The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  She wondered which door to go to. There was a main door, with a little chrome plaque saying “Tommi” in deep purple ink, in the cursive handwritten signature that formed his logo. She knew there was another door round one side that connected to what had looked like his living room, and it looked like there was a similar arrangement the other side.

  “Where the body was,” Tommy shouted down from the top floor window.

  Emily craned her neck and gave him the thumbs up and went round. He was holding the door open for her by the time she got there.

  “Hi, Em.”

  “Hello, Tommy.”

  “I’m guessing,” he said, removing her coat, “that you want the tour.”

  “And why would you guess that?”

  “Well, it’s not too hard to park wherever you want after six, so I’m sure you’ve come up here rather than going straight to the pub for a reason.”

  “OK, Tommy, give me the tour, but I can’t be late home.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of delaying you.”

  Emily was surprised how easily they fell into conversation. Familiar rhythms and cadences, no searching for the right way to put things. She didn’t remember it being this easy when they were together. There had been too many agendas at work. She wondered what agendas were at work now, of his and of hers, and straightaway the rhythms felt a little less easy.

  “Do you keep up the running?” he asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Good. Follow me and I’ll give you the whizzy tour.” He was already off up the stairs two at a time and had the door open onto what used to be the top flat.

  The whizzy tour lasted about four minutes. It was a good job she hadn’t been casing the joint, she thought. She wouldn’t have stood a hope of remembering how the labyrinth of passages and doors interconnected. She was sure she hadn’t been through the same door twice, but she seemed to have seen every room. Some of it was functional – the bits she could have guessed from the Tommy she had known at college like the sweaty, decrepit gym and the vast kitchen stuffed with pans. Part of her was surprised that neither exercise nor cooking had turned out to be a fad. The rest of the house seemed a world away from what she had imagined. It had some of the most beautiful rooms she had ever seen. She had always thought of Tommy as a bit of an arty bohemian student with too much of a fondness for throws and eclectic art posters, but the taste and the fineness of his brush took her breath away.

  “This place must have cost a small fortune.”

  “Not that small, really.”

  “So how on earth did you afford it?”

  “Well,” said Tommy. “Some of it’s cheating – freebies from people who want me to show off their stuff. And the rest: well, I might be a poncy designer, but it’s also a business. Get the basics right and it’s not alchemy.”

  “The basics?”

  “Well, actually, apart from making sure your client always pays you before you pay your supplier, there is only one basic in a business like this. There’s no money to be made in the middle of the market. Beyond that it’s up to you whether you pile ‘em high and sell ‘em cheap or focus on the very best of everything. You just have to be ruthlessly consistent about it and most designers aren’t. They’re too afraid of turning down work, but it’s exactly like many other things, a question of tipping points. Look at the product you sell that’s closest to the middle of the market. As soon as it reaches a certain proximity to the centre of the bell-curve all your business will follow it, and you get dragged into the cutthroat world of competition. Keep it as far away from the centre as you can and your customers will go as far down the tail as you want them to. Sorry, I’m boring you.”

  Emily decided that smiling was better than lying, “So how much do your top of the range clients pay?”

  “Anywhere from £10,000 to £1million,” he said. “About 20% of that’s mine to share with the Chancellor.”

  The half of Emily that wasn’t surprised Tommy had stuck with something long enough to be that successful thought that he had become part of a world she hated. She thought of the early apostles who shared all their goods, and of a set of values that focused on the poorest in the community and not the richest. But she knew that this vision was as far from her own world and what her church had become as it was from Tommy’s, and the knowledge made her resent him even more.

  Tommy stopped outside the Anchor. Perhaps he had sensed her awkwardness, “Look, Em,” he said. “I’m not sure whether you want an apology from me or an explanation, but the answer’s the same in both cases. I was an arrogant prick.”

  “Case closed, Tommy,” she said. “Anyway, we both seem to have got there in the end.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now let me buy you a drink.”

  He didn’t seem so dangerous now, she thought. Sad, but not dangerous. There was something insecure and anxious in him, but nothing sinister. Perhaps it was the seemingly desperate need for exactness, for everything to be exquisite. Whatever it was, it was something that made her want to be his friend. She found herself saying the word in her head. She was surprised and relieved. Maybe she’d ask him round to dinner and get David to cook for the three of them. She could ask Rosie over too, although Rosie would kill her for it, but it was a nice thought, and sat comfortably with her absolutes.

  When her phone rang she was glad she’d stuck to orange juice. “Rosie?”

  “Emily, we’ve got a body.”

  “I’m on my way. Where are you?”

  “JR. Women’s Health Centre.”

  SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 9, 2007

  ____

  28

  Emily looked down and saw that David was holding her hand. She was too numb to feel his gentle grip. She listened to the service going on around her and wished for a moment that she was a Catholic; longed for the cleansing intimacy of the confessional. Her job very rarely made her feel dirty. The rotting human detritus that clung to Oxford’s streets made her feel neither exhilarated nor exhausted. It wasn’t the job that was affecting her now, either. Not Dr Knightley’s melancholy stare, fixed in death. Not the gunpowder residue bedded into the wound on one temple or the blood and brains that trawled out of the opposite temple. Not the quiet shaking of the cleaner who had watched as Knightley lifted the gun and shot.

