Read The School of Night: A Novel Online
Authors: Alan Wall
Detective Inspector John Marney stood up then and left the house without another word. And for the first time in my life I knew I was definitively on the other side of the law.
* * *
In the notebooks I found myself staring at a complex drawing of a set of parabolic curves. After a while I realised that they could only represent the trajectories of missiles. Curious how many scientists, even Einstein, that peaceable and unworldly Jew, seem to become involved in devising surer and surer ways of blowing humanity to bits.
21 December
We walked down to the harbour. It was windy but dry. Sally took my arm as we stared out at the waves. They were beginning to rise. She spoke slowly, on our way back to the house, of Dominique’s affair with Dan. It was, she said, the only one of his many liaisons that had ever seriously threatened their marriage. She seemed to know all about it and assumed that I did too.
When we returned I read more of Hariot:
Sir Walter spoke of how birds have the whole of the heavens inside them; only thus do they understand the relationship between stars and time. How else could they navigate with such precision and seasonal aptitude? This is the primal transaction by which the vastness of the heavens passes through the tiny globes of the eyes and into the only slightly larger globe of the skull. They must swallow the world entire to understand it, he said, just as we do. By the time we die, we have each of us eaten a universe.
22 December
Now I go each morning to the church on the hill. It’s a dark enough place, all mortar and flintstone, though the ribbed bands of Whitby stone inside do lighten it. Pugin built it after he’d finished with the House of Commons. It was here in Ramsgate that he used to set out on stormy nights in his fishing boat, alarming even his professional sailors. Then his mind went entirely haywire and he ended up in Bedlam. His wife finally brought him back here to the house he’d built, but his wits and his spirit were already gone for good by then. He died soon after.
I attend mass and receive the sacrament, trying to prepare myself as best I can for what’s to come, intent, as I now appear to be, on a life of crime, however brief. The reading was from John: how the light shone in the darkness and the darkness comprehended it not. On my return Sally gives me a sceptical look.
‘Not going to die on me, are you, Sean?’
‘I hope not. Why?’
‘It’s just that Dan only took up with God again just before he went to meet him.’
* * *
First new shipment arrived at dawn. Sally says everything was blessedly uneventful.
23 December
Second shipment. The beginning of a routine. I suppose anything you do often enough becomes either liturgy or routine. In the evening after dinner, I climb back up to the turret room, place the snooker cue over my shoulder as though in propitiation and start once more to decode. These cipher books from the London Library are now three years overdue. I wonder briefly which was the last address I gave them. I worked for a few hours and was about to go down for a last drink when I turned the page and saw the words. I have grown sufficiently used to the code by now to recognise certain clusters of characters. And there they were, all in the space of a single paragraph. Shakespeare, Marlowe, the School of Night. Here then is that new source which had seemed impossible even to hope for; here at last is the solution to nearly twenty years of work. I walked to the window and stared out into the night. I won’t be sleeping between now and dawn.
* * *
The clumsiness of urgency. In my desperation to decipher the words I make twice as many mistakes as usual in the transcription. But piece by piece it comes together. I stare at what I have written, startled.
I had brought him Shakespeare’s quartos and prompter’s copies over the years. At first he had seemed to us no more than Marlowe’s apprentice, but after Kit’s death it was as though he had taken all the other man’s strength and then added that of others too.
‘How can this man, given who he is, given who he isn’t, gather so much into his work? He has made a whole world there, a bigger one than any of the rest of us.’
‘Remember the experiment we did with the light?’ I replied. ‘The way one glass shape drew all the different beams and made them a single colour, but the other we devised took the single light and rainbowed it.’
‘He’s a rainbow man, then? Is that what you are saying? That the light goes into him at one place and comes out everywhere?’
‘And everyone,’ I said.
‘Did he deliberately cultivate that air of being nobody, a little nobody with tiresome aspirations for his own coat of arms?’
‘He liked to be invisible, I think; all things to all men.’
‘And what did he once call us in that play of his?’
‘The School of Night,’ I said.
‘Well, so many of our number have since gone into the dark, maybe he saw something under his rainbow that we were all blind to.’
I went back to the window. Stared intently into the black shroud of what I couldn’t see. So it wasn’t a dead man using him, after all. He’d known the dead, all right, for he could never have found his thousands of voices without them. But he’d not been controlled by them; instead they’d been resurrected inside him. He had taken his fire from their flames. And because he had been a nobody, the man from nowhere, he had been able to become everyone. Shakespeare was Shakespeare after all. So who was I? I pulled the Collected Works out of my bag and started turning the pages of
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, where all of this had first begun, and I realised that in paying so much attention to the words and the myriad clues they might contain, I’d actually missed the plot. For what Shakespeare – and I could use that word at last without qualification – what Shakespeare had written of was a group of men, all highly intelligent, who had decided to eschew women and daylight and human company so that they could find the truth. And all that the plot showed, with its wry twists and turns, was that they had lost it entirely in the process. These men in their dark studies had merely stumbled about, blinded by every need they could not acknowledge. All of the proofs I had found in Shakespeare’s text had simply shown its inexhaustibility; how it could be interpreted in an infinity of ways. It only yielded as much truth as the living could bring to it.
24 December
Christmas Eve. Sally has put up a tree. Twinkling away in the bay window. She prepares a real dinner for the first time since I’ve been here, as I try to come to terms with what I read yesterday in the notebooks. How many years has it been since I first started pointing in the wrong direction? I feel numb, realise at last what a fool I am.
* * *
We are drinking wine. Then later she brings out the brandy. For some reason we start to talk about Dan’s early days up north. I am still so startled by my new discovery, I can hardly bring myself to speak of it.
‘It’s the living,’ I begin, but break off again. She looks at me and smiles. She starts talking again. She is a little drunk.
‘I think the only thing Dan’s mother taught him was that anything he was permitted to have probably wasn’t worth having, if you must know. I’m only surprised he didn’t turn to crime before. Or maybe he did – it seems to be a pretty thin line in a lot of businesses these days. What I mean is, if there was anything she was prepared to give, his darling mother, then there couldn’t be any pleasure in it anyway. The world existed only to disgust her. Emotionally speaking, he’d always had to steal whatever he really wanted from those closest to him.’
‘The way he stole you.’
‘He hardly stole me, did he, Sean? When he came back from seeing you in Oxford during your first term, the message I was given was that you wanted to leave it all for a year. You had other things on your mind; there were other people you might meet. Some of them female.’
‘What?’ I had a strange sensation of sinking underneath the surface of something I’d managed to keep my head above, but only just, for many years.
‘Oh, come on, what difference does it make now? He’s gone and you’re still here.’
The rough wool of her skirt helped abrade the memories. Then my fingers alighted once more on cashmere. Obviously her favourite.
‘Always were scared of him, weren’t you, Sean?’
‘Weren’t you?’
‘Not in the way that you were.’ I had the curious sensation he was willing me on: I was after all in his house, with his wife, and he had placed me there. Perhaps it was his vagrant spirit that prompted me moments later into the bedroom. White bodies in the dark. The electric charge of memory.
And then we are in bed together and a whole lifetime of something inside me has come pouring out. And I tell myself that this is life, and this was the secret I’d been searching for all that time: that the dead, finally, do not control the living. Which, for the living, might not necessarily make the days to come any easier to endure.
* * *
He says those words in my ear once more: ‘A maggot’s life, Sean, is it really worth it? Must you always be a coward in the playground?’ I press the pillow down hard on his face then, not with love but anger, all the years of anger that have erupted in this one focused moment, as he probably knew they would and there is a brief struggle, but it’s the struggle of a body, not a mind. It is merely flesh protesting that it still has air to breathe, food to eat, love to make; that it is surely too early to be asked to leave this place. But Dan doesn’t have much strength by now and this is what he has asked me to do, begged me to do, taunted me into doing at last, and so I press on, press down relentlessly, as though to prove that I’m neither a maggot nor a coward any more, and as the greater strength of my body overcomes the lesser strength of my old friend’s, the jerks and spasms of his limbs grow fainter and less frequent, until at last there is no movement left in him at all.
The body has fallen silent. I lift up the pillow then to look at what lies beneath me and as my hand reaches down to touch his cheek, still warm but already dead, my fingers are now only inches from that face as I suddenly jerk forward in the bed, heart racing and forehead damp with sweat, shrouded in the dream of the final thing I did for Daniel Pagett while he was on this earth.
Sally lies beside me, sunk deep in sleep, so I stumble out of bed and go downstairs. I stand for a moment at the window, staring out into the witching howl of the weather. I stare and stare as though some message might be written on the night’s pelt. Then I walk around from room to room. Don’t ask me what I’m looking for, but even in this blind gloom I feel they’re staring back at me.
Soon the dawn will arrive to deliver its own grey visibilities. These household mirrors are blind as bats now, dark lakes drained temporarily of all crime and possibility. Come dawn, they must resume their daytime jobs as witnesses. Lucid and lethal witnesses.
Also by Alan Wall
Jacob
Curved Light
Chronicle
Bless the Thief
Lenses
A to Z
Silent Conversations
Richard Dadd in Bedlam & Other Stories
The Lightning Cage
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
SCHOOL OF NIGHT.
Copyright © 2001 by Alan Wall. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wall, Alan.
The school of night: a novel / Alan Wall.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-28778-X (hc)
ISBN 0-312-31628-3 (pbk)
1. Literary historians—Fiction. 2. Raleigh, Walter, Sir, 1552?–1618—Friends and associates—Fiction. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616—Authorship—Fiction. 4. Secret societies—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6073.A415 S36 2002
823'.914—dc21
2001048996
First published in Great Britain by Secker & Warburg, Random House
First St. Martin’s Griffin Edition: May 2003
eISBN 9781466829138
First eBook edition: August 2012