The School of Night: A Novel (21 page)

I believe in the universality of matter too – always have; believe that if you could follow the stars back to their noisy births, or trace with minute enough attention and exactitude all the myriad subatomic particle dances, the shifting microscopic spiderweb that constitutes the universe, you would find stuff of a unitary splendour, thriving in a nest of time. In the matter of the text of life, I am not a disintegrator: atomism is merely a phase humanity had to go through, a pupa from which it is at last emerging.

So I would have to say that ultimately Daniel Pagett and I were shaped out of the same material. Only the form differed. Now, of course, his earthly form has been lifted from him. His matter is free once more to transmute into anything. Or anyone. And his spirit is as free as Puck to girdle the globe. Remember, Sean, he had said to me as he drove me along the Embankment in that Porsche before leaving for America, if we could travel at the same speed as money, we’d be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Money’s the same as a shark; it can only stay alive by keeping moving. As he said this, I remembered being back with my grandfather in Blackpool three decades before. As we had entered the aquarium under the Tower, I had looked up at him and asked, ‘Are there any sharks here, Grandad?’

‘Only those buggers who just took our money at the door, lad.’

Daniel had made it plain once again, over those last few days we were together, that he was disappointed in me; sad that I had simply resigned myself to the world of thought, though he probably overestimated the amount of it there really was at the BBC at any one time. He reckoned thought was the husk left over when the real thinking ended. And the history of thinking was the history of money, according to him. If you had a comprehensive chronicle of every monetary transaction in the world since the beginning of time, then you would know pretty much what everyone had ever wanted or disliked, what they had loved and hated, what they had been prepared to go to war about and on what terms they had finally made peace; even what poetry had been worth reading. Coins changed hands, sooner or later, wherever anything of significance occurred. Where money was, according to Dan, was where the real action took place, and that was where the important thinking was always done, the thinking that kept you alive. I was trying to come up with exceptions to this rule of his, which married thinking and money quite so monogamously, and I mentioned Bletchley Park, briefly remembering a newspaper article I had recently read. At this Dan had grown excited. Bletchley Park, he reminded me, as we cornered hard through a roundabout, was not in the middle of the country so much as in the middle of the war. That was its true location. Otherwise, it could never have attracted so much money. The brains arrived along with the investment. Universities, he said with some vehemence, housed the residue of talk, after history was already settled: the edges and grass verges where you went when nothing much else was moving down the highway. Greensward in an age of tarmac. Did he really say that? I can’t think why I’d have made it up. And did he only say such things because he had never managed to get to Oxford? Could there still have been an edge of bitterness from all those years before, when millstone-grit mansions and Indigo from Paris had replaced the last stage of his education? I didn’t know, but there was certainly poison in his bite from time to time: ‘Tell me the last university that made anything happen, Sean. Whenever anyone wants to make things happen they leave the university, don’t they? They have to go somewhere else to really do anything. Whether it’s Downing Street or Silicon Valley.’

Myself, I simply sank ever deeper in thought as I sat on the leather seat beside him, trying to work out what I was doing there anyway. But I knew really. I wasn’t about to start sinning against time, not at this late stage. I was being provided with the wherewithal for my studies to continue, for the Sphinx’s life-threatening riddle finally to be answered. It was one more of life’s gifts; they simply came in different wrappings. And now here I was in his penthouse apartment. Tomorrow I would put on the suit he had bought me, and the shirt and tie, go downstairs with an authoritative air and wander about mysteriously, giving the impression that I was in some way important.

Which was precisely what I did.

*   *   *

I don’t know if anyone has ever pointed out that different clothes change the way you walk. As I’ve said before, I seldom buy new clothes, but dressed as neatly as I now found myself after my refurbishment, I found that my gait became more brisk as I stepped from restaurant to bar, from bar to restaurant. I lost my apologetic air as I sat down at one of the tables to order my meal, courtesy of the house. Instead I looked at my watch and then askance at whoever was meant to be serving me, if I judged its arrival to be too tardy, even by minutes. I grew to recognise the regulars, even learning some of their names. One of them I already knew, rendering Dan’s introduction superfluous when he showed me round that first evening.

