The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  Not to worry, he told himself. Having pizza with Rosie was hardly a risk. People make new friends all the time. People have pizza all the time.

  “Hey, Tommy.” Rosie kissed him on the cheek and left a dark crimson lipstick mark. She led him through the pots and canes to the narrow stairs. Tommy was pleased by the comforting smell of oregano that filled the living room.

  “Sorry about the state of the place,” she said. 2With you being a designer, I feel like a nutter at a party with a shrink. I expect you get that all the time.”

  “It looks, and smells, wonderful,” Tommy said, looking around him. “So, are you going to tell me about your friend?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Well, he may be a chameleon, but no matter how hard he tries, a tank that size is always going to be a giveaway.”

  Rosie laughed, a natural, unrehearsed laugh that flowed from the top of her head in an elegant wave right through her body. “That’s Chris.”

  “As in Patten?”

  For a moment she looked taken aback but then she gave him a knowing nod. Tommy wondered if Emily had told her he was the juju man who could see into your soul. Hardly the last thing you’d guess, though, for someone who’d followed the erstwhile Tory grandee from Hong Kong to Oxford. People seemed to have lost the art of the educated guess, Tommy thought. It always amazed him how easily people were impressed by what he had always thought of as the art of starting with the obvious and taking it from there.

  “You don’t go back to Hong Kong much, do you?”

  “How do you figure that out?” She looked unnerved, or maybe just uncomfortable.

  “Well, I doubt you have many friends on the force who’d have time to look after an exotic pet for you.” Tommy stated the obvious again, and made the obvious extrapolation, “I’d guess he’s what you have to remind you of home. Instead of home, maybe.”

  “I don’t think much of your small talk, Tommy West.”

  “I don’t really have any small talk.”

  “It’s OK. I like Oxford,” she said unconvincingly.

  Tommy was surprised to find that he had left his problems somewhere on the staircase. She had made a great home here. He looked straight at her and smiled, “Yeah, I’m beginning to think it isn’t all bad.”

  He handed her the wine, “I would have stolen some flowers from downstairs but I didn’t want to get you into trouble.”

  “1997,” she said, checking the label. “Very nice. A better year for Chianti than Hong Kong. Do you want to open it?” She handed him a corkscrew and a pair of glasses.

  “Why did you let me come round?” he asked. He wasn’tsure he had any idea what thought process had led to him calling her. Now, quarter of an hour later, he was opening wine at her flat. “I can’t begin to imagine what Em’s told you about me, or what she’ll say if she finds out I’m here.”

  “Well, Tommy, I let you come because of what Emily told me. I want to know all the gossip. Sorry, I should probably try to prise it out of you, but why waste the time?”

  Tommy laughed and handed her a glass of tawny coloured wine. “Let’s drink to not wasting time.”

  “To not wasting time!”

  Tommy stood in the kitchen doorway as Rosie served up. The pizza was shop bought junk with a few extra herbs sprinkled on and added butterfly king prawns that had been dipped in something that looked radioactive, but he marvelled at the way she cut and plated it with little more than a flick. It was like the way she decorated, and the way she dressed. She clearly had exquisite taste but she kept it entirely for her own amusement. She didn’t seem to care in the slightest what anyone thought of her, except her. When she bought cheap crap she knew she was buying cheap crap and did it partly because she didn’t have the money not to, and partly because she wasn’t greedy with the good stuff. Either way she didn’t give a fig what anyone else thought her motives were.

  “Go and sit down,” she said, squeezing past him. “Chris and I don’t do standing on ceremony.” He followed her to the sitting room where she sat on the sofa with her legs folded in a zed under her. He moved the plate she had put next to her and sat down.

  “So, Tommy West. Tell me about you and my boss.”

  “There’s nothing to tell that you don’t already know,” he said. It was funny. A few days ago he’d have imagined she would have told the world what a bastard he was; but since he’d started to get to know her again, since he’d started to get the measure of just how good a person she was, he somehow got the impression she’d been have been more than discreet. He wasn’t sure it made him feel better. “Everything bad she’s told you is true. Everything good is probably a nostalgic lie”

  “Well that gives me plenty to conjure with.” Rosie smiled, a huge, orthodontically perfect smile framed in dark red lipstick. She was wearing her hair up, held in place casually with a pen.

  “I bet it does.” He’d told himself after they’d split up that he’d done the noble thing, that he’d invented the lie about his insatiable need to sleep with her so that she would know he was bad and move on. He was right, of course, that there were so many reasons that had nothing to do with sex why they would never have stayed together or, worse still, why they would have stayed together in determined misery. But whether, looking back now as if staring into the reflective black of Rosie’s eyes he was gazing into a part of his soul that had died years ago, any of those reasons had formed part of his decision he had no idea. All he saw looking back at him was his own puzzled expression, and a vague feeling of revulsion.

  “Why are you here, Tommy?” she asked, moving her head as if to look for him behind his gaze.

