The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  “After Becky was born he went to the Sorbonne for two years.” Haydn explained. Tommy registered absolutely nothing.

  “The Sorbonne? What was he working on?”

  Haydn laughed. For the first time Tommy caught something bright at the back of her eyes, “We were long past the pillow talk stage by then, I’m afraid, Tommy. We separated a while before he went. The reason I believe he gave was research on Thomas Aquinas. He published his book on Scholastic ethics when he got back, so I suppose we have no reason to doubt him.”

  ”Haydn?” Becky started flicking her fork in her hand twice as quickly. Tommy thought she’d kick him under the table if she was close enough.

  “Tommy.”

  “May I ask you something personal?”

  “You may ask anything, Tommy.”

  Becky was playing frantically with her fringe. Dark eyes staring from under red hair. Tommy blinked.

  “When you were first married to Charles you were happy weren’t you?” Strangely, he knew that this was true. But he had no idea how.

  “Yes, Tommy, I was.”

  “What did you talk about at night? Sorry, forgive me if that’s too personal.” Tommy didn’t know why he was asking. He knew it wasn’t anything to do with Shaw’s death. It was something he had never understood. When you are in love what do you talk about when the lights are out? When the sweat is drying off, the heart rate returning to normal, adrenalin slowing in the veins, what do you say? Especially when you are so different and independent, have such tunnel vision in your own specialism? It was a space he realised he had never had to fill. It was part of human nature that remained blank. Was that because it was somewhere he had never been, the absolute ease of love that plays itself out in unrehearsed rituals? Or was it why he had never been there? He felt an overwhelming desire to hold someone’s hand and see what the closeness felt like, and for a moment he wanted the Shaws to leave. He realised that in the time that they had had he and Emily’s had never fallen into the simple habits of togetherness. Now they never would. He clasped his fists under the table to feel contact on his skin and blinked to cut off the tears, half expecting to see Emily’s face on the back of his eyelids, fading mockingly as he loosened his grip. But he saw nothing.

  “Nothing, Tommy. We talked about nothing. No, that sounds like we chattered happily to ourselves. What I mean is that we said nothing.”

  “Just a comfortable silence?” He couldn’t imagine the silence being comfortable with someone else. Silences with Emily had been filled with tensions, waiting to split into arguments or tears. Comfortable silences were a delicious privilege of living on his own.

  “I never noticed. I was always too busy thinking.”

  Becky had at least settled. Now she knew that he wasn’t digging for information about Charles’ death.

  “Do you want a hand with pudding?” Becky offered as she emptied the last of the wine into her glass and swirled it against the light.

  Tommy glanced, out of courtesy he hoped she would think, at Haydn who smiled back that it was OK to leave her.

  “How’ve you been, Tommy?” Becky asked quietly when they were alone.

  “Exhausted.” Tommy reached into one of the dresser-cum-fridges in the drawing room and pulled out a tray of espresso glasses filled with flavoured crèmes.

  “Any progress?”

  “Plenty.”

  “Anything you want to share with me?”

  “You’re getting a little close to the loop aren’t you, the one you wanted to be kept out of?”

  “Sorry. I missed you over the weekend.”

  “Want me to make some time tomorrow to hang out?”

  “No, not if you’re busy, it’s just, you know, you’re going around asking questions, getting things clear in your head, and I’m sitting at home all day with things getting more and more screwed up, and you’re the only safety valve I’ve got.”

  “Want to stay over? I’m not up to thinking tonight anyway. We could watch a film and drink some more wine. Would your mother mind?” He was no longer desperate for her to go. He needed to unwind and so did she. With any luck they could unwind over something a long way from Charles Shaw.

  “I think she’d be glad to get rid of me for a night.”

  “Tommy, that was delicious.” Haydn said as she finished the last of her lavender crème, “Thank you so much for a lovely evening.”

