The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  Edmund Curll, bookseller and publisher, and amongst the most hated of all the figures in Pope’s Dunciad, was quick to see the potential of both these trends. He had already had both his ears cut off in a previous brush with the law, but his senses were still in fine working order and they told him to avoid all scrupulosity in regard to the facts. He kept in his rotting garret three particularly disreputable hacks who could be prodded into ill-paid service at a moment’s notice. With their aid he produced ‘biographies’ of many of the famous figures of his day, including some writers. Besmirched on every page with libels and scurrilities, these were a great success. Because Pelham had gained a certain notoriety for his excesses, both alcoholic and religious, Curll brought out a little pamphlet entitled Richard Pelham Esquire and the Quaint Muse of Dementia. By the time this work appeared, Pelham was already incarcerated in the Chelsea Asylum, which was perhaps just as well.

  We have grown accustomed now to the counter-hagiography of modern enquiry. We expect to be told not about miraculous gifts and healings, but about the full chamber pot stinking under Beethoven’s piano while he composes work of sublimity, his own ears deaf to whatever sounds his fingers evoke. The novelty should have worn off by now, but the books do keep coming, and at the time of Curll’s pamphlet people were still relatively fresh to the phenomenon. Alexander Pelham, in the Clarendon edition of his great-grandfather’s work, could only bring himself to mention Curll’s pamphlet once, in an acid footnote. I had finally managed to buy one of these pamphlets, at considerable expense. It was undoubtedly libellous and almost certainly profoundly unfair. It was also very funny. I had the distinct impression that Curll had been in some of the taverns where Pelham had done his drinking. He had seen him at it, probably even joined him in his cups, playing witling to the monarch of laughter.

  But he couldn’t tell me anything about the black sun, nor about another subject that was beginning to obsess me. After that day with Charles Redmond, I had come back home and pulled down my copy of Stamford Tewk’s Eighteenth-Century Bibliography, the very place my interest in Pelham had started all those years before. And I read again that line I had first read up in Leeds, but thought nothing much about at the time:

  Pelham the man, uniquely, underwent the terrors of both star-machine and lightning cage. Pelham the poet at least managed to tell us something of the experience.

  The only thing was, no lightning cage appeared in Pelham’s collected works, nor in Curll, nor in Alfred Burnett’s nineteenth-century essay. It wasn’t in the OED either. There was no mention of it in Thomas Parker’s Chelsea Asylum, even though the star-machine was there, varnished by then into a precocious mechanism of redemption. So where had Stamford Tewk found it? Chilford Papers, Charlie Redmond had said, hadn’t he, acquired many years before? All very hush-hush. Whatever the difficulties, it seemed that I had somehow to get to see Stamford Tewk. His address appeared to be still the same as on that bibliography from thirty years before: Richmond, just up from the bridge. But with all the stories I had heard about him over the years, I did wonder if I could summon the strength to face it.

  Stamford Tewk had developed a rancid reputation among antiquarian booksellers. In a trade famous for its league of cantankerous, malodorous, misanthropic ne’er-do-wells and bankrupts, Fordie – as he was universally known, even by those who’d never spoken to him – held a special position of honour. He was so indefatigably impolite, so sharply offensive to the most innocent intruder in search of a book, whether it be on Shelley or the Napoleonic Wars or Nietzsche’s breakdown, that the stories accrued about him, glowing with venom, until they formed in effect a repolarised halo. Even old Jimmy Baskerville, with his poetry bookshop in Camden Town and his fondness for creeping up behind young female customers and grabbing their breasts, usually with the better part of a bottle of vodka sluicing around inside him, even that seventy-five-year-old bibliographer was as nothing in his legendary status compared with Stamford Tewk.

  He had been one of the famous crowd of Soho poets, his first book published by Faber & Faber back in 1948. There had been two slim volumes, all written in strict forms, and all strenuously avoiding any of the whirling rhetoric and sonorous lamentation which so filled the air at the time. The new expressionism of Dylan Thomas and George Barker obviously had no appeal whatsoever for Stamford Tewk, since his bleak and weary eye would have none of it. After the second book he had fallen silent, cleared off and married a painter, who had been well thought of at the time and was now almost entirely forgotten.

