The Company of Fellows (27 page)

“
Nothing,
Tommy. We talked about nothing. No, that sounds like we chattered
happily to ourselves. What I mean is that we said
nothing.”

“
Just a
comfortable silence?” He couldn’t imagine the silence being
comfortable with someone else. Silences with Emily had been filled
with tensions, waiting to split into arguments or tears.
Comfortable silences were a delicious privilege of living on his
own.

“
I never
noticed. I was always too busy thinking.”

Becky had at
least settled. Now she knew that he wasn’t digging for information
about Charles’ death.

“
Do you want a
hand with pudding?” Becky offered as she emptied the last of the
wine into her glass and swirled it against the light.

Tommy glanced,
out of courtesy he hoped she would think, at Haydn who smiled back
that it was OK to leave her.

“
How’ve you
been, Tommy?” Becky asked quietly when they were alone.

“
Exhausted.”
Tommy reached into one of the dresser-cum-fridges in the drawing
room and pulled out a tray of espresso glasses filled with
flavoured crèmes.

“
Any
progress?”

“
Plenty.”

“
Anything you
want to share with me?”

“
You’re
getting a little close to the loop aren’t you, the one you wanted
to be kept out of?”

“
Sorry. I
missed you over the weekend.”

“
Want me to
make some time tomorrow to hang out?”

“
No, not if
you’re busy, it’s just, you know, you’re going around asking
questions, getting things clear in your head, and I’m sitting at
home all day with things getting more and more screwed up, and
you’re the only safety valve I’ve got.”

“
Want to stay
over? I’m not up to thinking tonight anyway. We could watch a film
and drink some more wine. Would your mother mind?” He was no longer
desperate for her to go. He needed to unwind and so did she. With
any luck they could unwind over something a long way from Charles
Shaw.

“
I think she’d
be glad to get rid of me for a night.”

“
Tommy, that
was delicious.” Haydn said as she finished the last of her lavender
crème, “Thank you so much for a lovely evening.”

“
It would
always be a pleasure, Haydn.”

“
I don’t want
you to think I’m interfering,” she continued. “But I’m going to go
home now. I think it might be nice for Becky to have some time
without me getting in her way. Would you mind if she stayed with
you tonight? I know she wants to but she probably thinks I’d
disapprove so she wouldn’t ask.”

“
I’d be
delighted for her to stay. There are several rooms made up, all in
their own unique styles.”

____

39

“
Thanks for
letting me stay, Tommy.”

“
That’s OK.”
Already, now that they were alone, Tommy’s anxiety levels were
rising and he wondered if he’d done the right thing. He knew she’d
start to get suspicious if he kept putting her off. But he couldn’t
cope with her questions yet.

“
When you were
talking to mum earlier,” Becky said into her wine. “I thought you
were going to start digging things up but you didn’t.
Sorry.”

“
Don’t be
sorry, I ask too many questions. I gave you my word, though. You
can trust me.”

“
I know. Dad
trusted you. Look, let’s talk about something else.”

“
Good idea,”
he said, perhaps too quickly. He realised again that he’d forgotten
this was a young girl who’d just lost her father. If he thought he
was finding it hard to cope with the events of the last few days,
what must she be going through? “Want to choose a
subject?”

Becky got up
and paced around the room, looking at the carefully placed
ornaments and the piles of samples that Tommy only really cleared
away once or twice a month. She looked young, Tommy thought, with
her weight back on her heels and her hands in her jeans pockets,
still able to slouch without any danger of a stoop. Her head was
cocked to one side and it made her hair fall straight down over her
forehead. She stopped in front of a poster for a Delauney
exhibition at the Pompidou Centre.

“
You travel a
lot?” she asked.

“
A lot, yes.”
That was one of the ironies of being Tommy. Half of his life he
spent trapped inside his house, too frightened of the world to go
outside. The rest of the time he wandered through it at will, going
places that would terrify the average Brit.

“
Always for
work? Seeing suppliers, picking up samples, getting a feel for the
culture, getting themes for your rooms?” Her head was still hunched
into her shoulders. She seemed to be questioning his things one by
one as she looked at them.
Who are you?
Where do you come from?

The truth was
that she had hit the mark exactly. The moment he had his work head
on, as soon as he was Tommi, it was as though he became invincible.
As soon as he was just Tommy again his unbreakable shell exploded
and he was just the petrified young man screaming on her father’s
floor for the safety of home. The world of difference was summed up
in that one changed letter.

“
Most of the
time I go somewhere I pick something up for work. That’s never the
only reason, though. There’s always a gallery I haven’t seen, a
mountain I haven’t climbed, a valley to walk through or a stretch
of sea to swim in.” He realised as he said it that that was also
true. There was something about the unfamiliar that was less
frightening than the world he knew. Maybe it was just the new
sensations that he loved; maybe what he actually loved was being
somewhere that wasn’t yet touched by failure.

Now Becky was
sitting, cross-legged on the floor, her chin resting on her clasped
hands like a four-year old transfixed by their teacher’s fairy
tales.

“
And wherever
I go,” Tommy continued, “there are people I haven’t spoken to
before, food I’ve never eaten – recipes to swap, drinks to
discover, textures as much in the landscape and the sky as the
textiles. I can’t imagine not travelling.” It was a strange life,
he thought as he listened to himself speaking. He could function in
the bubble of his home; he thrived in the unknown. He just couldn’t
cope with anything in between.

