The Lightning Cage (14 page)

‘What sort of expenses?' Victor asked. It had been a mistake to visit all this upon an old family friend, I realised that now. I should have just picked a solicitor out of Yellow Pages.

‘What sort of expenses, Christopher?'

‘Night clubs. Hostesses. Champagne.'

‘You paid for sex on your company expenses?' No flies on Victor then, we could drop the euphemisms. After only a slight pause, I said, ‘Yes.'

‘Did you pay on your expense account, or did your friend Cavendish-Porter pay on his?'

‘At first it was all on his. Then…'

‘Then?'

‘He told me to pick up a few of the bills.'

‘And you did?'

‘Yes.'

‘Not in cash?'

‘On the card.'

‘So there are company records of it?'

‘Yes.'

‘How did you account for these nights of yours on the documentation?'

‘Entertainment. We were meeting a lot of potential foreign clients. It would have seemed like no more than hotel and restaurant bills. Someone must have made it their business to contact these places and find out what services they actually provided.'

‘But all this goes back over a number of years?'

‘Yes.'

‘So why bring it up now? Is it simply because of this Cavendish-Porter and his transport company?'

‘I've been thinking about that over the last few days. I suppose the truth is, we were fine as long as we were bringing in the money. They'd probably have forgiven us anything. But for the last two years it's been dropping away. For the last nine months we've probably been running at a loss. Andrew was never there, I had my mind on other things. So they started paying attention to us, which they never did as long as we were in profit.'

Victor looked at me in silence for a moment. It was that look again – I thought I'd left that look behind in Rome, but it seemed to be following me around the world. Finally he spoke.

‘This is personal advice, for which there is no charge, because if you were to proceed with this business, I shouldn't wish to be involved. If I were you, I'd accept that you have behaved recklessly and laid yourself open to charges of defrauding the company. If you were an employee merely, there could be grounds for saying that you had been led on by your director. But as it stands, I think you might cut a sorry figure if it came to court. It would all seem so … seedy. You're too young to need to buy sex with other people's money, Christopher. That's an old man's game.' Victor had now risen.

‘The car?' I said.

‘Either give it back or go abroad in it for a very long time. And do give my love to your mother.'

*   *   *

My running had slowed down with Alice around. I think it might have had something to do with the marijuana. My circuits around Battersea Park had become meditations, I had even stopped now and then to stare at the river, but when I came back from seeing Victor that day I ran as hard as I ever had. I ran as though I wanted to hurt myself, and only as I came round the railings by the zoo did I stop. Helena was walking towards me as her Irish setter dashed and then dithered and sniffed over the grass. She carried on approaching me as I heaved for breath. It was the first time I'd ever seen her without her make-up, and her bony face and thin lips now looked pale and ghostly in the morning light.

‘Hello, Chris.' I said nothing, but simply stared at her for a moment as I got my breath back. ‘How are you?'

‘Out of a job,' I said finally, ‘otherwise fine.' There was a flicker across her face, but no more than that.

‘Yes, it's all a bit awkward isn't it?'

‘Where's Andrew, then?'

‘Down in Bristol most of the time. Well, going between there and Bath – we've just found a new house. We're moving down there. It's lovely, actually.'

‘Nice for you.'

Helena suddenly moved forward and put her hand on my arm. ‘Andrew's sorry he's not been in touch. He was hoping you'd be kept on at Shipley's, but we heard it hadn't worked out that way. He'd be happy to take you on at CPT, you know.'

‘Big of him,' I said. She let go of my arm and stepped backwards. The setter was still cavorting jerkily about the place.

‘You know they let him down? You know they'd always promised him a directorship and a shareholding in the main company as soon as he'd raised your turnover to half a million?' I shook my head.

‘Then they changed their minds and made it a million. He decided it was all my eye and Betty Martin, and decided he'd best start looking out for himself. And us, of course.'

‘Maybe he'll have to start doing it from the inside of a prison,' I said, but she shook her head and smiled briefly.

‘They won't do that,' she said. ‘If that's your worry, you can forget it. You'd like it down in the west, Chris. Think about it.' Then she turned her head and looked up towards my flat.

‘Is Goldilocks still with you?'

Now it was time for me to shake my head. ‘No. I eat my porridge alone these days.'

Her smile became fuller. ‘I always thought you might drop by one of those evenings after you'd left Andrew abroad.' I suppose she saw the mild commotion of shock as I looked at her. ‘Well, come on,' she said, ‘you didn't really think I sat at home grieving for my darling Andy while he screwed his way across Europe, did you? I'll drop you a line with our new address, anyway. Andrew would have contacted you himself, but even a hint of connivance at this stage could be risky. Let's give it a few months, shall we, till it's all quietened down.'

Then she kissed me, shouted for her dog and set off swiftly towards the bridge. And by the time I was back in the flat standing in the shower with the scald of the water on my face, I thought: Alice and Helena, Helena and Alice. And I could feel my soul crouching down in preparation for some serious woman-hating.

With only a few days left before that car had to be returned, I thought I might as well put it through its paces. I had never cornered so hard, never accelerated so hard, never braked so hard. I probably took more rubber off those tyres in three days than I had in the previous three years, and every time I turned to look at the empty passenger seat, I pressed my foot down a little harder. So I suppose I can't really blame the man in the white Sierra. I accelerated too hard and he followed me, then when I braked hard as the lights changed he really wasn't expecting it. And I wasn't expecting the hammer blow that seemed to hit me on the neck. I climbed out rubbing the back of my head and walked round to look at the mangled chrome of the bumper, and the sheet of buckled blue steel that two minutes before had been the boot. I think the middle-aged Indian in the clapped-out Ford, with his grey cardigan hanging down below his grey jacket, was expecting me to be angry at the damage he had inflicted on my beautiful sports car, and was a little surprised as we exchanged details to see me starting to laugh, despite my physical discomfort.

