The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  ‘How is your mind today, Pelham?’ Lord Chilford asked, with a sideways smile as he looked through the window down to the river. A lighter was beating slowly upstream. He turned in his fingers a new medical implement Pelham didn’t recognise. A drill of some sort. Pelham looked again at the skulls on the cabinet. He imagined the sharpened point breaching the calcium walls, blood and ichor dribbling out. For many weeks now all had been calm inside, all tranquil, no raging spirit trespassing, no voices cursing and blaspheming, no lakes of black bile giving off their feculent vapours.

  ‘I have nothing to complain of at present, my Lord,’ Pelham said quietly.

  ‘Perhaps my regime has had some small effect after all,’ Chilford said, still with a fixed smile, but no apparent joy.

  ‘Perhaps the spirit is presently bored with me,’ Pelham said, staring at the microscope now as it caught the light at an unexpected angle and signalled a message to him. One he did not understand. ‘Perhaps he has gone off in search of more toothsome meals.’

  ‘No spirits, Pelham – there are no spirits. A troubled marriage between soma and psyche, a miscegenation between the body and the mind, but no spirits. We have left the realm of superstition behind us now.’

  Pelham kept his eye fixed on the sunlight gesturing so wildly from the barrel of the microscope, then suddenly it was gone. A cloud had draped the sun’s face. A vernicle across those hot and wounded features.

  ‘When will your Lordship and my Lady travel back to town?’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ll return each fortnight or so. You are sure that you are happy to remain here?’

  ‘It seems to have represented a great benefit to my spirits.’

  ‘Then stay. Jacob and Josephine will provide for you. They know all your particular requirements by now. Make use of my study while I’m gone – continue with your appraisal of the wisdom of antiquity for a while. I think it preferable, given your condition, to your Hebraic excesses. Studies I mean, forgive me. I had meant to say studies.’

  ‘I have been reading the Aeschylus you lent me, and have been reflecting on those furies. How merciless the female spirit can be without the intervention of God’s grace. I should have thought that a mind can be packed tight enough to explode, simply from the images that these works provide, without any Hebraic excesses whatsoever.’

  ‘Try not to have your head explode, Pelham,’ Lord Chilford said, rising, ‘I’ve not properly finished writing my account of what goes on inside it yet. Already a source of some excited speculation at the Society.’

  ‘Were it to explode,’ Pelham said, bowing to his patron and taking a step backwards, ‘I doubt the agencies concerned would seek my permission first.’

  Once Lord Chilford had moved back to town, Pelham was alone in the house with the servants, who one by one completed their tasks and returned to Piccadilly, leaving only Jacob and Josephine. For a few days he shifted very tenderly about the place, as though the walls had been instructed to fall on top of him should he make a single sharp noise. The self-congratulatory symmetry of Chilford Villa oppressed him. He loved the perfection of crystals, but he knew that the only creatures preserved in crystalline shapes were invariably dead ones.

  Jacob and Josephine were both kindly, but had a way of looking at him sometimes and then smiling broadly, one to another. He knew what that meant. For them he was one more inexplicable indulgence acquired by their curious employer. Certainly not the first, but undoubtedly the most peculiar so far. Chilford had left Jacob instructions to allow Pelham anything he requested and to give him the free run of the house. He had not entirely abandoned hope that Pelham’s lengthy tranquillity might still be interrupted by one of the incalculable frenzies of which he had heard reports. Even his study, which he normally locked while he was away, was to be kept open to give Pelham access to his library. No feasible stimuli were to be excluded, including the contents of his cellar. He recalled how in Herodotus some had thought Cleomenes touched by the god in his madness, while Cleomenes’s own countrymen had been quite sure that his fate was the result of spending altogether too much time with the Scythians, amongst whom he learned to take his wine both neat and in heroic quantities. The same, he strongly suspected, might well be the case with Pelham.

  On the rear porch, set into a corner of the balustrade, was one of the objects of the house which filled the poet with genuine dread. It was a model made in serpentine of the sea snake seen by Hans Egede in 1734, just off the south coast of Greenland. Its mane of drenched coils and its leprous, thrashing, scaly tail had been well captured by the anonymous sculptor. Pelham loathed this effigy as though it were alive and actually menaced him with articulate hostility, yet still he was drawn back each day to stare at it. At night it came alive in his dreams, its fluent language of ferocity restored in full. In some of the dark passages of the house there stood other creatures. There was a Roman plaster cast of Artemis at Ephesus. The breasts proliferated wildly from her waist upwards as though she were a burgeoning tree, the fruit of her own sexuality. There was the lion-footed griffin in marble. And there was the skeleton, propped up inside an open coffin, with his jaw dangling in a hideous post-mortem howl of hilarity. The poet came to believe that this ghoulish glee must be directed at him entirely. And this was merely a portion of the bric-à-brac from Chilford’s tour.

  Often he would go out into the grounds to escape. There was a rookery among the high oaks. Those black creatures screamed inside their own feathered world. A kingdom of appetite, with nothing to halt it except for the weather. Their wide eyes assessed him in brief glints of suspicious intelligence. Then he would withdraw from both grounds and river and sit in silence in Lord Chilford’s study. The medical implements there reminded him how much his mind and his flesh feared intrusion. And then he was off again around the house.

  While their employer was in attendance, both Jacob and his wife Josephine were careful to keep their noise in the attic storey, where they had their bedroom, to a minimum. The house was an echo chamber. The regular creak of a bed was like a cumbersome piston movement advertising itself. When his lordship was not in attendance, however, and the other servants had gone back to Piccadilly with him, they made the best of the freedom afforded them. They were both dutiful and conscientious in carrying out their tasks, and they were strict with themselves in regard to the hours when they began and ended their work, for Jacob had been too long in service to doubt how swiftly a good position could be forfeited for ever. But once their day was done they felt free to fulfil their marital obligations to one another. Since the only other occupant of the house at that time was the licensed idiot on the rustic floor, they made no effort to contain their cries, though Jacob always kept close to hand the restraints which Thomas Parker had left behind when he deposited Pelham. You may yet need them, he had been told.

  Pelham stood by the doorway in the piano nobile and listened as their voices swept and soared above him. How close the wails of ecstasy are to those of torture, he thought. His wife had left so suddenly with their young son, never giving him an opportunity to try to cajole her into staying. He would undoubtedly have made the attempt, given the chance, and used all the powers of rhetoric for which he had once won university prizes, but she would have gone all the same. He remembered the silk sway of her breasts in his hands, as her little cotton shift came away, and the motion of her thighs beneath him as she permitted him to sink inside. Susannah. And little Tom, the fruit of their love. He’d not seen either of them since the day she departed. The cries above him were reaching a crescendo. The frenzy of that coupling made him feel dizzy. Was that a sound from heaven or from hell? Angels’ bodies could, he had once been taught, interpenetrate entirely. And demons were fallen angels, after all. He had once believed that lovers should be indistinguishable one from another, their identities merged to the outrage of property, like the phoenix and the turtle.

  That was the first time he had gone down the spiral stone steps that led to the cellar. The room was a hexagon, all p
ainted white. Lord Chilford’s wines were kept in eight big casks there. Good claret was his chief requirement. Pelham held the pot against the barrel and knocked out the wooden bung with the small hammer that hung on a length of bristling string. And that was where Jacob found him sleeping the next morning, his lips and teeth still livid from the juice of the grape.

  The Price of Alice

  Weave a circle round him thrice

  For he on honey-dew hath fed

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, ‘Kubla Khan’

  I suppose that if I had stopped to think about it at all, I wouldn’t have done it. A whole lifetime spent in avoidance of sharing the same space day in day out with any one person, and now, within a month, I had invited Alice to join me in the fastness of my own retreat and bring all her worldly possessions with her. Not that there were too many of those.

  I hadn’t been the only one who went out there to those women while we were ordinands in Rome. We called them cousins. They had a particular fondness for priests and priests in training. I think they thought some magic still accrued to us, so they might kiss it from our skin, as though to make love to us was a kind of sacrament in itself. As though we could enter them as Christ had once entered Jerusalem. There were a few scattered here and there around the centre of the city, but I always travelled to the suburbs to meet mine.

  ‘How tidily you sin,’ my confessor had said to me one day, as with head bowed I told him of my latest journey by bus to the realm of the forbidden. ‘How neatly you separate the sacred from the profane.’

  Within a month of arriving in Leeds I had met Jane, and two months later we were sharing a flat. Just the two of us and her little boy. He was only four then, the solitary offspring of her disastrous marriage to Roger. I had grown fond of the little boy and I was more than fond of Jane. She seemed as intelligent in her body as in her mind. She had a flare of red hair that settled half-way down her back and covered her breasts when she was naked. Our lovemaking was better than anything I had ever known with any cousin in the Roman suburbs. At night when she slept I would lift up the sheets to look at her body. In the neon light that leaked through our scanty curtains from the street outside, her hair was flame and her skin milk. Uncovered, she looked like one of the creatures in Alma-Tadema’s Tepidarium. I remember that picture – we reproduced it in one of our gallery brochures. Those Victorians were smart: they camouflaged their pornographic canvases as research into antiquity. Then one night, on the top rung of passion, a second before you step out into space and start falling, she had whispered in my ear, ‘I want your baby,’ and nothing had ever been the same again. I found myself watching Roger intently when he came on his weekly visits to see his son, and saw the look in the boy’s eyes as he welcomed his daddy into the little space of his life.

  I hadn’t started all this around me, you see. I needed to plan things, to get them right. I couldn’t just drop into the middle of the lives of so many other people and begin as though from the beginning. I hadn’t yet got to the beginning, so how was I supposed to get started?

  ‘I just need some time to think things through,’ I said as I stood on the doorstep with my bags in my hand.

  ‘I’m not expecting you back, Chris,’ Jane said quietly. ‘We’ll miss you.’ As I said, she was as intelligent in her mind as in her body. Didn’t seem to need to divide things up between them. And she was right, of course: I didn’t go back. I thought of her often, and of the boy too, but I never did go back.

