The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  That Christmas my mother insisted we should go to midnight mass at Westminster Cathedral. I tried desperately to talk her out of it, but she would not be budged. She always had been strong-willed, and the onset of her mild senility had in no way modified that characteristic. On Christmas Eve I opened up the garage to look at my father’s car. This last was at my mother’s bidding, since I had no doubt it would be non-functional: flat-tyred, flat-batteried, untaxed, undrivable. To my astonishment, his old Rover started at the second turn of the ignition. The tyres were at the right pressure, and when I checked the tax disc it had been renewed three months before. Inside the glove compartment I found my father’s motoring file and service history, and discovered that the insurance was up to date too, for any driver over thirty. I couldn’t believe my mother had had anything to do with this, for she didn’t even drive, so I asked her who had been tending the car.

  ‘Harry does it.’

  ‘Who’s Harry?’ I said.

  ‘Harry who?’

  ‘Never mind, mother.’

  I had to some extent come to terms with my disability. Whether the pain had actually declined, or my accommodation of it had increased, I can’t say. That’s one of the curious things about any pain that comes to stay: after a while you can’t remember what life felt like without it. I had simply learnt not to move whole sectors of my body whose fluency and strength I had once taken for granted. But it was the first time I had driven since my accident, and I had forgotten entirely what a great cumbersome beast my father’s car was. It had been designed for a more genteel age, when petrol had been cheaper and the roads emptier. The smell of old leather and the dashboard’s gleaming mahogany triggered memories of years before, but it hurt my back every time I had to turn the wheel full circle. The distance between the gears using that old metal stick seemed to require an acrobatic contortion. Whenever I leaned forward to find the indicator switch, the slack safety belt would tighten suddenly across my shoulder and jerk me backwards. There were frequent bleatings from the horns of other drivers. When we arrived at Victoria I was so nervous about parking, and having to twist my head around to do it, that I drove in and out of the surrounding streets for twenty minutes before I found a gap large enough to pull into without reversing. My mother sat tranquilly at my side, gazing out with contented wonder at the world beyond her window, flashing and flickering away out there like another galaxy.

  In the car on the way back that night, my mother was silent for a few minutes, until she said finally, with a great sigh of satisfaction, ‘Well, amen to all that.’ The next day I couldn’t even get out of bed. She brought me my TENS machine and switched me on. The crowds of electrons whirled and cavorted inside me, bearing their infinitesimal burdens of negativity.

  My mother’s smile was much in evidence that spring. Once I came back to find her chewing contentedly on a piece of soap. It was a pink bar of Lux – she had always been choosy regarding the bathroom accoutrements. Then something entirely unexpected happened: my mother started to speak to me as she had never done before, and using words I never knew lurked in her vocabulary.

  I was sitting at the table one morning, eating a boiled egg and reading this line of Pelham’s from the letters: ‘I am the age’s gull, and every year that passes cozens me.’ My mother was staring through the window with a copy of the New Testament open on her lap.

  ‘Do you remember what God said to Paul?’ she asked. I carried on reading Pelham, as I normally did these days when my mother started on one of her monologues. ‘He said: “My grace is sufficient for thee; for power is made perfect in infirmity.” I was thinking how true that is. In your case for example, Chris.’

  ‘How’s that mother?’ I said without looking up.

  ‘Well, when you were successful, and a director, and had that lovely little car, I couldn’t help noticing something about you.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘You were such a twat, dear.’ I swallowed hard on the piece of egg I was chewing and turned to look at her. She was serene as usual, her face pointed towards the window. I thought I must have mis-heard.

