The Company of Fellows (14 page)

He changed
into a respectable black cashmere suit and sat at his desk with a
cup of Hawaiian Kona coffee. He put on some Philip Glass and looked
into the De Kooning print on his wall. They were things that his
study had in common with Shaw’s. They helped him to remember the
man who had turned up back in his life after 10 years. It wouldn’t
be true to say that Tommy hadn’t given him a thought since he
finished his doctorate. What were they though, the thoughts he’d
had in the intervening years? Guilt because he’d abandoned his old
life? Of course. Guilt was the annoying friend who went everywhere
with him.

He felt
gratitude as well, though, not just because Shaw sharpened his
mind, but because he had given Tommy the confidence and the means
to change the rhythms and tempos of his life. Maybe he’d never
realised it. It had certainly taken Tommy years to realise that the
tools, the strength he’d found in himself to tackle his illness
head-on without drugs, had actually come from his
supervisor.

The acceptance
of the lows and highs of manic depression, that’s what he’d
ultimately learnt from Shaw, although he hadn’t known it until he’d
heard the same things, put in very different terms of course, in
his cognitive behavioural therapy sessions. He’d learned that there
comes a time when you have to stop fighting and try something more
subtle. You had to accept that you’re low, or high, to realise that
that’s just the way it is, that it’s not the end of the world; that
it’s all just part of a tedious cycle. Often, just telling himself
enough times that what he was going through was just part of the
natural course of things for a manic depressive would be enough for
his mood to begin to turn the corner.

He had always
felt a slight unease around the Professor, though. Charles Shaw had
perfected the art of patience to such a degree that it seemed
almost mechanical. Tommy found himself thinking that Shaw was just
indifferent for the second time. What was it that worried him about
that? It wasn’t that there had been no place in the Professor’s
life for pleasure. Shaw had clearly found, or at the very least
anticipated, more pleasure in life than anyone else Tommy had met,
even amongst his epicurean clients who often seemed to have glutted
on delight. No, what worried him was the Professor’s serenity. He
was, quite simply, never anxious. Thinking back over Shaw’s old
lectures, Tommy realised that it made perfect sense in theory – all
that stuff about acceptance, about never letting the course of life
bother you. But making sense in theory and being able to put that
theory totally into practice were very different. Wasn’t that the
kind of “rationality” that psychopaths followed?

Tommy didn’t
know whether it was his own illness that prevented him from
understanding this, or whether the illness made him understand it
too well. In his manic phases nothing worried him. The possibility
of failure didn’t exist, and as a result precautions that any
normal person would take remained untaken. But Charles had always
seemed to have every precaution covered. That was part of the
waiting process. He had the unshakeable confidence of the manic
without the mania.

Perhaps this
was why Tommy felt slightly afraid. He was certain Shaw hadn’t
killed himself. But all that confidence, meticulousness, and
although Shaw had seen his killer coming he never saw who it was.
But he still believed that Tommy would. Worse still, after a
lifetime of calm, something had finally made the Professor anxious.
And if it created anxiety in someone who made the average Zen
master seem highly strung, what the hell should a nut job like
Tommy be making of it?

____

20

Memorial
services at Oxford happen either the moment someone is dead or
months after they were in the ground. Usually the limiting factor
was making the necessary arrangements for guests who needed to fly
in from the other side of the world. Sometimes it was a question of
politics, especially if there was a contentious appointment to be
made. In the case of Charles Shaw, the motivation for a swift
service was a combination of politics and spite, if it was possible
to separate the two. Term was nearly here – it was better to get
rid of him without his flock of student groupies, be it the
anti-establishment radicals or the besotted undergraduates of both
sexes. It was better not to let the great and the good come running
from the four corners to put their oar in when a new Warden was due
to be appointed before the end of the new term, and there was a
clear front runner whose path no-one wanted muddied. And it was
certainly best to get him forgotten about quickly and get his junk
eased out of Number 37 so that some decent accommodation could
finally be built – and, which was a wonderfully propitious bonus,
what better way to poison the new Warden’s arrival than a
controversial building project jus too late to be stopped. The
college shouldn’t have to have another woman Warden
generations.

