The School of Night: A Novel (15 page)

I will advise you where to plant yourselves,

Acquaint you with the perfect spy o’th’time …

What could it mean? Well, I think it means Banquo. He was the perfect spy of the time, because he knew Macbeth’s secrets, he had been with him when the weird sisters made their prophecies. In other words, he knew too much. Just as Marlowe did. So the State set its curs on both of them, three men in both cases who made a profession of selling themselves body and soul, and were only too happy to sell the lives of others too.

‘It’s an odd thing, but Shakespeare’s works don’t speak too badly of spies; it’s a word that has an almost redemptive ring to it when it’s used. Remember what Lear says to Cordelia: “And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies.” Not so, though, with the word intelligencer, which is nasty. Richard III is referred to as hell’s black intelligencer. The real crookback schemer, of course, was Robert Cecil, who takes over from Francis Walsingham when he dies in 1590. What he takes over is the business of intelligence and projection. He decides in other words who is to be made to talk and who will be kept silent; who will be positioned at what precise position of peril in the spider’s web. There are racks and prisons at his disposal and if necessary blades too, like the one that went through Kit Marlowe’s head, just above the right eye, and found his brain. The man who wrote Shakespeare was still brooding on it over ten years later.

‘Everybody seems to be speaking in code here. That doesn’t necessarily make analysis any easier, does it?’

Stefan put his drink down on the table.

‘Well, speaking as someone who has lived under a communist regime, let me tell you this much: the only intelligent response to a world that is entirely encrypted and encoded is suspicion. At its worst this leads to paranoia; at its best to a profound scepticism in regard to human motivation and witness.’ By now I was hunting through my papers again.

‘Here it is. This is a phrase from a letter by the pursuivant and torturer Richard Topcliffe, a phrase I sometimes think is the most terrifying in all Elizabethan literature. He speaks of how, in regard to some poor sod attached to the old religion, he had endeavoured to “decipher the gent to the full”. I think it might explain why there’s something close to hysteria in Hamlet’s wish not to be inquisitorially known.’ I turned the sheets on the table before me again until I found his passage: ‘“You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass…” It was better not to be known, wasn’t it? To be known could be very dangerous, so people encoded themselves, became mysterious ciphers to their own contemporaries, so as to ensure their survival.’

‘But that’s what those works are all about, Sean, I realised that much during my translation work. You’ve summed up the theme that runs through each of them, even the comedies. But you don’t think the man from Stratford wrote them?’

‘His life doesn’t seem to correspond in any way to this man of secret studies, this dark obsessive with his terrifying revelations.’

‘But do you seriously think you could ever prove that it wasn’t him?’

‘Not at the moment, no. Maybe never. I’d have to turn up another source, wouldn’t I, to provide something in the way of triangulation. It’s far from impossible, though. I don’t doubt myself that there’s enough in Shakespeare’s work to read the age by, but what intrigues me about his life is that the facts lead nowhere. There’s something disconcertingly banal about them. They don’t tell you anything that helps you to interpret the plays. It’s almost as though they’re a provocation.’

Stefan had risen and now took another book down from the shelf. He turned the pages as he spoke.

‘I suppose there is another way of looking at it though, isn’t there?’

‘What’s that?’ I said.

‘That his life, or rather the inconsequentiality of what’s known of his life, could be a standing rebuke to all those who worship the world of fact. To live entirely in facts is to be dwarf-brained and dwarf-spirited. Keats got it absolutely right, as so often. Here, I’ve found it: “That quality that forms a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean
Negative Capability
, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…” In other words, if the mind is to expand into the space provided for it, what he called elsewhere the vale of soul-making, we must have faith. Now Shakespeare, whoever he was, knew that to place your faith in the wrong thing can lead to madness, but he knew just as surely that to refuse to place your faith in anything at all leads always to evil, to the howling pit. The zero of no belief at all is the black hole through which all that is good disappears. All Shakespeare’s villains end up as nihilists, even the ones that didn’t start out that way.’ Stefan took another sip from his glass and looked distractedly towards the window. ‘But I do know what you mean. There seems to be something unanswerably adrift between life and work that does make you wonder if another, hidden hand could have been involved. Could that solid and tiresome-looking burgher in the portraits really have undergone all the torment and passion that the words contain? This man who, when he’s hoovered up sufficient profits from his businesses in London, heads back to Stratford to count his tithes. Dante’s words do at least correspond to his life and his exile – not that you could have predicted them, but there’s nothing in the life that actually contradicts them. But nothing in Shakespeare’s life corresponds to what he created, as far as I can see. Nothing. So where does the School of Night come in?’

I shrugged.

‘Maybe that’s where I’ll find the hidden hand, if there is one.’

Then the telephone rang. I could tell within seconds by Stefan’s intimate tone that it was a woman. His responses seemed discreet, ambiguous, until he finally said, ‘I’ll look forward to seeing you later then.’ He turned to me with his winning smile.

‘Sean, I wonder if you would mind staying over at Theobald’s Road again tonight…’

9

London, fluked in a dawn light, can reinvent itself; appear inexplicable and unexpected. Each street you walk down seems to have only just happened. In my search for historical paradigms I once read the work of Walter Benjamin and was fascinated by his notion that the past has an afterlife which is neither more nor less than our consciousness of it, and that unless we struggle to sustain this afterlife, in our ceaseless polemic with time, the past will die once more. More importantly I seized upon, or perhaps was impregnated with, his concept of the dialectical image, by the simple law of which the products of any given society contain within themselves both an aspect of the past and an aspect of the future, the former as a memory trace riddled cunningly into its technology, and the latter as an unconscious vision, whether dream or nightmare, or even sheer hallucination. Every commodity, every instrument, can be seen as a little moon containing a series of occulted faces, which are revealed only through darkness and revolution. Thus do the objects themselves dream what is to come, an impending world which has already started to engulf and obliterate them, though a few will survive, severed from all that once kept them alive, like fragments of bone in a reliquary.

I stood in front of the shop window in Covent Garden. I had just finished my night shift and was now almost alone in the early-morning mist, as the first glimmering of dawn life bestirred itself out on the streets. I stared at the items displayed: scientific instruments from hundreds of years before. Navigational, chronometric, astronomical, medical. Ancient clocks stood next to astrolabes of the same period. There were orreries, compasses, brass telescopes and quadrants, and suddenly I was back up north during one of my grandfather’s ghostly visitations. It would happen now and then in the afternoons, following a trip to the pub at lunchtime, when he would retrieve objects otherwise destined for the municipal tip. These would vary in the extravagance of their unusability, depending on how many pints he’d had. I acquired at various times the following items: a black bicycle with crooked wheels; a long sheepskin coat, home to a myriad of tiny creatures; a miniature snooker table, its green nap already shiny with baldness; a pair of luminous rubber swimming caps with gold hearts impressed in formation across them; several reproductions of Victorian paintings showing wide-eyed animals about to be hunted to death; an upright Remington typewriter, none of the keys of which could be depressed without each prong jamming into all the others; and a vintage radio, still boasting its original fluffy valves. This last I kept in my room, but everything else departed the day after its arrival, with my grandmother’s muttered curses accompanying the unwanted goods all the way back to the tip.

I never could think of the north without thinking of Dan and now he was in the papers once more. It appeared that he had created a network of companies sufficiently complex to baffle even the City analysts, but it was a new age of surging trade with Europe and his various businesses had mostly thrived. He floated the company. Shares were bought eagerly and were soon worth several times their purchase price. You could turn to the financial pages and find his name there every day, the fluctuations of his quoted prices a matter for ceaseless speculation. My old friend Daniel was becoming seriously wealthy.

And now he was opening little cafés and restaurants here and there, all called Davenant’s, so it seemed I might have had some small effect on his business dealings after all. Jennet would have been proud of me, whatever she might have done in the attic with the man they called Shakespeare. They were clean and elegant, these cafés, with décor the precise opposite of his mother’s tastes: Scandinavian chairs, Italian coffee, well-made and well-packaged sandwiches, wine that was unpretentious, potable, acceptably priced. The word went about that once again Mr D. Pagett had got it right. There was one in Southampton Row, only a few minutes’ walk from Stefan’s flat, where I would go from time to time. It was odd, as I handed over my money, to think that it was destined for Dan’s pocket. Davenant’s was approvingly remarked upon by almost everyone, and presumably emboldened by his success Daniel had continued his expansion into the world of fashionable catering. I picked most of this up on my news trawls for the BBC. I hadn’t actually seen him since that day in Thames Ditton with Dominique.

10

If I was working my shifts, then there was no problem. Stefan might ask me to leave a little earlier in the evening than usual. I even occasionally saw one of them coming in as I went out. They always looked my age or younger. It was when I wasn’t working that it started to become tiresome. Whether it was merely the monthly cycles of his libido, or simply the good fortune fate intermittently brought his way, there were times when I had to spend two, even occasionally three, nights at Dalrymple House.

‘Stefan
has
been busy entertaining this week, hasn’t he?’ Maggie would say to me. She knew things about him I didn’t. She spent a lot of money on her hair and lavished her face with daily make-up. I couldn’t help wondering if, some years before … But no, I wasn’t going to start speculating on Stefan’s love life. That way madness lay. It was hard enough keeping up with his contemporary lovers without trying to archive the historic ones. There was a portable television set in the corner of the tiny room where Maggie always put me. I only switched it on once, to see the features of Gus Markus, Australian commentator and wit. I stared at the screen for a moment and marvelled at the extent to which he had become the robotic mannikin of his own slickness. His permanent wry smile had hardened into a mask, a passport now for meeting celebrities. His little eyes gleamed with the brilliance of proof coins and I quickly switched the television off again. And left it off.

So I would go out more and more often; to the pubs round about, the sandwich bars, the pizza restaurants, even to Davenant’s. I would read my books and make notes in their margins, sitting in a corner of the Plough or the Museum Tavern rather than go back to the solitary cell of Dalrymple House. Maggie had offered to make me dinner some time, but I didn’t take up her invitation. Stefan had asked me never to return to the flat, after one of his evenings of entertainment, before ten in the morning, to allow for any delayed departures. When I arrived, there was always a trace of perfume in the air and it always seemed to be a different scent from the last one.

I had never done so much research, not even while living with Dominique, but I suppose it was really a relief, all the same, when Dan turned up on that Saturday evening. I had been standing looking at a map of the Elizabethan capital which Stefan had hung on his wall. I had only just noticed the date: 1593. A plague year. Back then you could have walked within the liberties of London and seen the ravaged bodies proliferating under hedges or in the cages where they were often fastened, sometimes three at a time. Plague years meant the closure of the theatres, so emblems shifted from stage to street and from thence to the graveyard: flowers of all sorts were scattered when maids went to their graves and rosemary was always worn to mark the passing of a bachelor. Maybe that’s what, in her clairvoyant prevision, Ophelia meant: ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance – pray you, love, remember.’ Hamlet would die a bachelor like her brother, to whom the words were spoken. That particular plague was merely an epidemic of mendacity shrouding the State with its murderous untruths. There’d been plenty of others.

Stefan and I had been sitting in silence as I went to answer the door.

‘Guess what I’ve bought, my friend?’ Dan said, standing in a shaft of summer light from the window, with his jacket over his shoulder. I smiled at him.