by Alan Wall
The Thames had always been a living thing for Pelham, from its source somewhere in Gloucestershire, not far from where he had been born, all the way to Gravesend, where, as he once wrote, fresh water and salt engaged in tidal dalliance, and the river opened its mouth on the sea, like a long, coiling fish. He watched its changing moods, and the joy or displeasure with which it allowed the boats to ride its back, or froze to virgin linen for ice-fairs. Now he walked along the towpath, noting the occasional didapper and asking the good Lord to spare him the cup he sensed was about to be offered.
And offered it was, at the first gin shop he came to in Teddington. Without hesitation he took it. The liquor burned away his guilt and increased his anger. That was to begin with, then he took more, until his anger had disappeared too, along with his guilt, until his mind became one with the gin and his thoughts translucent fish that moved about inside the sea of it, luminous spirits silently swerving this way then that inside the great cold aquarium of intoxication. He slept the first night on a pallet in the back of a tavern, and the second in a ditch beside the river, where he was terrified by a gang of lobcocks braying at some little local victory or outrage.
(Pelham’s appetite for gin is at least worth a footnote here. It was not a gentleman’s drink, but then Pelham was not really a gentleman. And even if he had been, the marks of derangement upon him would have meant that the normal rules did not apply. Gin was the drink of the poor. It was lethally powerful, and its effects troubled the government of the day so much that it introduced not one, but two, acts in rapid succession in an attempt to limit its sale. In Hogarth’s prints, Beer Street and Gin Lane, the effects of traditional English ale are contrasted with this novel concoction, so potent it swiftly makes mothers sodden with oblivion, oblivious enough, indeed, to allow their own infants to fall to their deaths in the stairwells below. It is the poison of skeletal apparitions. Pelham had started to drink it in his days of penury on Grub Street. And just as, many years later, the Paris painter Utrillo would refuse a fine vintage, for he could take pleasure only in cheap, harsh wine drunk in great quantities, so it seems that the damaging intoxication supplied by gin provided Pelham with a sensation nothing else could match. Lord Chilford’s wine had merely served by way of a prelude before the return of this darker theme.)
By the time he returned to the villa, he was ill, sick in his body as well as his mind. Jacob saw his ragged figure coming across the grass and led him gently to his room, where he put him to bed. At some point over the next twelve hours the symptoms which others had described, but neither Jacob himself nor his master had ever witnessed, returned in full. The sound of the crashing and yelling below woke Jacob and he rushed down the stairs to find Pelham surrounded by wreckage and yelling obscenities in a manner he would never have expected, given his knowledge of this deranged but gentle man. The newly acquired strength of the raging figure astonished him too, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that he managed to subdue him. So alarmed was he at the unexpected power confronting him in the shape of the diminutive poet that he shouted to Josephine to bring in the restraints that Thomas Parker had brought with him from the asylum. With these devices he chained and clamped Pelham to the bed, telling his wife to leave them so that she should not be tainted by the filth spewing from the man’s mouth. Only when he was sure Pelham could not escape his restraints did he go out and saddle his horse. Then he rode at full speed to Lord Chilford’s house on Piccadilly.
By the time his lordship arrived at Twickenham in the early hours of the morning, Pelham’s fit had ceased. Although not asleep, he seemed to be drained of all energy, emotion or even capacity for speech. He lay in a state of tremulous vacuity. Josephine stood in silence at the edge of the room, staring at his supine shape on the bed.
Chilford walked over quietly to his side.
‘How do you feel, Richard?’ There was no reply. Chilford took his hand, and noted how cold it felt. The room too seemed icy. ‘You have had one of your seizures, you poor man. Can you remember anything of it?’ Still there was no reply. Chilford placed the palm of his hand upon the poet’s forehead. The sweat had dried now, and the flesh felt as chilly as that of a corpse. Pelham appeared to be in some kind of trance. His lordship turned to go, but Josephine had started to point at Pelham’s chest.
‘What is it?’ asked Jacob. But she said nothing, only carried on pointing. Chilford walked to the bed once more and pulled back the sheet. He stood staring at the marks on Pelham’s flesh. He turned back towards Jacob and Josephine.
‘Has he had access to any implement?’ They both shook their heads. ‘And you are sure these marks were not here when you undressed him, Jacob?’ In silence, Jacob nodded his head slowly to show that they had not been. Chilford asked Jacob to go to his study, and bring back a quill, ink and paper, then he carefully copied what he saw, reproducing it as exactly as he could.
Later, sitting alone at his desk, he stared at the page before him, and finally said to himself out loud, ‘Now how on earth did you do that?’ Then he called to Jacob to bring him some of Pelham’s manuscript papers for The Instruments of the Passion. He studied a number of these carefully and held them against the sheet upon which he had just written. He was no graphologist, but he could not help but notice an unmistakable similarity. For several hours, Lord Chilford wrote out his notes. When he was finished he walked to the window and stared down at the river. Only then did he at last start to smile.
The next day he spoke separately to Jacob and Josephine. He wanted to make absolutely sure that there had been no connivance between them, though he could not imagine why there should have been. At the end of his interview with Josephine, she faltered before leaving.
‘What is it?’ he had asked, alerted suddenly by her discomfort, for she was obviously distressed. ‘Come along Josephine, I need to be apprised of all that occurred.’
‘When I was alone in the house with him, after Jacob had gone to fetch your lordship, his voice suddenly changed. I was standing outside the room and I heard something different. I went inside.’
‘And?’
‘He spoke to me private words, words that only Jacob and I share. In the privacy of our bed.’ Lord Chilford thought for a moment.
‘He could have overheard them. He has been here in the house alone with you both.’
‘But it was Jacob’s voice doing the talking, not his. That’s the only reason I stepped back inside. Whatever could have made that room so cold?’
‘A window had probably been left open,’ Chilford said impatiently. He was staring distractedly down towards the Thames, his smile now gone entirely.
‘Everything was closed, my Lord. Jacob made sure before he left that everything was locked up tight.’
Later, Chilford summoned Jacob back to his study.
‘Is there anything else Pelham said that you didn’t tell me?’ Jacob looked uncomfortable.
‘There were many things he said. He was shouting all sorts of things, most of which are best forgotten.’ Chilford walked round the table and laid his hand on Jacob’s shoulder.
‘What did he say that you are so anxious to spare me?’ Jacob looked up finally, always the obedient servant; it was too late now for him to change that.
‘He said my Lady would die, though it didn’t seem to be him speaking. He said she would die in childbirth, my Lord.’
Chimera #2
The great post-natal myth: that we get born all at once.
HERMANN SIEGFRIED, Chimera
I had decided to surprise Alice, though in one sense perhaps I surprised her all the time. That’s to say that, since she never made any decisions herself, I took them all for her. Almost all: let’s not forget her weekly trip to the Siegfried Group in North Kensington, where I presumed she also collected her dope, which I’d developed a taste for, so I wasn’t complaining. I planned the holiday in secret. I had booked two weeks in Tenby, in a house at the very edge of the harbour. I could imagine her sitting there drawing. I did
n’t tell her until the night before that we were going, and even then I only said ‘A trip to Tenby’ – I didn’t say for how long. I had already packed spare clothes for her, not that she’d have noticed. She looked at me in silence for a moment.
‘Where’s Tenby?’ she said finally. She was cutting her hair with a pair of nail scissors. There was no mirror in front of her during this operation, and that presumably explained why every strand was always a different length. I hurriedly dropped some sheets of paper on the floor about her chair.
‘In Pembrokeshire. You can take your sketchbook and do some drawing.’
‘I don’t have a sketchbook,’ she said, ‘and I don’t draw.’
The next day I rose early, took a shower and went to sort out the car. Tyre pressures. Oil. Petrol. I took the hood down. The sun was already bright in the autumn sky. When I finally came back into the bedroom with a coffee in my hand, I stared at Alice tangled in the bedclothes. Her flesh looked even whiter than the sheets. Finally she uncoiled from her sleep and stumbled into the living room, and as she sat at the table rolling a supply of joints in preparation for our journey, I plotted the route. Four and a half hours later we were driving along the twisting road that riddles its way down to the Pembrokeshire coast.
As we let ourselves into the blue house on the harbour front, Alice said, ‘I didn’t think you could rent places like this just for the weekend.’ I said nothing.
From the wide, low window sill you could stare out at the boats bobbing on the swell, and this was where Alice almost immediately positioned herself, her arms locked around her knees. She had placed Chimera by Hermann Siegfried on the table, and it lay there like a Gideon’s Bible in a hotel room. I knew she had put it there for me to read, for she had asked me to look at it a number of times before. I’d always managed to evade the invitation. It seemed to be the only book she possessed, and the members of the group she visited every Wednesday evening were, as far as I could understand, entirely devoted to the wisdom it contained. As she studied the metronome masts of Tenby’s tiny fleet, slapping wave-time back one way then the other, I opened it and looked at a chapter title: ‘Character as Signature’. Then I closed it again. I put the book down and walked over to Alice at the window. I dropped my hand gently on to her shoulder.
‘Let’s take a walk outside.’ Without nodding or speaking, she simply stood up in physical acquiescence and I found myself reflecting how often she did that. I suppose that’s what she’d done when I had invited her to join me in my flat in Battersea.
If you walk to the very top of the High Street, Tenby Bay suddenly opens out beneath you. You are on the same level now as the swooping, shrieking gulls. And here we sat on one of the benches gazing into the sky and sea before us. I had taken her hand, but she had not taken mine back, simply accepted my grasp, as usual. It did occur to me from time to time that I never had the faintest notion what was going on inside her head. I sometimes wondered if anything was going on in there at all. Could it really be possible simply to absorb life, instead of arguing with it all the time the way that I mostly did? Though I’d been arguing less of late. Whether you put it down to Alice or her spliff, or maybe the mixture of both, I had been calming down. I wasn’t even cross with God any more.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘A pity we won’t be here more than a few days.’ That was going to be the biggest surprise of all.
I suppose people go to the seaside to be inside the weather, to crouch inside the season’s heart. For the whole of that weekend it was a delight to be there, to be included in the early autumn sunshine and breezes. We walked the beaches, we found the places that served vegetarian food, we made love. Alice even started to ask me questions. I had fed her plenty of information about myself during the time we had spent together, but she never seemed to respond to any of it. I had often wondered if she even heard. But now she started to surprise me. Her questions showed that nothing I had said had ever been lost on her.
‘Why did you leave Rome, Chris? Why did you decide not to become a priest?’ We were lying in bed together. The window was slightly open and an early evening breeze was arriving, laced with the cries of the gulls.
‘Fornication,’ I said, but even as I said it I knew I was lying.
‘There’s no love in that word, is there? None of the sweetness people really find. The word spits on all of that.’
What she had said was true, and it was also true that my truant couplings had not dislodged my faith; they were, after all, by way of weakness rather than contradiction. The tragedy of them was probably that they simply did not affect me enough soon enough. That might have been what my old confessor in Rome had meant when he gave me the most mysterious of all his many puzzling penances: ‘Pray that your sins may at last start to communicate to you the nature of your dilemma, since you always leave it to them to do the talking.’
No, what finally dislodged my faith was the way Jesus was disappearing back into the original text of his time, leaving me only dubious translations to read. Does the book recount the event or create it? ‘Perhaps you are pushing the book further and further away from your mind and your soul – perhaps that is why the text is receding,’ my confessor had said, but I didn’t think it was quite so simple.
‘You didn’t just abandon the priesthood when you left Rome, though,’ Alice said, ‘from what you told me you abandoned the Church too. Everything you ever believed. How could you do that?’
It was true that I had attended mass when I had first landed in Leeds, but I soon stopped. Jane had her own makeshift religion, with a greater emphasis on charity than faith, and I didn’t feel like confessing her as a sin to anyone. But there was something else as well: I couldn’t bear to think of myself as a spoiled priest. I knew some, hanging around at the edges of the Church, and I found them a sad lot. If you catch them off guard you can see them hunched over themselves in fateful concentration, as though trying to spot what it is they lost when they quit. And so some, like me, leave not only the priesthood behind, but the Church too. We don’t go to that house any more. The trouble is that the Church never entirely leaves us. It tracks along a few thoughts behind, perhaps at times even a few thoughts ahead. And it’s always there when the silence gets started. I took Alice’s hand again.
‘I suppose that if I couldn’t be the priestly representative of Christ on this earth, I must have decided to have nothing to do with him at all. If I couldn’t administer his sacraments, I’d leave them alone – except even that’s not possible, since baptism and confirmation are already lodged irrevocably inside me. Penance and eucharist I can avoid. Holy orders have already risen up and gone down the tube. As for extreme unction, I probably won’t be in a position to refuse it by the time it’s called for. These days they call it the sacrament of the sick, you know, but it will always be extreme unction for me. We all need some unction, don’t we, some balm, whether we’re in Gilead or Tooting? And that only leaves marriage.’ I paused. ‘Will you marry me, Alice?’ This last question took me aback, almost as much as it evidently did her. She turned and looked at me.
‘Why?’
‘Because I love you. I know I love you because, for the first time in my life, I want someone to have my baby.’ Her eyes never blinked, her stone-grey scrutiny continued uninterrupted, then she got up from the bed and walked over to the window. The gauze curtain flicked gently against her bare belly.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Don’t try to make embryos from embryos.’ After that, she put on her clothes in silence and walked downstairs. I heard the door close: she had gone out. So there I had it, the summation of the wisdom of Hermann Siegfried: don’t make embryos from embryos. I lay there in silence. I was living with a woman who’d never been born. That’s why she was so white, such a consumptive mirage – the blood hadn’t even started pumping through her veins yet. There was nothing inside her but the thin milk of possibility.
On Monday the weather chang
ed. It turned to a black, growling smear of rage, spitting chilly venom at the clifftops and slapping the harbour with icy storms. This wasn’t autumn any more, this was a premonition of what was to come. It was as though we were in a different place entirely. Everything felt damp now, even the bed. We drove to Pembroke, but that was damp and miserable too. The Healey was not the best car in heavy rain. The little restaurant we’d visited at the weekend was now deserted, and the vegetarian dishes had somehow lost their savour. All the salt was now in the wind. We were housebound, fingering the condensation on the windows, counting hours.
‘We’ll be going back tomorrow,’ Alice said to the storm outside.
‘No,’ I said, not looking up. ‘I booked this place for a fortnight.’ She was silent for a while, then spoke again quietly.
‘I have to be back by Wednesday, Chris, for the Siegfried Group, but I’ll go by train if you want to stay.’ My voice rose unintentionally.
‘Surely you can miss that thing this once, can’t you? What use is it if all it does is to turn into another form of dependence, if it’s just something else you can’t do without, like your bloody spliff?’
Alice took her coat from the hook and stepped outside into the rain. I stood by the window and watched as her shape disappeared into the murky howl of the evening. Then I went and bought a bottle of whisky. I needed something with more of a hard kick than Alice’s herbal mixture. When I came back from the off-licence, I poured myself half a glass of straight Scotch and then sat down by the window with Siegfried’s Chimera in my hand. What was the big deal with this man that I seemed to have ended up in competition with him? I started flicking through the pages. My eye landed on a quote:
