The School of Night: A Novel (14 page)

‘Daniel?’

‘He was trying to find you. I told him you’d moved out. It was late when he came, so he stayed for a drink.’

‘Couldn’t he have phoned me at the newsroom?’

‘I gave him the number, but he said no. Said it was your physical presence he craved. He’s a great one for physical presence, your friend Daniel. Said to tell you Sally and the boys are well. They’d all like to see you some time. It’s only a train ride to Thames Ditton, he said. He’s working on something new in London at the moment, did you know that?’

I stared at her in silence.

‘How’s your head, Sean?’

‘Not too bad. I’m not sure half a pint of gin helps much.’

‘Things are still going in then, through the night?’ I decided not to answer that.

‘How’s our friend Dr Emmanuel been?’

‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t see him any more.’

‘Then…’ I hesitated.

‘No, Sean, it’s over. Had been for a good long while and you know that as well as I do. But like so many people, we didn’t want to face the fact. We hadn’t even made love for six months. I must have been desperate to start doing it with Emmanuel. The Tavi’s Don Juan. If you ask me, you’ve been living alone since the beginning anyway. You still have your vocation, after all. I’d just been getting in the way of it, like a priest’s doxy.’

I finally dropped the last book into my bag and walked over to the door. Dominique came and kissed me a little less remotely on the cheek and then spoke again.

‘Maybe you should try getting angry. The only times I’ve ever seen you really angry were with Sigmund Freud and once over that mystical statue in Rome. Who was it again?’

‘St Teresa.’

‘The only thing the two of them have in common is that they’re both dead.’

‘Maybe I can only get angry with the dead.’

‘Or maybe it’s the dead you’re angry with – it’s not the same thing, you know. One of the most important functions of the parent is to be there to get angry with. You can’t even remember your mother, or you say you can’t, and your father finally wandered off and disappeared after one of this century’s most unsuccessful criminal careers.’

‘I didn’t know either of them well enough to spend too much time grieving.’

‘No, and that’s why you’re going to spend the rest of your life doing it through other means. You should be careful, you know, Sean. There
is
a lot of anger in there, actually. I know, because I located it from time to time. And if you leave it long enough, when it finally does come out you’ll probably kill somebody. There and then. How’s the School of Night these days?’

‘Still in the dark.’

‘Suit you then.’ I noticed as I looked down at the flesh on her neck a small red welt. It looked more like a tooth mark than anything else.

On the way back on the Underground I remembered the one time I had taken Dominique to stay with my grandparents. She had been entirely natural with them, for which I had been grateful. On the day we left we had driven to the glen outside town, a glacial valley strewn with mighty boulders. It had been early spring and there had been an overnight frost. She’d found a tiny wild flower, the name of which neither of us knew, its heart a vivid yellow. It was bright from its icing and I could still see the wonder on her face as she gazed at it, brilliant in its unexpected diamond.

I lay in bed and thought of what Dominique had said. Anger. Deep inside me. Not towards her, though. Towards someone else then, but who? Sally? No, I certainly felt something about her, but it wasn’t that. And it was surely not my old friend. I didn’t feel capable of any truly negative feelings towards Dan any more. Dear dead Dan.

8

You start to notice certain figures, luminous in their small cubes of light, suspended over the city. I liked to think of them as my fellow students: nocturnal lepidoptera, night-imps and night-hags, the incubi and succubi who prey upon the body of the past. They too shunned daylight’s kingdom as too bright and noisy for important recollections. Then home again to Stefan.

As a translator of the
Sonnets
, he was intrigued by my work on the School of Night. We were both in no doubt that they were riddled with clues, but neither of us was sure where the clues might be pointing. He peered over my shoulder at the sheets spread out all over the table, then, reclining on his ancient sofa with a cognac in his hand, he demanded that I explain the cat’s cradle I was trying to disentangle. And so I started.

‘I think Ralegh’s in here somewhere,’ I said.

‘Ralegh?’

‘Elizabeth’s pet name for Ralegh was Water. Take the L out of Walter and you have Water, and it’s surely appropriate enough, given his trade, though perhaps not quite as amusing as the good lady imagined. So, pushing it a little further, Ralegh calls himself Ocean. And when he’s in the Tower in 1592 he’s writing “Ocean’s Love to Cynthia”, Cynthia, as you know, being his name for Elizabeth. Well, London back then was a leaky sort of place and I doubt many literary secrets were kept for very long. What I mean is, I should think quite a few people knew that Ralegh was petitioning, in the name of Ocean, to his queen from his imprisonment. Petitioning to be reinstated inside the court of her sulky little heart. It strikes me as only to be expected that sheets would have been copied and passed around. Maybe not round the taverns, but then whoever wrote the works assigned to Shakespeare was moving in circles higher than the tapsters by then. So Ocean had run dry. The king of the seas was locked in a tower.

‘Of course, a fair number of scholars have assumed that some at least of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in the early 1590s. So take another look at Sonnet 64.’ I picked up my sheet from the table and read:

When I have scene by times fell hand defaced

The rich proud cost of outworne buried age,

When sometime loftie towers I see downe rased,

And brasse eternall slave to mortall rage.

When I have seen the hungry Ocean gaine

Advantage on the Kingdome of the shoare,

And the firme soile win of the watry maine,

Increasing store with losse, and losse with store.

When I have seene such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded, to decay,

Ruine hath taught me thus to ruminate

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death which cannot choose

But weepe to have, that which it feares to loose.

