The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  ____

  37

  Tommy stopped for a coffee at Convocation House, the tea shop attached to the University Church of St Mary Magdalene on the High Street, and then made the short trip back to St Saviour’s. Fortunately he’d never had tutorials with Professor Ellison. Stories from those who had were of a man who loved his own inconsiderable wit rather more than his students’ intellectual welfare. He also made many of his female students feel uncomfortable – not, they put it, because he was a creep, but because he’d spent all his life in single sex cloisters and seemed to spend tutorials constantly surprised by female company. At least having him tongue-tied meant they didn’t have to listen to his jokes, some of Tommy’s friends would say.

  Professor Ellison’s accommodation took up the southwest corner of Martyr’s Quad. Tommy knocked. Tommy could hear hard leather soles approaching on the flagstones. He felt his anxiety levels rising.

  “Hello.” Ellison stood in the doorway with his head tilted to one side, neither inviting him in nor blocking his way. Tommy’s anxiety wasn’t receding. Ellison had none of his contemporaries’ social pleasantries. In Knightley Tommy had found this social diffidence rather appealing. In Ellison he found it trying. It was as though the Professor made him feel like he was walking on sand.

  “You may or may not be expecting me,” said Tommy.

  “Obviously,” Ellison said, as though affirming Tommy’s summary of the law of the excluded middle.

  “I was hoping you might have a few minutes to tell me a bit about Professor Shaw’s book.”

  “Come in, come in,” said Ellison. “I don’t think I’m booked up yet this morning. Tea?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Ellison took Tommy past a cut-out in the floor where a staircase led down into the basement, and into his study. The study was a vast room with ceilings that must have been five metres high or more. Every wall was filled to the top with bookshelves, all painted in a white that had been yellowed by years of Ellison’s little roll-ups, one of which he picked up from his desk and lit as he sat down. Tommy sat on a battered leather chair ten feet or so from Ellison’s desk and wondered if his voice would echo in the vast room with next to no furniture breaking up the space.

  “How have you been, Tommy? Everyone was, well, very concerned for you, but I gather that you’ve made something of a name for yourself in your new field.” Tommy felt the insincerity seeping out of Ellison’s pores.

  “I’ve been very well for a long time now, thank you.” Tommy gave an equally insincere smile back, and wondered if the Professor would step outside of his ego long enough to pick up on it. “Given you concern for me I rather thought I might have heard from you in my new capacity.” Tommy looked around the room, which lacked, as far as he could see, a single item of any personality. Professor Ellison was independently wealthy. Very wealthy. His grandfather had made a fortune in the early days of the canning industry and the family company still did very well from food storage solutions. Evidently he’d spent none of it on home comforts.

  “I leave all of that to my wife, I’m afraid. And in a house we actually own. The all-seeing eye of the great architect in the Works Office would never forgive me if I lifted a paintbrush in anger here.”

  “Professor Shaw’s book,” said Tommy, already tired of the inanities. “From what you said it was going to make quite a splash. Did he ever talk about it?”

  “He talked about little else. You know what he was like, anything to get a citation. Never actually gave away his big ideas, though.” Ellison sipped a cold cup of tea, his lips curling around the edge of the cup as he made a sucking sound like a wine taster taking in air. He had aged neither well nor badly, but looked like a man in his mid fifties who had led a life that was little out of the ordinary in any way. That was, by and large, from what Tommy understood, true. The Professor had had one wife, two children, and a very successful career. It had faltered when it became apparent that the big offers from America wouldn’t come, but it still provided enough kudos for most egos.

  “You said that it was about children; and from the way you said it I assume that it wasn’t about the ethics of designer babies.”

  “Absolutely not. I think he found children rather problematic. Well, I suppose it’s only understandable.”

  “In what way?”

  “In what way understandable?” Ellison raised a bushy dark eyebrow that stood out against his white hair. Tommy thought he looked like Father Ted

  “In what way problematic?” Tommy corrected.

  “Well, I suppose the basic problem he saw is the one that the church has had problems with for centuries, the problem of the so-called innocent child. You know the rather tedious questions, where do they go when they die? Heaven, or limbo as our Catholic friends used to have it? Are they innocent at all or are they all tainted with original sin? And if they are innocent, when do they cease to be and start to be guilty? Standard problem cases. Two fifteen year-olds having sex. At midnight one of them turns 16 and becomes a paedophile. Thompson and Venables murder James Bulger and people want them strung up, yet if someone had a quick fiddle in their trousers they’d have been poor victims. Rather banal stuff that, frankly, Philip Pullman did rather better.”

  “And he gave no hint what his big idea was?” Tommy tried not to look too interested, and tried not to look as though he wasn’t looking. Maybe it would have been easier if he’d asked for a cup of tea after all. He wanted to see whether the question bothered Ellison.

  “Not that I could understand. He occasionally made some rather postmodern comments about children not being anything in themselves except signifiers, empty vessels onto which we project our own meanings and choices. From what I understand that’s more your sort of thing.”

  “Indeed,” Tommy said. “I doubt he would have called them empty vessels, though. That would be a term he might have saved for the wombs that carry them. He may have called them blank screens.”

