The School of Night: A Novel (26 page)

‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Mr Tallow.’

‘Hello, Charles,’ I said. ‘Keep your voice down, will you?’

‘Ah, staying out of harm’s way, are we? I did note your somewhat speedy departure from the scene. Come in and have a drink.’ And as I walked through his elegant hallway, hung with watercolours, and into his kitchen, he turned to me and smiled.

‘Keeping a low profile, Sean?’

‘Exactly, Charlie. You have put it with characteristic succinctness.’ He poured me a glass of chilled white wine and then he explained, with the expertise gained from his profession, how the receiver had evidently decided that the best way to attempt to liquidate the portion of debt accrued by Davenant’s was to keep the business going, which they were endeavouring to do.

‘They did drive off in Mr Pagett’s nice sports car. Mind you, it needed a wash by then. Daniel was always so fastidious about it too. I did get the feeling they’d love to have a chat with you though.’

‘I’m not here, Charlie, all right? I’m not anywhere.’

‘I spend half my life pouring drinks for chimeras, so let me refill yours. Do you remember the Dong?’ he said meditatively, looking out of the French windows into his neat little garden.

‘The Dong?’

‘He was a poet, so I’m told anyway. Used to sit over in the corner of the Pavilion on a Friday evening. Nose glowed with forty years’ straight whisky. If there’d ever been a power cut, he could have charged you lot utility rates. Had a young chap there with him last week, a nephew or something, who informed me he was about to go to Scotland for three months. To stay in a remote castle, on some new course of therapy specifically designed to discover the inner self.

‘I told him I’d discovered my inner self years ago, without too much effort being required. Found it repellent, quite frankly, a ceaseless whine of appetite and mawkish blather, yearning for the womb all over again, so I reverted immediately to the outer self, where I’ve been more than happy to remain ever since. Why do you think people are so hard on repression these days? It is, after all, the only thing that makes life amongst us even halfway tolerable.’

‘I never thought of you as particularly repressed, Charlie, I must say.’

A photograph had caught my eye and I went across to peer at it. Charles was standing in his morning suit outside a church, and beside him in her bridal gear was a figure I was sure I recognised from years before. I looked more closely.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said, ‘it’s Becky Southgate.’

‘And what are you doing there?’

‘Marrying her.’

‘You
married
Becky Southgate?’

‘Oh, don’t sound quite so disapproving, Sean.’

‘You told me she was a hysteric and a liar.’

‘You didn’t see her at her best that evening. I mean, she could get a bit worked up from time to time, but to be fair she was never a liar.’

‘So Comrade Protheroe and the Disciplinary Committee were right after all?’

‘I think even Becky came to see that she’d overreacted to what is, when all’s said and done, a pretty traditional way for a man to express his physical admiration for a woman. In some cultures it’s the required first step in a courtship ritual. It’s thought very rude if you
don’t
put your hand there.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought that Becky would have been very keen on marriage.’

‘She wasn’t, but her father was. And Becky did love her old daddy.’

‘So what happened?’

‘She found after a while that she didn’t believe in marriage after all. Well, not to me anyway. We got divorced.’

‘Any particular reason?’

‘Tell me something: does it strike you as a realistic condition of life, Sean, to ask a man to stick to one pair of breasts? I mean, you say “I will” on some misty Saturday morning and then that’s it for ever. Just the one pair.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘How many pairs do you have access to these days?’

‘None.’ He pondered this for a moment, then looked at me intently, his bony features quizzical and quirky. ‘Are you suggesting we should try to average it out? Decide if three pairs a year at one stage of your life really justifies having no pairs at all at another? Is that what you’re getting at? A sort of statistical approach to the mammary question?’

‘I don’t know, Charlie, but I suppose it might be one way of looking at things, don’t you think? How long have you had this flat, out of interest?’

‘My old man passed this on, pausing only to pass on himself first. I should be grateful. In fact, I
am
grateful, believe it or not. What have you inherited, Sean?’

‘A snooker cue.’

‘Do you play snooker?’

‘No.’

We walked out into his trim and tiny garden. The liquefying throb of a blackbird’s song seemed to moisten the evening air.

