The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  Then it was summer again, Austin Healey weather. Each Saturday I checked the oil level and the tyre pressures, gave her a quick clean and then took the hood down. I drove Alice to Hastings, Glastonbury, King’s Lynn, Clacton, up through the Cotswolds, down across the Weald. She would sit silently in the passenger seat as we burned rubber, her head immobile as the world blurred by. If the sun came out, she covered her face with a scarf. Something about her skin, she said. I think those drives might have been the happiest moments in my life. Our last trip was to the Black Mountains. I enjoyed picking the small hotels and buying her meals. I made sure we were always within range of a museum or gallery of some sort. I would take a few photographs and collect their printed material. That way all our trips were on expenses. I had been planning a drive to St Ives when she said, ‘Do you mind if we don’t go anywhere this weekend, Chris?’ I shook my head and shrugged.

  ‘Not if you don’t want to,’ I said. ‘I thought you enjoyed it.’

  ‘I’d just like to be still for a while.’

  So that weekend we went nowhere. I continued my study of vegetarian cookery, occasionally looking out of the window and lamenting the waste of such glorious motoring weather, while Alice sat in front of her canvas over by the window. As I said, that painting of hers seemed to go on for ever. I stood behind her, taking a drag of the joint she had just passed back to me. Sometimes there were railings and a pond and grass and swings. There had been a rainbow there the day before, but now that too was gone.

  ‘Why did you paint over the rainbow? I really liked the rainbow – I thought it gave a shape to everything.’ I looked down at Alice. The white clock of her face was measuring out its own slow time. She said nothing as I handed her back the joint.

  And on she went, painting in and painting out, blackening the sky or brightening the grass, adding a red van, or deleting the same, only stopping from time to time to roll and smoke some more of her herbal spliff. The music from the hi-fi system swelled and coasted, and for a while there were no hard edges at all in that flat with Alice. All geometry was abolished, as the straight lines and right angles slowly distorted and the ragged scrolls of smoke rose to the ceiling.

  The following Monday Andrew made one of his rare appearances at Shipley’s. He handed me the invoice for the work at the West London College. That was going back a bit.

  ‘I hadn’t realised we’d started working for charity,’ he said. Andrew still had his smile in place, but it had thinned out somehow.

  ‘Just to get the work,’ I said.

  ‘Hardly seems worth it for five thousand brochures a year, does it? You weren’t even quoting at cost. By the way, from now on use CP Transport for all freight and deliveries, all right? I have asked you before.’

  ‘It was only the other side of London, Andrew. I drove over with the stuff myself.’

  ‘Thereby giving something else away free. Well done. As I said, from now on use CP for everything. No exceptions.’

  ‘But they’re in Bristol. Surely you don’t want me to bring them up here for local deliveries?’

  ‘For the third time, Chris’ – Andrew’s voice was now quiet and low, and there was even a hint of menace in it, the first time I’d ever heard it – ‘use CP for everything.’ I felt the need to change the subject quickly.

  ‘By the way, I’m no longer alone.’

  ‘Did you find Jesus?’

  ‘No. Alice. She’s moved in with me.’ Andrew’s full smile returned.

  ‘Alice. Not a dog or a budgie, I take it? A girl?’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘A grown-up one?’

  ‘A woman, in fact.’

  ‘Well, how exciting. Bring her over for dinner on Friday. I’m sure Helena will be thrilled. She kept asking where you’d suddenly disappeared to. I told her it must be either sex or religion.’

  * * *

  I don’t know how much Alice smoked on an average day. I didn’t even know who or where her supplier was, though I had a suspicion. It made her serene, perhaps even a little distant. Occasionally she seemed actually disconnected from everything around her; immersed entirely in the world of her own preoccupations. There were minute time lags between her eyes and her words. What she said often seemed unsynchronised with what she was thinking. At a guess, I would say that she’d already had a good few joints by the time I arrived back that Friday. So when she suggested we share one last one before setting out, I suggested we didn’t.