  ‘I was a what, mother?’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘What did you say I was a moment ago?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘A twat. Such a fucking twat and you were so pleased with yourself about it, too. I found myself wondering if you’d ever given a bugger about anyone but yourself in the whole of your life. Your father was a bit like that, to be perfectly honest with you. Reliable, of course, like those cars of his. I think the people who built them might have done him as well, when they had a day off. But what a bloody bore he could be with his trial balances and all of that palaver. I don’t think anything ever excited your father as much as double-entry book-keeping. Certainly not sex. He’d come home at night and sit in that armchair by the fire and talk to me about … cases of insolvency. Not surprising we only had the one child, is it, Christopher? Though probably just as well. Did you get those sausages, by the way? And I could see so much of your father in you that I thought it would be better if you became a priest, that’s why I encouraged you in that direction, if you want to know. Then if you were going to be a selfish little shit you could be a selfish little shit amongst men, who wouldn’t get damaged by it, since most of them were probably selfish little shits as well. How many women did you have, over the brush, as your father would have said?’

  ‘I can’t remember, mother,’ I said slowly.

  ‘Too many then. I only hope you gave them money.’

  And when I thought about it, the only thing I could be absolutely sure I had given Alice was money. My mother sat in silence for a few moments, then she said brightly, ‘I sometimes think that if they made a twat that didn’t have a woman round it, there’d be quite a lot of takers amongst you chaps.’ Then a slab of pain so hard it almost lifted me off the chair suddenly met my neck and brought tears to my eyes.

  ‘Bayliss men don’t weep,’ my mother said evenly. ‘Your father always said that. He always said bollocks to men who blub.’

  * * *

  We both coped in our different ways until the incontinence began. I’ve heard tell that the faeces of an infant can seem like fragrance in the nostrils of a doting mother, but I’ve never heard anyone claim the smell of a parent’s shit can be sweet to the child, however loving. I came back from my walk around the common to find her smeared from the waist down with streaks of the fetid sludge. One of her fingers was brown from poking at herself in bovine incredulity.

  It wasn’t long after that I put her in the home. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an affordable one nearby. I can still see the silent reproach in her face as I left her there that day, but what else could I have done? I tried to visit every four or five days, when the state of my back allowed me to drive, but I think mother must have decided that she’d had enough for one lifetime. Her dignity had been mortally offended, I could see that, even as her wits came indisputably astray. But she still swayed in and out of focus and only when she was out of focus entirely did the distress appear to cease. Then she was nobody and nowhere. She was out of focus more and more often. Within a year she was dead.

  ‘Save you a lot of money in bills anyway,’ her sister Agnes said to me at the funeral, from under her freshly purchased, wide-brimmed black hat. ‘Sylvia was always so considerate that way. Though if you’d only got her a home nurse in, I don’t doubt she’d still be alive today. And after all that time she spent nursing you, Christopher.’

  Right up to the end my mother had kept her silver hair swept back immaculately into a little knot of royal blue silk.

  * * *

  There was no ghost of her left after that in any mirror, for I’d not inherited her features, neither the high cheekbones nor the blue eyes, nor the tall, thin frame. I was once trim and taut enough in my climbing days up in Yorkshire. In fact, I always stayed fit, I had prided myself on it right up to the accident. But as I loped around, it seemed more and more that my body wa
s merely an encumbrance to my mind. I no longer asked much of the flesh, except that it should leave my thoughts free from distraction and discomfort for as long as possible.

  But now I had a whole house to myself – a big one, too. I transferred my thoughts completely into the eighteenth century, having nothing further to keep me in the twentieth. I would occasionally catch sight of myself in shop windows, or in the mirrored wall inside the chemist’s. A dishevelled and dubious figure. Since I’d retired from public life, I shaved once a week, and that was with my father’s old electric razor, so the results could often be sketchy. My clothes had grown rumpled and baggy and seemed suddenly too big for me, for I only ate these days when I occasionally remembered to do so. I had withdrawn, you see, into the world of study and reflection. Even my flesh had withdrawn.

  In that ramshackle Edwardian house at the edge of Tooting Common, I lived by myself. I took no lodgers, and I received no visitors. I pursued my true work at last, with no Alice or anyone else to distract me from it. Now that I was seemingly free from both the pleasures and the burdens that the world afforded, I felt I had been left alone at last to elucidate the life and poetry of Richard Pelham, as I had set out to do so many years before.

  Melancholy

  Black sun of melancholy. They say the sun never sees a shadow, but the black sun never sees anything else.

  RICHARD PELHAM, Letters

  By the time Lord Chilford returned to Chilford Villa, many of its contents had been draped and shrouded in muslin dust sheets, even the virginals at which his wife had played so prettily. He had bought them for her as a wedding present from an instrument maker in Deal by the name of Atterbury, a man renowned for the tonal precision of his harpsichords. He would now arrange for Jacob to cut the strings. He found the idea of any other fingers dancing along its keys repugnant.

  He walked up and down his geometric stairs and in and out of his perfectly proportioned rooms, halting momentarily to stare at the plasterwork on the grand ceiling. Mermen frolicked in the frozen white as their womenfolk taunted and teased them. In the middle of it all was Chilford in his most luxurious wig, as Lady Chilford’s smile beckoned him, both her eyes and her breasts focused relentlessly upon the man who represented the centre of her world. Was it Francesco Vassalli who had done that for him, or had he only been employed on the busts? He could no longer remember, but whichever Italian he had congratulated so enthusiastically on his work, he had hardly thought then that its contemplation could so soon become nothing but a source of nameless grief to him.

  He made his way through sad, silent rooms. The multitude of long-case and carriage clocks had all ceased the measured clunks and hammerings which had once sunk so relentlessly through Richard Pelham’s soul, for he had instructed Jacob to stop winding them the day after Lady Chilford’s death.

  At last he came to his study. Pompeo Batoni’s portrait of him in oils still hung opposite the door, painted years back in Rome while Chilford was doing the tour. Batoni had given his sitter the airs and graces of an emperor, in contradiction to all Chilford’s true beliefs, but still it had amused him and had become a part of the lore of his lovemaking with his wife, as she would whisper coquettishly into his ear about his pagan Roman customs, and he would oblige her with one or two to which his stay in the Holy City had in fact introduced him. One hot afternoon he had crushed grapes across her shifting thighs and then begun to lick … Ah leave it, he thought, as he turned the canvas to the wall. She’s down in the earth with the worms now, so have done with it.

  What confronted him next had always struck him before as of merely anatomic significance. One of the écorché studies so popular at that time portrayed a heavily pregnant woman, the flesh of her belly ripped back to reveal a hugely swollen womb, all the other organs neatly arranged like side dishes, as though to garnish the heavily veined and bloated egg they surrounded. Now for the first time it likened itself in his mind to an explosion, or the rising of a bloody planet over devastated, war-torn ground. Now it meant death, not anatomy. Or perhaps anatomy itself had come to mean nothing but death for him. That image, too, he turned quickly to the wall.

  Around him were so many of the objects that had filled the mind of Richard Pelham with panic and confusion. The wax models, the flayed man, the skulls, the Byzantine array of medical implements, to hack into this piece of bone or saw through that one. Even a delicate point so finessed it could drill a tiny hole in a man’s skull. ‘Is that how you plan to let his spirit escape?’ Pelham had asked him. He walked across to the small engraving which hung behind his desk, acquired while journeying through Nuremburg: Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia. He looked at it intently now, as he had never looked before.

  It pictured a winged woman, the emblematic figure of the melancholy state, gazing off into impossibility, as around her were strewn all the tools of possibility, left immobile by her mystic stare. An hourglass trapped her wing. A magic square was incised in the wall above her head, its arcane promise of hidden knowledge and unworldly power somehow as muted and despairing as all the worldly implements of building and geometry scattered about her feet. Though her face was dark, the eyes were of a startling brilliancy. Watercress and ranunculus wreathed her head – watery flowers to offset the dry and earthy humour. Medieval superstitions creeping into the new learning. But he had been intrigued once by Marsilio Ficino’s distinction between melancolia candida bilis, or the white bile melancholy, and melancolia atra bilis, or black bile melancholy. The one was said to produce genius and the other mania. Indeed, he had once thought he might well need to apply the distinction to Richard Pelham himself, to show how a single personality could contain both states, or at least how one type might in time degenerate into the other. The compasses in Melancholy’s hand could no more measure out a new state house or a basilica than they could fathom the bottomless dimensions of saturnine gloom.

