The Company of Fellows (26 page)

“
I don’t
know.” He had absolutely no idea.

“
Grooming you
as his successor, that’s what everyone thought. Which is why we
were all so disappointed with what happened. But, as you say,
things are working out for you after all. Not for Charles, though.”
The comment hung in the air. Tommy decided to leave the Professor
to his glee.

____

38

Tommy
collapsed into the bath, fresh from his workout. He was exhausted.
It felt like he hadn’t recharged for days. He needed time to think
everything through, time away from anything to do with Charles Shaw
so that his unconscious could go to work on the backlog it was
building up, but too many things were bubbling around his head.
Perhaps preparing dinner for Becky and Haydn would occupy just
enough of the unquiet part of his mind.

He hoped
they’d arrive and leave together, that he wouldn’t have to spend
time alone with Becky. She wouldn’t want to ask him how things were
going. He wouldn’t want to tell. Neither of them would be able to
resist trying to have the conversation with their eyes, and
constantly looking away at the last minute to avoid it. He wanted
to ask her if she had ever felt the kind of telepathic link twins
talk about feeling, even when they don’t know they have a twin. He
wanted to ask her if she was old enough to remember when it
stopped. He wanted to stare into the blackness of her eyes and see
if this was the darkness at her centre, the secret about herself
that she didn’t even know. He wanted to know if Carol was the light
that had gone out.

Into her
eyes, underneath her tired red fringe. He lifted her chin and felt
a dead weight. She managed to turn a cheek in case he tried to kiss
but he was reaching for her eyes and not her lips. Straggles of
hair draped over a skull, lank red matching the red of the
eyeballs. A glimpse of flesh in the neon coming in through the
curtains, pock-marked and punctured. Screaming and laughing and
engines outside. “Fuck me,” monotone and phlegmy, “That’s it, fuck
me.”

A splash and a
shiver, water gone cold. Tommy gasped and opened his eyes. He could
feel the gooseflesh on his skin. He pulled the plug and towelled
himself off.

It was already
5 o’clock. He pulled on a thick polo neck but he was still shaking.
He couldn’t get the image out of his head.
Dead eyes looking at him from under a cheap red fringe. Not
Becky’s eyes.
He didn’t know whose they
were, where he had seen them; whether he ever had seen
them.

He poured
himself a smoothie and set about his ingredients with what was left
of the afternoon. Maybe the time pressure would occupy his mind. It
was a good job he had four courses to prepare. None of it would
take particularly long to cook, but everything needed to be ready
to go exactly on schedule.

First of all
he took out the meat, a grouse that was at the height of its
season. He had decided against wrapping it in bacon to keep it
moist. He could get much richer and more complex flavours by
fatting from the inside and out, in the stuffing and under the
skin. He took a pat of unsalted butter and a block of speck, and
cut equal pieces from each. The speck was a little too hard to
manipulate with a fork so he blended it into a puree before putting
it into a bowl with the butter and mixing the two together. Next he
took some sage and hyssop and tore them in, grated a little nutmeg
and allspice, two or three strands of saffron for the groundnotes,
and a black summer truffle from the Perigord, which he sliced into
the bowl. He set the fork aside and used his fingers to bring
everything together, feeling with the tips when the mix was just
right. He took about half out and made a sausage in his left hand.
With his right he lifted up the skin of the grouse just enough to
get his fingers underneath and work the near-liquid across the
breast and over the thighs. The bird had been hung just long enough
to help him, not so long as to make the skin burst.

He toasted a
handful of pistachios with crumbs from equal amounts of stale rye
and sourdough bread in a hot, dry pan and put them into the bowl
along with half the insides of a fig the other half of which he ate
whilst flicking the breadcrumbs in the pan. A thimbleful of 30 year
old MacCallan finished off the stuffing, which he again worked
gingerly into a sausage to go inside the bird.

