The Company of Fellows (39 page)

Charles hadn’t
sold Carol to Ellison. Tommy knew that for sure. He’d seen the room
where he’d kept her until very recently. He wanted more than ever
to ask Becky if she’d ever felt the pull of her twin, and wondered
if it would ever be an appropriate question to ask. There were so
many questions. Too many. It’s not the right time to ask them now,
he told himself, not even whether it was also the room where she
died, although in his subconscious the gape of blood-red paint was
all the answer he had needed.

Just a little
longer. He allowed himself a moment of relief for Jane Ellison.
Whatever vileness had burrowed its way into her husband’s head had
stayed there. Perhaps she could hold onto normality a little
longer. Maybe she’d never know just how close she came to losing
it. It certainly wouldn’t be him who told her.

Just what did
you do with her, Professor? Tommy went through the list.
Make the fundamental choice in your life.
You certainly did that, didn’t you?
Jacob I loved but Esau I hated
. You chose one fate for Becky, one for Carol, but which was
which?
Raise a child
. How did you raise her, Professor? However you did it, that
wasn’t the point, was it? Whatever you did with her you were
basically just fattening her up like meat.

Tommy felt
himself drawn to one line on the screen, the one line his eyes
refused to look at because it was little better than the answer he
had believed to be true until this morning.
Have sex with someone you have loved as long as you can
remember.
He went over everything Ellison
had said to him. What if Ellison hadn’t been trying to parry him
away from a terrible secret, but had just been telling things as
they were. Charles hadn’t been with a woman since he left Haydn.
Why not? Is that what Carol was? Hadn’t Knightley said something
similar when Tommy met him at the memorial service? The perfect
shag, he’d called it, one of Charles’ great thought experiments,
every word, every detail planned out over the course of 18
years.

Something else
was knocking at the door. No, it was in his pocket,
“Tommy”

“
Just keeping
you on your toes.”

“
I haven’t
forgotten, Becky. I’ll be there tonight. 6 OK?”

“
6 is
great.”

“
Good. Look, I
need to go now if you want me to make it for tonight.”

“
Later.”

That was it.
The phone. Wagner. There it was on the list,
Go to the Bayreuth Festival.
And the
sound files, the different recordings from Tristan and
Isolde.

That’s it,
isn’t it, Professor? Tristan and Isolde. A yearning so great it can
be satisfied only in death. You raised her for 18 years. Somehow
you kept her away from the world and you taught her exactly what
she needed to know for that one night. Every time you saw her you
knew what was going to happen. You knew you were going to have her,
but you knew that you couldn’t touch her yet. No wonder you never
looked at another woman. Nothing else mattered. No-one else
mattered. Is that why you wouldn’t see Becky? Because you couldn’t
see her, couldn’t bear to. Started seeing her again just after she
was 18, didn’t you? Did she remind you of that night, help you to
relive it? No, they were twins, but to you they were as different
as if they had been born to mothers on opposite sides of the
world.
Jacob I loved, but Esau I
hated
. That’s the whole point of children,
isn’t it? What they are in themselves is absolutely nothing. They
are only what we decide they are going to be. Whatever you had in
store for Carol, the opposite was there for Becky. Becky wasn’t
special, she was absolutely mundane. Against everything natural,
you chose Carol as your partner, but Becky was just your daughter.
When Carol was dead you could make your peace with her, tell her
you were sorry and let her get on with her life, just like any
other crap father.

Tristan and
Isolde had died in each other’s arms. Charles hadn’t died, and that
was why. He would have left exactly the right time before, and
exactly the right time after, and then he would have killed
himself. If the killer had just let him be for a little while
longer, until he had finished making whatever kind of peace he
wanted to make with Becky, he would have killed himself and Becky
would never have had to be hurt.
Jacob I
loved but Esau I hated.
Carol the lover,
but Becky the daughter. Carol dead, but Becky safe. At the whim of
a capricious father. It’s the whole foundation of the
Judaeo-Christian tradition. If only the killer had learned to
wait.

____

62

What did the
Sansoms talk about at night? He couldn’t get the question out of
his head, but it had a new significance now. Did they ever discuss
Shaw, ever discuss Becky and Carol, ever discuss what one of them
had done? If they did, Tommy was sure they would have constructed
their alibis on a foundation of solid granite. A choice once made
and never reneged on. Whatever choice each had made it clearly
involved the other. He hoped they spent their nights reading their
books and papers rather than the nuances of each other’s
bodies.

It was time to
go, just in case Harry changed his mind once he got home, and made
the call. They should at least have finished lunch by now. It would
be best to catch them separately.

Tommy could
feel the acid rising in his throat as he approached Elgin Square,
passed the tower on his right, stood to cross the road, and found
himself staring at the entrance to his old college. So much had
happened since the first time he had stood here, an eager teenager
early for an interview, slightly overwhelmed, with a strange
feeling he identified as nerves telling him it wasn’t too late to
turn away, but knowing somehow that his destiny lay through that
giant arch.

He had that
feeling again now, but now, after years of sickness, he knew
exactly what it was. He listened in vain for the voice telling him
it wasn’t too late to turn back, but he knew that it wouldn’t come.
It had been too late the moment he had walked into Professor Shaw’s
study. He knew surely now as he had sensed vaguely then. His
destiny lay through that giant arch.

He crossed,
oblivious to the hum of traffic, the shouts of the bus driver
wanting to pull away, the oohs of pedestrians waiting to see if the
taxi would bother stopping to let him through. He couldn’t take any
of it in, couldn’t afford to. He sensed that the moment he turned
even slightly to one side, his head would be flooded and the truth
would be lost. No, he had to preserve what shred of sanity he had
left. He would need it.

