The School of Night: A Novel (17 page)

‘Hands off, if you don’t mind.’

Fresh from my reading of a Thames & Hudson book, I turned and replied, keeping my hand in place, ‘Henry Moore says that if people don’t touch his sculptures, they’ll die.’

‘That’s as maybe, son,’ said the man in the uniform, ‘but if you don’t take your hand off that particular one, I’m going to cut it off.’

My grandmother had not been well. She was even shakier than usual on her legs. Her eyes had sunk a little deeper into her face, whose flesh was now ivory white, with dark hairline cracks across it. I asked her what the matter was, but she only gestured to the lower part of her torso.

‘It’s a funny thing about being uneducated,’ she said later in a meditative tone as she sipped a glass of whisky, ‘but you only ever find out the names of all the things inside you after they start packing in.’

‘Stay young, lad,’ my grandfather said, looking through the window at his roses. ‘Stay young as long as you can, that’s your best bet.’

By this time my grandfather had been retired for a while and spent most of his days, when it wasn’t raining, playing bowls in the local park. I arranged to take them down to the Metropole that Saturday night, ferried there by the local taxi service, to sample the buffet meal at the carvery.

My grandmother couldn’t grasp the concept of the carvery, no matter how often I explained.

‘You can go back as many times as you like,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to pile it up like that.’

But she kept piling, and when she’d eaten everything that was on the plate she edged across to me and asked in a whisper if I might sneak back and get her some more of the roast beef and potatoes.

‘We don’t have to sneak back,’ I said. ‘We’ve paid for the meal. You can have as much as you like.’ She looked dubious.

‘But won’t you have to pay them again?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘just the once. You can clear the table, if you’re that hungry.’ I thought as long as she had her appetite there probably wasn’t too much to worry about.

‘You get it for me anyway,’ she said, just in case, offering me her plate. I went dutifully and piled once more. After I had placed it before her and sat down, she leaned across conspiratorially.

‘You didn’t have to pay them again, did you?’ My grandfather stood up.

‘I’ll go get her another lager,’ he said. ‘She was always more logical with a bit of drink inside her.’

By day I walked the streets where I’d grown up, called into pubs where I’d drunk, even saw the occasional face I recognised. On a piece of wasteland near a wrecker’s yard there were still the ravaged shells of motors long defunct. I remembered how I had once sat in them, heaving the steering wheel this way and that as I gunned along some imaginary highway. That was as close as I’d ever come to driving and, odd though it may seem, as close as I’d ever wanted to. I stood on St Enoch’s Road and looked down the hill to where I’d once watched a Lister have sex with some local girl, while twenty feet above him one of his brothers threw stones at them both. There’d been white twitches of flesh under the chaos of her clothes. I remembered the excitement I’d felt, laced with dread.

My grandmother couldn’t face any long trips out, so I made my own way by bus over the moors. I travelled to the glen and stood in the exact spot where Dominique had found her yellow-hearted flower. There were none now. I walked up through the mist to the top of the hill where the sheep emerged from the inkwash grey, still wrapped in their genesis wool. They stopped dead and stared, and I felt for a moment as if I were dissolving in their gaze, then somewhere below us a churchbell exploded. In bed at night I found myself thinking of Kate. Might I have been a little hasty there? A certain asynchrony between desire and its expression surely wasn’t the gravest misdemeanour in the world. I wondered if I was really ready for the monk’s life yet. I could still feel her tongue enticing me, the way they say amputated limbs carry on sending their messages to the brain long after they’ve entered the incinerator. I thought of Dominique, too, and even of Sally Pagett, but I didn’t really want to think about her. I had to think really hard not to think about her. The trouble was that I couldn’t think about her without also thinking of Dan. Dear dead Dan.

Then one afternoon at five o’clock I was back on the train again, heading for London. And on the way down I decided to retrieve Kate from wherever she’d landed and bring her back to Stefan’s flat. He liked her, that much was obvious; they were at ease in one another’s company. Maybe we could live as a family. An unorthodox one certainly, but then that was the only sort I’d ever known. And the next time Stefan had one of his women in, we could all be introduced; go off at the end of the evening to our separate bedrooms, with smiles of wine-bright anticipation on our faces. I felt a surge of warmth towards both of them.

