The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  The ad spoke about a printing firm in Wandsworth, which was looking for someone well educated and presentable, who must also have a car and a clean driving licence. Previous experience in the business preferred but not essential. I posted my letter requesting an interview that evening. And the next Monday I drove over there.

  As you make your way out of the centre of Wandsworth along Garratt Lane, there is a scatter of industrial buildings by the edge of the tiny River Wandle. One of these, built sometime in the 1920s in a parochial version of the International Style, was Shipley’s Print Group. The whitewash on its walls had long turned to grey, and the yellow paint of its metal window frames was peeling at the same slow, consistent rate throughout. I parked my ageing green MG at the edge of the courtyard, and went in to be interviewed. Opposite the entrance area was a full-length mirror, and I stopped to examine myself. At five foot ten and a half, I was trim, muscly but trim, my black hair cropped to my temples, my chin blue from the scraping of the razor’s edge, my face solid and serious, no hint of weakness about it. I had inherited my father’s professional brown eyes, and square-set features. And my suit was neatly pressed, my black shoes brilliant with polish: I had always taken a certain pride in my appearance.

  Andrew Cavendish-Porter was about my height, but his suit was a lot more expensive. His light brown hair was brushed back from his forehead and had started to thin. His jowls were dark and heavy and I could see the beginning of a paunch which even his expensive tailoring could not entirely disguise. But the scowl of care and concern on his face vanished suddenly as he treated me to his smile. It was a smile that suggested his bank account was in a lot better shape than mine. His wide grey eyes were almost unnerving in their unblinking calm. His voice was low and soothing and within minutes he was explaining that he was forming a new division within the company for a particular area of specialisation that he had in mind, and needed initially a sales rep who could probably soon be promoted to an account manager, assuming all worked out as he hoped. I wasn’t at all sure of the difference between these job descriptions, but I nodded intelligently, showed enthusiasm and alacrity, expressed my particular interest in the world of printing. In short I played the applicant to perfection and was told the following week that I’d been given the job.

  Outside on the tarmac forecourt, Andrew shook my hand and stared at my MG.

  ‘That yours, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘First car I ever had.’

  I pointed in turn to the classic Jaguar parked some way off in the corner. ‘Would that be yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said happily. ‘One of them anyway.’

  * * *

  And so I became a sales rep for the Shipley Print Group, driving up and down motorways in my car, and taking great care to keep all my petrol receipts. I picked things up quickly. My patter about the particular benefits the company afforded was soon as impressive as anyone else’s. And Andrew Cavendish-Porter was as good as his word. Within a year I was an account manager, and six months later my MG was replaced by a company car, a BMW. I bought a flat in Battersea along Prince of Wales Drive. This was at the very edge of the park and on the other side, across the river, was the house of Andrew Cavendish-Porter and his wife Helena. As for academic life, I didn’t miss it much. After all, I had my books and my music, women who occasionally came and always went, and I was paid for things I had learnt how to do with some competence. I found the neatness of this satisfying, after the interminable open-endedness and scatter of energies up at Leeds University.

  The area of specialisation on which Andrew and I were exercising our joint intelligence was art: art prints, art calendars, art diaries, art cards. I spent half of my time scouting around galleries of one sort or another, where, as we put it to the curators, the full potential of their exhibits was not being realised via their repro product line. I would turn up and explain the various packages we could arrange to print for them, and the irresistibly competitive prices we offered for the service. Andrew had taken the precaution of giving one of the major London galleries such exceptionally keen prices (he worked at a loss to hold the account) that he kept the business year in, year out. But it was certainly impressive when I pulled out their catalogues and calendars. You could almost see the publication manager’s thoughts written right across his face as he considered: well, if it’s good enough for them …

  It wasn’t a bad life by any means. I certainly preferred it to university, though I missed my climbing companions, but it was a relief simply to do a job and see it finished. Andrew and I got on well enough, but he was always anxious for more business, however much we had. Andrew was no small-time Charlie, as I soon realised. And he started to talk one day about going abroad to find the new accounts he was after. Then he discovered I lived in Prince of Wales Drive and said, ‘But that’s only ten minutes away from us. We’re in Oakley Street over the other side of the river. You must come to dinner and we can start to talk about the future. We’ve already made a success of the present.’

  That was how I began to visit the house of Andrew Cavendish-Porter and his wife Helena.

  Helena was so gaunt that it almost stopped her being beautiful – almost, but not quite. She was a good inch taller than I was, and you could make out the shape of the bones in her face. Her eyes were such a dark shade of brown that in the candlelight they looked as black as her hair, which fell luxuriantly about her skinny shoulders. She never seemed to do more than peck at her food, though she provided a generous enough meal for her guests, while Andrew meanwhile set forth his views, whatever the topic of conversation might be. Andrew was undoubtedly afflicted with certainty. He never wavered in his profound conviction that if he believed something to be true, it must therefore be indisputable on any rational assessment.

  I suppose I’d abandoned the last of my certainties when I abandoned Rome, so it’s possible that Andrew filled a gap for me. And since he made me a director of the company, and doubled my salary, I wasn’t complaining. I never could entirely understand the logic of his move into Europe, but I wasn’t about to pass up the prospect of motoring through Italy and France and looking at some of the world’s great paintings.

  One day Andrew saw me staring at his other car, an Austin Healey 3000 he kept parked outside his house, and smiled.

  ‘Do you want it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said without hesitation. ‘Why, can I have it?’

  ‘It’s yours. I’ll sell it to the company next week. I’ll take the BMW instead. Suit me better for the European trips.’

  Andrew offered such sharp prices, including transportation, that some of the foreign museums simply couldn’t refuse. In fact the prices weren’t so much keen as positively anxious. I began to wonder what my role was during these trips, apart from being Andrew’s companion, because his figures didn’t add up to me, so I didn’t have much to say to those foreign curators. I simply couldn’t see how he could make any profit on these jobs, given the cost of shipping the stuff over from England. But he seemed happy enough with it all, so who was I to complain? And he introduced me to some of the clubs he frequented, scattered about the continent. These offered a somewhat specialised service. Along with the expensive drink and the expensive food, there was also expensive sex.

  It must sound odd but, having given up the priesthood at least partly because of my inability to remain chaste, I now lived a largely celibate existence. There had been Jane in Leeds, of course, and occasionally these days I would see someone for a while, but never for very long, and none of them ever held the key to my flat. I always wanted to make sure I could retreat into my solitude at the end of the week, with everything in its place, exactly where I had left it. It was pleasant sometimes to have someone to share my weekend drives, particularly when the weather was fine in the summer and I could take the hood down on the Healey. One of these female companions of mine had said to me, smiling, but only just, ‘You don’t really need a girlfriend, Chris. Just something to fill up your passen
ger seat.’ So perhaps Andrew’s clubs suited me in my way as much as they evidently suited him in his. It was brief, hygienic and non-committal. Only once did I hear the echo in my mind of the words of my old confessor in Rome, who had looked at me sadly on a rainy Italian afternoon when I had gone to him to be shriven, and had said, ‘Some men seek celibacy only through fear of female affection and fecundity, imagining that to be a vocation, when it is no more than a sin.’ I could still hear the sound of the rain hammering on the window pane, and still see the infinite sadness of the old priest’s expression. It was not long after that I had packed it all in and gone to Leeds.

  These trips abroad involved Andrew and myself in mutual complicity. We were roped together now by our knowledge of one another. When anyone else asked us about our journeys overseas, an invisible wink would pass between us. We knew something the others couldn’t know. And this knowledge that we shared also excluded Andrew’s wife. In one sense I was closer to his heart than she was. I went over there to dinner more and more often.

  Things between them were not as I had first supposed. Seeing her fragile, emaciated beauty, and the twitching unstillness of her hands and face, I had assumed that Andrew had taken her on in his life, much as he had taken me on, as though sprinkling his largesse like holy water over those about him. As though he had employed us both, in short. But as they relaxed in front of me, and grew ever more confident in their confidences, I began to realise how I had misconstrued it all.

  For one thing, I started to realise that the impression Andrew gave of great wealth was insubstantial. He was in his own phrase, a bit levered at the present moment, or as anyone else would have put it, deeply in debt. Andrew presented this as a sign of his economic courage, what he called his spunk, but Helena had begun to see it all differently. In fact, I came to feel that Helena’s physical gauntness was no more than an outward expression of the continual shrivelling of the spirit within. I had looked at the photographs of her on the mantelpiece when I was alone in the room, and that figure was a lot less thin and a lot more ready to smile than her current incarnation. Helena Cavendish-Porter had come to feel that she had not only married beneath herself, but had compounded the situation by marrying into financial insecurity as well.

  The Norfolk branch of the Cavendish dynasty had been landowners for generations, and compared with them everything about Andrew was just a little too assertive and brash. It wasn’t as if his wife’s family could criticise him for speaking too loudly, for my brief meeting with Helena’s relatives made it evident that they had been bawling at one another for generations, across open fields and croquet lawns, and vast oak tables laden with weighty meals; it was simply that he spoke too loudly at the wrong time, and about things his in-laws assumed one discussed in tones closer to a whisper, while locked in a room with one’s professional advisers. He did not appear to understand the distinction between what was to be advertised and what should properly be kept quietly stored away with the family silver. His failure to respect this crucial demarcation signified a defect in the pattern of his breeding, which the Cavendishes knew very well was probably irremediable. And now their daughter had chosen to swim in the murk of the same mongrel gene pool. Andrew’s apparent worldly success represented for them only the dimmest consolation for such a dynastic climbdown, but probably only Helena knew on what slender foundations that success itself rested and how easily it might all be undermined.

