by Alan Wall
Paracelsus had invented laudanum, but he frisked up its alchemical credentials by dropping unperforated pearls and gold leaf into the mix. This added considerably both to its mystique and its price, but the devotees who could afford the concoction swore by it. It took a while for physicians to establish that only the opium was necessary to achieve the desired effect, all the rest being by way of a magus’s window-dressing. So there was nothing magical in the potion that Lord Chilford administered to Pelham, merely a muddy mixture in a beaker. Alcoholic tincture of opium.
Half an hour later, Chilford dropped a pin into a brandy glass on the little table beside Pelham and the poet in his reverie heard a thousand church bells clanging with celebratory peels in a square the size of St Mark’s in Venice. Pelham had by now overcome the extreme agitation that he had initially displayed. It was in fact the alcohol in the solution, not the opium, which distressed him, for he had decided that alcohol was an inferno in earthly form for him, and he had solemnly renounced any further use of it lest he should choose damnation and the road to hell of his own volition. But if Lord Chilford said it was to be taken, then he would take it. He had been placed under this man’s authority. Chilford was his patron and worldly redeemer.
For the first hour or so Chilford observed that Pelham seemed happy to sit entirely motionless in a chair and gaze at the flames as they swayed and flickered in the fireplace of the study. Pelham wore a fixed smile as the rush of exaltation and well-being swept through him. In the later stages, Chilford would coax the poet to talk about his visions, and note down matters he thought worthy of record. Pelham had occasionally been given borage and hellebore at the Chelsea Asylum, and he had of course indulged himself on his own account with untold quantities of gin, but the effect of the opium was unprecedented: it released what Chilford called the deposit of images within Pelham, including one in particular which the poet had been at great pains for some time to suppress entirely, though even this at last appeared to be free of terror for him. For the moment anyway. Even this particular spirit he could face now with equanimity, at times even a certain flinty humour. Chilford confided to his journal:
It seems to me that if Pelham displays the symptoms of insanity it is in the form of hallucination and a species of religious mania. He talks calmly and coherently about what he calls his visitations by spirits, though informing me that these have largely ceased of late. The opium brought back some of their vividness for a while. He described them for me with remarkable precision, as though other figures were indeed in the room. I begin to understand perhaps a little more the source of the absurd claims made by Pelham’s wife about his condition, in the letter that Parker handed me. Also the nonsense in Ezekiel Hague’s hand from the asylum log, about the purported goings on in Chelsea. Anything imaged so firmly and fiercely in the mind is likely to convince not merely the principal but also the spectators of its reality.
Pelham’s obsession with the words of the Bible: this is surely the source for many of his wilder images of angels and suchlike. A morbid and extreme imagination fed such stuff incessantly will illuminate them with all the strength of intellect of the man concerned. I have encouraged him to read the classics more, though he still appears determined to complete his version of the Psalms, in the Gothic mode as he puts it. He read me some, which struck me as barbarous.
I wonder if the drug might indeed heighten particular faculties. Yesterday Pelham informed me, in the latter part of his intoxication, that he had heard the flutter of an eyelid in the chamber above him. I went upstairs to discover that Lady Chilford had indeed recently fallen asleep in a chair. And later he said with great confidence that we had a little visitor next door. I went into the library and only after a careful search found a tiny mouse in the wainscot.
He asked me, Where does it come from, what you are giving me? Poppies, I replied. Papaver somniferum. Ah, he said, those little mouths of fire in the valleys. The elves’ volcanoes. When I was a boy, we called them lightnings.
It seems evident that whatever the nature of Pelham’s condition it was largely in remission at the time of his entry into Chilford Villa. Lord Chilford, to his credit, soon realised this, and ceased administering opium. But he had brought intoxication back into Pelham’s life, after its lengthy absence. Pelham was to remark in a letter that opium gummed up the wheels of time and held still all the machines of invention. He could hear the vegetation outside growing in whispers. A new hole had been created inside him that once more needed to be filled. And at the same time, an old one had perhaps been re-opened.
However chilly and sceptical Chilford’s remarks about the reported manifestations in regard to Pelham, one cannot help but sense a certain disappointment at his not having the opportunity to see them at this point for himself. His ambition actively to cure a lunatic can be sensed in the account of the matter he finally wrote for the Royal Society.
Lord Chilford was more and more inclined to spend his weekends as well as his weeks in his large house on Piccadilly, with his young wife, and to take a greater part in the political life of the realm.
There were those who found King George II more acceptable as an English monarch than King George I, though Chilford’s Twickenham neighbour Pope had not been one of them. He wrote, ‘Still Dunce the Second reigns like Dunce the First.’ The new king’s grasp of English was considerably better than his father’s, who could not understand his subjects at all and never expressed the slightest wish to. George II at least spoke English well enough to exclaim frequently how much he detested ‘bainting and boetry’. Whatever Chilford’s views on his monarch, and we don’t precisely know them, he had obviously been itching for some time to return more fully to the life of the city. He decided to leave Pelham at the villa. Jacob had been instructed to keep a careful watch over Chilford’s ward, and instruct his wife to do the same. They were told to report immediately any interesting symptoms, for his lordship had not yet altogether given up hope of a return of Pelham’s full-blown dementia. He placed his partly-written paper on the subject in his desk drawer, as the poet, with the last dose of Chilford’s laudanum inside him, went out to the house of easement and stood there askew from time, a colossus towering over the waterfall of his own golden urine.
Chimera #1
Let’s all move one place on.
LEWIS CARROLL, Alice in Wonderland
The worst part of the day was the drive to work in the morning and the drive back in the evening. I was always mired in rush-hour traffic. My Healey was mostly throttling with frustration in neutral. I learnt a different route, up Trinity Road from the Wandsworth roundabout, which gave the chance of one serious flare of acceleration to full revs in third, before the traffic lights came up, and the lords of caution and inertia reasserted their domain.
So it was a pleasant change on this particular Sunday morning to set off towards my mother’s house: the roads were empty and the engine of the car chortled with exhilaration to find itself at last with a little freedom. A Healey still has the recognisable sound of an engine, a real engine, while most modern cars sound more and more like over-tuned sewing machines. Mother was making me lunch. She looked out of the window at the car.
‘Is that blue and white thing yours?’ she said. ‘It’s very pretty.’
‘It’s my company car, mother. I’ve told you before.’
‘So does that mean it’s yours or the company’s?’
‘Technically it belongs to the company.’
‘So it’s not yours?’
‘But I’m now a director of the company.’
‘Does that mean you own the company then?’
I sighed. ‘No, but I do play an important role in deciding what the company does. One day soon I’ll have my own shareholding, and then I will own the company. Or a part of it anyway.’
She looked at me sceptically.
‘Anyway, you’re obviously doing well for yourself, Chris. You have more in common with your father than I had imagined. I thought God had m
eant you to be a priest. I thought the way the world worked was a matter of indifference to you, that you were preoccupied only with things of the spirit. Your father would have been so pleased to see me proved wrong on that one. Had he lived, of course.’
As she finished preparing the food, I scanned the books that constituted our little household library. It was well stocked with Catholic items. The works of Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Henri de Lubac, Ronald Knox on enthusiasm, Evelyn Waugh on Ronald Knox, and Graham Greene on the infinite varieties of worldly corruption. I couldn’t help remembering how, although I was frequently enjoined to read Chesterton in my childhood for the brisk and combative Catholicism he propounded, I would more often find my father in his armchair with one of the darker works of Waugh, a look close to serenity on his face. Comedy could be made, it seemed, out of staring into the black pit of human motivation. There was a book there I didn’t recognise, which my father must have bought in the last year of his life: a biography of Chesterton. I flipped through the pages. In the illustrations was a reproduction of one of his early manuscripts and in every margin there were doodled devils, vile creatures spitting malice, with nothing comic about them whatsoever.
I left soon after lunch and made my way over to North Kensington. After our fiery beginning in the museum and gallery print business, things had slowed down recently. Andrew spent half his time abroad and when he wasn’t abroad he seemed to pass most of his days in places other than Shipley’s, though I was never sure where. The numerous accounts we had picked up in France, Belgium and Italy didn’t appear to have added much in the way of profit to the company. For four years we had been the fastest-growing sector of the group, but no more. And now we had started losing some of the British work too. Even with our London gallery, the loss-leader which we’d believed impregnable, we had been undercut by some company which had made an even better offer. Whether they too were working at a loss for promotion’s sake we couldn’t fathom, but we did register the fact that their offices and print works were in Cornwall, not London. I took comfort in the fact that we were an integral part of a much larger organisation. Safety in numbers. And we had done very well indeed for a good few years. All the same, we needed to crank up our turnover. And that was why I was devoting two hours of my Sunday afternoon to the West London College of Art, so that I could quote on a brochure reproducing works from their diploma exhibition. We had picked up a few of the colleges recently. It wasn’t big money, but it was something; it kept the machines turning and everything helped.
The West London College was not dissimilar in appearance to Shipley’s, except that it had been built forty years later in the 1960s and the progress of its dilapidation appeared swifter. I made my way through the rooms devoted to the students’ work, quickly scribbling down notes for the estimate I would prepare the next day, but I stopped at the middle of the second wall in the final room. A single painting there made me put my pencil in my pocket and close my notepad.
I can’t explain it precisely, but then I suppose you never can. It was a view of the sea and sky and in the foreground was a figure, sitting on the sand and staring out towards the horizon. The figure was painted in a manner that made it almost epicene, but I knew it was female. There was something about the acid blues and aquamarines and the way they shifted back and forth by way of blue-grey skylines and pathways that lifted this painting above everything else in the show. Almost the whole of it was blue, in one shade or another. There were a few tiny flecks of white and gold, but that was all. Even the seated woman, arching forward into her own blue prospect, was blue throughout, a darker grey-blue that seemed both melancholy and yearning at the same time. I leaned down to read the title: Chimera #1 by Alice Ashe.
Two days later I arrived with a photographer and told him which pictures I wanted shooting. There was a minor altercation with some official when the tripod was set up, but my card was soon brandished at him, and I explained that I had been asked to submit quotations for a brochure and needed to take a few sample shots to make up a chromalyn. This was, in fact, not true, but I had decided to go in with a number of made-up pages – it would give us a much better chance of picking up the job. If I failed, then I’d have to write off the photographer’s costs, but Shipley’s could bear it. That was one advantage of being part of a large and successful organisation. My worries about our little part of it were always offset by the bigger picture. I had a certain autonomy, particularly since Andrew had started making himself scarce, so I told the photographer to concentrate on that painting by Alice Ashe, to make absolutely sure he got that one right.
I spent hours into the evening all that week putting a dummy brochure together. Then I made the quote so low that no one could have turned it down: another act of my recently found independence. I put Chimera #1 on the cover. That was the only thing the principal balked at.
‘I doubt we’d be wanting Alice Ashe on the cover,’ he said. ‘I admire her work myself, but I hardly think it represents the usual standards of the college. Perhaps a little … I don’t know, retrospective.’
‘I found it the most striking thing in your show, that’s why I put it on the front.’ He was a gaunt man in his fifties, in whom weariness had just got the edge over exasperation. He shrugged. ‘You may be right. The actual quality of work, though, is not the only consideration in a place such as this. Alice’s piece must certainly be in the brochure somewhere, I agree, but I wouldn’t have thought it should appear on the cover. It might give the wrong impression about our activities.’
‘One thing I must do,’ I said, ‘is to have a written agreement from all the students whose work we are reproducing. We have a standard form, but we have been caught out that way before. If someone should start to get difficult…’
He sighed again. ‘I can imagine, believe me. See my secretary next door. She’ll give you all the addresses. You obviously know what you’re doing. I find your prices astonishing, by the way.’
‘Sharp, aren’t they?’
‘Very sharp indeed.’
I collected all the addresses from the principal’s secretary. To the others I sent a standard letter and a permission form to be completed and returned. Only with Alice did I drive over to see for myself. There was something there I felt I needed to find out about. Hence, I suppose, the almost altruistic quotation I had given to the principal.