  Tommy smiled, relieved that the bright room with the reassuring student feel in which he found himself had nothing to do with his past, delighted to see that it was Rosie and not Emily who was looking back at him. “That’s two questions,” he said. Her eyes weren’t moving. There was nothing closed that he could see about them. No detecting, no gossip, just a question. “I called you because I had your number. But I’m still here because I like you.”

  “I guess I get lonely a lot of the time too” Rosie said, seeming to understand exactly what his first answer had meant. Tommy had sensed it as soon as he came in. She’d built a wonderful home here; but somewhere thousands of miles away she’d left another home. “Maybe she makes people around her feel like that.”

  “No,” said Tommy. “I was good at being lonely a long time before I met Em. Ask her and she’ll tell you that’s a lot of my problem.”

  “She has. Plenty of times.” Rosie laughed and the creases in her face made her eyes look even bigger. “I’m only joking,” she said. “She refuses to say much at all. Why do you think I was so keen for you to come round?”

  “So I really am just here for gossip,” he said, smiling.

  “That’s why I wanted you to come,” she said. “It’s not why I want you to stay.”

  Tommy almost balked at the warmth against him as he held her. Warmth. How long had it been since he had felt human warmth on his skin? He didn’t let her go even as the sun came creeping back to christen a new week. He turned in the sheets and put his head on a new piece of the pillow, but he could still feel her warmth.

  MONDAY SEPTEMBER 10, 2007

  ____

  36

  It was warm – in a comforting way, not like the warmth of his sheets heated up by a night of disturbed sleep.

  “Hey there, Tommy.” He opened his eyes. Big, deep brown eyes looked back at him with a huge smile.

  “Hey, Rosie.” He really didn’t know what to say. He took stock of his feelings. It didn’t feel like he’d made a mistake. It didn’t feel like he’d done anything rash. He didn’t feel out of control. Almost certainly he was wrong about all three. Either he was entering a manic phase and he’d lost his ability to keep tabs on his condition, or he really liked Rosie. There were so many reasons why he hoped it was the latter.

  “Can I see you again?” he asked.

 
“What do you think Emily would say about that?”

  “I don’t care,” he said, and he believed that it was true, although he didn’t know why.

  “Well, you can see me now,” she said, pulling him so that every inch of her was touching him. “Let’s take it from there.”

  He closed his eyes and everything was gone except the taste of her, and images of numbers rolling and writhing beyond an imaginary horizon. Numbers. A woman turning to make love to him. Rosie turning to make love to him.

  *

  Back in his flat, bathed and in fresh clothes, he put a dab of Number One on his neck. Tommy felt vital and alive. Every sense was heightened. He took in every nuance of the overture to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde that was playing in the background as he finished his smoothie and picked up the phone.

  “Charteris, good morning,” came the answer. Tommy remembered several years of lunchtimes trying to make the line sound vaguely interested. He knew he hadn’t done a much better job.

  “Good morning. May I speak to Henry Wilde, please? It’s Tommy West, an old colleague, calling about Professor Charles Shaw.” It was best to be up front and head off any questions at the pass.

  “Let me see if he’s in for you.” That was another line he’d used, one of the delightful euphemisms of office life. You could hardly sit on the reception desk of a small solicitors’ firm and not know who was in. Still, it sounded better than I’ll see if he can be bothered to talk to you or I’ll see how close to the end of his tether he is already.

  “Tommy West.” Tommy could picture Wilde’s mouth open to reveal his vast smile. He closed his eyes and took in the deep, Teflon-smooth texture of Henry Wilde’s voice.

  “I’m sorry about John,” said Tommy. “I assume you know that he was on an appointment to see me when he died?”

  “Yes I did know that,” the lawyer said evenly. “From why Susan said you’ve called I’m guessing it was Professor Shaw’s business he was on. I can’t tell you much at the moment I’m afraid. We’re still trying to tie up some loose ends with his estate, but I’ll tell you what I can. I have half an hour free at ten. Do you want to meet somewhere?”

  “Could I come to the offices?”

  “That would be good. Can you be here in 20 minutes?”

  “Of course.”

  Charteris was one of the many small solicitors’ partnerships that nestled in the area behind St Saviour’s. It was a rat-run of alleys and snickets, doorways and garages, where with a little local knowledge you could lose anyone in a chase.

  The ground floor reception was a small high-ceilinged regency room painted white. The magazines scattered on the solid mahogany table were splashed with pictures of yachts and Ferraris, a signal that this was a conveyancing, divorce and probate practice, not a Legal Aid criminal and employment law firm. Across the narrow duck-egg corridor was a similar but much larger room, an open-plan office that was called the typing pool not long before Tommy joined but was now had the grander title of the paralegals’ room. It was still upstairs/downstairs to the core, Tommy thought as he opened the door, the receptionist peering uneasily from across the corridor to work out what he was doing but soon losing interest.

