by Alan Wall
Perhaps Alexander Pelham had been considering a further volume of Pelham’s work, or even a definitive life. It is possible he had retained some material for this purpose, without ever clarifying the matter. But by 1914 he had acquired the status of Captain Alexander Pelham, and his life was soon to be lost leading his men into battle at the Somme. Now whatever was left of the archive was lodged with his wife and, after she died in 1940, with his only child Amelia, who had been a mere three years old when her father the captain was killed. Fordie’s notes made it seem likely that she had left the materials in her father’s study exactly where they were, as her mother had before her, to gather dust and provide a domicile for spiders. But Amelia too grew old and frail in her turn and her inherited rentier income became more and more flimsy. Her one foray into romance had failed long before the prospect of an engagement could flower, and Guisely Manor could now no longer be adequately sustained for its sole occupant. And so she had put the entire building, with most of its contents intact, up for auction, on the assumption that with the money gained by the sale, she could take herself off to a retirement home in Hove and live comfortably there for her remaining years.
But this had been during Stamford Tewk’s glory days, the time when his formidable reputation had been established, and little escaped his attention then. He had seen the announcement of the auction, and he had registered the name Pelham. The next day he was there and managed to talk the old lady round to giving him access to her father’s papers. He only needed to read a few pages to know that he wished to buy them. He gave her a reasonable sum too, far more than she could have expected or would have agreed to, and this peripheral sale made no difference whatsoever to the price finally agreed at auction. But all this had been years back. Many years back. I found it extraordinary, as I turned the pages, that he had not published any of the material. I flicked forward to the manuscripts at the back of the folder. Pelham’s writing. He was obviously crazed by then, but it was his writing. But I would work through what was before me in the order in which Fordie had left it to me – I felt firmly obliged to do this, though I’m not sure I could have told you why.
The doorbell rang. I hesitated for a moment, then decided that I needed a break. The figure that confronted me might have stepped out of the mirrored wardrobe at Tooting. The grey hair that fell to his shoulders and the shabby clothes. Also an unfocused look I had occasionally noticed in myself back then, as though there were nothing in the field of vision that the eye could rest on. Except for words on a page. I stood there silently and after a moment he spoke.
‘Hello,’ he said hesitantly, though the voice was deep and almost seductive. ‘My name’s Shadwell. We have some mutual friends in Charles and Josianne.’
We sat down together and I soon saw why Josianne’s face shifted into a smile whenever his name was mentioned. There was beneath the vagueness an indisputable charm, though charm is a quality that normally makes me dubious. (It was a quality that Fordie had come to detest. He spoke of it with the same contempt that he used when talking of those who made nothing but money.) There was enough charm, in any case, for him to help me through a bottle of the Chablis and to sell me two signed editions of Lawrence Durrell, a writer I have never had any interest in whatsoever, and even a signed first edition of his own book of verse, Megalith, which seemed to be much preoccupied with the question of prehistoric Wales. Then he went, leaving me to consider the fact that I had just parted with the better part of fifty pounds and a bottle of wine. I felt suddenly exhausted. Not merely exhausted, but irritated at the time it had taken up. So it was not a good time for Shadwell to return, which was what he did ten minutes later. He stood in the doorway, neither coming in nor going out.
‘Do you think there might be any chance that Stamford Tewk would be interested in having poetry readings here?’ he asked, looking around speculatively. ‘It’s a long way for me to come, of course, but I do have a feeling this could become a very good venue.’
‘I honestly couldn’t answer for him,’ I said, ‘he’s resting at the moment.’ Then I gave Shadwell directions as to how he could get to the crematorium, though carefully avoiding the use of that word for his destination. ‘Only take about twenty minutes, walking. Ask around when you get there, you’re bound to find him.’ Fordie would have been proud of me. Then I did something I had seldom known Fordie do: I actually locked the door and pulled down the blinds. I took out my TENS, for my back had tightened over the last few days into its rigour of rotting muscles. In mourning probably. I switched on and sat there blinking in the gloom, hidden away inside the twilit murk of Fordie’s bookshop.
Dark-Backward
What seest thou else
In the dark backward and Abisme of time?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest
Alexander Pelham had had to work from the few abbreviated references in the Chelsea Asylum log and from the poet’s occasional remarks to Lord Chilford. Fordie had merely glossed these sources with further references and definitions, but the story in regard to the lightning cage had finally emerged plainly enough. Fordie had snipped this cutting from somewhere and pasted it in:
For the Entertainment of the Curious
There is to be seen at the House of Capt. John Williams, near the Golden Fleece in King-street, Boston, A Great Variety of curious Experiments of the most surprizing Effects of Electricity, wherein will be shewn the wonderful Force; particularly the new Method of electerising several Persons at the same Time, so that Fire shall dart from all Parts of their Bodies, as the same as has lately been exhibited to the Astonishment of the Curious in all Parts of Europe.
This had been an advertisement in the Boston Evening Post of 1747. Then he began with the English equivalent of that same material.
It seemed that Stephen Gray, a pensioner of Charterhouse, and a man of legendary irascibility, whose papers appeared intermittently in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was conducting his experiments in the electrification of objects throughout Richard Pelham’s lifetime. The objects were various: a guinea, a fire shovel, a poker, a copper tea kettle – on one occasion filled with hot, and on another with cold water – flint, chalk, a map of the world stretching to twenty-seven square feet, an umbrella, a dead cock and, on 8 April 1730, at long last, a young boy. This diminutive fellow was attached to a multitude of silken threads, chosen for their non-conductivity, and suspended from the ceiling of the Charterhouse. Then he was electrified, and Gray noted that his hair stood on end and large sparks could be coaxed with little effort from his nose. Word got around about this spectacular display and it was soon repeated across Europe, becoming a particular favourite at the court of Louis XV.
Thomas Parker wondered if electricity, particularly the natural variety that God himself supplies from heaven, might not have therapeutic as well as spectacular possibilities. Committed as he was to the idea of forces of nature invading the body and ridding the mind of all blockage and distortion, he then set about devising the structure known as the lightning cage. It was made of metal rods, and riddled with a lattice of vacancies, not unlike the type of construction in which circuses would once keep animals for show, and devised in such a manner that the cork floor was meant to ensure survival. The asylum inmate was inserted into the cage, often with substantial potions of brandy to render him at least partly insensible, and then frame and madman were suspended in midair from a makeshift gantry, from which they proceeded to dangle and turn in the shudder of storm and rain, until the lightning arrived. Depending on the temperament of the internee, or the efficacy of the brandy, the figure might crouch on the wooden base, or kneel to pray, or stand clamouring and weeping at the bars. When what Parker called the great electric veining of the sky finally occurred, the darkness about the the Chelsea Asylum’s grounds would blanch into momentary illumination, and then, after the thunder, an odd silence would often quench the rattle of the storm. They would quickly take down the cage and Parker would examine its occupant. Accordin
g to Ebenezer Hague’s notes, only one caged member was actually eloctrocuted (this being before the perfection of the cage’s construction), but he, as Hague put it drily, was also the only one whose turmoil ever terminated with the experiment. Two others died subsequently, one of a fever brought on by his drenching, the other apparently of unassuageable fright. And then there was Richard Pelham. The word on him was that the lightning which flashed around the bars touched but didn’t kill him. It sealed his tongue for three whole months, and lit his eyes so brightly that one of the attendants could no longer bear to look at him. But the memory of much, including the chronicle of his recent torments, was temporarily deleted. According to Pelham’s own lines in The Instruments of the Passion, it stretched him out between hell and heaven and, in the scorching brilliance of that moment, permitted angels and demons to travel through him, as they passed incorporeally from one realm to the other. And one stayed, he said. One settled in and made a temporary home of him, and from then on it knew his address when it needed a sojourn from the middle kingdom. This was Agarith.
Now Lord Chilford valued his friends from the Royal Society more highly than any of his other acquaintances. He was particularly close to Peter Collinson, the confidant of Benjamin Franklin, and soon became close to Franklin himself. Collinson was the man who disproved the common belief that swallows hibernate underwater during the winter, a belief shared at the time even by Linnaeus, and mentioned frequently by Chilford, who must undoubtedly have been aware of the considerable interest in electricity, in its experimental and its atmospheric incarnations. Yet one day he pointed to the crescent-shaped cicatrix, which stretched from Pelham’s left ear right across his forehead, and asked where he had received it, but he merely laughed when Pelham replied quietly, ‘From lightning. Heaven and hell branded me both at once.’ His lordship’s laughter was both sceptical and mildly bored. Pelham had noted before that his patron laughed often, but seldom with any passion.
‘I ask for data regarding my philosophical investigation, Pelham, and you give me metaphors. Sadly, we don’t live in a world made of verse, or I might be able to use what you have told me to some effect.’ Fordie remarked acidly in his notes, ‘Thus did his lordship miss Thomas Parker’s one genuine scientific discovery: his anticipation of the radical effects of electro-convulsive therapy, later to become such a popular tool in the hands of our psychiatrists. Serena.’
* * *
I was growing less inclined to unlock the door. I was also growing less inclined to open the mail. However else Fordie had spent the money I’d given him, he didn’t appear to have used any of it to clear his bills. I suppose if I thought about it we had lived well during the time we’d spent together, what with our daily Chablis and our weekly trips out in search of food without a hint of egg each week. Fordie had always signed for these dinners using a bookshop cheque. Now and then I had spotted some item in the auctions which might conceivably be relevant to Pelham or Chilford or both, and he had always insisted that we should purchase it immediately on the company account. I had felt grateful to him at the time. Soon after his death, however, the bank informed me that our overdraft was now nearly twenty thousand pounds, and given the changed circumstances of ownership, it might perhaps be better to clear it and start again. After that, the amount I had left in my building society account began to look increasingly unimpressive. And the bills kept arriving, many of them printed in red. But they were my bills now. I kept signing cheques. I wasn’t sure I wanted to open up the bank statements any more. I had to make an effort sometimes not to entertain some black feelings about Fordie. Beware resentment, Christopher …
I woke from a dream in which water was cascading down on to my face to discover water cascading down on to my face. It took me twenty minutes to fathom how to get up into the roof. I found where the water had been pouring through, but by the look of all the surrounding insulation, or what was left of it, water had been pouring through for a long time. It had only just found its way into my bedroom, but it had long before been going somewhere. Down the walls, into the timbers, along the joists. I could see the sky flickering through various small holes in the slating. There was some tarpaulin up there and I managed to get enough of it into place to hold off the weather for the present. That morning I stepped outside the shop and walked to the other side of the road. It didn’t require much architectural expertise to see that Tewk’s Books was considerably more dilapidated than the buildings to the left or right of it. Some of the concrete façade on the first floor was actually coming away. Much of the outside timbering had rotted. I went back inside and hunted through the various papers that had passed over to me at the time of Fordie’s death until I found the details of the landlords who were head lessors. I then wrote a brief and tetchy note asking them if they might perhaps like to call in and have a look at the property for which they had ultimate responsibility, since it appeared to be in a state of remarkably poor repair. With that done, I went back inside and locked the door again. After downing some Chablis and a boiled egg, I settled myself once more in front of Fordie’s folder.
