The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  I had to breathe in hard before descending the steps at Tooting underground station, but I persevered. Half an hour later I was there, and I wondered why I had bothered. The street has been truncated and surrounded by a fearful symmetry of modern offices. Could this really be the place where for ten years Pelham learned to drink deep and taste corruption? So many windows glittering with City prosperity, but no sign of any life at all, just stonewall anonymity. At the top now stood a tower of darkly tinted glass that I tried to peer through, but I couldn’t make out very much. I had to walk right round it before I found a tiny sign, informing me that this was a British Telecom building. Odd to think such an eye-deflecting, enquiry-refracting pile should be one of the centres of the country’s communications. So uncommunicative. I’d always thought the idea was that the century decided to dispense with Victorian façades and make buildings out of glass, so that the machinery of life could be transparent with modernist hygiene, no need any more to hide away the golden facts in inner sanctums. Now they had darkened the glass so much that no one could look inside, and the glass had become its own façade instead. Could this place really have been such a thriving nest of vagrant brilliance and journeyman cynicism, learning and hypocrisy, all seasoned and poxed with lust? Johnson’s Dictionary was pert and personal: ‘Grub Street: A street near Moorfields, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.’ And from the Walks Through London: ‘The residence of sorry authors … From this street has proceeded an infinity of wit and humour: perhaps authors were poorer in former days than at present, and therefore chose this cheap part of the town for their residences.’ That was a mere two centuries before. Now it was a counting machine, curtained by steel and glass from the inquisitive air outside. An occasional besuited figure, carrying a sandwich and a slimline drink strode efficiently up the pavement. I was out of place. Even freshly bathed and shorn, I was still ragged with distraction compared to these functionaries of the financial machine. They looked at me with faint suspicion, as though I might be about to ask for money. There’d have been no use in telling them I was in pursuit of Richard Pelham, for they wouldn’t have known who I was talking about. There are no blue plaques to him in the City, or anywhere else for that matter. Even most academics have barely heard of him, so why should some fresh young accountant be expected to know? Anyway, Pelham and money are incompatible, we’ve established that much surely, if no more.

  So I made my way over to Museum Street, to collect the book I had ordered on the eighteenth-century houses of Twickenham, and that night, exhausted but pleased with myself at my re-entry into the world, I opened the old folio volume carefully and started to read the section on Chilford Villa.

  Dilapidation

  To Dilapidate: To go to ruin; to fall by decay.

  Johnson’s Dictionary

  In Twickenham’s Georgian Houses there were three pages on the building of Chilford Villa and another ten on the lengthy saga of its ruin. This was material I knew nothing about.

  It seems that after the death of his wife, Lord Chilford raised his son at the villa, with the faithful Jacob and Josephine in attendance, as he devoted himself more and more to his scientific studies. Many members of the Royal Society visited him there, including Benjamin Franklin, who became a great friend and who was reputed to have collaborated in Chilford’s experiments in the laboratory which he had constructed inside the villa.

  On achieving his majority, Chilford’s son promptly embarked on the life of a libertine, to the lifelong regret of his father, who became more and more reclusive and was reputed in his final years (here I stopped reading for a moment, startled) to take his solace in ever-deeper draughts of laudanum. On his death, his son began to use the place as a weekend retreat for whoring and other, more spectacular variants of Georgian debauchery. The villa’s precipitous decline had now begun. By the time of the early death of the third earl of Chilford, the building was already in poor repair. It was acquired by a number of figures in the nineteenth century, two wealthy industrialists, and a local dowager of considerable means. But although renovation began on at least two separate occasions, it was never completed satisfactorily. By the turn of this century, the place was half-decayed, its gutters fallen, the lead from the roofs stripped out, the copper plumbing gutted, its interior a damp and windy haunt of bats, birds and the occasional tramp. Then during the First World War it was requisitioned by the army for storage purposes, and by the time they’d finished with it, anything of any remaining interest in the interior had either been vandalised or entirely destroyed.

