The School of Night: A Novel (27 page)

She stopped then and she was gone before the tears came, and a few minutes later Dan came back in, clutching his sheets of paper. He spoke with difficulty and had to keep returning to the beginning of some of the sentences, but little by little it dawned on me what he was talking about. I wondered briefly whether the tumour had so mangled his mind that he had entirely lost any capacity for coherent thought. He
could
still think though, haltingly, fragmentarily, and with recurrent difficulties of expression. But he certainly could think. When he’d finished, he sat back exhausted and I looked at him in silence, pondering all that he’d told me.

‘But what would I actually have to do, Dan?’ He looked up, obviously weary with the effort of so much communication.

‘The same as you had to do at the Pavilion, that’s all. Just be here. Everything’s set up, but she needs the company. She can’t do everything by herself.’

‘I need to go back to London to work things out, Dan. I can’t answer your questions straight away.’

‘You didn’t say no.’

‘I didn’t say yes either.’

‘But you didn’t say no.’ Then Dan was somewhere else entirely. Things he must have had on his mind.

‘Funny how we’re wrapped up in air,’ he said. ‘I saw this thing on the television about some of the other atmospheres out there. Little envelopes of dust. There’s that gull again outside trying to shout down the wind. What am I talking about, Sean, do you know? Didn’t you used to explain things to me.’

‘Only once, I think.’

‘And when was that?’

‘On your wedding day.’ He turned back from the window and looked at me with a bewildered expression.

‘What did you explain?’

‘That you were getting married. To the assistant librarian on the seventh floor.’

‘That was very good of you, Sean. That was a good thing to do.’ He fell silent for a moment and seemed to look around the room in sudden panic, as though he had mislaid the next word somewhere amongst the furniture. ‘We did manage it once here since I came back from the hospital. I sort of stumbled into her. I reckon it must have been a charity fuck, to be honest. From Sally’s point of view, that is. When I came, I remember there was this amazing rattling and shaking going on down there, like an engine blowing up on you on the motorway, but you know the odd thing was it all felt as though it was happening to somebody else. Felt I should get on the phone about it. Report it to the council. Maybe it
was
someone else. Couldn’t have been you doing it, could it, Sean, cascading away inside her like that?’ His old smile had returned again briefly. ‘I seem to recall you did have a couple of my women back there, didn’t you?’

‘No, Dan,’ I said quietly and then felt sorry at the confusion that returned to his face as I said it. ‘You had a couple of mine.’

‘Ah. Well, I knew it was something like that. Just remind me, what was it they kept behind those soft doors, Sean?’

‘The soft room, Dan. The softest room.’

Then Sally let the doctor in. A small thin Indian, with a ready smile and a pair of enormous steel-framed glasses on his delicate nose, he nodded to me then turned to Dan.

‘And how is Mr Pagett today?’

‘One day closer to not needing your services than he was yesterday,’ Dan said, with his eyes still closed. ‘But thank you for your curiosity.’

On the train back I finally opened the paper I had bought at Victoria that morning, and reading automatically as you do when your mind is elsewhere, I saw the item about the newly discovered Hariot Notebooks and where they were exhibited. I’ve just deciphered another sentence:

Sir Walter’s ravaged face: how badly death must desire the sons of men, to be filled with such an unholy passion to possess us.

3

When I got back to London I phoned Malcolm from the station and told him I wouldn’t be able to work that week and perhaps not for a while. He sounded taken aback. I suppose he’d grown so used to having me around. The next day I travelled by tube to the exhibition of the Hariot Notebooks. That’s when I transcribed what was written and took it back to my bedsit to start the decoding. That’s when I made out the words ‘the School of Night’. And the next day I made my decision.

I called Sally from the pay-phone in the hall downstairs.

‘Are you sure? Absolutely sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘So when will you come?’

‘Tomorrow.’

The train was delayed by half an hour and I found myself thinking again about the recent crash at Paddington. I had read all the accounts in the papers of how the trains had screamed into one another, steel splicing steel, the carriages swerving wildly and turning over, flinging their cargoes about like clothes inside a tumble-dryer, except that these clothes had actual flesh inside them, soon to be torn, severed and scorched featureless by the flames already eating them. Acrid smoke blackened their insides.

