The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  “And is Clarissa happy to keep moving?”

  “You’re very good at reading people, aren’t you, Tommy?” she said, clearly realising he’d picked up on Mrs Sansom’s melancholy.

  Not you, though, he thought. Or your daughter.

  “Clarissa is, as you may know, the second Mrs Sansom, “she continued. “She and Hedley both know, although I doubt either has ever said it, that he only ever loved the first, but Valerie died. Hedley was ambitious, and a wife is an essential accessory in the circles in which he moves. There is no requirement for love, and certainly no expectation of fidelity, although I somehow suspect that Hedley has never strayed.”

  Haydn had stopped slicing beef and was rough chopping caper berries. Her hands had lost their absolute steadiness. It clearly wasn’t the moment to push the matter. Tommy took the meat board and sushi knife and, laying the flat side flush to the flesh, began to slice.

  Dinner was a delight, a single, simple course of beef, half the slices served raw, the other half flashed on a skillet, served with two finger bowls at the side of each plate, one with an olive oil and caper dressing, the other with watercress leaves and mustard seeds floating in miso soup. But, mindful of Becky’s watchful ear, Tommy had no more seams of information to mine. Nonetheless there germs of ideas in his head. Haydn Shaw’s hands shaking; Hedley Sansom leaving Oxford; one wife dead and in the ground, another just dead inside. Seeds of ideas floating in his mind like mustard seeds glistening in the corn flour gloss of miso soup. Floating in a finger bowl inviting him to taste.

  MARCH 1992

  Professor Shaw handed the sheets of paper back to him without a word. Tommy had asked him to supervise his doctoral thesis, for which he had sent a preliminary outline the week before.

  “Thank you,” said Tommy.

  “The Lips that Never Kiss. An interesting title,” said the Professor, as though the title of Tommy’s thesis were of more interest than the content.

  “It’s a reference to the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray…” Tommy began.

  “I am aware of the reference,” the Professor interjected. “And of her implied parallels between cunnilingus and the cross of Christ. And I am aware of the point you are making about the futility of putting off gratification until the afterlife.”

  “Not just…”

  Shaw raised his hand. “I’m also aware of the connection between the title and your contention that it is impossible for a man and a woman to share a mutually pleasurable experience.”

  Professor Shaw smiled. His sleek grey ponytail coiled around his silk jacket. His titanium eyes filled the room with equal measures of mischief and glee. “Tommy, there are no lips that never kiss; just some that are prepared to wait almost forever.”

  Tommy said nothing. He waited, following the Professor’s lead, waiting for him to finish his point. Finally Shaw spoke. “Our world is not structured against pleasure.”

  “Perhaps,” Tommy replied, “we can only experience pleasure because of the inequalities in the world, because we have to overcome something to attain it, to master something, or someone. Perhaps only power makes pleasure possible. Pleasure for itself; a kiss that is just a kiss, maybe they’re just myths.”

  Shaw smiled. “Very good. Pleasure does indeed get its character from having something to work against. Gearing, you could call it. But what it works against is something outside of both men and women. The obstacle that gives pleasure its nature is time. What gives us pleasure in the kiss is not that we have conquered our damsel like some medieval knight. What makes the kiss pleasurable, equally so for the woman as the man, is that in it we have momentarily conquered time. You shall not have me yet, Father Time.”

  His eyes were open but he was almost whispering, as though Tommy weren’t there. “I haven’t had my fill of delight; not yet, not as long as I kiss. Wouldn’t you wait for almost a lifetime to deliver a rebuke like that?” In an instant the Professor was out of his reverie and Tommy felt the chill from his eyes pin him to his chair.

  SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 8, 2007

  ____

  24

  Tommy lay in his bed. It seemed much smaller this morning. His eyes hurt but as soon as he closed them his heart raced and skipped and he felt as though the adrenalin would explode out of his skin. Last night he had been perfect company, but his social graces came at a cost to himself. The effortless bow to kiss someone’s hand had the serene curve of a swan’s neck, but he expended just as much effort below the surface. He had lived on his own ever since he left for college, and when he was honest he knew that if he didn’t he would not have managed the prolonged periods of sanity he’d enjoyed over the years. What was it that he found so hard about being in other people’s company? Was it the same thing that had stopped him fighting harder to keep Emily? He was good with people, he mused. He knew that by and large people liked him. And it wasn’t the case, as it had been with many of the depressives he had come across during therapy, that when he was with people he had to keeping up an exhausting act. No, the charming, sharp, sensitive Tommy was the real Tommy. Most of the time.

  Becky peered around the curtain in his head, and reflected in the darkness behind her questioning eyes, he felt as though he got a glimpse of an answer. He was good with people, could read people as quickly as print, on the whole, and say just the right thing to each. It was something that he was able to do especially well with people’s pain. It was as though his empathy were another sense, and when he was with people – most of all when he was with damaged people – their thoughts screamed from every direction and overwhelmed him until he needed to run for the quiet. But until he found Charles Shaw’s killer there would be no quiet. His house, his beautiful, quiet things would never drown out the shouts of Becky’s dark, damaged eyes.

  He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. He began one of the many techniques he had learned to cope with the darkness. Don’t fight the thoughts. That was the secret. Let them come. Let them play in the blank space on the ceiling. Slowly he dissociated himself from their comings and goings, becoming aware of them as if he were watching a scene taking place in the park. The only thing of himself he was aware of was his breathing, ragged at first. Deeper, slower now. He listened to the noise it made, to the pulling in of the air, so deep that it seemed to pull the night into his lungs, the grey-blue empty, sleeping night; to the sigh of the gentle escape of pollution filtered away from him. Slow, rhythmical, a long way from the scenes flashing by on the ceiling, scenes slowing down, greying into the plaster, until there was only the sound of breath, and then nothing.

  Tommy got up and checked his heart rate, which had fallen to a pleasing 40 beats. It was best not to stoke it up, he thought, and poured himself a smoothie, foregoing the usual coffee. He laid out the day in his head, drawing a schedule into his mental diary, being careful to allow himself time to doodle in the margins, to dissipate any excess energy that thinking about it might bring. What did he want to learn today? Who killed Charles Shaw? He let himself take time over erasing that in his head and drawing a smiley in the margin. Realistically what did he want to learn today? Realistically. That was a word that most of the time he found a ridiculous and unnatural constraint, but given the state he had been in when he woke, it felt abnormally apt. There was only so much adrenalin the body can push through itself without protesting and shutting down altogether.

  Realistically, he repeated to himself, what did he want to learn today? In single, unexpanded bullet points. He drew four equidistant dots on his mental diary page. One. Who or what exactly had killed the first Mrs Sansom and when? No, that was two questions. Out with the rubber. One. Who or what had killed the first Mrs Sansom? Two. When had the first Mrs Sansom died? Three. Why had Stephen Knightley paid so much attention to Haydn? Four. Haydn. What did he feel about Haydn? He looked at the question written down and wondered what it meant. An open question would never do, but it was such an intriguing question, and when he had stopped turning it over and gone back to hi
s mental diary he found that he had sketched an elegant line drawing of her, like a sketch from a 1950s Dior fashion show, down the side of the page. It was a pleasing image, not one to rub out. He tore the mental page neatly, filed the sliver a few leaves further on, and rubbed out the question. Four. Why exactly did Charles Shaw leave Haydn?

  He changed the colour of his mental pencil to write in the action points that would lead to his answers. Beside three and four he wrote Stephen Knightley’s name in red. For one and two, well, he could do worse than to get out his multi-coloured retractable ballpoint and write Google.

  Tommy sat his laptop on a piece of felt on his desk, quickly putting a post-it in his mental diary to buy a new laptop to go through Shaw’s peripherals, and started googling. He figured that sooner or later he would end up at the Oxford Mail, but he wanted to see where he might be taken on the way.

