The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  He had lined one wall, free from Chinese vegetable-dyed embroideries, or African hangings with their myriad scorched mineral colours, with shelves made out of planks of ovangkol wood, the edges of which shone like tiger’s eye in the candlelight. The floor was a black canvas of wenge wood that was darker than ebony. It had been highlighted painstakingly and absolutely sparingly with an occasional pool of hand-enamelled tiles in the delicate geometric patterns of Islamic art, no two the same.

  At the far end, by the window, Tommy sat at his giant desk, which was built on the root formation of a baobab tree, sliced off and surfaced with oak that had been inlaid with veneers in the pattern of a Mandelbrot Set fractal. It was a sampler of every wood and shell and semi-precious stone he sold. On the desk was a rosewood bowl, the kind that held the counters in the ancient Chinese game of go. It contained an ellipsoid piece of basalt that had been rubbed slick like oil in Tommy’s hands. Alongside it was the row of extracts and absolutes in their tiny phials that he blended from time to time and rubbed into the stone. Now the stone glistened with a fresh blend of jasmine, cedar, lavender, and ylang ylang that Tommy had fixed in a droplet ambergris that was cut from a piece washed up on the West African shore.

  Tommy had his nose in his hands, sucking the sebaceous residues into himself, steadily slowing his heart. He was excited, but he knew that adrenalin was the manic depressive’s most insidious enemy precisely because it was so alluring and empowering. It made you do stupid, impulsive things, and many manic depressives were diagnosed only when they ended up in hospital or prison. Like Tommy. Stupid and impulsive like stealing a hundred grand from a dead man, he thought. No, that wasn’t impulsive. He hadn’t decided yet whether it had been stupid; but he was fairly sure it wasn’t theft. He is able to provide all you need. Tommy wondered how much of the money Professor Shaw had asked Charteris to give him, and how much the lawyer had demanded as a fee for his unusual errand; he wondered how urgent his mission must have been for Charles to agree to such a sum. Maybe Charteris had intended to alter the proportions in his favour. Almost certainly not, he thought, detecting in himself for the first time a flicker of guilt. This wasn’t just a puzzle, and John wasn’t just part of an enigma. He was someone Tommy had known once, someone who had treated him well for all the bookish gaucheness of his early twenties. Tommy realised that he didn’t even know if Charteris had had a wife, a family; a mistress, perhaps, who had been promised £100,000 when he died to see her good.

  No, Tommy thought. It was right to remember John, but not now. Now there was another dead person who needed Tommy’s attention more. Not to mention the living. Tommy’s nostrils flared and the jasmine brought him back to the happiest places in his memory. Green tea in a tiny Zen garden in the centre of Tokyo, taxis and buses humming only a few metres away, a monorail suspended magically just above him, but all the movement unreachable in this little pool of stillness. A terrace in Seville, tendrils of jasmine laced over a trellis, cosseting him on every side.

  He had the stack of Shaw’s printed papers in front of him. It seemed like the easiest place to start. The publications that were intact had dates or issue numbers. Those that had been cut or torn out were meticulously labelled in the top right corner with the source, article title, author, page number, and date. He had arranged them in chronological order, trying for now to take as little active interest in the content as he could whilst he did so in order to let any ideas slip up on him.

  Once he’d finished it was a small pile, only a couple of inches high. It comprised abstracts of journal articles, pages from monographs, newspaper clippings, a couple of screen prints of web pages, and several pages clipped or torn from cultural magazines and auction catalogues. As he had hoped, there was nothing at this stage that gave him any real sense of Shaw’s big idea. It was far better to look at material without being told what to make of it. He would be far less likely to miss any clues that Shaw himself had failed to spot.

  Top of the pile, the earliest publication, from 1989, was a brief abstract outlining an article called The Anticipation of Gifts, by a Bulgarian theologian, Dr Krista Markova. It was from the proceedings of a conference that had been held in Sofia in 1987. The article was about the way icon painters in the Greek Orthodox religion saw their art as a way of compensating people for Christ’s delay in returning to collect the blessed. Some of them apparently believed that their work was the embodiment of the first fruits of the Spirit that Christ had promised the Church it would enjoy until he came – a little taste of heaven here on earth, a spiritual amuse bouche. Some artists, it seemed, conveyed this idea in colour symbolism. Tommy imagined hundreds of worshippers looking up at the painted ceilings of their churches and catching a glimpse of celestial blue, suddenly being transported into the presence of God and realising how transitory their problems were. How much more useful than food, he scoffed. Or vaccines. Then he laughed to himself. How different really were these escape mechanisms from his own little glimpses of heaven? He looked at some of the pictures tied to the paper with a treasury tag, appreciating just how important beauty was in people’s lives, how much more than the luxury it was often made out to be.

  He proceeded through more articles, some of which were about the Holy Spirit, some of which were about religious art, most of which were about neither. As he reached the beginning of the 1990s, around the time the art and culture market was going stratospheric, there were several pages torn out of Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction catalogues, from London and New York. They were taken from specialist sales devoted to fine art, furniture, antiques, and wine. Shaw had attached notes to many of these detailing the prices the lots actually fetched. Uniformly the auction house figures were vast underestimates of the voracity of a market fuelled by stockbroker bonuses, coke-fuelled competitiveness, and a whole new generation of buyers looking for another bubble to pump for profit. In a few instances the sales exceeded by a factor of ten the already-inflated estimates.

  Tommy inevitably spent longest with the wine. His eyes lingered over the enlarged photos of old dark bottles and frayed labels as though he was gazing at erotic art. There were cases of the finest wines ever made side by side with some of the early garagiste obscurities – wines so called because they were produced in such small quantities that they were often literally made in garages. In the 1980s and 1990s, during the financial boom of Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Gecko, the commodities market in wine had been as frenetic as oil or sugar or precious metals or any of the other traditional objects of speculative desire. A killing was there to be made if you bought right, and to a community that lived by the law of supply and demand it was obvious that for something to be the best buy it had to be the rarest. So overnight tiny new producers like Chateau Le Pin in France and Screaming Eagle in California sold their wines for more than the oldest, finest producers in the world who happened to be unlucky enough to produce their exquisite liquors in larger quantities. No matter that no-one knew what the drink would taste like after 4 years, let alone 40, when presumably it was intended to provide for people’s retirement.

  Tommy skipped past these parvenu curios, and came to rest on the classics. This wasn’t good wine, the kind you can pick up for £10 from the supermarket; nor the exceptional wine you can get for £30 or £40 from a wine merchant for a very special anniversary; nor even the once in a lifetime fine wine you can find at the best stockists in London for a few hundred pounds. These were the complex, unctuous nectars that had been adding layer on layer of richness and charm for decades, like a lacquer worked on for months by a Japanese master craftsman, and would carry on doing so for decades to come.

  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 fr
om 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.”