The School of Night: A Novel (28 page)

‘Uncanny, isn’t it?’ Sally said later.

*   *   *

We sat in the big black cars and motored slowly to the crematorium. I was surprised at the Catholic priest who was there to conduct the service, particularly when he said, ‘Daniel lived outside the faith for most of his life, but made his peace with God before the end.’ That confused me so much I had to be prodded by Sally when the time came for my reading.

*   *   *

She had asked me to choose something for the brief ceremony. The only thing I could think of was this passage from Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s
Death’s Jest Book
:

’Tis better too

To die, as thou art, young, in the first grace

And full of beauty, and so be remembered

As one chosen from the earth to be an angel;

Not left to droop and wither, and be borne

Down by the breath of time.

Beddoes had been at my Oxford college in the early nineteenth century, the college Dan never quite made it to, so busy was he by then selling perishable goods. The poet had studied there before changing to medicine, like his father before him, who had apparently performed human dissections in front of his children, thereby hoping to inculcate in them a proper scientific interest, but all he managed to instil in Thomas was a lifelong obsession with death and putrefaction. Everything maggoty held him. His teacher in Germany, a formidable man called Blumenbach, kept an enormous collection of skulls, which ceaselessly fascinated his English student. Beddoes poisoned himself in 1849 at the age of forty-seven. Dan never got to be so old.

*   *   *

Dominique was there, dressed in black. She looked beautiful, though very forlorn. Her face, which had so often appeared to me to be sleeved in glass, had now shattered entirely into the shards of her tears. I realised how much she must have loved him and for some reason I was glad. She asked me how I felt as we sipped our drinks back at the house and I told her I was fine.

‘Migraines?’

‘No. I was sure there’d be one today. But nothing.’

‘Maybe you’ve finally cracked it then, Sean. Head cleared up; all the information from the outside finally got in.’

‘Does that mean my hidden desires have at last been set free then, Dominique?’

‘I don’t know what it means. I suspect I know a lot less these days than I did when we used to live together.’

*   *   *

I smelt a familiar smell. The smoke from a menthol cigarette. There she was, Dan’s mother, wandering about. It seemed to me that she had barely aged. She was accompanied by a younger man, who had driven her to the funeral.

‘That bitch gets other people to do her dying for her,’ said Sally, in the first unkind comment I’d ever heard from her lips. ‘Dan always said she’d see him in the grave. First her husband, then her son. If I were that chauffeur, I’d watch out.’

*   *   *

Evening. A gibbous moon and the same gull gallowing outside, maybe the one Dan used to listen out for. Sally started to tell stories of Dan’s younger days. How quickly grief can be overlaid with laughter, without in any way ridding you of the mourning.

17 December

Unusually for Hariot, the second half of this second notebook is dated. I suppose this was because of Ralegh’s impending execution. Hariot observed the days passing with the same gravity as his patron, perhaps a little more, for Ralegh was capable of swoops of gaiety until the very end. It is still a laborious task decoding this writing, even though it is hardly a complex cipher, merely a series of displacements of letters of the alphabet, according to their numeric sequence. These strange reported utterances from Ralegh:

Then the mare’s belly grows mighty and the foal drops.

That’s the field of the world.

The foal grows to a stallion and soon has the globe spinning beneath its hooves.

At the end they bring it back to this small field, so it can gaze over the wall, and see the world it once cantered over so freely.

Now its grey head is lowered and it quietly crops grass. Soon enough it will be axed and fed to the hounds.

I know that he still broods on that last trip.

We went far enough up the Orinoco into Guiana, he said, where the seams were ored with pure gold. I knew that all we had to do was hack deep into the earth’s belly and we’d bring out enough of it to blind the king with riches, however wide and greedy his eyes.

He knew well enough that his crew on that voyage were the scum of the earth, and he has said so to me again today: drunkards, fornicators, blasphemers, he calls them. Some being the sort of men who would kill a child and then hold up its mangled body before its mother’s weeping face. For himself, he would not have chosen to entrust a dog to their mercy. Not one he loved anyway. They were the sort for whom one could only find night employment.

He mused for a little, and then looked up smiling as he spoke:

His desire is a dureless content

And a trustless joy.

I think he was pleased that I could complete his quatrain:

He is won with a world of despair

And is lost with a toy.

He looked out of the Tower to see a bird, pecking about on the roof.

A maggot pie, he said with an unexpected delight. How pleasant to see a little white glistening among the executioners’ hoods of the ravens.

I reminded him how I had once seen the eclipse over the Atlantic, the time I sailed to Virginia without him. The two Indians we had on board had been afraid; they had deemed it a portent of evil times to come. I had explained to them how the moon had interposed its body between sun and earth, so that through a certain trajectory the moon’s shadow had brought an uncalendared night. My explanations were listened to with a wonder tempered, it seemed to me anyway, by their native scepticism.

In Virginia, the men had stood about with six-foot bows of witch-hazel, twitching the firing threads on and off, as I demonstrated the very latest sea compass, the one designed by Doctor Dee. I held up a Bible, explaining that it contained all the potency of the sacred word, how its truth could heal damaged and fractured mankind, even though everything in it might not be literally so.

