The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  Enquiring of a colleague at the Royal Society, who follows such matters of letters more closely than I, if he knew anything of the man, he informed me that – far from inhabiting some docile country living in a parsonage as I had assumed – this precocious observer of natural phenomena had spent ten years amongst the most insalubrious passages of London, and was now incarcerated under the aegis of your care, his wits having disintegrated some time before.

  I have a particular interest in this matter. I daresay you may already be acquainted with the little treatise I wrote a while back, and which the Society published as a pamphlet last year, entitled ‘An Aetiology of Insanity’.

  I have for some time wished to examine a gifted man, and if possible a man of evident genius, afflicted with a severe distemper of the mind. Along with the Society itself, I have long regarded the repeated use of metaphor as in some way emblematic of many of the mind’s disorders.

  My informant, who I grant may well be ignorant of the present facts, has told me that the word on Pelham is that the poor wretch, while patently incompetent, is mostly neither violent nor malicious, and indeed continues to compose verses of sorts, despite his unhappy condition.

  If this is truly the case, then he would make an ideal subject for my proposed inquiry. I would wish to take the fellow under my own care for some time and study his behaviour intently during that period. My findings would almost certainly be published as a longer essay by the Society. Obviously your assistance would be generously acknowledged. Equally obviously, any promised incomes to yourself from the anticipated clinical care of Pelham over the forthcoming years, would be made good.

  I remain,

  Yours,

  Chilford,

  Chilford Villa,

  Twickenham

  Parker did not see this letter for at least a month, such being the ramshackle nature of communications within his domain. He was in Birmingham at the time of its arrival, having recently founded a new asylum there, and had been busy soliciting potential inmates from disgruntled families, particularly ones where testaments were in dispute. When he finally had sight of the letter, he was so flattered by the scientific lord’s condescension that he dashed off the following reply to him, delivered to Twickenham by a courier on horseback the next morning.

  My gracious Lord,

  Anything I might do to assist your study, which I have no doubt will come to be seen as of the greatest importance, shall assuredly be done. Perhaps we could meet to discuss the nicer points of Pelham’s dilemma before I hand him over to you?

  I am your obedient servant,

  Thomas Parker

  The log of the Chelsea Asylum, made out dutifully during those years by its chief keeper, Ezekiel Hague, records that upon Parker’s return to the place the following Monday he shouted as soon as he was through the stout oak door, ‘Remind me, will you, which one’s Pelham? Didn’t I machine him once?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the ever-dutiful Hague, ‘and tried the other treatment too, during one of his visitations.’

  * * *

  As I read and re-read The Chelsea Asylum in the university library up in Leeds, I kept turning back to these remarks, which Parker had banished to a footnote: ‘Pelham’s wife returned to Dublin, and lived thereafter in the bosom of her Papist family. Her own attempted description of her husband’s curious condition was, I concluded, typical of the medieval superstition that still characterises her religion, so I resolved to ignore it entirely, and proceed with Pelham’s treatment as I would with any other of my wards.’

  I looked up from the book. So Pelham’s wife had been a Roman Catholic, even though he himself had belonged to the established Church: it was not unknown. But what was this ‘attempted diagnosis’ that made Parker think of the popish idolatries of the Middle Ages? I didn’t like the sound of that. I felt a pull backwards, in a direction where I really didn’t want to go. I had spent enough of my life kneeling in the darkness of ill-lit chapels in Rome, and I had resolved to be done with it, to live in the daylight from now on, in a region untouched either by the angels above or their opposite number below.

  The Dangerous World

  My mother groan’d, my father wept,

  Into the dangerous world I leapt.

  WILLIAM BLAKE, ‘Infant Sorrow’

  And so, little by little, after working my way through the available Pelham texts, and much surrounding material, I started to let the books sit closed on the table. The flat I rented was at the edge of Roundhay Park, where I went running every day. At weekends I was out on the crags climbing with the boys. I even started going up there during the week too sometimes. It was the nearest I ever came to total freedom, even in the wind and rain. When the only urgency is making the next move, or falling off a sheer face of granite, the mind achieves true clarity. But other urgencies were already pressing in on me.

