by Alan Wall
Nothing so true as what you once let fall:
Most women have no characters at all.
I knew this. This was my old territory. This was Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to a Lady’. And as I read on, I found that the words produced a curious panic in me. By now I already felt jagged inside. If you ask someone to marry you and you’re turned down, you’re not back where you were before you asked. You’re in some different region, some hillside limbo where the mists reign. I poured out more whisky and drank it quickly, then poured some more again, trapped in my broken window of a mood. There was no sign of Alice, and now there were memories catching up on me, shipped in, it seemed, by the shifting shapes of that unending storm outside. When she finally came back, she was soaked. I offered her whisky, but she shook her head and took herself off to the bedroom.
It was as though she was moving further away from me with each minute. There had always been something strange about our lovemaking. It wasn’t that Alice didn’t make love, for she did; it’s just that I was never sure she was making love to me. Without my being there, it would have been harder, or at least different, but all the same I never felt like its necessary subject – I felt temporarily sufficient but not necessary, and I started to think again about how easily Alice had moved in with me. I wasn’t sure that she had ever made a single decision in all the time I had known her. And now she was more anxious to get back to the Siegfried Group than to stay here. It was desperation and anxiety that made me push and hammer so hard, pinioning her arms against the mattress and thrashing away in my swerving whisky haze. After we were finished, the sweat on our bodies turned acid and cold, and finally she said, ‘That hurt.’
I went out to buy the newspaper the next day so that I could be alone for a while, even in the rain. I left her sleeping. I didn’t want her to wake. I didn’t want those grey eyes opening on me. I hacked up the hill through a visor of rain, and stood at the top exactly where I had first stood with Alice, looking out over the bay. A single gull dropped and veered in the air, no longer serenely riding the weather, but seeming to be imprisoned by it now, tangled in its darkening bluster and conflict. I went to the newsagent’s at the top of the hill and looked out briefly over that bay which had seemed so idyllic when we arrived, and now was nothing but a squall of rain and vacancy. Then I went into the café nearby, and after only a twitch of hesitation as I looked at the menu, I ordered egg and bacon and sausage. I’d left one vegetarian behind in the blue house and maybe the ghost of another too. I flicked through the pages and I only registered the obituary because of the photograph. Mick Tiller. We had climbed together on the Yorkshire outcrops years before. But Mick was a rising star and I wasn’t even a falling one, even when I fell. I could only follow on behind him, helping with belays and brewing the tea. Mick was our golden boy. He trained almost every day on the Don Robinson climbing wall at the university. He was the most supple and gymnastic human being I have ever seen, and when he turned his strength and grace and courage towards a new gritstone line, crowds would form at the foot of the rock to watch him. That’s when there were any people around. Often it was just us, in bleak moorland rain, with the grey fields beneath us stretching away to the horizon. I liked it best of all then.
I can still see him putting up his own route on Almscliffe, the one he named Axle-Grip, upside down on the overhang, with only one nut twenty-five feet below him for protection. It would have ripped out if he’d fallen, he knew that as well as we did. But he didn’t fall. Instead he ended up on the cover of Climbing World. I still have my grainy black-and-white photographs somewhere, of Mick in his dirty sweater and jeans and his battered EBs, standing proud of the rock with his curly black hair flowing wildly in the wind, as he overcame one more impossibility. He put all his new routes down as ‘Very Severe’, but they’re classified a lot higher than that in the Yorkshire gritstone guidebooks these days. E5, E6. Warning signs to the uninitiated: don’t try climbing these, if you have any sense at all. Most of them I couldn’t even make the first swooping moves on – they were so demanding, I simply couldn’t get off the ground.
Then we all used to drink together, either up on the crags when the weather was fine, or back in town when it wasn’t. Whatever he’d done the night before never seemed to affect him when he started climbing the next morning. Until he tore his hand trying to open a can of beer with a serrated knife at some midnight party. The major tendons in two fingers were severed. At first we didn’t think it was so bad. He told us he’d be roped up again within a month. He didn’t even bother to find any medical help for a while, but when he did, it suddenly became apparent how serious the injury was. He never fully recovered, and although he could still climb better than most people would ever dream of doing, he’d lost that mysterious edge the top boys had. Too much of his grip had gone. He couldn’t do the fresh routes that make the headlines any more, though he would still solo old ones from time to time with astonishing speed. Then gradually he dropped out of sight altogether.
I had heard accounts of him now and then; that he lived in a caravan somewhere in North Yorkshire; that he drank a lot, and had become morose and bitter, but now I was reading his obituary, and seeing that young god’s face stare out at me from twelve years before. Apparently he had climbed alone to the top of Malham Cove, taking with him in his bag nothing but a bottle of tequila, and when the bottle was empty, he’d jumped. They found his body all smashed up down there the next morning.
‘Mick Tiller,’ I said, very quietly when I was back in the little blue house. I held the obit page in front of her. ‘He’s dead,’ I went on, ‘my old friend. We climbed together, and now he’s dead.’ Alice looked briefly at the column. I felt I couldn’t touch her, though I wanted to.
‘Following the route of denial,’ she said, after scanning the page, ‘acting as though he’d never needed the womb in the first place.’ This I presumed was once more the wisdom of Hermann Siegfried. It was the wrong thing to say, and for some reason I felt that Alice knew it was the wrong thing to say, and that was why she was saying it. Each word put more distance between us.
‘Yes, well anyway he’s dead,’ I said, growing angry, ‘and he was braver than your Mr Siegfried and your Miss Orley put together. And funny with it. I shouldn’t think you spend too much time laughing at those therapy gigs of yours up in North Kensington, do you?’
‘I was wondering when the contempt would finally come out, Chris,’ she said, with a curious air of satisfaction as though she had at last been proven right. ‘Contempt and what often passes for humour are more often than not disguises for fear, you know.’
That afternoon she took the train to London. I drove her to the station and stood on the platform as she climbed aboard.
‘I’ll see you back here on Thursday,’ I said, trying to disguise the urgency in my voice. ‘Remember I’ve rented this place for a fortnight.’ Alice looked out of the carriage window and said quietly, ‘How long did you rent me for, Chris?’
‘What?’ I said, but the train was already pulling out. ‘Thursday night then,’ I shouted.
Back at the little blue house I looked around and realised that Siegfried’s book had gone along with Alice. Why hadn’t she left that behind for me to read? But then, perhaps she needed it for her meeting. That was probably it. I remembered how I would drive her up to that group of hers, and how one evening I’d even managed to peer down into the basement where it all took place, and caught a glimpse of the brisk and busy lady who ran the affair, Miss Orley. Very professional looking in her wire-rimmed spectacles, with her salt and pepper hair pushed back seriously from her face, and tied up with a black silk ribbon. I had felt envious of her intimacy with Alice, but not envious enough to want to attend the meeting, as Alice had once suggested I should. I’d left one church and didn’t feel like joining another just yet. Or could it be that I’d never entirely left the first?
The rain let up, but the cold remained. I drove along the coast and walked about here and there,
and when Thursday night came I prepared a vegetarian feast. I bought a bottle of expensive wine to go with it. But Alice never came back that night, so I drank the Margaux myself. Then I started on what was left of the whisky bottle. At midnight I emptied the last of the whisky into my glass as I sat in the little alcove by the window with Mick Tiller’s obituary in my lap as his face stared up at me from the crumpled newspaper.
And then the rain came back.
Thunder
What is the cause of thunder?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear
To the great irritation of his wife, Lord Chilford remained at Twickenham. He decided to lessen her annoyance by arranging a surprise ball for her at the villa that Friday evening. Her pregnancy was still in its early stages, long before any confinement would be required, and she did take a particular delight in dancing. Jacob and Josephine were set to work with the preparations. Meanwhile, each day Chilford interviewed Pelham for hours at a time, in an attempt to arrive at an objective account of his condition.
LORD CHILFORD: Do you know what happened to you, Richard?
RICHARD PELHAM: I was taken again.
LC: What was it took you?
RP: Agarith.
LC: Is Agarith a spirit?
RP: An angel.
LC: A fallen one?
RP: One who sometimes needs a home. A condition I understand. Perhaps that’s how he acquired my address.
LC: You had been drinking.
RP: In preparation for his return, yes.
LC: How did you know he was coming?
RP: I was sent a letter.
LC: By whom?
RP: By you, my Lord.
LC: Where did you find this letter?
RP: In the drawer of your desk.
LC: What did it say?
RP: When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.
LC: I did not write those words, Richard. They are from scripture, I think.
RP: Maybe a man’s a window pane, however much the glass of his soul has been stained.
LC: I do not understand.
RP: I cannot be merely seen through, even Richard Pelham in his confinement can’t. I am flesh too.
LC: You are referring to my attempt to analyse your condition?
RP: Your trek over my mind.
LC: I merely believe that the mind and the body are interconnected, Richard, so much so that the torments of the one must aggravate a torment in the other. An imbalance in the mind provokes disquiet in the body, and vice versa. I believe an excess of alcohol in the body might so affect the mind that it even believes itself to have visited hell.
RP: You cannot see the spirit that comes upon me with your enlarging lenses, so for you it is unreal. By your own confession you are a natural philosopher of the visible.
LC: And what are you, Richard?
RP: A sinful fellow, with my lusts and gluttonies on my head, visited at intervals by a spirit in need of a shelter for the night, in an age without words to welcome such visitations. Even in one of your palaces of healing, all they could do the last time that spirit arrived, was to hoist me up.
LC: Hoist you up?
RP: Fasten me to the tongue of the storm. That’s when they burned the mark into my brow.
LC: Do you know what it was that wrote on the skin of your chest, Richard?
RP: Agarith. If he was there inside me again.
LC: The writing was in your hand.
RP: The writer was in my body.
LC: Do you have anything to tell me about my wife, Richard?
RP: Only that she is a very beautiful woman, my Lord, but then you already know that. And now I believe you are to have a child. My congratulations.
Chilford was impatient with the centuries of superstition, for he could still hear the whispering clamour of all that liturgy behind him. He had, in fact, thought a great deal about bodies and the language in which they utter their imbalances, their trials, their queered and quirky messages. Too premature in the calculus to ponder the writing all over Queequeg’s body, and how it announces that he is a visitation from another world, Chilford could see all the same that the writing on Richard Pelham’s body seemed to proclaim that this man had been touched by a region elsewhere, but he could only remain unmoved by the utter lack of co-ordinates to establish such a world’s location, using any compass reason might tolerate, let alone confirm or ratify. He was inclined therefore to situate the world inside the turbulence of his subject’s mind, not outside in any grid of latitude and longitude.
As for Pelham’s own great obsession, namely what it was that was written on the body of Jesus himself during the course of that passion which ended with his death on the cross (for that was the true theme of The Instruments of the Passion), Chilford had also thought this subject through methodically enough:
1 That his hands, which had been said to transmit such an electric charge of love to the sick and the maimed as to heal them instantly with a single touch, should have nails driven through them so that they might touch no more.
2 That his feet, which had trodden the earth already created through him, or so orthodoxy maintained, in whatever species of ontological singularity, should walk no further upon it, fixed one upon the other now unto death. (Chilford had no reason to doubt the fact of the crucifixion, and could therefore only conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was at this point drowning inside himself, his breath a diminishing torrent of protest at the forces about it, as they pressed ineluctably inwards, his body both uninhabitable and inescapable at the same time.)
3 And that, finally, his heart, which was said to have at its centre an unending upswelling of the love of the Father, should now contain merely a lance of the imperial soldiery, courtesy of one Longinus.
He who had abrogated the law of condemnation in pity’s name, thus to redeem all those who truly sought redemption, hung there writhing at last on the nails of the law, unable even to write in the dust with his finger, as he had done once (according to record, anyway) so as to repel the dread agents of righteousness. When he opened his mouth, only blood came out. Thus, thought Chilford, did the Redeemer’s body spout its omega.
Chilford was not alone in his intellectual encroachments on belief. As the universe became more and more of a mechanism, governed by laws whose force was acknowledged to be universal, the requirement for a God to keep the planets turning and the hours moving had seemed to lessen. This age’s deity was no longer the passionate and jealous God of Abraham and Isaac, nor the Abba of Jesus’s prayers and anguished cries; instead he became the primum mobile, an intelligence large enough to fashion those laws in the first place, but whose presence was thereafter largely unrequired. For rational and ordered men, this represented something of a comfort, indeed an undoubted progression; but of course, for those still tormented by forces which rationality could neither encompass nor subdue, the age of reason was an age of terror, perhaps a terror even greater than those in the ages which had preceded it. Richard Pelham in the time of his tribulation could find no minister who was even aware of the vocabulary of the powers that visited him, let alone one who could speak their language fluently enough to order them to be gone, assuming he wished them gone, for he never said any such thing. Such talk had after all been dispensed with, along with papish superstitions, and the incense and holy water stoups of more primitive times. Things were looking up. There was deemed to be – it is not putting the matter too strongly – a heliotropic tendency in even the obscurest matter, for everything now yearned towards the light, the light at the centre of the word enlightenment. The black sun of Pelham’s Instruments was an absurd trick of the imagination, a jest in bad taste, the product of a diseased mind, thoug
h it’s worth remembering that in 1714 Tobias Swinden produced a paper for the Royal Society entitled An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell, in which he established the sun as the only logical, scientific site of hell. Such a combination of size and unrelenting flame was required to roast the vast quantity of damned souls for eternity. But scientific accounts of eschatology like this were not to last much longer.
Chilford read and wrote into the early hours of the morning. He was trying hard to clarify terms.
So Pelham has a demon, does he? he thought. All right, if that’s the common usage, then let’s go along with it. He turned the pages of his Plato. The word had corrupted into demon now, but the daimon that accompanied Socrates was his spiritual guide, not some tormenting and degraded angel. It represented all that was best in the man’s spirit. The narrative of how Satan, the wily adversary of Job, had become the foul fiend, the father of lies, the emperor of malignant spirits, was for Chilford the history of a shadow, the shadow any man can study when he turns away from the source of light and looks too studiously in the opposite direction. If you stare long enough into the darkness, your pupils contract. And ultimately your mind does too.
So, he thought, let us accept the demon, and even speculate that an earlier age might have called it daimon instead. Now, let us see what we might make of it.
If a demon has come on a visit, then where has it come from? Whose energy has it tapped into? Whose voice does it speak with? Whose eyes does it look through? Whose flesh does it use, whether to write upon or prod with torments? And should it offer delights, where is the source of the delight? Chilford formulated these questions, but he had no doubt as to the answer in each case: the mind and body of the one afflicted. They were signatures, but distorted signatures, out of the dark part of the mind. Lord Chilford took out the sheet of paper on which he had copied down the lettering on Pelham’s chest, and studied it again. He started writing swiftly. Shortly before dawn he finished his narrative thus:
