Free The Company of Fellows by Dan Holloway Page A

made in the twentieth century. It had, according to
Charles’ immaculate script next to the estimate, fetched $7000 at
Sotheby’s New York. A case of the other, Chateau Cheval Blanc from
1947, had sold for £84,000 at Christie’s in London to an
advertising executive - £7000 per bottle. Reaching further back in
time, there was a case of Tokaji Eszencia from 1811, the most
celebrated year in the wine-growing world and known, because of the
appearance of Halley’s Comet, as the year of the comet. The first
time the case had been moved from the cellars of its Hungarian
producer by the Nazis. The owner, Tommy noted, had recently died.
He wondered if this was how an unsuspecting family had found out
their father was a war criminal. Still, they hadn’t been too
repulsed to emphasise the perfect cellar conditions in which it had
been stored. Nor had the Canadian investment banker who bought the
case for £98,000 had any qualms about provenance. What historians
know about the Nazis would make those members of the general public
who have only seen the published photographs of concentration camps
recoil in shock. What cultural historians, on the other hand, know
about the Nazis is how carefully they looked after their
art.
    Tommy opened
his eyes and the flavours vanished. He set the printed materials to
one side and picked up the drawings.
    It was not
quite so clear how he should arrange these. Annotated and
unannotated, that was a start. He wasn’t sure what next. There were
no titles. Clearly their meaning was obvious, to Professor Shaw at
least. Mostly they looked like random scribbles. He thought he
understood some of the drawings, the ones that looked like
geometry, or engineering. They seemed to represent some kind of
gearing: ratios, proportions. Tommy guessed that Charles had been
thinking about the mathematics of beauty, about the similar way we
relate to the many different things we find beautiful, each in
their own way, across different axes. He was sure that one of these
was the axis of time. He laughed when he got to a set of drawings
of Penrose tilings, mathematical patterns that are capable of
filing a surface infinitely without leaving a single gap. What is
so unexpected about these patterns is the lack of symmetry many of
them display. Far from being boring, uniform shapes, many are as
complex and irregular as life itself. It was an idea they’d often
talked about in tutorials, the lack of symmetry that exists in
balance. Fragility in perfection; love; the incarnation of Christ.
Tommy was beginning to remember what it was like to feel his brain
moving with Shaw’s. Falling into old rhythms. Aged lovers who don’t
need to rediscover each other’s bodies in the dark. The light was
on.
    The one he was
looking at now was different. It wasn’t abstract. It was real
engineering, with measurements written on planning lines. It was a
pen drawing of what looked like a cage from one of the wicker
chairs that had been so popular in the 70s. The sizes looked about
right, too, but the object in the middle wasn’t a chair. It was an
armature, attached by a height-adjustable mechanism to the back
pole, 45 centimetres from the Y-shaped limbs at the top to the
gibbet-like arm at the bottom. About two thirds of the way up was a
cross-beam 30 centimetres across that had similar gibbet arms at
either end. The two side-arms and the bottom one were labelled,
“tie”. That was the only writing on the diagram other than the
measurements. From either side of the Y hung a semi-spherical cage
with screws in the side half way between the bottom and the 15
centimetre diameter, cut off half way up so that only its outer
frame met the twin supports. At the cross where the smaller
armature joined the pole connecting it to the larger, Shaw had
drawn curved lines that seemed to indicate a hinge, which he had
annotated “90º”.
    Tommy stared.
It looked like one of the torture instruments he had seen in an
exhibition in the dungeon of