  In 1908 the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments had been set up, but the buildings it was required to list needed to have been erected before 1714, and Chilford Villa was not completed until 1745, so its sad dissolution carried on unhindered until finally in 1935 its condition was deemed so unsafe as to call for demolition, which is why no stone of it remains standing today. During the demolition, human remains were discovered in the foundations. This was the ‘black mischief which Charles Redmond had mentioned. Their presence had never been satisfactorily explained, but the corpses had evidently been experimented upon.

  I lay in bed that night with images of the ruin of Chilford’s Palladian dream going through my mind. I tried to listen to a story on the radio. I fell asleep with the radio on and I woke early on the Sunday morning to its grim announcements. Princess Diana had died after a car crash in Paris. Later I bought some papers for the first time in months and in reading them found myself more affected than I would have expected. In the week that followed, I forced myself out each day, to practise my freshly found worldly expertise, and I became intrigued to see London transformed into an open-air mausoleum and shrine. The newspapers started to report that the driver had been out of his head with drink and drugs. It seemed that as she lay mangled in the dark concrete underpass, the photographers’ flashlights had still been exploding in her face. As in life then, so in death. One day I left all the bookshops behind so that I could walk back through the parks. Great masses of bouquets, still glistening in their cellophane wrappers, had burgeoned around St James’s, Buckingham Palace and, most spectacularly, at Kensington. I read some of the messages: ‘Hope you are happy at last among the angels.’ Children’s toys had been dropped in among the forest of flowers, little funerary gifts for her journey beyond. One evening I stayed up in town and walked, as the dark was settling, to Kensington and there I looked with wonder at the thousands of silhouetted figures queueing almost silently, shuffling along like the shades in Dante, to add their condolences to the great black book, as the rings of candles flickered prayerfully around every tree. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Even Rome’s exuberant processions had never matched this.

  That night I left the station at Tooting and stopped a moment later outside a pub. An old man, diminutive, bewhiskered, with an aluminium walking stick, whirled, danced and juddered, as though under compulsion from whatever force had taken hold within him. His jacket was a putrid grey above his black and baggy trousers, and his bare, blistered feet were inserted into massive overshoes. He could only move forward by splaying his feet sideways, and as he twisted, jerked and convulsed along, his shiny walking stick described chaos manoeuvres about him. His unruly other hand drew surrealist maps of fork lightning in the air, and it was impossible not to think of Chaplin, his sad little clown now terminally plagued by St Vitus’s Dance. I resolved never to allow myself to disappear into that interior at Tooting again.

  Back inside the house I stared at those pages about the ruin of Chilford Villa, and I knew that the next day I had to start out once more to see Stamford Tewk.

  Part Two

  Stamford Tewk

  Where each man reads the book of himself.

  RICHARD PELHAM, The Instruments of the Passion

  This time my journey to the shop was uneventful. I walked up and down a few times outside before I finally managed to step through the door.

  ‘Closed,�
�� he shouted from the desk, without looking up. I didn’t move. Finally he raised his face from the desk. He was wearing a black double-breasted suit, which looked as though it had put in at least one decade of service too many, and some species of college tie, darkened from many years of use. But what I hadn’t expected was his face. His face was ascetically thin, thinner even than his short, trim body would have led you to expect. His nose was both delicate and prominent, his eyebrows arched and coal black, even though the hair above was entirely grey, parted immaculately in the manner of film stars of the 1940s. Could that really be Brylcreem he was using? When he took off his glasses to stare at me, his eyes were vivid green, and seemed not to blink at all. Stamford Tewk was that rare thing: a beautiful old man. His voice when he spoke had a depth of resonance and a precise inflection, which in more conscripted times would probably have been referred to as commanding.

  ‘I said we were closed, or do you suffer from an auditory disability?’

