The Lightning Cage

by Alan Wall

  All of this had undoubtedly suited me in many ways, because I had felt uneasy for a long time about what I had come to think of as the Church’s baggage of idolatry, its little black shapes that rose like mists out of Irish bogs, its weeping madonnas, its plaster saints with bleeding wounds, all those absurd hagiographies in which St Patrick in his chariot ran over his unchaste sister, or the fairy-tale daily miracles of The Little Flowers of St Francis. I was aware too that this heritage of superstition was not always blithe and innocent. The anti-Semitism that coiled itself around the legend of Hugh of Lincoln, the fear of the foreign, the hatred of the strange – these were a part of that heritage and they troubled me greatly. Even during my time there, Roman rumours had abounded about the Vatican’s role in spiriting the Nazi Croatians of the Ustashe out of Europe after the war, with a series of monasteries used as safe houses, as a link in the ratline. That’s not what they’re for, I remembered thinking angrily to myself as the details leaked out, that’s not what they were built for at all.

  And now here I was, trying to work out if Jean-Baptiste Vianney, the saintly Curé d’Ars, was a psychotic liar, or if the Devil might not, after all, have disappeared with the dim and unenlightened centuries that had been so fearfully fascinated with him.

  Fordie had put a lot of work in here. I started studying his notes, and as I did I realised the significance of all those questions Fordie had put to me. I had thought it an intellectual game for him at the time, but now I could see that was the last thing it had been. He had been trying to get at the truth of the matter.

  He had experimented with a variety of psychological stratagems, seeing if he could square St Jean-Baptiste Vianney’s evident goodness and candour with his reported visitations. He noted that Jung had written how he himself had been menaced by a psychosis, one that had threatened both his sanity and his well-being. He had described the force as both real and dangerous, and yet emanating from inside him, but how could that be? Fordie had wondered how such an inner force could arise; where was its source? If one were to place the locus of the diabolic attacks within Vianney, rather than without, the potency and projection still remained inexplicable. Freud’s account of the diabolic contract signed in his own blood by Christoph Haizmann in the seventeenth century was written largely in the manner of a scholarly amanuensis, simply writing down indisputable events. It was as though Freud expected such things. He even explained the logic and attraction of a deal with the Devil. But the last trustworthy account Fordie had been able to locate of an actual encounter was that of Huysmanns in Paris a hundred years before. The evidence suggested that the writer had indeed attended black masses and involved himself with a number of sinister figures in the world of the occult. The accounts were so specific that Fordie found it hard to doubt them. More to the point, Huysmanns became so terrified of the powers he believed had come to be directed at him, that he spent the last years of his life in a monastery, surrounded by alternative powers he believed to be redemptive, not infernal. That struck Fordie as a very large gesture to make, for any mere poseur.

  But none of this resolved the problem he had with Vianney himself. The little priest had been brought up at a time when Reason, that pitiless French goddess, was enthroned. The cathedral in Paris was reconsecrated in her name, while the churches whose names did remain dedicated to the worship of Christ largely ran free with pigs and cattle. All the darkness of the past was to be left behind. Humanity would live henceforth in the glare of the light. Time had been revised to match the ticking of a different clock. The calendar had started all over again. It seemed ironic to Fordie though, that when humanity finally stepped on to the evolutionary platform of enlightenment, it should find itself metamorphosed into the Committee for Public Safety, ritual daily executions, a true terrorism of the spirit. Terror was, after all, what Robespierre had called the hygiene of the Revolution. And Vianney had seen priests come and go in secret amidst all this, risking their lives to administer the sacraments. The first definition of a priest he’d ever been given was this: a man who’s prepared die to be one. So there he was, at the cusp, with on the one side a medieval battle between heaven and hell, and on the other a violent, evangelising Enlightenment. Enlightenment: where had the light come from, sitting so securely enthroned in the heart of that word? The supreme notion that the goddess Reason would now put everything to rights, and shine her brilliant eyes into everyone’s darkness.

  In the middle of this disquisition, Fordie had suddenly stopped. He had written across the page: We cannot answer this question. Or at least reason gives one answer, faith another. Is this why we have portraits of poets? Pelham’s.

  I pulled out the first edition of Psalms of Solace and looked at the frontispiece portrait, then I turned back to Fordie’s notes, trying to fathom where his mind was taking him. He pointed out that Pelham’s period was the age of the portrait of the poet, though the tradition itself stretches back a long way, back to those busts of Homer in his blindness, the whole of his expression turned inwards from the world, reconnoitring now the landscapes and the battles he must find inside himself; or Euripides darkening, as humanity prances its rituals of destruction before him. But with the frontispiece to the folio edition of the works of Shakespeare in 1623, a new trend was begun, or rather an old trend of codex and scroll re-established: having an image of the poet attached to his works, so that one could study the shape of the head through which the flashes from above had been transmitted. Incompetent and inexpressive as this engraving is, it inaugurates our modern cult of inspiration.

  Alexander Pope seemed set to fill the nation with his likeness, making it his business to have as many portraits painted and engraved, and as many miniatures of them distributed as possible. They often show him in a melancholy solitude, chin on hand, as though the present age had provided no one with whom he might truly speak; as though all his converse was with the line of artists threading him back in hermetic communion to antiquity.

  One tradition had it that Hogarth’s ‘The Distressed Poet’ of 1737 was a portrait of Pelham in penury, his wife Susannah dutifully repairing his only pair of hose, his son Tom rubbing his eyes with incredulity at the bleakness of the world into which he has been born. The poet, booze-blotched and bleary, is scratching the hair under his wig as he dreams up fresh tropes and modern instances for the epic he labours away at, which carries the title ‘Poverty’.

  Godfrey Kneller had painted him as a young man and this image provided the early portrait of Pelham which was the original for the engraving on the frontispiece I was now looking at. A later portrait, by an otherwise obscure Dutch painter named Droet, shows Pelham already embarked on his dissolution, the startling clarity of his eyes beginning to be imprisoned by the encroaching flesh about them.

  On an otherwise blank page, Fordie had written: So we make the poet into hell’s journeyman, and look into his eyes in portraits to see where he has been. Just when we have stopped believing in hell. Except we didn’t stop believing in hell, did we? Only its externality. Serena again.

  The River’s Last Drink

  The river’s last drink is the sea.

  RICHARD PELHAM, The Instruments of the Passion

  Fordie annotated as best he could the sad life of Lord Chilford following his wife’s death. His stoical cheerfulness had perhaps always concealed a bleaker temperament. There was in him, too, a melancholy thread he had done his best to lose in scientific compassings and analytic precisions, a thread that perhaps tied him a little more closely to Richard Pelham than he ever cared to consider. But now with the sudden death of Lady Chilford, this unilluminated seam became the sable threading his psyche. Not that he communicated this to anyone. Even if he had felt any inclination to cry out, his quinsied distemper would probably have inclined him back to silence. But he too started to take lightning from the bottle.

  It was only as I reached the last manuscript section, and the last of Fordie’s notes that I came fully to understand why he might have put all this aw
ay in his safe, and left it there. I read through it all once and then I put it away myself. Time to go outside again.

  * * *

  I hadn’t even noticed that it was snowing. But Richmond was white and I looked around, a little dazzled, at all the countless blank sheets of snow-sugared windscreens on the endless parked cars. On one or two a finger had already entered its script, but most were pristine, untouched, aboriginal. For an hour that morning the world was fresh, but the thaw had started by lunchtime. By then I was sitting in a café eating a sandwich and making my decision. I decided that one way or the other I had to get this business over with. Fordie had obviously shelved it for years. But I didn’t have years. In a few months’ time I would be out, and I had an odd feeling that I might soon have to be selling off anything of any value. Including possibly the Chilford papers.

  When I arrived back I opened up the last bottle of Chablis – it had stopped coming, along with the eggs. I suspected that the non-payment of bills might have had something to do with this. Then I telephoned Westminster Cathedral. On the back cover of Grappin, there was a note that the author, Monsignor Templeton, had spent many years in various missions and now tended a parish in south London. There was one line in his book, one line about the confrontation with the face of evil, which made it evident to me that Templeton had either conducted or been present at an exorcism. Out of that had come the particular slant of his work on Vianney, its undeniable passionate engagement. There was no doubt in this monsignor’s mind about the reality of Grappin. So when the lady at the other end asked me the nature of my enquiry, I said that it was a matter of some urgency that she give me the address of Monsignor Templeton. Thirty seconds later she did. He was now resident in a little church at the edge of Clapham Common.

  I could have telephoned or written, but I had a feeling he’d have found a way of fobbing me off. Had he guessed the nature of my enquiry, he would probably have refused to collaborate at all. So I simply went there on the train. On the way I did something I seldom did any more: I bought a newspaper. Inside I saw a photograph I recognised and read the headline Poet Shadwell Jailed in First Editions Scam. Shadwell, it seemed, had been topping up his exiguous income by signing early editions of other writers’ work, using their own style of signature (so much for my Lawrence Durrells). He had done so much of this that the judge felt obliged to have him put away for three months. In his first prison interview Shadwell pointed out that there was a long and intimate connection between poetry and criminality. I read the names Villon, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Ben Jonson before I threw the paper aside.

  I have often thought about the shock that must be sustained by those in England who turn to the Church of Rome without knowing much about it, imagining that they are about to enter an earthly shadow of the heavenly city, particularly those who have spent any time studying the buildings of the Italian Renaissance. So often our buildings are no more than bleak machines for praying in. This one looked particularly bleak, and the presbytery seemed to be falling down. The stucco had gone almost entirely, revealing the uneven bricks beneath. I rang the doorbell twice and at last a tall, anxious-looking woman appeared. She gave me a sceptical look and asked, in a sharp Irish voice, what I wanted. The housekeeper.

  ‘I have come to see Monsignor Templeton.’

