The Company of Fellows (25 page)

“
Please,” said
Tommy shaking Wilde’s hand and feeling even better about life than
he already had done. He had forgotten just how much he’d looked up
to Wilde as a student, and just how long an hour a day for four
years eventually adds up to. Even when he first met him Wilde must
have been pushing forty, but his mind and his body only ever seemed
to get sharper. It’s much further into old age than lazy people
care to admit before the ravages of natural decay begin to outstrip
the benefits of constant training, thought Tommy. Wilde had always
had time to speak to Tommy when he went out to the gym at
lunchtime, and whatever Tommy had brought with him as the day’s
read, Wilde always had something to the point to
contribute.

“
Charles
Shaw,” Wilde said, half to himself. He took a seat and gestured for
Tommy to do likewise. His steeple formed a frame around the
vermilion shot silk tie that was the only colour in his outfit.
“You know he used to be my client?”

“
No, I
didn’t.” Tommy sat more upright.

“
Well he was,
ever since he made his first will, when he was still an
undergraduate. Talk about being prepared. He switched over to John
just before you started here, about 18 years ago.”

Now Tommy was
very interested. “Did he say why?”

“
No he didn’t,
Tommy. Not that I should really tell you if he did. It’s probably
time for you to tell me why you’re here. Maybe then I can answer
you.” He smiled, totally noncommittal, a perfect lawyer’s
smile.

“
Archaeology,”
Tommy said.

“
Just digging
around, eh? That much I got. Are you digging for anything in
particular or just because you like holes? Thank you,
Christine.”

Tommy took his
tea and let it warm his hands to get the blood flowing as quickly
as he could. It had been ten years since he had sat across a desk
from someone and not felt that he had them covered from every
angle, physical and mental. He liked the feeling, but he still
needed information. “Well, Howard Carter had Lord Caernavon; I have
Becky Shaw.”

“
I’ll bet you
do. What does Becky Shaw want to know that she can’t get her mother
to ask me?”

“
Loose ends,”
Tommy said. “Becky was seeing her father again. Haydn didn’t know.
Is that why Charles Shaw changed? Because you were his wife’s
solicitor?”

“
I thought
that’s what you were thinking,” Wilde said. It wasn’t at all what
Tommy was thinking ,and Tommy was fairly sure Wilde knew that. He
was only going to tell what he wanted to tell. “He switched a
little while before the divorce, a couple of months before the
business with Carol. The divorce was pretty irrelevant. I farmed
that out to another firm to avoid any conflict of
interest.”

Tommy had
guessed that Wilde would be more keen on the appearance of
propriety than Charteris had been. He’d guessed that the man with
his name on the brass plaque would have pulled rank. Maybe that was
the kind of man Professor Shaw thought should represent him. Maybe
he just found Wilde a little too uninspired by life’s little
hedonisms.

“
She wants me
to fill in the background that she never had time to find out from
him.”

“
That’s bull,
Tommy.” Wilde paused, as if considering whether to exchange a few
pleasantries and show him the door. Tommy wondered if he’d blown
it, if Wilde had seen through him, although he knew he could hardly
have told the truth. “Hell,” the lawyer said eventually. “It’s good
enough bull for me. What background are you after?”

“
Just a couple
of things. The message he sent round with John mentioned a will. I
have a feeling that was a concoction?”

“
One hundred
percent.” Wilde was sitting back with his hands clasped behind his
head. He had had his little joust; now he looked benign. Probably,
Tommy thought, at any rate. There was one percent of him that
couldn’t tell, the one percent that Wilde had on him in age and
guile and a history of good mental health.

“
When exactly
did Shaw make his money?” said Tommy. It was the question he had a
feeling held the key to everything. “Not his millions, the hundred
thousand or so seed corn money he used to build them
up.”

“
You mean
before or after the divorce,” Wilde surmised.

Close
enough
, thought Tommy. How about
before or after his daughter was born?

“
Well, I
believe the money entered his traceable accounts a few months
afterwards, while he was still on sabbatical. You’re not going to
ask me how he made it?”

“
It wouldn’t
occur to me to think he’d have told anyone,” said Tommy. “What
about your loose ends? Money that needs tracing before people can
be given their share?”

“
There’s not
really a good reason to say there is any more money.” It seemed
like a satisfactory answer to both of them. “Like you said, just a
little archaeology.”

“
Care to let
me know where the dig is?”

“
Spain. That’s
all you’re getting, and I’m only saying that because it’s the end
of summer and you still look pasty.” Wilde’s eyes scanned Tommy’s
figure under his black cashmere, “Call again, Tommy. We’ll go to
the gym together.”

____

37

Tommy stopped
for a coffee at Convocation House, the tea shop attached to the
University Church of St Mary Magdalene on the High Street, and then
made the short trip back to St Saviour’s. Fortunately he’d never
had tutorials with Professor Ellison. Stories from those who had
were of a man who loved his own inconsiderable wit rather more than
his students’ intellectual welfare. He also made many of his female
students feel uncomfortable – not, they put it, because he was a
creep, but because he’d spent all his life in single sex cloisters
and seemed to spend tutorials constantly surprised by female
company. At least having him tongue-tied meant they didn’t have to
listen to his jokes, some of Tommy’s friends would say.

Professor
Ellison’s accommodation took up the southwest corner of Martyr’s
Quad. Tommy knocked. Tommy could hear hard leather soles
approaching on the flagstones. He felt his anxiety levels
rising.

“
Hello.”
Ellison stood in the doorway with his head tilted to one side,
neither inviting him in nor blocking his way. Tommy’s anxiety
wasn’t receding. Ellison had none of his contemporaries’ social
pleasantries. In Knightley Tommy had found this social diffidence
rather appealing. In Ellison he found it trying. It was as though
the Professor made him feel like he was walking on sand.