‘Do you know what that noise is, Sean?’

‘Joy?’

‘Territoriality, I’d say. Thank God the little buggers aren’t armed.’

2

How quickly months turn into years. Come to think of it, I really didn’t miss being employed by my old friend Dan all that much. I suppose I so easily fit in with the conditions wherever I find myself, not wishing to commit any of the capital sins against time or to push against rivers, but I did wonder now and then what had happened to him. For some reason I simply couldn’t bring myself to call Sally. One day I walked along the towpath between Hampton Court and Kingston and stood opposite Thames Ditton. I knew, even before the new people stepped out on to the lawn, that the Pagetts didn’t live there any more. Down in that cellar I tried hard to think things over, but nothing made much sense, so I simply kept on with my work on the Shakespeare mystery, following my tutor’s priceless advice to spend the rest of my life studying the School of Night. At times I felt I was beginning to disappear inside my own cryptographia, which is perhaps understandable. Shakespeare’s text, after all, is not a stable thing. The folio edition of
Henry V
says, unequivocally, in regard to Falstaff’s death: ‘For his Nose was as sharpe as a Pen, and a Table of greene fields’, whereas today any edition will read: ‘for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and ’a babbled of green fields.’ Such being the present principles of emendation, which shift with vertiginous force from century to century. We’ve always changed the Shakespeare text at will to suit our latest preconceptions.

After the chemical wedding comes the dissolution of forms, darkness and eclipses. She’s an elusive one, Lady Alchymia. I remembered once reading how Richard Pryor, while attempting to freebase crack cocaine in his basement, had suffered first-degree burns when his equipment exploded. Disreputable alchemists were still locked in their cellars searching for the veins of gold.

One night, as I was closing up after treating myself to an hour on one of the beds, I called Dominique on an impulse. I wasn’t even sure if she’d still be at the same address.

‘Where the hell did you go, Sean?’

‘Not far.’

‘You took your time letting us know.’

‘I’m sure you all survived.’

‘One of us won’t survive much longer, though.’

‘Don’t understand.’

‘Dan’s sick, Sean. Very sick. Come over for dinner tomorrow and I’ll tell you about it.’

The next evening we sat eating pasta and drinking red wine, as though the years that had passed between us had altered nothing. Except for little hints, italic lines about Dominique’s eyes, flecks of grey scattered through the ringlets. She looked as though the transference had finally started working and now she really was receiving the sorrows of fractured hearts from the other side.

‘You look better than I’ve ever seen you,’ she said. ‘You should have introduced yourself to daylight earlier.’ I didn’t tell her that all my sunshine came from underground.

And then as we ate she spoke of Dan.

‘He’s had radiotherapy and chemo, but it can’t be long. He’s a sorry sight, Sean, to be honest. I can’t remember the names now but there are three sorts of tumour that affect the brain and he’s got the big one. He’d like to see you, I know that. But you’d better make it sooner rather than later.’ And she gave me the address and telephone number.

‘Ramsgate?’ I said, baffled.

‘Don’t ask me. He’s bankrupt, of course. The big house they had on the Thames was taken and Ramsgate’s where they ended up. Maybe he’d put some money in his wife’s name.’

‘Sally,’ I said quietly.

‘That’s right, Sean. Your old girlfriend, Sally.’

‘You got quite close to Dan, didn’t you?’

‘He’d told me he was getting divorced. I don’t make a habit of screwing up other people’s marriages.’

‘I thought you hated him.’

‘No, I never hated him. It’s hard not to be fascinated by a man like that, isn’t it? You always were.’

‘Was he a good lover, out of interest?’

‘No better than you. Different, but no better.’ I found it hard to believe her.

‘You never told me I was a good lover.’

‘You never asked. You never told me whether I rated much either.’

‘You were the only one I’d ever had, so I didn’t have anything to compare you with.’

*   *   *

The next day I called and Sally answered. Her voice was subdued.

‘Nice to hear from you, Sean. We thought you’d vanished off the face of the earth. Dan’s not too good today or he’d come to the phone himself. Could you travel down at the weekend? It’s only a couple of hours on the train.’

I stared out of the window all the way from Victoria, and when I arrived I walked about for half an hour, along the coastal road, before I managed finally to direct my feet to the house. Ramsgate. Despite the new marina, the place felt as though out-of-season winds had blown away the heart of it some decades before. Like so many English seaside towns, it had lost the will to continue. The stucco that remained on its old houses was peeling from the walls and the facias of the new shops and fast-food dives were just as tawdry, newer maybe, but equally dismal. It felt like a place that no one actually came to any more; these days everyone merely passed through. It was a transit camp beside the grey, unlovely swill of the Channel. The few amusement arcades bleated disconsolately as unsmiling children rammed coins into their slots. What on earth was Daniel Pagett doing here?

It was on the East Cliff, a big white building with a curious little tower. There was a similar one further along. Presumably there’d been a vogue for turrets in Ramsgate some time around the 1920s.

I pressed the bell and Sally answered. She was older too, still attractive, but a little worn all the same. Some of the sunshine inside her had been put out. One or two shadows had finally started breaking through.

‘Hello, Sean. God, you look good. Spending the winters in the Caribbean? You’re positively glowing.’ Her northern accent had not shifted by a single vowel. We kissed, awkwardly, and gave each other a gentle hug.

I was sitting in the living room looking out through the window towards the Channel when Dan came slowly into the room. His head had been shaved and there were mottled patches where I supposed they’d had to drill. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, the sort they wear in hospitals, and his arms were covered with blue patches, still sore where the needles had gone in. All of the old Dan had disappeared from his walk, which was painfully lumbering and unsure. And he’d put on weight. For the first time ever, Dan’s belly was bulging. So quick bright things come to confusion. But there was still some of the humour in his eyes. I gave thanks for that as I stood up and walked across to him. I took him gently in my arms. I was frightened of squeezing anything in case it hurt.

‘You look well, Sean,’ he said slowly. ‘The years are getting kinder to you at least.’

And then we sat down. Sally brought us some coffee and I asked questions which Dan could sometimes answer, sometimes not.

‘It comes and goes,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I can remember things, but I can’t remember what you just said. The only thing I can ever remember is that I’m hungry. No, there’s the headaches, I remember them too. You used to be the one with all the headaches, Sean. How are yours now?’

‘Seem to have gone, pretty much.’

‘How did you manage that?’

‘It was something trying to get in.’

‘What?’

‘I think the pain was the sensation of something trying to get into my head, not out of it. Everybody got it the wrong way round, including me for a while. Some information needed to be transmitted, and now that it has been, the pain has largely gone away. Well, that’s not entirely true. It still happens on big occasions.’

‘Strange you say that,’ he said, with a hint of the old brightness in his expression. ‘My doctor says that no one really knows what pain is. So I said, I know what pain is, my friend; maybe I should wear the white coat around here. He carries on, my doctor. He says, pain: it’s a form of information. He says, it’s a way of moving messages around the body. The steroids, he says, send the information on, now what did he call it, a diversion from my brain. And some of this information ends up in my stomach. Which is why I’m so ravenous half the time. All the time, I mean, not half the time. I’m even hungry when I’m sleeping, Sean. I have these dreams. Never mind. Now I can’t remember what I was talking about.’

‘Weeks,’ Sally said to me later in the kitchen. ‘Maybe days. They’re surprised he’s lasted this long. This Monday he lost most of the sense from his left side for the first time, which is why he has to walk so carefully.’ She looked at me and smiled. I remembered her sad smile from all those years before. ‘He wants to talk to you, Sean. For some reason he was always convinced you’d turn up before he died. And he says he needs to have a talk with you. By himself. He’s written some things down on sheets of paper. That’s the only way he’d be able to remember everything he needs to say. And he doesn’t want me there.’

‘Do you know what it’s about?’

‘Probably.’

‘You don’t want to tell me anything about it?’

‘No, love. Only this. You don’t go and do anything you really don’t want to. Do you understand that? We’ll survive, you know, one way or another. We always have. Well, when I say we…’