The School of Night: A Novel (22 page)

At eight o’clock Dave Lambert arrived. I was down in the bar, sipping meditatively on a gin and tonic. He would, I suppose, have looked like any other American businessman, except for the one noticeable detail: his face was entirely covered in white bandages, leaving only a slit through which he could see, and another through which he could breathe, speak and eat. His hair sprouted from the top in small curly squibs. Jet black. One of the yellow-clad barmen led him over to me.

‘Mr Lambert, this is Sean Tallow.’

‘Hello, Sean,’ Dave said in a low voice, holding out his hand. ‘You’re a friend of Dan’s and that means you’re a friend of mine too.’

‘Let me get you a drink,’ I said.

‘I’ll take water. Carbonated with ice. Need to keep my mind clear for the night ahead.’

Half an hour later we made our way in a taxi towards the Cromwell Road.

‘Only a little place,’ Dave explained, ‘but I’d like to get my hand in again, before the bandages come off.’

The taxi was pulling up outside the L.A. Limits and we climbed out. I paid the cab and we stepped into the big luxurious interior of the casino. Dave went into action. Blackjack. For an hour he played for ten-pound stakes, as I watched from the side. He was starting to do well. The pile of chips in front of him was growing. Then he asked for the stakes to be raised from ten to a hundred and was immediately hushed across to another table, where he now played alone. I whispered urgently as we made our way from one patch of green baize to the next, ‘Dan said to remind you to be discreet,’ but Dave only patted my arm. He was happy.

One hour later a gentleman in an evening suit appeared and asked if we could accompany him into the next room for a moment. He was a small, neat man, with grey hair and an air of great authority.

‘I’m not sure I know your name, sir.’

‘Lambert,’ Dave said, evidently accustomed to this routine.

‘We’ll cash in your chips for you, Mr Lambert, and I hope you’ve had a pleasant time, but the management would appreciate it if you didn’t return. You seemed to be monitoring the cards very well, if our observations are anything to go by. I can’t help thinking you may be in the wrong place. This is merely somewhere Joe Punter comes out for a decent evening, sir. We’re not really set up for professionals. Had some sort of accident, by the way, have you? In which case, I’m sure we’d all like to wish you a very speedy recovery.’

So there we were back on the pavement, around midnight. I managed to spot a cab.

‘Do you have a hotel, Dave?’ I said as we climbed in, but he ignored me.

‘Take us to Dexter’s,’ he told the driver, his earlier affable mood now vanished entirely. The taxi started off.

‘Dave, do you think it’s a good idea…’

‘Just can it,’ he said, so I did and stared through the window as the blur of the London night went by. When we stopped at the traffic lights where Knightsbridge turns into Hyde Park Corner I found myself looking at a couple on the pavement, the girl in tears and the boy with both his hands on her shoulders, talking and talking as she stared down at the ground and wept.

We entered the club in Mayfair with no trouble, though Dave’s bandages provoked a few glances. I sat down near the blackjack table where he elected to play. The female staff in their tight clothes pointed their breasts in one direction or another. It was sex for someone else, not you, that was for sure. Dave played for hours, until after dawn in fact, and I was wondering how long it would take before we were ejected from there too, but as it turned out we had no cause to worry. Dexter’s was happy enough to have Dave Lambert patronise their premises that night, whatever the level of his professional expertise, for the simple reason that Dave kept on losing. Seriously losing. By my count the end of the session left him down the better part of forty thousand pounds. When we came out and climbed into our taxi, he said, ‘Is there somewhere you could take me, where I could have a stroll? This hasn’t been a very good night, Sean, and I won’t be sleeping for a while yet.’

I told the taxi driver to take us to Battersea Park, and there we walked up and down until Dave’s nerves eased up a little. We walked for two hours or more, until I was dropping on my feet.

‘Did Dan tell you anything of this?’ he said, pointing to the bandages that covered his face.

‘No.’

‘Had to change the scenery above my neck. I’m a professional gambler, Sean, but you probably worked that one out.’

‘Dan only said you’d had a little surgery.’

‘Do you know what a card counter is?’

