The School of Night: A Novel (9 page)

The two-seater was a Morgan. British racing green. I remarked upon it.

‘Traded up from the Anglia, I see. I should think this one performs even more creditably in the rallies.’

‘I’ll take you for a drive over the moors. We’ll go the long way round.’

‘Not too long, Dan. I don’t want to leave Dominique by herself.’

‘She’s not by herself,’ he said, already throttling away enthusiastically. ‘She’s with Mother.’

And so he drove me, with his customary
brio
, across the moors. It was a sunny day and the hood was down and after a few minutes I started to enjoy it too. After all, my memories criss-crossed those moors with the frequency of drystone walling.

‘What’s the distribution centre, Dan? Don’t remember hearing anything about that before.’

‘No. Dad was setting it all up when he died, so I’ve carried on. If you want to control the profits in this game, you’ve got to bring transport into it. Otherwise there’s too many people ripping you off, dictating who gets what and when, not to mention the question of condition on arrival. Perishability, remember. So now, instead of having other people collecting and delivering to us, we’re collecting and delivering to them.’

‘Sounds interesting.’ My voice probably lacked conviction.

‘You don’t find it interesting in the slightest, Sean, so don’t lie about it, to be polite. You’re with Dan, remember, your old mucker. Just because you went to Oxford and I didn’t is no reason to patronise me. I don’t find it all that interesting either, as a matter of fact.’

The moorland sped by until we came to a large ugly building at the edge of town. A metal sign said Pagett Distribution.

‘Open up for me, will you, Sean?’ I climbed out of the car and pushed the enormous, ramshackle iron gate so that Dan could drive his gleaming new motor off the pock-marked and dilapidated road outside. Then he unfastened the locks and led me into his fruiterer’s cathedral. I stopped and looked about me at the central area, filled with lorries. All around its edges, on two floors, were rooms with metal and mesh doors, where an endless variety of fruit and vegetables were kept. The air was sharp with a citrus bite.

‘It’s very impressive, Dan.’

‘Only the beginning. What are you doing at the BBC?’

‘Editing news.’

‘Why not make some instead?’ We looked at each other for a moment. We were back in the playground.

‘Anyway, come and look at what riches are mine,’ Dan said as we began to move from one room to another, with him opening boxes and checking thermometers, and me following after. ‘Oranges and apples. Kumquats, tangerines, avocados, bananas, grapes, damsons and plums. Eat anything you like, Sean. Eat until the juice runs down your neck. Olives, dates, raspberries, melons. Coconuts and hazelnuts and peanuts and Brazil nuts. And just to show that I don’t share my mother’s prejudices, pawpaw and mango, brimful to their skins with African sunshine. Vegetables now. Potatoes and cabbages, broccoli, sprouts, runner beans, string beans, haricot beans, broad beans, rhubarb. Jerusalem artichokes. Onions and shallots, red peppers, tomatoes. Mushrooms and, believe it or not, ladies’ fingers. You are not eating, Sean. When you’ve been in the trade as long as I have now, you notice these things. Will you not taste my wares?’

‘Not hungry.’

‘No. It always has that effect on me too. Anyway, everything seems to be in order. One or two things already turning putrid, of course, but that’s the fruit business for you. Let’s go have a drink somewhere.’

‘Dan, I don’t want to leave Dominique…’

‘Oh, love a fucking duck, Sean, this is the day before my wedding. You’re my best man. This appears to be the nearest I’m coming to a stag night. Surely I’m at least entitled to a pint?’

At the pub he startled me by suddenly saying, ‘Come in with me.’

‘What?’

‘Come into the business with me. I’ll make you a director.’ The suggestion seemed so ridiculous I started laughing. He reached across and took hold of my left ear. It was a gesture he had often made over the years and I’d always wished he wouldn’t. He held it tightly, as my head turned round towards him; I was aware once again that if his mood were to darken suddenly, I might emerge from the manoeuvre looking less symmetric than when I’d entered.

‘I can’t see myself as a fruiterer, Dan, that’s all.’ The squeeze on my ear had tightened.

