The Company of Fellows (30 page)

“
I’ll have to
watch out then if you’re chasing around after a younger woman.”
Rosie sucked in a strand of tagliatelle that slapped on her lips
and they fell about laughing.

“
Not a
chance,” Tommy said. He got up and stood behind her. He put his arm
around her waist from behind, pushed aside her hair, and kissed the
nape of her neck.

“
So why does
she want you to help her?” She reached her hand back and wrapped it
around his neck.

“
Because I
was, apparently, his star pupil. She thinks I understand
him.”

“
And do you
understand him?” She pulled his head against her neck and he kissed
her again.

“
No. I think I
hardly know him.” With the hand that was around her waist he lifted
her out of the chair and turned her to face him. He ran his eyes
over the lines of her face, not embarrassed any longer. His fingers
followed, and then his lips. “I have to leave at two tomorrow
morning,” he said, realising there was never going to be a perfect
moment to break it to her.

“
Where are you
going?”

“
Jerez. For
one night, maybe two. Charles spent a couple of years there. I want
to speak to his friends. Come with me,” he found himself saying
before he’d had a chance to think what he was saying.

“
Really?”
Rosie beamed, and kissed him eagerly.

“
Really.”

“
Thank you,
but I don’t think Emily would go for it somehow. Will you bring me
something back?”

“
Yes.”

“
Do you need
to get an early night?”

“
Yes.”

“
To get some
sleep?”

“
No.”

WEDNESDAY
SEPTEMBER 12, 2007

____

45

The heat hit
the back of Tommy’s throat the moment he stepped off the plane at
Jerez. Jerez lies in a basin of south western Spain that forms the
frying pan of Europe, where temperatures regularly press 40 degrees
even in mid September. The tiny airport is laid out in a giant
dustbowl lined with palms and sherry casks stacked solera style.
Tommy skipped over the sun-bleached tarmac to the terminal
building. Flying always exhilarated him, as did this part of Spain.
He had hardly slept for a day and a half but he didn’t care. The
dark thoughts of the past few days burned to nothing in the
sun.

This was where
he felt truly at home, researching in the field. He spent at least
half of his life abroad looking for new things to transfer to the
homes of the greedy and the rich, and his happiest times were those
he spent in the markets and bazaars, the souks and the backstreets,
talking and negotiating with anyone who had something that caught
his impeccable eye. The thought of merging into the local
background of Jerez for a day or so filled him with almost as much
excitement as the thought of going home to Rosie.

He hadn’t
checked in any luggage. He had a few travel size toiletries with
him in his leather duffel bag, spare Egyptian cotton underwear, a
couple of white linen shirts, a sketchbook that would double as a
notebook if he got round to asking questions rather than sitting
sketching in the town squares, and the tiny bottle of Stanza from
Haydn. Nothing else except the clothes he was wearing, chinos as
white as a Frontera village, an equally white linen shirt, and soft
suede loafers.

It was still
only midday when Tommy reached the centre of Jerez, and the heat
temperature was rising into the mid thirties. He parked his bike at
the Hotel Doña Blanca on the Calle Bodegas, just a hundred metres
or so from the Calle Caballeros, where Shaw had lived in the heart
of the old town for two years. An unlikely bolt hole, Tommy
thought, in the hubbub of such a close community. He checked in,
washed the sand off his face and took a couple of puffs of Number
One from his little atomiser before heading out into the sun in
streets empty for siesta, perfect for catching people at home. He
had a photo of Shaw in his top pocket, sketchbook and pencil in his
chinos, and a plan to knock on some doors, but that was about it.
When the town reopened he would ask shopkeepers if the elegant
Englishman ever shopped there. He didn’t think people would forget
someone so striking as Charles Shaw, even after this much time. And
if they remembered him then the answer to the question he really
wanted to ask would be easier still: did he have a young child with
him?

