The Lightning Cage (3 page)

I was actually out running around the common when he died. The next day, after the undertakers had carried him with all due ceremony out of the house, I crept around his study. Drawer after drawer of docked receipts and ticket stubs, all neatly classified. My mother reported that he had said one last thing to her: ‘I've sorted everything out, Sylvia.'

‘So typical of your father, that,' she said, with the handkerchief to her face.

*   *   *

The funeral made me uneasy. I was asked to give one of the readings, and standing up there in the pulpit declaiming sacred words to those in the pews beneath brought back a little too much of the beliefs and feelings that had once sent me out to Rome. When the priest read out the final exequies for Adam Bayliss, my mother started to cry. I didn't, though, and it struck me that I had never seen my father cry either. Two dry-eyed Baylisses then – at least we had that much in common. After the reception, when we were back home, my mother said, ‘Just think, Chris, if you had continued with your studies in Rome, it might have been you there today conducting your father's funeral.' I looked at her without speaking for a moment. She had been a beautiful woman, my mother, there was no doubt about that. She was still beautiful, with her high cheekbones and hazel eyes, even though her hair had switched from blonde to silver. And I knew that I would never in the whole of my life be anything to her except a failed priest, whatever else I might manage to achieve. Her problem, not mine.

Two days later, my mother asked if I might perhaps stay at home with her for a while.

‘You could work here,' she said. ‘It's not as though you've any lectures or anything to go to. You spend half of your time out climbing, from what you say. It would be nice for me to have a little company, now that I don't have your father any more.' So I nodded and stayed. It seemed to be the least I could do.

And since I was in London, I thought I should check out the site of Chilford Villa, Pelham's next domicile after the Chelsea Asylum. So I took my father's Rover from the garage, drove to Richmond and then walked down the river.

Along that stretch, you can watch the tufted heads of grebes dipping and twisting and gobbling about, and count plenty of coots. It was cold, a cold that seemed to lift right off the Thames and into my flesh. I stopped before Marble Hill, its confident Palladian proportions probably the nearest thing to Chilford Villa that the Thames still affords and, as I stared at its river frontage, I remembered Pelham's words: ‘No place for the dark inside this luminous geometry.'

I walked past St Mary's, where they'd buried the crippled poet Pope – at evening as I recalled, so as not to upset any sensibilities, what with him being a papist and therefore more than a little suspect. Then I stood before that plot of land which had once been Chilford Villa.

*   *   *

For two whole days Pelham had been interviewed by Parker, who had even insisted that the poet read him sections from whatever this extended work was which, so Parker's employees said, Pelham scratched away at day and night. Pelham took out the large pile of sheets on which he was writing
The Instruments of the Passion.
He started to read, but warily, taking care to suppress any mention of the moon in the text in case he should find himself destined once more for the star-machine. Parker could make neither head nor tail of any of it, and nor could Pelham fathom this sudden aggressive beneficence, from a man whom he barely recognised and who had not initially recognised him at all. When Parker reckoned that he had enough information to make a good impression, he explained to Pelham that he was to be transferred to the care of Lord Chilford, who had a particular interest in his welfare. Parker described the location of Chilford's villa.

‘An asylum by the river then,' Pelham said, almost smiling.

‘Yes. You would like that, Richard, wouldn't you?'

The villa had been completed only two years before. It was in the neo-Palladian style, which had already been made popular at Chiswick House, Marble Hill and, in a more modest way, with Alexander Pope's own home. Lord Chilford had as a young man been sent off on his grand tour, and had sketched antiquities in Rome, along with the façades of Renaissance palaces. He had marvelled at churches and cathedrals in towns the length and breadth of Italy. But when he arrived at Vicenza, something changed. With his first sight of the Villa Rotunda, as he wrote excitedly in his journal, ‘Classical antiquity ceased to be a curiosity in a dusty cellar, and became the purest spirit of beauty and proportion translated into the present. I resolved that upon my return to England I would create something in the style of that unparalleled genius, Palladio.' Chilford Villa was the result.

