The Company of Fellows (44 page)

*

After six
weeks Tommy decided to get back to work. He began by ordering
samples for Farlow Bateson’s gym. He was delighted when they
started arriving on his doorstep, and today he was particularly
delighted to see the Rome postmark. He took the thick brown
envelope upstairs in anticipation. It would be a selection of
sports floors from his friend, Gianni.

He sat down
with his abalone letter opener and a smoothie and slit the
envelope. Out flopped an auction catalogue. It was for a Sotheby’s
Fine Wine auction, dated a week ago. There was a post-it on one
page. Tommy opened it. Tokaji. Eszencia 1811. One bottle from the
cellars at Mezes Mały. A case had sold in 1991 for
£98,000.

He shook the
envelope. Out came a sheet of heavy woven paper. He ran the letter
opener feverishly down the letter and put it on the table. He fell
back into the sofa and heard the familiar voice reading the letter
back to him.

You blinked
first, Tommy. Johnny Boy really did give you everything you
needed.

£98,000. The
money, that he had given to Haydn, was £98,000. It was the price of
the world’s finest Tokaji. It was clear at once what Charles had
been trying to tell him. Why would a man of that wealth drink the
second best wine in the world when the best was available? It had
been his way of telling Tommy that he was still alive. Tommy had
been so obsessed by the two wines he had found at Charles’ house
that he had missed the most important thing of all – the wine that
wasn’t there.

Jacob I loved
but Esau I hated. You obsessed over it, I think, but you never
thought about it logically. You never thought what it would mean
given the one incontrovertible fact that I was still alive, so you
looked at the wrong twins. It was thirty years ago that I
discovered I had a twin, at the time I found out I had been
adopted. He, however, was never so curious. It was easy to keep
tabs on him. I was able to marry my appearance to his, just as
easily as I was able to match Carol’s appearance to Becky’s. I
mirrored him for thirty years, not knowing at first when it would
come in handy.

Everything I
told Carol is true. I set out to give her everything, and once I
made my choice to do so I never went back on it. I had hoped that
you would be part of her future, but I do not hold it against you
that you are not. That, after all, is the risk we take when we
leave things to choice. I know that I planned everything as fully
as I could have done. John, for example – the perfect way to pique
your curiosity, wasn’t he? I wonder if you realised why I took him
on eighteen years ago. It certainly wasn’t because his legal skills
were superior to Henry’s, but Henry, I’m afraid, was just too
conscientious with his body. John, however, I was able to groom for
ill-health and he actually thought it was a treat. All I had to do
was induce the right amount of anxiety and over-exertion at just
the right time and you were hooked. And I wonder how difficult you
found it to turn your back Carol’s sad eyes when they looked up at
you from under her badly-dyed hair. Perhaps I should have expected
you’d do it eventually – you’d turned your back once before, after
all, hadn’t you? I thought you might have found it harder to do so
a second time. In all the years I had you followed, that was the
one thing I thought was sure to sway you. You can sleep soundly, by
the way – my man acted quickly enough to remove any traces you
might have left in the poor girl’s room in Brewer Street, even
though you’d just shoulder-charged him in your hurry to
leave.

I never
resented a day I spent raising Carol, never withheld even the
smallest amount of love from her. But before she was born I fell in
love. Although I knew that I could never be with the lady in
question until I had discharged my promise to Carol, from that
moment I never looked at another woman.

When I made
that original choice regarding parenthood, I was wrong. It’s not
the things you can only do once that make you who you are. It’s the
one thing you always do for as long as you live, the one thing that
is an end in itself. And that can’t be raising a child. Parenting
is a never-ending sequence you see. For some people that makes it a
thread that connects them somehow, from inside their own fragile
shell, to immortality; but all that really shows is that even in
our secular world human beings are still able to find a rationale
for delaying pleasure beyond the grave. Thomas Aquinas saw just how
absurd such reasoning is. Philosophers have ridiculed him ever
since, but really, the idea that every effect has a cause, which in
turn has a cause, and so on ad infinitum without there ever being a
first cause is, if not philosophically nonsensical then – and
doesn’t he reveal his true twenty first century credentials? –
morally futile. We raise a child, our secular ascetics tell us, so
that they can raise a child, so that they in turn can raise a
child, and so on, and no-one ever looks for happiness except in the
happiness of their children. And so, of course, no-one is ever
happy because their happiness always depends upon something that is
beyond their reach in the future.

So much for
our alleged society of hedonists. Happiness becomes a logical
impossibility. The last child is not happy because there is no
possibility of happiness to come later. And if the last child is
not happy then its parents are not happy either, because their
child cannot be happy, and the whole chain of disappointment worms
its inexorable logic back into the loins of Adam. Of course they
are wrong. Pleasure, Tommy, is something made greater because we
wait for it, but we never need to wait beyond the boundaries of our
own mortality.

Carol does
not know I am still alive, of course. When the time came I sent her
out of the room. Of course I could be lying, but when you picture
her eyes, Tommy, can you really see if she knows?

