by Dan Holloway
He felt gratitude as well, though, not just because Shaw sharpened his mind, but because he had given Tommy the confidence and the means to change the rhythms and tempos of his life. Maybe he’d never realised it. It had certainly taken Tommy years to realise that the tools, the strength he’d found in himself to tackle his illness head-on without drugs, had actually come from his supervisor.
The acceptance of the lows and highs of manic depression, that’s what he’d ultimately learnt from Shaw, although he hadn’t known it until he’d heard the same things, put in very different terms of course, in his cognitive behavioural therapy sessions. He’d learned that there comes a time when you have to stop fighting and try something more subtle. You had to accept that you’re low, or high, to realise that that’s just the way it is, that it’s not the end of the world; that it’s all just part of a tedious cycle. Often, just telling himself enough times that what he was going through was just part of the natural course of things for a manic depressive would be enough for his mood to begin to turn the corner.
He had always felt a slight unease around the Professor, though. Charles Shaw had perfected the art of patience to such a degree that it seemed almost mechanical. Tommy found himself thinking that Shaw was just indifferent for the second time. What was it that worried him about that? It wasn’t that there had been no place in the Professor’s life for pleasure. Shaw had clearly found, or at the very least anticipated, more pleasure in life than anyone else Tommy had met, even amongst his epicurean clients who often seemed to have glutted on delight. No, what worried him was the Professor’s serenity. He was, quite simply, never anxious. Thinking back over Shaw’s old lectures, Tommy realised that it made perfect sense in theory – all that stuff about acceptance, about never letting the course of life bother you. But making sense in theory and being able to put that theory totally into practice were very different. Wasn’t that the kind of “rationality” that psychopaths followed?
Tommy didn’t know whether it was his own illness that prevented him from understanding this, or whether the illness made him understand it too well. In his manic phases nothing worried him. The possibility of failure didn’t exist, and as a result precautions that any normal person would take remained untaken. But Charles had always seemed to have every precaution covered. That was part of the waiting process. He had the unshakeable confidence of the manic without the mania.
Perhaps this was why Tommy felt slightly afraid. He was certain Shaw hadn’t killed himself. But all that confidence, meticulousness, and although Shaw had seen his killer coming he never saw who it was. But he still believed that Tommy would. Worse still, after a lifetime of calm, something had finally made the Professor anxious. And if it created anxiety in someone who made the average Zen master seem highly strung, what the hell should a nut job like Tommy be making of it?
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20
Memorial services at Oxford happen either the moment someone is dead or months after they were in the ground. Usually the limiting factor was making the necessary arrangements for guests who needed to fly in from the other side of the world. Sometimes it was a question of politics, especially if there was a contentious appointment to be made. In the case of Charles Shaw, the motivation for a swift service was a combination of politics and spite, if it was possible to separate the two. Term was nearly here – it was better to get rid of him without his flock of student groupies, be it the anti-establishment radicals or the besotted undergraduates of both sexes. It was better not to let the great and the good come running from the four corners to put their oar in when a new Warden was due to be appointed before the end of the new term, and there was a clear front runner whose path no-one wanted muddied. And it was certainly best to get him forgotten about quickly and get his junk eased out of Number 37 so that some decent accommodation could finally be built – and, which was a wonderfully propitious bonus, what better way to poison the new Warden’s arrival than a controversial building project jus too late to be stopped. The college shouldn’t have to have another woman Warden generations.
*
Becky was standing underneath Elgin Tower with a tall, elegant woman Tommy presumed was Haydn Shaw. Haydn was wearing a knee-length black lambswool cardigan over a black silk shift dress. Sapphires set in an iris-shaped brooch pulled the light from her eyes. Tommy bent over and kissed her hand, his head bowed perhaps a moment longer than was seemly to hide the dilation in his eyes. “Good morning, Dr Shaw. I wish we could have met in happier circumstances.”
“Mum, this is Tommy West.”
“Good morning, Tommy West,” said Haydn. “Should I know you?”
“I was a student of Professor Shaw’s,” said Tommy. “I’m a friend of Becky’s.”
“Then probably I should at least know about you, but I’m afraid that I don’t.” She looked at Becky. “Is this the friend you were staying with the night before last?” It was impossible to tell if there was a note of disapproval in her voice, or if this was a simple factual enquiry.
“I stayed at dad’s on Tuesday.” Becky started walking the couple of hundred metres to St Saviour’s.
“I’m not sure that’s an answer. Still, I’m happy to meet you, Tommy. As you’re a friend of Becky’s you should come for dinner with us tonight.”
“I’d be delighted, Dr Shaw.”
Through enormous wooden double doors, the neatly-lawned expanse of Martyr’s Quad with its unfinished cloisters led straight to the unassuming steps that you would never realize led into the Chapel.
Haydn nodded demurely to the porter standing at the gate who dipped his head back to her. She walked through the middle of the Quad and into the chapel, taking an order of service as she went. She strode up the nave and took one of the carved wooden seats by the bishop’s throne. “Tommy, please sit with us, won’t you?” she said.