Finally Tommy
stood back and admired the little game bird sitting in its cast
iron roasting dish. He closed his eyes and took in every one of the
smells from his hands. His nostrils flared in the evening sunlight
that was streaming in through the windows, and he could barely
remember who it was he had coming for dinner. Nothing mattered
except the exquisite blend of sensations, and the textures of the
fruits and fishes he was yet to prepare. Every synapse that fired
in his head arced itself towards the common goal of preserving
everything that was good in his ingredients.

Every
conscious synapse that is. Far deeper below the folding membranes
of the cortex, beyond the reach of any sunlight the trepanner might
let in, other synapses flashed and flared their secret messages,
slowly shuffling pieces that, taken separately, were too disturbing
for Tommy to face. They were slow roasting, accreting slowly in the
darkness, not yet fully formed but getting closer every moment he
left them be.

He was just
bringing a decanted bottle of Burgundy down to the dining room when
the front doorbell rang.

“
Good evening,
Tommy,” said Haydn as he opened the door. “Thank you so much for
asking us over.”

“
Haydn.” Tommy
took her hand, kissed her lightly on the middle knuckle and turned
her like a dancer to take her jade green wrap.

“
Hey, Tommy. I
was beginning to forget what you looked like.” Becky had already
taken off her cropped denim jacket and handed it to him with a peck
on the cheek. “Have you been a busy boy?”

“
You wouldn’t
believe it.” Not that he was going to test the
hypothesis.

“
Unlike you,
I’m afraid, I have little imagination for gifts,” Haydn said as
they walked through to the reception room. She handed Tommy what
looked like a small cigar holder, “so I’m afraid I brought you
wine.”

Tommy could
feel her eyes on him as he took the tiny packet. He saw her
register that he knew what was in the container. He took out what
looked like a test tube of liquid amber. “Stanza,” he said quietly,
holding it to the light, recognising at once one of the fabulously
rare 100 millilitre phials of unctuous Eszencia, bottled as
collectors’ editions only in the very finest vintages of the
1990s.

“
Now you can
have indulgence with you everywhere you go, even on an aeroplane,”
Haydn said.

“
Just like the
great critic Raymond Postgate,” Tommy replied.

“
Who carried a
bottle of Tokaji with him everywhere he went, so that he might have
it to hand at the moment of his death.” Haydn smiled and for a
moment Tommy thought that there had been a moment of connection in
their shared knowledge. “Which sounds rather like the kind of
romantic fancy that Charles would have espoused,” she continued,
and the flicker of recognition between them went out.

Tommy handed
her a drink and motioned for her to sit.

“
This is a
beautiful room.” She folded her pale brown silk shift dress
underneath her as she sat down on the Barcelona chair with her ice
cold glass of aquavit.

“
I think it’s
the closest I have to your preferred style. I’m afraid that turning
my home into a set of showrooms requires a little too much
serendipity for anyone to get an idea of my own taste.”

“
Not even in
your bedroom, Tommy?” Becky grinned.

“
I don’t
generally take my visitors to my bedroom.”

“
Generally?”

“
Let me fetch
you a little amuse bouche.”

“
A ferme
bouche, you mean.” She smiled.

It was a
strange dynamic, Tommy thought as he brought them tiny shot glasses
filled with what he called pearl kisses – iced gazpacho with a
scallop floating on it, topped off with a rose petal. Haydn’s
serenity never seemed broken by her daughter’s slightly spiky side.
He wondered if this was because she was comfortable enough with him
that she didn’t worry about superficial niceties, whether she loved
Becky so much that behaviour didn’t matter, or whether she simply
saw their public manners as different but equal. Perhaps she just
didn’t care. Had she really buried the wounds of 18 years ago so
deep that they left no trace on her, like the layers of sediment
built up over fossil remains? Or was all of it just a giant open
sore that she constantly cauterized with indifference to keep the
nerve endings numb?

