stone. He ambled up the steps and out into Martyr’s Quad, turning right to walk the twenty yards or so back to the Warden’s Lodge. He smiled at Ellison. “And you’d certainly be better at composing something with the appropriate gravitas for the college you care so much about.”

  ____

  5

  The orange grey of night enveloped the top floor of Tommy’s house. On the carpet sifted piles of Professor Shaw’s papers threw shadows on the floor, but it had been too dark for a long while for Tommy to try and read. Slowly the straining chords of Mahler that came out of his sound system faded; the rush of the cars outside followed, and he was alone in the noise of his thoughts.

  Emily’s body pushing through cotton drenched blue by night. Her lips quivering in the shadows cast across her cheeks by spikes of hair leached grey. Her skin, sheening with anticipation, reaching, arching towards him with desire, cowering hidden beneath her shirt. The rise and fall of her breasts uneven as she fought to steady her breath, strained cruciform to remember why she mustn’t.

  Thinking of Emily’s body made him think of numbers. Like many of the world’s fastest arithmeticians, Tommy had synaesthesia. He experienced things through unusual or inappropriate senses. Numbers appeared in his mind as shapes, landscapes, the contours of a woman’s body. Answers to long multiplication sums would come to him not through calculation but a gradual transformation. He told people he saw a woman turning to make love to him. Numbers. 1972. 1982. The wines on Professor Shaw’s table. Eszencia from 1972, the finest Tokaji vintage from the whole communist occupation of Hungary. Chateau Cheval Blanc from 1982, the greatest mature Bordeau
x vintage of the last 40 years. 1972, 1982. Emily turning her back to him.

  In an instant the thoughts were gone and the cacophony of engines and piano chords rushed in to fill the vacuum.

  Tommy turned on the light. He’d set the disks and flash drives to one side. He would wait and buy a new, untraceable laptop before he touched them. He’d sorted the papers only by appearance. Most of the handwriting was too small and untidy for him to speed read, but everything fell into natural categories. There were articles and cuttings: printed, published material; there were letters and printed e-mails, correspondence; here were pages of handwritten notes; finally there were drawings, some plain, some annotated.

  It looked like academic research. Letters to and from colleagues, clippings to provide the examples to illustrate a theory. He wasn’t sure about the drawings. By and large they looked like notes for a normal book. Why would someone want Charles dead for the sake of a book?

  A wave of excitement went through him as he anticipated rifling through the papers. He was desperate to start, but he knew he should wait. He knew that launching helter-skelter into a new world was as sure a way as any to send him into the kind of manic episode he’d spent the last twelve years avoiding. As much as he wanted to find his way into the dead Professor’s mind, Tommy knew that if he was going to see this through the best thing was to flush the excess adrenalin out of his system, and that meant exercise.

  Tommy lived in the upstairs flat that he had rented as a student. When the old professor who owned the building died Tommy had bought the rest of the house from the man’s children. One by one the tenants of the other flats had moved out and Tommy hadn’t replaced them. He used the flats as showrooms, and put the rooms in main house to various uses, one of which was a gym. It wasn’t a high street style gym with steppers and rowers and MTV. It was a soundproofed, white-walled room with a bench, a bar holder, and four inches of rubber flooring over sprung wood. And metres of racking filled with dark, scuffed metal plates. The one concession to modernity was the Bose sound system on the mantelpiece.