‘Come over here and meet the thinnest man you’ll ever see,’ he had said, indicating the back of a tall drinker standing at the cocktail bar. ‘He’s a civil servant during the day. Comes here in the evenings to get both the civil and the servant bit out of his system. He lives in a lovely little flat round the corner on Markham Square. Always looking to pick a quarrel, which he usually does very successfully. If he were twenty years younger I’d probably have to bat him. Can be very entertaining, though, if you’re in the mood.

‘Why’s he so thin? Has he got a disease?’

‘No, he’s a cerebrotonic ectomorph.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he told me. Not enough spare flesh on him to feed a mosquito.’ And then, as Dan tapped him on the shoulder, Charlie Leggatt turned to face me. The goatee beard had gone; the spectacles were now square instead of round. Otherwise he hadn’t changed much.

In drink, which was where he invariably already was by the time he arrived at the Pavilion, Charles Leggatt would these days sink swiftly to bright-eyed venom, and when I came down this particular evening to find him at the bar, he had evidently dipped beneath the surface of his civil service persona a good hour or so before. Now he was sharking about at periscope depth, moving in stealthily on any buoyant targets in his range. He was addressing a young man, who was still staring at his copy of the
Financial Times.

‘When I began my career in the civil service, the City was thought on the whole to be a place of probity. If you could swallow the basic premise of the capitalist enterprise, then that was thought to be the most reasonable contraption for keeping it going. There was the occasional scandal, to be sure, but one looked to most of its personnel as men of honour. Now if I were to learn someone works in the City, I’d be disinclined to leave him alone in the room with my budgerigar, let alone my daughter.’

‘You don’t have a daughter, Charles,’ the man said, without looking up from his paper. ‘And you don’t have a budgerigar either. Your presence is inimical to most forms of organic life. You told me, remember? Now, if I buy you a drink will you go and pick on someone else for a while?’ Charlie spotted me as I approached.

‘Ah, Sean. The prospect of some civilised company. Makes a bit of a change round here these days.’ So we sat down at one of the tables with our drinks.

‘To think that those years at Oxford should have finally landed us both here, with you as a functionary of Mr Pagett, no less.’

‘And you as a civil servant, Charlie. I shouldn’t think anyone would have predicted that future for you.’

‘No. A fellow must look to his pension though.’

‘Are you still a revolutionary, out of interest? You shaved off your Trotsky beard, I see. Did your dialectics go with it?’

‘I reckon I’ve worked out where we went wrong back there,’ he said meditatively. ‘I reckon I’ve cracked it. We had to get to one side or the other of the endless and voracious maw of capitalism, but we went the wrong way. I mean, if profits are all that life is about, then it has no horizon, does it? And where there’s no horizon, there’s no light. And we are obliged at least to
try
and see. We can’t live in the dark all the time, can we, Sean?’

‘I do my best.’ I was touched that Charlie was still searching for the mystic cipher, the riddle at the heart of the system. He seemed to be brooding now about his old beliefs.

‘Accumulate, accumulate. According to Marx, that was Moses and the prophets,’ he said, and I thought briefly of how invisible money had become; no more and no less than the space needed to fill the inside of the figure zero. But he was already off again. ‘We pretended to choose Demos when the truth is that we were all really leaning towards Aristos. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about fascism, which is, frankly, even more vulgar than capitalism. But we didn’t
really
fancy Marx anything like as much as we did Byron, deep in our hearts. Freedom fighter, lush, lord, fornicator
and
poet. That’s one in the eye for the nation of shopkeepers.
Kapital
never had quite the same swing to it as
Don Juan
, if you ask me. Or even if you don’t.’ Charles threw back his head and recited:

‘
I say – the future is a serious matter –

And so – for God’s sake – hock and soda-water!’

