The School of Night: A Novel Read online

  In the end-of-year examinations when we were fifteen, Daniel Pagett and I shared first and second place in a number of subjects. This astonished everyone, but no one as much as me. Dan and I still didn’t speak though, and if I closed my eyes I could always see his finger writing the word CHICKEN on that school bus window. But then Mr Crawley formed his little group.

  There was a question often in my mind in those years and it was this: can you be popular and yet have no friends? This seemed to be the case with Daniel. Everyone thought highly of him (with the possible exception of Mark Scully) but he was close to no one. In the days when only policemen and soldiers had short hair, Dan’s was cropped. Its spiky bristle formed an appropriate thatch above his large brown eyes. His nose was firm and secure, not like mine, which was thin and fragile, almost inviting someone to come along and break it. Daniel didn’t seem to blink much either and his beard, which arrived early, was dark. When mine came years later at university it was fair and furry, hardly worth the trouble of a razor. Dan was one of those boys who seemed ready for the world from the word go; after that he simply grew readier and readier. And yet even when he was smiling, his full-fleshed lips turned down at the edges with a permanent hint of contempt.

  Crawley’s subject was history. History with him was an unceasing obsession, and it was Crawley’s group that finally brought Dan and me together. Its purpose was to get people into Oxford, Crawley’s old university. Each Friday night during term he held a seminar at his house, which was half a mile away from the school. One of the boys would read out an essay and the others would be expected to comment upon it intelligently. We had been chosen for signs of maverick intelligence, little rogue sparks flying unexpectedly from the steady flame of the curriculum. Increasingly Crawley came to focus his attention on Daniel and me, and increasingly I found myself speaking, over a whole variety of subjects, words which had leeched into me from my hungry reading. Sometimes I even startled myself with how precise and articulate my working-class tongue was becoming. And each Friday night, as we left Crawley’s little house, Dan and I would be carrying more borrowed books in our arms than all the others put together. Dan had taken to listening carefully whenever I spoke and then at last he started talking too. I can still remember that day as clearly as any in my life. It seemed I had been forgiven at last for my lack of physical courage; that the new-found clarity of my thoughts might make up in some way for the incoherent fog where all my actions disappeared. Or was Dan merely curious to know who and what I was? Whatever the reason, he spoke.

  ‘Would you like to go fishing tomorrow, Sean?’

  * * *

  The next day we sat for the first time on that towpath, waiting for something under the water’s dark surface to make contact.

  3

  Four decades of cowardice: can I now be really shaking free of it? Dan had put the matter with characteristic pungency: what some might have called my resignation, my patience in the face of all misfortune and adversity, he called cowardice. By which he meant that I accepted whatever life put in front of me without demur. I never answered reality back. I did not engage in that tough quarrel with the given that the Greeks called dialectics. I had learnt to put it differently: I never tried to push against the river. But the first truly dialectical manoeuvre of my life was undoubtedly the theft I committed the day after Daniel died. At long last it seemed I was reclaiming my identity, following in my absent father’s footsteps.

  I can see the navigation lights of a boat out there, a luminous smear like a snail’s progress across the dark and shifting acres. I can’t fathom any clues as to what happens next though, in the sea’s traffic and the wind’s bluster. Who else but Daniel Pagett could pursue me like this from the grave? And he’s not yet in the grave. I think he is here now, in this tower. Those might even be his thoughts entering the woman who sleeps alone downstairs. Dan’s last woman. His last woman and his first. The line I’ve just decoded in the Hariot Notebooks is this:

  Sir Walter said today: Is that the sin against time then, to lament it can never run backwards?

  When Dan finally came home with me, I felt uneasy about letting him in. I had never been to his house, but I’d heard enough about his very different circumstances. And it was true that, on entering my grandparents’ small and crowded front room, he looked about him initially as an anthropologist might on discovering an unknown tribe, but it hadn’t taken long for him to make himself comfortable. Very comfortable.

  ‘I think I’ll come to Blackpool with you this year,’ he said one day as we walked through town.

  ‘But you haven’t been invited.’

  ‘Get me invited, then, Sean, or what would be the point of keeping you in service?’ In saying this, he placed a little more emphasis than usual upon another quality that distinguished him from those about him: how nicely spoken he was, in a region where the pronunciation of an aitch was thought by most to be a waste of breath.

  Two months later we sat in Yates’s Wine Lodge as my grandmother told stories. I’d already heard them all at least twice, but for Dan they were undiscovered country. She was talking of some of my grandfather’s more notorious misfortunes while out drinking.

  ‘One Saturday night he was so blotto he didn’t realise how thick the fog was until he’d left the pub. He knew his way all right, but the drink must have affected his compass. He made straight for Horton Park Pond. And fell in. Well, the last time anybody saw anything alive in there was before the war, but there’s no shortage of slime. In fact, come to think of it, there’s a lot more slime than there is water these days.’ My grandfather had returned to the table with drinks from the bar. He gave his wife a sceptical look, his green eyes suddenly piercingly precise. Despite his years of boozing, working on the bins had kept him lean.