  ‘You do not have an appointment, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Today is his day off. He has no appointments today.’ Housekeeper and protectress. ‘If you would like to leave a message for him, I’ll see that he gets it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘but it’s a matter of some urgency.’

  ‘There is another priest on duty…’

  ‘No, I’m afraid it has to be Monsignor Templeton, for reasons I can’t go into.’ This was a nasty trick, and I knew it. No Irish housekeeper would ever take on the responsibility of sending someone away in a state of mortal sin, and therefore in peril of his immortal soul should he step under the first oncoming bus. With a sniff of irritation she showed me into the reception room and left. I looked around at the slowly rotting furniture and sub-Murillo framed kitsch on the walls, and wondered once more how any high Anglicans had ever walked the path to Rome, without promptly turning back. At last Monsignor Templeton came in and gestured with his arthritic hands for me to sit down at the oilcloth-covered table. I felt guilty. He had about him a look of utter exhaustion. I would have said he was in his late sixties and had probably already retired from the usual parish duties. There was a little grey hair on his head, but his milky blue eyes, though rheumy, were sharp and sceptical. The veins on his forehead were visibly throbbing. He wore the shabby dark clothes of almost all elderly priests when they are trying to pass for civilians.

  ‘How can I help you, Mr…’

  ‘Bayliss.’

  ‘Forgive me, Mr Bayliss, but have we ever met? It’s just that Moira, sorry, Mrs O’Connell, said you wanted to see me in particular. I don’t believe we’re acquainted.’ My eyes had wandered up the wall to the ceiling as the monsignor spoke. Along the ceiling ran an enormous crack from corner to corner, a threatening, gaping crack that augured worse to come. The priest’s eyes had followed mine.

  ‘Not in very good repair, I’m afraid, this house.’

  ‘Hope it’s not a full-repairing lease,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Never mind. Monsignor Templeton, I’ve called on you during your day off on false pretences. I’m sorry, but I didn’t know what else to do. I read your book Grappin and you are the only person I think might be able to help me.’ Suddenly he stiffened.

  ‘Are you from the press?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Not the television?’

  ‘Nothing like that, believe me.’

  ‘Ever since that film The Exorcist we have been plagued with enquiries of a dubious nature.’ I had expected something like this and that’s why I had brought the manuscripts along with me. I took them carefully out of my bag. No scholar can ever resist looking at unpublished manuscripts from centuries before.

  ‘What are these?’ he asked peering across at them and fumbling for his reading glasses.

  ‘You are going to have to spare me a half-hour of your time for me to explain.’

  He looked up from the papers, still a little wearily. ‘Perhaps you would like a coffee?’ He went to the kitchen, and a few minutes later he carried the mugs in one at a time, with enormous difficulty, in his arthritic fingers. I should have offered to help, but I had been staring out of the window at the snow, which had started falling again.

  I told the story as briefly as I could. Occasionally he would ask for some clarification and I realised by the astuteness of his questions that whatever was going wrong with Templeton’s body, there was nothing at all wrong with his mind.

  ‘Do you know of a demon named Agarith?’ I asked him.

  ‘Minor Babylonian deity. Re-emerged infrequently as a demonic power. Enlisted at some point as one of our devils, like so many others.’

  ‘What were his attributes?’

  ‘He appears in certain grimoires and necromantic instructions for raising the dead. He was called upon to bestow special gifts in the sciences. A certain penchant for fanciful violence. But you haven’t told me what finally happened to your Richard Pelham. You’ll have to forgive me, but I’m afraid I know nothing about him. France was my area of specialisation.’

  ‘What happened to him has been a mystery for over two hundred years.’ He looked at me once more a little warily. He would be a good man in the confessional, I could see that, as hard to shock as he was to impress.

  ‘And now your manuscripts here are about to bring light where previously there was darkness, is that it?’

  ‘Can I read something to you?’

  ‘What is it you are reading?’

  ‘Lord Chilford’s diary of events.’ He nodded and I started to read.

  ‘The weather had already turned into snapping winds and howl
ing showers. Unexpected blusters ruffled the water of the Thames into petulant swells. It was only an hour after dawn when Jacob noticed the rope tied to the willow’s trunk. At the other end of this tether, dragging slowly in the outgoing tide, was the poet’s mutilated body, attached by a well-executed bowline. (I couldn’t help remembering Pelham’s boyish pride in his knot-tying.)

  ‘The wounds appear, for a suicide, inexplicable. All five fingers on each hand pierced, the lobes of both ears, an aperture passing right through the flesh of the nose, and the appalling stabbing through the right eye that sent him plunging down into the water. It was only some time later that I noticed the wound to the tongue. All of the wounds had been effected with the lancet Pelham had stolen from my laboratory.’ I looked up. Monsignor Templeton was staring through the window at the snow, which was now falling more heavily.

  ‘Do the wounds mean anything to you?’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes. They are a parody of the mortification of the senses. Sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. Most lengthy ascetical rites or penitential practices would work their way through them one by one. It does rather sound as though your fellow decided to get them all over at once.’

  ‘That’s assuming he was still deciding anything.’