*

Becky was
standing underneath Elgin Tower with a tall, elegant woman Tommy
presumed was Haydn Shaw. Haydn was wearing a knee-length black
lambswool cardigan over a black silk shift dress. Sapphires set in
an iris-shaped brooch pulled the light from her eyes. Tommy bent
over and kissed her hand, his head bowed perhaps a moment longer
than was seemly to hide the dilation in his eyes. “Good morning, Dr
Shaw. I wish we could have met in happier
circumstances.”

“
Mum, this is
Tommy West.”

“
Good morning,
Tommy West,” said Haydn. “Should I know you?”

“
I was a
student of Professor Shaw’s,” said Tommy. “I’m a friend of
Becky’s.”

“
Then probably
I should at least know about you, but I’m afraid that I don’t.” She
looked at Becky. “Is this the friend you were staying with the
night before last?” It was impossible to tell if there was a note
of disapproval in her voice, or if this was a simple factual
enquiry.

“
I stayed at
dad’s on Tuesday.” Becky started walking the couple of hundred
metres to St Saviour’s.

“
I’m not sure
that’s an answer. Still, I’m happy to meet you, Tommy. As you’re a
friend of Becky’s you should come for dinner with us
tonight.”

“
I’d be
delighted, Dr Shaw.”

Through
enormous wooden double doors, the neatly-lawned expanse of Martyr’s
Quad with its unfinished cloisters led straight to the unassuming
steps that you would never realize led into the Chapel.

Haydn nodded
demurely to the porter standing at the gate who dipped his head
back to her. She walked through the middle of the Quad and into the
chapel, taking an order of service as she went. She strode up the
nave and took one of the carved wooden seats by the bishop’s
throne. “Tommy, please sit with us, won’t you?” she
said.

He would
rather have had a clearer view of the congregation, but Tommy
smiled and sat between Haydn and Becky. They cordoned off from the
rest of the congregation, in the ornate seats where the Warden and
dons usually sat, free to catnap or giggle at leisure. It was hard
for him to see exactly who was there. His overwhelming impression
was of Haydn beside him, the smell of rose water, the presence of
her skin pushing against silk, an immense inner calm, that worked
in tandem with a mind that was never still.

As the service
went on, Tommy tried in vain to discern Shaw’s hand behind the
music and the readings. There were sacred texts and sacred music,
fitting for a man of the cloth. He wondered whether the religious
elements of the service would have angered the Professor, or
whether he would have just felt indifference. In the end he decided
the Professor Shaw he remembered would have seen the whole thing as
a waste of an opportunity to cause mischief.

The readings
were from I Corinthians 15, St Paul’s account of the resurrection
of the body at the Last Day; and the Gospel of John, chapter 14,
when Christ at the Last Supper promises the disciples that although
he will shortly depart, he will leave them the Holy Spirit in his
place. For a minute Tommy felt a whiff of sulphurous humour as he
imagined Shaw, posturing as the Messiah leaving consolation for
those who were lost without him; but the scent was gone in a second
in the smoke of the sacred candles. No, in the blandness of the
texts, and the predictability of the Bach that must have been part
of every Organ Scholar’s kit bag, Tommy saw nothing but politics
and spite.

Professor
Barnard Ellison stood to deliver the eulogy. Tommy remembered
Ellison’s lectures from his undergraduate days. They were as dry as
the deserts he spent so much time talking about. In those days he
had been a high achieving – high-flying would unduly imply charisma
– scholar, one of a generation of brilliant young professors that
included Charles Shaw, although none of them had been quite as
young or quite as brilliant as Shaw. As he prepared to speak, his
now late middle-aged face was etched with an amount of
barely-hidden glee that bordered on the unseemly. Through the
shadows and the pillars Tommy sensed rows of eyebrows that were
knitted in firm concentration to fend off an impolitic smirk on
senior faces.

