The Company of Fellows (20 page)

Emily decided
that smiling was better than lying, “So how much do your top of the
range clients pay?”

“
Anywhere from
£10,000 to £1million,” he said. “About 20% of that’s mine to share
with the Chancellor.”

The half of
Emily that wasn’t surprised Tommy had stuck with something long
enough to be that successful thought that he had become part of a
world she hated. She thought of the early apostles who shared all
their goods, and of a set of values that focused on the poorest in
the community and not the richest. But she knew that this vision
was as far from her own world and what her church had become as it
was from Tommy’s, and the knowledge made her resent him even
more.

Tommy stopped
outside the Anchor. Perhaps he had sensed her awkwardness, “Look,
Em,” he said. “I’m not sure whether you want an apology from me or
an explanation, but the answer’s the same in both cases. I was an
arrogant prick.”

“
Case closed,
Tommy,” she said. “Anyway, we both seem to have got there in the
end.”

“
Yeah.”

“
Now let me
buy you a drink.”

He didn’t seem
so dangerous now, she thought. Sad, but not dangerous. There was
something insecure and anxious in him, but nothing sinister.
Perhaps it was the seemingly desperate need for exactness, for
everything to be exquisite. Whatever it was, it was something that
made her want to be his friend. She found herself saying the word
in her head. She was surprised and relieved. Maybe she’d ask him
round to dinner and get David to cook for the three of them. She
could ask Rosie over too, although Rosie would kill her for it, but
it was a nice thought, and sat comfortably with her
absolutes.

When her phone
rang she was glad she’d stuck to orange juice. “Rosie?”

“
Emily, we’ve
got a body.”

“
I’m on my
way. Where are you?”

“
JR. Women’s
Health Centre.”

SUNDAY
SEPTEMBER 9, 2007

____

28

Emily looked
down and saw that David was holding her hand. She was too numb to
feel his gentle grip. She listened to the service going on around
her and wished for a moment that she was a Catholic; longed for the
cleansing intimacy of the confessional. Her job very rarely made
her feel dirty. The rotting human detritus that clung to Oxford’s
streets made her feel neither exhilarated nor exhausted. It wasn’t
the job that was affecting her now, either. Not Dr Knightley’s
melancholy stare, fixed in death. Not the gunpowder residue bedded
into the wound on one temple or the blood and brains that trawled
out of the opposite temple. Not the quiet shaking of the cleaner
who had watched as Knightley lifted the gun and shot.

The Women’s
Health Centre had dredged up from under the sediment of her soul an
area of her life that she kept a long way from work. Afternoons
sitting in the Purple Zone, as it was known: a pair of seats and
some brown-leafed tropical plants where people sit to see the
infertility counsellor. Where she sat with David week after week.
To get there she had to walk through the toys and tots and rows of
expectant mums. If she was early or kept waiting and wanted coffee,
the only machine was in the IVF centre round the corner, through
corridors of noticeboards updated with photos of the latest
successes.

Two years into
marriage, two years trying not to let the excitement build up as
the month wore on, two years trying to time it just right, and the
rounds of testing began. David had been first because testing him
was less intrusive. She had waited in the car outside, not able to
cope with the thought of what he was doing, had waited while he
made the long walk to Microbiology to be handed a pot and
told
we
haven’t
got any facilities. The loo’s down there on the
left
. That was where the testing stopped.
Almost all his sperm were
immotile.
“Not going anywhere, mate,” the doctor had said,
trying to keep the mood light.

There was no
point in her being tested. She wasn’t going to have a child if it
wasn’t David’s, although it had taken several sessions with Suzanne
the counsellor for her to admit that was entirely her choice;
several of the many sessions staring at the tissues and watching
Suzanne trying to be inconspicuous in her glances at the clock on
the wall behind Emily’s shoulder.

David hadn’t
had a vasectomy, he hadn’t spent his childhood in a radon hotspot,
he had always made wholesome unprocessed home cooking, and never
took hot baths. God why couldn’t there be something she could blame
him for because she did blame him so much and she felt as though
the whole fucking thing was her fault because of it.

Everyone was
standing for communion. David was pulling her out of her
seat.
Get off me
.
How could she take Christ’s body and blood when she felt like this?
Didn’t St Paul call it eating and drinking your damnation to take
communion in the wrong frame of mind? But how could she not? David
would want to know why. Everyone would want to know why. Eventually
the crowd she could see and wouldn’t forgive had a deeper pull for
her than the God she couldn’t see who would forgive.

Pews passed
her by in a peripheral slow motion blur as she walked to the front.
If she had wobbled at first she was steady now. Fully removed from
the person she was watching make their way up the aisle, she could
control her movements like a puppeteer. Hands outstretched and
solemn.
“The body of Christ.”
“Amen.”
“The blood of
Christ.”
“Amen.”

The blood of
the Son of God. The blood of all the sons and daughters, born and
unborn. Blood on Knightley’s desk. Blood on his note:

30 years. It
was always for the children. Every time but one. One too many. You
took the easy way out, Charles. Who’d have thought you’d beat me to
it. Here’s a last thought experiment. How many lives can you fuck
in one night?

Emily saw
herself in the pew, replete upon the slaughtered body of her
saviour, and urged herself to hold onto the taste, to hold onto the
thought. Wait, she told herself, slowly feeling herself descend
back towards her body. Wait for the still small voice of calm, and
eventually it will come.

____

29

St Saviour’s
stood directly opposite St Bride’s Church, separated only by a road
named after the latter. The congregations, though, felt themselves
to be at irreconcilable poles of the Christian spectrum. To the
evangelicals of St Bride’s those over the road had sold out their
beliefs for the sake of a middling quality weekly concert. To the
chapel-goers, the fiery-hearted schismatics across the way had
thrown out centuries of rich tradition for a quick hit of spiritual
warm and fuzziness.

