The School of Night: A Novel (8 page)

12

I once compiled a list of all the things I didn’t do at Oxford: punt, row for my college, attend a May Ball, eat strawberries and cream on the banks of the Isis, wear a boater, get a First, act in a Jacobean drama. What precisely did I do, I find myself asking now, apart from studying that curious mixture of darkness and light which is the bridge between Elizabeth’s England and that of King James? Well, I managed to come across my first mention of the School of Night, so the seed of crime was already being planted. There was something about the phrase that enticed me. It produced a thrill, almost one of recognition. What was it? What did it mean? What had once been studied so intently in the dark? This might sound ridiculous, but I knew, even then, that I was being given my life’s assignment. I’d known it would come, known ever since I was little that a puzzle awaited my solution and that solving it was what I was for. We’ll have to come back to this: I can’t explain everything now. I learnt later all the terms that can be employed to describe this condition of mine, but they’re all misguided, because none of them can accept one indispensable premise: that what I’m saying happens to be true.

The literal source of my lifetime riddle, whose tail is now at last uncurling as I turn the pages of the books on the table before me, is this: a single reference, a quote from
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, found originally in Thomas Bridewell’s book about Walter Ralegh’s circle. I quoted it to my tutor the next day, as a paradigm of historical knowledge, or rather as a paradigm of its absence, whenever you most need it. The School of Night.

‘Your subject, Sean, I can see that,’ he said, as he unfolded another map. Not his, obviously. So I started looking into the matter more closely. So closely, in fact, that I was soon doing little else.

There has only ever been one known use of the phrase, in Shakespeare’s play, and the truth is that when history summons whoever Shakespeare was to answer for himself, which is to say to explain whatever heresy of hopelessness or expectation he has been seen to exemplify lately, by whoever his newest band of enemies are, his ghost will doubtless plead the text’s unworthiness and point to four centuries of exegesis, a squabbling line of editors and scholars whose snaking succession only goes to show that there simply isn’t evidence enough to hang a cat. Because between whatever Shakespeare wrote and the words ascribed to him today falls a mighty shadow.

All the same, my starting point was
Love’s Labour’s Lost
– since I could have no other. Upstairs in the Bodleian I worked away at the sources. The quarto text dates from 1598, though some say it is no more than a prompter’s or actor’s copy, corrupt beyond reconstitution. However this may be, the quarto is all we’ve got, since that is the primary evidence, even though, like the legendary directions on the road to Dublin, it might have been better not to start from here.

It was, we are told, ‘imprinted at London by W.W. for Cutbert Burby’. W.W., I soon discovered, stands for William White, who had set up in business by himself in 1597, which did not give him long to practise before posterity landed him with his mighty task. Sadly, the evidence strongly suggests that he had never been much of a printer in the first place. Ballads and other ephemeral matter, read briefly or even sung in the tavern and then swiftly binned, seem to have been his stock-in-trade. With those, it is safe to assume, the rubric and typography were seldom of the first importance.

The text he bequeathed us is so incompetent, so riddled with errors both intellectual and mechanical, that the kindest supposition is that William White’s print shop was still being built at the time this job arrived. The compositor responsible gives the impression of being semi-literate and partially blind, or perhaps merely permanently drunk. He doesn’t appear to know how to use his own type-cases. He has often inserted the wrong letters in his stick, and even when he has the right ones the letters end up loose in the chase and fall out once the press has started rattling, and if the movement of the press didn’t dislodge them, then the dabbing of the ink-balls did, pushing the unsecured type out of the formes and on to the floor. Shakespeare’s words were coming astray even as they were being set; his text was falling apart at the exact moment of its translation to the printed page. The later the pull, the greater the debasement.

So in a text in which wrong becomes woug, and Ione Love, it is hardly surprising that any crux will provide endless possibilities for dispute. And so it has proved. The crucial lines for me were these:

O paradox, Blacke is the badge of Hell,

The hue of dungions, and the Schoole of night.

Creative emendations have not been slow in coming and school has been changed in one edition after another: to suit, scowl, stole, soil, to almost anything in fact except what it says, the School of Night. But, for the purposes of my study, I had to assume that in this one instance the compositor, despite himself, had it right; that School of Night was precisely what Shakespeare intended, even though there was simply no way of proving it. Short, that is, of the momentous discovery of an unknown and undiscovered text.

The School of Night. So the reality of this glittering cohort of human daring and folly, which was said to surround Walter Ralegh, hung by a single thread, thin and bright as gossamer: one half of a disputed line in Shakespeare’s play
Love’s Labour’s Lost.
They were a group of men who had renounced the company of women so that they could give their lives over entirely to study. Other phrases had been used to describe them, including Robert Parsons’ ‘school of atheism’, but the School of Night was what intrigued me. It conjured the danger, the secrecy, the notion of a truth so bright it must be shrouded in darkness. These were men with very dangerous ideas. Some of them spent most of their lives in prison. Some of them died at the hands of the State. They were careful that the words they shared with one another were never made public, and they never have been. The contents of the notebooks before me now have not been understood by a single human being between Hariot’s day and mine. And I have just made out another entry:

When we knew that Kit Marlowe was to return to Star Chamber for questioning, we spoke of the possibility of him disappearing; living elsewhere and otherwise; continuing his important work in secrecy.

