The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  Pelham seems to be telling me that the country inside himself has been invaded, but not so much by Agarith as by those in the Chelsea Asylum, and then by me. He says he has been forced to translate the topography of his soul into a foreign language, and now is confused as to location and locution. When I asked him finally if there was anything he required, he replied, ‘I should be grateful for a little peace now. Could I have some more of the lightning from the bottle?’ – this is how he refers to the laudanum, so I woke Jacob and instructed him to make up the tincture, according to my instructions. It appears to render him calm; appears even to afford him some kind of protection, given that he is at times oblivious to the greatest personal discomfort, and at other times so fly-skinned with vulnerability that even a breeze could break his defences.

  And then he went to bed, hoping for a deep sleep, though a short one, since the ball he had arranged for Lady Chilford was planned for later that day.

  * * *

  Pelham felt stained from his bingeing and his visitation. He did not know in what precise manner he would be punished, but he had little doubt that punishment of some sort must come. He had been tested with his liberty, and had shown himself unworthy to take hold of it. The preparations for Lord Chilford’s party went on noisily, not that Pelham knew anything at all about that. Why, after all, should anyone have told him, even if he had been in a fit condition to be informed? They had already cleared the floor of the piano nobile, and Lady Chilford was already on her way from London. She had become very bored during the course of the week as she posed for her portrait in a fashionable studio in Covent Garden. She had even chosen the image of the oak tree which the artist would paint in as a backdrop for the final picture, with her listless, slightly cross expression upstaging the immemorial form. The artist’s assistant was at that moment filling in the azure blue of her silk skirt, and the watery rivulets of its creases.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Pelham,’ Jacob had said, as he called in on him. That was all he had said, but he had said it with what struck Pelham as a minatory smile. Something was going on, though he had no idea what.

  Lord Chilford had based Chilford Villa somewhat loosely upon the Villa Rotunda at Vicenza. Perfect proportions were achieved only by forfeiting practicality and comfort. Pelham’s room was small and draughty, and had never been intended as a space for accommodation in any case. When Lord Chilford visited him there around five o’clock, he seemed if anything cheered by the slightly wild demeanour of the poet. This return of the furor had meant that his paper on insanity was now being completed to his satisfaction. It might effect Pelham’s eventual cure, and the cure of many others too. The poet had always found Chilford’s perfunctory bonhomie distressing, but in the light of his own recent drunkenness and loss of self-possession, he now found it truly alarming. What could be his lordship’s intentions? Then the carriages started rolling down the drive, one, two, three, four, and Pelham looked quickly about him, as though the walls might contain a mute stony wisdom as to his new predicament. He fell upon his knees once more and began to pray.

  Pelham could not imagine why so many people had come to the house, unless it was to discuss his fate. He had stolen wine from the cellar in considerable quantities and had absconded without permission from the villa for two days. Then he had become once more the home for the unhoused spirit. Jacob had obviously reported all this to his master, and his master had even come to see some of it for himself. And then the thunder above his head began, a relentless rolling crash and hammer, and he ran to the window to look out. Sure enough, a full moon was riding the few swift clouds, but there was no sign of any storm. He needed no further sign. Whatever the Lord wanted, He most certainly did not want to see any of his creatures ever again strapped to the star-machine, with grinning faces floating in the sky above them. He collected his few belongings and crept into Chilford’s study to steal only two things: the bottle of laudanum and a small lancet engraved with the monogram EA. Then he fled from the house, never even turning back to see the shapes of the dancers in the windows on the floor above his room, as they ceremoniously marched and stamped and twirled to the lyric geometry of the music.