Where Notting Hill starts to blur into North Kensington, there are rows of Victorian houses, long ago split up into maisonettes and bedsits, their white, crumbling porticoes often depositing whole chunks of rotting plaster on to the pavement, and it was in the basement of one of these that Alice lived, five minutes’ walk from Portobello Road. It took almost a minute for the shuffling within to stop and for her face finally to appear at the door.
Alice Ashe was the whitest woman I had ever seen. Not blonde and not albino, but white, her hair as moon-blanched as her skin. Her eyes were grey like Andrew’s, and a small constellation of ghost-freckles scattered drops of milk over the blank sheet of her face. It was as though, as an embryo, she had been wombed in bleach and the bleach had soaked right through her flesh. In a January field you’d have lost her. It was hard to believe she had ever seen sunlight.
‘Alice Ashe?’ She nodded slowly. I took out my card and showed it to her. She stared at it and said nothing, as I explained that I was preparing the brochure for the college and that her painting from the diploma show was to be reproduced in it, and could I please come in for a moment? As I stepped inside I picked up that mild reefer reek of rooms from so many years before in Leeds. I stopped in the middle of the floor and stared all around me. The room was filled with her chimera paintings, Chimera #2, #3, #4, #5, #6. They were all like the one in the show, and yet all different. In each one the figure had taken its colour from the surroundings, whether it was in a bath, before a television set, in front of a curtain, or lying in a field. I walked around staring at them.
‘You could have called them chameleons instead of chi
meras,’ I said and Alice smiled. A smile of such composed distance and serenity that it stopped my thoughts entirely and I stood still looking at her. When her smile ceased suddenly, I followed the line of her gaze to the silky black back making its way across the floor.
‘You have cockroaches.’
‘Yes,’ she said, still following the stately progress of the one on the floor with her undeviating gaze, ‘a whole family of them. A very big family.’ I had noticed that some of the pictures had been taken down and were leaning against the wall, leaving large rectangular gaps where they had hung.
‘Are you rehanging?’ I asked her.
‘No. I have to be out of here by the end of the month. I still don’t know where I’ll be going.’
A month later Alice moved into my flat in Battersea, and brought her paintings with her. And her dope.
Ditto or Double
Some would spirit themselves away
With adieus to our lethal rabble
But when they returned, oftentimes the next day
Their dosage was ditto or double.
STAMFORD TEWK, Soho Ledger
Pelham detested being summoned to Lord Chilford’s room in the rustic. On the table a wax figure of a flayed man stared out at him, his skin all hacked away to reveal the veins and arteries beneath, red and blue roadways of the soul. Lord Chilford had laughed when he had first seen the poet recoiling from it.
‘Don’t worry, Pelham,’ he had said lightly, ‘we’ll not do that to you. The fate of Marsyas shan’t be yours. Not for the moment anyway.’
The room glittered with its instruments, many of them for cutting, sawing and chamfering bones of varying sizes and thickness. A trepanning set lay with its lid of red velvet always open on the desk. Pelham had asked one day what the different instruments were called. That one? A trephine. And that one? A raspatory. And that? A lenticular. He learnt the names of the catlings too, as they shone in sinister attendance alongside daintier lancets. There was a small silver dish to catch the blood during venesection. On the cabinet beside the table were two skulls, one European and one African. At times, in his distraction, Pelham could still hear the locked voices mourning inside them. The brass microscope with its large adjustment screws seemed inexplicably minatory, a Cyclops of ravenous curiosity, a polished eye to swallow the world in a single, meditative blink. On one wall hung an engraving of a gravid uterus, the unborn child already heavy and muscled inside it. It made him think always of the prints he had seen of Michelangelo, his prisoners torsioned and quick inside the stone, so desperate to free themselves into the fluent air. On the other wall there was a watercolour of the shrine of Asclepius at Epidaurus, where the patients slept on couches inside the portico, and phalanxes of priests arrived to elicit their dreams, seeking thus to riddle out the origin and destination of their ominous pathologies. (It was rumoured that opium had played no small part in this process.) There were wax figures which his lordship had acquired on his European journeyings, one of a man with half his head peeled away to reveal the brain inside. The expression on his pthisic features suggested a stoicism fit for Dante’s legions of lost souls.