One of the naked women, handsome with firm breasts and dark tattooed skin, took the book from my hands and performed a makeshift dance with it, drawing it over her breasts and through her legs, then rubbing it gently over her belly to make herself fecund. I had given her a word and she had accepted it; only with the birth of the metaphor are we all of us turned into sceptics.

I reminded him how many had said that their dark skins and tattoos undoubtedly put them at a further distance from God, when we published our account of Virginia. Their souls could hardly be as large as those of the sons and daughters of Europa.

We on this planet are all the same distance from God, Sir Walter said. Between God’s hierarchies and man’s, God always provides the more generous dimensions. Then he spoke again with reverence of the fishes and their sharp liquid prayers, timed to perfection.

Finally I looked up to find that it was dark already. The night had fallen on the waters between here and France, without my even noticing. There’s a single boat out there festooned with lights. A whole Christmas tree of winking lights. As though all the stars from the sky had snagged in its rigging.

18 December

The boys leave today, one back to Germany and the other to Australia. They had both offered to stay on, but their mother wouldn’t have it. You have work to do, she said. Anyway, Sean’s here. Your father’s best friend. Maybe the only true friend he ever had, for all the thousands of fine-weather companions who swarmed around him when he was riding high. Never saw any of their faces down here in Ramsgate. And Sean promised your father to look after me before he died.

After they left, the house seemed suddenly vast and empty, and I couldn’t face sitting in that turret room decoding Hariot’s Notebooks. I might be afraid to find out how many years a dead man can go on living.

In my dream a swirl of life and colour had scattered through a void, like one of the photographs from the Hubble Telescope, or a painting by John Hoyland. Such a swarming splatter of cosmic energy. I woke and thought I heard her breathing in the other room.

19 December

We finally receive the visit Sally had warned me was bound to come, sooner or later. They’d had them before, apparently. She told me only to remain calm whatever was said.

The detective inspector sat in the living room, at a chair by the table, with his notebook laid beside him, and talked of the business of cigarette and alcohol smuggling, and how no one should be under any misconceptions about how seriously it was taken by the authorities. A joint investigation was presently being conducted, involving Customs and Excise and the police. Of course, for those who came clean there might be the possibility of a very light sentence indeed. Probationary really. Effectively an amnesty. Sally heard him out and then replied.

‘Neither of the two people you are talking to has ever committed a crime, Detective Inspector. Oh, I might have parked on the odd double yellow line, and I suppose he might have spat on the pavement from time to time. But we’re not criminals, either of us, so what right have you to talk to us as though we were?’

‘Simply being in receipt of smuggled goods is a criminal offence.’

‘But we’re not in receipt of smuggled goods.’ The policeman bethought himself, and shifted about on his chair.

‘Being in receipt of any proceeds from smuggled goods…’ he started, but Sally was aflame, or was pretending to be. It intrigued me. I had never seen her like this.

‘When you get your nice fat pension, Detective Inspector, a fair chunk of it will presumably come from crime.’ The officer bridled.

‘Now what precisely do you mean by that? If you are implying that I…’

‘Oh, I’m not suggesting you’ve been doing anything wrong, or picking up bungs on the side. How would I know which of you fellows do? For all I know, all your activities have been clean as a policeman’s whistle, but the better part of your pension will still come out of other people’s taxes, so they tell me, and we can presumably assume that a fair amount of that, maybe ten per cent, has come from dealings that weren’t entirely above board. I’d have thought that’s a conservative estimate myself. So would you give it back, then? If it could be proved? If it could be shown without question that ten per cent of your entitlement was coming out of funny money, would you accept a cut in your pension of the same amount?’ She turned and pointed to me. ‘He worked at the BBC for twenty years, before they decided they no longer required his services. Tell us, Sean, did they have somebody there to vet the money coming in from all the licence fees, to make sure it was all free from contamination?’ She didn’t bother waiting for an answer. ‘It’s just that when I go down to the post office to pay for my own licence, I haven’t noticed anyone holding the money up to the light to see if there might be any fingerprints on it. From the gypsies – you know, the ones I brought in under cover of darkness in my little boat. No one seemed to bother at all.’ The policeman had been sitting perfectly still, but his face had gone a flesh tint pinker during her tirade. I couldn’t work out whether it was anger or embarrassment. Then she was off again.

‘If one of your lot is caught leaning too far in the other direction, he’s suspended on full pay for as many years as it takes for everyone to forget about it. And if they still haven’t forgotten by then, he retires on a full pension, owing to ill health. Very sickly lot, you police. All right for some, isn’t it, Detective Inspector? My husband was never extended the same courtesies when he hit a spot of bother. And now you come round here, fishing. I won’t have it and neither will Sean.’

‘You seem very close,’ he said, in his copper’s tone of sinister intimacy, ‘you and Mr…’

‘Tallow,’ she said, matching his quiet intonations with her own low northern confidentiality, ‘Mr Sean Tallow. And we are very close, since you ask. Maybe you have a problem with that. In which case, let me give you a bit of advice, speaking as a woman, you understand. Try not to play the inquisitor with your ladies, because we don’t like being taken by inquisitors – never entirely sure if they might change their minds in the morning and decide to burn us in the village square after all. It’s not all that long ago, is it? Anyway, thank you so much for coming round to pass on your condolences. It’s such a help with the grieving process.’