Within minutes the scene had fallen silent except for the cries and the hissing of metal, a much greater noise now coming from the sirens shrieking their way through London’s traffic. And then it had begun, the curious bleat of lamentation, the mobile phones scattered throughout the wreckage with their ceaseless wails of ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Eine kleine Nachtmusik’, digitalised musical phrases, activated by the wives and husbands, the mothers and sons of those missing commuters. For hours this bleeping had continued, until one by one the batteries inside each compact plastic device went flat and the noises died. Then the people on the other end of the line, accepting at last that all day they had been sending messages to corpses, crumpled to their knees in the fading light of their hallways. Now finally they could weep without let or hindrance.

Soon enough I was on the train, remembering once more the photographs and the interviews with the bereaved. How quickly the curious pornography of grief had begun, legions of counsellors swarming and buzzing over their latest carrion. And then I saw a tiny item at the foot of the page, about Miller’s Peas being withdrawn from the supermarket shelves. Someone had been poisoned. How things do come around.

Sally met me at the door.

‘Dan’s lying down upstairs. Come and get a coffee and then go up to see him.’

When I entered the bedroom I realised what death smelt like: it seemed to be eating away at the air in there, gradually vacuuming its potency.

‘I knew you would, Sean, I told Sally you would. I said, now that he knows he’ll never invent a dog that doesn’t shit…’ But he’d lost his thread. He seemed too weak to move much and I lay my hand on his arm, cratered and bruised from all the needles that had gone in.

‘Go down and talk to Sally. She can explain things better than I can. She’s been the strongest one round here for a while. And when you’ve done, come back up and see me. All right?’ I nodded and went downstairs.

*   *   *

We sat together in the front room on the sofa, both staring out at the mist gathering over the water. I only took in certain phrases as she talked.

‘The usual line has been English cigarettes from here to Andorra, where there’s no duty,’ she said and took a sip from her mug. ‘You take them out lawfully, duty-free, then it’s just a question of getting them back in without the excise boys noticing. That’s the scam down the road in Dover. Dan, as usual, had a good look at the rest of the world and then did otherwise. Everyone else is functioning out of Dover; so he decides we’ll have to come to Ramsgate. Who’d have ever thought that Daniel Pagett would end up living in Ramsgate?’ She laughed quietly to herself.

‘So we bought this extraordinary bloody house with its tower and its two-foot white perimeter walls. And Dan then made friends with a funny little man in the bonded warehouse.’ She looked up again and out towards the sea. It was beginning to be grey and bleak now on this December day. I followed the line of her eyes and found myself staring at the ferry leaving port and heading out into the Channel. A muffled bell made a dim sound.

‘If goods land in this country for trans-shipment and are put into the bonded warehouse, as long as they’re properly sealed and that seal remains unbroken, then they haven’t landed here at all, or not so as to incur any of the normal duties anyhow. All the paperwork says is that the goods go into the bonded warehouse for trans-shipment. And if you can arrange for that same paperwork to accompany lots of bona fide goods going out to where they say they’re going, while still keeping enough of the original stuff here…’

‘You pocket the difference.’

‘Well, you and the nice man in the bonded warehouse share the difference between you. With a big trailer moving three times a week, it’s quite a big difference, believe me.’

I did a few swift mental calculations from the figures she’d mentioned. Thirty times ten thousand. There were too many noughts on the end, it couldn’t be right. So, I did the sum again more slowly, but it came out the same. So many zeros. As she had said, it was a big difference.

‘As you can imagine,’ she said, ‘the Customs boys don’t like it one little bit. Which is why Dan’s been so keen we should complete our schedule according to plan and with no change of personnel. Except for the one, of course, the one that couldn’t be helped. Another few months of what we’re doing and we’ll own the house and have some put away for the future as well. Can’t think of any other way of getting it now. He’d hoped to have the whole thing settled before he died, but it does look as though, just this once, he’s got his timing wrong.’