  Money had certainly started to seem urgent enough, largely because I never had any, and I was perhaps getting a bit long in the tooth to be shuffling by on a student grant. My thesis, as you’ve probably realised, was by now going nowhere in a hurry. It was called ‘Decorum and Insanity: Eighteenth-Century Literary Convention and Revolt’. My supervisor, an obese and bearded man with a permanent snuffling air of disgruntlement, had forced me to open up the subject a little. He had no interest whatsoever in Pelham, whom I think he had barely read, and though he insisted I should bring in the careers and psychological disablements of Cowper and Smart, he was most insistent that this should not turn out to be a panegyric to derangement.

  ‘There are enough idiots out there pitting madness against enlightenment without you joining in too,’ he said, scowling. I don’t think he liked me much and I didn’t like him at all. We silently agreed to leave one another alone and gradually I came to leave my thesis alone too. Then I came back one day from my early morning run in the park, and found this telegram lying on the mat: Father very ill. Please come quickly. Mother.

  By the time I arrived in Tooting, my father wasn’t merely very ill: he was dying, and in the days that followed, as I sat for hours at his bedside, I had time to examine my feelings about him. I was surprised to discover that they were almost entirely retrospective: I didn’t seem to have brought any feelings about him into the present at all. They were all historical, wrapped up in a filament of departed years. He was a tall, handsome man, in an understated English sort of way, a thin shingle of brown hair still raggedly in place above his reliable brown eyes. He was fifteen years my mother’s senior, and a well-regarded chartered accountant. I stared at his face on the pillow, and unerased glimpses of my childhood flickered briefly through me.

  Once I had thought my father the very perfection of man, but then I suppose that’s a gift given by every son to his father, at least before he gets to know any better. By my early manhood I had begun to wonder a little. The strangest thing about him was his excessive normality. He seemed determined to eschew every idiosyncrasy. Each time a new Rover model appeared, my father would buy it, and this was I think the nearest thing to any extravagance of gesture I ever detected in him. He did love those Rovers, though he would never drive one above fifty miles an hour. I once asked him to show us what it would do flat out, and he pulled in at the nearest lay-by, where he gave me a lecture, a long one, on the subject of road safety. He had found himself incapable of speaking to me on the subject of my decision to go to Rome and become a priest. Whatever pleasure my vocation gave my mother, it undoubtedly gave my father at least as much pain. A man should take charge of his own affairs – I think that was his real religion. A man’s savings are penance enough. It wasn’t that he objected to priests; after all, the one down the road administered the sacraments to him each week. But that didn’t mean that his own son actually had to be one. I think it embarrassed him. It was aberrant behaviour and it was financially inept.

  I was actually out running around the common when he died. The next day, after the undertakers had carried him with all due ceremony out of the hous
e, I crept around his study. Drawer after drawer of docked receipts and ticket stubs, all neatly classified. My mother reported that he had said one last thing to her: ‘I’ve sorted everything out, Sylvia.’

  ‘So typical of your father, that,’ she said, with the handkerchief to her face.

  * * *

  The funeral made me uneasy. I was asked to give one of the readings, and standing up there in the pulpit declaiming sacred words to those in the pews beneath brought back a little too much of the beliefs and feelings that had once sent me out to Rome. When the priest read out the final exequies for Adam Bayliss, my mother started to cry. I didn’t, though, and it struck me that I had never seen my father cry either. Two dry-eyed Baylisses then – at least we had that much in common. After the reception, when we were back home, my mother said, ‘Just think, Chris, if you had continued with your studies in Rome, it might have been you there today conducting your father’s funeral.’ I looked at her without speaking for a moment. She had been a beautiful woman, my mother, there was no doubt about that. She was still beautiful, with her high cheekbones and hazel eyes, even though her hair had switched from blonde to silver. And I knew that I would never in the whole of my life be anything to her except a failed priest, whatever else I might manage to achieve. Her problem, not mine.

  Two days later, my mother asked if I might perhaps stay at home with her for a while.

