The Lightning Cage (10 page)

‘I suppose that if I couldn't be the priestly representative of Christ on this earth, I must have decided to have nothing to do with him at all. If I couldn't administer his sacraments, I'd leave them alone – except even that's not possible, since baptism and confirmation are already lodged irrevocably inside me. Penance and eucharist I can avoid. Holy orders have already risen up and gone down the tube. As for extreme unction, I probably won't be in a position to refuse it by the time it's called for. These days they call it the sacrament of the sick, you know, but it will always be extreme unction for me. We all need some unction, don't we, some balm, whether we're in Gilead or Tooting? And that only leaves marriage.' I paused. ‘Will you marry me, Alice?' This last question took me aback, almost as much as it evidently did her. She turned and looked at me.

‘Why?'

‘Because I love you. I know I love you because, for the first time in my life, I want someone to have my baby.' Her eyes never blinked, her stone-grey scrutiny continued uninterrupted, then she got up from the bed and walked over to the window. The gauze curtain flicked gently against her bare belly.

‘No,' she said at last. ‘Don't try to make embryos from embryos.' After that, she put on her clothes in silence and walked downstairs. I heard the door close: she had gone out. So there I had it, the summation of the wisdom of Hermann Siegfried: don't make embryos from embryos. I lay there in silence. I was living with a woman who'd never been born. That's why she was so white, such a consumptive mirage – the blood hadn't even started pumping through her veins yet. There was nothing inside her but the thin milk of possibility.

On Monday the weather changed. It turned to a black, growling smear of rage, spitting chilly venom at the clifftops and slapping the harbour with icy storms. This wasn't autumn any more, this was a premonition of what was to come. It was as though we were in a different place entirely. Everything felt damp now, even the bed. We drove to Pembroke, but that was damp and miserable too. The Healey was not the best car in heavy rain. The little restaurant we'd visited at the weekend was now deserted, and the vegetarian dishes had somehow lost their savour. All the salt was now in the wind. We were housebound, fingering the condensation on the windows, counting hours.

‘We'll be going back tomorrow,' Alice said to the storm outside.

‘No,' I said, not looking up. ‘I booked this place for a fortnight.' She was silent for a while, then spoke again quietly.

‘I have to be back by Wednesday, Chris, for the Siegfried Group, but I'll go by train if you want to stay.' My voice rose unintentionally.

‘Surely you can miss that thing this once, can't you? What use is it if all it does is to turn into another form of dependence, if it's just something else you can't do without, like your bloody spliff?'

Alice took her coat from the hook and stepped outside into the rain. I stood by the window and watched as her shape disappeared into the murky howl of the evening. Then I went and bought a bottle of whisky. I needed something with more of a hard kick than Alice's herbal mixture. When I came back from the off-licence, I poured myself half a glass of straight Scotch and then sat down by the window with Siegfried's
Chimera
in my hand. What was the big deal with this man that I seemed to have ended up in competition with him? I started flicking through the pages. My eye landed on a quote:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall:

Most women have no characters at all.

I knew this. This was my old territory. This was Alexander Pope's ‘Epistle to a Lady'. And as I read on, I found that the words produced a curious panic in me. By now I already felt jagged inside. If you ask someone to marry you and you're turned down, you're not back where you were before you asked. You're in some different region, some hillside limbo where the mists reign. I poured out more whisky and drank it quickly, then poured some more again, trapped in my broken window of a mood. There was no sign of Alice, and now there were memories catching up on me, shipped in, it seemed, by the shifting shapes of that unending storm outside. When she finally came back, she was soaked. I offered her whisky, but she shook her head and took herself off to the bedroom.

It was as though she was moving further away from me with each minute. There had always been something strange about our lovemaking. It wasn't that Alice didn't make love, for she did; it's just that I was never sure she was making love to
me.
Without my being there, it would have been harder, or at least different, but all the same I never felt like its necessary subject – I felt temporarily sufficient but not necessary, and I started to think again about how easily Alice had moved in with me. I wasn't sure that she had ever made a single decision in all the time I had known her. And now she was more anxious to get back to the Siegfried Group than to stay here. It was desperation and anxiety that made me push and hammer so hard, pinioning her arms against the mattress and thrashing away in my swerving whisky haze. After we were finished, the sweat on our bodies turned acid and cold, and finally she said, ‘That hurt.'

I went out to buy the newspaper the next day so that I could be alone for a while, even in the rain. I left her sleeping. I didn't want her to wake. I didn't want those grey eyes opening on me. I hacked up the hill through a visor of rain, and stood at the top exactly where I had first stood with Alice, looking out over the bay. A single gull dropped and veered in the air, no longer serenely riding the weather, but seeming to be imprisoned by it now, tangled in its darkening bluster and conflict. I went to the newsagent's at the top of the hill and looked out briefly over that bay which had seemed so idyllic when we arrived, and now was nothing but a squall of rain and vacancy. Then I went into the café nearby, and after only a twitch of hesitation as I looked at the menu, I ordered egg and bacon and sausage. I'd left one vegetarian behind in the blue house and maybe the ghost of another too. I flicked through the pages and I only registered the obituary because of the photograph. Mick Tiller. We had climbed together on the Yorkshire outcrops years before. But Mick was a rising star and I wasn't even a falling one, even when I fell. I could only follow on behind him, helping with belays and brewing the tea. Mick was our golden boy. He trained almost every day on the Don Robinson climbing wall at the university. He was the most supple and gymnastic human being I have ever seen, and when he turned his strength and grace and courage towards a new gritstone line, crowds would form at the foot of the rock to watch him. That's when there were any people around. Often it was just us, in bleak moorland rain, with the grey fields beneath us stretching away to the horizon. I liked it best of all then.

