The Company of Fellows Read Online Free PDF

have to ask you some questions, Dr Shaw; Miss
Shaw.”
    “ Of course,”
said Haydn.
    “ Is that OK
with you, Becky?” Emily asked, pointedly, but by now the smile had
returned to Becky’s face.
    “ Of course it
is.”
    “ The note was
rather cryptic. It said There’s nothing
left to wait for . That was
all.”
    Haydn was
already laughing before Emily could ask if it meant anything to
her.
    “ I’m sorry?”
Emily said, aware that by now her annoyance was showing in her
voice. Fortunately Rosie was obviously aware too, and took a step
forward as though to indicate that she would take over for the time
being.
    “ Well, my
ex-husband certainly wrote that. Dear Charles,” said Haydn,
“devoted his career. No, he devoted his life to
waiting.”
    “ I don’t
understand,” said Rosie.
    “ My husband,
Sergeant Lu, was a theologian. An ethicist. He was paid to teach
people about right and wrong, if you can imagine anything quite so
absurd. Strictly in the theoretical sense, thank God.”
    This isn’t the
first time this invective has been wheeled out, I’ll wager, thought
Emily. It had the whiff of polish about it, and Emily wondered if
Dr Shaw rehearsed it every time she met someone new. Or whether she
just practised it to herself as she lay in bed.
    “ His area of
speciality was pleasure,” Haydn continued. “What gives us pleasure?
How can we increase the pleasure something gives us? Should we
allow or deny ourselves pleasure? His big idea, if you can call it
that, was that the greatest pleasure comes from the things we wait
for longest. He essentially spent his whole career trying to
justify his predilections, old wine and seduction, the only two
things he ever cared about.” Haydn stopped for a moment.
    Emily wondered
if she had physically shivered, or if she had only felt the ice
jumping in her spine. It was as though Haydn was pausing for
dramatic effect before delivering a punch line.
    “ It all boils
down to the Tristan myth,” Haydn continued. “A cliché as old as his
so-called idea.”
    “ The what?”
Emily asked, no longer bothered whether or not she let her
irritation show.
    “ Tristan and
Isolde, Chief Inspector Harris. It’s a story that goes back a
thousand years. It’s the story of a love that cannot be fulfilled,
a desire that can only be consummated in death.”
    “ Wagner wrote
an opera about it,” Rosie chipped in, surprising Emily
again.
    “ Indeed,
Detective Sergeant Lu. The point is that you spend your whole life
yearning for someone, build yourself into a frenzy, to the point
where your body and soul are about to burst and then you die
together in an almighty climax that brings your whole life to a
grand apotheosis.” She paused again. “It’s about never getting
round to having a fuck because you’re worried it’ll be a let
down.”
    “ Did your
husband have many affairs, Dr Shaw?” Emily asked curtly. Old wine and seduction. There had been empty wine glasses by Charles’ hand. Emily
went over the image in her head. There were bottles on the table.
Two bottles. One larger, one smaller. One was French; she wasn’t
sure about the other one, but she remembered that the label had
said it was from the 1970s. Old
wine .
    “ I was one of
many,” said Haydn. “Some of them were his students; some of them
weren’t. He was pretty indiscriminate, but they were always top of
their year in whatever their subject was, and they were never, for
all his charm and importance, a pushover.”
    Old wine and
seduction . Emily put the words together
with Professor Shaw’s beautiful house and the feast laid out where
she had seen the body, and she began to form a picture of Charles
Shaw the sensualist. No wonder they got divorced, she
thought.
    “ And where
were you this afternoon between two and four? I’m sorry, I have to
ask.” She wasn’t sorry at all.
    “ We were
here,” said Becky, and Emily felt herself flush. She had allowed
herself to get so wrapped up in Dr Shaw that