The Company of Fellows (9 page)

There was a
bottle of Chateau Margaux, 1928, reckoned by many to be one of the
two best wines made in the twentieth century. It had, according to
Charles’ immaculate script next to the estimate, fetched $7000 at
Sotheby’s New York. A case of the other, Chateau Cheval Blanc from
1947, had sold for £84,000 at Christie’s in London to an
advertising executive - £7000 per bottle. Reaching further back in
time, there was a case of Tokaji Eszencia from 1811, the most
celebrated year in the wine-growing world and known, because of the
appearance of Halley’s Comet, as the year of the comet. The first
time the case had been moved from the cellars of its Hungarian
producer by the Nazis. The owner, Tommy noted, had recently died.
He wondered if this was how an unsuspecting family had found out
their father was a war criminal. Still, they hadn’t been too
repulsed to emphasise the perfect cellar conditions in which it had
been stored. Nor had the Canadian investment banker who bought the
case for £98,000 had any qualms about provenance. What historians
know about the Nazis would make those members of the general public
who have only seen the published photographs of concentration camps
recoil in shock. What cultural historians, on the other hand, know
about the Nazis is how carefully they looked after their
art.

Tommy opened
his eyes and the flavours vanished. He set the printed materials to
one side and picked up the drawings.

It was not
quite so clear how he should arrange these. Annotated and
unannotated, that was a start. He wasn’t sure what next. There were
no titles. Clearly their meaning was obvious, to Professor Shaw at
least. Mostly they looked like random scribbles. He thought he
understood some of the drawings, the ones that looked like
geometry, or engineering. They seemed to represent some kind of
gearing: ratios, proportions. Tommy guessed that Charles had been
thinking about the mathematics of beauty, about the similar way we
relate to the many different things we find beautiful, each in
their own way, across different axes. He was sure that one of these
was the axis of time. He laughed when he got to a set of drawings
of Penrose tilings, mathematical patterns that are capable of
filing a surface infinitely without leaving a single gap. What is
so unexpected about these patterns is the lack of symmetry many of
them display. Far from being boring, uniform shapes, many are as
complex and irregular as life itself. It was an idea they’d often
talked about in tutorials, the lack of symmetry that exists in
balance. Fragility in perfection; love; the incarnation of Christ.
Tommy was beginning to remember what it was like to feel his brain
moving with Shaw’s. Falling into old rhythms. Aged lovers who don’t
need to rediscover each other’s bodies in the dark. The light was
on.

The one he was
looking at now was different. It wasn’t abstract. It was real
engineering, with measurements written on planning lines. It was a
pen drawing of what looked like a cage from one of the wicker
chairs that had been so popular in the 70s. The sizes looked about
right, too, but the object in the middle wasn’t a chair. It was an
armature, attached by a height-adjustable mechanism to the back
pole, 45 centimetres from the Y-shaped limbs at the top to the
gibbet-like arm at the bottom. About two thirds of the way up was a
cross-beam 30 centimetres across that had similar gibbet arms at
either end. The two side-arms and the bottom one were labelled,
“tie”. That was the only writing on the diagram other than the
measurements. From either side of the Y hung a semi-spherical cage
with screws in the side half way between the bottom and the 15
centimetre diameter, cut off half way up so that only its outer
frame met the twin supports. At the cross where the smaller
armature joined the pole connecting it to the larger, Shaw had
drawn curved lines that seemed to indicate a hinge, which he had
annotated “90º”.

Tommy stared.
It looked like one of the torture instruments he had seen in an
exhibition in the dungeon of the Schloss Glucksburg in northern
Germany. But in miniature.

____

12

Emily kicked
off her shoes and sank into the sofa, exhausted. She hadn’t had
time to think about seeing Tommy. She was aware of him only as
something that nudged her in the stomach; something that made her
less interested than she might be in the smell of David’s
shepherd’s pie that was wafting in from the kitchen.

The doorbell
rang. “Can you get that, D?”

“
Hi, Rosie,”
said David, holding the door aside, ushering her
through.

“
Sorry to
interrupt again, David. God that smells good.” Rosie smiled,
revealing two enormous rows of perfect white teeth.

“
Do sit down,”
said David.

“
Thanks.”

David went
back to the kitchen. He didn’t bother setting another
place.

“
Hi, Rosie.
What news?”

“
Well,” said
Rosie, kicking her Doc Martens boots off beside Emily’s mules and
joining her on the sofa. “Tox results came back. Our professor died
from an overdose of warfarin. Rat poison, not heart medicine. We
may get a proprietary brand in a few days, but there was a packet
under his sink with his prints on it.”

“
How did he
ingest it?”

“
In his
water,” Rosie said.

“
Water?” Emily
thought over what Tommy had said. Water made sense. “Well, I guess
that suggests suicide.” She drained her glass, wondering if she
would detect the difference if it contained a fatal dose of
warfarin, “He would have noticed it if someone had slipped a slug
of rat poison in his water,” she added.

“
Yeah.” Rosie
fetched a glass from the tallboy and filled it generously. “The
Divinity Faculty at Harvard confirmed they turned him down for the
post.”

“
The Warden
said he had his heart set on moving.”

“
You’d have
thought he’d have been able to find another job, though, if he was
desperate to go to America.”

“
From what I
gather he was a pretty high flier,” said Emily. “Perhaps it was too
much of a dent to his ego.”

“
I guess,”
said Rosie. “Can you imagine what his wife would have made of it
when she found out they’d turned him down? I might have been
tempted to kill myself to avoid that.”

Emily said
nothing for a moment. She thought about Haydn, about the coldness
between her and her daughter. She felt her blood pressure rising.
She would have loved to pin something on the callous bitch. She
took a large gulp of wine, ashamed of herself. It was along time
since she’d had so many uncharitable thoughts. She wondered if it
had anything to do with seeing Tommy again.

