The Company of Fellows (13 page)

Up the narrow
magnolia stairs the flat was laid out in miniature on one level,
kitchen and bathroom to the rear, sitting room at the front and
bedroom in the middle. A giant reptile tank dominated the sitting
room, full of leaves, branches, and Chris, her chameleon, named
after Chris Patten, Chancellor of the University and Governor of
Hong Kong at the time of the handover to China in 1997. In the
years leading up to the handover there had been a mass exodus as
people fearing the breakdown of the rule of law, the loss of
freedom, the loss of their capitalist ways, had taken off with
their British passports for other corners of the Commonwealth.
Among them had been Rosie’s parents. In the years since July 1 1997
many, seeing that the doomsayers had been, if not liars then at
least vast exaggerators, had found the pull of home simply too
strong and returned. Rosie’s parents had been part of this tide.
She had felt the pull too, but, feeling as though she were at the
start of something and not the end, she had made the choice that
one wrench from home was enough.

On the other
side of the room, where the electric hum wouldn’t disturb Chris,
Rosie kept a small drinks cooler next to a large shot glass chess
set. She used it to store vodka and dark rum for the chess set, and
mail-ordered grasshoppers for Chris. There were no framed pictures
on the wall, just a selection of theatre, music and film posters.
Among others she had an original poster for Notting Hill that she’d
blagged from the cinema, one for a performance of Ionesco’s
absurdist comedy Rhinoceros at the Oxford Playhouse, and one for a
Covent Garden production of La Bohème that hung alongside a still
from a Nine Inch Nails video.

“
So, what’ll
it be?” Rosie asked Emily who had made herself at home with a large
glass of white wine on the futon where she would probably stay the
night. “You can have fried crap, grilled crap, or baked
crap.”

Emily loved
coming here even though she felt guilty that she enjoyed spending
any time at all away from David. Rosie still lived the student
life. The only person she had to compromise anything for was her
landlord. Emily loved her life now, but being at Rosie’s reminded
her of times when she’d had so many possibilities. She’d believed
that she could have taken any path she wanted in life. She’d still
believed that by the time she hit her mid thirties she’d have a
house full of children. The belief that all that to come meant she
had enjoyed the solitude without a trace of guilt or regret. She
emptied her glass and poured another. She had to stop getting so
maudlin. Wine wasn’t the answer, she knew. Not long term, anyway;
but it would help for tonight.

“
Seeing as I’m
trying to get in shape,” said Emily, “I think I’ll go for baked
crap, please.”

“
Cool. Pizza,
oven chips and sausage rolls with barbecue sauce for two,” she
called from the kitchen. “So how was Tommy?”

“
I think you’d
like him,” Emily called back, “I gave him your card so he could
call you about picking up his wine, but he went to get it with
Becky Shaw instead. Shame, really.” She wished she could see
Rosie’s expression, wondered if she would be interested, imagined
probably she wouldn’t. She was surprised that she’d thought of
Tommy with her best friend. He must have done something to get back
in her good books without her even noticing it.

Rosie returned
from the kitchen and grabbed the Mickey Blue Eyes DVD from the
shelf. Tonight would be popular culture not high art, which was a
great relief.

“
Glad you
thought of me,” said Rosie, sitting on the futon and pulling her
feet up onto the seat, hoiking her baggy red jumper over her knees.
“You could have called him, you know. Or got me to call him. Does
David know you saw him?”

“
Of course he
doesn’t,” Emily replied.

“
That’s not
good, you know. That’s how it starts.”

“
Nothing’s
going to start,” she said.

“
So why did
you call him?”

Why
did
she call him? There
were all sorts of reasons, but none that would have a hope of
standing up to cross-examination. “I was curious,” she said. It was
probably the closest to the truth she could get.

“
God that’s
bollocks. So has he changed in fifteen years?”

“
Yeah.” For
all he was the one who was still living on his own, the one who’d
had the breakdown, he’d seemed older and more mature. He wasn’t the
one who still enjoyed hanging out in student digs.

“
Good; because
I was beginning to wonder exactly what all the fuss was about. He
seemed like any other normal bloke.”

“
Yeah,” she
repeated. That’s exactly what was different about him. Normality.
It was the bit of him that had been missing when she knew him
before.

“
Didn’t he
have a breakdown?”

I bet David
told her that, Emily thought. She’d kept enough tabs on him since
they parted company to know at least that much. As ludicrous as it
had seemed to every part of her, her reaction had been guilt. It
was shortly after then that she’d tried to make herself stop
looking for information. It was the only way to make a lean break
and give herself a real chance with David. It was hard to tell
which of them David liked least, but Rosie was the only one he’d
met. It was best to keep it that way. “Yeah, just after he finished
his doctorate. He turned up at his graduation party and nearly
killed himself.”

“
Is that part
of the attraction?” said Rosie. It was typical of the sort of thing
she’d say. She was great at making the sort of comments that
sounded crass and insensitive but actually hit the mark perfectly.
That was Rosie all over, a brash superficial exterior that hid one
of the shrewdest brains she’d ever met. And, she knew, one of the
kindest. If she spoke too much it was only because she thought you
needed to listen.

“
There isn’t
an attraction. Not any more.”

“
He’s not like
David, though, is he?”

She knew that
Rosie wasn’t David’s biggest fan either, not just because he didn’t
like her, but for all the things she loved in him, all the things
that wouldn’t fit in a student flat. Perhaps that was why she
didn’t need a man with a dark side – any time she fancied tasting
another side of life she could come to see Rosie – and then she
could go home again, back somewhere warm and comfortable. “No, he’s
not. Thank goodness.”

“
Don’t you
ever think it would be nice if he had a bit of an edge? Something
dark in is past somewhere?”

“
No. David is
an open book. That’s one of the things I love about him
most.”