The Calle was
empty and all the houses shuttered. Where to start? Tommy felt like
an encyclopaedia salesman. Excuse me, señora, can I interest you in
a dead English professor? May or may not come with additional baby.
He looked up and down the Calle. Nothing except a tourist stopped
on the corner of the Plaza Del Arenal smoking a cigarette. Nothing
for it. Start next door to Charles’ house and work from there. Hope
the locals don’t see you coming and set the dogs on you.

Hostility
wasn’t a problem as soon as Tommy broke into his best Seville
accent, “I’m very sorry to bother you in the heat, but I’m trying
to find out about an old friend of my family who lived here fifteen
years ago.” He showed the picture. “He was English.”

“
Ingles? Si,
Señor Shaw.”

“
You knew
him?”

“
Of course,
everyone knew him. Come in, you must eat.”

Everyone knew
Professor Shaw. Everyone wanted to offer Tommy tortillas and beer.
Everyone said the same. Charles was a writer; he wrote during the
day in the Plaza del Arenal, stayed there most of the evening
talking with the locals. He always held a big feast at the weekend
and everyone was always invited. Hardly the lifestyle of a man with
a baby in tow.

It was four
o’clock by the time Tommy had asked enough questions to know that
he wasn’t going to get any further with the door to door approach.
The streets were alive with the sound of people talking and
shopping, youngsters zig-zagging on their scooters and groups of
tourists milling and snapping. The sun was below the halfway point
in the sky and buildings and trees glowed as though they were
coated in a fine gold varnish. He headed into the Plaza del Arenal,
where tables spilled into the square, golden beers shining amber in
the sunlight, vast boards with pictures of hundreds of different
tapas that waiters would point at with one hand for the benefit of
the tourists as they steered them into a table with the other.
Tommy thought it would probably be easier to resist their patter
than the eager insistence of Spanish matriarchs but he was
beginning to get hungry so he simply smiled, sat down at the
nearest table, and ordered prawn croquettas and beer.

He took his
small Moleskine sketchbook out of his back pocket and began to draw
the scenes in front of him. Wherever he was he always drew the
people, only the people and the motion in their limbs, the dynamism
of arguments and passion, or the relaxed to and fro of
conversation. From the lack of buildings his drawings could have
been set anywhere but his eye for local manner was as perfect as
his ear for dialect. He drew the waiters’ confident sway as they
brought beer, the kids stopped on their scooters on the other side
of the square to chat to their less mobile friends who were trying
to look cool with exaggerated puffs of their cigarettes, tourist
couples trying to spy out the menu boards from far enough not to
attract the waiter’s eye, the lady at the table next to him
shucking out a Camel and offering it to him for a light.

Tommy looked
up and smiled, “Lo siento, Señora.”

She shrugged
her shoulders and held the cigarette up just as a waiter was
passing, who had his Zippo out of his pocket and flipped open in
one movement, not even slowing down as he sparked her up. She
breathed deep and blew the smoke pointedly away from Tommy, giving
the stick a small look of disdain through Bulgari specs that
matched his before returning to pick through a bowl of anchovies
and tapenade with the non-smoking hand.

Taking little
more than a minute with each, Tommy drew sketches of the neat
little series of events, the chutzpah of the waiter and the
nonchalance of the arm that held out the cigarette. He captured
every movement perfectly. Action drawing, he chuckled to himself,
thinking of Pollock and De Kooning and their grand action paintings
of the 1950s. He looked at the lines on the page, the way he had
captured the implied movements in her long, tanned legs, the sweep
of her spiky hair. Funny how he always found short, gelled up hair
attractive and now he was falling in love with Rosie and her sleek
shoulder length locks. He stopped. God, had he really said that to
himself?

“
Not going to
finish your drawing?” He could hear every cigarette in her voice
like the low purr of a TVR Tuscan. Beautiful Spanish but not
local.

“
Sorry?”

“
Your drawing.
Aren’t you going to finish it?”