He would rather have had a clearer view of the congregation, but Tommy smiled and sat between Haydn and Becky. They cordoned off from the rest of the congregation, in the ornate seats where the Warden and dons usually sat, free to catnap or giggle at leisure. It was hard for him to see exactly who was there. His overwhelming impression was of Haydn beside him, the smell of rose water, the presence of her skin pushing against silk, an immense inner calm, that worked in tandem with a mind that was never still.
As the service went on, Tommy tried in vain to discern Shaw’s hand behind the music and the readings. There were sacred texts and sacred music, fitting for a man of the cloth. He wondered whether the religious elements of the service would have angered the Professor, or whether he would have just felt indifference. In the end he decided the Professor Shaw he remembered would have seen the whole thing as a waste of an opportunity to cause mischief.
The readings were from I Corinthians 15, St Paul’s account of the resurrection of the body at the Last Day; and the Gospel of John, chapter 14, when Christ at the Last Supper promises the disciples that although he will shortly depart, he will leave them the Holy Spirit in his place. For a minute Tommy felt a whiff of sulphurous humour as he imagined Shaw, posturing as the Messiah leaving consolation for those who were lost without him; but the scent was gone in a second in the smoke of the sacred candles. No, in the blandness of the texts, and the predictability of the Bach that must have been part of every Organ Scholar’s kit bag, Tommy saw nothing but politics and spite.
Professor Barnard Ellison stood to deliver the eulogy. Tommy remembered Ellison’s lectures from his undergraduate days. They were as dry as the deserts he spent so much time talking about. In those days he had been a high achieving – high-flying would unduly imply charisma – scholar, one of a generation of brilliant young professors that included Charles Shaw, although none of them had been quite as young or quite as brilliant as Shaw. As he prepared to speak, his now late middle-aged face was etched with an amount of barely-hidden glee that bordered on the unseemly. Through the shadows and the pillars Tommy sensed rows of eyebrows that were knitted in firm concentration to
fend off an impolitic smirk on senior faces.
He tried to read Haydn’s emotions as Ellison spoke, but all he felt was a void; not impenetrability, just emptiness. He thought about Haydn and Becky at home together, one impassive, the other inscrutable. The thought made his house full of inanimate, unfeeling treasures seem intensely warm.
The speech was just as erudite as Ellison’s lectures on the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah had been, and every bit as dry. The Professor surveyed Shaw’s career. He ran through and his contribution to ethics, from his very first paper on the moral importance of separated identical twins to his participation in the public debates on chimeras and stem-cell research. It was filled with well-rehearsed jokes about waiting and entering into the spirit. He had clearly made an effort to keep his distaste at Shaw’s outspoken role as the public and rather too liberal face of the Church of England on controversial issues such as gay marriage and fertility to brevity rather than criticism.
“Children were central to Charles’ private as well as his academic life,” said Ellison, winding to his finale. “Not only did he contribute richly to the public debates on adoption and embryo donation, on parenthood and the way society treats its young and its old; whenever he spoke in private he would always tell you the same thing, that his only child, Becky, was at the heart of everything he did.”
Tommy fixed his eyes on Ellison, but he allowed his peripheral vision to wander around the congregation, lingering on the women to either side as he heard Becky’s name. He noted the simultaneous twitch, the cable-like tautening of the muscles in both mother’s and daughter’s forearms, although their hands remained fixed in their laps as they had been throughout.
“In many ways he redefined the theology of sexual ethics for our age. In his unrelenting focus on the child he took the ethics of love out of the bedroom and into the nursery. He had been working on for many years and was, as many of you will be aware, on the verge of publishing what I am sure would have been the most important contribution of recent times to our understanding of the way we relate to our children. It was to be the summit of his career, the thing for which he and his public alike had been waiting. It is his tragedy and ours that it would not wait for him.”
The end was the most generous part of the speech, almost warm, Tommy thought. Perhaps Ellison was rising to his crowd, perhaps it was something else. But as Tommy played the words back in his head, he took the ethics of love out of the bedroom and into the nursery, and put them into the context of Shaw’s papers, he felt sick to the core.
____
21
After-service drinks were held in the Warden’s Garden, the college’s flagship venue for tea parties and fundraisers. Tommy stood by the bushes with Becky, watching the goings-on, shunning the cheap champagne for an orange juice. He watched Haydn make her way straight to Professor Ellison. He watched her angle her head elegantly to one side and offer him her hand. Tommy wondered for a moment if he was discomfited by the warmth of her thanks.
He was interested to see how many people he recognised. Life never seemed to move on in Oxford. Charles Shaw hadn’t moved on either, of course, but there was no doubt that his stasis was part of a purpose, even if Tommy didn’t know what. Tommy wondered how many of the academics he saw in the gardens had a point to their lives, and how many were simply pickling themselves slowly like a schoolboy’s conker on college port. He could see at least two people he had studied with as undergraduates. He guessed from their tweeds that they weren’t here as old students of Charles’. They had eased effortlessly out of their student gowns and straight into the fireside slippers of academic middle age
“You think she’s beautiful, don’t you?” said Becky, leaning in with her hand in the crook of his arm.