  Tommy guessed the paralegals were still arranged in strict hierarchical formation, juniors and secretaries to anyone on articles at the front, assistants to the partners at the back. The one exception had been Tina, Charteris’ secretary, who had an ante-chamber by his top-floor room. Just like Shaw’s cellar, he thought, everything building up to the oldest and best, who were kept furthest from the variable climate of the real world. It wasn’t nearly as well-kept as the cellar, though. There were still three or four faces he recognised, and they all recognised him at once and smiled. None of them seemed to have changed. A couple of them had moved closer to the back of the room, following their solicitor’s progress rather than their own ability, which experience told him was more than they realised or his pay reflected.

  “Tommy, wonderful to see you.” The voice seemed to ooze through the air towards him and he turned around to see Henry Wilde, his perfectly-sculpted fifty-something figure pushing ever so slightly but not too much against the chest and shoulders of his Saville Row suit. The smile shone out of his jet black face. “Christine, can you get some tea for Dr West and bring it up, please? Jasmine, as I remember?”

  “Please,” said Tommy shaking Wilde’s hand and feeling even better about life than he already had done. He had forgotten just how much he’d looked up to Wilde as a student, and just how long an hour a day for four years eventually adds up to. Even when he first met him Wilde must have been pushing forty, but his mind and his body only ever seemed to get sharper. It’s much further into old age than lazy people care to admit before the ravages of natural decay begin to outstrip the benefits of constant training, thought Tommy. Wilde had always had time to speak to Tommy when he went out to the gym at lunchtime, and whatever Tommy had brought with him as the day’s read, Wilde always had something to the point to contribute.

  “Charles Shaw,” Wilde said, half to himself. He took a seat and gestured for Tommy to do likewise. His steeple formed a frame around the vermilion shot silk tie that was the only colour in his outfit. “You know he used to be my client?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Tommy sat more upright.

  “Well he was, ever since he made his first will, when he was still an undergraduate. Talk about being prepared. He switched over to John just before you started here, about 18 years ago.”

  Now Tommy was very interested. “Did he say why?”

  “No he didn’t, Tommy. Not that I should really tell you if he did. It’s probably time for you to tell me why you’re here. Maybe then I can answer you.” He smiled, totally noncommittal, a perfect lawyer’s smile.

  “Archaeology,” Tommy said.

  “Just digging around, eh? That much I got. Are you digging for anything in particular or just because you like holes? Thank you, Christine.”

  Tommy took his tea and let it warm his hands to get the blood flowing as quickly as he could. It had been ten years since he had sat across a desk from someone and not felt that he had them covered from every angle, physical and mental. He liked the feeling, but he still needed information. “Well, Howard Carter had Lord Caernavon; I have Becky Shaw.”

  “I’ll bet you do. What does Becky Shaw want to know that she can’t get her mother to ask me?”

  “Loose ends,” Tommy said. “Becky was seeing her father again. Haydn didn’t know. Is that why Charles Shaw changed? Because you were his wife’s solicitor?”

  “I thought that’s what you were thinking,” Wilde said. It wasn’t at all what Tommy was thinking ,and Tommy was fairly sure Wilde knew that. He was only going to tell what he wanted to tell. “He switched a little while before the divorce, a couple of months before the business with Carol. The divorce was pretty irrelevant. I farmed that out to another firm to avoid any conflict of interest.”

  Tommy had guessed that Wilde would be more keen on the appearance of propriety than Charteris had been. He’d guessed that the man with his name on the brass plaque would have pulled rank. Maybe that was the kind of man Professor Shaw thought should represent him. Maybe he just found Wilde a little too uninspired by life’s little hedonisms.

  “She wants me to fill in the background that she never had time to find out from him.”

  “That’s bull, Tommy.” Wilde paused, as if considering whether to exchange a few pleasantries and show him the door. Tommy wondered if he’d blown it, if Wilde had seen through him, although he knew he could hardly have told the truth. “Hell,” the lawyer said eventually. “It’s good enough bull for me. What background are you after?”

  “Just a couple of things. The message he sent round with John mentioned a will. I have a feeling that was a concoction?”

  “One hundred percent.” Wilde was sitting back with his hands clasped behind his head. He had had his little joust; now he looked benign. Probably, Tommy thought, at any r
ate. There was one percent of him that couldn’t tell, the one percent that Wilde had on him in age and guile and a history of good mental health.

  “When exactly did Shaw make his money?” said Tommy. It was the question he had a feeling held the key to everything. “Not his millions, the hundred thousand or so seed corn money he used to build them up.”

  “You mean before or after the divorce,” Wilde surmised.

  Close enough, thought Tommy. How about before or after his daughter was born?

  “Well, I believe the money entered his traceable accounts a few months afterwards, while he was still on sabbatical. You’re not going to ask me how he made it?”

  “It wouldn’t occur to me to think he’d have told anyone,” said Tommy. “What about your loose ends? Money that needs tracing before people can be given their share?”

  “There’s not really a good reason to say there is any more money.” It seemed like a satisfactory answer to both of them. “Like you said, just a little archaeology.”

  “Care to let me know where the dig is?”

  “Spain. That’s all you’re getting, and I’m only saying that because it’s the end of summer and you still look pasty.” Wilde’s eyes scanned Tommy’s figure under his black cashmere, “Call again, Tommy. We’ll go to the gym together.”