  But Tewk had become a part of the folklore of Soho and Fitzrovia in the 1940s and 1950s. You could pick up a book by Daniel Farson and read how Fordie had been one of the few characters capable of matching John Deakin rudeness for rudeness, or how he had been a true habitué of the Wheatsheaf, never at a loss for a spiked remark. There were anecdotes about his meetings and collisions: with Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, or Dylan Thomas himself. How, in his expansive moods and conciliatory days he had picked up the tab at Kettner’s, and on another occasion had actually dragged an abrasive companion by his leg along Old Compton Street, until a policeman enquired as to the precise nature of their business. Yet they said he had been kind to Paul Potts, putting up with his indigence and petty thieving, even enduring his company when the smell he emitted had grown feculent enough to drive away many others. He had always bought Sylvia Gough a drink in the Fitzroy, and had sat next to Nina Hamnet as she announced for the fiftieth time that Modigliani had assured her she had the finest tits in Europe, enduring the subtle reek of her urine as it slowly percolated though her underclothes. The drinks passed through her quickly by that stage.

  And then one day he had left, and had never been known to return. He was one of the few people to turn his back entirely on Soho, having once inhabited it. And he had at some point opened his bookshop and published his own bibliography of eighteenth-century poetry, which could still be found in the libraries. Then slowly and imperceptibly he had settled down into the dusty eccentricity of his own myth. As far as I could see, no one had anything much to do with him any more. They made do with telling the old stories over again.

  The bookshop, in a little road above Richmond Bridge, was permanently closed. Even when the sign said open, and the door was on the latch, it was closed. Tewk would look up with undisguised irritation from his desk if some unsuspecting punter should venture inside, and shout, ‘But what do you WANT?’

  ‘I was wondering if you might have a book on…’

  ‘But we’re closed, for goodness sake, can you not see that?’

  ‘It doesn’t say closed on the door.’

  ‘I am here on urgent private business, sir. Now will you please leave the shop, or must I call the police?’

  When it rained, he simply locked the door and imperiously waved his umbrella at any sodden individuals who banged upon it, shouting at them from behind the glass to kindly repeat their journey in drier weather, if they really had to repeat it at all. An occasional tyro bookdealer would arrive, looking about him knowingly with a professional frown, fingering the pockets of his leather jacket for his notebook.

  ‘Do you have any modern first editions?’ Fordie’s response was always the same, and he would deliver it without even looking up from his desk.

  ‘Clear off out of it, will you, sonny? I don’t need your sort round here.’

  The stock that filled up the front of his shop appeared to be largely a matter of indifference to him. Large rows of volumes that were often distinguished by their contents, if not their prices: mostly literature, history and a miscellany of theology and philosophy, often of an unexpected nature. This constituted the remainder of the auction lots, and country house sales, after he had extracted the few volumes that truly interested him. But he seemed to regard it as no more than necessary lumber. He showed no interest whatsoever in its sale. His finances constituted an impenetrable mystery to everyone, though he was hardly unique in that respect, in a trade which thrives on Chinese whispers,
systematic innuendo and downright falsehood. The only thing of importance to Stamford Tewk, so it was said, was the back room in which he kept his bibliographic gold. In locked shelves and cabinets, and in a large safe. There were a few, a very few, who had been permitted to enter that room and discuss its contents with him, or even handle the precious titles and manuscripts. But they were the chosen, who had fought their way through to the inside of his sanctuary. And God help any of the hoi polloi who disturbed him then, intent on one of his secret sessions. Those who had been in there would never let on to anyone outside what they had been shown, partly to enhance their own prestige as bookmen (for never, so far as anyone knew, had a woman entered), and partly for fear that someone else might have been handed an item of even greater value, of which they themselves still knew nothing. Thus had the mystique of Fordie’s stock intensified with every passing year, its value wrapped in ever-thicker shrouds of speculation. That was why, dealers would tell you with a wink, the old boy never left the shop any more. That was why he was going to die in there, keel over in a shroud of manuscripts, rather than step out blinking into the light; why they’d have to chip out his fossil finally with a geologist’s hammer, after his remains had begun to settle into a sediment of crumbling pages.

