The School of Night: A Novel (4 page)

I don’t know why we so often ended up inside them, Dan and I. They were free, I suppose, for the living if not the dead. And there was always somewhere to sit, eat sandwiches, prop our bicycles; even a porch to crouch in if necessary until the shower was over. But Dan didn’t want to come any more. So now, on my own, I made for them again. Without intending any disrespect to Daniel, I began to find they were even better without a companion, those scattered stone lectionaries for the departed.

There weren’t too many churches belonging to our own Roman Catholic faith, with their buried Michaels and Theresas, but there was no end to the ramshackle tabernacles of nonconformity. Those who lay around there, in the riches of this industrial earth, had become my study. That, I suppose, is how my historical work began (and maybe where it will end too, with the interment of Dan’s ashes). So many loom weavers and drystone wallers and factory hands. Their labours had built the new world. Their hands had smelted the iron as the air turned cellophane-yellow and the age wrote in black italic script across whole conurbations. I whispered their names and tried to imagine hearing them spoken in the fellowship of the chapel or the intimacy of the bed. How we summon faith out of the air and gather round about ourselves a cloud of witnesses.

I noticed that the old stones were cut deeper than more recent ones, often more crookedly, but deeper. So deep that even lichen wouldn’t colonise the incisions. I loved the precision of the names, places and dates; this was that craving for hard information that Crawley so frequently mocked in me as the veneration of data, my worship of testaments and tallies. The reason I sought such chiselled facts is probably obvious enough: I felt life might be secured by them. Death too. We needed those stones with their hard inscriptions to stop ourselves sinking under the surface of uncertainty, the tepid swill of imprecision. Just as we need the words of Hariot that lie on this table before me to resolve four centuries of speculation and doubt.

Dan didn’t have his bicycle any more, even if he had wanted to join me: he had bought a car. Or rather his father had bought a car for him. He’d ended up with a second-hand Ford Anglia, which for some reason he found ridiculous.

‘Note its lines of comic domesticity, Sean; don’t you see, it’s basically an enormous American car that’s shrunk from being left out in the English rain. But enjoy for a moment the razzmatazz of its cut-back roof. This car’s a joke.’ He drove me over the moors, seeing how hard he could corner. He was denouncing, with some passion, the ratios of its gears, when I asked him if he would mind slowing down. He turned and looked at me in wonder.

‘Sean, cars don’t actually
go
any slower than this.’

We pulled over at a lay-by. Dan walked round and round, from chrome bumper to chrome bumper and shook his head as he kicked one of the tyres.

‘If my old man weren’t such a penny-pincher, he might have upped the ante a few bob to get me something better than this. Three hundred more and I could have had the MG.
You should start at the bottom, same as I had to.
’ The booming tone of command in Dan’s voice was presumably in imitation of the father I’d not yet been allowed to meet. He had turned away and was looking over the moors. ‘They want you to come to dinner, by the way.’

‘Who?’

‘Mother and Father want you to come to dinner. Two scholars on their way to Oxford, a farewell evening prior to the life of learning that awaits us. All that crap.’

‘So you do have some then.’

‘What?’

‘Parents. It’s just, what with you being a changeling, I thought there might be a lonely gypsy caravan on the wasteland…’

‘Saturday night. Seven o’clock. Bring your deaf aid, but make sure the batteries are flat before you arrive.’

*   *   *

On the opposite side of town to where we lived lay the valley. The prevailing wind ran down it towards the centre, and for this reason they said the mill-owners had built their houses out that way. They obviously wouldn’t have wanted the smoke from their mills following them home – ‘Only the money,’ as my grandfather remarked. Whether there was any truth in this or not, the valley road was blessed with large houses on either side, set grandly in their spacious gardens. And the Pagetts lived in one of these. I caught the bus there that Saturday evening. Dan had given me directions and when I reached the gate I stopped briefly and looked up the long, immaculately mown lawn to the big house. Another of my grandfather’s remarks ran through my mind: ‘I tell you, lad, one half doesn’t know how the other half lives.’ It seemed that one half was about to find out.

I knocked and a woman opened the door. I said nothing for a moment as I stared at her slim figure, swept-back black hair and pale, beautiful face. She wore a wide shiny belt with an enormous gold buckle, fastened tightly over the pullover that hugged her breasts and trim waist. She permitted me a few seconds of appreciation and then, without smiling, finally spoke, and I couldn’t help noticing that her accent was a lot closer to mine than it was to Dan’s. She shared the unmanicured vowels of my kind.

‘You must be Sean then,’ she said. ‘I’m Dan’s mother.’ The intonation flat, unshaped by any affluent tuition. She opened the door wide and I walked in.

I suppose the house had been built around the middle of the nineteenth century. There was a particular local style which never changed much, the windows hardly adapted at all from the stone mullions of Tudor times, the door frames still carrying their rudimentary block lintels, the dimensions simply growing bigger as the money poured in from the industrialisation going on up the road. I liked the manner of these houses: they appeared oblivious to changing fashion. They had an air of ageless strength about them. It was this impression which made all the more startling the condition of every object inside.

The contents of our own home were neither tasteful nor tasteless, they were simply cheap. Many of the objects had come, in any case, via unorthodox routes, being discards from those who could pick and choose. I had even grown fond in my own way of the huge luminous fish on our sideboard, its entrails a kaleidoscope of twisted coloured glass, though I doubt that Ruskin would have appreciated it much; fond too of the endless shells –
A Present from Blackpool
– which served my grandfather for ashtrays, and the little metal towers that I used as paperweights. What was startling, in Dan’s parents’ mansion along the valley, was how gleamingly new everything appeared. Things shone with novelty as though in a department store. From the thick-pile fitted carpets to the polished chandeliers, every single item looked untouched by human hands, and so, by the way, did Dan’s mother. Her black hair hung down six inches beneath her shoulders and glistened like sealskin, as she stood carefully in profile against the French windows and lit a menthol cigarette. The minty smoke drifted across to me; on my tongue a moor fire started to turn acrid.

Dan was in the garage outside and Mrs Pagett suggested I go and see him. He was leaning into the bonnet of his Anglia. I tapped him on the shoulder and he surfaced looking oily.

‘Seen the house, have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you do need to buy any of the items on display, sir, the lady in the black top will be more than happy to help you.’

Dan’s father arrived back an hour later. One of the enormous Jaguars that were fashionable at the time swung smoothly into the drive. I was standing at the window with Dan when his father climbed out. His red hair and red moustache certainly made his appearance striking.

‘Here comes trouble,’ Dan said wearily. Around the room hung photographs of Mr Pagett in his RAF days, standing in front of aeroplanes or sitting in their cockpits. The moustache had been more flamboyant back then, with curly wings spread right across his cheeks, two decorative serifs to garnish his broad smile. The man who came in still had the smile, though it was no longer as fresh and open as the one in those photographs (is it possible to smile impatiently?) and the moustache had been trimmed now to fit the requirements of civilian life. His face was a vivid crimson. He held out a hand.

‘So you’re the other chap, are you? How Dan got in’s a mystery to me, given how little work he does. They’ve obviously lowered the standards at Oxford since my day.’

‘Did you go to Oxford?’ I asked innocently.

‘No. Too busy fighting Germans. Then after that I was too busy building a business.’

‘Never mind, you can go at the end,’ Dan said. ‘They’ll probably be taking OAPs by then.’

‘My son finds the subject of the war and my life in business a joke.’ Dan looked out of the window at the beautiful lawn stretching all the way down to the valley road; you could hear the distant burr of the cars beyond.

‘I applied to the University of Life, Dad, you know that, but I failed the entrance exam; so I’ll just have to make do with Oxford.’

I found myself staring at what appeared to be a picture of Wharfedale, made out of some luminous fabric. Dan’s face suddenly appeared in front of me.

‘Lovely, isn’t it, sir?’ he said with a garish grin, as though we actually were in a shop. ‘We did consider the nineteenth-century watercolourists, as you would expect, but mother thought the frames were dust traps.’

‘You’ll have a beer, Sean?’ Dan’s father shouted from the kitchen.

