The School of Night: A Novel (12 page)

This might account for my own obsessively tidy hand, my tiny, regular characters and my horror of misspelling. A mistake on a page can stop me reading for a moment; two or three will make me throw the text away. An expanse of print sufficiently littered with errors makes me nauseous. This had intrigued Dominique. She thought it connected up in some occult manner with my migraines. Dominique. Anyway, let’s say I am acutely aware of the patternings of script and orthography, which was why, the first time I ever set eyes on some of Hariot’s papers, I was beguiled. A variant of the secretary hand, it is curiously linked and graced by unexpected devices, which seem almost to be characters in themselves, secret figures from a cabbalistic alphabet. Geometric shapes flourish in unexpected margins. Euclidean segments intervene between one hurried thought and the next. Planets and their dispositions break into the middle of a sentence. But only in these last two weeks have I realised that he also wrote in code. I am pleased that he did. It means that things I knew to be true might now be proven. Except, of course, that I can’t tell anyone else about them without going to prison. There is a certain pleasure in the knowledge that prison was where Hariot wrote most of what lies on the table before me. It was also where my father was on the day I was born. Such hidden symmetries.

Coded writing. Secret societies. It seems at last that my eccentric studies are coming together. Anyone would think I had been meant to arrive here and sit in the darkness with my stolen books. You couldn’t really have planned all this, could you, Dan?

Dominique had wanted me out sooner than I’d expected. I daresay it was difficult for her to continue romancing Dr Emmanuel at his place, with his wife and two children already
in situ.
I didn’t argue; she would have known I wouldn’t. She had, after all, made a study of what she called my providential superstition: my refusal to push against the river, my belief that what was given could not be rejected, that nothing was ever accidental. To think so is the capital sin against time. I once pointed out to her that she herself held a similar belief, however unacknowledged, since Freudians also reject the accident as too slipshod and unworthy a basis for explanation. They also are committed to the belief that every event, however apparently casual it may seem, is in truth freighted with lifelong significance, buried deep inside the wounds of time. Otherwise their diagnostic technique collapses.

She merely kept a weather eye on any rogue migraines, but she was evidently not minded to reconsider my removal from her life. I’d never had anything to do with the arrangements about where we lived. It was all done through friends of Dominique’s family and I merely paid my portion of the monthly rent. So I went quietly. And there was only one place I could think of going: to Stefan Kreuz’s flat.

I hadn’t made many friends in London, in fact I suppose I had made one: Stefan, though I do wonder if friends is really the right word for what we were. I seem to remember once hearing someone define a friend as a person whom you’d not change, even if you could, since you’ve come to love their faults as much as their virtues, but Stefan and I didn’t really know each other’s faults. Not yet anyway. So, it was to him that I turned for accommodation.

He was one of the exotics who thronged the World Service. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, though with a mane of silky white hair that could have made him look older. He had left his native Hungary in 1956 when the Russian tanks rolled in. In the years since he had acquired a ventriloquist’s facility for speaking every European language with a pronounced, but engaging, accent. And he had become a translator of repute. He had produced the definitive Hungarian versions of Rilke’s
Duino Elegies
, Apollinaire’s
Alcools
and Shakespeare’s
Sonnets.
He was deputy head of the Hungarian section. It was not a hard-and-fast rule, more an unwritten convention, that those whose first language was not English did not become head of any section. This had the curious result that many deputy heads were considerably more distinguished than their superiors and knew it. He had first come to my attention when he made a programme at Bush House called
Translating Shakespeare.

Immediately after hearing it I had sought him out. We had sat downstairs in the bar, with the enormous aquarium full of luminous fish before us.

‘Shakespeare is not translatable, as a matter of fact,’ he had said, in answer to a query of mine.

‘But you translated him.’ Stefan considered this for a moment as I watched the fish describe invisible diagrams of great complexity.

‘I think my translation was actually designed to point up his untranslatability.’ Here he murmured some beautiful sounds in what I assumed was Hungarian.

‘What’s that?’

“‘Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” From my translation of the
Sonnets.
That explains, rather beautifully I think, that no truth is translatable elsewhere – it can only flourish when connected with its own specific need. What I mean is, Shakespeare sounds out every register. It’s unnerving enough even for the most attentive reader, but for a translator it’s truly alarming. It’s as though he can inhabit the language at any point without effort, as though the heavy gravitational pull that constitutes our very relation to speech and writing doesn’t apply. It’s eerie. I imagine this is what Wittgenstein meant when he insisted that Shakespeare wasn’t a Dichter, though it’s possible he’d only ever read the Schlegel-Tieck text.

‘Of course it must have had something to do with English at that moment in its history – one new world achieved and another waiting at the door. Do you know what Yves Bonnefoy said in the afterword to his translation of
Hamlet
? That the English language is Aristotelian, all surface and practicality, while the French is Platonic, all depth and quintessential form.’

‘Do you think that’s true?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘No, but I think it’s very French. They do love their binary oppositions. There’s something spiritually amoeboid about a Frenchman: nothing ever seems to give him as much pleasure as splitting his little world in two.’

I soon realised that Stefan thrived on the company of younger people. He seemed to need the current of their energy about him. I think he fed upon it. Smoking his Gauloises, sipping his cognacs, or adapting the indigenous coffee to his requirements with the aid of the chicory beans he kept in one pocket and the tiny grinder he kept in the other, he would discourse fluently upon whatever subject he had alighted. I had spent many evenings at his enormous, book-filled, slightly dusty flat overlooking Museum Street, drinking into the early hours. Sometimes our talks went on so long that I would have had to walk back home.

‘Sleep here,’ he would say easily, if the weather was really bad. ‘There is a spare room with a bed made up.’ And so I had slept in it from time to time. Only for the night though. Now I was asking for something considerably more substantial in the way of hospitality.

