The School of Night: A Novel (7 page)

Perhaps that’s how it felt for the maggot when our barbed hook severed its eyes. By then, the migraines still only hit me twice a month.)

*   *   *

That Christmas we sat before our drinks in the Yarnspinners, the three of us, Dan, Sally and me. I was surprised how quickly I had come to accept the idea. It’s true that for a while I had woken again each morning and thought of Daniel Pagett, this time wanting not to be him, not that at all, but simply to hurt him very badly. But I had no means to hurt him, or anyone else for that matter. I seemed to lack the facility. I say this now without self-reproach. What is the point, after all, of lamenting who you are? You can’t reverse things. Even to contemplate such a manoeuvre is a sin against time, for it spits in the face of all that’s given. My indoctrination in the catechism has left me with an abiding conviction of the truth of the doctrine of Original Sin: we are all of us flawed, mangled, damaged, and no amount of therapy or solicitude will ever redeem us from being that way. The seeds take root and grow, and we are thus and thus. One of us is Sean Tallow and the other Dan Pagett. And Sally, my Sally, was now with Daniel. She also looked at me and smiled, but it was a sad smile. Who could blame her, after all, for choosing my companion? If I’d been a woman, I’d have chosen him. He didn’t have any trouble looking in mirrors. He’d been designed to look in mirrors. He could have chosen one as his home. And they made a handsome couple, there was no doubt of that. Dan said it was one of those things. He said he hadn’t planned it. The soft doors opened and he went in. She was wearing the same cashmere sweater my fingers had alighted on during our first night out. Perhaps I should have fought after all. But which one of us, if so? Daniel, Sally or myself? Which part of the river should I have chosen to push against?

As we stood before the urinal at the end of the evening he turned to me and grinned.

‘What am I supposed to do, Sean? It’s my animal magnetism, I suppose. Has exactly the same effect on the cat at home.’

9

Man makes his true maps in stone, only later recording them on paper. Thus Ralegh, according to Hariot.

One day in a pub close to Folly Bridge I met Roy Cairn. Roy had about him a carefree luminosity. His long brown hair fell down in a great swathe over his face whenever he laughed, which was often. The wind-tanned skin of his face creased in good-humoured lines that fanned out in all directions. He was not part of the university, but a sculptor from the Isle of Lewis. He had found some unexpected work, since the grotesque heads of emperors forming a broken ring in front of the Sheldonian Theatre had become so badly weathered that the authorities had decided to replace them. I regretted this. However eroded they were, however unintelligible their features, I felt they had gained a kind of authenticity simply from being there so long. Roy didn’t regret it though, since it provided him with much-needed money.

His rented studio was a large dilapidated workshop down by the canal. I started to go there in the evening and by the uneven illumination that his lamps afforded I would watch him hack and chisel great blocks of sandstone. As the weeks went by, features slowly started to emerge. Flinty dust filled the air, riddling the beams of light. By the end of the evening there was always a desert dryness in your throat. I was fascinated at the way the shapes grew visible, defining themselves slowly in the half-darkness.

His accent was strange; more conspicuous than mine. He explained that he had spoken only Gaelic until he went to school, but after that he was not permitted to speak it at all – he would be beaten if he did. He invited me to the ceremony that saw the new heads fixed in place. They were novelties now, perched up on their plinths with their perfect features. They looked new, desolately new. They no longer reminded me of Ozymandias. The local morris dancers jigged and jingled to summon spirits of fecundity.

I had started explaining to Roy my obsession about how, whoever wrote the words ascribed to William Shakespeare, he must have been a man obsessed with alchemy as well as crime.

‘Alchemy?’ he echoed as he hammered away. ‘I hadn’t realised it was so important back then.’

‘To the Elizabethans it was the equivalent of nuclear physics or the double helix today. It was the key to the riddle of life and its riches. Lord Burghley actually wrote to Edward Kelley while he was in Prague asking for some of his powder – what we’d call the philosopher’s stone. He said the queen desperately needed the gold so that she could strengthen the English fleet, given the threat from Spain.

‘So whether it was Ralegh sailing up the Orinoco or Ralegh in the Tower, conducting alchemical experiments with the Wizard Earl, he was after the same result both times. Searching for the brightest thing, for something so luminous, even though it was hidden away at the heart of matter, that, should it ever get to be uncovered, it would have made the earth itself shine.’

‘Make the sun blink, you mean.’

‘That’s it, yes. Make the sun blink. Just once. As our nuclear explosions made the earth shake, if only an inch or two, on its axis.’

Then one evening I arrived at the studio to find it all locked up. It was the same the following day and the one after. I left a note for Roy, but I never heard from him again. He’d left in a hurry. He probably owed somebody money.

10

I had returned once more to the practice of my religion, which in truth I have never abandoned, despite long periods of neglect. It is, like the north of England itself, home – even when you stop going there for a while, even if you were never to go back there again. You still can’t forget the austerities of its peaks and mineshafts. Or its lakelands of mercy, its unexpected rivers veining the stony ground. Somehow I had made my way to the Dominican house. I found both its atmosphere and its priests congenial.

I started to read deeply about the history of the order, and in my devotion to the eminent Dominican thinkers I soon grew attached to the apophatic theology of Father Victor White. His inverse manoeuvre of the soul described how all that could ever be said of God was what He wasn’t; that no positive assertions about the deity could be made at all. The sole thing we might achieve here in this sublunar realm was a self-conscious nescience, a negative theology. All any of us could know with certainty was what we didn’t know. This beguiled me, even though it stood in some ways as a rebuke to my own historical studies. I wanted to know more about what I couldn’t know. I felt properly baffled. My incomprehension had its own part to play, since the blanks inside my head and soul had evidently been ordained. All I wanted to do was to fill them in, but without committing the capital sin against time.

‘What exactly
is
intellectual ascesis?’ I asked my confessor in his room in Blackfriars one day. Father Geoffrey was an enormous man, who looked affably mountainous in his white preacher’s habit. He laid his head back against his chair and spoke.

‘Simply the stripping away of the inessential from the world of thought, so as to enable the true perception of reality. Even the
sanctum sanctorum
can become so crammed with sacred furniture that one becomes blind to the original purpose of the space. What dear Victor White was talking about was how we must empty our lives so we may discover the fullness of which they are capable, since this particular
plenum
needs all the space in the world for its expansion; it cannot co-exist with the clutter of our usual preoccupations. You must be emptied to be filled; he who loses his life shall find it.

‘As for negative theology, St Thomas really summed it up, you know, centuries ago:
Hoc est ultimum cognitionis humanae de Deo; quod sciat se Deum nescire
: here is the ultimate in the human knowledge of God; merely to know that we do not know Him.’

I went to mass each day. I took the communion bread on my tongue. I blazed with a brief sensation of holy nothingness. Transubstantial. The white disc melted slowly in the dark moist cave of my mouth. And I even began to derive a curious comfort from catachetics. After all, why
did
God make me? It’s a reasonable question.

11

‘I sometimes think,’ my tutor said one day, ‘that you might have been better off studying another subject. Something more explicitly scientific, perhaps something more exactly
provable.
You show such a scepticism in regard to factuality.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I revere factuality. My teacher Mr Crawley always said so. He thought I came close to mixing it up with religion. It’s just I can never really believe I’ve found it.’

The two essays I had written which had impressed my tutor the most were neither, strictly speaking, historical, something that bothered and amused him in equal proportions. The first had been a short history of secret writing, a subject my entanglement with the Elizabethans had obliged me to look into, and the second an account of how the
The Tempest
and
The Alchemist
, written within a year of each other, took diametrically opposed views of alchemy and alchemists, the one crediting the activity with virtue, a noble and austere virtue, the other with nothing but vice, a seamy jamboree of chicanery. It was the distance between the saintly John Dee and his iniquitous scryer, Edward Kelley, the distance between praying and being preyed upon. My tutor had found it an intriguing study of the subjective position in history.