  Pelham walked through the night. He was no athlete and it took him six hours and more to reach the edges of town, though he often rested so that he might lie in a ditch and sip some of the opium. Then he would stay awhile. Once again, infernal rats had started to scurry, with their little scratching feet, across his brain. Lady Chilford. He had caught sight of her before he left, as she shimmied down a corridor, bejewelled in billowing folds, the warm breath of her perfume engulfing everyone about her in brief clouds. How could anybody smell so sweet? Had Susannah too once smelt as sweet as that? His nose, in its lengthy exile, had forgotten. Pressing her sumptuous breasts so tightly into her bodice that the flesh appeared ready to explode into a man’s hands. Just as Eve had once handed the fruit of damnation to Adam. Her gaze had lighted on him in the corridor, but only en route to somewhere else, as she turned her long neck first this way and then that, sometimes with the imperious bemusement of an ostrich, and at others with the white perfection of a swan. Our Father, which art in heaven … It was only as he approached the fields of Wandsworth on his pilgrim’s journey east, that he realised his papers for The Instruments of the Passion were still in Lord Chilford’s study, where Jacob said he had taken them for his lordship’s perusal. He stopped still under the troubled moon for ten minutes while he considered this, which felt like the final catastrophe of all. He knew, of course, that he could not go back. He felt that everything had now been taken from him at last, precisely as he deserved.

  Pelham was fortunate not to be robbed and beaten senseless, for there were many travellers in the night whose business was menace and thieving along the highways, but his ungentlemanly appearance, remarked upon more than once by Chilford in his letters, most likely protected him. He didn’t look as though he possessed anything much worth taking. His clothes were now in such a state of deterioration that even a vagabond might have thought twice before troubling to strip him of them. As he edged into London from the west, the last yawning link-boys ignored him, extinguishing their lights and heading home.

  The city rose early in those days, and Pelham was soon walking through the shouting streets. He found an inn and met a woolstapler on his way to Halifax, with whom he shared a pleasant drink and some ragged conversation. Then he walked until he knew his ground again, and by the time he entered the area around Grub Street the place was ripe with noise and bustle, as some set out to work and others, in the unbuttoned uniforms of their debauchery, came home again. A cheeseman with a £7 Cheddar trotted past him. He breathed in the feculent air and felt free for the first time in years. Street criers were practising their hoarse crow notes outside the Strangers’ Tavern, which boasted that it was never closed to thirsty travellers. Pelham knew of nowhere else he could be sure of a welcome, and so he made his way there, and once inside he knew he had returned at last to his true asylum.

  Accounts

  Account: A computation of debts or expenses.

  Johnson’s Dictionary

  I started phoning the flat, but there was no reply. By that Saturday I couldn’t stand it any longer, so I cut short my holiday and drove to London. That was the first long drive in the Healey I’d ever hated. When I arrived back I ran up the five flights of stairs and as I opened the door I heard the little jingle on the floor that I had been dreading: Alice’s keys. She had put them through the letter box after leaving. She had taken all her things, except for her unfinished canvas. There was a sheet of paper on the table, and on it she had written:

  We both need time. Not the same sort.

  Alice

  As I stood later by the window I looked at that canvas she’d spent so many months painting over, and suddenly realised something that I should have noticed the first day: it differed from all the other Chimeras. The colours were the same and the way the objects blended one into another, but there was
no figure in the foreground. It was all background.

  Now time itself was going backwards. In my mind I had compiled, it seemed, without even noticing, an Alice Diary, and now I knew that not a single entry could ever be annulled. I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I contacted the West London College, but they had no forwarding address for her. Well, in fact, they did have one, but I lived there. A month after she’d gone, I drove up to the Siegfried Group one Wednesday evening. All the pre-natal figures appeared except for Alice. Maybe she would be late. I went into the pub opposite, a seedy place, the sort I’d normally avoid. I walked through the door and tasted the nicotine breath of its air as it exhaled a Jim Reeves dirge, the three or four notes of the bass line booming like a huge, fretful heart. And as I sat there with a pint in front of me, gradually giving up hope of ever seeing Alice again, I started to watch the sorry saga at the bar, as a rough-looking drunk refused to remove himself as requested by the barman. The requests grew more peremptory and finally the unwanted drinker turned and looked at the bottle a few inches to his left, and then he made the slightest feint of a gesture, but the barman saw it, saw exactly the same thing that I saw forming in the delinquent’s sodden mind: the edge of the broken glass finding his face and twisting backwards and forwards as the flesh came apart.