  The Women’s Health Centre had dredged up from under the sediment of her soul an area of her life that she kept a long way from work. Afternoons sitting in the Purple Zone, as it was known: a pair of seats and some brown-leafed tropical plants where people sit to see the infertility counsellor. Where she sat with David week after week. To get there she had to walk through the toys and tots and rows of expectant mums. If she was early or kept waiting and wanted coffee, the only machine was in the IVF centre round the corner, through corridors of noticeboards updated with photos of the latest successes.

  Two years into marriage, two years trying not to let the excitement build up as the month wore on, two years trying to time it just right, and the rounds of testing began. David had been first because testing him was less intrusive. She had waited in the car outside, not able to cope with the thought of what he was doing, had waited while he made the long walk to Microbiology to be handed a pot and told we haven’t got any facilities. The loo’s down there on the left. That was where the testing stopped. Almost all his sperm were immotile. “Not going anywhere, mate,” the doctor had said, trying to keep the mood light.

  There was no point in her being tested. She wasn’t going to have a child if it wasn’t David’s, although it had taken several sessions with Suzanne the counsellor for her to admit that was entirely her choice; several of the many sessions staring at the tissues and watching Suzanne trying to be inconspicuous in her glances at the clock on the wall behind Emily’s shoulder.

  David hadn’t had a vasectomy, he hadn’t spent his childhood in a radon hotspot, he had always made wholesome unprocessed home cooking, and never took hot baths. God why couldn’t there be something she could blame him
for because she did blame him so much and she felt as though the whole fucking thing was her fault because of it.

  Everyone was standing for communion. David was pulling her out of her seat. Get off me. How could she take Christ’s body and blood when she felt like this? Didn’t St Paul call it eating and drinking your damnation to take communion in the wrong frame of mind? But how could she not? David would want to know why. Everyone would want to know why. Eventually the crowd she could see and wouldn’t forgive had a deeper pull for her than the God she couldn’t see who would forgive.

  Pews passed her by in a peripheral slow motion blur as she walked to the front. If she had wobbled at first she was steady now. Fully removed from the person she was watching make their way up the aisle, she could control her movements like a puppeteer. Hands outstretched and solemn. “The body of Christ.” “Amen.” “The blood of Christ.” “Amen.”

  The blood of the Son of God. The blood of all the sons and daughters, born and unborn. Blood on Knightley’s desk. Blood on his note:

  30 years. It was always for the children. Every time but one. One too many. You took the easy way out, Charles. Who’d have thought you’d beat me to it. Here’s a last thought experiment. How many lives can you fuck in one night?

  Emily saw herself in the pew, replete upon the slaughtered body of her saviour, and urged herself to hold onto the taste, to hold onto the thought. Wait, she told herself, slowly feeling herself descend back towards her body. Wait for the still small voice of calm, and eventually it will come.

  ____

  29

  St Saviour’s stood directly opposite St Bride’s Church, separated only by a road named after the latter. The congregations, though, felt themselves to be at irreconcilable poles of the Christian spectrum. To the evangelicals of St Bride’s those over the road had sold out their beliefs for the sake of a middling quality weekly concert. To the chapel-goers, the fiery-hearted schismatics across the way had thrown out centuries of rich tradition for a quick hit of spiritual warm and fuzziness.

  Intellectually, both positions made perfect sense to Tommy. On a personal level they were both nonsense, he reflected, as he sat listening to the choirboys, thinking of Emily, who was probably being seized by the Spirit a hundred metres away. September was a busy time for St Saviour’s Chapel services. The tourists and summer school visitors flocked to hear the trebles, the schoolboys with their unbroken voices and starched ruffs who had just returned from their summer holidays, and congratulated themselves that they avoided the trap of coming thousands of miles to hear them in the middle of the school holidays.

  Tommy was looking forward to hearing Hedley Sansom give the sermon. Sansom was a brilliant speaker who never stuck to the prescribed liturgical readings or collects. Tommy hadn’t heard him for a decade and a half, though, and he wondered if the career ladder had slickened his delivery but dulled the intellect behind it.

  “It is a sad delight,” Sansom began, “to welcome the trebles back for a final time, just as it will be to welcome my last set of Freshers a few weeks from now.” He really is sad, Tommy thought as he looked over the half-moon glasses and behind the preened film across Sansom’s eyes. Not sad for Charles. No, he really is sad to be going. So why not stay? “I thought, whilst I was staring at an empty page for this sermon last night with my wife calling me to bed, that this is always the most delightful time of year, and the saddest time of year, if you will forgive a Dickensian allusion before term has even begun.