  On the table stood the pile of letters in Pelham’s wild hand, which Jacob had told him had been arriving over the previous months. Chilford pulled the tug-rope and a bell rang elsewhere in the house. Jacob arrived with Josephine a foot or two behind him. She began to sob as she entered the room and her employer walked across and took her in his arms.

  ‘I’m so sorry, my Lord. I’m so sorry for your trouble.’

  ‘Thank you, Josephine. But we cannot stand about and grieve all day. Jacob, despite my previous instructions, I intend to move back here to the villa for a while, after all, and I’m arranging for my son and his nurse to join me shortly. Would you start making the necessary arrangements?’

  Jacob’s face brightened, despite the heavy fact of the death of her ladyship in childbirth, as he realised that the villa was not to be shut up after all. He had grown attached to it, he and his wife.

  ‘You’ll be able to help, no doubt, with the raising of the boy, Josephine.’

  ‘I’d be honoured, my Lord.’ It was one of the sadnesses of their marriage that they had not been blessed with children.

  ‘Good. Then that’s settled.’ Chilford pointed briskly to the pile of letters on his desk, and Jacob nodded.

  ‘Those are the ones I told you of.’

  ‘How long have they been coming?’

  ‘Over six months now.’

  ‘And never any return address?’ Jacob shook his head. ‘Right, let’s all make a start then, shall we?’ Jacob and Josephine stepped out of the room and about their business, and Lord Chilford gazed out of the window at the river. The recent storms had converted the field in front of his house into a whin. He suddenly turned, as it seemed to him momentarily that he caught a breath of his wife’s perfume. An absurdity, of course: no more than a trick of undischarged memory intruding on the mind’s present calculations. No scent’s particles could sustain themselves even in such static air for such a duration. Then he sat down at his desk and started on the unwelcome task of reading Richard Pelham’s letters.

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  Medical treatises. Memoirs. Obscure works of theology. Volumes of letters so long forgotten that only antiquarian booksellers and lizard-grey librarians knew they still existed. Diaries printed privately in limited editions. All those distant, rolling mists of recollection. Faded obituaries in long-defunct journals. Holograph texts inserted into warped vellum bindings. Marginalia whose sepia inks were dying slowly in the intermittent light.

  The only thing that ever took me out of the house these days, apart from simple provisions, was my forays in pursuit of my manuscripts and books among the dealers. I had tried but quickly given up on the London and the British Libraries. I found even the breathing of other people deafened me to the words of the text I was studying. A cough at the next table could end my concentration for the day. I had begun to realise that if I was ever to say anything of substance about this poet who had sunk into such universal oblivion, I was going to have to own some serious material, share my living space with it night and day, stare at it slowly as it stared slowly back, exchange intimate details, date of birth and year of publication, home town and place of printing. For borrowed texts, I had begun to understand, can be very coy in yielding up their secrets. Intercourse with books requires that you should marry them, and the sacrament is money (or theft, whichever one costs you the most), the estate possession. Books need to be owned and treasured, or even abused, not scanned swiftly and coldly in public places as though they were government statistics or pornography. It’s no good wrapping them in dirty polythene coats and passing them from one subscriber’s hand to another. Books offer illumination only to those they choose, and where and when they choose. A paperback wrapper is a mere illusion of availability, but then so is a luxurious leather binding, like the fur coat a whore wears in winter. Many who read, and often the richest among them, are given nothing whatsoever. The spirit of the text might be retained, however grand and stately the transaction, even while the letter is given. Books must always cost you a little more than you can afford, otherwise they’ll keep themselves to themselves, hunch frigid and impenetrable inside their covers, shroud their secrets with a chilling baffle of propriety. And who wouldn’t, after all? Whoever taught us to assume that the hearts of books should be easier to come by than our own? Or that their souls should be for sale at a lower price than anyone else’s passport to eternity? What is a book, when all’s said and done, but someone’s heart, someone’s soul?