The School of Night: A Novel (11 page)

That night in bed Dominique rolled over towards me and said, ‘Do you ever think of someone else when you’re making love to me?’

‘Yes,’ I replied truthfully.

‘Does she have a name?’

‘Sally Pagett.’

Who had given birth two weeks before to her second son.

3

Years went by like this. Dominique finally qualified as an analyst and began her practice in the spare room where I had once sat and stared down at the traffic. And I edited news for the BBC, seeming to hear from time to time Dan’s sour query: ‘Why not make some instead?’ The truth is I had no great wish to, not that sort anyway. I was not seeking my own promotion and it soon enough became apparent that no one else was either. Simply being in the BBC had seemed a sufficient achievement when I left Oxford. I still remembered my grandparents’ faces when I told them where I was soon to be employed. They had smiled, both of them, small smiles of wonder, that one of their own should have passed at last through the looking-glass: I was about to join those on the other side of the radio, the invisible ones who spoke while lesser folk listened.

In fact, my relatively humble position on the news desk left me free to pursue my real interests, solving the riddle life had given me. This necessitated studies that were complex, involved, possibly arcane. Not merely the prevalence of alchemy amongst the Elizabethans, but the nature of Giordano Bruno’s mission to England and the possibility of a Shakespeare cryptogram. (I’d like to point something out here: I have no natural inclination towards the mystical. In fact, I’ve always steered well clear of the hullabaloo at midnight every solstice. Most Roman Catholics probably agree with Cardinal Newman about mysticism, that the phenomenon, like the word, invariably starts in mist and ends in schism. I wanted precise answers to precise questions, but between each question and answer lay centuries of darkness. The light really has been a long time arriving.)

So I had simply taken my old tutor’s advice and decided to dedicate my life to pursuing the School of Night. I knew in some way that I was uniquely suited to the task, and London is a good place to study such things since in its streets you can still trace the topography of those times. The School of Night now had me enrolled. But in the grandiloquent building at the bottom of Kingsway what I was actually paid to do was merely reduce to digestible form the mighty transactions of human misery going on at any one moment; to provide a chronicle and abstract of the time. I made my précis of the groaning of creation out there, becoming very adept at it. I was complimented. From time to time I even complimented myself.

I also made a curious discovery: when I was on the late shift my migraines were greatly reduced and sometimes I didn’t have any at all. So the streets of London by night became my world. Unlike most of my colleagues at the BBC’s World Service, who worked nights unwillingly and intermittently, I started to do it all the time, by special arrangement. It paid more and my migraines were lessened, but those were only two of the reasons; there were others, perhaps as many as there were streets to walk. Making my urban pilgrimage from dusk to dawn, I often counted them.

I read once, in the work of one of those nineteenth-century writers who spent a lifetime meditating on metropolis, that all cities become one uninterrupted conurbation under cover of darkness. This I know to be untrue because as I made my forays and excursions, stepping through London’s nocturnal murk, the labyrinthine maze threading about Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Strand, I found myself thinking so often of somewhere else. Somewhere else and someone else. Unlike the people whose shifts I proxied, I didn’t feel I had too much left to hold me to daylight. Night had come to provide the perfect cover beneath which the mesh of my thought occasionally netted its prey.

It takes twenty-six minutes if you walk hard. That is to get from Durham House Street to the Tower; from the site where Walter Ralegh’s elegant home once stood to the place of imprisonment where so much of his life was spent. En route you pass the spot where Essex House issued its perilous invitations, its owner another grandee destined for the Tower and the block. And then there are the wharves and churches, the tiny alleys leading to the river or dying suddenly amongst the precincts of the latest office block, hygienic fortresses of glass and polished granite behind which lurks the riddling sphinx called finance. I even walked once right through the underpass, as a few early-morning lorries honked and blared at me in incredulity, so I could fathom the monoxide thunder down there, the underground roar of London’s myriad-headed beast. And I have stood on hundreds of occasions in varying degrees of shadow and light at the edge of the Pool of London, listening for the whispering cargoes arriving and departing in their stately clippers. Elephant ivories. Bananas. Then up the hill and down King William Street, like the crowd of lost souls in
The Waste Land
, ghosted by the bells of St Mary Woolnoth.