  “God I hate that bollocks,” Ellison said. “Whatever happened to proper theology?”

  Tommy laughed. It hadn’t been intended as a joke but he couldn’t help himself. People like Ellison were what happened to proper theology, he reflected. They took it out to the desert and desiccated it. He was pleased with the image and laughed a little more.

  “He always liked that bloody perverse streak in you, you know, ever since you arrived.”

  “I remember I particularly enjoyed my interview with him.”

  “He talked about it, you know, during the selection meetings afterwards.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Oh yes. You were always his little protégé, singled out for special treatment.”

  “Special treatment?” Now Tommy was interested, and he knew that he had shown it. He could feel Ellison muzzling at it like a doe hungry for rut.

  “How many undergraduate rooms in St Saviour’s do you think had their own private kitchen?”

  It had been the source of conversation and envy that Tommy had ended up in a room in Cecil Quad that not only had its own private bathroom but a kitchen as well. It was where he had honed the culinary skills his grandfather had passed him, where he had tried to seduce Emily unsuccessfully with the finest food. He’d always simply assumed he was lucky.

  “One,” said Ellison. “That’s how many, and Charles leaned on the accommodation officer to make sure you got it. Why do you think that was, Tommy?”

  “I don’t know.” He had absolutely no idea.

  “Grooming you as his successor, that’s what everyone thought. Which is why we were all so disappointed with what happened. But, as you say, things are working out for you after all. Not for Charles, though.” The comment hung in the air. Tommy decided to leave the Professor to his glee.

  ____

  38

  Tommy collapsed into the bath, fresh from his workout. He was exhausted. It felt like he hadn’t recharged for days. He needed time to think everything through, time away from anything t
o do with Charles Shaw so that his unconscious could go to work on the backlog it was building up, but too many things were bubbling around his head. Perhaps preparing dinner for Becky and Haydn would occupy just enough of the unquiet part of his mind.

  He hoped they’d arrive and leave together, that he wouldn’t have to spend time alone with Becky. She wouldn’t want to ask him how things were going. He wouldn’t want to tell. Neither of them would be able to resist trying to have the conversation with their eyes, and constantly looking away at the last minute to avoid it. He wanted to ask her if she had ever felt the kind of telepathic link twins talk about feeling, even when they don’t know they have a twin. He wanted to ask her if she was old enough to remember when it stopped. He wanted to stare into the blackness of her eyes and see if this was the darkness at her centre, the secret about herself that she didn’t even know. He wanted to know if Carol was the light that had gone out.

  Into her eyes, underneath her tired red fringe. He lifted her chin and felt a dead weight. She managed to turn a cheek in case he tried to kiss but he was reaching for her eyes and not her lips. Straggles of hair draped over a skull, lank red matching the red of the eyeballs. A glimpse of flesh in the neon coming in through the curtains, pock-marked and punctured. Screaming and laughing and engines outside. “Fuck me,” monotone and phlegmy, “That’s it, fuck me.”

  A splash and a shiver, water gone cold. Tommy gasped and opened his eyes. He could feel the gooseflesh on his skin. He pulled the plug and towelled himself off.

  It was already 5 o’clock. He pulled on a thick polo neck but he was still shaking. He couldn’t get the image out of his head. Dead eyes looking at him from under a cheap red fringe. Not Becky’s eyes. He didn’t know whose they were, where he had seen them; whether he ever had seen them.

  He poured himself a smoothie and set about his ingredients with what was left of the afternoon. Maybe the time pressure would occupy his mind. It was a good job he had four courses to prepare. None of it would take particularly long to cook, but everything needed to be ready to go exactly on schedule.

  First of all he took out the meat, a grouse that was at the height of its season. He had decided against wrapping it in bacon to keep it moist. He could get much richer and more complex flavours by fatting from the inside and out, in the stuffing and under the skin. He took a pat of unsalted butter and a block of speck, and cut equal pieces from each. The speck was a little too hard to manipulate with a fork so he blended it into a puree before putting it into a bowl with the butter and mixing the two together. Next he took some sage and hyssop and tore them in, grated a little nutmeg and allspice, two or three strands of saffron for the groundnotes, and a black summer truffle from the Perigord, which he sliced into the bowl. He set the fork aside and used his fingers to bring everything together, feeling with the tips when the mix was just right. He took about half out and made a sausage in his left hand. With his right he lifted up the skin of the grouse just enough to get his fingers underneath and work the near-liquid across the breast and over the thighs. The bird had been hung just long enough to help him, not so long as to make the skin burst.

  He toasted a handful of pistachios with crumbs from equal amounts of stale rye and sourdough bread in a hot, dry pan and put them into the bowl along with half the insides of a fig the other half of which he ate whilst flicking the breadcrumbs in the pan. A thimbleful of 30 year old MacCallan finished off the stuffing, which he again worked gingerly into a sausage to go inside the bird.

  Finally Tommy stood back and admired the little game bird sitting in its cast iron roasting dish. He closed his eyes and took in every one of the smells from his hands. His nostrils flared in the evening sunlight that was streaming in through the windows, and he could barely remember who it was he had coming for dinner. Nothing mattered except the exquisite blend of sensations, and the textures of the fruits and fishes he was yet to prepare. Every synapse that fired in his head arced itself towards the common goal of preserving everything that was good in his ingredients.

  Every conscious synapse that is. Far deeper below the folding membranes of the cortex, beyond the reach of any sunlight the trepanner might let in, other synapses flashed and flared their secret messages, slowly shuffling pieces that, taken separately, were too disturbing for Tommy to face. They were slow roasting, accreting slowly in the darkness, not yet fully formed but getting closer every moment he left them be.

  He was just bringing a decanted bottle of Burgundy down to the dining room when the front doorbell rang.

  “Good evening, Tommy,” said Haydn as he opened the door. “Thank you so much for asking us over.”

  “Haydn.” Tommy took her hand, kissed her lightly on the middle knuckle and turned her like a dancer to take her jade green wrap.

  “Hey, Tommy. I was beginning to forget what you looked like.” Becky had already taken off her cropped denim jacket and handed it to him with a peck on the cheek. “Have you been a busy boy?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it.” Not that he was going to test the hypothesis.

  “Unlike you, I’m afraid, I have little imagination for gifts,” Haydn said as they walked through to the reception room. She handed Tommy what looked like a small cigar holder, “so I’m afraid I brought you wine.”

  Tommy could feel her eyes on him as he took the tiny packet. He saw her register that he knew what was in the container. He took out what looked like a test tube of liquid amber. “Stanza,” he said quietly, holding it to the light, recognising at once one of the fabulously rare 100 millilitre phials of unctuous Eszencia, bottled as collectors’ editions only in the very finest vintages of the 1990s.

  “Now you can have indulgence with you everywhere you go, even on an aeroplane,” Haydn said.

  “Just like the great critic Raymond Postgate,” Tommy replied.

  “Who carried a bottle of Tokaji with him everywhere he went, so that he might have it to hand at the moment of his death.” Haydn smiled and for a moment Tommy thought that there had been a moment of connection in their shared knowledge. “Which sounds rather like the kind of romantic fancy that Charles would have espoused,” she continued, and the flicker of recognition between them went out.

  Tommy handed her a drink and motioned for her to sit.

  “This is a beautiful room.” She folded her pale brown silk shift dress underneath her as she sat down on the Barcelona chair with her ice cold glass of aquavit.

  “I think it’s the closest I have to your preferred style. I’m afraid that turning my home into a set of showrooms requires a little too much serendipity for anyone to get an idea of my own taste.”

  “Not even in your bedroom, Tommy?” Becky grinned.

  “I don’t generally take my visitors to my bedroom.”

  “Generally?”

  “Let me fetch you a little amuse bouche.”

  “A ferme bouche, you mean.” She smiled.

  It was a strange dynamic, Tommy thought as he brought them tiny shot glasses filled with what he called pearl kisses – iced gazpacho with a scallop floating on it, topped off with a rose petal. Haydn’s serenity never seemed broken by her daughter’s slightly spiky side. He wondered if this was because she was comfortable enough with him that she didn’t worry about superficial niceties, whether she loved Becky so much that behaviour didn’t matter, or whether she simply saw their public manners as different but equal. Perhaps she just didn’t care. Had she really buried the wounds of 18 years ago so deep that they left no trace on her, like the layers of sediment built up over fossil remains? Or was all of it just a giant open sore that she constantly cauterized with indifference to keep the nerve endings numb?

  There was so much that Tommy wanted to know about Haydn. With everyone else he had found himself involved with over the past few days he didn’t feel he had had a problem. If he couldn’t ask exactly the question he wanted he could at least ask a question that bordered on the subject and then scan the reaction. With Haydn that was impossible. He was t
ransfixed by her taste, her manners, every detail of which was impeccable in every way. Everything was as pristine as a surgeon’s instruments, and yet he wondered if maybe she wasn’t closed at all, just empty. But that was just part of it. As long as Becky was here he could see from the twitches and the nervous energy she was burning up that she was watching everything he said, everything he so much as implied. There was a danger that her protection of her mother would end up stifling the truth. That was the other thing that was out of place in their relationship. The protectiveness worked the wrong way round.

  He tried to conceal his delight when Haydn brought the subject up herself.

  “You know, Tommy, Charles never talked about you before he walked out. He talked about a lot of students, but never about you. Yet it seems from what people have told me that you were his protégé.”

  “Professor Shaw never taught me as an undergraduate,” Tommy said, not wanting to point out that by the time he knew the Professor the Shaws had long been divorced. “In fact, aside from my interview I don’t think we ever spoke until the summer before I started my Masters, when he agreed to supervise me.”

  “No, I suppose you would only have been what, at the end of your first year when he went on his extended sabbatical?”

  “I don’t think I was ever aware that he’d been on sabbatical.” He tried to make it sound throwaway, to weave the thread into conversation without Becky noticing. Becky was making too great a show of mopping up her lime butter sauce as she listened. “I’m afraid I didn’t pay much attention to people. I turned up at lectures I liked the sound of, and read books that helped me with ideas, but I’m afraid that if I didn’t think I needed to footnote something I probably couldn’t tell you who said it.”