  ‘Out,’ said the barman, any hint of diplomacy now gone from his Irish voice. His hand had moved up to a horizontal plane in line with the man’s throat, and the fingers were curled tightly into the karate attack position. ‘Out now, before I fucking deck you.’ And the man had gone. Somehow, after that, the acrid despair of the place seeped right through my skin. Alice hadn’t arrived, so I finished my drink and went home, where I lay on my bed until something like sleep finally stretched a great, black, itching wing across my face.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a dream that had intruded on my daytime memory. Dreams were for the darkness and once I rose I had no interest in them. But now they started to take over. Dreams and memories became hard to separate. The whiteness of Alice’s body, its sparseness, its curious frugality. Her flesh was somehow extreme in its understatement, and as I reached out I would be back up on the moors again, entering a chapel in the dark with a snowstorm blowing. In one dream she calmly peeled the skin away to reveal her heart, and that too was white, framed in the Gothic tautness of her ribcage. All white, except for the hair between her legs. I came across the shellac sheen of an Iroquois squaw hiding in a winter valley. A little warm wet cave of secrecy and delight. From such dreams I woke, incoherent with longing. It seemed that my body had its own memories, rooted firmly in torment and desire.

  Then one day at dawn, stumbling from bed to escape from those dreams that pursued me, I looked about the flat. On the table were dirty cups and plates, knives and forks gluey with mouldering food; books were strewn across the floor, and clothes bedraggled the furniture. There were newspapers everywhere. In the kitchen the sink was so full I couldn’t reach the taps. Later that day I spent an hour scrubbing frantically at the blurs of blue on the carpet by the window where Alice used to paint. I was suddenly desperate to clean things up again.

  By this time I hardly saw Andrew from one month to the next. So it was a surprise when Mr Henry popped his head round the door five minutes after I’d arrived one Monday morning and asked me to accompany him to the boardroom.

  I should explain that I had gradually come to realise the significance of the fact that Andrew was a director of only one sector of Shipley’s, and I wasn’t entirely sure how much of the share capital he held. There were obviously other people he was answerable to, but I had assumed all this would become clearer when I was myself given the shareholding he kept promising me. My directorship was a preliminary to acquiring a financial stake in the company. So I wasn’t too sure what was happening when I walked into the boardroom and realised that all the directors of the company were seated around the table. All except one, that is: Andrew.

  They made an impressive sight in their well-tailored suits and neatly knotted ties. Most were considerably older than Andrew and their grey hair and balding heads gave them a final touch of gravitas. The managing director was Mr Fairbrother, whom I seldom spoke to more than once a year, and that was during the company outing, when we all sipped drinks together and ate from paper plates, and carefully said nothing of any importance. There was something grave and considered about Fairbrother that I liked. He gestured for me to sit down at the end of the table, and as I did so he coughed and then started to speak.

  ‘You must forgive us for asking you in here at such short notice, Christopher, but we have a matter of some importance to sort out, and given the sudden difficulty of locating Andrew Cavendish-Porter, we are left with yourself as our primary source of information. We suspect this might take the better part of the morning, so perhaps you would like a coffee?’ I nodded, and Fairbrother motioned to one of his junior directors to go and arrange the refreshments. Then he started.

  At first, I simply couldn’t work out what was happening. What seems so clear in retrospect didn’t seem at all clear at the time. It was only as the interrogation drove relentlessly on and I occasionally caught the looks of the other members of the board as they paused from taking notes, or took a sip of their coffee, that I began to realise what it was I was in the middle of.

  ‘How much do you know about the company called CPT?’ Mr Fairbrother was asking.

  ‘That’s Andrew’s chosen freighting company.’

  ‘And you know where they are based, of course.’

  ‘Bristol.’

  ‘So you didn’t find it in any way odd that they should be summoned from the West Country to London to pick up packages in Wandsworth and deliver them to Ealing or Dulwich or North Kensington, for example?’

  I paused for a moment at this. ‘Andrew had told me they were to be used for any movement of goods, whatever it was.’