It was after nine when I let myself into the flat and as I made my way through the living room I heard a sound I knew only too well. Kate was already past the initiatory moans and had moved on to the tiny yelps. I sat down slowly on the sofa and listened as the third movement, the
basso profondo
of labyrinthine passions at long last located and now gaspingly explored, began its progress. ‘Stefan, Stefan,’ she cried, calling out his name exactly as she’d once called out mine, though with what seemed to me, from the auditory gallery, a more unambiguous enthusiasm. Then she moved to the attenuation, the dying fall, and Stefan uttered some lyrical sounds in Hungarian, which I could have sworn were lines from his translation of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets.

Five minutes later he emerged, wearing nothing but an open bathrobe that flapped about his torso. He stopped in the middle of the floor.

‘Sean, I didn’t realise you were back.’ I nodded, in acknowledgement of the fact that I was and that he evidently hadn’t realised.

‘Have a cognac.’ I nodded weakly. I certainly needed something. He came back with the drinks and sat down next to me on the sofa.

‘Kate,’ he began, then faltered. The only time I had ever known his English give way.

‘Has moved into your bed, Stefan,’ I offered helpfully. ‘Yes, I heard.’ Stefan smiled at me, his ancient seducer’s smile. His brown eyes were always warm, always amused and tolerant. I could see, I suppose, what they saw in him. He reached into the pocket of his robe and took out a Gauloise. Blue smoke soon enshrouded us both.

‘I wonder if you’d mind very much,’ he said and faltered again, then he stood up and walked across to his mantelpiece, where he stared down at the acorns and trilobites he’d collected over the years, ‘mind going to stay in Dalrymple House instead of here. It’s just, it could seem a bit crowded otherwise. That’s the way it felt before…’

‘You want me to move out?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Would tomorrow be all right?’

‘Tonight would be better. I mean, you could come back and get your things tomorrow. Just pick up what you need for the moment. I already notified Maggie. Your room is ready: she aired the sheets.’

So that night I stayed at Dalrymple House.

‘I gather you’re moving from there to here,’ Maggie said, a little cautiously, as she gauged my mood.

‘So it seems.’

‘Stefan must be keen.’

‘Must be.’ She was an attractive woman, older than me but younger than Stefan, and she gave me a smile then, a smile that bespoke either the possibility of intimacy or the established fact of complicity. Both were equally unwelcome.

*   *   *

Next day I walked down to collect my things and stopped outside the British Museum. I decided to go inside and look at the one thing I always ended up looking at. This was the obsidian mirror into which Dr John Dee had so often gazed with Kelley, a black pool making visible the vast invisible agencies that surrounded them. The kindly female curator, Annette, had one day taken it from its case when no one else was about and let me hold it in my hands. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was holding, or whether the images of any spirits had ever really moved across its surface. Dee said they had, though; he’d been in no doubt of it whatsoever. On alternate days came Modimi, in the shape of a pretty female child, and another feminine spirit named Galvah. Their speeches had needed to be decoded from Kelley’s unreliable reports.

It was by way of a magical speculum, which over the years had come to be called the devil’s looking-glass. Obsidian was sacred to the Aztec god Tezintlipoca, who would gaze into his own black scrying pool, there to observe the curious doings of humankind. Aztec priests preferred reflective surfaces for divination – smooth water, polished stone. The good doctor’s interests, it struck me once more, had been very dangerous indeed, as dangerous as casting the queen’s nativity, which he had in fact once done, landing himself in prison in the process. Aubrey records that he was reputed to have the power to raise tempests and he also claimed for himself the faculty of discovering hidden treasure. All he wanted was to be allowed to exercise his gift under the protection of the Royal Letters Patent, then he would set out into the world to discover mines of gold and silver ‘for her Grace’s only use’. But an ancient belief was still prevalent in those days: that treasure sunk under the earth was in the keeping of demons, and that their help must be solicited for its discovery. Stringent statutes were extant against such sorcery. You could die if you were caught at it.

Next to the obsidian mirror was the shewstone, a crystal ball, a polished glass zero pregnant with nothing, though seemingly patient with the possibility of everything. A translucent egg of mystical vacuity. Had Dee been the model for Prospero? How close was he to the School of Night? He certainly knew its most important members. How to fathom the past when we had so little notion what was going on in the present.

A few minutes later I let myself back into the flat. There seemed to be no one about. I assumed they were both probably recuperating from their nocturnal exertions in Stefan’s bedroom, the door of which was closed. It only took ten minutes to pack my things, which were mostly books and a few clothes. As I came out into the living room, I walked across to the bookshelf and ran my hand across some of Stefan’s ancient volumes. I was saying goodbye, I suppose. I had a sad feeling that I’d not be back.

