The Company of Fellows (12 page)

For a second
he felt a thump of sadness hit him in the stomach. He had mapped
his life out even clearer than she had hers. He had almost got
there then smack, he got ill and that was it. Fifteen years later
there she was, at rest, at ease, at home. And he was still just
part of the white noise that went on around her.
Enough navel-gazing
, he
said to himself.
Time to get
on.

“
Hey,” he sat
opposite her. “Should I get one too, or is this a flying
visit?”

“
Go
ahead.”

“
Fancy another
one?”

“
Yeah, I’ll
have an Americano, please.”

“
So,” Tommy
said on returning, scissoring his legs over the slatted bench
without spilling the coffees. “You wanted to see me.”

“
I asked to
see you,” Emily corrected.

“
Mmm.” Tommy
smiled.

“
We’re not
looking for anyone else in connection with Professor Shaw’s death.
I thought you’d want to know.”

Tommy took
this in. Perhaps for a moment his subconscious considered
challenging her; but the thought never made it any
further.

“
So he killed
himself?”

“
We think so,
yes. With rat poison.”

“
Did you say
yesterday it was in his wine?”

“
That’s what
we thought, yes. But it turns out it was in his water.”

Tommy thought
about it. Whoever killed him obviously wasn’t totally stupid.
They’d given themselves a fighting chance of having Charles’ death
written off as suicide. And it appeared to have worked – in the
police’s eyes at any rate. Then again the police didn’t exactly
have all the evidence. He suddenly felt uneasy, tried to scan the
milling tourists for anything amiss. Had the killer known that the
police wouldn’t get the whole picture? Did they know Charles had
warned Tommy? He didn’t want to think what it would mean if they
did.
Get a grip
,
he said to himself, hoping Emily hadn’t sensed his
distraction.

“
That sounds
more like the way he’d kill himself than poisoning his wine,” he
said.

Emily spooned
the froth from her Americano. “So what did you see,
Tommy?”

“
Sorry?”

“
When you were
looking at me from behind the entrance to the Sheldonian. What did
you see?”

Tommy felt a
wave of relief that the conversation had moved on. “Aside from a
shrewd detective?” He smiled. “I saw someone happy with where they
are.”

“
I
am.”

“
You and your
husband,” he said, sensing her stiffen and kicking himself that he
had raised the subject as soon as the words left his lips. “Do you
have children?”

“
No,” she
said. “No, we can’t.”

Idiot
. He kicked himself. Why was it
he could mix effortlessly with people from any class or background,
charm them, make them feel like royalty even, but Emily could still
make him act like a klutz.

“
What about
you?” she said. For the second time he was glad she’d rescued the
situation by changing the subject. “Are you happy with where you
are?”

“
Well,” he
said. “I’ve learned not to beat myself up when I’m not.”

“
I heard about
your breakdown,” she said, as though that was what he
meant.

“
I think
everyone must have done. I’m better now,” he added, knowing that
like an alcoholic this was something that would never be more than
partly true. “If you’re wondering about Becky,” he added, “she’s
going to need a friend over the next few weeks. That’s all it is.”
As though that’s what she had meant.

“
I really
don’t care.” She looked as though she meant it. He felt a twinge of
disappointment.

“
It’s good to
see you, Em, you know. You look good.”

“
Assuage your
guilt to see me happy does it?” He could tell what her eyes looked
like under her glasses. It was a look he’d known well. A look that
said
There, I know you don’t like it but
I’ve hit the nail on the head, haven’t I?
“Sorry,” she said. “That’s not fair.”

It was
probably more than fair, he thought. “Do you want to have lunch
some time?” he said, knowing it would be god to go before he said
anything else stupid. Or before she hit the mark again. “Your
husband as well, of course.”

“
I’m not sure
that’s a good idea. I don’t know that I’ve always given you the
best reviews to David.”

“
David.” He
played with the name, put it to the featureless face he had
imagined in the gym.

“
I might give
you a call some time for coffee, though.”

“
That would be
good,” he said.

“
Yeah, it
would. Goodbye, Tommy.”

He was
relieved as she swung her legs out from the bench. “Take care, Em,”
he said, but she was already on her way.

Tommy swilled
his espresso round and chugged it back. He watched the parties and
the walking tours jostling on Catte Street, snapping the replica of
Venice’s Bridge of Sighs that connected the buildings of Hertford
college on their mobiles, peering into the rotunda of the Radcliffe
Camera library, unaware that the people they could see inside were
probably only American high school kids rip-off summer course. He
wondered, after a while, if Emily was lurking somewhere watching
him, trying to get a handle on the new image of him as he had done
with her. He wondered how different it would be from the old
one.

____

16

Tommy needed
to bathe before sitting down with Shaw’s papers again. Somehow just
the thought of them made him feel dirty. He followed his bath with
a long coldwater shower. Maybe he thought it would close his pores
and keep out the rankness.

He sat in his
study in the evening cool, wearing only a light cotton galabiyya.
Pages of Professor Shaw’s handwritten notes flopped across his
desk. Tommy wanted to read through them and feel some kind of
pattern emerging from them, just as the Professor had done. He
wanted to know exactly what ideas had formed in Charles’ mind. Just
what was it that was in his head that had made someone want to kill
him? Whatever it was, it had grown there like a cancer out of the
papers he had left Tommy. Maybe it was there in plain sight.
Somehow he thought it wasn’t; not if Shaw had needed him to find
it.