As the shadow
of Martyr’s Tower fell over him, Tommy nodded to one side without
looking whether there was a bulldog there or noticing if there was
a greeting. His eyes blinked as he re-emerged into the sunshine but
he didn’t register it as light. Nor, as he walked by wire towards
the fountain in the middle of the Quad, was he aware of his name.
Not the first time, not the second, nor the third. Nor did he see
the figure running towards him in his peripheral vision.

Only when the
arm on his shoulder exerted enough for to make his footing falter
did he look round. He looked at the face but for several seconds he
didn’t really see it.

What he saw
sucked the blood from his face, and it was all he could do to keep
standing.

“
Tommy, what’s
wrong with you?”

“
You haven’t
the first clue,” Tommy said, his facility for pleasantries long
gone.

“
Yes.” Her
eyes didn’t leave his. “Yes, I think I do.”

Jane turned
him gently and led him across the quad. She opened the door and
took him downstairs into the kitchen that was scented with boiling
herbs and a meat that was probably chicken. She sat Tommy at the
sturdy oak table and set about making a mug of tea to bring some
heat to his blood-drained hands.

If Tommy had
had any feelings left he would have used them to fight himself back
from taking in his surroundings, with their warmth and homeliness,
their welcoming normality that was built at best upon a sham, at
worst, well, those were thoughts that were a long way beyond him
now. But there was no danger of his taking any of it in. His only
connection to the events of the past two weeks was a general
awareness through the grey fog that had fallen over him that he
should be glad of the numbness.

After a length
of time he had no way of measuring, Tommy felt the heat of a
steaming mug of tea pressed into his hands, soft pads of fingers
warm against his knuckles, holding his hands in place. Eventually
he looked up.

Jane smiled,
her eyes burning further warmth into him. She let go of his hands.
“It’s good to have you back with us.”

As the steam
from the tea burned its way slowly through the fog he began to
piece his thoughts back together. Eventually he looked up again,
into Jane’s friendly eyes, and the lurch he felt coming from his
stomach was enough to tell him that he really was back. For the
moment.

“
Good,” Jane
said matter-of-factly. “We need to talk.”

Tommy feigned
blankness but he knew that the lights had come back on and were
shining right into a deep vacuum somewhere behind his
eyes.

“
It must have
been almost twenty years ago now.” She was no longer smiling, Tommy
registered, but if there was pain then either he was inured to it
or it was hidden too well and too far for him to see. Jane
continued. “I’d gone to bed early after dinner and left them to
their interminable chunterings. Having Charles round always gave me
a headache for some reason. I think it must have been the constant
intensity. Anyway, that night I couldn’t get to sleep, and the
headache never developed properly, so I went down to the living
room to write some letters. It’s immediately above Barnard’s study
and they must have thought I was spark out as usual because they
were talking particularly loudly. Or maybe it was just that
something in my subconscious tuned in to what they were
saying.”

Tommy could
feel himself fighting the urge to leave.
It’s too late for that
, he thought.
Something he couldn’t quite place made him feel he owed it to Jane
to listen. Possibly it was the feeling that whatever it was she was
going to say, this was the first, and maybe the last, time she
would ever say it.

“
They were
talking about sex. Not like giggling schoolboys or faceless suits
getting lary on a Friday night.” The casual colloquialism of her
language took Tommy by surprise, as if she had had to put on a mask
to allow herself to talk about it. “And they weren’t discussing it
as an academic point. There was something about the way they were
talking that made me feel as though I shouldn’t be listening, as
though I was intruding on something private.” She added absolutely
flatly: “I would give everything now to have put my things away and
gone back upstairs. But it was impossible not to listen.

“
They must
have been talking about what felt best, physically best. I remember
every word of what they said. ‘So you think it’s best in the
mouth?’ Charles said. ‘What makes that so good? The combination of
the soft moistness of the cheeks and the flickering wet warmth of
the tongue?’ It was as though they were reading the script from a
porno film, but were reading it absolutely deadpan. ‘No, it’s too
slack like that,’ Barnard said. ‘No matter how hard they suck or
what they do with their lips. No, the mouth is best when they wrap
their lips over their gums. If they do that right they can get a
tightness that’s almost an exact fit, and then they can hold you in
place while they use their tongue.’

“
Charles
didn’t say anything. I don’t know what I was thinking. I should
have been disgusted, I should have wondered what my husband did,
where he went, to know all this, but somehow I didn’t want any
questions stopping me hearing what came next. And when I did, it
was too late for questions like that.”

It was Tommy’s
turn to put his hand on Jane’s. He knew exactly what it felt like
to have to stop yourself asking questions, to make yourself focus
only on what came next.

“
After a
minute or so Barnard continued. What he was doing for that minute
I’ll never know, but I think he was sizing Charles up, wondering
how he would react to the conversation being taken one stage
further. ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he said. “And it’s still
not quite as good as it could be. Teeth still poke through and
gums, well, they’re bony, slightly too hard. What you need is
something more cartilaginous to make it perfect. Cartilaginous but
still body temperature on the inside, soft, spongy, but with just
enough give.’”

Tommy felt the
kitchen start to swim. Concentrate, he said to himself. Just on the
words she’s saying. She did it. Make yourself do it too.

“‘
I’ve been
thinking about it for a long time, and I’ve worked out exactly what
would work.’ He paused again, slightly. He still hadn’t committed
himself, wanted to make sure he could I suppose. ‘The crown of
baby’s skull, before it fuses, if you could trepan a hole in it
just the right size.’ They were silent again for a while. Charles
didn’t shout. I couldn’t hear him get up and walk out, or throw
things around. Eventually Charles did speak. ‘You’d have to find a
way to keep it still but still allow enough room for it to thrash
around to mimic the flickering of the tongue.’”