I can still remember my tutor’s monologue as he descanted on the long and often troubled marriage between evidence and belief, how history is always and everywhere whatever is forever gone before us, so that what we are left with is never history itself but merely its study, the pursuit of that which has already disappeared over the horizon. I could never understand why he seemed so cheerful about it and occasionally wondered if perhaps he might have been right about my choice of subject after all. But if a man can’t travel into the past for certainty, then where is he supposed to go? At first I panicked when I realised that there were no documents to confirm there even
was
a School of Night, a group of dark and fearless intelligences, exploring with scepticism everything previously deemed unapproachable in any mode other than venerable credulity. Then I accepted the riddle as a gift. By now all my certainties about Shakespeare had disintegrated, except for one: that whoever wrote the works of William Shakespeare, it wasn’t the man from Stratford called William Shakespeare. In regard to the authorship question I was at sea, and not always above the waves. It was almost enough to make you turn away from the past altogether and put your faith in the present instead. Which is perhaps why, when Dominique Grayson invited me into her college bed, I accepted the offer with barely a backward glance towards Sally and the feelings I’d once had for her, now squandered in the recklessness of passion. Her passion for my friend Daniel. Daniel Pagett. Dear dead Dan.

13

In my last term I gave my talk to the Historical Society on the history of Renaissance alchemy. Charlie Leggatt was there, drunk but characteristically articulate.

‘They were searching for a world of slaves and gold. They just thought alchemy was a cheap way of getting there, that’s all.’

‘Ralegh never wanted slaves,’ I said. ‘He never treated anyone like slaves.’

‘He treated the Irish like slaves. Butchered them in their hundreds. Never even expressed a moment’s regret. You might at least make an effort to solidarise with your own coreligionists from darker times, Sean.’ Charlie always did have the last word in any dispute.

By then Dominique and I were already preparing to leave for London. I had my job at the BBC and Dominique her place at the Tavistock, where she would train to be a therapist. She had arranged for us to live in part of a house in Swiss Cottage, owned by one of her father’s friends. The students from my college year were about to disperse into a gallimaufry of vocations and employments: communications, commerce, education, industry, advertising, banking. Many went into the City, some I suppose into permanent exile and a few on to the dole. There was a rumour going the rounds that Henry Willoughby, whose face seemed to be carved out of lard, his delicate nose like the tip of a fin emerging from it, had joined MI5. Later still I heard he’d gone to Belfast. Intelligence work. Undercover.

But I nearly forgot. There was one other thing I never did when I was at Oxford and that’s find out what it would have been like in the company of Daniel Pagett, because Dan never actually arrived.

*   *   *

Dominique was small. Her black hair fell in natural ringlets across her cheeks and forehead. The effect of such an abundance of dark curls against her sun-mottled skin, and her delicately hooked nose, reminded me of a painting I’d once seen. Maybe of a madonna, but a madonna who was a street girl or a peasant. Just possibly, it might have been a courtesan, but it was almost certainly fifteenth-century Italian, though Dominique, as she soon informed me, was twentieth-century Anglo-French.

She was so light that with one hand round her shoulders and the other in the small of her back I could lift her momentarily off the bed, before we both fell again upon one another. Her jackknifed legs had the delicacy of a grasshopper’s when they ankled my thighs. On our second night together, I lavished my tongue on her breasts until they glistened with moisture in the dark.

‘Don’t drown me,’ she said laughing and I fell away then, all desire abolished. I lay on my back and explained about my mother. She listened in attentive silence, then mounted me. Her tongue caressed and queried what had suddenly turned into a whole world of flesh.

‘You can drown me, Dominique,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t mind drowning.’ A salt tide surges into the fresh, mingles until slack water. In my memory now our bodies are fish-white under the night’s surface where soft doors had opened. I had entered the soft doors at last and no part of me felt the same any more. Inside her, in the dark, the curse of self-loathing had finally been lifted. Was that possible? Until the morning light, anyway. But then I already preferred the darkness.

She was fascinated by my early years, and made me tell the story of them over and over again. I couldn’t help feeling that notes were being made, stealthily, in the gaps between our words. I had the curious feeling, even then, that I might be providing evidence against myself.

Tiny as she was, she was the most self-possessed woman I had ever met, and unlike so many people who start to study psychology, she appeared to be in no need of immediate psychiatric care herself. Her intonations were cultured enough but with none of the stridency of Becky Southgate, so I felt unthreatened by them; felt in fact the contrary. Whenever Dominique spoke, in a voice that was lower than her frame would have led you to suspect, I felt hushed into her confidence, convinced by her authority and happy to accept it. She had taken control of my anxiety. I seldom disagreed with her about anything. I think she might have liked that. You could get on very well with Dominique as long as you didn’t disagree with her.

14

And here’s the reason Dan never turned up at Oxford: Daniel Pagett Senior, out journeying between two Pagett’s General Stores, one day dropped down dead. I asked Dan how.

‘Exploded, I think. He just blew up.’

Dan’s eyes looked as though wasps had recently made nests in them.

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Mother says I’ll have to help her sort out the business. Postpone Oxford for another year.’

‘You’ll never come,’ I said, thinking briefly of Indigo from Paris, Jaguars, detached millstone-grit houses.

‘I’ll never come,’ Dan said wearily. And he didn’t.

*   *   *

By the time Dominique and I drove up north to attend Dan and Sally’s wedding, he had already been acting head of Pagett’s for two years. I say Dominique and I drove; Dominique drove – it’s a competence I’ve never wished to acquire. My work has obliged me to move more slowly over the revolving surface.

Dan had asked me to be his best man.

‘How do you feel about that?’ Dominique said as we sped up the motorway. I shrugged. ‘But he stole her from you.’

‘She was a pretty willing theft. Anyway, if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here with you.’

‘Being driven.’

Dan had said we could stay at the house if necessary, but suggested a small hotel down the road might be better, all things considered. Within half an hour of our arrival, he asked me to join him on his last, prenuptial trip to the distribution centre.

‘Maybe Dominique would like to come,’ I said uneasily.

‘It’s only a two-seater,’ Dan said, already making for the door.

‘I won’t be long,’ I told her. Her face in return told me nothing. I became confidential. ‘Maybe Dan needs to talk about a few things before the ceremony.’