I can still see him putting up his own route on Almscliffe, the one he named Axle-Grip, upside down on the overhang, with only one nut twenty-five feet below him for protection. It would have ripped out if he'd fallen, he knew that as well as we did. But he didn't fall. Instead he ended up on the cover of
Climbing World.
I still have my grainy black-and-white photographs somewhere, of Mick in his dirty sweater and jeans and his battered EBs, standing proud of the rock with his curly black hair flowing wildly in the wind, as he overcame one more impossibility. He put all his new routes down as ‘Very Severe', but they're classified a lot higher than that in the Yorkshire gritstone guidebooks these days. E5, E6. Warning signs to the uninitiated: don't try climbing these, if you have any sense at all. Most of them I couldn't even make the first swooping moves on – they were so demanding, I simply couldn't get off the ground.

Then we all used to drink together, either up on the crags when the weather was fine, or back in town when it wasn't. Whatever he'd done the night before never seemed to affect him when he started climbing the next morning. Until he tore his hand trying to open a can of beer with a serrated knife at some midnight party. The major tendons in two fingers were severed. At first we didn't think it was so bad. He told us he'd be roped up again within a month. He didn't even bother to find any medical help for a while, but when he did, it suddenly became apparent how serious the injury was. He never fully recovered, and although he could still climb better than most people would ever dream of doing, he'd lost that mysterious edge the top boys had. Too much of his grip had gone. He couldn't do the fresh routes that make the headlines any more, though he would still solo old ones from time to time with astonishing speed. Then gradually he dropped out of sight altogether.

I had heard accounts of him now and then; that he lived in a caravan somewhere in North Yorkshire; that he drank a lot, and had become morose and bitter, but now I was reading his obituary, and seeing that young god's face stare out at me from twelve years before. Apparently he had climbed alone to the top of Malham Cove, taking with him in his bag nothing but a bottle of tequila, and when the bottle was empty, he'd jumped. They found his body all smashed up down there the next morning.

‘Mick Tiller,' I said, very quietly when I was back in the little blue house. I held the obit page in front of her. ‘He's dead,' I went on, ‘my old friend. We climbed together, and now he's dead.' Alice looked briefly at the column. I felt I couldn't touch her, though I wanted to.

‘Following the route of denial,' she said, after scanning the page, ‘acting as though he'd never needed the womb in the first place.' This I presumed was once more the wisdom of Hermann Siegfried. It was the wrong thing to say, and for some reason I felt that Alice knew it was the wrong thing to say, and that was why she was saying it. Each word put more distance between us.

‘Yes, well anyway he's dead,' I said, growing angry, ‘and he was braver than your Mr Siegfried and your Miss Orley put together. And funny with it. I shouldn't think you spend too much time laughing at those therapy gigs of yours up in North Kensington, do you?'

‘I was wondering when the contempt would finally come out, Chris,' she said, with a curious air of satisfaction as though she had at last been proven right. ‘Contempt and what often passes for humour are more often than not disguises for fear, you know.'

That afternoon she took the train to London. I drove her to the station and stood on the platform as she climbed aboard.

‘I'll see you back here on Thursday,' I said, trying to disguise the urgency in my voice. ‘Remember I've rented this place for a fortnight.' Alice looked out of the carriage window and said quietly, ‘How long did you rent me for, Chris?'

‘What?' I said, but the train was already pulling out. ‘Thursday night then,' I shouted.

Back at the little blue house I looked around and realised that Siegfried's book had gone along with Alice. Why hadn't she left that behind for me to read? But then, perhaps she needed it for her meeting. That was probably it. I remembered how I would drive her up to that group of hers, and how one evening I'd even managed to peer down into the basement where it all took place, and caught a glimpse of the brisk and busy lady who ran the affair, Miss Orley. Very professional looking in her wire-rimmed spectacles, with her salt and pepper hair pushed back seriously from her face, and tied up with a black silk ribbon. I had felt envious of her intimacy with Alice, but not envious enough to want to attend the meeting, as Alice had once suggested I should. I'd left one church and didn't feel like joining another just yet. Or could it be that I'd never entirely left the first?

The rain let up, but the cold remained. I drove along the coast and walked about here and there, and when Thursday night came I prepared a vegetarian feast. I bought a bottle of expensive wine to go with it. But Alice never came back that night, so I drank the Margaux myself. Then I started on what was left of the whisky bottle. At midnight I emptied the last of the whisky into my glass as I sat in the little alcove by the window with Mick Tiller's obituary in my lap as his face stared up at me from the crumpled newspaper.

And then the rain came back.

Thunder

What is the cause of thunder?

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
King Lear

 

To the great irritation of his wife, Lord Chilford remained at Twickenham. He decided to lessen her annoyance by arranging a surprise ball for her at the villa that Friday evening. Her pregnancy was still in its early stages, long before any confinement would be required, and she did take a particular delight in dancing. Jacob and Josephine were set to work with the preparations. Meanwhile, each day Chilford interviewed Pelham for hours at a time, in an attempt to arrive at an objective account of his condition.

LORD CHILFORD
: Do you know what happened to you, Richard?

RICHARD PELHAM
: I was taken again.

LC
: What was it took you?

RP
: Agarith.

LC
: Is Agarith a spirit?

RP
: An angel.

LC
: A fallen one?

RP
: One who sometimes needs a home. A condition I understand. Perhaps that's how he acquired my address.

LC
: You had been drinking.

RP
: In preparation for his return, yes.

LC
: How did you know he was coming?

RP
: I was sent a letter.

LC
: By whom?

RP
: By you, my Lord.

LC
: Where did you find this letter?

RP
: In the drawer of your desk.

LC
: What did it say?

RP
: When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first.