The School of Night: A Novel
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Authors: Alan Wall
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Contents
To Monsignor George Tancred
lifter of burdens
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following for their help:
Bob Bass, Elizabeth Cook, David Elliott, Marius Kociejowski, Anita Money, W.S. Milne and Bernard Sharratt.
Thanks to Ann Denham for everything.
Philip Byrne was, as always, invaluable for his detailed critique, and for his friendship through difficult times.
Anthony Rudolf kindly shared with me his insider knowledge and much else besides.
Ray Leach restored first my house and then my good humour.
David Rees employed his bibliographic know-how on my behalf.
Thanks to Mike Goldmark and Fiona for their heartening response, and for the hospitality at Uppingham.
I am grateful, as ever, to the staff of the London Library for their assistance.
I would like to thank Eileen Gunn and the Royal Literary Fund for their generous support.
Lastly, but a long way from least, my agent Gill Coleridge and my publisher Geoff Mulligan supplied more active solidarity over the last year than any reasonable writer could normally hope for. The final shape of this book owes much to both of them. Not forgetting Lucy Luck and her mighty labours on my behalf.
Blessings on all their heads.
The oddest thing about the School of Night is the irresolvable effect it produces in regard to memory and analysis, one not dissimilar to that of the synoptic gospels, and which might be described thus: how something so luminous in its brilliance, its sheer intensity of life, is in all crucial respects neither provable nor disprovable, but must remain a matter as much for faith as science.
THOMAS BRIDEWELL
,
Ralegh’s Secret Circle
(1926)
The hue of dungeons, and the School of Night
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Part One
Come to this house of mourning, serve the Night
GEORGE CHAPMAN
,
The Shadow of Night
1
Five days ago I stole the Hariot Notebooks. From the university library where they had been put on display. Two buckram-covered volumes, only recently discovered, in an archive not long before acquired. Thomas Hariot was the scientist of genius who spent much of his life providing Walter Ralegh with intellectual companionship in the Tower of London, but because he does not currently have the fame he deserves there wasn’t much security in the room, merely one of those wooden cabinets with a slanted glass top and a Victorian lock, which was more decorative than it was secure.
I’d come to see the notebooks the week before. I knew Hariot’s script well enough to be able to transcribe what was written on the four pages displayed, though the enciphered passages were as unintelligible to me then as they were to everyone else. Only once I’d arrived home and spent a day going through the transcription with my code books did I realise what I was looking at. Even then, it wasn’t until I’d returned from my last trip to see Daniel Pagett that I sat down and, for the first time in my life, planned a crime. What I had deciphered, you see, in amongst the cryptic stresses and inversions, the algebraic signs and equations, was a single phrase, ‘the School of Night’. I didn’t really need to look since I knew the passage more or less by heart, but still I took down my old copy of Thomas Bridewell from the shelf and flicked through its chapters until I came to the paragraph I had marked twenty years before:
We have only ever located one reference to the School of Night, and that is in Shakespeare’s play,
Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The discovery of another, which might confirm the speculations constituting this little book, would be something of an event in the world of literary and historical scholarship.
I still find myself asking one question: would I have found the courage to carry out the crime I’d planned if Dan hadn’t tempted and taunted me in? The following morning I went out and bought the heavy screwdriver. (But it was always my father who did all the stealing in our family, so why did I do it? What pushed me over to the wrong side of the law, after a whole lifetime spent so timidly obeying it?)
Five days ago I stole the Hariot Notebooks; the evening before, Daniel Pagett had died. Daniel, who was not my brother, and yet was the nearest thing to a brother I have ever had. Did his death unhinge me? I don’t feel unhinged. If anything, my mind for this last week has brightened with unexpected clarity. My thoughts have grown sudden – electric eels signing their gloomy element with rapid and sinuous traces. The blackness in my heart, that fetid ditch of sorrow and suspicion, is now being burnt away. I think I might be seeing the light at last, though it’s certainly taken long enough. I’ve spent most of my life in the shadows; that’s where I’d chosen to live.