Jess appeared thirty seconds later, carrying a glass, which he placed before Charlie.

‘Spritzer, sir.’

‘He’s smart, that boy. He’ll go a long way, if you ask me.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘That’s the reason we chose Trotsky, you know.’

‘Is it?’ I asked. It all seemed a long way back and had never much concerned me in the first place.

‘Trotsky is the Byron of revolutionary movements, though I suppose Che Guevara has been bringing up the rear lately. Lenin was the bureaucrat, labouring away in his office, filling in forms in triplicate, adding soviets to electricity. And Stalin was the butcher, the big brute in the abattoir we’d rather have nothing to do with. But Trotsky is blessed with a substantial intellect, cosmopolitanism and total and utter failure – he’s therefore irresistible. He even had the good taste to get assassinated. And no Trot anywhere in the world has ever really believed they’d come to power. Power, after all, is vulgarity incarnate. But to be in beleaguered opposition, that’s Missolonghi. That’s to be lordly in your disdain for everything this tawdry world might offer.’

‘And these days you get your kicks as a civil servant. What do you think Byron would have had to say about that?’

*   *   *

I suppose I’d pretty much settled in by the end of the week. I was lying on the bed when Jenny arrived with my drink. She placed it carefully on the table by my side, then hesitated.

‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’ She was attractive. She was small, but her tight yellow jumpsuit made what Dan would doubtless have called a feature of her figure. I could smell her perfume. She pushed her long blonde hair back over one shoulder, and said, ‘Mr Pagett told me that, if you wanted the same range of services he did, then I should provide them.’

‘No,’ I said quietly and picked up my drink. ‘That’s very kind of both you and Mr Pagett, but it won’t be necessary, thank you.’ She left then as she had entered, zipped.

6

During the next few weeks I acquainted myself with all the odd corners of the place, the times of deliveries of food and drink, and I tried to memorise everyone’s names. I grew so used to silently checking everything and everyone that I even went through Daniel’s dresser. There were some nice clothes and one drawer overflowing with invitations, letters, scribbled notes, all dumped in there. One card was scratchily inscribed with handwriting I easily recognised:
Thanks for that. For all of it. I never knew it could be that good. Love, Dominique.
I couldn’t work out the date from the smudged postmark, but maybe I didn’t really want to know. And there was a photograph of Sally, an early one, just as I remembered her on our first date. I put it in my inside pocket. At the end of the following week there was a phone call from Dan.

‘A friend of mine’s arriving this evening. Known, for the moment anyway, as Dave Lambert. Take him where he wants to go. Use taxis. Stay with him. He’s been having a little surgery and now he needs to visit some casinos. He knows his way around. Be polite. I owe him one. Just remind him to be discreet, will you? On the subject of which, do give my love to Jenny.’ And then he hung up.

So I showered and dressed and went downstairs. I visited each bar in turn, staring with my newly practised expression of inquisitorial scepticism into the faces of the staff. They had all started to look guilty. Or at least I thought they had. Charlie Leggatt was already in the first-floor bar, hungry for something to get his teeth into.

‘That’s right, keep an eye on the buggers,’ he said merrily, easily on his fifth or sixth drink. ‘His eminence Mr Pagett always did, and I do rather take his point. Some of your staff here are lovely – even the chaps are lovely, if it comes to that, but I don’t doubt they’re not past a bit of thieving, given the opportunity. If twenty years in Whitehall has taught me anything, it is that the urge to acquire pelf, to defraud, embezzle and purloin, is one of the most universal human instincts, second only to breathing, eating and sleeping. And the other thing, of course. I’ve noted from the newspapers that several old Etonians this very year…’

‘Shut the fuck up, Charles,’ I said quietly. His voice was loud. Both staff and customers were staring over in our direction.

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

‘I said, shut the fuck up.’

‘I find that remark very offensive, Mr Tallow. I’m inclined to take my custom elsewhere.’

‘So, take it.’ And with that, I went to check that the tables had been laid properly in the restaurant.