The School of Night: A Novel (3 page)

‘Are you here with your parents?’ said the blonde one, Jane, who was now holding Dan’s hand.

‘No,’ he said gravely, ‘no, you see, Sean and I are orphans.’ My girl, Susan, giggled at this, and after sticking her tongue energetically into her ice-cream cornet she said to him, ‘You’re not an orphan.’

‘How do you know I’m not?’

‘I just know, that’s all.’ She had started lavishing her tongue once more on her whipped vanilla. Dan stopped dead and we all came to a ragged standstill around him. He stepped in front of my new companion and squared up to her as he had once squared up to Mark Scully in the playground. I thought for a moment he was going to hit her.

‘Why do you eat ice cream all the time, love?’ he said, as she continued giggling. ‘Is it to make your tits bigger? It’s working anyhow. Soon you’ll be able to put them both in your mouth.’ Susan silently unlinked her arm from mine, just as I was growing used to the freckled warmth of it, and said to Jane, ‘Come on.’

So that was the end of our holiday romance. In bed later it struck me how I wanted to be Daniel Pagett a little less than I had at any time since first setting eyes on him. Only a fraction maybe, but that was the first unit of subtraction in my esteem. Next day I brought the subject up.

‘Why did you have to talk to her like that? She only said you weren’t an orphan.’

‘How could she know?’

‘But you’re not.’

‘How do you know? Maybe I’m a changeling.’ We had been studying Jacobean drama. I spent the next minute or two pondering the fact that since I’d never met either of his parents, for all I knew, maybe he was.

When we arrived back home my grandfather’s roses were splashed all over his wall, red, yellow and white ones; they had flared into life while no one was looking.

4

Nothing much is flaring into life out there tonight, though I suppose the eating and the being-eaten continue apace. I find myself reading over and over again these litanies of names. Could I be the first person to understand them since Hariot wrote them down? Here are the definitive lists of the Elizabethan illuminati, who felt the time had come to get to the heart of things; who wanted to know what kept the stars shining and the skies dark. Even to think some of their thoughts, and then utter them, was a criminal act.

How hard I seem to be finding it to keep my mind off dead Elizabethans, while Dan, who is now as dead as any of them, keeps flicking in and out of this room. It’s as though he’s not decided yet whether it is really time for him to go. Maybe the gravitational force of a lifetime’s memories is holding him here a little while longer. Hariot once said he felt Ralegh’s presence, his physical presence, circling around him for weeks after the axe had fallen.

My grandparents’ red-brick terraced house was provided courtesy of the city council. I’d been born there, with the local midwife in attendance. My grandfather was a dustman and even though he was the driver, he prided himself on sharing all the work, hoisting bins on to the leather patch on his shoulder and ditching the dribbling contents into the van’s stinking maw. In those days there were no lorries with cantilevered mouths to crunch and gobble the garbage. He drove a light brown Karrier Bantam. Each side of the vehicle had three convex metal doors that slid open and shut, and the refuse was tipped in with a smelly clatter. Then on to the next point down the lane, the opening of another narrow snicket, where the bent and battered bins would stand askew in ragged rows along the cobbles.

During the war he had been a driver in India and, although he never saw combat, he had been torpedoed twice on his way out there and watched his best friend dying slowly in the water. He had driven for thousands of miles on India’s high hills, had his arms and chest tattooed with tigers, elephants and snakes in purple and vermilion, sampled the Asiatic beers and developed a lifelong aversion to the smell of curry. My grandmother said that after he was demobbed he was so thin, so dark-skinned and so tattooed, she had nearly closed the door in his face after his years away. Only when he spoke did she realise.