He began
looking. Many of the themes he found were familiar. There were
references to art, to the depiction of the Holy Spirit, to the
Madonna and Child, the murder of the innocents. There were
references to the production of art, to the process of writing, to
the long loving care of the painter, inevitably to the craft of the
wine grower. Other references were to contemporary events and
modern culture: the James Bulger murder, the separation of
conjoined twins (with extracts from the script of David
Cronenberg’s film Dead Ringers), the declining birth rate in parts
of Europe.
Children
, Tommy thought. That’s what all these things had in common:
children. There were historical and sociological references too:
the age of consent to sex and marriage, the history of arranged
marriage, the use of children as soldiers, schooling ages,
attitudes to paedophilia.

Tommy could
feel the outlines of pictures in his head. He wondered if they were
the same ones Shaw seen. It made him feel like a student again. He
forgot why he was looking, lost, after all this time, in the
enjoyment of thinking.

As ideas flew
freely through Tommy’s head he felt as if they were blowing the
dust away from parts of his brain he’d kept in storage. Like an
old, cranked engine, he felt synapses flare into life that had been
dormant for over a decade. They felt like old friends coming back
from a very long holiday. He desperately hoped that this time they
would stay; but as soon a he thought it, he realised that perhaps
he had already gone too far down a very dangerous road. It was time
to pull back. Thinking was intoxicating, but look where spending
too much time alone in his head had got him before. Sure he had to
tap into that part of his brain, but this wasn’t about showing what
he was capable of. This was about finding out why his old
supervisor was dead. And the answer wasn’t hidden in the recesses
of Tommy’s past. It was hidden in the papers on his desk. And those
papers were about children. It was hardly an original subject. He
wondered what original twist Charles had put on it.

From the way
it was written in the top right hand corner of many of the A4
sheets, the working title of Shaw’s book seemed to have been
The Anticipation of Gifts
.
He had seen that title before in
Charles’ papers; it was the title of another article by another
scholar. Perhaps the whole thing was just a simple case of
plagiarism or academic jealousy, he thought
optimistically.

Tommy read
through a few sheets of notes. They contained little more than a
series of bullet points. From their rather overwrought style, they
looked like the kind of soundbites that Charles would have used for
his back cover blurb, or maybe a TV or radio interview. The
Professor had underlined one of them. Maybe he was saving that one
for the front cover.

What would
you give up to be happy? Your principles? Your sanity? Your
children?

Spoken like a
true father, Tommy thought. He looked at the words again. He had
leafed through cuttings about the killing of James Bulger, extracts
from articles about the pre-pubescent killer Mary Bell, transcripts
from the trial of the Moors murderers when the tape of the torture
of Lesley Ann Downey had been played; but of everything it was this
that made him stop. This was wrong; very wrong, but Tommy had no
idea why. As an atheist who took his lack of ethical principles
seriously, he no more believed that it was bad, in the moral sense,
to torture an innocent man than he believed it was bad to put
carpet in your bathroom. So how did this feel wrong? It was wrong
because something about it rang untrue; like a bum note in a
symphony, something about it clanged. Something that made Tommy
think he’d hit his first breakthrough.

And it was
wrong because, even though in the last week he’d seen two dead
bodies, this was the first thing that really made him feel sick. As
he tried to analyse just what was pumping the nausea from somewhere
deep below his gut, all he could see was Becky. He pictured her as
he’d left her, wandering aimlessly around Shaw’s enormous house,
neither at home there nor a stranger, just ambling aimlessly; as
though the house, as though Shaw, had been indifferent to her
presence; as though her life meant nothing.

Perhaps, he
thought, that was all that the calm and patience he’d admired in
the Professor had been: indifference. He wondered how it was
possible for someone to create a whole world of ideas they could
talk about as though it had a life of its own, a world to which
they had no emotional connection at all. Maybe that had been
Tommy’s problem, the reason he had never been able to finish his
studies – his ideas meant too much to him. He had never really been
able to think about them dispassionately and in the end the
connection had taken its toll. Or perhaps he had exactly the same
problem as Shaw. Perhaps, for all they differed in their approach
to ideas, what linked them was the fact that neither was capable of
making any kind of attachment to people. He heard Becky’s hollow
steps in his head, and he knew that he was wrong. For some reason
he did care, and maybe the fact he cared was what would help him
see this through. If it didn’t give him another breakdown
first.

Pulling
himself out of his thoughts, he knew he’d spent too much time
thinking already. If he was going to make the course, he had to do
it in very small steps, however frustrating it was, however useless
it made him feel.

He went to the
bedroom and put on his sweats. He took the key and ran down the
stairs, out of the door, down the snicket and up the Woodstock
Road. By now he had a pain in his head that throbbed so deep it
seemed impossible that anything could reach it. The rank stench of
depression was beating and shrieking against the inside of his
skull. Sometimes he wished he could trepan himself and watch the
fetid pressure escaping like marsh gas from his head. In his
daydreams he would see himself from above lifting a circle of bone
and reaching inside to rip out the hurt.

He stopped.
Disoriented, he couldn’t see the road or hear the traffic. He
thought for a moment he must have had a stroke; and then he stopped
thinking. He had no recollection of walking back to his room, or of
the bottle of brandy he had drunk without drawing breath before he
collapsed; or of scribbling on a post-it on his desk,
parent/trepan
.

____

17

The entrance
to Rosie’s small rented flat in Summertown was through a florist.
Sometimes, if she came home during the day, she would pretend to be
a customer. She’d stand by the orchids and irises and hum and hah.
“I wish my boyfriend would buy me something elegant and thoughtful
like these” she would say loudly to Chrissy, the shop assistant, in
earshot of any clueless young public school types, of which there
were many, “rather than more carnations.” In return for the added
sales Chrissy let her use the customer car park whenever the owner
wasn’t around.