  “It would always be a pleasure, Haydn.”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m interfering,” she continued. “But I’m going to go home now. I think it might be nice for Becky to have some time without me getting in her way. Would you mind if she stayed with you tonight? I know she wants to but she probably thinks I’d disapprove so she wouldn’t ask.”

  “I’d be delighted for her to stay. There are several rooms made up, all in their own unique styles.”

  ____

  39

  “Thanks for letting me stay, Tommy.”

  “That’s OK.” Already, now that they were alone, Tommy’s anxiety levels were rising and he wondered if he’d done the right thing. He knew she’d start to get suspicious if he kept putting her off. But he couldn’t cope with her questions yet.

  “When you were talking to mum earlier,” Becky said into her wine. “I thought you were going to start digging things up but you didn’t. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, I ask too many questions. I gave you my word, though. You can trust me.”

  “I know. Dad trusted you. Look, let’s talk about something else.”

  “Good idea,” he said, perhaps too quickly. He realised again that he’d forgotten this was a young girl who’d just lost her father. If he thought he was finding it hard to cope with the events of the last few days, what must she be going through? “Want to choose a subject?”

  Becky got up and paced around the room, looking at the carefully placed ornaments and the piles of samples that Tommy only really cleared away once or twice a month. She looked young, Tommy thought, with her weight back on her heels and her hands in her jeans pockets, still able to slouch without any danger of a stoop. Her head was cocked to one side and it made her hair fall straight down over her forehead. She stopped in front of a poster for a Delauney exhibition at the Pompidou Centre.

  “You travel a lot?” she asked.

  “A lot, yes.” That was one of the ironies of being Tommy. Half of his life he spent trapped inside his house, too frightened of the world to go outside. The rest of the time he wandered through it at will, going places that would terrify the average Brit.

  “Always for work? Seeing suppliers, picking up samples, getting a feel for the culture, getting themes for your rooms?” Her head was still hunched into her shoulders. She seemed to be questioning his things one by one as she looked at them. Who are you? Where do you come from?

  The truth was that she had hit the mark exactly. The moment he had his work head on, as soon as he was Tommi, it was as though he became invincible. As soon as he was just Tommy again his unbreakable shell exploded and he was just the petrified young man screaming on her father’s floor for the safety of home. The world of difference was summed up in that one changed letter.

  “Most of the time I go somewhere I pick something up for work. That’s never the only reason, though. There’s always a gallery I haven’t seen, a mountain I haven’t climbed, a valley to walk through or a stretch of sea to swim in.” He realised as he said it that that was also true. There was something about the unfamiliar that was less frightening than the world he knew. Maybe it was just the new sensations that he loved; maybe what he actually loved was being somewhere that wasn’t yet touched by failure.

  Now Becky was sitting, cross-legged on the floor, her chin resting on her clasped hands like a four-year old transfixed by their teacher’s fairy tales.

  “And wherever I go,” Tommy continued, “there are people I haven’t spoken to before, food I’ve never eaten – recipes to swap, drinks to discover, textures as much in the land
scape and the sky as the textiles. I can’t imagine not travelling.” It was a strange life, he thought as he listened to himself speaking. He could function in the bubble of his home; he thrived in the unknown. He just couldn’t cope with anything in between.

  Becky came and sat back down beside him. She didn’t look up and he couldn’t see her eyes. He couldn’t see them but he could feel hurt somewhere deep inside her. He put his hand on her chin but she turned away. Turned to avoid a kiss, but he was looking for her eyes and not her lips. Laughing and traffic. No, the only noise was the background of Wagner. “Hug,” said Becky, and her head fell onto his shoulder.

  “It’s been a hard week,” Tommy said. “But this bit will be over soon. I can’t tell you that it will all be so quick, I’m afraid.”

  “The funeral’s on Wednesday. We spent the day arranging it.” Her voice sounded a little more composed.

  No wonder she needed some time out, he thought. “Want me to come?”