  ‘Not that one again,’ he said. She shook her white head at him, though it shook slightly all the time by that stage.

  ‘You go outside, you, if you don’t want to hear. Anyway, he got himself out of the pond finally, but he brought half the slime with him. He was covered from head to foot, and he’d left his keys in there for good measure. He managed to get back to our house, though God knows how, and started banging on the door. I went down and looked out through the letter box. All I saw was a green man and I thought, he’s not coming in here, whoever he is. He ended up sleeping on the doorstep, though he’d done that before.

  ‘In the morning I took out a bucket of water and cleaned him down, and there he was, good as new.’

  ‘Nearly died of bloody pneumonia,’ the old man said, though without apparent rancour.

  Each day we walked along piers, pressed coins into slot machines, ate hot dogs, hamburgers, candyfloss and toffee apples, drank beer then fell asleep swiftly on the beach with the gritty tang of hot sand beneath our skin. There were still some mill girls about in those days, even if their skirts no longer billowed out like hybrid roses, as they’d once been framed in Bert Hardy’s famous Brownie. Blackpool is the least liminal of any seaside town – its only lethal edge is the one between the workday and the holiday. Towards the end of the week, Dan and I set off alone to the South Shore. Within an hour, Dan had picked up two girls. I say he had because I had nothing to do with the operation and was convinced that it was Dan they were both after anyway, even the one who linked her arm through mine later as we walked along the promenade. I had been trying to remember how much it would cost for us all to have a ride on top of one of the open-air trams that were clanging past. Not that there was any money left in my pocket, but there still seemed to be plenty in Dan’s.

  ‘Are you here with your parents?’ said the blonde one, Jane, who was now holding Dan’s hand.

  ‘No,’ he said gravely, ‘no, you see, Sean and I are orphans.’ My girl, Susan, giggled at this, and after sticking her tongue energetically into her ice-cream cornet she said to him, ‘You’re not an orphan.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not?’

  ‘I just know, that’s all.’ She had start
ed lavishing her tongue once more on her whipped vanilla. Dan stopped dead and we all came to a ragged standstill around him. He stepped in front of my new companion and squared up to her as he had once squared up to Mark Scully in the playground. I thought for a moment he was going to hit her.

  ‘Why do you eat ice cream all the time, love?’ he said, as she continued giggling. ‘Is it to make your tits bigger? It’s working anyhow. Soon you’ll be able to put them both in your mouth.’ Susan silently unlinked her arm from mine, just as I was growing used to the freckled warmth of it, and said to Jane, ‘Come on.’

  So that was the end of our holiday romance. In bed later it struck me how I wanted to be Daniel Pagett a little less than I had at any time since first setting eyes on him. Only a fraction maybe, but that was the first unit of subtraction in my esteem. Next day I brought the subject up.

  ‘Why did you have to talk to her like that? She only said you weren’t an orphan.’

  ‘How could she know?’

  ‘But you’re not.’

  ‘How do you know? Maybe I’m a changeling.’ We had been studying Jacobean drama. I spent the next minute or two pondering the fact that since I’d never met either of his parents, for all I knew, maybe he was.

  When we arrived back home my grandfather’s roses were splashed all over his wall, red, yellow and white ones; they had flared into life while no one was looking.

  4

  Nothing much is flaring into life out there tonight, though I suppose the eating and the being-eaten continue apace. I find myself reading over and over again these litanies of names. Could I be the first person to understand them since Hariot wrote them down? Here are the definitive lists of the Elizabethan illuminati, who felt the time had come to get to the heart of things; who wanted to know what kept the stars shining and the skies dark. Even to think some of their thoughts, and then utter them, was a criminal act.

  How hard I seem to be finding it to keep my mind off dead Elizabethans, while Dan, who is now as dead as any of them, keeps flicking in and out of this room. It’s as though he’s not decided yet whether it is really time for him to go. Maybe the gravitational force of a lifetime’s memories is holding him here a little while longer. Hariot once said he felt Ralegh’s presence, his physical presence, circling around him for weeks after the axe had fallen.

  My grandparents’ red-brick terraced house was provided courtesy of the city council. I’d been born there, with the local midwife in attendance. My grandfather was a dustman and even though he was the driver, he prided himself on sharing all the work, hoisting bins on to the leather patch on his shoulder and ditching the dribbling contents into the van’s stinking maw. In those days there were no lorries with cantilevered mouths to crunch and gobble the garbage. He drove a light brown Karrier Bantam. Each side of the vehicle had three convex metal doors that slid open and shut, and the refuse was tipped in with a smelly clatter. Then on to the next point down the lane, the opening of another narrow snicket, where the bent and battered bins would stand askew in ragged rows along the cobbles.

  During the war he had been a driver in India and, although he never saw combat, he had been torpedoed twice on his way out there and watched his best friend dying slowly in the water. He had driven for thousands of miles on India’s high hills, had his arms and chest tattooed with tigers, elephants and snakes in purple and vermilion, sampled the Asiatic beers and developed a lifelong aversion to the smell of curry. My grandmother said that after he was demobbed he was so thin, so dark-skinned and so tattooed, she had nearly closed the door in his face after his years away. Only when he spoke did she realise.