He had spent a considerable amount of time elucidating the rudiments of The Instruments of the Passion. The single note at the top of a page stated: The title explains everything. It seemed that Pelham had simply described more instruments than anyone before him, or anyone since, for that matter. In addition to the scourge and the column, the nails and hammers, the crown of thorns and the spear, he had thought up many others. Fordie had scrupulously noted that many variants could already be derived from the Speculum Humanae Salvationis of the fourteenth century. He listed them: Judas’s kiss, the thirty pieces of silver, the torches and staves of Christ’s captors, Malchus’s ear, the open hand that struck the saviour, the blindfold, the cloak, the spitting mouth of one of his tormentors, the stick that struck the crown, the column, the ropes, the whips of the flagellation, Pilate washing his hands, the cock which crowed, the nails, hammer and ladder, the casting of lots, the sponge, the lance. To which Pelham added Mary’s tears (more acid than the gall they had given him on a stick apparently) and Magdalena’s body, twisted in grief, the body that might have twisted in ecstasy beneath him instead; the water into which Pilate’s fingers sank; the sighs of the sleeping apostles in Gethsemane; the stars in the sky above Jerusalem; the tune that Joseph hummed as he planed wood; the wine at the last supper; the lost dreams of bliss that are hidden inside the poppy, and every species of sharp point that can cut a man’s skin, whether a Roman’s or a woman’s nails.
Pelham had simply started to write his own book of truth, effectively doing two things in the process: rewriting the history of his own life and times in terms of the passion of Christ, and rewriting the passion of Christ as though he were Pelham’s contemporary. And with this dialectical manoeuvre in action he had escaped the conventions of Augustan verse and accepted freely the condition of fragmentation. As Fordie stated simply in his marginalia to one of Pelham’s lines, Modernity is here getting ahead of itself.
In fact, I began to suspect more and more with each page I read that Fordie had decided Pelham was not mad at all, that he had, as he put it, entirely eschewed the romance of insanity. Why else should he have quoted with such emphasis these words from Alexander Cruden’s attempted self-vindication, after his own incarceration for imputed insanity only a few years before Pelham: That the way to be mad, was to be sent to a Madhouse? I couldn’t think of another reason why he had written out so carefully this quotation from Hester Thrale: ‘Mean observers suppose all Madness to be Phrenzy, and think a person Insane in proportion as he is wild, and disposed to throw things about – whereas experience shows that such temporary suspensions of the mental faculties are oftener connected with delirium than with mania, and, if not encouraged and stimulated by drunkenness, are seldom of long duration.’
I was now ignoring all knocks on the door, but this was not knocking, it was banging, and finally in fury I went and opened up.
‘What?’ I almost
shouted at the diminutive, bearded character in the leather jacket outside.
‘Christopher Bayliss?’ he asked merrily.
‘Yes.’
‘Christ, mate, it’s taken me long enough to find you.’ And with that he pushed past me into the shop.
‘But who are you?’ I said, as he fiddled with his hearing aid.
‘You what, mate?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Ah. Got it adjusted now. I’m Harry.’
‘Harry.’
‘Used to do jobs for your mother. Sorted out the car and everything.’
‘Oh, Harry,’ I said, trying to quench the expression of unremitting hostility in my features by an act of will, but still incapable of smiling all the same. ‘Harry, of course, what can I do for you?’
‘You could pay these bills for a start,’ he said smiling. ‘I’ve been holding on to them long enough. Comes to nearly six hundred pounds all told. I wasn’t expecting you to just bugger off like that, to be honest.’
Harry, it became apparent, was from Manchester and had recently spent a lot of time back up north, which was why he’d missed my departure. But now, however affable his manner, he obviously wanted his money, and sooner rather than later. I wrote him a cheque, the fifth I’d signed that week.
‘You wouldn’t have cash, would you?’
‘You’re right, Harry,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t.’
He had heard about my mother’s death from a neighbour and expressed his condolences at some length.
‘They say she went a bit doolally at the end.’ This was a subject I didn’t wish to be drawn on, not just at that moment. So without thinking much about it I asked Harry what it was he did.