‘Let me put the matter another way,’ he started, puffing away busily as he lit his pipe. ‘Given that factuality in the study of history can never be more than a tissue of probabilities, an interleaving of varying accounts which can nevertheless be collated in such a manner that one finally arrives at a certain point in the past and says, “It appears to have been thus,” I still wonder if you might not have settled more easily into one of those fields which can truly end their expositions with a flourish of QEDs.

‘I’ve often thought, by the way, that Wittgenstein would have been happier had he stayed with aeronautics. I daresay the rest of us would have been the poorer for his choice – though, who knows how much aerial flight might have benefited – but he himself had a mind of such steely precision, combined with such a craving not merely to know but to know with certainty, that perhaps a life among men of a similar disposition, all practical minds engaged on practical tasks, might have spared him much torment.

‘It’s as though you’re always searching for another body of evidence underneath the body of evidence. This missing body, what is it, Sean, that you think could conceal it so effectively?’

‘Transparency,’ I said without hesitation. ‘That’s the best way to be invisible.’ That was the way my mother’s life had vanished, while her body remained visible. That’s the way I’d found her, so they told me, since the memory had gone entirely into that labyrinth within.

*   *   *

In the summer vacations I found a job in a dehydration plant a few miles south of my grandparents’ home. Fresh vegetables were driven in at one end and dried out to shrivelled seeds on hot metal beds, before being doused in a shroud of chemicals, then bagged up and hidden in the warehouse for nine or ten years. I was working on Chemical Control and realised in the middle of a shift that the sodium sulphide valve had jammed. The legal limit of this poisonous preservative per batch was 0.2 per cent. The batches now registered 2.5 per cent. I went hurtling down the lines between the hot-beds and shouted at the shift manager to close them down. He stood staring at me in silence as I mapped out the extent of the catastrophe.

‘This shift is about to win a record bonus,’ he said smiling, ‘but perhaps you’d care to go round and explain to each one of these fellows why they’re no longer going to get it.’ There were some big lads raking those beds and I didn’t find the idea at all attractive, so I wandered off quietly back to my gauges and kept my mouth shut. He was in fact a
trainee
manager: white wattle lightweight panama hat, lightly freckled milky skin and a softly spoken southern voice. He had stared with incredulity one day when he saw the book I was reading as I sat waiting for my chemicals to mix:
Alchemy and the Elizabethans.
The riddle assigned to me for the duration of my life was, I suppose, already being inscribed. Hieroglyphs were forming on the inside of my skull, whether writing over the ones already there or merely joining them.

Some time later I heard our man explaining to a young worker (female, as it happens, and pretty) about his intermediate factory training, and how he’d soon be heading back to college in Hertfordshire, and how management was essentially all about responsibility, responsibility was the main thing really and, surprised as much as he was at my own sudden temerity, I leaned across in my baggy overalls and my peaked white cap and said, ‘I suppose you’ll be out there in eight years’ time explaining to people why they’re all getting poisoned from eating Miller’s Peas, will you? You’ll tell them all about the stuck valve and the bonus and the rest of it, given your great sense of responsibility.’

Next day he put me on spraying duties. The colouring powders they used (to make the soups in those slick little bags still look like food when water gets added after so many years) would cake up on their pallets, technicolour scenes of lunar squalor, and in the hot weather wasps would gorge on them. More wasps than I ever knew existed. Cloudfuls like locusts in a film about the Midwest, where the man stands helplessly waving at the end of a field as the skies above him darken and buzz. And I stood there in my beehive suit and visor squirting poison at them, until they turned and went for me. One of them got through. I left at the end of the week. I couldn’t stop thinking about those hidden poisons in the warehouse, silently about their business, rearranging the atoms with a hidden grin, day after day, year after year.