  ‘You could work here,’ she said. ‘It’s not as though you’ve any lectures or anything to go to. You spend half of your time out climbing, from what you say. It would be nice for me to have a little company, now that I don’t have your father any more.’ So I nodded and stayed. It seemed to be the least I could do.

  And since I was in London, I thought I should check out the site of Chilford Villa, Pelham’s next domicile after the Chelsea Asylum. So I took my father’s Rover from the garage, drove to Richmond and then walked down the river.

  Along that stretch, you can watch the tufted heads of grebes dipping and twisting and gobbling about, and count plenty of coots. It was cold, a cold that seemed to lift right off the Thames and into my flesh. I stopped before Marble Hill, its confident Palladian proportions probably the nearest thing to Chilford Villa that the Thames still affords and, as I stared at its river frontage, I remembered Pelham’s words: ‘No place for the dark inside this luminous geometry.’

  I walked past St Mary’s, where they’d buried the crippled poet Pope – at evening as I recalled, so as not to upset any sensibilities, what with him being a papist and therefore more than a little suspect. Then I stood before that plot of land which had once been Chilford Villa.

  * * *

  For two whole days Pelham had been interviewed by Parker, who had even insisted that the poet read him sections from whatever this extended work was which, so Parker’s employees said, Pelham scratched away at day and night. Pelham took out the large pile of sheets on which he was writing The Instruments of the Passion. He started to read, but warily, taking care to suppress any mention of the moon in the text in case he should find himself destined once more for the star-machine. Parker could make neither head nor tail of any of it, and nor could Pelham fathom this sudden aggressive beneficence, from a man whom he barely recognised and who had not initially recognised him at all. When Parker reckoned that he had enough information to make a good impression, he explained to Pelham that he was to be transferred to the care of Lord Chilford, who had a particular interest in his welfare. Parker described the location of Chilford’s villa.

  ‘An asylum by the river then,’ Pelham said, almost smiling.

  ‘Yes. You would like that, Richard, wouldn’t you?’

  The villa had been completed only two years before. It was in the neo-Palladian style, which had already been made popular at Chiswick House, Marble Hill and, in a more modest way, with Alexander Pope’s own home. Lord Chilford had as a young man been sent off on his grand tour, and had sketched antiquities in Rome, along with the façades of Renaissance palaces. He had marvelled at churches and cathedrals in towns the length and breadth of Italy. But when he arrived at Vicenza, something changed. With his first sight of the Villa Rotunda, as he wrote excitedly in his journal, ‘Classical antiquity ceased to be a curiosity in a dusty cellar, and became the purest spirit of beauty and proportion translated into the present. I resolved that upon my return to England I would create something in the style of that unparalleled genius, Palladio.’ Chilford Villa was the result.

  Parker took Pelham to Twickenham in his own carriage. Lord Chilford’s letter to Blount describes the scene.

  I had no real idea what to expect in terms of the physical appearance of Pelham, except that by prejudice and assumption we expect a man of great gifts or even great torment to bear some physical sign of distinction too. The slight and dishevelled figure who climbed down from the coach alongside Parker I at first assumed to be a manservant. It was only when he was introduced to me that I realised I was beholding our poet. A little more than five and a half feet in height with a sallow face, a small nose, a slow-moving, slightly feminine mouth, but the eyes are extraordinary. They have about them a haunted intensity unlike anything I have ever before seen. There is also a scar across his forehead, quite severe, of which I made a note to enquire further regarding the causes. The man stared at me, but said nothing. He had if anything the look of something which has learnt over the years the manner of being hunted. Also his hands are extraordinarily slim and expressive – indeed they have an eloquence entirely their own, and sometimes when Pelham himself remains silent, it is as though the wordless shapings of his fingers would speak for him. I showed him the whole house, but he said nothing. It was as though his spirit sank with each fresh room we encountered. This is probably connected with his condition, as I hope to establish over the next months.

