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

wedding.’
    The following morning, after Dominique had driven me up to the house, I stood outside in the garden alone with Dan. We were both wearing our morning suits and buttonholes, both holding our top hats in our hands. Dan turned to me and said, ‘What am I doing, Sean? Can you tell me what it is I’m doing this morning?’
    ‘You’re marrying Sally,’ I said, ‘the assistant librarian from the seventh floor.’ But he just stared at me as though he couldn’t understand the words, as though some letters on a misted glass were already disappearing.
    Then came the ceremony, with its life-turning questions and answers. When the time for communion came, I went up to the rail and took it. And as I returned to my pew and knelt to pray, I felt Dominique’s incredulous eyes upon me.
    ‘You really do still believe in all that mumbo-jumbo, don’t you?’ she said afterwards. I didn’t get the impression Dominique was enjoying this wedding much.
    ‘Hocus-pocus would be better.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘It was a Jacobean trickster’s parody of the words of consecration in Latin. Hoc est corpus. Became the classic instance of all forms of chicanery. Hocus pocus, tontus talontus, vade celeriter jubeo. How to pull the wool over your eyes. The sheer non-sense of transubstantiation. The cant of smoke-sellers and sorcerers.’
    ‘What a lot of pointless things you know, Sean. And they all seem to go back centuries. One day you must join us all in the present; employ that intellect of yours on learning something useful.’
    ‘Suss out the transference, you mean? Abreaction; sublimation. Get down to the nitty-gritty of existence, so I too might heal the sick and make the halt and the lame walk once more? Then we could solve each other’s psyches and balance up our respective souls’ equations. To each his own hocus-pocus, that’s what I say, Dominique. At least I reserve all my credulity for my religion.’ She let go of my hand and I realised that I’d grown a little crosser with her analytic manner over the previous year than I’d realised.
    At the reception I told the story of how Dan and I had first met, but it somehow didn’t come across as amusingly as I’d intended, particularly the sequence on the bus. I had meant it to be droll, but instead it sounded savage. Dan’s mother, presumably as a simultaneous gesture towards her dead spouse and her nuptial son, was wearing a curious two-piece outfit, funereal blue-black alternating with bridal white. My eye was drawn continually to its magpie sheen. She emitted a sob at the ‘I will’s’ but I couldn’t help noticing, having perhaps taken too close a look, that her face powder and eyeliner were entirely unirrigated by anything resembling a tear. Bone dry.
    Before we left I asked Dan where he and Sally were planning on living.
    ‘At home,’ he said. ‘It’s big enough.’
    ‘With your mother?’ My tone probably registered spontaneous incredulity. He stared at me in silence for the second time that day.
    ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘With my mother. It was one of the conditions.’
    ‘Conditions, Dan?’
    ‘You don’t have any conditions in your life, do you, Sean?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then why exactly were you so concerned about the state of mind of little Lady Muck in there, when I drove you back from the pub yesterday?’
    *   *   *
     
    That night in our hotel Dominique and I soaked the bedsheets with our sweat, as I thought continually of Sally and her soft doors. Forbidden entry now to everyone but Dan. Dominique’s thighs were shorter and thinner, her breasts smaller. And the way she sighed had an intonation scented elsewhere and otherwise. Don’t get me wrong: I was in love with Dominique all right, for all the irritation I felt at her attempts to decode me. I was grateful to be still permitted entry, whenever I was. It had simply never occurred to me, despite the lyricism of all those songs and poems, that my body could be so sweetly sheathed and