Becky came and
sat back down beside him. She didn’t look up and he couldn’t see
her eyes. He couldn’t see them but he could feel hurt somewhere
deep inside her. He put his hand on her chin but she turned
away.
Turned to avoid a kiss, but he was
looking for her eyes and not her lips. Laughing and traffic.
No, the only noise was the background of Wagner.
“Hug,” said Becky, and her head fell onto his shoulder.

“
It’s been a
hard week,” Tommy said. “But this bit will be over soon. I can’t
tell you that it will all be so quick, I’m afraid.”

“
The funeral’s
on Wednesday. We spent the day arranging it.” Her voice sounded a
little more composed.

No wonder she
needed some time out, he thought. “Want me to come?”

“
Of course.”
Becky sat up and picked her wine off the floor. “But not if it
slows down finding dad’s killer.”

“
You didn’t
tell me about your travels,” said Tommy, changing the subject back
quickly.

“
I only really
go when mum’s at a conference. I hang out at the galleries. The
only place I’ve been on my own was eastern Europe this summer.
There’s plenty of time to catch up with you, though.”

“
Did you enjoy
it?” That seemed somehow a more appropriate question than simply
asking her where she’d been.

“
I absolutely
love it. I want to travel every moment I have spare. There’s too
much to see for me to be able to see it all already. The more I
wait the more there’ll be I never get to see. That’s a scary
thought, isn’t it?” She pressed her head into his shoulder. Tommy
felt tiny convulsions that he knew were tears. He felt them pushing
his own tears away, as though the need to stay strong for her
protected him from the darkness that was trying to fight its way
out from within him.

“
Yeah.” She
didn’t get that from her father, he thought, that impatience with
life. That was more like him speaking. Tommy had never really
understood the debate between more experiences or better
experiences when there were just so many experiences to have. If
people lived a thousand years maybe it would be an issue, but when
they live fewer than a hundred can anything be worth the delay in
gratification that comes from denial? It would have to be something
qualitatively different. Something he had no knowledge
of.

TUESDAY
SEPTEMBER 11, 2007

____

40

Tommy drifted
in and out of sleep throughout the night, images playing themselves
out in his head at random, combining and drifting apart as
something deep within him struggled to make sense of things.
Jacob I loved, but Esau I
hated
.
Eyes
staring hollow from under red hair. Becky’s eyes, hiding something
dark. Different eyes, hiding nothing. “Fuck me.” A needle hanging
from an arm that may have been a woman’s but was too thin to tell.
Shaw sitting in a library in Paris counting money.

Finally he
woke and the pictures were gone. He breathed in deeply the cool
freshness of cotton. Cool. He turned over to a new piece of pillow
and felt the cold cloth on his cheek. “Rosie?” But there was no
warm figure curled up by his side.

“
You’re awake,
then?” came a voice from the doorway.

“
Eh?”

“
Coffee,
sleepy?”

“
Becky?”

“
Unh-hunh. Who
did you think I was? Who’s Rosie?” And then, as if realisation had
struck: “Oh my God, not Sergeant Rosie?” Becky came and sat on the
bed and thrust a mug of coffee in his face. From short range it
smelled like dark roast Columbian, which was exactly what he
needed.

Tommy said
nothing. It wasn’t a conversation he’d expected to be having. At
least it was less difficult that having to explain what he’d found
out about her sister in the last few days.

“
You’ve got a
girlfriend, haven’t you?” Becky was sitting cross-legged slurping
her coffee. She looked better without her make-up Tommy thought.
Her hair looked less severe against her lips, clashed less with her
eyes. He felt like he was back in college after a sleepover party,
chugging down caffeine and dissecting who had snogged
whom.

“
It’s too
early to call her a girlfriend,” he said, wondering why on earth he
was discussing his love life with her.

“
What does DCI
ex-girlfriend Harris think about it?”

“
Emily doesn’t
know,” he said, realising that this was yet another complication
he’d walked into that he could do without. “She’s also happily
married.”

“
Mm. So is
this what you were busy at over the weekend?”

“
Hardly. I’ve
been out doing the rounds like an overworked plod. Rosie, well, we
had pizza Sunday night.”

“
I had pizza
with mum on Sunday night but I didn’t call her name out in bed this
morning.” She got up and took his cup from him, turning and heading
to the kitchen. Tommy heard a sudden violent gush from the
over-sensitive tap, and the crack of China on metal, and underneath
the churn of water he caught the sound of Becky swearing to
herself.

He went
through to the kitchen and turned the tap to a more manageable
speed, holding her hand underneath it to rinse out a cut that
hadn’t gone too deep. He picked the pieces carefully out of the
sink and wrapped them in kitchen towel before binning them, tearing
off an extra sheet for Becky. “I’ll cook us some pancakes and give
you a lift home. I’ve got some serious investigating to
do.”

“
Good idea,”
she said, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. “You don’t
want my clutzing to get in the way.”

“
Put it down
to low blood sugar,” Tommy said, putting a jar of maple syrup on
the side.

*

By ten Tommy
was back in his study, sitting at his laptop with a small stack of
floppies that looked like poker chips. He felt refreshed. He
thought about calling Rosie and it felt good. If he had to be
distracted, it was better to be distracted by Rosie than by mania,
he reflected. The more he thought about her the more he thought
that for all his initial worries, they weren’t the same
thing.
Best not to be distracted at all,
though
. He mixed a little jasmine, rose,
and honeysuckle on his basalt smelling stone and closed his eyes.
His breathing slowed and in his mind’s eye he was walking through a
garden, hands brushing on honeysuckle and jasmine.
Somewhere in the distance the spire of Seville
Cathedral and the rhythmic tapping of flamenco guitar
strings
.