“Your mother? Yes, she’s very beautiful.”
“Is she your type?”
“I’ve no idea. Maybe I’ll be able to tell you after dinner.” What was his type? he wondered. It had been years since he had given it any thought. What would “being his type” even mean? Someone he could see himself spending the rest of his life with? Someone he wanted to pin to the wall and fuck senseless? They were questions he hadn’t asked in a long time. Maybe he had dwelt on them for so long in his student days that he had done with them for good.
Tommy was suddenly aware that he was breathing too heavily. He felt Becky’s fingers tighten a little on his jacket. “At the moment I’m interested in finding who killed your father,” he said. “I’m not interested in becoming your stepfather.”
He noticed a man in dark blue pinstripes sidle over to Haydn, breaking her off from her conversation with the Warden’s wife. “Who’s that?” he asked, glad to change the subject.
“That’s Stephen Knightley,” said Becky, “mum’s obstetrician.”
“Is she pregnant?” he said, trying unsuccessfully to hide his shock.
Becky started to laugh, seemed to realize that some of the guests had turned around to look, and turned it into a cough. “Fuck, no. Well, no fuck anyway; not for at least 10 years. He delivered me. And my sister,” she added after a pause. “I think it’s got more to do with her, Carol, than with me or mum. He took it very badly that he couldn’t save her.” She talked without pausing as though she were reciting a speech she had learned, something she felt she had to get through. It was probably something a therapist had told her a long time ago that it would do her good to be able to talk about, Tommy thought; only now she couldn’t not talk about it. “Mum had pre-eclampsia. She was taken to hospital and monitored for two weeks. Her condition deteriorated suddenly and Dr Knightley induced labour. It was very busy; no-one was around to help him. We both had our umbilical cords twisted around our necks and he had to get us out in a hurry, on his own. He was only able to save one of us. Mum thought he was a hero for managing to save one of us; but he never forgave himself that one of us died. I think hanging around her is the only way he can feel good about himself.”
“Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.” Tommy said, half to himself.
“Sorry?” said Becky, coughing on her drink. He wasn’t sure why, but for some reason it had shocked her more than anything she had just told him.
“Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad – in order that God’s purpose in election might stand: not by works but by him who calls – she was told, ‘The older will serve the younger.’ Just as it is written: ‘Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.’,” Tommy recited. “It’s from Paul’s letter to the Romans. Your dad quoted it quite liberally in his paper on identical twins.”
“I know,” said Becky. “I may not have known him very well, but I did read what he wrote.”
“So what did Dr Knightley think of your father?” said Tommy, changing the subject again.
“Well, from what I can gather, because dad wasn’t with mum that night, he kind of blamed him for Carol’s death. He thought that the stress of dad not being there made the pre-eclampsia worse. I think he thought if dad had been there the extra pair of hands might have been able to give Carol CPR long enough for someone else to get there. I think he was furious with him.”
“Were he and your mum ever involved?”
“God, no.”
Come on, then, Tommy thought, it may be a funeral but it’s time to start paying your way. “Do you know him well enough to introduce me?”
“Of course.”
Becky led him by the arm across the lawn.
“What have you two been huddling over so conspiratorially?” asked Haydn.
“Just gossip,” said Becky. “Stephen, this is Tommy West, dad’s star student. Tommy, Stephen Knightley, mum’s friend.”
“Delighted,” said Tommy, taking his hand warmly. There had definitely been a glimmer of something that may have been recognition when Knightley heard his name. Tommy could feel the doctor’s eyes screwing into him, trying to figure out why he wanted to be introduced and why he was so friendly with Becky. The eyes were dull, though, and it was obvious
that the doctor had found nothing. From the red thread veins on his nose and cheeks, Tommy thought that Stephen Knightley had probably been drunk by midday many times in the years since Becky’s birth.
“Tommy.” Knightley’s hand was thick, the flesh on his fingers too tight and out of condition.
“Becky tells me you’re a gynaecologist. Are you based up at the JR?” he asked, referring to the John Radcliffe, Oxford’s large teaching hospital.
“Yes, that’s right. I know your name. I’m sure Charles mentioned you.”
Tommy could see the doctor’s brain trying to work, ticking over so slowly that Tommy couldn’t help feeling pity. “Charles?” he said. “I thought you were a friend of Doctor Shaw’s.”
“Quite so. Charles was a complete shit. Only found that out too late though. Known Charles for half my life by then. Rowed together at St Stephen’s.”
Tommy gave him the once-over. Knightley looked as though he was in his late 60s at least. Alcohol and self-loathing had been the forces at work on his body, as opposed to Charles’ self-possession. He couldn’t see Stephen Knightley playing with the passage of time to titrate his pleasure as Shaw had done. He couldn’t see him playing with anything. He tried to imagine him rowing but couldn’t.
“That seems to be most people’s opinion of Professor Shaw,” said Tommy. “I always found him to be quite brilliant, and very personable. Charming in fact.”