‘Do you think I do, Sean? Do you seriously think I intend to devote my life to flogging perishable goods like my pink-faced old daddy before me? It’s a beginning, that’s all. Things will get interesting soon enough. Now do you want to come in with me?’

‘But I’ve already got my job at the BBC.’ He relinquished my ear and turned away in evident disgust.

‘You could actually do something, Sean, instead of just talking about what other people do.’

‘I am doing something.’

‘What?’

‘Studying the School of Night.’

‘Wouldn’t be something that happened four hundred years ago, by any chance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Going to move the world, is it then, Sean?’

‘An inch or two.’

‘Why did you ever bother getting born in the twentieth century?’

When we finally arrived back at the house, some hours after we’d left, Dominique barely looked up at me. I knew the dead expression on her face. It didn’t often appear there, but when it did, it spelt trouble. Dan stared at her with interest for a moment, then went into the kitchen. I walked over and sat on the arm of her chair. I put my hand on her head. Fondled a dark ringlet. She didn’t move.

‘Did you talk?’

‘She talked.’

‘What about?’

‘Immigration. And someone called Mother Shipton, who I gather predicted, some centuries ago now, how all these darkies would one day land upon our green and pleasant shores. Half-caste children. Prostitution, drugs…’

‘Where she lived isn’t very far from here,’ I said quickly. ‘If you wanted, on the way back, we could drive…’ She removed my hand from her head and spoke with great deliberation.

‘Leave me alone with the black widow one more time, Sean Tallow, and I’m off back to London by myself, wedding or no wedding.’

The following morning, after Dominique had driven me up to the house, I stood outside in the garden alone with Dan. We were both wearing our morning suits and buttonholes, both holding our top hats in our hands. Dan turned to me and said, ‘What am I doing, Sean? Can you tell me what it is I’m doing this morning?’

‘You’re marrying Sally,’ I said, ‘the assistant librarian from the seventh floor.’ But he just stared at me as though he couldn’t understand the words, as though some letters on a misted glass were already disappearing.

Then came the ceremony, with its life-turning questions and answers. When the time for communion came, I went up to the rail and took it. And as I returned to my pew and knelt to pray, I felt Dominique’s incredulous eyes upon me.

‘You really do still believe in all that mumbo-jumbo, don’t you?’ she said afterwards. I didn’t get the impression Dominique was enjoying this wedding much.

‘Hocus-pocus would be better.’

‘Why?’

‘It was a Jacobean trickster’s parody of the words of consecration in Latin.
Hoc est corpus.
Became the classic instance of all forms of chicanery.
Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo.
How to pull the wool over your eyes. The sheer non-sense of transubstantiation. The cant of smoke-sellers and sorcerers.’

‘What a lot of pointless things you know, Sean. And they all seem to go back centuries. One day you must join us all in the present; employ that intellect of yours on learning something useful.’

‘Suss out the transference, you mean? Abreaction; sublimation. Get down to the nitty-gritty of existence, so I too might heal the sick and make the halt and the lame walk once more? Then we could solve each other’s psyches and balance up our respective souls’ equations. To each his own hocus-pocus, that’s what I say, Dominique. At least I reserve all my credulity for my religion.’ She let go of my hand and I realised that I’d grown a little crosser with her analytic manner over the previous year than I’d realised.

At the reception I told the story of how Dan and I had first met, but it somehow didn’t come across as amusingly as I’d intended, particularly the sequence on the bus. I had meant it to be droll, but instead it sounded savage. Dan’s mother, presumably as a simultaneous gesture towards her dead spouse and her nuptial son, was wearing a curious two-piece outfit, funereal blue-black alternating with bridal white. My eye was drawn continually to its magpie sheen. She emitted a sob at the ‘I will’s’ but I couldn’t help noticing, having perhaps taken too close a look, that her face powder and eyeliner were entirely unirrigated by anything resembling a tear. Bone dry.

Before we left I asked Dan where he and Sally were planning on living.

‘At home,’ he said. ‘It’s big enough.’

‘With your mother?’ My tone probably registered spontaneous incredulity. He stared at me in silence for the second time that day.

‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘With my mother. It was one of the conditions.’