  ‘There’ll be wine,’ I said. ‘Let’s take it easy. We can have one when we get back.’ Alice was clothed as she always was. As casually as I could, I wondered out loud whether she might perhaps consider putting a dress on. I knew that she had one because I had ironed it the day before. She gave me that look of hers, which could appear so serene sometimes, but at others could be perilously close to vacancy. Then she went off to the bedroom without saying a word. When she came back, she had put on the short green dress. Over the top of her blue jeans. And she still retained the constructor’s boots on her feet. But then, she was a painter, after all. I didn’t have the strength to argue.

  We walked across the bridge and stopped there awhile to watch the river. When we arrived at the house, it was Andrew who opened the door. He was in his suit, but then he usually was. He looked at Alice, and there was a momentary flicker, no more than that, but enough to register his surprise. Then Helena appeared in a full-length red velvet dress, and I realised they had decided this was a ceremonial occasion. Helena looked Alice up and down, from the mop of her white bedraggled hair to her building-site boots, and simply said, ‘Well.’

  I fumbled my way through the introductions as we entered and were given our glasses of wine.

  ‘And what do you do?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘I paint. I did a diploma at the West London College of Art.’ Andrew swung his eyes towards the ceiling in his characteristic gesture of concentration and recollection. I noticed the small tuft of hair growing out of his nostrils.

  ‘West London College of Art,’ he said finally, ‘but now, didn’t we just do a job for them?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Quite a while back actually. The brochure, remember. That’s Alice’s painting on the front.’ Andrew looked at me in silence, as though in the middle of a calculation, and then started to nod his head slowly as the facts sank in.

  I had forgotten, of course. I had omitted entirely to mention Alice’s dietary exclusions, which in fact were now my dietary exclusions too. I had taken her pledge. The subject of meat had been banished from our lives. When both our hosts were out of the room for a moment, I spoke quietly and hurriedly to Alice.

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot all about asking for a vegetarian meal. Slipped my mind completely. You’re amongst serious carnivores here. Let’s not make a fuss about it. If there’s meat on your plate, I’ll eat it for you.’

  ‘I thought you’d given it up.’

  ‘I have,’ I said. ‘But, just tonight.’ I had begun to wish I had agreed to that pre-dinner joint after all.

  So it was that when the Parma ham and melon were served, I managed somehow to scoop all the ham from Alice’s plate while no one else was looking. And then, when the medallions of lamb appeared, I forked those from her plate too, leaving her with the vegetables. She took out a paper handkerchief from her jeans pocket and carefully wiped the traces of blood from the porcelain. Then she dropped the soiled paper on to her side plate. I picked it up quickly and stuffed it into my pocket. Thus did we survive dinner, perilously.

  Alice had never demonstrated much of an appetite for sustained conversation, but it had not seemed to matter overmuch while the two of us were alone together in my flat across the river. That evening, around the table, her lack of interest in the content of questions addressed to her started to feel like more of a liability. Andrew and Helena finally gave up, and spoke exclusively to me, as though she weren’t there at all. If they wanted to find out something about Alice, they asked me instead. Helena occasionally glanced in her di
rection and then back, reproachfully I began to think, towards me, as though to say, ‘What on earth do you think you’re about here? There must be the better part of fifteen years between you, and you have nothing in common, apart from the one obvious thing. The girl not only doesn’t know how to dress; she’s barely capable of coherent speech. Can sex really be so important, Chris?’

  After dinner we wandered about, sipping coffee. Andrew decided to show off the Cavendish-Porter collection of paintings, what with Alice being in that line of business. He seemed particularly interested in her view of the hunting scenes.

  ‘A wedding present, actually. What do you think of them?’ Andrew was well oiled by now, and affable again.

  Alice looked at them only for a matter of seconds and said, ‘I think they’re quite disgusting.’

  ‘Disgusting?’ Andrew echoed, evidently taken aback.

  ‘They’re all so formulaic,’ Alice said, ‘and the formula is only there to remind everyone what a lovely time you can have tearing other creatures to pieces.’ Andrew stared at her, as though for the first time fully taking her in, as he considered the implications of this, which was by far her longest statement of the evening.

  ‘Oh God, you’re not one of those are you? Never heard such bloody nonsense in my life, frankly. Helena spent most of her childhood on top of a horse, didn’t you, darling?’ He shouted this last phrase through the open door, but Helena had started to wash up. Noisily. With each clanging lid and clattering plate I felt I heard an instruction to be gone.

  That night, for the first time since she had moved in, Alice and I did not make love.

  ‘You’re full of meat,’ she said. ‘There’s an animals’ graveyard inside you.’

  I lay there and reflected on the evening. Alice had already started snoring, very gently. It struck me that I had never before seen Andrew and Helena bonding; they had even started confirming one another’s opinions, nodding at one another’s pronouncements. Alice had managed to bring them together in a surge of shared hostility.

  I pulled the sheets gently from her so that I could stare at her small boyish body, and I marvelled to see how dark the hair between her legs appeared in the gloom. I looked again at the hair on her head, but it was entirely white, and every single straggle of it seemed a different length from all the others. How could that be? Then I lay and listened to the sound of her, the little unexpected mountains that breached the mist of her breathing. It was warm in the room and I didn’t cover her again. I kept looking her up and down, from the charcoal furrow between her legs to the firm, small pointings of her breasts. Then at last my head sank back on to the pillow, and we lay there, the two of us, like a couple of Spartan soldiers sprawled on the hillside together after battle.

  His Sudden Fits

  I’m sipping at a distillation of the crystal-fountain, an alchemical pot-full glows translucent in its clarity here on the table, and its bright and esoteric metal has begun once again to illuminate my veins. Gin: ardent spirit of Geneva, the stringent logic of the heart, the machinery that snares a creature used to soaring.

  RICHARD PELHAM, Letters

  Jacob did not at first know what to make of it, but his lordship had been most specific in demanding of him that whatever Pelham required should be provided. So he found a small table and chair and moved them down to the cellar, as the poet had requested, and Pelham started to pass his days between Chilford’s study and the white hexagonal room underground, where he would take the books he had chosen, while helping himself to liberal potions from the casks. And he covered sheet after sheet of paper with his scribbles. Some days he did nothing else. Once, while the poet slept in an untidy heap, Jacob had picked one up and started to read:

  Shall charity at least permit the adder his venom?

  He had gone out and searched the grounds for adders, but had found none. That night as he lay in his bed with his hand on his wife’s stiffening nipple, he said, ‘He’s a sot as well as a madman. Still, why should we complain? I daresay it’s easier than entertaining princes.’

  ‘Some princes are sots and madmen too, my love.’

  * * *

  Pelham refilled his glass. What, he was asking himself, do the teeth of desire finally close on? An apple or a grape? If a grape, then by drinking the juice from the grape the need for mastication can be avoided. Then wine could take the teeth out of desire, and all the sharpness from the heart’s affections. Surely some ancient source had somewhere noted this down? Surely somewhere in Lord Chilford’s library there must be an account of this? He took himself back up the stairs to search.

  Inside the study, he stopped momentarily at the curious transparent effigy mounted on its own little plinth by the door. Two figures, one kneeling, one supine, the hands of the one plunged into the torso of the other. His lordship had informed him it was a present from his wife and was meant to signify love, but for the poet it looked closer to surgery.

  ‘It’s a whimsy-glass, Pelham, a frigger, no more,’ Lord Chilford had called one day, as he saw him eyeing it defensively.

  Many of the books from antiquity which Chilford had acquired Pelham had already examined. After a half-hour, it suddenly struck him that his lordship might himself have penned some thoughts on the subject, so he did what he had never done before: he turned the key to Lord Chilford’s desk drawer and started rustling through the papers inside. He found nothing on the teeth of desire, but he did find a pile of sheets with this title: Mr Richard Pelham, Lunatic. And with his back against the wall, and his haunches on the cold floor, he began to read.

  Mr Richard Pelham was brought to my home at Twickenham in May of this year from the Chelsea Asylum, with the full cooperation of Dr Thomas Parker.

  As will probably be known to the Society’s members, Pelham had made a name for himself with some volumes of verse, whose skill and aptitude were matched by a most acute observation of the minutiae of Nature. Pelham was thought to be destined for a life of literary accomplishment, but this was not to be.

  Instead the progress of his years has evidenced acute debauchery followed by a descent into madness. At present the lunacy itself is in remission, though signs of it re-emerge frequently, not in noisome exhibitions, or physical tantrums, but in a kind of waking delirium which seems frequently to afflict him. His writings these days consist of little more than a glossography of this delirium. While his mind has lost none of its acuteness in local and specific observation, it appears governed entirely, if governed at all, by incoherent passions. In his writings, fantasies of religious victimhood are often expressed as identification with the Messiah. The expressions of religious belief which I have gleaned from him would make even the wildest Enthusiasts on makeshift outdoor pulpits sound like epiphanies of the Rational Mind. Wit at its most facetious has overrun judgement entirely.

  In pursuit of my own theories regarding the retention of memories by the melancholic type, I administered opium to Pelham over a number of weeks. His ravings were lyrical and of some interest. There was also, unless I’m mistaken, a heightened sensibility in regard to sound. There was not, however, the disembarkation of clotted remembrance; I was disappointed in the hoped-for effect of alleviating this pressure of congealed chronology upon the normal mental functions. The same patterns of over-excitement followed by paralysing sloth are also observable, though much less pronounced than previously.

  We have so far been treated to none of the ‘sudden fits of insanity’ noted by others. I had hoped to distil the essence of this phenomenon from the superstitious dross which has surrounded it. I shall not tire the patience of other members with some of the cant of darker and earlier ages to which I have been treated on this subject.

  Pelham, despite his considerable gifts, is evidently in a state of intellectual incompetence, exacerbated by scriptural and theological obsession. It is hard to envisage him ever making a full enough recovery to take much part in life, public or otherwise, in any rewarding manner.

  THIS PAPER TO BE CONTINUED
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  Pelham read this document twice and then he went to his room, where he collected some of the money that he still had in his possession, despite the bribes he had given weekly to the keepers at the Chelsea Asylum, and walked out of the house and the grounds. There were no instructions to say that he should not do this, but it was the first time that he had, all the same. He walked up the road to where Strawberry Hill was being Gothicised, and he slipped in unnoticed through the gate. Walpole had already finished feeding his birds and squirrels for that day and had set out for the House of Commons. And Pelham stared about him at what Lord Chilford once described as ‘that fop’s gimcrack castle, spirited out of the ghost of a past that never even existed in the first place’. With his dusty clothes and the buttons missing from his waistcoat, Pelham had about him the look of a cultivated foreman, and he simply stepped through the open door. The library was being completed. The famous pierced Gothic arches of the bookshelves had not yet received any volumes, but the borrowings from Westminster Abbey and old St Paul’s were obvious enough to Pelham’s eye and he saw what was going on immediately, with his first brief glance at the fake groinings above him. Gothic had been turned into a pretty confection for some fellow’s private amusement. It was altogether too delicate, with its traceries and fretwork, and nothing else grand enough to offset the delicacy. An environment for priests, but without any priests to put inside it, either to consecrate or shrive. It lacked the awesome proportions of belief. It was devoid of reverence or terror. As he was leaving, he said to a workman, ‘Don’t trust this building, it’s telling you lies.’ Both Ruskin and Pugin were to say more or less the same thing when they arrived for their own visits a century later.