Tommy looked
down at his sketchbook. The waiter still had no legs. “I think I’ve
just realised I’m in love.”

“
You don’t
even know me.”

Tommy smiled.
He flicked back to the previous page and tore out the sketch of her
leaning back, arm outstretched, sunglasses catching something on
the other side of the plaza, “Here. Have this.” He slid it under
her ashtray, left 10 Euros under his beer glass and headed for the
shops.

____

46

Emily sat at
the back of the small screen at the Phoenix Cinema. It was several
months since she’d been here, and she was in danger of not getting
full value from her membership. Recently she’d done most of her
film watching at Rosie’s, but that was the last place she wanted to
go at the moment. Goodness knows what she might walk in on, if
anyone was even in. An afternoon showing of Forbidden Planet was
perfect. She could close her eyes to and have some space to herself
to think; and possibly to cry. She really must get some more
friends, she thought. Rosie and David were the only people she
would normally go to if she needed to cry, but if both of them were
part of the cause where did she have left to go? The back seat of
the cinema and her old friend toffee popcorn.

She knew what
she’d been thinking the moment she walked into Tommy’s flat. It
wasn’t until she was on her own that she would let herself realise
it, of course, but she knew that it had been there as a glimmer,
somewhere she would never usually let her introspection go.
What kind of father would he make?
She hadn’t thought about it at all since she’d
been with David. She’d always had Tommy pegged as too flighty for
it even to be an issue. Too flighty, and totally lacking the
emotional maturity or constancy necessary for a relationship with a
woman, let alone any children they might have had.

Now she wasn’t
sure.
Kind, funny, and
reliable
. Those were the words she would
use for the man she had got to know over the last week, if she
hadn’t known him before. She’d found herself playing games of what
if that she’d cut off before she could put the thoughts into words.
Now she let the thoughts come. What if David didn’t work late? What
if he was seeing someone else? How much would she hurt? How much
would she take it gladly as a reason to get out? If that was the
case shouldn’t she leave him anyway? But of course then it would be
her fault. She wondered if she was waiting for him to slip up, had
been for the last year. She thought of all the times she had
encouraged him to stay over at conferences and pitches. “I care
about your career”, she would say. “It’s lovely that you want me to
come but this is your time”. He never gave a hint, never a flicker
of infidelity or inattentiveness. He was so good. He loved her so
much.

She loved him
too. She certainly didn’t love Tommy, or maybe that was just
another place she couldn’t let herself go yet. She thought about
him lying beside her years ago, about the sheen on his taut skin,
tangled curls falling over dark eyes, and the sound of his
breathing. She superimposed the kindness of the smile that she knew
now, let the hunger in his eyes sit side by side with the warmth.
He had strong, gentle eyes, a father’s eyes, and a lover’s eyes,
and the ability to change between the two the moment the children’s
bedroom door was closed. Or theirs was opened. She didn’t stop the
tears coming or wipe them away when they did.

It was too
late now, she thought. No, it was too late the moment she married
David. That was when she made her choice, when she chose friendship
and affection. Chose steadiness. She had made a choice she could
never renege on. No, she’d made a choice she
would
never renege on. Maybe some
day she would be really happy for Tommy and Rosie. No, she was
happy already, she just didn’t feel it yet. Soon she would, and she
would be grateful that Tommy was back in her life and that she had
an extra friend. And if he and Rosie had kids? That was a thought
for another day, for a time when there were tears enough
left.

___

47

There was
little twilight in southern Spain as the day turned dark, and after
a late afternoon in local shops Tommy soon found himself walking in
the moonlit blue. Lights threw shadows across the sandstone
churches. The deep red Alcazar glowed like an ember on the sky.
Some people remembered the Ingles. They commented on his courtesy
or his exactness of taste. None recalled shopping patterns that
would indicate he had an infant in train, and none recalled
anything to suggest he came into a sudden fortune.