  Valerie Sansom death seemed to be a good set of search terms to start with. He soon changed his mind as he scrolled through the first three pages, through a couple of snippets that were clearly relevant but many more that contained journal articles by a leading Australian pathologist.

  OK, he’d triangulate in from the other extreme. Valerie Sansom death Hedley St Saviour’s Oxford. Bingo. 11 matches on the screen. He clicked the “show similar” link and brought up all 33 items. Clearly not all of them were relevant. The illustrious Antipodean Valerie Sansom had, it seemed, elaborated upon the existential aspects of her daily experience of mortality at a conference on all aspects of death in Princeton where Hedley was also speaking.

  That left 25 hits. Some of them seemed to be from online versions of the St Saviour’s Annual Report, a couple from the Gazette, which was the University’s mouthpiece for disseminating official news about itself, and a few from the Oxford Times and Mail. Looking at the summaries the word that stood out was suicide.

  Tommy clicked a link to the Oxford Mail archive:

  Old College Hand Appointed Warden of St Saviour’s 14 Years After Tragedy

  Reverend Dr Hedley Sansom, currently Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Head of the Faculty of Divinity at Princeton University has been appointed the new Warden of St Saviour’s College. Professor Sansom, who replaces retiring Warden Geoffrey Maynard, spent 4 years at St Saviour’s in the late 1980s, where he held a College Fellowship and University Lecturership in the Philosophy of Religion. During his stay he published the widely acclaimed book, The Devil’s Tea Party.

  Sansom left Oxford shortly after the tragic suicide of his wife, Valerie, in 1990 to take up a post at Tübingen University in Germany. In 1995 he became Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin, a position he left in 1998 to move to his current position at Princeton. In his years away from Oxford, Sansom developed a reputation not only as an academic but as a supreme fundraiser, bringing money from business and private donors to create new buildings for libraries and research facilities, as well as endowing many chairs and projects in perpetuity. He returns as Warden and College Chaplain with his second wife, Clarissa, alumna of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

  The newspaper articles all referred to Sansom’s appointment as Warden. To get the original reports of the death Tommy would have to go to the Oxford Mail offices and the physical archive. That would have to wait until Monday.

  He tried replacing death in the search engine with suicide, and various other permutations, but it seemed that St Saviour’s Wardens were simply not celebrity enough to make any of the multitude of internet conspiracy sites.

  Tommy spent half an hour in the workout room, leaching the excess adrenalin from his body, and rested in the bath, lavender oil forming tiny reflective shards on the surface. He watched the droplets drift and collide, forming growing pools, oil running over the membranes of his mind. The answer to Charles Shaw’s death was in his book, or possibly in the research for his book, and his book was about children. For centuries people had been killed for their ideas. As a theologian Tommy knew how easily the outside world laughed off the notion that an idea could ever be motive enough for a person’s basest or grandest actions. He knew just how powerful ideas really were to those who believed them. Especially when those ideas left the sickening rankness in the lining of your soul that Tommy got when he thought of the Professor’s papers piled high on his desk.

  Even so, it was much more likely that there was something specific in there, something about a particular child; something about Becky, or about Carol. Charles and Haydn’s divorce, Stephen Knightley forced into making a choice, Valerie Sansom’s suicide, Hedley Sansom leaving the country, the birth of twins, one living and one dead. Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. Either Charles Shaw did something, or he knew who had done something. Now someone had found out what it was and killed him, either for what he did or for what he knew. Tommy splashed his face in the fragrant, viscous water. He wanted it to be the latter, but such hopes had no place in his thoughts now. The answer was in Shaw’s mind, not in his. And it was in the formerly close-knit group of colleagues he was being drawn into. And if he found it he would have to find a way to tell Becky.

  ____

  25

  “John Radcliffe Women’s Health Centre. Good morning.”

  “Good morning,” said Tommy. “Could I speak to Obstetrics, please?”

  “Let me put you through.”