  ‘And you always do whatever Andrew Cavendish-Porter tells you, evidently.’ There was an uncharacteristic edge of contempt in the tone of this remark.

  ‘He is my boss,’ I said.

  ‘He is your senior director. You yourself are a director, of course, and not a mere employee. You have responsibilities beyond simply taking orders. You do acknowledge that?’ I nodded uneasily. ‘We have no access, as I’m sure you know, to the books of CP Transport, but we suspect that you do.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘I don’t know anything about the company and I’ve never met any of its directors. All I know is that Andrew wished me to use it for all freight movements from Shipley’s.’

  ‘And I suppose you don’t even know what the CP in CP Transport stands for?’ said Tim Hollis, with his perennial smile. Tim was a small man with a flock of ginger hair and wire-rimmed glasses that perched precisely on his freckled nose. He was said to have married money. He lived in an Elizabethan farmhouse somewhere in Somerset, and a few years back at one of those company events he had asked about my background. On being told that I had once been in training to be a priest, he had turned and looked at me severely.

  ‘If one of my daughters were to come home and tell me she was marrying a Roman Catholic, I would know I had failed somewhere,’ he had said. I didn’t make a habit of defending my long-dead priestly ambitions, but this sally had its effect.

  ‘If your daughters look anything like you,’ I had said, grinning unpleasantly, ‘I shouldn’t think you have much cause to worry.’ And from that point on we had avoided one another. But, unlike me, Tim Hollis was a senior director and a shareholder too, facts that were gaining in importance with each minute that went by.

  ‘Are you seriously telling us you don’t know what CPT stands for?’ he said again.

  I had never even thought about the freighting company’s name, though the initials did suddenly seem significant.

  ‘It never occurred to me,’ I said, feeling guilty even though all I had been guilty of was stupidity. ‘Is it Andrew’s company?’ Fairbrother leane
d forward and started to speak again.

  ‘Yes, I think we can safely assume that the CP in CPT stands for Cavendish-Porter, don’t you? There are no accounts lodged as yet at Companies House, though I daresay the police can establish the facts quickly enough, should that prove necessary.’ This last statement was evidently designed to intimidate me, which it did.

  ‘My involvement with CP Transport began and ended with me giving them transportation jobs.’

  ‘Have you any idea what they were charging for those jobs?’

  ‘No. Andrew handled all the invoicing.’

  ‘And did it never occur to you, as a director, that offering cut-price work to galleries in France and Italy, and then providing the transport gratis was a little extraordinary?’

  ‘I couldn’t understand the economics of it. I told Andrew that.’

  ‘Perhaps you understood the economics of these expenses, all the same.’ Fairbrother held up a pile of receipts. ‘I think we must assume you noticed at the, let me see,’ he put on his glasses and slowly read the one at the top of the pile, ‘Belle Nuit in Nice, for example, how expensive the champagne was, particularly since it appears that you were not buying it merely for yourselves but also for your companions for the night. Ditto at the Cabaret Noir in Toulouse.’

  ‘And there’s plenty more where they came from, Chris,’ Hollis said, his smile now even broader than usual. Why is it that people who shorten your name in conversation are so often the ones you would prefer to call you sir? ‘I trust they were all good Catholic girls you were consorting with, or perhaps you were engaged on a missionary trip of some kind?’

  ‘You became very close to Andrew Cavendish-Porter, so we are told,’ Fairbrother continued quickly. I had the sudden feeling he disliked Hollis as much as I did. ‘Going to dinner with him and his wife, sometimes every week. He even sold his old sports car to the company, at a very good price indeed to himself, so that you could have it as a company car. The only convertible company car in the history of Shipley’s, I think I’m right in saying. I’m afraid it’s very hard indeed to believe, Christopher, that the pair of you hadn’t set out to milk this company dry. Given that Andrew was no more than a minority shareholder in one sector, but with access to considerable funds, and given our trusting, I now think perhaps in some ways even lax, attitude to accountability, I suppose the agreement between you was that you could take pretty much what you wanted as long as you agreed to keep mum about the amount of cash being shunted into CP Transport.’