  Tewk’s age was as much a matter of dispute as his biographic details. One school held that he was seventy, another that he was at least ten or twelve years older; some claimed that his father had left him an estate in Bedfordshire, which he had sold off quickly and thus financed his life in the book trade. There was even a paranoid sect, so foxed by the total lack of sales or purchases which appeared to be Fordie’s hallmark for much of the time, who claimed his shop was a front for either MI5 or MI6, an esoteric fascia behind which the murky doings of the intelligence services were being conducted. Given the sort of organisations capable of employing the likes of Burgess or Philby, who could ever be sure? And then there was the mystery of the marriage. People would narrow their eyes in concentration and say, ‘Yes, Serena Tallis. Interesting painter, actually. Highly thought of, once upon a time anyway. Went completely nuts.’

  So I plugged myself into my TENS for half the morning, until my nerves were honeyed with the flow of the electricity, then went down the road to wait for the red bus that would take me to Richmond. At some point beyond Wandsworth, a group of schoolchildren mounted. Two of them, one black and one white, sat in front of me, and as the bus started moving again the black boy opened the window, and spat randomly out of it. Then he did it again. The white boy next to him started laughing. Then a few seconds later the black boy took aim and spat hard, managing to hit a woman pushing a pram on the pavement.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ I said and leaned forward to shut the window.

  ‘Who the fuck do you think you are?’ the black boy said, his face turned to me, his bright, round eyes absolutely fearless – he couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old, but he was already my height. I looked up to see if the driver realised what was going on, for there was no conductor.

  ‘Just leave the window shut,’ I said, with I suppose some of the schoolmaster from many years before rising up inside me. I never had been able to put up with insolence. The boy pushed it open again and spat out of it once more.

  ‘Right,’ I said rising, ‘off the bus.’ And I grabbed him by the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him along into the aisle, but he struggled and before I could pull him any further a pain struck with such force down my neck and my back that I let go of him as I froze, then almost fell over. The boy shrieked with sudden delight, ‘The poof’s a cripple. The poof’s a fucking cripple,’ he shouted, turning to everyone around him so that they could share his joy. The bus stopped and I managed somehow to get out. I had to stand for ten minutes leaning against a wall, in too much pain even to register the humiliation I had suffered. Mercifully a taxi came by and I talked him into taking me back to Tooting. When I arrived home, I shut the door behind me and locked it, and after that I didn’t go out any more even to see the bookdealers. I had them post me their catalogues. Thus was I confined to the little acre of my bare necessities.

  Now Pelham took up the whole of my days and most of my nights too. Since I had improvised my own study downstairs, I seldom ventured into my father’s on the first floor. I think its atmosphere must have retained something of the calculating precision of his spirit. Perhaps I felt the value of what I was doing was put too severely into question there and I already doubted how much questioning it could stand. But I meandered in one day and that’s when I found the stash of postcards, all neatly stacked into filing drawers.

  It had been a family tradition ever since I could remember: from each holiday location my father would post a card home, with a brief account of our vacation penned on the back. I picked one out and read it:

  Dear House,

  The weather has been mixed, but has not deterred us from the coastal paths. Christopher fell on the rocks and cut both his knees. Hope you are free from burglars and leaks. See you Saturday.

  Bayliss, Bayliss and Bayliss

  His clear copperplate script was festooned with unexpected flourishes, as though indulging an otherwise well-concealed decorative vitality. On the obverse was a photograph, heavy-handedly enhanced, of Fowey in Cornwall. The garish colours seemed somehow entirely of their period: that was precisely how I remembered the world of my childhood, as though the unsophisticated repro work corresponded in some mystical way to the reality around it. I kept flicking through the cards.