  That evening, newly settled in his quarters on the rustic level, Pelham wrote the following lines:

  A Goth made furious by Rome’s luxury

  Smash’t a household god and freed a spirit

  It had once inshrin’d …

  It took him a week to understand that he had the free run of the house and grounds; that he could come and go as he pleased; that he had access at all times to Chilford’s library. This represented an extraordinary change after his previous confinement. It is hard to establish now what terrified him the more: the unimpeachable geometric perfection of the villa, or the hybrid garden statuary, like the black basalt sphinx, which Chilford had gathered on his travels. And then the following week Lord Chilford began the first of his experimental treatments using tincture of opium.

  * * *

  As I stared at the site where the villa once stood, and where now there was another unimpeachably geometric building, a block of flats, I suddenly knew that I would never go back to Leeds, and never return to my thesis. In truth, it had already ended six months before, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to admit it. Maybe I’d simply started on the wrong topic. I had certainly come to suspect that the unweeded data of the life and work of this man would resist rationalisation, and there was also perhaps something about him that I did not wish to get any closer to. There was no space in my mind where I could easily house him or the anarchy of his torments. I knew that my engagement with Mr Richard Pelham was now finished, for ever I thought at the time. But I was wrong.

  Supply and Demand

  O! may thy Virtue guard thee through the Roads

  Of Drury’s mazy Courts and dark Abodes,

  The Harlots’ guileful Paths, who nightly stand,

  Where Catherine-street descends into the Strand.

  RICHARD PELHAM, ‘Temptation’

  Gradually I edged up the speed of the Rover. It accelerated a little crossly, with a bad grace, but I kept pushing. Then one day I drove off down the A303 to Stonehenge, and I had my foot flat down for much of the way. When I arrived back and put the car in my father’s garage, it wouldn’t shut up. Its fan kept wheezing and there were angry scalding drips s
plashing down from the radiator. The car was breathing heavily in indignation at me, and for a moment I had the distinct and unsettling notion that some part of my father’s identity had been incorporated into its rubber and steel. I certainly knew I was being told off, and that night I informed my mother I was going to look for a job, so I could buy my own car. I also informed her that I’d soon be taking a flat of my own. She looked at me and smiled serenely. We both knew what she wasn’t saying: ‘Priests don’t have to go looking for flats. They live in big houses next to churches, and the car’s provided at the Lord’s discretion.’

  ‘You’re definitely not going back to Leeds?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Something else you’ve started and not finished then, Chris.’

  I remember the late Richard Nixon once announcing to the nation, in that tone of hunched sincerity he had made his own, ‘I am not a quitter.’ I am, I suppose. I had quit on my training for the priesthood and now I was quitting on my thesis too. My mother was not slow in pointing out the connection. On both occasions, I felt nothing but a mild sense of exhilaration and relief. Perhaps freedom really did come from renouncing commitments, even though one wasn’t permitted to mention the fact. I had also quit on Jane some time before, but I’ll have to come back to that. I can’t face talking about her just yet.

  Anyway, I started supply teaching in schools around Streatham. As any teacher will tell you, you can always get supply work, and it doesn’t take long to discover why. You’re the maverick figure in the staff room, the Johnny-come-lately who’ll soon be gone. I watched the faces of the teachers who’d made a lifetime’s job of it. It was visible in their expressions how their early enthusiasm (for I was sure that most had had some) was changing into a merely competent professionalism, and how even that in some of the older ones was now sliding into an increasing weariness of spirit, a melancholy resignation imprisoned in a timetable. I started to pick up something of the same gloomy fatalism myself, though I had only been at it for a few months. The sound of a crowd of children bestirring themselves into mayhem, even from a long way off, caused bad, black weather to gather inside my mind. I never disliked them, don’t get me wrong. One or two I would cheerfully have killed, like any other teacher, but on the whole I didn’t dislike them. I simply could not see the point of throwing my words into that great thrashing pool, as they grew so quickly from shivering spawn into feeding sharks. To read them a poem felt at times like offering up a sacrifice before a particularly murderous sect. I recited one by Pelham, and they never cleared their heads of turmoil long enough to take in a single line. But I made enough money to buy myself a car on hire purchase, a second-hand convertible MG that didn’t tell me off whenever I pressed it up to ninety miles an hour. Then I started scanning the Situations Vacant columns.