The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  ‘No,’ I said, understanding fully for the first time where all this was leading. ‘It wasn’t like that. If that’s what he’s been doing, I knew nothing about it.’

  ‘There must surely have been a nod and a wink somewhere. You yourelf have made nine journeys in the last six months, each one involving expenses for yourself and your wife. None of us actually knew you were married by the way, Christopher, we only found out from these accommodation receipts. Hotel expenses. Restaurant expenses. Entertainment expenses. Petrol expenses. How busy your company credit card has been. And unless I’m very much mistaken, not one of these trips has as yet brought to this company a single penny. In fact, the last job we can discover which you brought in over the last eighteen months was for’ – here he pondered his notes – ‘the West London College of Art. And according to the estimator, whom you mysteriously did not consult at the time, we worked on that one at a loss. Why, out of interest?’

  ‘It was a way of bringing in new business,’ I said unsteadily.

  ‘Like all the European jobs, yes, I see. I see very clearly, I think.’ Fairbrother took off his glasses now and stared at me with a look I remembered from somewhere, but I couldn’t think where. It was only later I realised it was the same look my old confessor in Rome had given me that rainy afternoon. He now spoke with great deliberation. ‘We haven’t decided yet whether to make this a legal matter. In the circumstances, I suppose you might wish to go home and consider your resignation. For us to dismiss you would certainly require an explanation, and the explanation might not reflect well upon your behaviour here.’

  And that was it. Except that Hollis accompanied me to my office, where I picked up a few things. I was about to take some of my papers from the desk when he waved me off.

  ‘Leave the papers, Chris. We’ll need them for the full investigation.’ I looked at Hollis’s unanswerable smile, and thought briefly of slapping the smugness from his features, but then I simply stepped outside and climbed into the Healey. I stopped the car a quarter of a mile along the road, and took down the hood. It was a clear autumn day, but there was the hint of a chill in the air. I didn’t go straight back home, but drove to the A3, and when the road cleared, I floored the accelerator. You’ll read in the old specifications that a 3000 will go up to 120, but mine wouldn’t. Somewhere around 115, its power gave out. I wondered if it had always been like that, or if it was beginning to feel its age. All the same, the wind blew and the engine roared and the earth beneath me seemed to spin at the speed dictated by the pressure of my right foot on the pedals. So by the time I arrived back in Battersea, I felt as though some at least of my discontent had been blown away. Though it did seem that my future had too. First Alice and then my job. A week later I received the request for the Healey to be returned to the company within ten days, or the bailiffs would come and collect it.

  The Pleasures of Delirium

  25 drops and a pint of Gin is Paradise.

  RICHARD PELHAM, Letters

  The Strangers’ Tavern was presided over by Ann Wigley. She had many years before married the landlord, Tobias Wigley, and had lived happily enough with him until he died of a medley of over-indulgences. She had known Pelham a long time back and remembered serving him drinks while he spouted so cleverly among the ever-changing host of his scribbling friends. Now she stared at him. He had lost weight since she had last seen him all those years before, when she had watched him at the table talking his wild, brilliant talk. Now his eyes seemed to blaze with some brightness that she couldn’t fathom, some occult fire that simultaneously captured and repelled her. He had made a lengthy journey, she could see that much, anyway, and he seemed to gleam in the strangeness of its afterglow. Master Richard must have dived deep indeed in search of his pearl. She wondered if he’d found it. Her own cheeks were now chapped red and she had gained as many inches around the middle as he had lost.

  He asked for gin and she told him he’d have to go elsewhere for that, but she served him brandy instead, and as she filled his glass a second time she watched him sip the glowing liquid and saw his face uncrease a little. How he had once impressed her with his talk. She wondered how he had acquired the scar across his forehead.

  ‘You have nowhere to go, I suppose.’ He shook his head. ‘And it looks as though you have been out all night. I shan’t ask why, but you had better have some sleep anyway. Come with me.’ And she took him upstairs and put him in the little room next to hers, where she lit the fire for him and helped him climb into bed. Then she walked around the rooms to make sure everything was in order, and went down to the cellar to finish preparing the day’s ale. When she called back half an hour later, he was sound asleep.

  So Richard Pelham became a guest at the Strangers’ Tavern. The habitués of the place were far from sure that Ann Wigley’s relationship with him was entirely that of a hostess, but he paid for his keep in any case by writing and even performing entertainments. In one he actually appeared as Old Mother Fox, dressed up in Mistress Wigley’s worn-out clothes for the purpose. He wrote the oratory and the songs, all long-since vanished. Music was played on the Jew’s harp and the salt box. Dogs and monkeys cavorted dementedly, to the great delight of the inebriated crowd. To this period we must presumably ascribe the satire published on Pelham in the Gentleman’s Magazine:

  But see this gentle Lamb whom God hath chosen

  His Fleece shrived both of Blasphemy and Treason

  Even as his Wits are sheared of Sense –

  All travelling, after his Virtue, hence.

  So long as he stayed indoors under the aegis of Ann Wigley, he was safe, but it was probably inevitable that he would before long set out to explore the city’s streets once more.

  The place had been changing, though perhaps not as much as it would have liked. It was still guarded in those days by the watch, made up of unpaid parishioners, often old and close to infirmity. Horace Walpole was shot at in Hyde Park by a highwayman and later complained that ‘one is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going to battle’. But beneath the smoking chimneys and the endless smuts, new and different buildings were sprouting up. After the Great Fire, the city had not been reshaped according to some magisterial design, but had flourished once more on the old, crooked street plan. Dirty yards and foul shambles jostled next to the houses of the wealthy. Curricles and phaetons trundled before tall, at times magnificent, new houses, rising on their narrow sites. The great squares were shaping little villages for wealthy eyes to look down on, piazzas of greenery in the sea-coal fog. The painted lintels were soon enough furred and smeared, and men from further east were paid to come and clean them. Pelham walked about examining all this, as though he were Gulliver on one of his travels. Then he went in search once more of the life of the spirit.

  As the official Church had started on its long, slow rapprochement with Reason, dispensing with the apparatus of supernaturalism as much as possible, other sects had risen up to fill the vacuum, and one fine summer’s day Pelham chanced upon George Whitefield preaching outdoors in Upper Moorfields. The year was probably 1753. The scene had become a common one. A man sold nuts from a barrow. Dogs scurried about the place barking. A fair number of the drunk and destitute lay raggedly about. A blind man walked listlessly along, while women in flat bonnets smiled this way and that, and a naval officer in a tricorn hat walked around rather grandly, his fiancée balanced on his arm. A small boy in vast baggy breeches made a manikin with a negro head jig and shudder and call out ribald blasphemies at Whitefield, who preached in the shade of an oak tree. But nothing could divert him: he called all within shouting distance to true repentance, so that the spirit might descend and fill the soul with a joy unimaginable. Two ancient-looking Jewish merchants stood still, arm in arm, and attended to these words in silence. But Pelham that day was one of those who fell to the ground and writhed in either torment or ecstasy; one who came to believe that the spirit had come upon him once more. And for a while Pelham dutifully attended every Metho
dist meeting that he could. But it soon became evident to his fellow enthusiasts that the Holy Spirit wasn’t the only spirit providing him with intoxication, and he was instructed either to change his habits or to stay away. John Wesley was at that time preaching forcibly about the evils of gin.

  Two things then happened. First, he added laudanum to the gin he was now drinking in quantity, and second he came upon the Children of Bethany. Then a third thing happened, presumably as a result of the other two: he was thrown out of his accommodation at the Strangers’ Tavern. Ann Wigley could no longer be doing with his gin drinking, or his self-dosing with opium, but she tired even more quickly of his sermons. There were even rumours that there had been odd goings on too, yells and crashes in the night. No one was ever entirely sure why Richard Pelham left the place in such a hurry, but now begins the outpouring of letters that constitute the larger part of his correspondence, at first from a scatter of insalubrious addresses, then finally from no address at all.

  Pelham had fallen silent on the subject of religion since his incarceration in the Chelsea Asylum. He had written The Instruments of the Passion, it is true, and if called upon had read parts of it out, but always tentatively, always under instruction. Otherwise his religion and his insanity had been so closely identified by those in power over him that he feared any mention of the one would immediately imply the other. Even his naming of Agarith to Lord Chilford had only been by command. He was merely obeying the worldly power, as St Paul had advised. And after he had fled Chilford Villa he had expected with each day that passed to see Jacob at the head of a crowd of watchmen, come to collect him.

  But now the length and breadth of England was astir with enthusiasm. The soporific Sabbath day attendance of conformity was being loudly subverted in the open-air prayer meetings, the evangelical calling upon the Lord, of Wesley and George Whitefield. A little scholarly group, the Bible Moths of Oxford, had already flourished into what came in time to be called the Methodist Revival. As we know, Pelham attended more than one of these love feasts, and felt, as he said in his letters, that he too was struck by the Spirit. In his own words, it smote him fiercely at the top of his ribcage, and laid him out on the ground, seemingly unconscious, while the Holy Ghost performed its ministry. The wailing and the moaning all about him were, he later said, the sounds of imprisoned souls being released at last from the chains of bondage. Egypt’s tomb opened in Moorfields. He seems to have zigzagged haphazardly in and out of various conventicles until he came upon the Children of Bethany, in one of the tiny and untidy streets that ran off the Tottenham Court Road.

  The work of religious scholars has remained inconclusive here, for there is scant documentation, but they are all agreed on one point: no creed had ever been promoted or adhered to by this church, which was not in any case a church, with all that implies of structure, authority and a tribe of ecclesiastical entrepreneurs, but a congregation, a huddled gathering of the brethren upon the shores of time. There was a certain creative fluency in regard to doctrine, and crucial ambiguities in regard to personal morality, in particular sexuality. The one thing resolutely affirmed was that the merits of the Passion of Our Lord are imputed to us. Thus are we saved, though sinners all. We should not intrude our own infinitesimal and opaquely depraved persons in the way of the action of grace. We must each one of us avoid all shalling and willing.

  So deeply did these beliefs go that any large decision required the use of the holy lottery to elicit the expression of God’s will for the congregation. A chalice was the receptacle, containing small pieces of wood from tent pegs, with a cross engraved upon only one. And here they accepted Pelham, with or without his addictions. Here, with an admiration verging on reverence, the poet came to look upon the features of Prince Zabrenus, the tall, black-bearded magus of this sect, who stood no higher than they did, for physical platforms led to spiritual ones, and called out in the ramshackle assembly hall of Bethany House, ‘Think of me, my brothers and sisters, as no more than a self-proclaimed Galilean fool, for mine is truly an idiocy of Nazarene proportions.’

  Driven

  To drive away the heavy thought of care.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Richard II

  My father, Adam Bayliss, accountant, had one great friend, Victor Cray, solicitor. He would come to our house every month for dinner, and I would clamber over his vast belly, and pull from his waistcoat pocket his golden watch, which, after he had turned a tiny wheel on it, would chime to announce each quarter hour. I would sit on his lap and stare in silence as the big hand made its way round, and then shout with joy when the chimes began. How many years ago was that? I didn’t want to think about it as I made my way to his office in Morden. He met me at the door and I looked at him in wonder.

  ‘You’re a thin man,’ I said. ‘You didn’t used to be.’ He smiled an old man’s weary smile. He looked as though he had lost not only his weight but most of his vigour since the last time I had seen him, at my father’s funeral.

  ‘Had no choice,’ he said. ‘Health.’ Now where his great chin had had once hung and throbbed like a croaking toad’s there was only a sheaf of lizard folds. And the belly that had ballooned inside his waistcoat had shrunk so that his suit flapped about him.

  ‘Sit down,’ he said, ‘and tell me about this little difficulty of yours.’

  I explained about Andrew and CPT, and how it certainly appeared that he had deliberately siphoned money out of Shipley’s to fund the setting up of his own transport company; explained how it was assumed I had colluded in this manoeuvre, when in fact I had done no such thing, though I had been less than attentive in my directorial responsibilities.

  ‘I would say you are being treated unfairly and a case could certainly be brought to that effect.’ There was a pause, as Victor looked at me intently. I almost thought he was going to ask me to climb back up on to his knee. ‘That’s assuming you’ve told me the whole story.’

  ‘There are a few more elements to it.’ He motioned with his hands that I should inform him of these other elements. So I started, with some difficulty, to talk about my relationship with Andrew. I described the unusual arrangement regarding the car and explained how, in his increasingly lengthy absences, I had made decisions which in retrospect were perhaps unwise. How I had disposed of funds on my company credit card as though I were answerable to no one but myself. How I had used it to finance trips for myself and Alice which in truth had nothing to do with the company at all. How I had taken on at least one job for less than cost for private reasons. Then I swallowed and said, ‘Then there were some irregular expenses in Europe.’

  ‘What sort of expenses?’ Victor asked. It had been a mistake to visit all this upon an old family friend, I realised that now. I should have just picked a solicitor out of Yellow Pages.

  ‘What sort of expenses, Christopher?’

  ‘Night clubs. Hostesses. Champagne.’

  ‘You paid for sex on your company expenses?’ No flies on Victor then, we could drop the euphemisms. After only a slight pause, I said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you pay on your expense account, or did your friend Cavendish-Porter pay on his?’

  ‘At first it was all on his. Then…’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘He told me to pick up a few of the bills.’

  ‘And you did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not in cash?’

  ‘On the card.’

  ‘So there are company records of it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you account for these nights of yours on the documentation?’

  ‘Entertainment. We were meeting a lot of potential foreign clients. It would have seemed like no more than hotel and restaurant bills. Someone must have made it their business to contact these places and find out what services they actually provided.’

  ‘But all this goes back over a number of years?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why bring it up now? Is it simply because of this Cavendish-Porter and his t
ransport company?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that over the last few days. I suppose the truth is, we were fine as long as we were bringing in the money. They’d probably have forgiven us anything. But for the last two years it’s been dropping away. For the last nine months we’ve probably been running at a loss. Andrew was never there, I had my mind on other things. So they started paying attention to us, which they never did as long as we were in profit.’

  Victor looked at me in silence for a moment. It was that look again – I thought I’d left that look behind in Rome, but it seemed to be following me around the world. Finally he spoke.

  ‘This is personal advice, for which there is no charge, because if you were to proceed with this business, I shouldn’t wish to be involved. If I were you, I’d accept that you have behaved recklessly and laid yourself open to charges of defrauding the company. If you were an employee merely, there could be grounds for saying that you had been led on by your director. But as it stands, I think you might cut a sorry figure if it came to court. It would all seem so … seedy. You’re too young to need to buy sex with other people’s money, Christopher. That’s an old man’s game.’ Victor had now risen.