  ‘Not much point asking me, if I do, is there?’ I think I might have detected the rictus of a smile about his features then, the merest twitch of the possibility of amusement.

  ‘Is there anything specific you require?’

  ‘Lord Chilford,’ I said. ‘Edward Allingham, the second earl of Chilford. Royal Society publications. Letters. Diaries. Related material from other sources. Holograph texts. I was told you might have something.’

  ‘Why?’ The eyes unwavering in their focus on mine.

  ‘I’m writing a book on Richard Pelham.’

  ‘Is it likely to make any money, this book of yours? Or is it a requirement of your career? Might you perhaps be a member of a university department?’ These final words were uttered with a quiet, but maximum, disdain.

  ‘I’m not a member of anything at all any more. And I’d say there’s a fair chance the book will never even get published, let alone make any money.’

  ‘So why write it, then?’

  It’s an odd thing, one I came to note more and more as the months rolled on, but when Fordie asked a question, it tended to get answered.

  ‘I can’t help myself, if you must know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think there’s anything left for me to do but write it. Otherwise I’d just be a waste of space.’ And with those words I suspect I smuggled myself into the environs of Fordie’s heart. I might just possibly have fallen outside the innumerable categories of people whom he detested. Or could it be that he’d simply grown tired of telling the whole world he was closed?

  That first day he suggested I return the following week, after he’d had a chance to check on what he had stored away. And so it began, my lengthy dialogue with Stamford Tewk. We spoke of almost everything, and my visiting days increased until I would be there for several hours four or five times a week. The only thing he wouldn’t discuss were the Chilford papers, which were the only reason I’d come in the first place. I had to make do with other topics and study Tewk’s curious way with customer relations.

  I was sitting there one day reading a first edition of Pope which Fordie had placed in my hands. The man who entered was small and more boyish in appearance than his age should have allowed. His hair was golden but with a lacing of grey here and there, and studiedly unkempt. He wore jeans that were faded to the precise fashionable requirement and a suede jacket. He had slipped through the door, and managed to evade the proprietor’s scowl and the little intermittent barks requesting his departure.

  ‘Do you have any pomes?’ he asked Fordie, after a few minutes of idling about the place. A Liverpudlian accent. Fordie looked him over from head to toe with evident distaste.

  ‘Pomes?’ he said finally, and the man nodded. ‘Do you mind if I ask your nationality?’

  ‘I’m English actually,’ the man said, looking confused.

  ‘That’s your country of origin,’ Fordie said. ‘Your nationality, I think you’ll probably find, is British. Your occupation?’ The man looked even more confused, but he responded, as I mentioned people often did when Fordie interrogated them. Did they hear some tone in his voice that demanded a reply? Was there an atavistic requirement to answer the pressure of his rudeness?

  ‘I’m a university lecturer.’

  ‘Subject?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What is your subject, man? What is it we’re paying you to teach?’

  ‘English literature.’

  ‘Then, given the silver threads among the gold in your hairpiece, I’d have though you might have realised by this stage in life that the word is poem. PO-EM. Not pome.’

  ‘I was raised in Liverpool,’ the lecturer said with sudden indignation.

  ‘I daresay you were, but you must surely have grasped the principle of the English diphthong by now, whatever the peculiarities of your rearing in the north-west. I seem to recall you lot are more than capable of chanting EE-AYE-ADDIO. Over and over again, if memory serves. A diphthong. A rather melodramatic diphthong at that.’

  The small man left then, without another word, and banged the door fiercely behind him. The dusty little bell tinkled sadly, gently turning into an echo of its former self.

  ‘An educationalist,’ Fordie said evenly, pronouncing each syllable of the word fastidiously, before turning back to the book on the table before him.

  We would spend hours like this, as I watched in silent amazement at his treatment of all those impertinent enough to try to get into his shop. If anyone managed to enter and then find a book of interest, it would only take a few seconds before he would call out, ‘You really must take care not to crease the spine, you know.’ The bemused figure would look up from the book being inspected, nonplussed.

