Free The School of Night: A Novel by Alan Wall Page B

Butchered them in their hundreds. Never even expressed a moment’s regret. You might at least make an effort to solidarise with your own coreligionists from darker times, Sean.’ Charlie always did have the last word in any dispute.
    By then Dominique and I were already preparing to leave for London. I had my job at the BBC and Dominique her place at the Tavistock, where she would train to be a therapist. She had arranged for us to live in part of a house in Swiss Cottage, owned by one of her father’s friends. The students from my college year were about to disperse into a gallimaufry of vocations and employments: communications, commerce, education, industry, advertising, banking. Many went into the City, some I suppose into permanent exile and a few on to the dole. There was a rumour going the rounds that Henry Willoughby, whose face seemed to be carved out of lard, his delicate nose like the tip of a fin emerging from it, had joined MI5. Later still I heard he’d gone to Belfast. Intelligence work. Undercover.
    But I nearly forgot. There was one other thing I never did when I was at Oxford and that’s find out what it would have been like in the company of Daniel Pagett, because Dan never actually arrived.
    *   *   *
     
    Dominique was small. Her black hair fell in natural ringlets across her cheeks and forehead. The effect of such an abundance of dark curls against her sun-mottled skin, and her delicately hooked nose, reminded me of a painting I’d once seen. Maybe of a madonna, but a madonna who was a street girl or a peasant. Just possibly, it might have been a courtesan, but it was almost certainly fifteenth-century Italian, though Dominique, as she soon informed me, was twentieth-century Anglo-French.
    She was so light that with one hand round her shoulders and the other in the small of her back I could lift her momentarily off the bed, before we both fell again upon one another. Her jackknifed legs had the delicacy of a grasshopper’s when they ankled my thighs. On our second night together, I lavished my tongue on her breasts until they glistened with moisture in the dark.
    ‘Don’t drown me,’ she said laughing and I fell away then, all desire abolished. I lay on my back and explained about my mother. She listened in attentive silence, then mounted me. Her tongue caressed and queried what had suddenly turned into a whole world of flesh.
    ‘You can drown me, Dominique,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t mind drowning.’ A salt tide surges into the fresh, mingles until slack water. In my memory now our bodies are fish-white under the night’s surface where soft doors had opened. I had entered the soft doors at last and no part of me felt the same any more. Inside her, in the dark, the curse of self-loathing had finally been lifted. Was that possible? Until the morning light, anyway. But then I already preferred the darkness.
    She was fascinated by my early years, and made me tell the story of them over and over again. I couldn’t help feeling that notes were being made, stealthily, in the gaps between our words. I had the curious feeling, even then, that I might be providing evidence against myself.
    Tiny as she was, she was the most self-possessed woman I had ever met, and unlike so many people who start to study psychology, she appeared to be in no need of immediate psychiatric care herself. Her intonations were cultured enough but with none of the stridency of Becky Southgate, so I felt unthreatened by them; felt in fact the contrary. Whenever Dominique spoke, in a voice that was lower than her frame would have led you to suspect, I felt hushed into her confidence, convinced by her authority and happy to accept it. She had taken control of my anxiety. I seldom disagreed with her about anything. I think she might have liked that. You could get on very well with Dominique as long as you didn’t disagree with her.

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    And here’s the reason Dan never turned up at Oxford: Daniel Pagett Senior, out