The School of Night: A Novel

by WALL, ALAN

  ‘How often … I mean…’

  ‘Once a week. Occasionally twice. I am friendly with the owner of a small hotel on Theobald’s Road who will, I am sure, be happy to come to an agreement with you in regard to booking perhaps a full week in advance at a reasonable rate, then permitting you to use up your allocation one night at a time. Maggie is seldom completely full. There is usually a vacancy. We will deduct whatever you spend there from the total of your rent here.’

  ‘How much rent would you want?’

  Stefan waved his slender, manicured fingers in the air. They rippled elegantly in an age-old gesture of indifference from Mittel Europa.

  ‘How much were you paying at your last place?’

  I told him my half of the rent at the flat in Swiss Cottage.

  ‘That would be fine. So when would you like to move in?’

  ‘Would this weekend be too soon?’

  Stefan reached a hand into his inside pocket, took out a diary and flipped the pages until he came to the appropriate date, then looked at me distractedly.

  ‘Fate has arranged a brief period of celibacy, as it so happens. So we might as well be monkish together.’

  5

  It didn’t take me long to discover that Stefan’s open-handed manner disguised a soul as opaque as any I’ve ever met. Why was it that life kept presenting me with secrets I could not decode? I’m growing closer to a few of them, all the same. The books on this table before me are starting to yield up their riddles, if a little coyly. They’re certainly in no hurry to be translated into the region of analysis and comprehension and in that regard I think I may know how they feel. Here’s the last sentence I transcribed:

  Sir Walter said today that no life ever ends: we merely move from one place to another. As he spoke, I tried not to think of the axe that will so shortly effect his removal from here. And I only wish he didn’t have to go, for then our little school will surely be dispersed for ever.

  Dawn will be here before long, bringing its dew, greatest of all the alchemical solvents. And soon enough it will be time for Dan to make his last journey too.

  Stefan and I would sometimes talk and at other times sit for hours in silence in our armchairs at opposite sides of the room. I was working my way through a collection of code books I had extracted from one of the murkier corners of the London Library. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing it, but it’s certainly turned out for the best. These notebooks would have been unintelligible to me otherwise. At night I tried to sleep and could think of nothing but Dominique. Odd the nights beyond number I’d lain beside her without reaching out a hand in her direction and now every muscle in my body ached for her presence. The memories I was enduring seemed more potent than the realities they recalled. Like the day at Thames Ditton with Dan and Sally. By that time Dan had long before sold the family business and gone into transport and freighting. Then, after a while, he was once more in the newspapers with his cut-price computer, the Pagio. Pagio. I had laughed out loud when I had seen the name. It was soon gleaming away in shop windows, all the same.

  Dan collected us from the station at Thames Ditton in his convertible Bentley and as we drove up through the village he pointed out the little tower that had once been used for smoking eels.

  The house was one of those Edwardian confections that you find alongside the Thames beyond Richmond. White-painted, fringed metal canopies adorned the whole of the ground floor. There was about half an acre of finely mown lawn running down to the water’s edge. You expected longhaired girls to come out wearing embroidered frocks, ready for a gentle game of badminton. Instead Sally stepped through one of the French windows, flanked by her two sons. Could I really have forgotten how beautiful she was? A smile to make the sun blink. And it soon became apparent that her northern vowels hadn’t budged an inch to accommodate her fancy new neighbours either, though by then my own chameleon speech had started to take its colour from those around me.

  ‘Hello, Sean, and hello to you, Dominique. These are my boys, Freddie and Daniel. Daniel, as you’ll soon see, is taking after his father. I always knew we were asking for trouble giving him that name.’

  ‘Where is Signor Pagio, by the way?’ I said. ‘It was very nice of him to send his chauffeur down to collect us, but I’d like to see my old Neapolitan friend.’ Dan looked at me with his well-practised, dangerous smile.

  ‘Would you buy a computer called Pagett? Well, would you? We just needed something a few inches closer to an Olivetti, that’s all.’