“
You may or
may not be expecting me,” said Tommy.

“
Obviously,”
Ellison said, as though affirming Tommy’s summary of the law of the
excluded middle.

“
I was hoping
you might have a few minutes to tell me a bit about Professor
Shaw’s book.”

“
Come in, come
in,” said Ellison. “I don’t think I’m booked up yet this morning.
Tea?”

“
No, thank
you.”

Ellison took
Tommy past a cut-out in the floor where a staircase led down into
the basement, and into his study. The study was a vast room with
ceilings that must have been five metres high or more. Every wall
was filled to the top with bookshelves, all painted in a white that
had been yellowed by years of Ellison’s little roll-ups, one of
which he picked up from his desk and lit as he sat down. Tommy sat
on a battered leather chair ten feet or so from Ellison’s desk and
wondered if his voice would echo in the vast room with next to no
furniture breaking up the space.

“
How have you
been, Tommy? Everyone was, well, very concerned for you, but I
gather that you’ve made something of a name for yourself in your
new field.” Tommy felt the insincerity seeping out of Ellison’s
pores.

“
I’ve been
very well for a long time now, thank you.” Tommy gave an equally
insincere smile back, and wondered if the Professor would step
outside of his ego long enough to pick up on it. “Given you concern
for me I rather thought I might have heard from you in my new
capacity.” Tommy looked around the room, which lacked, as far as he
could see, a single item of any personality. Professor Ellison was
independently wealthy. Very wealthy. His grandfather had made a
fortune in the early days of the canning industry and the family
company still did very well from food storage solutions. Evidently
he’d spent none of it on home comforts.

“
I leave all
of that to my wife, I’m afraid. And in a house we actually own. The
all-seeing eye of the great architect in the Works Office would
never forgive me if I lifted a paintbrush in anger
here.”

“
Professor
Shaw’s book,” said Tommy, already tired of the inanities. “From
what you said it was going to make quite a splash. Did he ever talk
about it?”

“
He talked
about little else. You know what he was like, anything to get a
citation. Never actually gave away his big ideas, though.” Ellison
sipped a cold cup of tea, his lips curling around the edge of the
cup as he made a sucking sound like a wine taster taking in air. He
had aged neither well nor badly, but looked like a man in his mid
fifties who had led a life that was little out of the ordinary in
any way. That was, by and large, from what Tommy understood, true.
The Professor had had one wife, two children, and a very successful
career. It had faltered when it became apparent that the big offers
from America wouldn’t come, but it still provided enough kudos for
most egos.

“
You said that
it was about children; and from the way you said it I assume that
it wasn’t about the ethics of designer babies.”

“
Absolutely
not. I think he found children rather problematic. Well, I suppose
it’s only understandable.”

“
In what
way?”

“
In what way
understandable?” Ellison raised a bushy dark eyebrow that stood out
against his white hair. Tommy thought he looked like Father
Ted

“
In what way
problematic?” Tommy corrected.

“
Well, I
suppose the basic problem he saw is the one that the church has had
problems with for centuries, the problem of the so-called innocent
child. You know the rather tedious questions, where do they go when
they die? Heaven, or limbo as our Catholic friends used to have it?
Are they innocent at all or are they all tainted with original sin?
And if they are innocent, when do they cease to be and start to be
guilty? Standard problem cases. Two fifteen year-olds having sex.
At midnight one of them turns 16 and becomes a paedophile. Thompson
and Venables murder James Bulger and people want them strung up,
yet if someone had a quick fiddle in their trousers they’d have
been poor victims. Rather banal stuff that, frankly, Philip Pullman
did rather better.”

“
And he gave
no hint what his big idea was?” Tommy tried not to look too
interested, and tried not to look as though he wasn’t looking.
Maybe it would have been easier if he’d asked for a cup of tea
after all. He wanted to see whether the question bothered
Ellison.

“
Not that I
could understand. He occasionally made some rather postmodern
comments about children not being anything in themselves except
signifiers, empty vessels onto which we project our own meanings
and choices. From what I understand that’s more your sort of
thing.”

“
Indeed,”
Tommy said. “I doubt he would have called them empty vessels,
though. That would be a term he might have saved for the wombs that
carry them. He may have called them blank screens.”

“
God I hate
that bollocks,” Ellison said. “Whatever happened to proper
theology?”

Tommy laughed.
It hadn’t been intended as a joke but he couldn’t help himself.
People like Ellison were what happened to proper theology, he
reflected. They took it out to the desert and desiccated it. He was
pleased with the image and laughed a little more.

“
He always
liked that bloody perverse streak in you, you know, ever since you
arrived.”

“
I remember I
particularly enjoyed my interview with him.”

“
He talked
about it, you know, during the selection meetings
afterwards.”

“
No, I
didn’t.”

“
Oh yes. You
were always his little protégé, singled out for special
treatment.”

“
Special
treatment?” Now Tommy was interested, and he knew that he had shown
it. He could feel Ellison muzzling at it like a doe hungry for
rut.

“
How many
undergraduate rooms in St Saviour’s do you think had their own
private kitchen?”

It had been
the source of conversation and envy that Tommy had ended up in a
room in Cecil Quad that not only had its own private bathroom but a
kitchen as well. It was where he had honed the culinary skills his
grandfather had passed him, where he had tried to seduce Emily
unsuccessfully with the finest food. He’d always simply assumed he
was lucky.

“
One,” said
Ellison. “That’s how many, and Charles leaned on the accommodation
officer to make sure you got it. Why do you think that was,
Tommy?”