I shook my head. And then he started speaking with an unexpected fluency, almost lyricism, as we walked back and forth at the edge of the river, by the Peace Pagoda. Up and down we went as he talked, by way, I suppose, of exorcism for his losses, and I just tried to keep myself moving. He’d been barred from all the big casinos, apparently, both in London and the States. The card counter, he informed me, had a precise and capacious enough memory to note every card that had already slicked out on the baize out of the packs that were shuffled on a blackjack table. This nudged the odds fractionally away from the house. Not enormously, but sufficiently that the house didn’t like it. ‘Really don’t like it, Sean.’ In fact they so disliked it that they would soon make it plain how much they would prefer you not to come back, once they’d noticed who you were and what you were about. Hence his surgical identity switch. Dave talked on as we walked. The card counter, he explained, must suppress every hunch or glitch of spontaneity, in order to lessen the lethal machinery of the odds. His memory of the occurrence of all the preceding cards, together with the unremitting application of basic strategy, was the only route to success. His job was to become an automaton, severing any link between memory and imagination. No playing on hunches. He could only beat the system by making himself equally systematic. Tonight, though, he had failed. Tonight it was as though he had been entirely human. A quirk apparently. A statistical oddity. You certainly couldn’t have blamed his spontaneity because there hadn’t been any. But by now I was feeling entirely human too.

‘I’m going to have to get some sleep, Dave. Really am. Sorry.’

‘Sure. I’m sorry too. Sorry to have kept you up. I was sharp earlier.’

‘It doesn’t matter. Any friend of Dan’s.’

We sauntered at last towards Chelsea Bridge and a little boy who was walking along with his mother stopped in front of us, staring up at my companion with his bandages blanking out his face and said, with the nib-like precision of a child’s voice, ‘Mummy, is that man dead?’

*   *   *

When I finally got back to the apartment I switched on the television without the sound and lay on the bed. Open University. Some film about whales. They sleep upright, it seems, just under the surface of the water, shifting about gently like grey megaliths that gravity has stopped holding in place. It looked as though Stonehenge had started dreaming. And as I sank into sleep myself I reflected that the only thing I could be sure I knew about Dave Lambert was that his name wasn’t actually Dave Lambert.

7

Mirrors. I’ve spent a lifetime avoiding them, but now I was trapped inside them since Dan had spanned them along each wall in every bar. Looking into them one evening, I noticed as though for the first time the whiteness of my skin. So many faces around me looked golden and tanned against it, and I looked as though I’d never seen sunlight in my life, never encountered a vitamin, never been slapped about by the wind. The nocturnal existence. On one of the Open University programmes I’d watched in the early hours, I’d seen images of creatures which live underground all the time, losing their pigmentation and finally going blind.

I had never even thought about it before, but standing naked and glancing in the mirror at dawn the next day I registered the fact that I did indeed look like the victim of some deadly modern plague, or just an old-fashioned example of pitman’s pallor. So when I was next walking through South Kensington a few days later and saw the sign saying Sol, I went over and read it carefully. Below the piece of paper that read
Staff Wanted: Enquire Within
, were these words:
Acquire an authentic suntan swiftly and safely.
So I walked down the steps and into the upholstered cellar that was the suntan parlour.

A slightly obese man with no tan at all extolled the virtues of tanning to me. He spoke of vitamin enhancement and the lowering of blood pressure, but I cut him short and told him I just wanted to be golden instead of white.

‘Do you tan easily?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never done it.’

‘You obviously have extremely fair skin, so you’d best put this cream on.’ He held up a tube to show me. ‘You’re starting from zero, so a course will almost certainly be necessary. A two-week course. Would you like to pay in advance for that?’ I nodded.

‘That’ll be a hundred and fifty pounds.’ I looked at him in disbelief and he shrugged. ‘It’s still cheaper than going to Ibiza. And nobody will vomit over you down here.’

So for the next two weeks I walked each day from the King’s Road to South Kensington and lay underground, sandwiched between the glass slices of the tanning machines, as the glowing tubes burnt their way through the lotion to my skin.

I now had the texture of the sun all over my body, but I still hardly ever stepped outside while it was actually shining, except for my trip each week to the London Library, where I seemed to be making my way through some of the darker swathes of books. The static electricity that accrued about certain shelves seemed to give off a particularly potent charge these days.