‘I was wondering if it might be possible for me to stay for a while.’

‘A while,’ Stefan repeated, his inflexion managing somehow to turn the words into a query, as he pondered the chronological elasticity of the phrase.

‘I work most nights,’ I said, trying to put my finger on some advantages of life in my company. ‘Reading’s normally the noisiest thing I do. I sometimes get migraines, you see. If I’m particularly happy, I’ve been known to sing. But I doubt there’s much chance of that just at the moment.’

‘What do you sing?’

‘Old Bessie Smith songs.’

‘The blues?’

‘The blues.’

‘But only when you’re happy.’

‘Yes. Otherwise I don’t sing at all. These days mostly I don’t sing at all.’

‘Would you like a cognac?’

‘Yes please.’

He came back from the kitchen with his mind made up. He handed me my drink.

‘You may stay here for a while, as long as we both understand that it is for me to define precisely how long a while is. I’m sure that I shall often be glad of your company, Sean. There are, however, times when I shan’t. And then, my friend – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – you must make yourself scarce. No arguments. No excuses. The notice given may be rather short.’

I shrugged in compliance.

‘When I entertain a lady here you must contrive to be elsewhere. Whenever two people are in a state of intimacy, any others are, to my mind anyway,
de trop
, whatever the barbaric modern practices of multiple fornication. One must know that the little cries and murmurs are for one’s own ears. No one else’s.’

‘How often … I mean…’

‘Once a week. Occasionally twice. I am friendly with the owner of a small hotel on Theobald’s Road who will, I am sure, be happy to come to an agreement with you in regard to booking perhaps a full week in advance at a reasonable rate, then permitting you to use up your allocation one night at a time. Maggie is seldom completely full. There is usually a vacancy. We will deduct whatever you spend there from the total of your rent here.’

‘How much rent would you want?’

Stefan waved his slender, manicured fingers in the air. They rippled elegantly in an age-old gesture of indifference from Mittel Europa.

‘How much were you paying at your last place?’

I told him my half of the rent at the flat in Swiss Cottage.

‘That would be fine. So when would you like to move in?’

‘Would this weekend be too soon?’

Stefan reached a hand into his inside pocket, took out a diary and flipped the pages until he came to the appropriate date, then looked at me distractedly.

‘Fate has arranged a brief period of celibacy, as it so happens. So we might as well be monkish together.’

5

It didn’t take me long to discover that Stefan’s open-handed manner disguised a soul as opaque as any I’ve ever met. Why was it that life kept presenting me with secrets I could not decode? I’m growing closer to a few of them, all the same. The books on this table before me are starting to yield up their riddles, if a little coyly. They’re certainly in no hurry to be translated into the region of analysis and comprehension and in that regard I think I may know how they feel. Here’s the last sentence I transcribed:

Sir Walter said today that no life ever ends: we merely move from one place to another. As he spoke, I tried not to think of the axe that will so shortly effect his removal from here. And I only wish he didn’t have to go, for then our little school will surely be dispersed for ever.

Dawn will be here before long, bringing its dew, greatest of all the alchemical solvents. And soon enough it will be time for Dan to make his last journey too.

Stefan and I would sometimes talk and at other times sit for hours in silence in our armchairs at opposite sides of the room. I was working my way through a collection of code books I had extracted from one of the murkier corners of the London Library. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it, but it’s certainly turned out for the best. These notebooks would have been unintelligible to me otherwise. At night I tried to sleep and could think of nothing but Dominique. Odd the nights beyond number I’d lain beside her without reaching out a hand in her direction and now every muscle in my body ached for her presence. The memories I was enduring seemed more potent than the realities they recalled. Like the day at Thames Ditton with Dan and Sally. By that time Dan had long before sold the family business and gone into transport and freighting. Then, after a while, he was once more in the newspapers with his cut-price computer, the Pagio.
Pagio.
I had laughed out loud when I had seen the name. It was soon gleaming away in shop windows, all the same.

Dan collected us from the station at Thames Ditton in his convertible Bentley and as we drove up through the village he pointed out the little tower that had once been used for smoking eels.

The house was one of those Edwardian confections that you find alongside the Thames beyond Richmond. White-painted, fringed metal canopies adorned the whole of the ground floor. There was about half an acre of finely mown lawn running down to the water’s edge. You expected longhaired girls to come out wearing embroidered frocks, ready for a gentle game of badminton. Instead Sally stepped through one of the French windows, flanked by her two sons. Could I really have forgotten how beautiful she was? A smile to make the sun blink. And it soon became apparent that her northern vowels hadn’t budged an inch to accommodate her fancy new neighbours either, though by then my own chameleon speech had started to take its colour from those around me.

‘Hello, Sean, and hello to you, Dominique. These are my boys, Freddie and Daniel. Daniel, as you’ll soon see, is taking after his father. I always knew we were asking for trouble giving him that name.’

‘Where is Signor Pagio, by the way?’ I said. ‘It was very nice of him to send his chauffeur down to collect us, but I’d like to see my old Neapolitan friend.’ Dan looked at me with his well-practised, dangerous smile.

‘Would
you
buy a computer called Pagett? Well, would you? We just needed something a few inches closer to an Olivetti, that’s all.’

Half an hour later we were aboard Dan’s Thames launch and heading downriver towards Teddington. The wine was poured, the sandwiches were passed around. And Sally was quizzing us about our life; I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She seemed to glow with her own source of light. Suddenly Dan’s sharp words turned our heads.

‘Don’t hit him,’ he said. ‘What are you hitting him for?’

‘Because he annoyed me,’ his little namesake replied from the prow.

‘You annoy me sometimes, Daniel, but I don’t hit you, do I?’

‘Yes you do,’ the little boy said defiantly.