‘Conditions, Dan?’

‘You don’t have any conditions in your life, do you, Sean?’

‘No.’

‘Then why exactly were you so concerned about the state of mind of little Lady Muck in there, when I drove you back from the pub yesterday?’

*   *   *

That night in our hotel Dominique and I soaked the bedsheets with our sweat, as I thought continually of Sally and her soft doors. Forbidden entry now to everyone but Dan. Dominique’s thighs were shorter and thinner, her breasts smaller. And the way she sighed had an intonation scented elsewhere and otherwise. Don’t get me wrong: I was in love with Dominique all right, for all the irritation I felt at her attempts to decode me. I was grateful to be still permitted entry, whenever I was. It had simply never occurred to me, despite the lyricism of all those songs and poems, that my body could be so sweetly sheathed and cradled, that my risen flesh could find such a moist warm home. But I knew, all the same, as I pushed and murmured, that as of today, Sally, my Sally, was now Sally Pagett. Six months later, almost to the day, her first child was born.

Part Two

None of the spirits of the ayre or the fire have so much predominance in the night as the spirits of the earth and the water; for they, feeding on foggie-brained melancholly, engender thereof many uncouth terrible monsters.

THOMAS NASHE
,
The Terrors of the Night

1

Dawn won’t be too long arriving, and I will be able to see those waves which now I can only hear. Men in tall black hats will come, bringing back the earthly remains of Daniel Pagett to his door and thence to the place where the furnace is being prepared. Sun will flare briefly out on the sea. Fire and water. I try not to think of the way Dan is already rotting inside. The housefly larvae we once hooked through the eyes are happy to live saprophagously, making themselves at home within the decomposing body. That, I suppose, would be their domicile of choice, with or without eyes. They never survive the flames, though. There are no phoenix maggots, unless you regard their re-emergence from the pupa in the form of bluebottles as a resurrection. And so that a buzzing darkness in the head shall not descend on me this day, occluding the solemnities to come, I do now pray: spare me, you powers above, that insect turmoil in the brain.

*   *   *

I have spent so much of my life staring down from high windows. From where we lived in Swiss Cottage you could see the Finchley Road; its endless river of cars didn’t stop flowing, not even in darkness. It is an oddity of any capital city that the vehicles thronging its streets never seem to be going anywhere, but are merely one part of its fretful life, always there, always impatient to be elsewhere, endlessly halting and starting in a bluster of exhaust fumes. Don’t ask me why I would once stand for so long staring intently at the congestion below, as though some fateful long-hidden clue might be found in the traffic’s angry tangle. When my migraines came, the lights and horns would turn apocalyptically bright and loud, every single one of them angled at a point two inches above my right eye. My own vortex of pain, I realised one night, is precisely where Ingram Frizer pushed the blade into Christopher Marlowe’s head. And that was the day the lights started going out inside the School of Night. This was the beginning of my understanding.

Dominique had grown used to it all by then. I sometimes think she may have looked upon my migraines as one of my more endearing traits. But she was convinced, ungainsayably convinced, that they had a psychological origin, and as her reading of Freud, Jung and Klein deepened, so did her probing into the recesses of my psyche. There were times when the migraines made less of a drilling sound up there than she did. I’ve only now worked out fully what the origins of those agonies were, and their purpose, but I’d at least received the first hints. Dominique thought she knew, though. It was a subject of some importance to her. Whatever chance I’d had of gaining a First at Oxford, you see, had been lost because of the aegrotats that had to be issued in place of half my papers – I was simply too sick and raddled to attend. Though my tutor thought I might have forfeited my chance anyway, by my relentless obsession with the thirty years of English history between 1590 and 1620. I really should have spent more time studying benefit of clergy, land reform and the Whig ascendancy. When I left he had shaken my hand and said, ‘Only one thing for it now, Sean. Spend the rest of your life studying the School of Night.’ The best advice I’ve ever been given.

I was happy enough for Dominique to explore the labyrinthine passages inside me, but what started to grate after a while was the rising level of her certainty. She had made me recount my early experiences so often and in such detail that she now knew the facts as well as I did.