  Tommy waited. “Good morning, Obstetrics.”

  “Hello, could I speak to Dr Knightley, please?”

  “I’m afraid Dr Knightley won’t be in until 3 today. Can I take a message?”

  “No, thank you, I’ll call back this afternoon.” Tommy put the phone down. As soon as he had done so, it rang. “Tommi,” he said, the ee sound at the end not so much shortened as accentuated.

  “Is that how you greet your clients, Tommy?” Becky asked.

  “It is when I have any clients.”

  “And you don’t at the moment?”

  “Not any new ones, no. I’m too busy looking for murderers and drinking coffee and beer with 18 year olds.”

  “Which is why I called,” she said. “Coffee.” It didn’t appear to be a question. “How exactly do you make your money, by the way, Tommy? I don’t think I’ve actually seen you design anything yet.”

  “When I have clients, they pay very well,” he answered, which was true. Possibly not by their own standards, the record producers and Formula One impresarios, but by anyone else’s. Not that he was sure much of the time exactly why he needed the money he had, what it was that money gave him, other than guilt that he spent most of his life feeling worse than the mass of people that had so much less than he did. “That’s something I wanted to talk to you about as it happens.”

  “What? You want me to pay you? Like a PI?”

  “No,” said Tommy. “I want to know how your dad made his money.” He thought of the piles of notes in his kitchen drawer, of the vast cellar under Number 37, of the priceless antiques and the classic cars in which Shaw had cruised the streets of Oxford. The money had been bothering him. He needed a clean laptop, a little bit of petrol and maybe a new cummerbund if he was going to be hanging around St Saviour’s for very long; possibly some economy flights to wherever to speak to Shaw’s colleagues, but £100,000? And Shaw must have realised that Tommy was hardly penniless himself. He had begun to wonder if the Professor really had intended the cash for him. It was a bit too late to go to the police now, though.

  “Meet me at the Kings Arms in half an hour?” said Becky. “I don’t know, by the way,” she added. “He’d been rich as long as I can remember.”

  “Your mum never said anything about it?”

  “No, and for fuck sake don’t start asking her. See you.” Becky hung up.

  Tommy wondered. As far as he could see, Haydn Shaw had money and a few expensive things, but hardly the limitless wealth Shaw would have needed to fill Number 37. If Charles Shaw had been rich as long as Becky could remember, then either Haydn was sitting very discreetly on a fortune, or there was a tiny window a
fter the divorce when Charles made his money. He would dearly love to know which. It was a shame Shaw’s lawyer was dead.

  *

  “Thanks for coming last night,” Becky said. She had already fetched them both a double espresso. So much for keeping the heart rate down. “Mum appreciated it. The Sansoms are tiresome. Well, you saw that.”

  “More like a well-rehearsed stage act than dinner guests,” said Tommy, although he had a feeling there was more to the Sansoms’ double act than the desire to keep up appearances.

  “Yeah. God, imagine being a fly on the wall when they’re on their own.”

  “I doubt you spend much time on your own when you’re head of an Oxford college. So what did you want to see me for?”

  “Do I have to want to see you for something?” Becky asked. Tommy looked at her fire engine red hair with the sun flaming behind it. The blonde roots were showing almost a centimetre. He thought she was slowly falling into disrepair. Maybe it was a good job. If he didn’t feel sorry for her then going round in endless circles like this would have made him told her to get lost long ago. He thought of what she’d been through and regretted it as soon as he thought it.

  “Well, it depends how quickly you want me to get on with finding your father’s killer,” he said, doing his best to hide any exasperation.

  “I appreciated you coming too, you know.”

  “Thank you. I enjoyed it. Your mother cooks beautifully.”

  “My mother does everything beautifully,” she said. “as I’m sure you noticed.” She waited before adding, as if as an afterthought, “Sorry, it’s none of my business.”

  Damn right it’s not. It wasn’t the first time she’d brought the subject up. Was she trying to get him to be a surrogate father or something? he wondered