I smelt her before I saw her. Kate was behind me, wearing one of Stefan’s shirts, a candy stripe with a button-down collar.

‘Hope I’m not causing too much inconvenience round here amongst you boys.’ She kissed me easily on the cheek, then went and poured herself a drink.

‘Cognac?’ she called from the kitchen.

‘No thanks. A little early for me.’

She was sitting on the sofa, her legs crossed beneath her.

‘Just out of interest, Kate, why did you stop working at the Oasis?’

‘Daniel Pagett paid me to do some work for him instead.’ As she said this, she turned and looked towards the window. The clouds had briefly scattered and sunlight was shafting through. I bid her the fondest farewell I could muster and went quickly down the stairs.

Stefan called at the hotel a few nights later.

‘You are not angry with me, Sean?’

‘Not at all, Stefan. The soft doors opened and you went in. Isn’t that the way everything always gets started.’

*   *   *

A starred note from Hariot:

Women from that point on had no further place in our study. They were matter only for dreams and speculations.

I was glad to get back to work. I resolved myself against any murmurs of resentment; it’s not my way, after all, for that would be to commit the capital sin against time. Wishing things otherwise is merely another name for urging the years to go backwards, spitting in the face of what has been given, and I knew I’d never fathom my own particular riddle if I didn’t accept what was given. Anyway, I had the night to myself once more – apart from the news, that is, but I was well enough used to living with that. The great thing to remember about the news is that it always happens to other people.

Part Three

So ere you find where light in darkness lies,

Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
Love’s Labour’s Lost

1

Dawn is arriving at last. Well almost. The new day is dithering on the horizon amongst a few final feints and eclipses. So I had best press on, or we’ll never bring this history into the present.

I stayed at Dalrymple House. By now it’s probably clear enough that I have something in common with inanimate objects: I tend to remain in the inertial state wherever I’ve landed. Newton’s laws regarding the movement of bodies largely cover the movement of mine too, though it’s taken long enough for one of them to be proven. I’m in a position finally to confirm that every action does indeed have an equal and opposite reaction, and I can only wonder that people don’t find the fact more alarming.

I didn’t have much space now, so I dispensed with almost all my books. I kept my Shakespeare and a couple of biographies of Hariot, Ralegh and Marlowe. And of course my notebooks. There were already ten of these substantial A4 volumes, filled from first page to last with my meticulous and tiny writing. From time to time I might pick up some catchpenny tract or inkhorn effusion on the Farringdon Road, something I knew would not be available elsewhere, but I got rid of them again after I’d taken whatever needed to be transcribed. I didn’t want to be cluttered up, even with sacred furniture.

My régime from this point on became more rigid and mechanical. I worked my shifts with what everyone at the BBC agreed was exemplary efficiency. It seemed to be the one part of my life never afflicted with any form of chaos. It was my sheet anchor. If the weather permitted, then I would take my walks in the evening or the early morning, for my pilgrimage track had to be maintained. I would eat in pubs or the cheaper cafés, spending hours and sometimes even days, when work permitted, in the London Library or the British Museum. I suppose people take refuge in different activities, to fend off the demons and hobgoblins. There are many antidotes for the terrors of the night: a body to cling to, drunkenness or drugs, sunny expectations, since hope is such a great illuminator, a flame for the spider’s hole. Of course the fly often gets torched along with the spider, but there we are. For me it had become my research, of which both reading and walking were now complementary parts. And I did start to wonder if the rules that had applied in my old Oxford college a hundred years before, the ones that precluded any man marrying if he wished to remain a don, might not have contained a little more wisdom than I’d once supposed, for the solitary life does bring to your attention data which a more sociable existence couldn’t possibly supply. Thomas Hariot wouldn’t have stayed up all night at Syon House studying the stars if he’d had a wife and children to fret about. Giotto was lucky enough with his spouse, but he still had to endure the mockery, as she caught him stumbling about, ashen-faced at dawn: ‘Perspective again, is it, Giotto?’ I was grateful, to be perfectly frank, for my new condition, with no Kates or Dominiques to entice or distract me. Now, the solitude and the darkness between them were revealing connections and constellations so bright that sometimes I could hardly bear to look. The inside of my skull would flash, brilliant with illumination. The migraines had even started to return intermittently, probably to keep my brain from burning up.