The Company of Fellows

by Dan Holloway

  I never resented a day I spent raising Carol, never withheld even the smallest amount of love from her. But before she was born I fell in love. Although I knew that I could never be with the lady in question until I had discharged my promise to Carol, from that moment I never looked at another woman.

  When I made that original choice regarding parenthood, I was wrong. It’s not the things you can only do once that make you who you are. It’s the one thing you always do for as long as you live, the one thing that is an end in itself. And that can’t be raising a child. Parenting is a never-ending sequence you see. For some people that makes it a thread that connects them somehow, from inside their own fragile shell, to immortality; but all that really shows is that even in our secular world human beings are still able to find a rationale for delaying pleasure beyond the grave. Thomas Aquinas saw just how absurd such reasoning is. Philosophers have ridiculed him ever since, but really, the idea that every effect has a cause, which in turn has a cause, and so on ad infinitum without there ever being a first cause is, if not philosophically nonsensical then – and doesn’t he reveal his true twenty first century credentials? – morally futile. We raise a child, our secular ascetics tell us, so that they can raise a child, so that they in turn can raise a child, and so on, and no-one ever looks for happiness except in the happiness of their children. And so, of course, no-one is ever happy because their happiness always depends upon something that is beyond their reach in the future.

  So much for our alleged society of hedonists. Happiness becomes a logical impossibility. The last child is not happy because there is no possibility of happiness to come later. And if the last child is not happy then its parents are not happy either, because their child cannot be happy, and the whole chain of disappointment worms its inexorable logic back into the loins of Adam. Of course they are wrong. Pleasure, Tommy, is something made greater because we wait for it, but we never need to wait beyond the boundaries of our own mortality.

  Carol does not know I am still alive, of course. When the time came I sent her out of the room. Of course I could be lying, but when you picture her eyes, Tommy, can you really see if she knows?

  Goodbye, Tommy. Be very happy with Rosie. I have it on good authority that you are very much in love. That’s a worthy project.

  Charles

  Tommy sat. Charles was right. He couldn’t see far enough into Carol to be certain whether she knew. And if she didn’t then he wouldn’t be the one to tell her. He took the letter into the kitchen and lit a cook’s match under it. He watched the last of the ashes fall into the sink, and lit an incense cone.

  Tommy returned to the Barcelona chair in his sitting room and looked around him at the piles of sample books, exquisite things that had nothing to do with his previous life in academia.

  He asked himself for the second time in a handful of days what had happened to the brilliant young researcher. He thought of his work on the possibility of deep equality in a relationship between a man and a woman and almost felt like laughing. It was no wonder his ideas had no place in the world he had inhabited for the past few weeks. A world where it seemed given that a woman would sacrifice any part of herself for her children, whilst a man would happily sacrifice his children for himself. Which would he rather, he asked himself, to resolve the inequality? That men were expected to bear their share of the sacrifice, or that women were also expected to lay their children on the altar of their egos? They were questions he was glad no longer played a part in his life.

  He picked up one of his sample books and ran the back of his hand over the cool, gossamer fine silks. Then, as he stood, he felt his hand on the soft, warm leather, and considered the two sensations on his skin. These were the choices that governed his life now, he thought, picking up the telephone to call Rosie.

  ____

  67

  Asenovgrad in the south of Bulgaria is a magical town. It nestles beneath the foothills of the Rhodopi Mountains that tower over it to the south, reflecting the heat off the vast expanse of the Thracian Plain. The reflected sun ripens the grapes on the Mavrud vines to perfection, and hundreds of tiny vineyards dot the landscape, squeezed into gardens and fields.

  Further into the hills, at the end of a twisted road, beyond stalls of garish souvenirs, is the breathtaking Bachkovo Monastery, where sheep pens jostle side by side with shrines. It is known throughout the country for the brightly coloured labels on the bottles of Mavrud wine, for sale in every local corner shop, that bear its name. It is the same Mavrud wine that Charles Shaw shipped in by the case to Spain during his time in Jerez; cases in which Dr Krista Markova placed the icons that she had stolen from the Bachkovo Monastery during her time there researching Orthodox iconography. She didn’t take many, just enough, when sold to a market in the west that had a seemingly unquenchable thirst for everything that was flooding out of the former Eastern Bloc in the first flush of its newfound capitalism, to raise a modest amount of seed corn money.

  It is harvest time and in one of the many vineyards a man and woman work alone, loading their haul into a two wheeled cart to which they will hitch their horse at intervals to make the short journey to the maceration tanks. She has moved from the city and he is clearly a foreigner, but already the days under the sun are working their way into this handsome couple’s skin, and soon they will be as tanned and lined as anyone who has lived here all their lives. From time to time they stand up to rest their backs and share a joke, perhaps about a reference in a painting, or a line of poetry in one of the many languages they have in common; perhaps about political and commercial upheavals in a world they no longer inhabit, or about nothing in particular except how pleasant it is here under the sun. And when their lips have finished telling jokes and stories, maybe they will share a kiss.

  When he stops to drink, the man looks up at the sun. He can feel it beating its furrows into his brow and sometimes, if he screws up his eyes hard enough, he thinks that behind its beat he catches a glimpse of a God, whom he thanks daily that there is no more waiting left.

  Where the vineyard ends the small patio begins that leads directly into the kitchen of Krista Markova’s wood and stucco house. During the day the shutters remain closed, and the drapes that separate the rooms hang lazily. Behind the bedroom is a space that she and Charles have curtained off to form a wine cellar. If they wish to, they can feel behind them into the cool space in the night, selecting a bottle by touch.

  For now a bottle of 1811 Eszencia stands upright just behind the grey stuff-cloth drape. Maybe they will drink it in the night, or maybe they will wait. Just in case, there is a corkscrew on her bedside table, and a pair of crystal Tokaji glasses standing either side of a see-through clip frame that holds an effortless line drawing of a woman holding a cigarette. The small line that you will see in her hand represents a lighter, with a similarly elegant curve to the one that Dr Markova is using now to light a cigarette before she turns onto Charles’ shoulder to sleep; the one she borrowed in the summer, in Sofia, from a gap year student with badly-dyed red hair. Krista turns the smooth metal over in her hand. Sometimes, on nights like tonight, she wonders if Charles is curious to know where it came from. Then she puts it back on the table. It is the last thing she sees as the cigarette fades. As she ceases to gain her bearings by sight, and moves against him into the world of touch, she feels overwhelmed by the desire to cry. But she waits; the feeling passes; and it never returns.