I drove the car back to Shipley's and left the keys with the secretary.

‘It needs a bit of attention, I'm afraid,' I said as I walked out. It was their car and their insurance policy, so they could sort it out. But by the time I'd walked home I realised that I needed some attention too. I went to the doctor the next day, and the day after that I was at the hospital. The bruising and soreness constituted a classic whiplash injury, which I was at first told might well turn out to be temporary, but by the third week of visits and X-rays and examinations, it began to seem that it might not turn out to be so temporary after all. I shan't bore you with the details of all those medicals, though there are some giddy-sounding words involved: spondylosis, radicalopathy, osteophytes. My frozen shoulder and neck showed no signs of thawing. And the pain wouldn't go away, despite the ibuprofen and the Neproxen. They offered me an epidural, but did explain to me that it's a bit awkward up there around the neck, what with the gaps for the needle being so small. Should there be a mistake while doing it, you end up paralysed. I decided to say no to that one. For a while I wore a brace, a soft white plastic one around my neck that looked like part of a urinal. Even with my new machine, my
TENS
(transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) blipping little bolts of lightning from one patch of flesh to another when I hooked myself up and switched on – even with this, I couldn't bend, couldn't lift, couldn't turn my head without thinking it through beforehand. Sometimes I could barely move at all, my neck was so solid that I was immobilised. I felt like Humpty Dumpty, with a ridiculous, vast egg on my shoulders, and a bird's neck far too delicate to support it.

Just as well I no longer had the car, since I couldn't have driven it, being barely able to move or see what was going on behind me for days at a time. I soon learned to stop and consider the implications of bending down to pick anything up. More often than not I would leave it where it fell.

And that's how, within a couple of months, I ceased to be a promising junior executive in a printing company, and became instead a stiff, disabled figure edging about in a flat eighty feet above Battersea Park, seldom going out except to buy food and walk up the road once a week to collect my state benefit.

I certainly missed Alice. And her dope.

Madmen's Epistles

A madman's Epistles are no Gospels.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
,
Twelfth Night

 

Much of the early part of Pelham's addiction, like anyone else's, was sheer delight. A number of the letters from this period, which were collected in the Clarendon edition, testify to that. It is worth remarking that Pelham must rank as one of the most unrequited correspondents in the history of the language. Of his letters to his wife, all went unanswered. Of those to Samuel Johnson, a few were answered with a little note and a little money. Of those to Ferdinand Lowndes, an old and wealthy friend from Cambridge, an occasional reply was forthcoming, when Lowndes, away on his family estate outside Norwich, was not himself so debauched that he was incapable of lifting a pen. To be fair, when one examines these letters, it is often hard to see what precisely their recipients were meant to say in reply. They could be extremely short, like this one:

The elephant-shrew bathes in a dew drop.

Or this:

A schism in the weather. The mist that hovered and clung about everything with its creeping infection is gone. The sun's disc has hit the river with a wintry clang.

Others were more discursive, clearly reflecting the messianic vegetarianism of Prince Zabrenus and the Children of Bethany:

I have seen the oil-lamps burning in the windows and thought of the poor vast whales, harpooned by men in their Nantuckets, so that oil might pour from those great insides. I have looked on carp, salmon, trout, even the lobster, and wondered at their watery pleasures of the day before. Blood stuff'd in Skins is British Christians' Food? And eating hearts roasted? And why do so many souls lie sprawled among the ashes of a glass-house, so the heat of its daytime fires might leach into their flesh? Are they cooking too? For whose grand table? Only once, my friend, did I eat swan pie. And the pain that later developed was a white ghost in my intestines, yearning to fly.

To some extent one can observe the classic pattern of an opium addiction. In the early stages the mind achieves an unimagined fluency and scope, and thought expands to fill the million new universes provided for it. A fly crossing a curtain emits such a clamour of sound, such an intricate weave of noise, as to absorb the thinker for hours in the visualisation of all the worlds that surround him in a room, each one infinite, and each a source of ceaseless wonder. There are extraordinary mutations of time and space, with colours grown utterly spectacular, spectrums everywhere to rainbow the light. Astonishing undiscovered cities. Rivers that run with liquid gold. Every addict in the early stages is a traveller bearing exotic knowledge:

Have you ever seen the egg of a peregrine falcon? The texture of its skin is Mars, all clotted blood and sullen anger. Portents. An inflammation in the eye of war. Put your ear to it close enough, you'll catch the trigger of the claw and the spear of the beak beneath it. But then a second later pick up the swallow's egg and look at the scatter of stars there. Heaven shrunk to the size of a fingernail. This day our only angelus is the scavenger's bell. A gleaner of time's detritus.

Then the other symptoms begin. We have an eloquent testimony of this from De Quincey:
‘I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at … I was kissed with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.'
Or this letter about the unnameable and unsustainable terrors, written by Coleridge to Poole in 1796:
‘It came on … several times on Thursday … but I took between sixty and seventy drops of laudanum, and stopped the Cerberus … But this morning he returned in full force, and his name is Legion.'

Whatever Pelham's psychological symptoms from the drug, his physical state was made incalculably worse by the pints of gin which now accompanied his morphine intake. When he wrote to Lowndes, ‘I fear my entrails are rotting', he was telling no more than a literal truth. The deterioration of his mind was for him a decline of the soul itself, which he had decided was leaking, dripping out of his pores in unaccountable torrents of cold sweat, and falling from his mind and memory like leaves quitting a tree. Even the hair, which tumbled with increasing urgency from his scalp, he felt represented the departure of his shaping spirit. The last letter printed in the Clarendon edition consists merely of these three lines:

An amethyst weeps in its crystal glitter