On the fireplace stood a row of elephants, their black teak and ivory tusks brought back with him from the subcontinent. He would sit in his armchair in the evening, smoking and reading the racing pages while Daniel and I debated Crawley’s assignments, spoke of history, of peace and conflict, of the hot war and the cold, while my grandmother put the kettle on. By then we had already given up on fishing. Despite so many dead hours at the side of the canal, and whole days spent attending the seething menace of the perch-crammed reservoir, the pike had eluded us. In the local museum, mounted in a glass cabinet on the wall, its enormous eyes still stared out with an intelligent promise of ferocity. It seemed calm enough, only waiting for the return of its watery kingdom. Don’t ask me why I always found the sight of its pale belly so repellent.

The reason I lived with my grandparents was simple: my mother had managed to vanish from my life by lying in the bath in midwinter and having the electric heater fall from the shelf above into the soapy water. Death had been instantaneous. Given how cold that bathroom could be and the jungle-mist of condensation moistening the stone walls whenever you turned on the hot-water tap, her need to warm the place is easily explained. But there was always a rumour, one that never entirely disappeared, that my mother had simply had enough and called it a day a little earlier than most. Could she really have abandoned me like that, before I’d grown to the size of a decent dog? There would have been a ready explanation if she had.

My father, you see, was a petty criminal of spectacular ineptitude. A single example of his crimes should be sufficient to capture the flavour of the man. In one of his rare intervals of non-imprisonment, he announced that he had acquired a job as a redcoat at Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness. This was so implausible an occupation for him that everyone assumed it was merely a euphemism for low-grade criminal activity further afield. But he
was
employed as a redcoat, jollying along the campers to sing in strangled voices out of their blushes. However, the requirements of ceaseless good humour and early rising must have reminded him too much of his national service, thus prompting his second desertion. And as he made his way cross-country, he dropped off at various shops and off-licences to steal his basic provisions – dressed all the while in his hunting-red jacket. By the time he arrived back at the house where I now lived with my grandparents, he had slept rough so often that the jacket was punctured and torn in several places. He might as well have mailed the police his itinerary. They arrived a few hours after he did, while he was proudly presenting photographs of himself by the seashore. My grandmother saw them opening the gate and spoke to her son-in-law gently.

‘You’d better get your things, love; looks like they’ve come for you again.’

The police could hardly keep a straight face as they booked him. My grandparents had been ashamed. Years later they could still barely bring themselves to speak of it.

Back he had gone once more to Armley, that squat stone fortress in Leeds with the dirty barred windows. His sentence this time was thought by some to be excessively long, given that he was such a no-hoper as a villain, but at least he was well used to the place by then. He managed to instil in me a contempt for, and a sickening fear of, the life of crime. How curious then, to think that crime’s the life I’ve finally chosen.

5

My training has been as a historian and during these bleak hours now on this bleak night I find myself wondering if my apprenticeship might have been an utter waste of time. I’ve been landed at last with this solitary task: to become the biographer of Daniel Pagett, archivist of his triumphs and tantrums, his loves and hates, his melancholy and his laughter, and I’m far from sure I’m up to the job. I fear I may lack faith, not to mention intermittent and equivalent shortfalls of hope and charity.

The hook first went into me one evening at Crawley’s, the hook from which I’ve dangled ever since. I suppose the reason so many people become obsessed with the writings of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is simple enough: they seem to have more to say to the present than the present can intelligently say to itself. I run my hand gently along the spine of one of the Hariot Notebooks. The secrets I’ve been searching for all my life are contained inside them, enciphered and displaced in code though they may be.

Crawley had a little astrolabe on his fireplace and was fond of taking it down, turning it over in his hands and talking about its relation to the stars.

‘It works pretty well, whether you believe in Ptolemy or Copernicus,’ he would say. ‘Given its date, there’s a fair chance that it was used by people who moved from believing one to believing the other. Moved in their heads, that is. The stars and planets all carried on as before and I doubt the navigation improved much as a result. It is a curious thing about the paradigm, that it can be utterly mistaken and yet generate so much close and detailed observation as to remain extremely useful.

‘Now you, Sean, have effectively said that our signature, our character, is always to be found in our expressions; that anything read scrupulously enough, with sufficient intelligence, must to some extent reveal the nature of its creator. You do believe that, don’t you? You think the impersonality of the artist, for example, is a myth.’