“
So what’s
Tommy’s dark side if it’s got nothing to do with being
sectioned?”

“
I don’t
know,” she said. She hadn’t known when she’d first met him; he’d
hadn’t given her any clues when they were together; and she had no
more of an idea now. It was the part of himself he kept back from
her. Maybe that was all it was. Maybe it didn’t matter what he was
keeping from her; maybe she just wanted to know she had the whole
story.

“
I’m sure it’s
not going to help him getting tangled up with Becky Shaw,” she
continued.

“
Tommy and
Becky? Fuck a doodle doo!”

“
I’m sure it’s
nothing like that,” she said, hoping that it was true, and
straightaway wondering why she would hope that.

Rosie nodded
slowly. “Not that any of it’s got anything to do with
you.”

“
I
know.”

____

18

“
Have you
decided what you’re going to say?” If it was anything, the pitch of
Jane Ellison’s voice was anxious, but only a little. Twenty years
of marriage and two hundred years of breeding had flattened out any
extremes.

“
Well, I
suppose I should really say that I’m waiting to see.”

Even in the
darkness she could sense that her husband was still smiling to
himself, pleased with his remark. She shifted in the sheets, far
enough over to her side of the bed that if he noticed it was
because he heard her, not because he felt her move. He hadn’t felt
her touch at all now for the best part of two decades.

“
I know
exactly what I’m going to say,” he said. “You needn’t worry. I
won’t say anything inappropriate. I will be the very model of
decorum.”

“
Of course you
will be. You always are.” Even she was unable to tell whether her
sigh was one of sarcasm, of exasperation, or of plain
resignation.

Whatever the
sigh signified, its meaning was lost on Barnard Ellison. Jane could
sense from the tautening of the linen that he had already taken
himself off to wherever it was he went, deep inside his head where
the outside world couldn’t reach him. It was a place she knew only
from the occasional unconscious chuckle it brought on the few
occasions when it broke the surface. It was place she thought was
better left there, undisturbed below the horizon.

She heard the
thick wooden night door in Martyr’s Gate clank metallically shut.
Eleven o’clock. Outside the windows, down in Martyr’s Quad, a small
group of people staying in college for a conference on the how to
put on a better public face for the carbon footprint of the
advertising industry was making its way from the bar to the
Porter’s Lodge. She could hear laughter approaching, hovering for a
moment on the giant york stone slabs outside the window as though
it might stay, then moving on into the night. It was the same every
night in term time, and the nights like this in the vacation when
conferences took over the college. Academics and students alike
hated them, of course, resented the fact that even with the vast
reserves of property the college owned it still needed their money.
The rise and fall of slightly drunken laughter, though, the
cadences and pitch of sentences that came easily, were not measured
or considered, were not structured to impress, all of that was
white noise that made the vacation nighttimes bearable.

Especially
once the children had stopped coming home from college out of term.
No, even then the laughter, the easiness had always seeped in
through the windows, not under the bedroom door, not from inside.
Or maybe she had never heard it since, well, since then.

In the silence
her thoughts were loud. Too loud. She waited for another wave of
idle chatter to sweep across the quad. She waited, but everyone
staying in college was asleep; everyone except her. And Barnard, of
course, but he was somewhere else altogether and the only sound
that came all night was the infrequent punctuation of laughter,
postcards from wherever it was; so she stayed awake, listening,
waiting, wishing she wasn’t there.

MARCH,
1993

“
Life has its
own timing, far more complicated than the circadian rhythms or
lunar cycles you’ll find in any self-help book. It is a turbulent
system marked out by moments of existential choice, great fractures
that turn you upside down. But like any other chaotic system,
there’s an underlying, often very simple equation that controls
everything. Currents wheel and eddy out of sight. Occasionally they
break the surface, the fragile skin we think of as consciousness,
and we experience them as tipping points in our lives. But the
equations that govern these ripples are always the same, and have
always been at work. Psychoanalysis and any other form of
navel-gazing won’t help us find out what they are, but knowing that
they are there at all will at least stop our lives being punctuated
by a constant moments of surprise, and the circle of denial, anger,
and guilt that stretch themselves out until the next rupture in our
routine of self-loathing surprises us. Learn acceptance of these
cataclysms, and allow yourselves to enjoy the long stretches of
velvet calm between them. Learn, even, to anticipate them, to
wonder what might come next, allow your mind not to close itself
off to what would otherwise be surprising. These moments are as
much part of the pattern of life as the periods of stability, and
each can help you to understand the other, just as the rapturous
events of creation, fall, crucifixion can help us to understand the
long periods of salvation history in between, can even teach us how
to anticipate the next rupture – rapture if you will. History in
all its disorder is held together by the single strand of
providence – miracles, catastrophes are not interventions, just the
points that break the skin. So it is with an individual life full
of joys and heartbreaks, full of choices that seem impossible but
are nothing more than ripples reaching the surface.”

Charles Shaw,
Lecture on Chaos Theory, from his Science and Religion
undergraduate series.

FRIDAY
SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

____

19

Tommy woke and
felt the coldness of the Egyptian cotton sheets and the space
around him in his bed. Yesterday was the first day in over five
years that he hadn’t woken up alone, and now he felt absence
everywhere, emptiness amongst all his beautiful things.

He didn’t have
a hangover. Instead, the throbbing in his head had disappeared. The
short term effects of alcohol can be a little too attractive when
you’re depressed. He looked at the note beside his bed and for a
moment or so wondered if he had been doing a crossword. Then he
remembered the note in the margin of one of Shaw’s papers.
parent/trepan.
Something
was very wrong with Shaw’s notes. He fought back his suspicions and
the voices of idle chatter in his head. They had no place there.
What he really needed was context. Best to wait and see who was at
the memorial service before he went any further.