The School of Night: A Novel (25 page)

Part Four

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
The Tempest

1

It was part of the Orphic religion to utter the words
soma seme
– the body is a tomb. Similarly the alchemists believed that only once putrefaction had set in could the sacred spark trapped inside the material be released – the divine light that had fallen into darkness. The work, the opus itself, could now at last commence. Dan has surely started rotting, so maybe that’s his free flame out there finally, igniting the darkness, and starting to dance on the water. But I think it’s more likely to be dawn, come at last. The long night of memorial perplexity is over. The last sentence I read in the Hariot Notebooks was this:

If only the end of this school of ours heralded a dawn. But I fear there is merely a different darkness falling.

With my two canvas bags on my shoulders I walked away from the Pavilion towards South Kensington. I had often noticed a shop there with a window full of cards. I read them for the first time, made a note of one of the addresses and went round to see if the advertised bedsit was still available. It was.

‘You’d have to give me a cash advance if you want to move in today,’ said the middle-aged lady with the mop of white hair. I gave her the money and she seemed satisfied. Then, once I had placed my notebooks on the table and my few clothes in the wardrobe, I walked around the corner to Sol. A beggar squatted on the pavement. I dropped my pennies from heaven into the cap that lay between his legs. His head jerked forward automatically in acknowledgement, producing a little blizzard of dandruff.

There was still that sign saying:
Staff Wanted: Enquire Within.

Malcolm had been losing a little weight. These days he was invariably dressed in a tracksuit. His life had evidently acquired a new régime.

‘Do you want the facial or a bed?’

‘I want a job?’

‘Come again.’

‘It still says
Staff Wanted
outside.’

Malcolm thought for a moment and then said, ‘All right, I seem to have known you long enough. Let’s try it for a week anyway. You’ll soon get the hang of operating the beds and cleaning them. The only other thing is taking bookings and payments, but that’s not too difficult. I’ll be glad to get out in the fresh air during the day, to be honest. I’ve taken on a few girls down here, but it’s never worked out. The men are always trying to talk them into joining them on the beds. The money’s not brilliant, but it’s cash in hand. I’m not interested in tax or National Insurance or any of that stuff. As far as I’m concerned you’re nothing to do with me or my business, officially speaking. That suit you?’ I nodded. ‘You can start on Monday then.’

As I made my way down to the London Library I thought briefly of what Malcolm had said. The truth is I had never even thought about the matter since leaving the BBC, where all my deductions had been made automatically for me. Tax. National Insurance. All such things had disappeared from my life, not to mention pension funds, savings, building society accounts. I seem to have had a certain genius for never much considering these things, things that so many other people spend most of their working hours poring over. I felt the distant possibility of a migraine returning. Odd that, when I thought of it: I didn’t seem to have had one ever since I’d started working at the Pavilion. So they really do go as you solve the problems; it had been something trying to get in, after all. Taxes and insurance. It seemed a bit late to be addressing the issue now. How was I supposed to explain what I’d been doing all that time at the Pavilion? Anyway, have no care for the morrow, that’s what it says in the Bible, so it must be true. Such distracting concerns are one of the capital sins against time. Walter Ralegh had backed me up in ‘Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’:
Hold both cares and comforts in contempt.
So I decided to forget all about it.

After I had been to the library that day I walked down to Trafalgar Square and went into the National Portrait Gallery, where I climbed the steps to the top floor. This Elizabethan display never failed to touch something inside me: so many grandees, spymasters, explorers; the eyes of the killers and the killed speaking with such silent eloquence of their power and their fear. Behind them all, magnificently mounted, was the queen herself, the milk-dab of her face a pearl set amid the spectrum of her grand brocade. The centre of the widening circle of the world. Bald as a badger, some said, though they said it in whispers, out of earshot of ministers of State, or any versifying flatterers on their way towards the court. Syphilis, contracted from her mother perhaps, but the tides still heaved towards her, as navigators looped out like ecliptics from Gravesend.

The following week I started. It didn’t take long to learn how to switch the bed-timers on and off, and once I had settled into the routine I did it without thinking. Taking bookings, taking money, switching on fans and coolers, handing out lotions, chatting about the variety of skin types and the expected speed of tanning, wiping the sweat off the glass surface afterwards. There were occasional surprises, little murmurs rising just above the thrumming of the beds. The heat, I supposed. But mostly it was routine. I started bringing my notebooks down with me, turning the pages as I waited for the next phone call or the next customer. I threw away the pile of defunct motoring and gardening magazines to make shelf space for my few remaining books.

My view had by now become defined, dogmatic: the man from Stratford had not written the works attributed to Shakespeare. That doltish-looking maltster and usurer from Warwickshire, without a book in his will, whose daughter remained illiterate all her life, and of whom no mention was made at the time of his death as having written a single word, could simply not have composed this body of work more brimful with life and learning than any other that’s ever been created. As early as 1728 Captain Goulding had spoken derisively of the army of chuckle-headed historians who would have been required to supply William Shakespeare with all his necessary data. He had once done some acting, certainly, and picked up a fair amount of the equity in one or two theatres. He had even assisted Marlowe in a few early pieces. But I could see more and more clearly that Shakespeare wasn’t who he was supposed to be. It had confused many, at the time even the man’s own contemporaries. Ben Jonson obviously thought he was the author of the works ascribed to him, but then, if the secret had been well enough kept, why shouldn’t he have done? Jonson wasn’t in the room with him when the plays were being written. After all, the queen had thought Anthony Blunt merely a scholarly and patriotic old curator until someone had whispered in her ear about his decades as a Soviet spy. She’d seen him more often than Jonson ever saw Shakespeare. People can be other than we think. This would also explain why the Warwickshire man didn’t carouse much, but tended, by report, to stay alone at his lodgings most nights. Best keep yourself largely to yourself and thus keep out of danger from any detailed questioning.