  Half an hour later we were aboard Dan’s Thames launch and heading downriver towards Teddington. The wine was poured, the sandwiches were passed around. And Sally was quizzing us about our life; I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She seemed to glow with her own source of light. Suddenly Dan’s sharp words turned our heads.

  ‘Don’t hit him,’ he said. ‘What are you hitting him for?’

  ‘Because he annoyed me,’ his little namesake replied from the prow.

  ‘You annoy me sometimes, Daniel, but I don’t hit you, do I?’

  ‘Yes you do,’ the little boy said defiantly.

  Dan flinched. He turned away and looked over the water. He spoke more quietly.

  ‘Well, I don’t hit you often.’

  ‘You don’t come here often,’ came the reply. Sally smiled evenly at us both.

  ‘See what I mean?’

  I started to wonder how often Dan did come there, and for what stretches of time Sally might be alone with her boys. He spoke of his trips to the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain.

  We motored up and down the Thames, peering at bungalow-crowded aits, counting the swans and grebes, until on our final stretch down from Hampton Court, I found myself staring at the white wake of the boat, as so many traitors and kings had done before me on this same stretch of water. Finally Dan drove us back to the station. There were kisses, handshakes and promises, and then he was gone. Standing on the platform, waiting for our train, Dominique who had been silent for most of the afternoon, finally spoke.

  ‘Done well for himself, your friend Dan, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And he didn’t even go to Oxford.’

  ‘No. He’s never been psychoanalysed either.’

  Dan. Dear dead friend I’m here to bury.

  * * *

  When you wake at four o’clock in the morning with a poisonous sensation in your mouth it always tastes like the word futility on your tongue. And I suppose the end of love is as bad a taste as any, even if the love has been slowly dying for years. I am a Gemini. My planet is Mercury, presiding spirit of intellectuals and thieves. In the alchemical schema it is Mercurius, who facilitates the union between Sol and Luna in the chemical marriage. Mercurius is the prima materia and also the ultima materia. He is called upon to rain his precious fluids down on the work’s body, blackened by flame, thus enabling, on the far side of putrefaction, a resurrection of matter and spirit which is no longer divided, no longer separated by corruption. Mercurius is effectively the universal material, being all things to all men. But just now I didn’t feel like anything to anybody. All that was left for me to do was to work obsessively, press further and further on with my research on the School of Night. I’d already established that’s what I was here for, but even so I was glad for a while each time my shifts resumed and it was time for me to go to work again. Keeping up with things.

  Corruption in India, violence (black or white) in Africa. An occasional dictator deposed in all his peacock splendour, an eminent cleric caught, minus his cassock, between the legs of one of his parishioners. Memories of wars long gone, anticipations of worse ones to come. Occasionally a member of the royal family would marry a mere mortal and the nation would go berserk: the skies would weep confetti and the streets sprout bunting. Then back home again to my new life with Stefan.

  6

  Stefan didn’t go out much since everyone he ever needed seemed to come to him, so I was surprised one day when he invited me to The
Watchman’s summer party. He said he thought a little wander down the road might help to offset my prison pallor – and it was true that I only ever seemed to see the sun in the form of Sol gleaming through one of my alchemical illustrations.

  In a Georgian house somewhere between Holborn and Clerkenwell stood the editorial offices of The Watchman. The name was meant to echo Coleridge’s journal of the 1790s, providing the same edge of intellectualism, even a kind of urgent radical thought – well, that was the idea anyway. A glossy tabloid in appearance, it had become a fashionable weekly, with advertisements for shirt shops in Jermyn Street, jewellers in Bond Street, wine merchants in St James’s. In grainy photographs supplied by expensive admen to expensive department stores, women in evening dress would smoke a cigar while staring straight at you. Savvy, sassy, streetwise and cool.

  Its latest editor was Jim Chambers, whose smiling features, complete with permed grey hair, had for years gleamed from the masthead of his column in one of the broadsheet newspapers. He had made his name writing affable, boisterous and essentially lightweight pieces of reportage about the goings-on in Parliament. He could be amusing, though his routines had grown somewhat predictable over the years. His patented technique was displacement. At the end of the week in which Elvis Presley had made his last journey from one place to another, he started his column, ‘Three days ago an appallingly bloated body issued its final gasp of life, while the notes of one famous song died on its rouged lips … but just before we say farewell for ever to the Trade Union Movement and its anthem, “The Red Flag”…’ It would do if you were between stations and hadn’t brought a book.

  But transplanted to the editorial page of The Watchman, the essentially bantam size of Jim Chambers’ intellect began to look like more of a liability. He tried to be serious to begin with, but the frolicsome after-dinner raillery that governed his soul would keep breaking through. After dropping one too many clangers, about the amusing properties of landmines or how AIDS was more of a lifestyle emblem than a lethal disease, he had suddenly changed his tune, embarrassed presumably by one or two distinguished words in his ear. Now for the last six months all had been gravitas, post-prandial no longer in jollity, but only in portentousness. Hygienically free from any taint of military service himself, he would compose sonorous paragraphs about bloodshed, the soldier’s heart and the beloved homeland. His style, once seemingly a prose version of opera so light it blended imperceptibly into operetta, now struggled soulfully towards the Wagnerian. Editorial pages were littered with such words as slain, hazard, avenge, extreme jeopardy, misgovernance and danegeld. He had all of Kipling’s prejudices without any of his talent or his bite.

  ‘The thing to remember about Jim’, Stefan said to me as we made our way towards the summer party that The Watchman was holding in its back garden, ‘is that he is entirely Jim. It’s impossible to think of him as James. You’ll see when you meet him that his smile has been stapled on somewhere below the scalp. His democratic Jimness. Call me Jim. Not Jimmy, which might be just a little too demotic, but certainly, most certainly, not James. Good Lord no. Don’t you stand on ceremony with me, sir. Jim’s the name. Honest Jim. And how do I make a living? If you don’t hit me, then I’ll make you laugh. Except now he’s trying to make us cry and for the first time I think I’m beginning to find the bugger genuinely funny.’

  I was introduced to him as we went through. The smile remained constant, but the voice sounded unexpectedly disembodied and uncertain.

  ‘There you are,’ Stefan said as we walked away, ‘like I told you: don’t hit him and he’ll make you laugh.’

  ‘He didn’t make me laugh,’ I said. Stefan stopped and stared at me.

  ‘Then go back and hit him. But no, on second thoughts, better not. He might take some of your stuff on the School of Night and Shakespeare.’ We had been talking in the evenings about our shared interests.

  Stefan went and got us both a gin and tonic.

  ‘The famous Watchman gins,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Might be slightly more gin than tonic. Sip, don’t gargle.’

  The magazine’s fame and popularity were based on a certain maverick inclusiveness. It was simply impossible to know from one week to the next what might be in there. Ex-cabinet ministers slagging off their erstwhile colleagues. Mercenary majors explaining what had really happened in the latest African massacre. A millionaire supermarket owner would be given space to supply an apologia pro vita sua; a sacked television chief would expatiate on why he had not been dumbing down, or for that matter why he had and what a good thing it was too. Articulate eccentrics queued up with their stamped addressed envelopes and their grubby typescripts. If a village in Scotland suddenly discovered that it was in truth the thirteenth tribe of Israel, then The Watchman would be the place to announce the discovery.

  And this was why we were here, since Stefan occasionally wrote a piece about the ups and downs of Hungarian politics which appeared in the journal’s pages. There shuffled next to me a heavy man in what had once been a white suit. I would have thought him to be in his late fifties, though his face was oddly boyish, despite the ravages to which drink had subjected it. He still had a quiff that looked like a memento of the 1950s.