  A certain sadness had started to shape itself into a permanent expression on Helena’s angular and handsome face, perhaps echoing the distant disappointment of her family. And in his turn Andrew looked more and more at the immaculate pedigree of his wife with a respect which had about it a hint of weariness, much as one might look at a distinguished painting which has cost just a little too much to acquire, and which one is now growing bored with after all. Helena got on with raising their two children and organising the house, which appeared to have a ceaseless schedule of works and alterations all the year round, while Andrew got on with making money from his various enterprises. The way Helena would look at him sometimes implied her acute awareness that, whatever joys he had once shared with her between the sheets, he took most of his pleasure elsewhere these days, between different sheets, in other cities. The whole house, with its eighteenth-century hunting scenes and watercolour landscapes, its crystal glittering above polished mahogany, even with its two beautiful, dark-eyed children, seemed, in some manner that came finally to scar the heart, stained throughout with sadness and waste.

  And I was Andrew’s alibi. If he dropped me at some European airport and drove off alone in that BMW, I was the one who would call Helena when I arrived back and tell her that he had been detained over there. Urgent work to do. A big print job in the offing. She would fall silent and then say quietly, after a long pause, ‘I see. So you have a few days to yourself then, Chris.’

  One night at dinner she ate even less than usual, but took more of the wine, and then started smoking one cigarette after another. By the time the liqueurs were served, she was drunk and determined to have a good time, in that desolate way drunks have.

  ‘When I first met Andrew Cavendish-Porter he wasn’t Andrew Cavendish-Porter, of course,’ she said and leaned forward. She never wore a bra. I suppose her slender figure didn’t need that support, but the outline of her breasts was all too visible against her silk frock and I was not completely sober myself. ‘Were you, Andy? He was just plain old Andrew Porter in those days. But Andy thought it might sound a bit common to go through life as nothing but a mere Porter. Like one of those chaps who carry boxes of fish on their shoulders, or that character in the John Osborne play, the one who plays a trumpet and gets inside everyone’s knickers. So, anyway, Andrew just suggested we should hyphenate ourselves, didn’t you, darling? He bypassed the College of Heralds and all that nonsense, and just cranked himself up the hierarchy solo. My parents were appalled. It was one thing when great families amalgamated, but another altogether to find themselves suddenly linked up to the Porters of Hemel Hempstead. But here we are, all these years later, still with a little dash of something between us.’

  Helena poured herself another cognac, and I reached out and steadied her hand so that she didn’t spill it. Andrew said nothing, his grey eyes never even blinking in the candlelight as he stared at his unhappy, high-born wife, then turned and looked at me as he started, very slowly, to smile, and I suppose what the smile said was, ‘What does she know, eh Christopher? What does she know of our European nights together? We’re the boys with the knowledge, aren’t we, and she can’t come in, however far her bloody pedigree goes back.’

  That night I walked home from their house around midnight and I stopped in the middle of Albert Bridge to gaze down into the darkness for twenty minutes or more. I watched the moving water and then found myself thinking how it was only a few miles upriver that Richard Pelham had occupied Chilford Villa two centuries before.

  Bottled Lightning

  Bring in the bottled lightning.

  CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby

  Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood should really have put an end to all talk of humours in the scientific community. But the humoral terms persisted, much as, four hundred years after Copernicus, we still talk merrily of sunrise and sunset, as though that ball of flame had never ceased spinning around us, while we remain motionless at the still heart of space. Lord Chilford had a particular interest in the melancholic type, which he deemed Pelham to be. He had in his library the rare third edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which bore on its title page an engraving with various compartments. The illustrations represented Burton himself, Jealousy, Solitude, Inamerato, Hypochondriachus, Superstition and Madness. Chilford handed the book to Pelham.

  ‘Do you know this work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have my own theory regarding the melancholy disposition, Pelham, which is that an excessive hoard of images and memories prevents the discharge of
disagreeable sensations from mind and body. This is one reason those engaged in composition like yourself may be so prone to it. It is part of your trade, I suppose, for it has always been part of the scrivener’s profession to make heaps of all you have known, as Nennius had it.’

  ‘And what do you propose to do with my heaps?’ Pelham asked with a wintry smile.

  ‘Let’s burn away one or two at least, shall we, and see what happens.’

  There was no pharmacological agreement at this time regarding the effects of opium. John Jones in The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d simply stated that it caused a ‘pleasant Sensation’. Some thought that it heated and expanded the blood. Chilford was widely enough read to know that both Homer and Virgil had spoken of its healing powers. What it heals, according to them, is the past still trapped inside a human being, that dead chronology which corrodes the soul. This idea dovetailed with Chilford’s own notion of the damaging retention of images, the overburdening of the mind with lurid, superannuated information.