Parker took Pelham to Twickenham in his own carriage. Lord Chilford's letter to Blount describes the scene.

I had no real idea what to expect in terms of the physical appearance of Pelham, except that by prejudice and assumption we expect a man of great gifts or even great torment to bear some physical sign of distinction too. The slight and dishevelled figure who climbed down from the coach alongside Parker I at first assumed to be a manservant. It was only when he was introduced to me that I realised I was beholding our poet. A little more than five and a half feet in height with a sallow face, a small nose, a slow-moving, slightly feminine mouth, but the eyes are extraordinary. They have about them a haunted intensity unlike anything I have ever before seen. There is also a scar across his forehead, quite severe, of which I made a note to enquire further regarding the causes. The man stared at me, but said nothing. He had if anything the look of something which has learnt over the years the manner of being hunted. Also his hands are extraordinarily slim and expressive – indeed they have an eloquence entirely their own, and sometimes when Pelham himself remains silent, it is as though the wordless shapings of his fingers would speak for him. I showed him the whole house, but he said nothing. It was as though his spirit sank with each fresh room we encountered. This is probably connected with his condition, as I hope to establish over the next months.

That evening, newly settled in his quarters on the rustic level, Pelham wrote the following lines:

A Goth made furious by Rome's luxury

Smash't a household god and freed a spirit

It had once inshrin'd …

It took him a week to understand that he had the free run of the house and grounds; that he could come and go as he pleased; that he had access at all times to Chilford's library. This represented an extraordinary change after his previous confinement. It is hard to establish now what terrified him the more: the unimpeachable geometric perfection of the villa, or the hybrid garden statuary, like the black basalt sphinx, which Chilford had gathered on his travels. And then the following week Lord Chilford began the first of his experimental treatments using tincture of opium.

*   *   *

As I stared at the site where the villa once stood, and where now there was another unimpeachably geometric building, a block of flats, I suddenly knew that I would never go back to Leeds, and never return to my thesis. In truth, it had already ended six months before, but I hadn't been able to bring myself to admit it. Maybe I'd simply started on the wrong topic. I had certainly come to suspect that the unweeded data of the life and work of this man would resist rationalisation, and there was also perhaps something about him that I did not wish to get any closer to. There was no space in my mind where I could easily house him or the anarchy of his torments. I knew that my engagement with Mr Richard Pelham was now finished, for ever I thought at the time. But I was wrong.

Supply and Demand

O! may thy Virtue guard thee through the Roads

Of Drury's mazy Courts and dark Abodes,

The Harlots' guileful Paths, who nightly stand,

Where Catherine-street descends into the Strand.

RICHARD PELHAM
, ‘Temptation'

 

Gradually I edged up the speed of the Rover. It accelerated a little crossly, with a bad grace, but I kept pushing. Then one day I drove off down the A303 to Stonehenge, and I had my foot flat down for much of the way. When I arrived back and put the car in my father's garage, it wouldn't shut up. Its fan kept wheezing and there were angry scalding drips splashing down from the radiator. The car was breathing heavily in indignation at me, and for a moment I had the distinct and unsettling notion that some part of my father's identity had been incorporated into its rubber and steel. I certainly knew I was being told off, and that night I informed my mother I was going to look for a job, so I could buy my own car. I also informed her that I'd soon be taking a flat of my own. She looked at me and smiled serenely. We both knew what she wasn't saying: ‘Priests don't have to go looking for flats. They live in big houses next to churches, and the car's provided at the Lord's discretion.'

‘You're definitely not going back to Leeds?'

‘No,' I said, ‘I'm not.'

‘Something else you've started and not finished then, Chris.'

I remember the late Richard Nixon once announcing to the nation, in that tone of hunched sincerity he had made his own, ‘I am not a quitter.' I am, I suppose. I had quit on my training for the priesthood and now I was quitting on my thesis too. My mother was not slow in pointing out the connection. On both occasions, I felt nothing but a mild sense of exhilaration and relief. Perhaps freedom really did come from renouncing commitments, even though one wasn't permitted to mention the fact. I had also quit on Jane some time before, but I'll have to come back to that. I can't face talking about her just yet.

Anyway, I started supply teaching in schools around Streatham. As any teacher will tell you, you can always get supply work, and it doesn't take long to discover why. You're the maverick figure in the staff room, the Johnny-come-lately who'll soon be gone. I watched the faces of the teachers who'd made a lifetime's job of it. It was visible in their expressions how their early enthusiasm (for I was sure that most had had some) was changing into a merely competent professionalism, and how even that in some of the older ones was now sliding into an increasing weariness of spirit, a melancholy resignation imprisoned in a timetable. I started to pick up something of the same gloomy fatalism myself, though I had only been at it for a few months. The sound of a crowd of children bestirring themselves into mayhem, even from a long way off, caused bad, black weather to gather inside my mind. I never disliked them, don't get me wrong. One or two I would cheerfully have killed, like any other teacher, but on the whole I didn't dislike them. I simply could not see the point of throwing my words into that great thrashing pool, as they grew so quickly from shivering spawn into feeding sharks. To read them a poem felt at times like offering up a sacrifice before a particularly murderous sect. I recited one by Pelham, and they never cleared their heads of turmoil long enough to take in a single line. But I made enough money to buy myself a car on hire purchase, a second-hand convertible MG that didn't tell me off whenever I pressed it up to ninety miles an hour. Then I started scanning the Situations Vacant columns.

The ad spoke about a printing firm in Wandsworth, which was looking for someone well educated and presentable, who must also have a car and a clean driving licence. Previous experience in the business preferred but not essential. I posted my letter requesting an interview that evening. And the next Monday I drove over there.

As you make your way out of the centre of Wandsworth along Garratt Lane, there is a scatter of industrial buildings by the edge of the tiny River Wandle. One of these, built sometime in the 1920s in a parochial version of the International Style, was Shipley's Print Group. The whitewash on its walls had long turned to grey, and the yellow paint of its metal window frames was peeling at the same slow, consistent rate throughout. I parked my ageing green MG at the edge of the courtyard, and went in to be interviewed. Opposite the entrance area was a full-length mirror, and I stopped to examine myself. At five foot ten and a half, I was trim, muscly but trim, my black hair cropped to my temples, my chin blue from the scraping of the razor's edge, my face solid and serious, no hint of weakness about it. I had inherited my father's professional brown eyes, and square-set features. And my suit was neatly pressed, my black shoes brilliant with polish: I had always taken a certain pride in my appearance.

Andrew Cavendish-Porter was about my height, but his suit was a lot more expensive. His light brown hair was brushed back from his forehead and had started to thin. His jowls were dark and heavy and I could see the beginning of a paunch which even his expensive tailoring could not entirely disguise. But the scowl of care and concern on his face vanished suddenly as he treated me to his smile. It was a smile that suggested his bank account was in a lot better shape than mine. His wide grey eyes were almost unnerving in their unblinking calm. His voice was low and soothing and within minutes he was explaining that he was forming a new division within the company for a particular area of specialisation that he had in mind, and needed initially a sales rep who could probably soon be promoted to an account manager, assuming all worked out as he hoped. I wasn't at all sure of the difference between these job descriptions, but I nodded intelligently, showed enthusiasm and alacrity, expressed my particular interest in the world of printing. In short I played the applicant to perfection and was told the following week that I'd been given the job.

Outside on the tarmac forecourt, Andrew shook my hand and stared at my MG.

‘That yours, is it?'

‘Yes.'

‘First car I ever had.'

I pointed in turn to the classic Jaguar parked some way off in the corner. ‘Would that be yours?'