* * *
Dan’s final words are buzzing still in my head. I am now a criminal. The present has not yet noticed, though the past is in a mighty uproar: one of its beloved crew has been rescued at last from the salt of oblivion, from four centuries of incomprehension and obscurity. The testimony of Thomas Hariot is now being resurrected through a loving act of theft.
I don’t often smile these days, but I can’t help smiling briefly at my location. Here I am in a tower, looking down on moving water. I can’t see it, of course, in the anthracite darkness out there, but I can hear it. The sea is a medley of turmoil and patience, washing away mountains, swallowing its guests in fluent mouthfuls. I am here because later today, once the dark makes way for dawn, Daniel Pagett will be taken from this place to a furnace and burnt. Daniel Pagett, my friend Dan. Only at night are heavenly bodies at their brightest, even as they fall. That was the wisdom of the School of Night.
How I wish I could start at the beginning, then I might write a book as memorable as Dan’s life. But I can’t start at the beginning because I don’t know where it is. Anyway, if twenty years spent editing news for the BBC taught me anything, it is that the beginning of any story is simply wherever you start to tell it. And the end comes (or could you still be listening, Dan?) when you run out of breath. So I think of this, which is, I suppose, a kind of beginning. Two boys, both twelve years old. An asphalt playground, severely slanted because the school is built on a steep hill outside town. The boys know little of each other except names. Their homes are in the same town, but one of them (Sean Tallow, me) lives with his grandparents on a council estate, and the other (Daniel Pagett) lives with his mother and father in a detached millstone-grit house on the other side of town. This is in the north of England where Dan’s father owns a chain of grocery stores called Pagett’s General, thereby indicating a precise economic and social gap that could be measured in inches with a pair of steel callipers; reason enough in itself for the pair of us to keep our distance.
On this particular day my constant tormentor, Mark Scully, has decided to make a feast of my fear. Not content with the usual kick in the shins and slap round the back of the head, his persecution is growing noisy and a crowd is gathering. He jabs sharply with his right fist into my mouth and then follows with a straight hard punch. As that one lands, the bone tenting the flesh of my nose thrills with electricity; tears scald my eyes. The boys are shouting, ‘Hit him, Tallow, hit him.’ I don’t, though. I could never bring myself to hit anybody, one of the reasons I’d become such a focus of attention in the first place. Scully is growing enthusiastic for his work now and a grin fills his over-large face as he moves in for the finale. He taunts over and over again. ‘Tallow’s dad’s a tealeaf, Tallow’s dad’s a tealeaf.’ He stinks of victory, and I am merely praying that this humiliation might be over and done with quickly when something unexpected happens. A figure muscles through the swaying ring of spectators – Daniel Pagett. He pushes me away, squares up to Scully and belts him hard in the gut. Astonished, Scully buckles and as he comes back up for air, Daniel hits him in the face, first with one fist then the other. Thud thud thud as Scully lets out a whimper, a cry for mercy, but by now the little crowd has sensed the fall of a playground tyrant and they start spitting at him as he reels and stumbles. Daniel lands a couple more blows, then leaves it to the other boys to spit, copiously and accurately, until Mark Scully is covered from head to foot in great gobbings of phlegm and saliva. A whistle blows, everyone runs except for Scully, bent over in the corner by the railings, howling in the invisible tunnel of his grief now that the end of his reign has at last arrived. His fingers are frantically raking through the gluey substance his clothes are smeared with as the teacher walks quickly towards him, but the rest of the boys have already scattered.
And that evening, when I mounted the school bus and saw the vacant seat next to Daniel Pagett, I went and sat down. Not a word passed between us all the way into town, but before he stood up to get off at his stop in the centre, Daniel breathed on the windowpane and wrote a single word. It was already fading, leaving only
ICKEN
but I didn’t have much doubt that the vanished first letters had had been a
C
and an
H.
That was how we met nearly thirty years ago. I looked courage in the face and realised it had a name. Now it is about to become no more than memory and ashes, buried in a little graveyard by the sea, leaving me here inscribing that name painstakingly on the glass, then watching it fade as the mist of my breath disappears. Daniel. Daniel Pagett. Dear dead Dan.