Goodbye,
Tommy. Be very happy with Rosie. I have it on good authority that
you are very much in love. That’s a worthy project.

Charles

Tommy sat.
Charles was right. He couldn’t see far enough into Carol to be
certain whether she knew. And if she didn’t then he wouldn’t be the
one to tell her. He took the letter into the kitchen and lit a
cook’s match under it. He watched the last of the ashes fall into
the sink, and lit an incense cone.

Tommy returned
to the Barcelona chair in his sitting room and looked around him at
the piles of sample books, exquisite things that had nothing to do
with his previous life in academia.

He asked
himself for the second time in a handful of days what had happened
to the brilliant young researcher. He thought of his work on the
possibility of deep equality in a relationship between a man and a
woman and almost felt like laughing. It was no wonder his ideas had
no place in the world he had inhabited for the past few weeks. A
world where it seemed given that a woman would sacrifice any part
of herself for her children, whilst a man would happily sacrifice
his children for himself. Which would he rather, he asked himself,
to resolve the inequality? That men were expected to bear their
share of the sacrifice, or that women were also expected to lay
their children on the altar of their egos? They were questions he
was glad no longer played a part in his life.

He picked up
one of his sample books and ran the back of his hand over the cool,
gossamer fine silks. Then, as he stood, he felt his hand on the
soft, warm leather, and considered the two sensations on his skin.
These were the choices that governed his life now, he thought,
picking up the telephone to call Rosie.

____

67

Asenovgrad in
the south of Bulgaria is a magical town. It nestles beneath the
foothills of the Rhodopi Mountains that tower over it to the south,
reflecting the heat off the vast expanse of the Thracian Plain. The
reflected sun ripens the grapes on the Mavrud vines to perfection,
and hundreds of tiny vineyards dot the landscape, squeezed into
gardens and fields.

Further into
the hills, at the end of a twisted road, beyond stalls of garish
souvenirs, is the breathtaking Bachkovo Monastery, where sheep pens
jostle side by side with shrines. It is known throughout the
country for the brightly coloured labels on the bottles of Mavrud
wine, for sale in every local corner shop, that bear its name. It
is the same Mavrud wine that Charles Shaw shipped in by the case to
Spain during his time in Jerez; cases in which Dr Krista Markova
placed the icons that she had stolen from the Bachkovo Monastery
during her time there researching Orthodox iconography. She didn’t
take many, just enough, when sold to a market in the west that had
a seemingly unquenchable thirst for everything that was flooding
out of the former Eastern Bloc in the first flush of its newfound
capitalism, to raise a modest amount of seed corn money.

It is harvest
time and in one of the many vineyards a man and woman work alone,
loading their haul into a two wheeled cart to which they will hitch
their horse at intervals to make the short journey to the
maceration tanks. She has moved from the city and he is clearly a
foreigner, but already the days under the sun are working their way
into this handsome couple’s skin, and soon they will be as tanned
and lined as anyone who has lived here all their lives. From time
to time they stand up to rest their backs and share a joke, perhaps
about a reference in a painting, or a line of poetry in one of the
many languages they have in common; perhaps about political and
commercial upheavals in a world they no longer inhabit, or about
nothing in particular except how pleasant it is here under the sun.
And when their lips have finished telling jokes and stories, maybe
they will share a kiss.

When he stops
to drink, the man looks up at the sun. He can feel it beating its
furrows into his brow and sometimes, if he screws up his eyes hard
enough, he thinks that behind its beat he catches a glimpse of a
God, whom he thanks daily that there is no more waiting
left.

Where the
vineyard ends the small patio begins that leads directly into the
kitchen of Krista Markova’s wood and stucco house. During the day
the shutters remain closed, and the drapes that separate the rooms
hang lazily. Behind the bedroom is a space that she and Charles
have curtained off to form a wine cellar. If they wish to, they can
feel behind them into the cool space in the night, selecting a
bottle by touch.

For now a
bottle of 1811 Eszencia stands upright just behind the grey
stuff-cloth drape. Maybe they will drink it in the night, or maybe
they will wait. Just in case, there is a corkscrew on her bedside
table, and a pair of crystal Tokaji glasses standing either side of
a see-through clip frame that holds an effortless line drawing of a
woman holding a cigarette. The small line that you will see in her
hand represents a lighter, with a similarly elegant curve to the
one that Dr Markova is using now to light a cigarette before she
turns onto Charles’ shoulder to sleep; the one she borrowed in the
summer, in Sofia, from a gap year student with badly-dyed red hair.
Krista turns the smooth metal over in her hand. Sometimes, on
nights like tonight, she wonders if Charles is curious to know
where it came from. Then she puts it back on the table. It is the
last thing she sees as the cigarette fades. As she ceases to gain
her bearings by sight, and moves against him into the world of
touch, she feels overwhelmed by the desire to cry. But she waits;
the feeling passes; and it never returns.