He tried to
read Haydn’s emotions as Ellison spoke, but all he felt was a void;
not impenetrability, just emptiness. He thought about Haydn and
Becky at home together, one impassive, the other inscrutable. The
thought made his house full of inanimate, unfeeling treasures seem
intensely warm.

The speech was
just as erudite as Ellison’s lectures on the divided kingdoms of
Israel and Judah had been, and every bit as dry. The Professor
surveyed Shaw’s career. He ran through and his contribution to
ethics, from his very first paper on the moral importance of
separated identical twins to his participation in the public
debates on chimeras and stem-cell research. It was filled with
well-rehearsed jokes about waiting and entering into the spirit. He
had clearly made an effort to keep his distaste at Shaw’s outspoken
role as the public and rather too liberal face of the Church of
England on controversial issues such as gay marriage and fertility
to brevity rather than criticism.

“
Children were
central to Charles’ private as well as his academic life,” said
Ellison, winding to his finale. “Not only did he contribute richly
to the public debates on adoption and embryo donation, on
parenthood and the way society treats its young and its old;
whenever he spoke in private he would always tell you the same
thing, that his only child, Becky, was at the heart of everything
he did.”

Tommy fixed
his eyes on Ellison, but he allowed his peripheral vision to wander
around the congregation, lingering on the women to either side as
he heard Becky’s name. He noted the simultaneous twitch, the
cable-like tautening of the muscles in both mother’s and daughter’s
forearms, although their hands remained fixed in their laps as they
had been throughout.

“
In many ways
he redefined the theology of sexual ethics for our age. In his
unrelenting focus on the child he took the ethics of love out of
the bedroom and into the nursery. He had been working on for many
years and was, as many of you will be aware, on the verge of
publishing what I am sure would have been the most important
contribution of recent times to our understanding of the way we
relate to our children. It was to be the summit of his career, the
thing for which he and his public alike had been waiting. It is his
tragedy and ours that it would not wait for him.”

The end was
the most generous part of the speech, almost warm, Tommy thought.
Perhaps Ellison was rising to his crowd, perhaps it was something
else. But as Tommy played the words back in his head,
he took the ethics of love out of the bedroom and
into the nursery
, and put them into the
context of Shaw’s papers, he felt sick to the core.

____

21

After-service
drinks were held in the Warden’s Garden, the college’s flagship
venue for tea parties and fundraisers. Tommy stood by the bushes
with Becky, watching the goings-on, shunning the cheap champagne
for an orange juice. He watched Haydn make her way straight to
Professor Ellison. He watched her angle her head elegantly to one
side and offer him her hand. Tommy wondered for a moment if he was
discomfited by the warmth of her thanks.

He was
interested to see how many people he recognised. Life never seemed
to move on in Oxford. Charles Shaw hadn’t moved on either, of
course, but there was no doubt that his stasis was part of a
purpose, even if Tommy didn’t know what. Tommy wondered how many of
the academics he saw in the gardens had a point to their lives, and
how many were simply pickling themselves slowly like a schoolboy’s
conker on college port. He could see at least two people he had
studied with as undergraduates. He guessed from their tweeds that
they weren’t here as old students of Charles’. They had eased
effortlessly out of their student gowns and straight into the
fireside slippers of academic middle age

“
You think
she’s beautiful, don’t you?” said Becky, leaning in with her hand
in the crook of his arm.

“
Your mother?
Yes, she’s very beautiful.”

“
Is she your
type?”

“
I’ve no idea.
Maybe I’ll be able to tell you after dinner.”
What was his type?
he wondered. It
had been years since he had given it any thought. What would “being
his type” even mean? Someone he could see himself spending the rest
of his life with? Someone he wanted to pin to the wall and fuck
senseless? They were questions he hadn’t asked in a long time.
Maybe he had dwelt on them for so long in his student days that he
had done with them for good.