‘Yes.’

‘Then read this page to us, and tell us what you deduce from the words about the author.’ He handed me a copy of
The Tempest
, open at a page in Act One, and I read out the following:

Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me

From mine own library with volumes that

I prize above my dukedom.

MIRANDA
: Would I might

But ever see that man!

PROSPERO
: Now I arise:

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.

Here in this island we arriv’d; and here

Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit

Than other princes can, that have more time

For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.

‘So, Sean, tell us what you would deduce about the man from the words?’

‘That he loved books,’ I said.

‘That he loved books, perhaps even excessively,’ he said. ‘And what else? Given that these words were written at the very beginning of the seventeenth century?’

‘That he had a particular interest in the education of girls.’

‘It does look like that, doesn’t it?’ Crawley said smiling. ‘When people make a point which doesn’t move the action of the play on at all, and make it with such eloquence, you would suspect a personal interest. But here’s the interesting thing. There’s not much about William Shakespeare of Stratford that we can state with any certainty, but two things we know for sure. First, that when he died he left no books in his will, not a single volume, and in those days books were a valuable commodity, carefully detailed in inventories and testaments. Second, that his daughter Judith was completely illiterate. She couldn’t even write her own name. So where’s our signature gone, Sean?’

‘Maybe he had a different way of signing off.’

‘Maybe,’ Crawley said. ‘Or maybe the paradigm’s wrong. There is something very worrying about Shakespeare: let’s call it the chasm that appears whenever we attempt to match what we have of the works with what we know of the life.’

And that was how I started pondering the problem of who and what William Shakespeare was. By the end of this story I should have found the answer, but it hasn’t come cheap. It’s going to take a few more days to decipher the Hariot Notebooks fully. That’s the only excuse I can offer as to why I had to steal them.

One of Crawley’s theories was this: if history can be told then life has a meaning, and if it can’t then life is an uncharted asylum and we, its inmates, are all criminally insane. In those days I thought he overstated this, now I’m not so sure. So can I recount this little chronicle? Or have I finally arrived in the house where your wits come astray?

Perhaps if I had spent more time in daylight I wouldn’t remember as vividly as I do. But that last summer before university still shines inside me with a rotting phosphorescent flare, as brightly as if it had ended last week. We had taken our Oxford exams, had our interviews and both been accepted. All we needed now were the required A-Level grades. I thought I’d better earn a little money. I suppose that was the first time I’d seriously looked up from my desk to see what was going on outside the window. The giant humming of the mills around town had been falling silent and they were now the last place to find a job – they had been laying people off by the month. There was a bread factory two miles to the north and I’d heard that they were asking for casual labour. So that’s where I went.

The first thing they taught you at Rumbold’s was to drink a pint of juice with added salt at every obligatory two-hour break. The place was so hot in both summer and winter that the body pumped out all its natural liquids and the salt along with them. Then you worked in disciplined frenzy to match the pace of the conveyor belts as they delivered up four relentless lines of sliced white loaves on to your level. You had to pick them up five or six at a time and arm them over on to eight-tier trolleys. You only needed one thing to go wrong, an absent trolley, or a mis-timed swing, and you were in chaos. I stuck this job for five weeks and then one day somebody, either by mistake or out of mischief, doubled the speed of the conveyor belt. We were already drenched in sweat and hunched in self-absorbed labour, and now the loaves were gathering and colliding all about us, ludicrous shifting hills of glistening greaseproof packets. The small bald-headed Pole I worked opposite went berserk. He jumped on to the central alley, took two loaves in either hand and threw them down the gap into the level below; after that he took the wooden trays out of a vacant trolley and threw those down too, yelling at the top of his voice some Polish curses that I couldn’t understand. And then he walked out, as the cries of complaint started to rise from below, blending with the moans of halting machinery. No one ever saw him again. At the end of that week I decided to follow suit. By then, in any case, I wanted to get back to the graveyards.