  “Of course.” Becky sat up and picked her wine off the floor. “But not if it slows down finding dad’s killer.”

  “You didn’t tell me about your travels,” said Tommy, changing the subject back quickly.

  “I only really go when mum’s at a conference. I hang out at the galleries. The only place I’ve been on my own was eastern Europe this summer. There’s plenty of time to catch up with you, though.”

  “Did you enjoy it?” That seemed somehow a more appropriate question than simply asking her where she’d been.

  “I absolutely love it. I want to travel every moment I have spare. There’s too much to see for me to be able to see it all already. The more I wait the more there’ll be I never get to see. That’s a scary thought, isn’t it?” She pressed her head into his shoulder. Tommy felt tiny convulsions that he knew were tears. He felt them pushing his own tears away, as though the need to stay strong for her protected him from the darkness that was trying to fight its way out from within him.

  “Yeah.” She didn’t get that from her father, he thought, that impatience with life. That was more like him speaking. Tommy had never really understood the debate between more experiences or better experiences when there were just so many experiences to have. If people lived a thousand years maybe it would be an issue, but when they live fewer than a hundred can anything be worth the delay in gratification that comes from denial? It would have to be something qualitatively different. Something he had no knowledge of.

  TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 11, 2007

  ____

  40

  Tommy drifted in and out of sleep throughout the night, images playing themselves out in his head at random, combining and drifting apart as something deep within him struggled to make sense of things. Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated. Eyes staring hollow from under red hair. Becky’s eyes, hiding something dark. Different eyes, hiding nothing. “Fuck me.” A needle hanging from an arm that may have been a woman’s but was too thin to tell. Shaw sitting in a library in Paris counting money.

  Finally he woke and the pictures were gone. He breathed in deeply the cool freshness of cotton. Cool. He turned over to a new piece of pillow and felt the cold cloth on his cheek. “Rosie?” But there was no warm figure curled up by his side.

  “You’re awake, then?” came a voice from the doorway.

  “Eh?”

  “Coffee, sleepy?”

  “Becky?”

  “Unh-hunh. Who did you think I was? Who’s Rosie?” And then, as if realisation had struck: “Oh my God, not Sergeant Rosie?” Becky came and sat on the bed and thrust a mug of coffee in his face. From short range it smelled like dark roast Columbian, which was exactly what he needed.

  Tommy said nothing. It wasn’t a conversation he’d expected to be having. At least it was less difficult that having to explain what he’d found out about her sister in the last few days.

  “You’ve got a girlfriend, haven’t you?” Becky was sitting cross-legged slurping her coffee. She looked better without her make-up Tommy thought. Her hair looked less severe against her lips, clashed less with her eyes. He felt like he was back in college after a sleepover party, chugging down caffeine and dissecting who had snogged whom.

  “It’s too early to call her a girlfriend,” he said, wondering why on earth he was discussing his love life with her.

  “What does DCI ex-girlfriend Harris think about it?”

  “Emily doesn’t know,” he said, realising that this was yet another complication he’d walked into that he could do without. “She’s also happily married.”

  “Mm. So is this what you were busy at over the weekend?”

  “Hardly. I’ve been out doing the rounds like an overworked plod. Rosie, well, we had pizza Sunday night.”

  “I had pizza with mum on Sunday night but I didn’t call her name out in bed this morning.” She got up and took his cup from him, turning and heading to the kitchen. Tommy heard a sudden violent gush from the over-sensitive tap, and the crack of China on metal, and underneath the churn of water he caught the sound of Becky swearing to herself.

  He went through to the kitchen and turned the tap to a more manageable speed, holding her hand underneath it to rinse out a cut that hadn’t gone too deep. He picked the pieces carefully out of the sink and wrapped them in kitchen towel before binning them, tearing off an extra sheet for Becky. “I’ll cook us some pancakes and give you a lift home. I’ve got some serious investigating to do.”