There was so
much that Tommy wanted to know about Haydn. With everyone else he
had found himself involved with over the past few days he didn’t
feel he had had a problem. If he couldn’t ask exactly the question
he wanted he could at least ask a question that bordered on the
subject and then scan the reaction. With Haydn that was impossible.
He was transfixed by her taste, her manners, every detail of which
was impeccable in every way. Everything was as pristine as a
surgeon’s instruments, and yet he wondered if maybe she wasn’t
closed at all, just empty. But that was just part of it. As long as
Becky was here he could see from the twitches and the nervous
energy she was burning up that she was watching everything he said,
everything he so much as implied. There was a danger that her
protection of her mother would end up stifling the truth. That was
the other thing that was out of place in their relationship. The
protectiveness worked the wrong way round.

He tried to
conceal his delight when Haydn brought the subject up
herself.

“
You know,
Tommy, Charles never talked about you before he walked out. He
talked about a lot of students, but never about you. Yet it seems
from what people have told me that you were his
protégé.”

“
Professor
Shaw never taught me as an undergraduate,” Tommy said, not wanting
to point out that by the time he knew the Professor the Shaws had
long been divorced. “In fact, aside from my interview I don’t think
we ever spoke until the summer before I started my Masters, when he
agreed to supervise me.”

“
No, I suppose
you would only have been what, at the end of your first year when
he went on his extended sabbatical?”

“
I don’t think
I was ever aware that he’d been on sabbatical.” He tried to make it
sound throwaway, to weave the thread into conversation without
Becky noticing. Becky was making too great a show of mopping up her
lime butter sauce as she listened. “I’m afraid I didn’t pay much
attention to people. I turned up at lectures I liked the sound of,
and read books that helped me with ideas, but I’m afraid that if I
didn’t think I needed to footnote something I probably couldn’t
tell you who said it.”

“
After Becky
was born he went to the Sorbonne for two years.” Haydn explained.
Tommy registered absolutely nothing.

“
The Sorbonne?
What was he working on?”

Haydn laughed.
For the first time Tommy caught something bright at the back of her
eyes, “We were long past the pillow talk stage by then, I’m afraid,
Tommy. We separated a while before he went. The reason I believe he
gave was research on Thomas Aquinas. He published his book on
Scholastic ethics when he got back, so I suppose we have no reason
to doubt him.”

”
Haydn?” Becky
started flicking her fork in her hand twice as quickly. Tommy
thought she’d kick him under the table if she was close
enough.

“
Tommy.”

“
May I ask you
something personal?”

“
You
may
ask
anything,
Tommy.”

Becky was
playing frantically with her fringe.
Dark
eyes staring from under red hair
. Tommy
blinked.

“
When you were
first married to Charles you were happy weren’t you?” Strangely, he
knew that this was true. But he had no idea how.

“
Yes, Tommy, I
was.”

“
What did you
talk about at night? Sorry, forgive me if that’s too personal.”
Tommy didn’t know why he was asking. He knew it wasn’t anything to
do with Shaw’s death. It was something he had never understood.
When you are in love what do you talk about when the lights are
out? When the sweat is drying off, the heart rate returning to
normal, adrenalin slowing in the veins, what do you say? Especially
when you are so different and independent, have such tunnel vision
in your own specialism? It was a space he realised he had never had
to fill. It was part of human nature that remained blank. Was that
because it was somewhere he had never been, the absolute ease of
love that plays itself out in unrehearsed rituals? Or was it why he
had never been there? He felt an overwhelming desire to hold
someone’s hand and see what the closeness felt like, and for a
moment he wanted the Shaws to leave. He realised that in the time
that they had had he and Emily’s had never fallen into the simple
habits of togetherness. Now they never would. He clasped his fists
under the table to feel contact on his skin and blinked to cut off
the tears, half expecting to see Emily’s face on the back of his
eyelids, fading mockingly as he loosened his grip. But he saw
nothing.