  “As is always most prudent in such circumstances I left the page empty and let myself sketch it in over cocoa. I thought of a September many years ago when I stood in the church of the Holy Spirit in Istanbul. I never forgot the mix of sadness and joy I saw in the art of the Orthodox tradition, whose artists are able to take great, universal properties and capture them in images that have been portrayed a million times before and since. Christ child in the Virgin’s arms. Christ Pantocrat, ruler of the heavens and the earth, Mary at his side.

  “And I thought of the times I have stood in this great Chapel, first as a young lecturer, again as I started my Wardenship, and finally now at its end. I thought of the sadness I feel now, and the joy I felt when I arrived. Choirboy to graduate; Christ child to Pantocrat; lecturer to retiring Warden. Why is it that in each case delight turns to sorrow, even when the joy we have is the joy of potential, and we see that potential through to fulfilment? Shouldn’t the achievement of a goal well-executed merely increase our delight?

  “Well, the answer to that is almost always no. I had always thought that this was because a project finished is a purpose less that we have in life but that is not the case. True, there is loss in the completion of anything, but we soon find something new to fill the emptiness. It wasn’t until last night that I realized where the sorrow comes from. In my mind I was back in Istanbul. I walked again through the gardens of Sultanahmet, into the giant dome of Hagia Sophia. I stood under the protective wing of the dome and found myself looking into the eyes of Mary as she held the infant Jesus.”

  Tommy sensed shifting on the seats around him. The Chapel was known for positioning itself towards the higher end of the Anglican Church, but too much attention to the mother of God still made people very uncomfortable. He could see that Sansom was totally aware of this, and rather enjoying it.

  “What I saw in her eyes was joy. I returned to the mosaic, just a few metres away, of Christ Pantocrat, John the Baptist on one side, his mother on the other. Her eyes were thin and shaded with grey, not the grey of old age but the grey of sorrow. All the joy had gone, and it made no sense. The infant Christ was now king, the universe within his compass, and of course there is a deep contentment in his mother’s soul, but as a human that is first and foremost what she was: his mother. What we see is a mother who has found her saviour and lost her child, a mother whose son has left the familial hearth forever.

  “This is where the sorrow lies whenever we see potential fulfilled. What we lose is not the potential for success, but the potential for failure. It is the sorrow for a lost vulnerability, and it is a very human sorrow. This sorrow is the price of a fulfilled promise, the price for the fulfilment of the divine promise. God makes us the equals of angels, and in so doing takes away everything that it means to be human. If we look at God’s purpose we will always see its fulfilment tinged with sorrow. In heaven, after all, we are equal, there are no partners and no children, no particular friendships, no possessions. And as we here below contemplate our sure salvation how can that not break our hearts? To be free from this sorrow we can only wait, as St Paul would say, to see without our human eyes, to see face to face. Wait in the silence of the divine for the still small voice of calm.”

  ____

  30

  “Good morning, Tommy. It’s a long time since we’ve seen you at Morning Service.”

  Hmm. Nice of you to bring it up. “Good morning, Professor Ellison,” said Tommy. “I was at Professor Shaw’s memorial. I thought it was a beautiful speech.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d love to know more about the book you said he was working on.” Tommy watched for a reaction, and was sure he saw one.

  “Come round one afternoon next week,” said Ellison. “I’m not doing much research at the moment, just another rewrite of the same old lecture notes.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  “Tommy.” He felt the well-rehearsed hand of Hedley Sansom on his shoulder. “Is this annoying man pestering you?” Sansom smiled.

  “Chewing the fat, Hedley,” said Ellison. “I haven’t seen Tommy here since, well, for years.”

  “Of course. Of course. It was lovely to see you at dinner on Friday, by the way, Tommy.”

  Tommy watched as the colour drained from Ellison’s face. Sansom’s pleasure seemed to increase by the same amount as Ellison’s discomfort. A nice little zero-sum game, thought Tommy. If only everything were so symmetrical.

  “You too, and it was lovely to meet Mrs Sansom.”
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  “Speaking of which,” said Sansom. “You must come to lunch if you’re not doing anything.”

  “I’d love to. Oh, goodbye, Professor Ellison,” Tommy said to Ellison’s fast turning shoulder. “I’ll call round tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Mm. Tommy, Hedley. Good afternoon.”

  “Super”, said Sansom. “I’d better show my face at coffee first. That’s something I won’t miss.” He took off his Canon’s robes and folded them over his arm. Tommy thought he looked like an undergraduate on the way to formal dinner. There was something young in the way he walked that all the years of political hacking hadn’t taken away.

  “I enjoyed the sermon,” said Tommy. It was true. He enjoyed the Warden’s easy style, the way he made points seems throwaway that were actually in absolute focus. And of course the references to the fulfilment of childhood potential, and to the sadness of things coming to their end had more than piques his interest. Sansom had lost none of his sharpness, and Tommy felt sure that the Warden hadn’t just been talking about his own impending retirement. How much he actually knew about Professor Shaw’s death, and how much he was simply making his own contribution to the game that Barnard Ellison and probably others were already playing remained to be seen.