  “Good idea,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. “You don’t want my clutzing to get in the way.”

  “Put it down to low blood sugar,” Tommy said, putting a jar of maple syrup on the side.

  *

  By ten Tommy was back in his study, sitting at his laptop with a small stack of floppies that looked like poker chips. He felt refreshed. He thought about calling Rosie and it felt good. If he had to be distracted, it was better to be distracted by Rosie than by mania, he reflected. The more he thought about her the more he thought that for all his initial worries, they weren’t the same thing. Best not to be distracted at all, though. He mixed a little jasmine, rose, and honeysuckle on his basalt smelling stone and closed his eyes. His breathing slowed and in his mind’s eye he was walking through a garden, hands brushing on honeysuckle and jasmine. Somewhere in the distance the spire of Seville Cathedral and the rhythmic tapping of flamenco guitar strings.

  He opened his eyes and put in a disk. Time to think first, whilst his mind was empty, let the thoughts percolate up slowly, see if they would follow his bidding.

  What were the questions he had for today? Other than who killed Charles Shaw. That was simple. What did Knightley do with Carol Shaw? Did Charles know about it and is that why he was killed? Scrap the second bit; that was a secondary question. What did it have to do with the armature, and what exactly was the armature for – what and who? Where did Shaw get his money and what did he do on his sabbatical, and where did Spain come into it? Was that connected to Carol too? And what did Hedley Sansom know about all of it that he wasn’t letting on? Tommy was sure that the motive for Shaw’s murder was in these questions. It wasn’t in his ideas about childhood. Not ideas in the abstract at any rate, but in something that happened to two particular children 18 years ago.

  Money, he thought. Money may not be the answer but it was important. Tommy thought of Charteris’ money, all £98,000, stored neatly in piles of £50 notes. What was it for? That was still bothering him. Maybe for a trip? To the Sorbonne? To Spain? Maybe, but surely it was for something else as well. Was this the money he the Professor made all those years ago? Was that it? If he found out how Shaw had made the money would he find the reason for his death? Was this the money Henry Wilde was looking for, that Charles had squirreled away somewhere far from his traceable bank accounts? He made a note to go through Shaw’s CV with a toothcomb, and to call the Sorbonne to check exactly where Charles had been and at what times.

  Tommy shut his eyes and made himself put the money to the back of his
mind. With a few clicks of the mouse Tommy opened the first disk. He wasn’t really expecting to find answers here any more, but he tried not to let impatience make him careless. Shaw had given him everything in the box. He would look at everything he could, just in case. He reminded himself of the need to be painstaking. If Shaw hadn’t found the answer then he had too look harder and closer – and smarter – than the Professor.

  The files on the first disk seemed to be a list of chapters, drafts for the book, all except one file, which piqued Tommy’s curiosity. It was a Word file, Things we can or should only do once. It was just the sort of thought experiment Shaw loved thinking up. He imagined the Professor trying to devise a mathematical formula to decide when he should do things: when the anticipation and the memory were in perfect equilibrium, when the disappointment of knowing that the thing is done would be outweighed by the potential disappointment of knowing that it would have been more pleasurable done yesterday. Tipping points and symmetries, the shapes and numbers that had covered the surface of Shaw’s mind.

  “So, Professor, what did you actually do with your life?”

  Tommy clicked the document open:

  First kiss – Can

  Realisation that you are finally in love – C

  Make the fundamental choice in your life – C

  Have sex with someone you have loved as long as you can remember – Should

  Drink the oldest bottle of Tokaji in the world – C

  Have Sappho read to you by the Andalucian moon - S

  Raise a child – S

  Go to the Bayreuth Festival – S

  Eat puffa fish – S

  Skull-fuck a trepanned baby  - S

  Tommy stared at the screen. Stay calm, he told himself. That was easier than he thought. Which suddenly made him realise that he had known all along what the armature was for. It was the last thought he had for an hour.