But mostly I would make my solitary way between Durham House Street, sheltering the unlovely backs of public buildings which aren’t much lovelier from the front, and Tower Bridge, Traitor’s Gate, the turrets and the flagpoles; the great emblem of incarceration and judicial execution so universally regarded that it now peeps decorously from a million souvenir cups and printed silken pennants. Such pretty mementoes for so much bloody terror, torture and death.

So I would walk, in the evening dusk, in the morning twilight. After a brief spell of infatuation with Jung, when the alchemical diagrams and symbols that I spent so much time gazing at came to fascinate her briefly too, Dominique had opted for Freud. For his hard-man rigour, his pitiless investigative probe. That and, I suppose, my night shifts meant we spoke to each other less and less often. In bed we sometimes collided, but seldom caressed. Our lovemaking, in any case, had by then largely degenerated into sex. We’d grown apart, in both body and mind.

We had only taken one holiday together during the previous two years, going to Rome. Even this had soon become a source of division. We walked the streets each day, often silent, riddled with our own preoccupations, but frequently hand in hand. So many temples and churches and columns and crypts. Here they wrote their history in stone. As the evening darkened, there was still a Piranesi grandeur about it all. Then one day, without even noticing where we were, we had stepped inside the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, and there before us in its gloomy corner was Bernini’s St Teresa, swooning in ecstasy at the wounds she was sharing with her redeemer; a smiling angel had arrived with the arrow of divine attention, lifting the saint’s gown, the more expertly to pierce her heart. And the look on her face bespoke an ecstasy not merely spiritual but entirely physical too. Dominique snorted.

‘It’s not difficult to see what that’s all about.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ I said quietly, more moved by the statue than I would have expected to be from the many photographs of it I had seen in books of baroque art and wishing suddenly that I was alone. ‘It’s about the oneness of the saints with Christ’s suffering. They used to call it transverberation. You could say it represents a sort of sacred transference.’ Dominique’s snort now amplified itself into a guffaw and the sound of her mockery echoed through the church’s shadowy hollows. And as we walked the streets the divisions between us, divisions we had never before spelt out with such precision, started to be defined. Freudians, however loving they may actually be, have no real place for love in their schema, as far as I can see. Everything, logically, must be reduced to appetite, to the friction of unfulfilment and the brief relapse into comfort which any climaxing relief affords. All else heads off on its labyrinthine route either towards repression or sublimation. For that is the good doctor’s teaching. And as Dominique enumerated the tenets of the doctrine to me once again, I realised how utterly repellent I found it. It wasn’t true; that wasn’t what we were. We were made of something more than mere mechanistic drives. But I knew that I risked sounding grand in trying to express the fact.

‘The desire at the core of us, of my soul and yours too, is a yearning to be reunited with divinity,’ I said as we passed the Pantheon.

‘These are foggy words, Sean. Projection…’

‘No,’ I said, interrupting her, which I did not often do. ‘No. At least I allow you to believe something, even if I disagree with it. Don’t tell me that every time I speak it’s no more than a ghost dance of projections. We’re not just a jumble of repressions, not just a set of animal appetites. There’s something sacred in here,’ – I tapped my head – ‘a little splinter of divinity. Some spark we keep catching sight of. Otherwise there’d be no poetry, no music, no painting and no sculptures of St Teresa or anyone else. That’s why, when we make love, it’s not just a physical release. It’s more than that. Or used to be.’

‘What is it then, Sean?’ Her tone was gentle and solicitous but unconvinced. Perhaps even uninterested.

‘It’s hard to express.’

‘Try anyway.’

‘I think we’re trying to get back into the
sanctum sanctorum.
That’s why we push so hard. Because it’s one of the routes we’ve been given to link ourselves back to all that’s sacred.’ Then I was embarrassed at the things I was saying on that foreign street, even though I believed them all and we both fell uneasily silent.