  On the fireplace stood a row of elephants, their black teak and ivory tusks brought back with him from the subcontinent. He would sit in his armchair in the evening, smoking and reading the racing pages while Daniel and I debated Crawley’s assignments, spoke of history, of peace and conflict, of the hot war and the cold, while my grandmother put the kettle on. By then we had already given up on fishing. Despite so many dead hours at the side of the canal, and whole days spent attending the seething menace of the perch-crammed reservoir, the pike had eluded us. In the local museum, mounted in a glass cabinet on the wall, its enormous eyes still stared out with an intelligent promise of ferocity. It seemed calm enough, only waiting for the return of its watery kingdom. Don’t ask me why I always found the sight of its pale belly so repellent.

  The reason I lived with my grandparents was simple: my mother had managed to vanish from my life by lying in the bath in midwinter and having the electric heater fall from the shelf above into the soapy water. Death had been instantaneous. Given how cold that bathroom could be and the jungle-mist of condensation moistening the stone walls whenever you turned on the hot-water tap, her need to warm the place is easily explained. But there was always a rumour, one that never entirely disappeared, that my mother had simply had enough and called it a day a little earlier than most. Could she really have abandoned me like that, before I’d grown to the size of a decent dog? There would have been a ready explanation if she had.

  My father, you see, was a petty criminal of spectacular ineptitude. A single example of his crimes should be sufficient to capture the flavour of the man. In one of his rare intervals of non-imprisonment, he announced that he had acquired a job as a redcoat at Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness. This was so implausible an occupation for him that everyone assumed it was merely a euphemism for low-grade criminal activity further afield. But he was employed as a redcoat, jollying along the campers to sing in strangled voices out of their blushes. However, the requirements of ceaseless good humour and early rising must have reminded him too much of his national service, thus prompting his second desertion. And as he made his way cross-country, he dropped off at various shops and off-licences to steal his basic provisions – dressed all the while in his hunting-red jacket. By the time he arrived back at the house where I now lived with my grandparents, he had slept rough so often that the jacket was punctured and torn in several places. He might as well have mailed the police his itinerary. They arrived a few hours after he did, while he was proudly presenting photographs of himself by the seashore. My grandmother saw them opening the gate and spoke to her son-in-law gently.

  ‘You’d better get your things, love; looks like they’ve come for you again.’

  The police could hardly keep a straight face as they booked him. My grandparents had been ashamed. Years later they could still barely bring themselves to speak of it.

  Back he had gone once more to Armley, that squat stone fortress in Leeds with the dirty barred windows. His sentence this time was thought by some to be excessively long, given that he was such a no-hoper as a villain, but at least he was well used to the place by then. He managed to instil in me a contempt for, and a sickening fear of, the life of crime. How curious then, to think that crime’s the life I’ve finally chosen.

  5

  My training has been as a historian and during these bleak hours now on this bleak night I find myself wondering if my apprenticeship might have been an utter waste of time. I’ve been landed at last with this solitary task: to become the biographer of Daniel Pagett, archivist of his triumphs and tantrums, his loves and hates, his melancholy and his laughter, and I’m far from sure I’m up to the job. I fear I may lack faith, not to mention intermittent and equivalent shortfalls of hope and charity.

  The hook first went into me one evening at Crawley’s, the hook from which I’ve dangled ever since. I suppose the reason so many people become obsessed with the writings of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans is simple enough: they seem to have more to say to the present than the present can intelligently say to itself. I run my hand gently along the spine of one of the Hariot Notebooks. The secrets I’ve been searching for all my life are contained inside them, enciphered and displaced in code though they may be.

  Crawley had a little astrolabe on his fireplace and was fond of taking it down, turning it over in his hands and talking about its rela
tion to the stars.

  ‘It works pretty well, whether you believe in Ptolemy or Copernicus,’ he would say. ‘Given its date, there’s a fair chance that it was used by people who moved from believing one to believing the other. Moved in their heads, that is. The stars and planets all carried on as before and I doubt the navigation improved much as a result. It is a curious thing about the paradigm, that it can be utterly mistaken and yet generate so much close and detailed observation as to remain extremely useful.

  ‘Now you, Sean, have effectively said that our signature, our character, is always to be found in our expressions; that anything read scrupulously enough, with sufficient intelligence, must to some extent reveal the nature of its creator. You do believe that, don’t you? You think the impersonality of the artist, for example, is a myth.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then read this page to us, and tell us what you deduce from the words about the author.’ He handed me a copy of The Tempest, open at a page in Act One, and I read out the following:

  Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me

  From mine own library with volumes that

  I prize above my dukedom.

  MIRANDA: Would I might

  But ever see that man!

  PROSPERO: Now I arise:

  Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.

  Here in this island we arriv’d; and here

  Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit