The School of Night: A Novel by Wall Alan

Author:Wall, Alan [Wall, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2003-05-06T20:00:00+00:00

10

If I was working my shifts, then there was no problem. Stefan might ask me to leave a little earlier in the evening than usual. I even occasionally saw one of them coming in as I went out. They always looked my age or younger. It was when I wasn’t working that it started to become tiresome. Whether it was merely the monthly cycles of his libido, or simply the good fortune fate intermittently brought his way, there were times when I had to spend two, even occasionally three, nights at Dalrymple House.

‘Stefan has been busy entertaining this week, hasn’t he?’ Maggie would say to me. She knew things about him I didn’t. She spent a lot of money on her hair and lavished her face with daily make-up. I couldn’t help wondering if, some years before … But no, I wasn’t going to start speculating on Stefan’s love life. That way madness lay. It was hard enough keeping up with his contemporary lovers without trying to archive the historic ones. There was a portable television set in the corner of the tiny room where Maggie always put me. I only switched it on once, to see the features of Gus Markus, Australian commentator and wit. I stared at the screen for a moment and marvelled at the extent to which he had become the robotic mannikin of his own slickness. His permanent wry smile had hardened into a mask, a passport now for meeting celebrities. His little eyes gleamed with the brilliance of proof coins and I quickly switched the television off again. And left it off.

So I would go out more and more often; to the pubs round about, the sandwich bars, the pizza restaurants, even to Davenant’s. I would read my books and make notes in their margins, sitting in a corner of the Plough or the Museum Tavern rather than go back to the solitary cell of Dalrymple House. Maggie had offered to make me dinner some time, but I didn’t take up her invitation. Stefan had asked me never to return to the flat, after one of his evenings of entertainment, before ten in the morning, to allow for any delayed departures. When I arrived, there was always a trace of perfume in the air and it always seemed to be a different scent from the last one.

I had never done so much research, not even while living with Dominique, but I suppose it was really a relief, all the same, when Dan turned up on that Saturday evening. I had been standing looking at a map of the Elizabethan capital which Stefan had hung on his wall. I had only just noticed the date: 1593. A plague year. Back then you could have walked within the liberties of London and seen the ravaged bodies proliferating under hedges or in the cages where they were often fastened, sometimes three at a time. Plague years meant the closure of the theatres, so emblems shifted from stage

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