That night in our hotel I saw with utter clarity that we must either move forward in our relationship or accept that it was ending. I realised how much I didn’t want to lose her and after we had made love I asked her to marry me. I lay on my back and waited for Dominique’s response. It finally came.

‘I’ll marry you, Sean, but only if you’ll agree to do analysis. Do it properly, I mean. The real thing, not some watered-down psychotherapy. No, wait a minute. Listen to me. You’d be amazed at what you’d discover about yourself, you know. There is a dark area inside you that’s waiting for someone to map it. Something happened in that darkness a long time ago, I know it did, and you’ve buried it inside. But it won’t stay inside. It comes out as migraine and all your other strategies of self-sabotage. You’re happy with your menial job at the BBC really because something inside you doesn’t actually want you to succeed. That’s the School of Night you should be studying, not what happened four hundred years ago, but something more recent. This belief of yours that the migraines are something trying to get in and that you’ve somehow been marked out by life to solve this Elizabethan riddle – that’s an incipient psychosis, Sean. It’s the infantile will to control, that’s all. It’s the distorted expression of a reality you’ve never confronted. You make it occult inside you, then you pretend it’s something occult outside. I couldn’t believe it when you told me that you’d worked out what the migraines were; that it was the pain you felt when you resisted the information that was being offered. And it doesn’t even fit in with your religion, does it? All this astrology and alchemy you go in for: I thought they didn’t even do that stuff in the Vatican these days.’

‘It’s condemned.’

‘Then why?’

I knew it was all over now and felt I had nothing left to lose. ‘I suppose I think any tradition that continues long enough, even when the paradigm’s completely mistaken, must have gathered about itself some truths, however out of the way they may seem.’

‘So even Freudianism might qualify then?’ She was yawning, pulling the sheets up to her chin, getting ready to sleep.

‘Maybe. But not yet.’

‘A century’s not long enough?’

‘Not this last one. And they never look any better, anyway.’

‘Who don’t?’

‘The halt and the lame who come to your door. They never look any better to me, Dominique.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Your clients. I’ve seen some of those faces year in, year out. They look just as grim now as when they first arrived.’

‘It can take a long time, untying a knot.’

‘Maybe. But you’d expect them to look at least a bit more unknotted by this stage.’

‘Are you saying I’m not a good analyst, Sean?’

‘No. I’m sure you’re one of the best. I’m just saying – what am I saying? I’m probably quoting my old history teacher, Mr Crawley, that’s all: maybe the paradigm’s mistaken. Maybe the process itself is misconceived. Maybe you’re just looking in the wrong places for the wrong things.’

‘Good night.’

And we were never to speak of such matters again.

*   *   *

So I suppose I wasn’t really in much of a position to complain when, back in London, I arrived home unexpectedly in the middle of the night (migraine, never take it for granted) and found her in bed with her colleague from the Tavistock, Dr Emmanuel, author of
Anxiety and Modern Life.
I’d had dinner with him and Dominique a number of times and had felt then that not one but two people were now taking mental notes regarding my repressions. They had discussed the twisted psyches of everyone they knew with a mutual glee only barely masquerading as professional detachment.

I had come up the steps and let myself into the room with hardly a sound – creatures of darkness learn to tread softly. And now, while he made his exit and they whispered to each other out on the stairs, words I couldn’t make out, I found myself staring at the scarred wooden table in our kitchen. On it lay the remnants of the noodles they must have eaten the evening before, their congealed torsos tangled one over another in the ruins of that takeaway meal. Thirty minutes later, in bed exhausted with my eyes closed, those little yellow bodies were still making their slow progress across the room and into my mind. I suppose they entered finally as the migraine faded and sleep’s door opened me up to the true, the universal darkness.

4

We had never gone to visit my father on the inside. The subject was simply avoided. Sometimes a letter would arrive and I knew by the sinister black markings on the envelope who it was from. I would sneak it out of the sideboard drawer once I was alone in the room. There it was again, the illiterate quiver of his handwriting, with the prison number stamped at the top.
And I only hoap young Sean iss grwoing up beter than hiss Dad.
My old man’s spelling left as much to be desired as his thieving.