‘Ralegh, that man of towering pride, put in the tower and so down-razed. The advantage that he, as Ocean, had gained in the kingdom now reversed and all his treasure squandered, “Increasing store with losse, and losse with store”. I think the writer of this was probably astounded by Ralegh’s fall from grace. It was like watching God die. Look at the known facts. Even his judges later were to say, “You have lived like a Star, at which the World hath Gazed.” Everyone knew how gloriously he shone, what a height he’d scaled. To end up in the Tower. The Tower represented two of the last four things: death and judgement. And it was the entry point for the other two: heaven and hell. People went in there and came out alive, to be sure; Elizabeth herself had done so as a princess. But while you were there you represented to the world the absence of liberty, the curtailment of movement, the presence nearby of the axe. It was a very public place: later, during his last imprisonment, they had to stop Ralegh walking up and down one of the galleries because of the cheers the sight of him elicited from sailors on the river. You were put in the Tower as an emblem to the age; but now and then the emblem came to represent something the authorities had not intended.

‘This, our writer must have thought, was a definitive circumscription.’

‘Our writer, Sean? You’re referring to your national poet. What are you saying?’ Stefan lit up one of his Gauloises and blew the smoke up towards the ceiling.

‘I still think he’s our national poet, as a matter of fact, but I don’t think he’s necessarily who he’s been assumed to be.’

‘Forgive my ignorance, but has anyone else ever linked up that sonnet to Ralegh’s imprisonment?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Shakespeare was Southampton’s man, not Ralegh’s.’

‘When you say Shakespeare you mean the man from Stratford.’

‘Ah. You don’t, obviously.’

‘I’m sure of one thing. Whoever wrote that sonnet held Ralegh very close to his heart. I’m not at the stage where I can answer any questions, Stefan, I’m still asking them.

‘Ralegh, remember, had come pretty much from nowhere – the court aristos thought the way he spoke ridiculous. They hated and despised him for the way he’d gone straight to the top. If even he could be imprisoned, then thought itself was now a prison. And the building mentioned most often in the Shakespeare works is the Tower. See how the word
ruminate
in the sonnet actually contains the word
ruin
inside it. “Time will come and take my love away.” That doesn’t sound like decay so much as arrest by the Guard, such being the law of mutability in the interchanges of the State. Ralegh’s wife was imprisoned with him at the time. I think the Tower entered deep into this writer’s mind then. With the fall of Ralegh nothing was secure in this sublunary realm. And then, one year later almost to the day, Christopher Marlowe was done to death by Ingram Frizer in Deptford.

‘Marlowe and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Marlowe. There’s so much collaboration between these two that it’s hard to disentangle Shakespeare’s early work from Marlowe’s hand. Their imaginations fed upon one another. In some ways Marlowe seems to have shown whoever Shakespeare was how it could be done and that’s why he quotes the other poet’s line as a token of remembrance in
As You Like It
, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”’

‘And Marlowe was close to Ralegh, a favourite of his, in fact,’ Stefan said, ‘and he was also, unless I’m mistaken, a leading member of the School of Night.’

‘He was, and I’ve been coming to think he might well have written the sonnet I just quoted.’

‘Do you think he wrote the rest of the works attributed to Shakespeare too?’

I took another drink of cognac before answering.

‘I suppose that’s where my thoughts would lead me, if it weren’t for the one indisputable fact: Marlowe dies on 30 May 1593 and by then we can only be certain that whoever wrote Shakespeare has written
Henry VI, Richard III
, maybe
The Comedy of Errors, Venus and Adonis
and
The Rape of Lucrece
and some sonnets. All the rest is still to come.’

‘Yes, that does seem to present something of a problem.’

We both fell silent for a moment, then Stefan went and took his Shakespeare down from the shelf.

‘There is supposed to be an actual reference to Marlowe’s death, isn’t there, in
As You Like It
?’

‘Yes, I said. It’s at the beginning of Act Three, Scene Three.’

‘I’m impressed,’ he said, finding it there as he turned the pages, then he read it out:

When a man’s verses cannot be understood … it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

‘Isn’t that the quarrel over the bill?’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘The official cause of Marlowe’s death was said to be an argument over the reckoning in a little room in Deptford; there’s a whimsicality about those words that could be offensive, don’t you think? But it always sounds to me more like a man whistling in the dark to cheer himself up. It has about it an air of bravado. I don’t believe the tone here really tells us much, to be honest. I wonder if the writer could even admit to himself what he really thought about it, not until much later anyway, in
Macbeth
, when the three murderers are sent after Banquo and Fleance. And there were three in the room with Marlowe that day when he died, remember – all of them, it’s become apparent since, employed on and off by the State to get up to no good, the third a piece of low-life dross. There’s that strange speech made by Macbeth to the murderers, a speech that seems to stop the play dead for a moment and sounds to me like the playwright inadvertently talking to himself.’ I turned over my notes until I had found the passage. ‘The first murderer says “We are men, my Liege”. And Macbeth replies,

Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men;

As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves, are dept

All by the name of dogs
 …

Something ominously personal about that, don’t you think? There’s an actual revulsion there. Incidentally, allowing for the vagaries of Elizabethan spelling and letter substitution, there’s an anagram in amongst those nouns. They’ll let you spell Ingram Frizer, Poley and Skeres – the three men in the room when Marlowe was killed. It’s always been a slight oddity in the play that only two murderers go to see Macbeth, but by the time they kill Banquo there are three. But then the third doesn’t much signify – he’s just another piece of low-life dross.

‘A few lines later comes a crux the editors still argue over to this day. It’s still unresolved. Macbeth says, giving instructions for the murder: