The Lightning Cage (28 page)

‘I heard about the ceremony, by the way. I would have been happy to help of course, but…'

‘I'm sorry,' I said, realising the extent of the slight, ‘my fault entirely. It honestly didn't occur to me. Fordie'd made no mention. I'm sure he'd have wanted you there, probably wanted you to conduct it. Sorry.'

‘Not to worry. But we thought, perhaps, a memorial service. Not immediately. But he was a local figure of some importance, however eccentric.'

‘Very good of you,' I said. ‘Anything I can do, just let me know.' He had finished his drink now and stood up to go.

‘So you're the new proprietor. Planning any changes?'

‘Not planning anything at all until I've sorted out this Agarith business.' His smile vanished momentarily as he looked at me.

‘No good asking me, I'm afraid. Just don't regard it as my job.'

‘No,' I said as we reached the door. ‘Maybe it isn't.'

‘Are you actually planning to, I mean, unlike Fordie…'

‘Sell any books?' I said, and he started laughing.

‘Well, he never did seem very keen, did he? It always struck me as a bit of a shame really. By the way, I'd just like to say one thing, which I hope is not presumptuous. But Fordie did come to see me once more towards the end, to ask me if I would do something for him. Something I was more than happy to do. But perhaps you know all about this?' I shook my head. ‘It was in regard to his daughter.'

‘Fordie has a daughter?'

‘Ah. You don't know about it. Well, a stepdaughter, in point of fact. His wife Serena's child. And now suffering her mother's illness, more's the shame. It's just I know what Fordie was like, not a great communicator in such matters, and I just thought you might want to know how much it meant to him, you investing in the bookshop in the way you did, so that he had the money to make sure she could be properly looked after. She's over fifty now, of course. Knowing she'd be properly cared for till the end was important to him. More important than I could tell you.' So now at least I knew where that money had gone. It should have made me feel better, I suppose, but I'm not sure it did.

‘What was the favour he asked you?'

‘Oh, just to visit her, that's all, once every couple of weeks, as he used to. It's not my parish, of course, and Fordie was not as I ever understood it a believer, but these things are given one sometimes, and perhaps it doesn't do too much to question them.'

‘Will you come back?' I said.

‘Sorry?'

‘Will you come back and have another drink sometime?'

‘I'd be delighted,' he said, looking slightly astonished, and then he set out into the rain again.

*   *   *

Something had confused me entirely in working my way through Fordie's notes. From time to time he would make a reference, only by initials, and then with a page number appended. For example: BLJ, p.623, or ITPC, p.147, or MD, p.223. They corresponded to no works I had seen referred to, and I simply couldn't imagine what they were or what purpose they served. I was sitting at Fordie's desk looking behind me distractedly at the two shelves of books he had assembled. I had assumed they were merely a miscellany, since they appeared to have no connecting thread that I'd ever noticed. Then I took out Boswell's
Life of Johnson
and saw the marked pages, and I thought: BLJ. I turned to the markers and found pencil lines and comments in the margins. Then I got down on my knees and started carefully scanning the titles. Could MD be
Moby Dick?
Again I pulled out the volume, and once more inside there were markers and pencilled marginalia. It took a while to locate ITPC, but I found it finally inside the single volume of Kafka:
In the Penal Colony.
I felt a strange sense of exhilaration. Then there was a knocking on the door. I had locked it. I could see far enough behind the closed sign to recognise Mr Harrison and a companion. I went and opened the door but I didn't invite either of them in.

‘Hello, Mr Bayliss,' Harrison said, smiling his meaningless diplomatic smile, ‘I've brought a colleague with me who's a little more expert than I in these matters. Could we come in for half an hour, and do another little survey of the works required?' He was already stepping forward. He hadn't been asking a question, he'd been making an announcement.

‘No,' I said, ‘you can't come in. I'm busy. Go away.' He looked nonplussed.

‘We are entitled to get a court order, you know.'

‘Then go and get one,' I said, ‘and don't come back till you have it in your grubby little paw. Whatever the state of it, I've still got six months in this place, according to you.'

‘Yes, but…'

‘So bugger off,' I said, ‘and take your little friend with you.' As I banged the door shut, and heard the bell's startled merriment, I sensed that the spirit of Stamford Tewk had never left his bookshop after all; it had simply taken a while for me to absorb it fully.

‘I'm still fighting them off, Fordie,' I shouted into the depths of the bookshop. ‘They haven't evicted us yet, even though you did set me up for it.'

*   *   *

So I started elaborating that little concordance of Fordie's. I didn't understand what he was up to at first. Then it began slowly to shift into focus. When Ishmael first meets Queequeg, the writing on the harpoonist's body, his tattoos, is like the mark of Cain, something that sets him apart to be shunned. But as Ishmael learns to read that writing on his body, horror turns into acceptance and finally love. In Kafka's story the dreadful punishment in the penal settlement is to have a machine write on your body the commandment you have ignored. This is script as capital punishment. Fordie was trying to understand the ways in which writing on the body had been understood. He had written at the end of this section:
All these questions resolve more and more into one question, one question it was surely impossible for Chilford, given his beliefs, to ask: Grappin.

Back I went to the little bookshelf, and found the book he was referring to. It was a study of St John Vianney, the Curé d'Ars. And I began to wonder if I should have ever become involved in this business, because now it seemed I was going to have to read the life of a Catholic priest, and not just any Catholic priest either. Resentment. A real resentment was beginning. This time I went out and had a French meal on the bookshop account. And how much longer would I be able to get away with that?

For someone who had once never remembered his dreams, who had stepped into wakefulness the way he stepped into his well-pressed clothes, I was certainly turning into a serious dreamer now, and the dreams were all bad. I would roll over to take Alice in my arms and find Queequeg instead. I would wake to the chattering needles of the penal colony's machine, as they bit into my flesh. I always woke a moment too early to read whatever the commandment was that I had failed to obey. It wasn't much after dawn the next day that I rose and went downstairs. I thought I'd better get this Curé d'Ars business out of the way. I poured myself some coffee, picked up the copy of
Grappin,
subtitled
The Disciple Against Reason
and started. I knew well enough who Vianney was. I had even attended his feast-day mass in Rome and been exhorted from the pulpit to emulate the humble parish priest as far as possible in my own sacerdotal life. The problem was not who Vianney was, but what he was. He was either what his status in the Church proclaimed, a man of almost infinite obedience and humility who had stared down infernal powers for decades, or a credulous rural priest who, in reaction to enlightenment and revolution, had once more conjured all the Gothic palaver of medieval diabolism, so as to keep his flock well within the Church's grasp, to frighten the good citizens back into craven belief. And the interesting thing, it struck me now, was that I'd never been able to answer that question, even while I was in Rome. Hence my resentment now at being forced to confront the question once more.

As for the title of this book,
Grappin,
that was what everything hinged around. This word was the name the Curé had given to the Devil, the Devil who visited him, screamed abuse at him, called him a dirty little potato-eater, threw excrement at his holy pictures, and on many occasions even tried to kill him. The problem, simply put, was this: either the Curé was mad, or the Devil did indeed exist and had arrived in Ars each night to torment his humble little enemy. The surrounding testimony, of which a considerable amount still survives, corroborated Vianney's story. Even the severest scepticism had been overcome finally by the severity of the phenomena with which it had been confronted. If the Curé had been mad, then it seemed that he had made the better part of a French village mad with him.

I suppose it had been a curious time in the Church, when I was studying to enter the priesthood. There had been a strong sense that a great deal of outdated paraphernalia now needed to be dispensed with. At the time of the Second Vatican Council, Pope John XXIII had announced that he was opening the windows. It was time to let some fresh air in, and for the dark shapes of superstitious dread to fly away for ever. At some point between my childhood and my young manhood, the words in the creed that said of Christ after his crucifixion
He descended into hell
had disappeared, and they had never returned. The implication appeared to be that Christ had not made any such journey after all, in those hidden times between crucifixion and resurrection, and if he had never made that journey, could it perhaps be because there was no such journey to be made and no such place to disappear into? And if the dark kingdom had been quietly declared null and void, then perhaps its famous lord and master had also been dispensed with once and for all. There had been one or two ancient Jesuits about in Rome during my stay, who were whisperingly reputed to have conducted exorcisms many years before. But nobody ever spoke of anyone conducting such ceremonies any more. Except for half-smiling accounts of sinister goings on in Africa, or voodoo mumbo-jumbo in Haiti. Hell and its fallen angels had simply ceased to be a fit subject of concern for a modern Roman Catholic.

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.