  Manorbier in towering black and white, the castle a rearing cloud above the shoreline. Oast houses in Kent, herring stores in Hastings, the white cliffs of Dover, the Isle of Wight chines, the flatlands of East Anglia stretching away to meet an even flatter sky. Eastbourne, Worthing, Hove, Bridlington (how that Rover had purred contentedly at fifty miles per hour all the way there and back). Rocks from glacial valleys, limestone coves and blue-watered harbours, Marine Parade, Lyme Regis, the pier and pavilion at Weymouth, detailed line engravings of distant waterfalls and tarns. Each stamp bore the young queen’s head in profile and a neat postmark clearly recording the date; each card seemed to have absconded into the future bearing a tiny shred of the past. How like my father to have filed it all away, these random thievings from chronology. And now of the three Baylisses there was only one of us left to count the years, while the locations themselves had shrunk to this house in Tooting. But then the past was my study, after all, since I had already put the future behind me as something too nostalgic even to think about. Simply remembering the word Alice was enough to bring on the pains in my neck.

  * * *

  Dust. The house had been filling up with dust. I’d started to notice it rising round my stockinged feet as I padded downstairs in the morning. I didn’t care much about the curtains or the carpets or the wooden surfaces, but now it was settling over the books too. I didn’t know how best to handle this. I could hardly clean each volume every week, for there were far too many of them, and I certainly didn’t intend to open any windows. The very thought of it. And the notion of plugging in my mother’s Hoover and introducing its querulous, wheezing clamour to the library that this place had become, struck me as sacrilegious. It would have been like weighing in with an organ during the more reflective passages of a string quartet. The whole house was gaining on itself in silent increments, but I didn’t know where it was coming from, whether blown upwards somehow from below, or silting down gently from above. Perhaps it had always been there, except that mother had once chased it from room to room, keeping it furtive and fleet-footed. But since I’d stopped pursuing it, now that I’d introduced this lax regime of silent laissez-faire, the dust was growing confident, claiming more and more territory for itself, covering my little world with its minutiae.

  One day I noticed a bowl of dead oranges. How long had they been there? My mother must once have bought them, but how far back was that? Each looked like a little shrivelled skull, blood-blackened with rigor mortis; a
pile of them, a headhunter’s collection after a good season hacking the necks of pygmies. I picked one up and fingered its dry, dimpled dunes, the hide of some spherical foetus that had never made it through. Little dead stars, I thought, too far gone now for even the sun to touch them.

  * * *

  I had taken to thinking a great deal about the past. Not merely the past that had once held Richard Pelham, but the past that had once held me. I had spent nearly three years at the English College in Rome, but in the few months before I set out to embark on my vocation, I did start to consider very carefully whether this should really be the pattern of my life. Pauline Healey’s body did not come to the house to confuse me any more, but her spirit visited my dreams most nights. I had begun to wonder if I were not simply too worldly to be a priest, and then a number of things happened. First, I started to have my dream, the dream in which a leprous disease would slowly cover the flesh all over my body, as I looked on in horrified paralysis. My skin would slowly erupt in small volcanoes of disfigurement. I itched all over with some nameless filth. And then right at the end, as the tears started coming, invisible arms would hold me and heal me, and I woke then sobbing with gratitude. I had looked up Matthew 8:3, where Jesus puts forth his hand to the leper and touches him, and tells him he is made clean, and the leprosy instantly vanishes. A new man walks away. First sign.

  The second sign had been this: I had read an article about Merrim, the multi-millionaire businessman, in which one of his disgruntled ex-employees described the scene each morning when the mogul shouted to his advisers to join him in his personal lavatory, the one with the solid gold taps, and there bawled instructions at them, as they tried to avert their eyes from the fat, hairy thighs protruding out of his shirt-tails, and breathe as little as possible so as to avoid the stench of his abundant faeces. This image of earthly power had been sufficient to make me wonder once again whether I shouldn’t in conscience try, in however small a way, to be a part of the world’s leaven. The salt, its savour.