I was now once more plugged into the right city, and my hours were largely the hours of darkness. There is a topography of the mind that corresponds precisely to the mapping of metropolis. I’d come to feel the circuitry in both had hidden, unexpected parallels. And now I was back on my chosen streets again. I read as much with my shoes as with my eyes. I’d made a note of Paracelsus’s remark: ‘He who wishes to explore Nature must tread her books with his feet.’ And what was true of old fields was even truer of modern roads.

I suppose it must have been about this time that the School of Night stopped being confined in my thoughts to the sixteenth century. That eerie constellation had already sunk into my mind, its shape ceaselessly dissolving and reforming, one moment a tower, the next a scatter of shivering reflections on the Thames. History always flows through the courses of rivers, so Ralegh had written in his
History of the World.
I started to see them everywhere: behind the closing door of every School of Day, a School of Night. Just another name for any place where the darkest suspicions might truly prosper. I listened intently to the rumours given off in the bars of the Pavilion.

If Shakespeare really had based his Ferdinando in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
upon that actual Ferdinando, Lord Strange, his early patron, then it was a cruel enough joke. For soon after coming into his full title as fourth Earl of Derby, Ferdinando had died in circumstances as sinister as his name (something else that issued from the left hand of God). Died horribly and inexplicably. It seems that he had been approached by a papist conspirator in a bid to have him connive at the crown, since his mother was descended from Henry VII and since the outcome of Elizabeth’s reign was still a long way from certain. Derby denounced the traitor, who was promptly executed. But soon after he himself died, some said by poison, some by witchcraft, for his portrait was found with a spike of his own hair stuck through the image of his heart. Perhaps the Catholic conspirators had taken their revenge for his betrayal. Or perhaps it was down to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, whose own intelligencers were then seeping across England like an invisible contagion. Whether he was killed by the State or the State’s enemies, his pain was presumably undiminished. The poison in his gut had him writhing like a snake.

And now I would see a School of Night behind the weary smiles of the married couples down in the bar, as one’s boredom started to overtake the other’s love, or in the unmarried as I saw them returning through the dark to solitary rooms and silence and the growing whispers of mortality. Just a flicker in the eyes, no more, but enough to start me thinking. I even read one day about the School of Night concerning Hitler, for whom there was no School of Day at all. They spoke of golden showers in the bedroom, or even the possibility that he needed to have his flesh pastured by faecal matter. That would have fitted with the nihilist’s true worship of the wrong end of creation. But out of what black hole came his hatred of the Jews? A Jewish whore was conjured, who transmitted the spirochaete to his blood, leaving Hitler merely to translate that syphilis into politics. Alternatively, a Jewish trader had cheated him and the crater thus shaped inside by that anonymous schlepper’s pelf could only get filled up again after the entirety of Jacob’s nation had been buried in it. An eclipse of malignancy. I read that Eichmann said he could laugh his way into the grave knowing how he’d helped turn five million human beings to ash. Perhaps the most self-enclosed circle of darkness anywhere on this earth was that described by Primo Levi, in the story of the man who had uttered the word why, in regard to some outrage in the death camps. The guard had answered, ‘Hier is kein warum.’ Here there is no why.

Then back to Ralegh in the Tower. Everybody in the England of that time had to dream continually of an ending in the Tower, for the Tower was the reverse of the jewelled crown, and the closer a body came to the highest in the land the greater that body’s chances of confinement. The Tower was the enthronement of despair, the place where all preferment foundered. So what did Ralegh do there? Wrote a history of the world, acres of verse; conducted scientific experiments with Hariot regarding matters terrestrial and celestial, grew herbs for medicines, cast horoscopes, meditated ceaselessly upon his death, for his death was the one companion that could never leave his side in that place. Studied alchemy, with the Wizard Earl for company. He even had his portrait painted with his son Wat, the son who was later to die on an expedition commanded by his father, to Orinoco in search of gold to quell the king’s displeasure, a seam of ore bright enough to make the sun blink, however briefly. He had been released to redeem himself and had failed. Ralegh was thus to find himself in old age with nothing at all to gainsay the darkness. Thus did time and providence reverse themselves. Then back with him to the Tower, the true home of the School of Night, the museum of all dreams of rebellion, where the law kept the tightest of holds upon all those who might conceivably escape it.