She sighed.
She knew she could probably carry on pushing things for another day
or so, but she also knew what the Chief Super would say about
wasting resources, and going down dead ends. And deep down she knew
it was right; she’d only end up in the same place, but she’d get
there that little bit more bitter, which was never good. If you’re
only carrying on out of spite rather than reason, that’s always the
time to draw the line.

“
The rest is
paperwork,” said Emily at last. “We’ll file the report tomorrow.
Notting Hill?” She used Rosie as an excuse to watch Hugh Grant
films without risking David’s jealousy. He just got jealous of
Rosie instead. Still, it was better for him to go the green-eyed
monster over someone real, who would laugh and drink wine with you
and make you forget to feel guilty for enjoying
yourself.

“
What about
David? I don’t want to get in the way.”

“
It’s OK, I’ll
make it up to him later,” said Emily. “Anyway, I think he’s gone
off to his cave.” By now he’d be engrossed in his work, crunching
the numbers to price a tender for a new account. By the time she
asked him to come to bed he’d have forgotten that spending the
evening apart had been her doing, and would probably be desperate
to make it up to her.

David folded
his arms around her when they finally rolled into bed together long
after midnight. “Celebrating?”

“
Unh-hunh”

“
Case closed,
then?”

“
Looks like
it.”

“
No more Tommy
then.”

“
No.” Emily
ran her hand over the smooth skin of David’s chest. No more Tommy.
Still, though, there was something not quite right. She hadn’t been
sure that morning whether she’d been questioning him – but she had
been sure already that Professor Shaw had killed himself, so why
bother when Tommy hadn’t seen him for years – or tipping him a wink
as a friend, but after everything that had happened, and the time
that had passed since she’d finally put him out of her head that
made no sense either. Nonetheless something was unfinished. She’d
go to see him tomorrow and tell him the Professor had killed
himself. Then she’d take it from there.

____

13

Tommy was
relieved to see Becky had changed into a black turtleneck and
burgundy chinos, and wondered if she’d done so before or after she
went to the funeral directors’; and whether the body had been
released yet for her to say goodbye, or whether, like him, she had
already seen her dead father. She was sitting at the window table
with the dregs of a large juice, and an olive ciabatta with
goodness knows what kinds of grasses and pulses leaking onto the
plate. Her hair was held back with a safety pin, and he could see
her eyes properly. They were impenetrable, old and wise like those
of the infant Christ in a Greek Orthodox Madonna and
child.

Tommy, after
turning the Professor’s drawing over in his head – both trying and
not trying to think what it meant – had needed a workout and a
bath. Aside from Egyptian cotton underwear and hand-made oxblood
brogues, everything he was wearing from the skin-tight polo neck to
his socks was fine-knit black cashmere. He smelled of Clive
Christian Number One. These were the senses he focused
on.

Becky smiled.
“I started without you. Sorry.”

“
It’s OK,” he
said. “I’m not hungry.”

Becky scraped
a handful of something green, that seemed to have bits of black
grit on it, into her mouth. “So do we have a deal?”

Tommy reached
out his hand. He looked at the slick of hummus and oil on her skin
and made a fist, wiggling his pinkie at her. She locked fingers
with him and they smiled.

Not that he’d
had a choice. Drawing up a pros and cons table had taken a few
seconds. Cons: maybe she killed him and you’re next, which was
unlikely but he thought he could look after himself; maybe there
are things she shouldn’t know. That was slightly trickier. Charles
had wanted Tommy to look after her, but would it really help her
never to find out what had happened to him? Anyway, if it came to
it he was rather good at hiding things from people. Pros: he knew
nothing about Charles’ friends or anything else he’d done in the
last ten years. She did. And – it had taken him aback as he thought
it, almost aloud to himself – he was lonely, and having someone
around at a time like this almost certainly wasn’t a bad
thing.

“
Can I ask a
favour?” Tommy said.

“
Can I finish
my supper first?”

“
Of course.
And then do you feel up to going to your dad’s house?”

“
I was
wondering why you hadn’t asked earlier,” she said. “I assumed you
must have seen everything you needed to already,” she added
casually.

Who had seen
what the day Charles died? More to the point who had seen what and
not called the police? Or an ambulance. It was a subject he would
have to broach at some stage, but for the moment it could wait.
They were starting off with less than the truth. Tommy wondered if
it would set the pattern for their working relationship. “I’d like
to pick up some wine.”

“
Dad mentioned
that,” she said. “You know, I inherited dad’s palate. I know how
good some of that stuff is.”

“
I’m sure you
do.” Tommy looked at the tasteless straggles of fibre she was
dragging around the plate with her fingers.

“
Fuck
you.”

Tommy was
about to laugh, bond over a moment of dry humour with her, when he
realised she wasn’t sharing a joke. He remembered, properly for the
first time, that she had just lost her father. He was sorry, but he
didn’t know how to say it, and he didn’t trust himself if he opened
his mouth. As much as he didn’t want to hurt her there was also a
part of him that didn’t want to mess things up and lose the leads
she could give him.

“
I could
contest his wishes,” Becky said. She seemed to be absolutely
serious. Forget the muck she was hoofing into herself. It was
probably just something she’d learned from her trendy friends at
school. If she had inherited Charles’ taste she was probably
feeling it now as one of the few fragile threads that connected her
somehow in her mind to the man she hadn’t had time to know. Tommy
shuffled on his seat.

And as if the
needle had jumped, Becky grinned. “Or I could assume you’ll do the
right thing when it comes to drinking it.”

“
What would
that be? Invite you round for birthdays and Christmas for the next
ten years?”