  ‘But I’m only opening it enough to read it.’

  ‘READ IT?’ Fordie pronounced both words slowly, to emphasise how exotic he found the idea. ‘I see. Well, if you’re finding yourself at a loose end today, there is, I believe, one of those Christian Science Reading Rooms a mere five minutes’ walk from here, and I’m sure they’d be more than delighted to accommodate you. Alternatively, in the other direction there is a public library. I believe the spines of books there are specially strengthened with binding tape and apparently shrink-wrapped in some species of plastic, so no matter how much you bend, bump or scuff them about, no one’s likely even to notice. You could probably even tear the pages out, while sitting in the reference section, without attracting a moment’s attention. Sing an ethnic folk song while you’re about it. Claim it’s all part of your people’s inviolable traditions.’

  This last was usually uttered to white members of the middle class whose inviolable traditions stretched back no further than Ealing or Slough.

  One morning as we sat together in silence, Fordie gazed with a melancholy eye at his newspaper. He was staring at a photograph of the island of Montserrat lying under a carpet of grey volcanic ash, a huge dead cake floating disconsolately in the middle of the Caribbean. Another picture of the volcano itself, coughing out its dragon’s spew, showed the earth under her aspect of malignancy, an apocalypse of fury scorching only inches beneath her leprous hide. Vulcanologists were still in dispute, so the paper reported. Would la Soufrière return at last to its mighty slumber, or continue to lavish its lethal fumes and dust upon the acres of earth that now lay gagging beneath it?

  ‘Soufrière,’ Fordie said thoughtfully, looking up. ‘Sulphurous. Yes, it must be. From le soufre. Odd they should have made it feminine though, isn’t it? Or maybe not, come to think of it. The mons. So much bloody turmoil inside, once everything gets started. It seems that hell’s for real, after all: here we are walking round its rim.’

  ‘Another coffee, Fordie?’ I said. His silence was the nearest he ever came to an affirmative.

  ‘Do you really believe in hell?’

  Fordie pushed his delicate, well-manicured fingers across his neatly swept hair, a gesture he often made prior to speaking.

  ‘My wife, you know, believed in nothing but the imagination. The trouble was she thought the imaginati
on was a temple of light, a great big tower of illumination. No real darkness there at all. Then she went mad and started dying, rather horribly in fact, and after that her paintings … you have seen her paintings?’ He gestured at the wall behind me.

  I’d wondered whose they were. A tiny monogram, ST, thinly inscribed in white paint with a very delicate brush in the bottom right-hand corner of each one, had had me speculating whether they might not be Fordie’s own work. I turned and took them in again at a single glance. They were all small landscapes in oils. A copse in Surrey: silver birch, bracken, heather, pine and sand. A window showing on to the grand arc of the bay at Tenby (every time I looked at that I thought of Alice, and the last time I had ever seen her) with the Victorian buildings rain-scumbled in their pastels above it, and the boats heaving and bobbing at anchor in the little harbour below. A prospect of the Isle of Wight: sherbet-coloured sands sifting the headlands and chines. Another showed the battle between harshness and gentility in the great swathes of open colour, spliced by lattices of drystone walling, up in the Yorkshire Dales. And then there was a tiny pair, my favourites, picturing granite promontories thrashed by angry, rearing seas, with the winking lights of a fishing port, somewhere or other on the Cornish coast at night.

  ‘My wife was called Serena Tallis,’ Fordie went on, ‘very well thought of for a time, among an admittedly small and discerning group. She exhibited with the 7 and 5 Society a few times, before they all lost their heads about abstraction. Her studio in the 1930s was in Hampstead. Just round the corner from the Mall Studios. Five minutes’ walk, and you could meet Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, or Henry Moore. Even, for a little while, Piet Mondrian, before he moved on to New York, to the great city of grids, which I should think must have fitted his Puritan soul as though it had been made to measure.