*   *   *

And then I went back upstairs.

‘All sorted?’ Dan said.

‘Pretty much.’

‘There’s one more favour you can do for me, Sean. I know you won’t let me down.’ He managed to gesture for me to lean over him, and whispered in my ear.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t.’

‘You can do anything now.’ He gestured me down towards him again and whispered something in my ear, something so terrible that I nearly hit him.

‘Do it,’ he said. So I did.

4

At first you think maggots are silent, but they’re not. If you sit in the room with them long enough you’ll start to hear their sound – a tiny sound, the sound of thousands of white-blooded bodies the size of a baby’s fingernail, crawling and flexing over one another. This sound grows by an infinitesimal amount each day, until suddenly it goes completely silent. Chrysalis stage. Then you forget all about them for a week or so. Not a murmur. Suddenly there’s a black buzzing like something waiting to explode. A shifting bomb in a bag.

As my grandmother used to say, if you want to hear God laughing just tell him your plans for the future.

When I arrived back in London a few hours later there was a note stuck in my door. Please Phone Mrs Pagett in Ramsgate. Urgently.

I went slowly down the steps to the pay-phone in the hall and called the number.

‘He’s gone, Sean. An hour or so after you left I went up to see him. He must have died in his sleep.’

‘It’s a blessing.’

‘You haven’t changed your mind?’

‘No.’

‘So when will you be down?’

‘The day after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I have something to do first.’

The next morning the wood yawned and splintered, making the loudest sound I’d ever heard in my life, and I took those notebooks out of that old Victorian case in the museum. Then I went to the church in Cadogan Street.

The priest listened to what I told him and tried not to look astonished at the things I had just done, but I knew that he was. Then I explained to him what I was about to do.

‘You can’t absolve me for sins I’m intending to commit though, can you?’ He thought for a moment.

‘Do you feel sorry about them?’

‘I’m sorry that it has to be done.’ He paused again and then looked down at his hands, which were crossed as usual in his lap.

‘Do you sincerely wish to be reconciled to God?’

‘Yes.’

‘You wish to be in communion through the sacraments?’

‘I need it now more than ever.’

‘Then I must, as far as possible, enable you to do that. It is of course the case that one of the conditions of making a good act of contrition is to make a firm act of amendment, but one accepts that very often a person leaves here to continue with the selfsame sin he has just come in to confess. We are fallen, one and all. It was the sinners and criminals Jesus came to forgive, not the just and the righteous. This crime of yours, the one you are about to commit, have you inherited it, as you have so many other things in your life?’

‘Yes.’

‘But the original perpetrator is now dead, as I understand it. So why is there still a necessity to continue?’

‘His wife’s not dead.’

‘And you love his wife?’ The question was so straightforward and unexpected that I didn’t have time to think about it.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So the crime, although objectively bad, is being committed out of love. Who is the victim?’

‘The Customs and Excise, I suppose. They’ll be missing out on some of their importation levies.’

‘There is no violence?’

‘No.’

‘And you will promise that this crime will cease as soon as whatever necessity is presently impelling it has passed?’

‘Yes. I don’t want to do it at all. And neither does she.’

‘Then I will give you absolution. Perhaps only the grace which the sacraments provide will be able to bring the matter finally to a close.’

So it was that when I took the train back to Ramsgate, I felt cleansed once more. Spiritually cleansed in readiness for what was shortly to become my third major felony.

Now here I am in the Ramsgate dawn. And this history is finished at last, because what’s happening now isn’t history any more. The day has finally arrived, and I’ll have to note things down as we go along.

16 December

At eight the bell rang while I was standing in the kitchen. I went and opened the door, and stumbled back briefly, convinced now that I was in a Jacobean tragedy after all, as I stared at the face of Daniel, unspoilt by the passing years or the ravages of that last disease. Only as the young man held out his hand and introduced himself did I realise, by the difference in his voice, that this must be Dan’s son, aged twenty-one, and newly flown back from Australia. I tried to explain who I was as we walked through the house, but I’m not sure he was really interested. Why should he have been after all?