  After Jane, I watched myself. The minute anyone murmured between the sheets in a way that might end in a crescendo of ‘I want to have your baby’, I made sure I finished things quickly. The women who spent any time in my flat always remarked on its tidiness, impressed by how efficiently I conducted my domestic life. The cooking, the ironing, the cleaning, the pressed clothes hanging ready in the wardrobe.

  ‘You don’t need a wife. Unlike most men, you don’t even need a housekeeper,’ Sally Leiris said on the day of her departure. ‘What do you need, Chris?’ And now it seemed I had suddenly decided the answer to that question must be Alice. Except that I hadn’t decided anything at all. For once, I had simply acted. Normally I only did that on my way out, not on my way in. But if I didn’t need a housekeeper, she certainly did. I had handed her my other set of keys, and had set to work with hammer and hooks and tacks, hanging her pictures on my walls. And when she said on that first night, ‘Do you want some spliff?’ I had nodded and said, ‘Why not?’

  There had been plenty of the stuff around up in Leeds when I had been there, but I’d only smoked a few times. I didn’t like tobacco for one thing and I was always particular about my physical health. We’d all get drunk from time to time, and that was enough. It turned out that I didn’t have to worry about the tobacco, since Alice rolled her joints using some herbal mix. And as I breathed deeply and the music opened up the space inside my head, I looked across at Alice, sitting at the table by the window, and realised that she was even more beautiful than I had thought. Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was playing and I was startled suddenly to hear the strings laughing and dancing one over another. Why had I never noticed that before?

  Alice had already set her easel up by the window and placed a primed canvas on it. She sat silently and stared through the glass. My flat was on the fifth floor and you could look out of the window and see across Battersea Park to the Peace Pagoda and the river and rows of houses beyond, including the house of Andrew and Helena, which now seemed like another country, one in which people spoke a different language entirely. I would take Alice to see them all the same. I could hardly keep her to myself up there for ever.

  Later that night Alice went to the fridge and left the door hanging open as she walked backwards away from it all.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

  ‘I can’t live in a house with meat in it, I should have told you. I’ll dream about it now. There’ll be blood in my sleep.’

  Half an hour later, I carried a large black bag containing all the meat in my fridge down the five flights of my block of flats, since there was no lift, and put them into the large bin at the back of the building. The price of Alice, I supposed.

  I prepared that brochure lovingly. The principal specified some piece of flat abstraction for the cover. I said nothing. When I supervised the printing, I put Alice’s picture back on the front where I had first placed it, then I told them to print the lot.

  The principal shook his head when I laid it out before him.

  ‘But I was quite explicit. I told you I wanted Edward Holt’s abstract, not this picture by Alice Ashe.’

  ‘I pasted up new instructions,’ I said, ‘but I suppose they must have been torn off. The old ones were still underneath. That’s probably what happened. It’s unfortunate. I can pulp the lot if you insist, but I’m afraid at the prices I’m holding I just can’t afford to run it out again for you. It’s your choice.’

  And as I had suspected, he shrugged and sighed, and said he supposed he’d have to take them as they were. That night I went back to Battersea with a whole batch of the brochures in my car boot for Alice. I had assumed she would be delighted. She stared at them for a moment, apparently without interest, and then turned back to her canvas.

  She had started painting the park. Or rather, she had started turning the park into Chimera #7, which was, perhaps, not the same thing at all. Later that night, two joints later to be precise, I told her how I had smuggled her on to the front cover. I was laughing as I told the tale.

  ‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she said, and through the haze of my well-being I felt the sudden sting of her rebuke. It seemed as though her face was focused steadily on mine for the first time, though she didn’t appear to be looking at me so much as straight through me.

  Months went by and I almost grew used to Alice, even when I had to pick up her underclothes from the floor where she had let them drop, noting out of the corner of my eye as I
flung them into the washing machine the small, mysterious, often indeterminate stains that would occasionally appear upon them. I was always cleaning up after Alice, for Alice left items in her wake wherever she went. I could never entirely understand how someone who possessed almost nothing could so consistently strew floors and chairs and beds with such an abundance of debris. Every day I laid fresh newspapers underneath her easel in the hope that the paint that she dripped in her abstraction would land there, not on my immaculate fitted carpet.

  After the first week I gave up waiting for her to volunteer to do the washing up and simply got on with it. Once I suggested she might prepare a meal and we had half a banana and half a mango each, both sprinkled with sliced grapes. At least it meant fewer utensils to clean afterwards. Alice didn’t seem interested in food. When I wasn’t there I don’t think she ate at all. If in doubt, Alice would roll another joint and sit there spliffing away by the window, midway between her vision of the park and the canvas before her. The same canvas. I began to wonder how Alice had ever managed to finish any of her paintings. This chimera kept disappearing back into whatever it had arisen out of. No sooner was some part of the park coloured in than it was coloured out again. It became part of the routine of our life together. I didn’t resent it. Or at least I resented other things a lot more.