No, it had been Marlowe all along. The dead man had written the words, using the living one as his mask. Thomas Walsingham had facilitated the deception and Thomas Thorpe of St Paul’s Churchyard had been sworn to secrecy for his part in the production. And there were, of course, two other people who knew all about it: Walter Ralegh and Thomas Hariot. Now I found more clues whenever I opened up the Collected Works. I could seldom read more than six or seven lines without cryptograms starting to emerge. Here, for example, was one of the sonnets:

…
nor that affable familiar ghost

Which nightly gulls him with intelligence

As victors of my silence.

Whole books had been written trying to establish the identity of the rival poet mentioned here. But for the classically minded, as Marlowe undoubtedly was, there was another way of writing the word William: Guilliam. And that’s the way it is written on the memorial in the church at Stratford-upon-Avon. Guilliam. The gull. Also the victor of Kit’s silence, since he was the one who reaped the worldly rewards due to the other.

As I turned the pages of my notebooks, I realised that I had been edging towards this recognition for a long time, even when I’d had no idea where I was going. There was this entry from years before:

Hamlet’s the first modern figure in drama or fiction for a very simple reason: the further he delves into the past the more of a catastrophe he becomes, the more he questions his own identity. His ancestors in the genre would simply have taken their cue for revenge and got on with it, but the burden of the past settles on to Hamlet’s soul like a shrieking monkey. He takes revenge instead on himself; he finds it impossible to see how he could put things right. And he doesn’t, does he? He makes things worse. He retreats into a labyrinth of self-examination. He damages everyone around him before he finally gets to Claudius, and a few minutes later almost anyone of any interest is dead. Then the stage is inherited by Fortinbras – about the nearest we get to a fascistic automaton before the invention of fascism itself.

But Hamlet’s the first figure of modernity for another reason too: the possibility of suicide is the very condition of his thought. Self-extinction is the only clear exit from his dilemma. His own power, in other words, cannot resolve the fractured world he finds himself inhabiting; or it can do it only by turning against himself. Seconds after the poisoned sword has been poked into his flesh, it is in his hand being wielded against others – it’s almost as though it was always in his hand, as though the others were vicarious exponents of his own search for an exit. He is liberated into action only by his mother’s death, a death she has brought on by her own sexual infatuation. It is as though he has committed suicide by using someone else’s hand.

The more he finds out what’s really happened in the past, the more trouble Hamlet’s in and the less sense he can make of it. Isn’t the same true of the School of Night? Four hundred years on and we still don’t know how or why Marlowe died in Deptford that day. Or even if he did. Some might say that it’s hardly surprising we don’t know: it was four hundred years ago. But this could be reversed. We’ve had four centuries to think about it and ponder it and weigh up the evidence. If we haven’t come to a firm conclusion by now, what hope is there of establishing what went on a mere forty years ago? You can understand the judicial employment of torture, in a way. It’s an aspect of the State’s exasperation: will you, for God’s sake or the devil’s, just tell us what actually happened? If not, we’ll have to question you to the full. The scraping of the conscience, it was called back then.

I bought the papers for a few weeks, something I had stopped doing since leaving the BBC. Maybe I’d felt a little let down by the news after performing such sterling service on its behalf for so many years. But now I scanned the headlines with my old expertise. The story about the collapse of Arborfield emerged first in the financial sections, but made it finally on to the news pages. There was much talk of junk bonds, of a change of mood in the US regulatory bodies, a new intolerance in regard to asset-stripping and high-yield refinancing. It was hard to divide the politics from the economics, but then I suppose it always is. Arborfield had certainly not helped its own case by the nature of its expansion into South America at precisely the time that the dubious logging industry down there was coming under scrutiny for its potentially catastrophic environmental effects. They had been cavalier in this regard, though, as far as I could see, no more so than most of their competitors. One or two of the papers carried a picture of Gerry, with a caption saying that after a few days in prison he had been released on bail. And there was an occasional mention of Gerry’s partner, the English tycoon Daniel Pagett, who had also been guaranteed to make a fortune had their scheme actually come off. He, it was thought, had left the country, but no one knew where he had gone. His own companies elsewhere were all in liquidation.

During this news trawl I also noticed something else. Henry Willoughby, late of my Oxford college, had been charged with spying. It seemed that Henry had become so disillusioned with the British secret service, which he had served mostly in Northern Ireland, that he had toddled along to the Russian embassy in London one night and popped a list of his fellow agents through the door. He had been drunk: like so many famous English spies before him, he was an alcoholic. The Russians had been convinced that an attempt to contact them characterised by such blatant ineptitude had to be a set-up. They had complained to the British authorities and Henry had been caught the following week. Then it had also transpired that the figure I had known at Oxford had not been entirely what he’d seemed. The Anglo-Catholic with the upper-class accent had a few years before been a working-class boy in a council house. He had, said the authorities, always had some difficulty in blending his different personae.

One evening I walked down to the King’s Road. There were notices in the windows and on the door of the Pavilion, but it was still open; figures were walking in and out; I could even make out one or two yellow suits inside the foyer, but I didn’t dare go in. Instead I went along to Markham Square and knocked on Charlie’s door.