The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  Pelham himself was acutely aware of this. He wrote to his fellow poet James Thomson that whenever he looked at one of Lord Chilford’s books, he sensed the presence of the man, the severe crouch of his precision, beside him in the room. The one possession Pelham was never separated from, even in his last days in Grub Street, was his sextodecimo Psalms in the authorised version. A binding of red goatskin over birchwood boards. Tooled into the leather was an image of David playing the lyre, while Saul looked on from his throne, hoping the notes of the music could calm the unfathomed terror and torment that churned inside him.

  I’d come to see that books are bound in time as surely as they are inside their covers, which was why my prize possession up to now was a first edition of the Psalms of Solace, with handwritten corrections, quibbles and second thoughts. In the margins were written fractions of comments, all inscribed in a tiny, cryptic, eighteenth-century hand. Whose? I needed each day to touch this book, for it was a physical link. The original years, Pelham’s years, had rubbed off, they clung to its pages – they were still turning there. It hadn’t yet been reset in modernity’s font. When I held that book I took the poet’s hand across the centuries.

  But such items, it has to be said, did not come cheaply. And my appetite for them grew. My mother had left a small amount of money when she died, but not much. That had soon gone. And I was afraid of breaking into my building society account, since the interest on it was, after all, my only income. So one day I took a good look around the house.

  The paintings were the first things I sold. I’d never liked them much in any case, since most of them portrayed Victorian sentiment up on its stilts, and I found a most sympathetic man, a Mr Surtees, who had an antique shop a mile or so down the road. He would turn up and I would point to the items I’d decided I could happily live without, then he’d scribble a few notes on a pad, and quickly arrive at a figure. He seemed reliable enough, so rather than waste his time and mine bargaining with him, or hunting about town finding alternative valuations, Simon and I (for we were soon on first-name terms) would sort it out between us. With a smile and a minimum of fuss. No paperwork required. Then he could go back to his business and I back to my books.

  There were patches on the walls where the pictures and the mirrors disappeared, and gaps were opening up inside the rooms now as I cut down on the furniture, but the cash enabled me to buy books and batches of unpublished letters and papers; this was the only thing that was important. As for the mirrors, to be honest I was glad to see the silvered backs of them. They always seemed to turn my features round to face me like a silent accusation, though I never knew of what exactly I was being accused. Sometimes when I caught sight of myself as a ghostly blur in a window, I would ask momentarily who that man could be, since I had surely seen him before. My clothes were becoming too large for me. My greying hair was down to my shoulders.

  Surtees had expressed an interest more than once in the sofa on the landing. He had even gone from offering me fifty to offering me a hundred pounds, and then a hundred and fifty, but still I demurred. It had memories, that sofa. In fact, it was stained with memories.

  During my final exams at school, my mother and father had gone away for a few days to the seaside, and I had stayed on alone in the house to study. It was hot and sunny outside, so when I’d had enough of Robert Walpole’s administration, I went out and took a walk over the common. I didn’t go to the Lido any more. I think I might even have grown afraid of the place. It was a rendezvous where sex and violence were rehearsed, a hunting ground of physical display and wary counsel, where the smells of flesh and fear intermingled. I never heard tell of any fights actually happening inside – they all occurred later, but they had been negotiated in there, like the rumoured couplings they were so often about.

  I had wandered over, drawn most likely by the noise, as the girls’ cries threaded in amongst the boys’ loud boasts and splashes. I didn’t buy a ticket or go inside, but there is a corner near to the railway line where it is possible to climb through the bushes and see past the bars to the bodies within. I knew many of them – I knew them but was no longer friends with them, for I was the one who’d gone to the different school. As we had grown older this had become more important with every year. Then I’d made that big decision regarding my vocation, and had become entirely separate, no longer desirable as a companion. Among the boys, anyway.

  Pauline Healey had a legendary status. Her father had deserted his family years before, bestowing on them in the process an indefinably anarchic and socially unanchored status. Her mother was known to take lovers, relationships which sometimes ended noisily and badly. I had even heard my parents talking in low voices about it. Pauline’s two elder sisters were said to be notoriously free with their favours. But Pauline herself was famous primarily among the boys for her breasts, which had burgeoned and flourished earlier than any of those of her classmates. Everyone had found them impossible to ignore, whatever clothes she had on, whatever the time of year.

  She was there inside in a bikini, and even more impossible to ignore than usual. The boys laughed uneasily as they strutted about her. One wrestled with her for a moment at the water’s edge, and the consequence of his arousal was visible in the tightening fabric of his trunks. I had thought to remain invisible, but she saw me, saw me crouching and peering when the others had momentarily drifted away from her, and she made her way over to the rusting bars, where I stood outside looking in.

  ‘Hello, Christopher. Haven’t seen you for a long time. Working hard at your books, I suppose. They say you’ll be going to Rome this year.’

  ‘If I pass my exams, I will.’

  ‘I thought you never failed any.’ She bent down to scratch her knee and her breasts swung free from her ribcage. ‘Aren’t you coming in?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Just came out for a walk. I’m studying at home. By myself. Mum and dad have gone away for a few days.’ She looked at me closely and smiled. There was an insolent bravado about Pauline’s manner that made me nervy and unsure of myself. ‘Drop by for a coffee,’ I said, without considering my words.