At dinner, which we ate at a grand smoked-glass table edged in chrome, there was desultory chat about our forthcoming life at Oxford, but the conversation only began to engage me when Mr Pagett reminisced about his time in the RAF. Then he moved on to the period after the war and Africa, where he had built his first general fruiterer’s business. A business, it became apparent, he would have been more than happy to continue building. But on a visit to England he had met Dan’s mother and they had been married three months later. Then Mr Pagett had discovered the snag. He faltered in his narrative and Dan stepped in.

‘Mother wasn’t prepared to go to Africa because she didn’t want to have to touch black men.’ As he said this, his mother underwent an involuntary shudder.

‘Still don’t,’ she said.

‘So there we were,’ Mr Pagett said briskly. ‘Had to make alternative arrangements.’

‘Might as well have gone to Africa,’ Mrs Pagett said quietly, half to herself, ‘given what it’s got like round here these days. You must be old enough to remember the smallpox scare, Sean.’ I was. I could still recall the endless queues of shadows shuffling along in fog outside the hospital, waiting for vaccinations. A cloud of sinister potency covered the town, and everyone’s mouth was covered with a handkerchief, as though trying to keep out the word
epidemic.

‘They were Asians, Mother,’ Dan said quietly, ‘not black men.’

‘Well, they certainly weren’t white men, were they?’ she said, her voice rising with sudden passion, the first she had shown since I’d arrived. Mr Pagett’s face became one degree pinker. He flicked his fingernails rhythmically and incessantly against his heavy wine glass. I found myself looking intently at his wife’s mouth each time she spoke. Her lipstick was some strange dark blue I couldn’t remember seeing on anyone’s face before. Then I turned and looked at Dan. Of all the expressions of contempt I had seen on his face, and I had seen many, the one he now directed to his mother had about it a chilled disdain which was unique.

‘Anyway, Father decided to become a general fruiterer in England instead of Africa, didn’t you, Dad? And although perishable goods have always been his first love, he has broadened the stores to include universal provisions.’

‘Only way forward,’ Mr Pagett said, leaning across to replenish our glasses. ‘Won’t be able to do it for ever, of course, which is why I’m hoping young Dan here will look seriously at entering the business after Oxford.’

‘Dad…’

‘Things might appear a little different when the time comes to discover that money isn’t just the stuff that comes out of your old man’s pocket. And there’s nothing wrong with that Anglia either. Performed very creditably in the rallies.’

At the end of the evening, Dan offered to drive me home, and asked his father if he could borrow the Jaguar.

‘You’re not driving anything,’ his father said. ‘You’ve been drinking.’

‘So have you.’

‘I’m used to it. Come on, Jacqueline, get your coat on, we’ll have a little wander out and take Sean back.’

So Dan and I ended up in the back seat, with his mother and father in the front, and as we drove across town Mrs Pagett remarked, in a tone of incredulous hostility, at the change in the appearance of so many neighbourhoods now that they had been colonised by Commonwealth immigrants.

‘Just look at the colours they’ve painted those houses,’ she said, though she must have seen them a thousand times. They were certainly bright, like the narrow boats Dan and I had watched while sitting on our towpath.

‘Cheer the place up a bit anyway,’ Dan said morosely.

‘Well, it doesn’t cheer me up, Daniel. Cheer the place up! Never heard such codswallop in my life. I gather your father’s a dustbinman, Sean.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘my
grandfather’s
a dustbinman. My father’s a criminal. A pretty lousy one, actually.’ Jacqueline Pagett then fell silent again.

As we approached my grandparents’ house, Dan gave directions to his father. Finally we stopped and his parents looked out of the car window at the house of my birth. I think Mr Pagett’s expression probably said, It’s going to be a long way from here to Oxford, my boy, so you’d best start preparing now. But there was something in Dan’s mother’s face that I recognised, an emotion there I knew only too well. As I climbed out and said my goodnights, I realised what it was: panic. Mrs Pagett was having a good look from the inside of her husband’s Jaguar at where she had once started out from and it was evidently a place to which she had no intention of returning. As the car pulled away I noticed Dan breathing on the window and writing something, but I couldn’t make out the letters.

The following week, we received our A-Level results. I had the grades I needed for Oxford. Dan didn’t.