Intellectually, both positions made perfect sense to Tommy. On
a personal level they were both nonsense, he reflected, as he sat
listening to the choirboys, thinking of Emily, who was probably
being seized by the Spirit a hundred metres away. September was a
busy time for St Saviour’s Chapel services. The tourists and summer
school visitors flocked to hear the trebles, the schoolboys with
their unbroken voices and starched ruffs who had just returned from
their summer holidays, and congratulated themselves that they
avoided the trap of coming thousands of miles to hear them in the
middle of the school holidays.

Tommy was
looking forward to hearing Hedley Sansom give the sermon. Sansom
was a brilliant speaker who never stuck to the prescribed
liturgical readings or collects. Tommy hadn’t heard him for a
decade and a half, though, and he wondered if the career ladder had
slickened his delivery but dulled the intellect behind
it.

“
It is a sad
delight,” Sansom began, “to welcome the trebles back for a final
time, just as it will be to welcome my last set of Freshers a few
weeks from now.” He really is sad, Tommy thought as he looked over
the half-moon glasses and behind the preened film across Sansom’s
eyes. Not sad for Charles. No, he really is sad to be going.
So why not stay?
“I
thought, whilst I was staring at an empty page for this sermon last
night with my wife calling me to bed, that this is always the most
delightful time of year, and the saddest time of year, if you will
forgive a Dickensian allusion before term has even
begun.

“
As is always
most prudent in such circumstances I left the page empty and let
myself sketch it in over cocoa. I thought of a September many years
ago when I stood in the church of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul. I
never forgot the mix of sadness and joy I saw in the art of the
Orthodox tradition, whose artists are able to take great, universal
properties and capture them in images that have been portrayed a
million times before and since. Christ child in the Virgin’s arms.
Christ Pantocrat, ruler of the heavens and the earth, Mary at his
side.

“
And I thought
of the times I have stood in this great Chapel, first as a young
lecturer, again as I started my Wardenship, and finally now at its
end. I thought of the sadness I feel now, and the joy I felt when I
arrived. Choirboy to graduate; Christ child to Pantocrat; lecturer
to retiring Warden. Why is it that in each case delight turns to
sorrow, even when the joy we have is the joy of potential, and we
see that potential through to fulfilment? Shouldn’t the achievement
of a goal well-executed merely increase our delight?

“
Well, the
answer to that is almost always no. I had always thought that this
was because a project finished is a purpose less that we have in
life but that is not the case. True, there is loss in the
completion of anything, but we soon find something new to fill the
emptiness. It wasn’t until last night that I realized where the
sorrow comes from. In my mind I was back in Istanbul. I walked
again through the gardens of Sultanahmet, into the giant dome of
Hagia Sophia. I stood under the protective wing of the dome and
found myself looking into the eyes of Mary as she held the infant
Jesus.”

Tommy sensed
shifting on the seats around him. The Chapel was known for
positioning itself towards the higher end of the Anglican Church,
but too much attention to the mother of God still made people very
uncomfortable. He could see that Sansom was totally aware of this,
and rather enjoying it.

“
What I saw in
her eyes was joy. I returned to the mosaic, just a few metres away,
of Christ Pantocrat, John the Baptist on one side, his mother on
the other. Her eyes were thin and shaded with grey, not the grey of
old age but the grey of sorrow. All the joy had gone, and it made
no sense. The infant Christ was now king, the universe within his
compass, and of course there is a deep contentment in his mother’s
soul, but as a human that is first and foremost what she was: his
mother. What we see is a mother who has found her saviour and lost
her child, a mother whose son has left the familial hearth
forever.

“
This is where
the sorrow lies whenever we see potential fulfilled. What we lose
is not the potential for success, but the potential for failure. It
is the sorrow for a lost vulnerability, and it is a very human
sorrow. This sorrow is the price of a fulfilled promise, the price
for the fulfilment of the divine promise. God makes us the equals
of angels, and in so doing takes away everything that it means to
be human. If we look at God’s purpose we will always see its
fulfilment tinged with sorrow. In heaven, after all, we are equal,
there are no partners and no children, no particular friendships,
no possessions. And as we here below contemplate our sure salvation
how can that not break our hearts? To be free from this sorrow we
can only wait, as St Paul would say, to see without our human eyes,
to see face to face. Wait in the silence of the divine for the
still small voice of calm.”

____

30

“
Good
morning, Tommy. It’s a long time since we’ve seen you at Morning
Service.”

Hmm. Nice of
you to bring it up
. “Good morning,
Professor Ellison,” said Tommy. “I was at Professor Shaw’s
memorial. I thought it was a beautiful speech.”

“
Thank
you.”

“
I’d love to
know more about the book you said he was working on.” Tommy watched
for a reaction, and was sure he saw one.

“
Come round
one afternoon next week,” said Ellison. “I’m not doing much
research at the moment, just another rewrite of the same old
lecture notes.”

“
Thank you. I
will.”

“
Tommy.” He
felt the well-rehearsed hand of Hedley Sansom on his shoulder. “Is
this annoying man pestering you?” Sansom smiled.

“
Chewing the
fat, Hedley,” said Ellison. “I haven’t seen Tommy here since, well,
for years.”

“
Of course. Of
course. It was lovely to see you at dinner on Friday, by the way,
Tommy.”

Tommy watched
as the colour drained from Ellison’s face. Sansom’s pleasure seemed
to increase by the same amount as Ellison’s discomfort. A nice
little zero-sum game, thought Tommy. If only everything were so
symmetrical.