  ‘Tom Silehurst,’ Stefan said with a feint smile, ‘meet Sean Tallow.’ The head jerked forward in a hint of a bow and the greasy hair briefly fleeced his forehead. There was a bruise across his cheek, which was a few days old. He had collided, or fallen, or been belted. He started to talk and I found it very difficult to make out his words. He was not drunk; that word does not begin even to approach the condition. He was one of those who had become so inveterately sodden with alcohol, so drenched right through to the bone with the stuff, that he had developed a manner of speaking which I suspected remained constant whether he was taking a drink at the time or not. He seemed to be speaking of Turkey. I gathered through the bleared swerve of his vowels that he had recently made a trip to Bodrum. There had been a young man whom he had met; they had ridden on horseback together for days at a time. He had wanted the young man to return to England with him, but that had proved impossible. Another sadness in his life. The young man, it transpired, was married.

  ‘You married?’ The words blurred towards me from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied instinctively.

  ‘Always the way,’ he said. ‘Same with my friend Francis. Not gay, either of us. Queer. Always liked straight chaps. My father was an alcoholic, you know. Know what you’re thinking. Not me. I’m a drunk. Different thing altogether.’

  With the word Francis, I registered who I was talking to. He was one of the epic Soho boozers, part art critic, part historian. I had read that he retired for much of the year to his parents’ house in Devon and laboured on his books, which came out with a frequency that certainly suggested industry. Then, once every few months, he took the train to London, became shouting drunk within an hour and attempted to revisit his old haunts, almost all of which, sad to say, had barred him many years before. Then after some gruesome homosexual episode which involved either the police or the hotel management, he would board the train back to Devon and the family home he had to himself now, and settle down once more at his typewriter. As we spoke, or as he attempted to speak and I attempted to understand, the minister presently in charge of trade and industry had been pressed by the crush to within a few feet of us. Unlike everyone else, the politician was in evening dress, his wife beside him bespangled in her gown, both of them seemingly gift-wrapped for the occasion. They held their glasses of wine at an angle that suggested they had no idea what they were for. Silehurst finally focused on the man’s face and some message managed to clamber through the acres of debris that guarded his mind with such a comprehensive baffle. He lurched the few feet necessary to bring himself alongside the minister, only spilling a single wavelet of gin as he went. Then, in what was obviously intended as a whisper but managed to achieve a far greater volume than any of his confidentialities to me, he boomed, ‘Yo
u know what the matter with this country is?’ Minister and wife both winced, smilingly, and finally took a synchronised swig from their glasses. ‘The fucking wankers who run it, that’s what.’ I noticed as I looked down that my drink had been replenished for at least the third time.

  Then the confusion of the crowd leeched from the outside to the inside of my mind. Faces came and went before me: a man who wrote books of obscene verse; an expert on megaliths; a startlingly beautiful young woman who was apparently training to become a trapeze artist in Paris. There was a poet, whose best work over the years couldn’t quite hide the fact that he was an obsequious toad. He had devoted an extraordinary amount of his life to cultivating minor members of the royal family. He appeared to decide whether or not he was crippled, depending on how far he was from the drinks table at any one time. And, finally, a female campanologist from Ealing.

  Then Jim Chambers came over and pointed his smile at me.

  ‘Stefan tells me you’re doing some interesting work. On Shakespeare and … what was the other thing?’

  ‘The School of Night,’ I said.

  ‘What exactly was that?’

  ‘I’m not entirely sure myself. Still working on it.’

  ‘Well, if you do manage to work it out, you could always try us with a piece.’

  My glass kept being refilled and I kept emptying it. And at some time around eleven, as people were leaving, Stefan came over to me and said quietly, ‘I know this is very short notice indeed, Sean, but I wonder if you would mind staying over at Theobald’s Road tonight. It’s just that I have met an old acquaintance and she is unfortunately without accommodation. Maggie will be happy to take you in. I just telephoned her.’