  ‘All right then, I will. After tea tonight.’

  As I walked back over the common I felt a cold surge of fear going through me. What had I done? What was I expected to do? But along with the fear was an equally icy thrill.

  She came as promised. In her white T-shirt and black leather jacket, and her tight blue jeans. And I made her the coffee. After, she asked to look around the house. She even bounced up and down a few times on my bed and laughed, but it was later, on that sturdily built Victorian sofa, that Pauline Healey finally said, ‘Can’t keep your eyes off them, can you?’ and pulled the T-shirt over her head, leaving me to fumble with the fastening of her bra, while she unzipped me swiftly and took hold. She’d done all this before. Just like the boys had said, she knew what she was about. In one of Pelham’s notebook scrawls he speculated whether the first joy of the flesh that an infant ever knows, when its toothless gums are pressed deliriously against the nipple, remains a marker in the hidden memory for all subsequent delights. That might explain why the snowy dazzle of Pauline’s ample breasts had so overcome me that the stain was still there after all these years. A week later my mother had noticed it and given it a scrupulous examination, even dubiously sniffing it.

  ‘Looks like milk,’ she had said, though without conviction. I had said nothing, not wishing to inform her that it was in fact the spilt seed of Onan, her son. A week later I saw Pauline on a street corner with some of the local boys, and heard her laughter as I walked by. She called something out to me, and the boys laughed again as I hurried away. And in the amused tone of her voice I once more heard the question she had asked as she had left the house that night: ‘Are you absolutely sure you want to be a priest, Chris?’ Now I found myself asking a question I was often to ask again as the years went by: had Pauline been interested in me, or only in the priest I was destined to become? To tempt a priest with that which he
has renounced is a ritual curiosity for some women, and I don’t know whether it’s meant to abolish all sacraments in bodily delight, or simply to consecrate the flesh itself; to see if it’s true that a woman’s body might become the altar on which we perform our little miracle.

  So I never did sell that sofa. I seemed to be well on the way to selling everything else, though. I would put Simon Surtees’s cash in my pocket, then I would strap on my TENS. Little flitters of electricity started flying, tiny stars flashing through my veins, a dance of dainty currents that caused a small hot commotion in the blood. And then, renewed and freshly charged like a milk float, I’d be off, with money burning holes in my pockets, to do the rounds of the London dealers.

  London booksellers, I soon discovered, constitute an entire world unto themselves, where unpredictable alliances and bitter rivalries flourish. Some of the people who could supply the things I wanted were not in the centre any more, because they couldn’t afford the rents. Charles Redmond and Josianne Thring in Hammersmith were among them.

  Charles would open the door of the little house off King Street as though he had just woken up. He would yawn and stretch, whatever the time of day, then he’d push his long ginger hair back from his bony face and reveal his nicotine-discoloured teeth in an enormous grin. Usually he would have no shoes on, and his shirt would be unbuttoned, whatever the weather. He would never acknowledge that he was expecting me, even if I had phoned an hour before.

  ‘Christopher, how nice. Come in. Come in. Good timing – Josianne’s not gone out yet.’

  Through we would go down the corridor and up the stairs, all lined with shelf upon shelf of neatly stacked books. And there, sitting at the table, would be Josianne. Apart from a few finely nibbed lines around her eyes, she always looked entirely ageless to me, small with brown hair cut short in precisely the manner that the hair of all twelve-year-old boys used to be when I was at school, combed straight in every direction, a shingle of fringe at the front. Blue eyes, wider than the dimensions of her face would have predicted, above a tiny, sweetly arced nose. Her lips seemed permanently sculptured into a good-natured pout, and fastidiously lip-sticked. There was always a hint of white powder about her neck, and a meek blush of rouge on her cheekbones. She wore a double-breasted trouser suit, and appeared to be perfectly made, like the inside of a Swiss watch. And I could never see her body without thinking of Alice. They both had the same spare, boyish shape, as though neither of them could be bothered even trying to look womanish; as though they had both made the decision to be female at the very last minute.

  ‘I’ll make you some coffee, Christopher,’ Charles said as he stepped nimbly over to the kettle. He’d already lit another cigarette. ‘I was just telling Josianne about my trip to the East End this morning. Do you know Shadwell at all? Shadwell, the poet?’

  ‘No relation?’ I asked.

  ‘No relation,’ he echoed vaguely.

  ‘To the Poet Laureate in the seventeenth century. You remember Dryden’s lines:

  The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

  But Shadwell never deviates into sense.

  He was the first person ever recorded in England to die from opium addiction.’

  ‘No, this one’s alive and well. Alive anyway. He wasn’t actually called Shadwell when I met him at university. He was called Dennis then, but I can see why he might prefer Shadwell. It seems to be a new thing, this single-name business.’

  ‘What about Donovan?’ Josianne asked vaguely, while staring through the window, smiling compassionately at the sky, whose thickening grey suggested that it would start to weep at any moment.

  ‘True,’ Charles said. ‘Kitaj won’t let anyone call him Ronnie any more, you know. He’s just Kitaj from now on, apparently, even to his nearest and dearest. And there’s a man in Brighton called Leon, who lies in a box for a week at a time.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Josianne.

  ‘It’s some sort of art.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ve known Shadwell, or Dennis as he was then, ever since we were at college together,’ Charles continued, amidst the clinking of cups, ‘before he packed it in, that is, after the first year, as a task unfitted to his genius. So whenever Shadwell’s short of a bob or two, which is often, he calls me over to the Isle of Dogs to have a dekko at his first editions. It turns out that last night he gave a reading at a Whitechapel pub, and when he got back, worn out I suppose from the excitement of it all, he passed out in an armchair. After twenty minutes, wanting to catch up on the news, he started his usual search for the black-and-white TV set that he keeps in the corner, along with his other debris and bric-à-brac. Some time later, when this search had proved even more difficult than usual, he realised with sudden clarity that he’d been burgled.’ Josianne had started to laugh very softly, and Charles continued, smiling. ‘He then called the police. A constable arrives hours later and looking round the place, which was in exactly the same state it’s been in for the last ten years, he says, “Like animals aren’t they, sir? Just like animals.”’

  Josianne continued laughing, more loudly now. ‘Ah Shadwell,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to have him over again.’

  ‘No good trying to phone,’ Charles said as he brought the coffees over on a tray.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s about two hundred empty milk bottles between him and the telephone. He says by the time he makes it into the hall, it’s always stopped ringing. He reckons that’s why none of his work gets published any more – the publishers have all rung off by the time he picks up the receiver. I raised the possibility of him getting rid of the bottles, and he just shook his head and smiled. A dark smile. A poète maudit sort of smile, Paris circa 1870. He found it amusing, I think, that I should have such a limited grasp of how complicated the situation regarding his milk bottles really is. Picked up some interesting stuff though. Lots of signed first editions. He’s so vague he can never even remember where he got them all from.’ I was looking at one of these. A copy of Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings. Larkin’s neatly inscribed name was there, the ink apparently unfaded.

  ‘Anyway, come through and have a look at what we’ve got,’ Charles said. ‘One or two things might interest you.’ Josianne had stood up and was putting on her coat.

  ‘Goodbye chaps,’ she said as she started down the staircase. ‘How’s the neck, by the way, Christopher?’

  ‘You don’t really want to know.’

  I bought the three-volume diary of a long-forgotten surgeon and a few books of minor Augustan verse. We finally arrived at a price of three hundred and fifty pounds, though I had the feeling he might have taken slightly less, had I been inclined to haggle, which I wasn’t. As I left, Charles said, ‘It’s Pelham you’re after, isn’t it? Isn’t that your subject?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now, didn’t he have a patron?’

  ‘Lord Chilford,’ I said.

  ‘That’s him. Chilford. There was some dark mischief about him, wasn’t there? Bodies in his basement, or something. Anyway, I could swear there was a rumour, oh years ago now, about a private purchase of Chilford papers. Just on the grapevine, you know. That’s how this business operates mostly. The word was that Tewk had bought some material. All very hush-hush. Stamford Tewk. Do you know him? Down in Richmond, just at the side of the bridge. You should probably visit him, he’d have all sorts of stuff you’d be interested in, I should think. Only trouble is, of course, he won’t let you in.’

  Heart’s Hornbook, Memory’s Bible

  It pleased God that I should be born in a country where melancholy is the national characteristic.

  WILLIAM COWPER, Letters

  Lord Chilford stared at the page before him, with its wild writing.

  My Lord,

  You will perhaps remember how in Swift’s Voyage to Laputa the men of the Academy of Lagado carried on their back every conceivable object to which they might need to refer, thus absolving them of the need for vocab
ulary.

  It seems in these dark days that it is so with me: for now I carry every species of grief and sorrow, and cannot translate a single one of them into a lighter word. I am indeed cropsick and addled, and wonder whether the treatment you gave me, to which I so meekly submitted, hasn’t helped to turn the sun black.

  Of course, even David the Psalm-maker had his wife Michal taken away from him and given to another man, she who had cost him a hundred Philistine foreskins. But David at least one day won his wife back.

  What have I been given back for my gold coin but a scorched black disc? So that I could play Gobemouche to your lordly Jack-Know-It-All. And all the time I was privy to things your science couldn’t discover in ten thousand years. I have actually been there, my Lord, to the land you told me never existed.

  This text that Chilford had before him was not one of those included in the Clarendon edition. If it had been, I might have found it easier to diagnose what Pelham meant by the black sun, the image that kept recurring throughout The Instruments of the Passion. How often I seemed to be orbiting about this curious device, or was I merely going round in circles?

  One thing I had at least become clear about: it was in the eighteenth century that the modern form of our confusion between fiction and biography began. We say there was a real man called Alexander Selkirk who was shipwrecked and prompted Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe, and yet we now read Selkirk’s life through Defoe’s novel. The biographical has become a footnote to the fictional. This was the time too when the biographical became, all too often, the servant of the sensational.