The Company of Fellows (17 page)

“
It’s a
reference to the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray…” Tommy
began.

“
I am aware of
the reference,” the Professor interjected. “And of her implied
parallels between cunnilingus and the cross of Christ. And I am
aware of the point you are making about the futility of putting off
gratification until the afterlife.”

“
Not
just…”

Shaw raised
his hand. “I’m also aware of the connection between the title and
your contention that it is impossible for a man and a woman to
share a mutually pleasurable experience.”

Professor Shaw
smiled. His sleek grey ponytail coiled around his silk jacket. His
titanium eyes filled the room with equal measures of mischief and
glee. “Tommy, there are
no
lips that never kiss; just some that are prepared
to wait almost forever.”

Tommy said
nothing. He waited, following the Professor’s lead, waiting for him
to finish his point. Finally Shaw spoke. “Our world is not
structured against pleasure.”

“
Perhaps,”
Tommy replied, “we can only experience pleasure because of the
inequalities in the world, because we have to overcome something to
attain it, to master something, or someone. Perhaps only power
makes pleasure possible. Pleasure for itself; a kiss that is just a
kiss, maybe they’re just myths.”

Shaw smiled.
“Very good. Pleasure does indeed get its character from having
something to work against. Gearing, you could call it. But what it
works against is something outside of both men and women. The
obstacle that gives pleasure its nature is time. What gives us
pleasure in the kiss is not that we have conquered our damsel like
some medieval knight. What makes the kiss pleasurable, equally so
for the woman as the man, is that in it we have momentarily
conquered time. You shall not have me yet, Father Time.”

His eyes were
open but he was almost whispering, as though Tommy weren’t there.
“I haven’t had my fill of delight; not yet, not as long as I kiss.
Wouldn’t you wait for almost a lifetime to deliver a rebuke like
that?” In an instant the Professor was out of his reverie and Tommy
felt the chill from his eyes pin him to his chair.

SATURDAY
SEPTEMBER 8, 2007

____

24

Tommy lay in
his bed. It seemed much smaller this morning. His eyes hurt but as
soon as he closed them his heart raced and skipped and he felt as
though the adrenalin would explode out of his skin. Last night he
had been perfect company, but his social graces came at a cost to
himself. The effortless bow to kiss someone’s hand had the serene
curve of a swan’s neck, but he expended just as much effort below
the surface. He had lived on his own ever since he left for
college, and when he was honest he knew that if he didn’t he would
not have managed the prolonged periods of sanity he’d enjoyed over
the years. What was it that he found so hard about being in other
people’s company? Was it the same thing that had stopped him
fighting harder to keep Emily? He was good with people, he mused.
He knew that by and large people liked him. And it wasn’t the case,
as it had been with many of the depressives he had come across
during therapy, that when he was with people he had to keeping up
an exhausting act. No, the charming, sharp, sensitive Tommy was the
real Tommy. Most of the time.

Becky peered
around the curtain in his head, and reflected in the darkness
behind her questioning eyes, he felt as though he got a glimpse of
an answer. He was good with people, could read people as quickly as
print, on the whole, and say just the right thing to each. It was
something that he was able to do especially well with people’s
pain. It was as though his empathy were another sense, and when he
was with people – most of all when he was with damaged people –
their thoughts screamed from every direction and overwhelmed him
until he needed to run for the quiet. But until he found Charles
Shaw’s killer there would be no quiet. His house, his beautiful,
quiet things would never drown out the shouts of Becky’s dark,
damaged eyes.

He opened his
eyes and looked at the ceiling. He began one of the many techniques
he had learned to cope with the darkness.
Don’t fight the thoughts
. That was
the secret.
Let them come. Let them play
in the blank space on the ceiling
. Slowly
he dissociated himself from their comings and goings, becoming
aware of them as if he were watching a scene taking place in the
park. The only thing of himself he was aware of was his breathing,
ragged at first.
Deeper, slower
now
. He listened to the noise it made, to
the pulling in of the air, so deep that it seemed to pull the night
into his lungs, the grey-blue empty, sleeping night; to the sigh of
the gentle escape of pollution filtered away from him.
Slow, rhythmical, a long way from the scenes
flashing by on the ceiling, scenes slowing down, greying into the
plaster, until there was only the sound of breath, and then
nothing.

Tommy got up
and checked his heart rate, which had fallen to a pleasing 40
beats. It was best not to stoke it up, he thought, and poured
himself a smoothie, foregoing the usual coffee. He laid out the day
in his head, drawing a schedule into his mental diary, being
careful to allow himself time to doodle in the margins, to
dissipate any excess energy that thinking about it might bring.
What did he want to learn today? Who killed Charles Shaw? He let
himself take time over erasing that in his head and drawing a
smiley in the margin. Realistically what did he want to learn
today?
Realistically.
That was a word that most of the time he found a ridiculous
and unnatural constraint, but given the state he had been in when
he woke, it felt abnormally apt. There was only so much adrenalin
the body can push through itself without protesting and shutting
down altogether.

Realistically
, he repeated to
himself, what did he want to learn today? In single, unexpanded
bullet points. He drew four equidistant dots on his mental diary
page. One. Who or what exactly had killed the first Mrs Sansom and
when? No, that was two questions. Out with the rubber. One. Who or
what had killed the first Mrs Sansom? Two. When had the first Mrs
Sansom died? Three. Why had Stephen Knightley paid so much
attention to Haydn? Four. Haydn. What did he feel about Haydn? He
looked at the question written down and wondered what it meant. An
open question would never do, but it was such an intriguing
question, and when he had stopped turning it over and gone back to
his mental diary he found that he had sketched an elegant line
drawing of her, like a sketch from a 1950s Dior fashion show, down
the side of the page. It was a pleasing image, not one to rub out.
He tore the mental page neatly, filed the sliver a few leaves
further on, and rubbed out the question. Four. Why exactly did
Charles Shaw leave Haydn?

He changed the
colour of his mental pencil to write in the action points that
would lead to his answers. Beside three and four he wrote Stephen
Knightley’s name in red. For one and two, well, he could do worse
than to get out his multi-coloured retractable ballpoint and write
Google.

Tommy sat his
laptop on a piece of felt on his desk, quickly putting a post-it in
his mental diary to buy a new laptop to go through Shaw’s
peripherals, and started googling. He figured that sooner or later
he would end up at the Oxford Mail, but he wanted to see where he
might be taken on the way.

Valerie Sansom
death
seemed to be a good set of search
terms to start with. He soon changed his mind as he scrolled
through the first three pages, through a couple of snippets that
were clearly relevant but many more that contained journal articles
by a leading Australian pathologist.

OK, he’d
triangulate in from the other extreme.
Valerie Sansom death Hedley
St
Saviour’s
Oxford
.
Bingo. 11 matches on the screen. He clicked the “show similar” link
and brought up all 33 items. Clearly not all of them were relevant.
The illustrious Antipodean Valerie Sansom had, it seemed,
elaborated upon the existential aspects of her daily experience of
mortality at a conference on all aspects of death in Princeton
where Hedley was also speaking.

That left 25
hits. Some of them seemed to be from online versions of the St
Saviour’s Annual Report, a couple from the Gazette, which was the
University’s mouthpiece for disseminating official news about
itself, and a few from the Oxford Times and Mail. Looking at the
summaries the word that stood out was suicide.

Tommy clicked
a link to the Oxford Mail archive:

Old College
Hand Appointed Warden of
St
Saviour’s
14 Years After
Tragedy

Reverend Dr
Hedley Sansom, currently Professor of the Philosophy of Religion
and Head of the Faculty of Divinity at Princeton University has
been appointed the new Warden of
St
Saviour’s
College. Professor Sansom, who
replaces retiring Warden Geoffrey Maynard, spent 4 years at
St Saviour’s
in the late
1980s, where he held a College Fellowship and University
Lecturership in the Philosophy of Religion. During his stay he
published the widely acclaimed book,
The
Devil’s Tea Party
.

Sansom left
Oxford shortly after the tragic suicide of his wife, Valerie, in
1990 to take up a post at Tübingen University in Germany. In 1995
he became Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin, a
position he left in 1998 to move to his current position at
Princeton. In his years away from Oxford, Sansom developed a
reputation not only as an academic but as a supreme fundraiser,
bringing money from business and private donors to create new
buildings for libraries and research facilities, as well as
endowing many chairs and projects in perpetuity. He returns as
Warden and College Chaplain with his second wife, Clarissa, alumna
of St Hilda’s College, Oxford.

The newspaper
articles all referred to Sansom’s appointment as Warden. To get the
original reports of the death Tommy would have to go to the Oxford
Mail offices and the physical archive. That would have to wait
until Monday.

He tried
replacing death in the search engine with suicide, and various
other permutations, but it seemed that St Saviour’s Wardens were
simply not celebrity enough to make any of the multitude of
internet conspiracy sites.

Tommy spent
half an hour in the workout room, leaching the excess adrenalin
from his body, and rested in the bath, lavender oil forming tiny
reflective shards on the surface. He watched the droplets drift and
collide, forming growing pools, oil running over the membranes of
his mind.
The answer to Charles Shaw’s
death was in his book, or possibly in the research for his book,
and his book was about children.
For
centuries people had been killed for their ideas. As a theologian
Tommy knew how easily the outside world laughed off the notion that
an idea could ever be motive enough for a person’s basest or
grandest actions. He knew just how powerful ideas really were to
those who believed them. Especially when those ideas left the
sickening rankness in the lining of your soul that Tommy got when
he thought of the Professor’s papers piled high on his
desk.

Even so, it
was much more likely that there was something specific in there,
something about a particular child; something about Becky, or about
Carol.
Charles and Haydn’s divorce,
Stephen Knightley forced into making a choice, Valerie Sansom’s
suicide, Hedley Sansom leaving the country, the birth of twins, one
living and one dead
.
Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.
Either Charles Shaw did something, or he knew who had done
something. Now someone had found out what it was and killed him,
either for what he did or for what he knew. Tommy splashed his face
in the fragrant, viscous water. He wanted it to be the latter, but
such hopes had no place in his thoughts now. The answer was in
Shaw’s mind, not in his. And it was in the formerly close-knit
group of colleagues he was being drawn into. And if he found it he
would have to find a way to tell Becky.

____

25

“
John
Radcliffe Women’s Health Centre. Good morning.”

“
Good
morning,” said Tommy. “Could I speak to Obstetrics,
please?”

“
Let me put
you through.”

Tommy waited.
“Good morning, Obstetrics.”

“
Hello, could
I speak to Dr Knightley, please?”

“
I’m afraid Dr
Knightley won’t be in until 3 today. Can I take a
message?”

“
No, thank
you, I’ll call back this afternoon.” Tommy put the phone down. As
soon as he had done so, it rang. “Tommi,” he said, the
ee
sound at the end not
so much shortened as accentuated.

“
Is that how
you greet your clients, Tommy?” Becky asked.