The Lightning Cage (6 page)

‘I doubt we'd be wanting Alice Ashe on the cover,' he said. ‘I admire her work myself, but I hardly think it represents the usual standards of the college. Perhaps a little … I don't know, retrospective.'

‘I found it the most striking thing in your show, that's why I put it on the front.' He was a gaunt man in his fifties, in whom weariness had just got the edge over exasperation. He shrugged. ‘You may be right. The actual
quality
of work, though, is not the only consideration in a place such as this. Alice's piece must certainly be in the brochure somewhere, I agree, but I wouldn't have thought it should appear on the cover. It might give the wrong impression about our activities.'

‘One thing I must do,' I said, ‘is to have a written agreement from all the students whose work we are reproducing. We have a standard form, but we have been caught out that way before. If someone should start to get difficult…'

He sighed again. ‘I can imagine, believe me. See my secretary next door. She'll give you all the addresses. You obviously know what you're doing. I find your prices astonishing, by the way.'

‘Sharp, aren't they?'

‘Very sharp indeed.'

I collected all the addresses from the principal's secretary. To the others I sent a standard letter and a permission form to be completed and returned. Only with Alice did I drive over to see for myself. There was something there I felt I needed to find out about. Hence, I suppose, the almost altruistic quotation I had given to the principal.

Where Notting Hill starts to blur into North Kensington, there are rows of Victorian houses, long ago split up into maisonettes and bedsits, their white, crumbling porticoes often depositing whole chunks of rotting plaster on to the pavement, and it was in the basement of one of these that Alice lived, five minutes' walk from Portobello Road. It took almost a minute for the shuffling within to stop and for her face finally to appear at the door.

Alice Ashe was the whitest woman I had ever seen. Not blonde and not albino, but white, her hair as moon-blanched as her skin. Her eyes were grey like Andrew's, and a small constellation of ghost-freckles scattered drops of milk over the blank sheet of her face. It was as though, as an embryo, she had been wombed in bleach and the bleach had soaked right through her flesh. In a January field you'd have lost her. It was hard to believe she had ever seen sunlight.

‘Alice Ashe?' She nodded slowly. I took out my card and showed it to her. She stared at it and said nothing, as I explained that I was preparing the brochure for the college and that her painting from the diploma show was to be reproduced in it, and could I please come in for a moment? As I stepped inside I picked up that mild reefer reek of rooms from so many years before in Leeds. I stopped in the middle of the floor and stared all around me. The room was filled with her chimera paintings,
Chimera #2, #3, #4, #5, #6.
They were all like the one in the show, and yet all different. In each one the figure had taken its colour from the surroundings, whether it was in a bath, before a television set, in front of a curtain, or lying in a field. I walked around staring at them.

‘You could have called them chameleons instead of chimeras,' I said and Alice smiled. A smile of such composed distance and serenity that it stopped my thoughts entirely and I stood still looking at her. When her smile ceased suddenly, I followed the line of her gaze to the silky black back making its way across the floor.

‘You have cockroaches.'

‘Yes,' she said, still following the stately progress of the one on the floor with her undeviating gaze, ‘a whole family of them. A very big family.' I had noticed that some of the pictures had been taken down and were leaning against the wall, leaving large rectangular gaps where they had hung.

‘Are you rehanging?' I asked her.

‘No. I have to be out of here by the end of the month. I still don't know where I'll be going.'

A month later Alice moved into my flat in Battersea, and brought her paintings with her. And her dope.

Ditto or Double

Some would spirit themselves away

    
With adieus to our lethal rabble

But when they returned, oftentimes the next day

    
Their dosage was ditto or double.

STAMFORD TEWK
,
Soho Ledger

 

Pelham detested being summoned to Lord Chilford's room in the rustic. On the table a wax figure of a flayed man stared out at him, his skin all hacked away to reveal the veins and arteries beneath, red and blue roadways of the soul. Lord Chilford had laughed when he had first seen the poet recoiling from it.

‘Don't worry, Pelham,' he had said lightly, ‘we'll not do that to you. The fate of Marsyas shan't be yours. Not for the moment anyway.'

The room glittered with its instruments, many of them for cutting, sawing and chamfering bones of varying sizes and thickness. A trepanning set lay with its lid of red velvet always open on the desk. Pelham had asked one day what the different instruments were called. That one? A trephine. And that one? A raspatory. And that? A lenticular. He learnt the names of the catlings too, as they shone in sinister attendance alongside daintier lancets. There was a small silver dish to catch the blood during venesection. On the cabinet beside the table were two skulls, one European and one African. At times, in his distraction, Pelham could still hear the locked voices mourning inside them. The brass microscope with its large adjustment screws seemed inexplicably minatory, a Cyclops of ravenous curiosity, a polished eye to swallow the world in a single, meditative blink. On one wall hung an engraving of a gravid uterus, the unborn child already heavy and muscled inside it. It made him think always of the prints he had seen of Michelangelo, his prisoners torsioned and quick inside the stone, so desperate to free themselves into the fluent air. On the other wall there was a watercolour of the shrine of Asclepius at Epidaurus, where the patients slept on couches inside the portico, and phalanxes of priests arrived to elicit their dreams, seeking thus to riddle out the origin and destination of their ominous pathologies. (It was rumoured that opium had played no small part in this process.) There were wax figures which his lordship had acquired on his European journeyings, one of a man with half his head peeled away to reveal the brain inside. The expression on his pthisic features suggested a stoicism fit for Dante's legions of lost souls.

‘How is your mind today, Pelham?' Lord Chilford asked, with a sideways smile as he looked through the window down to the river. A lighter was beating slowly upstream. He turned in his fingers a new medical implement Pelham didn't recognise. A drill of some sort. Pelham looked again at the skulls on the cabinet. He imagined the sharpened point breaching the calcium walls, blood and ichor dribbling out. For many weeks now all had been calm inside, all tranquil, no raging spirit trespassing, no voices cursing and blaspheming, no lakes of black bile giving off their feculent vapours.

‘I have nothing to complain of at present, my Lord,' Pelham said quietly.

‘Perhaps my regime has had some small effect after all,' Chilford said, still with a fixed smile, but no apparent joy.

‘Perhaps the spirit is presently bored with me,' Pelham said, staring at the microscope now as it caught the light at an unexpected angle and signalled a message to him. One he did not understand. ‘Perhaps he has gone off in search of more toothsome meals.'

‘No spirits, Pelham – there are no spirits. A troubled marriage between
soma
and
psyche,
a miscegenation between the body and the mind, but no spirits. We have left the realm of superstition behind us now.'

Pelham kept his eye fixed on the sunlight gesturing so wildly from the barrel of the microscope, then suddenly it was gone. A cloud had draped the sun's face. A vernicle across those hot and wounded features.

‘When will your Lordship and my Lady travel back to town?'

‘Tomorrow. I'll return each fortnight or so. You are sure that you are happy to remain here?'

‘It seems to have represented a great benefit to my spirits.'

‘Then stay. Jacob and Josephine will provide for you. They know all your particular requirements by now. Make use of my study while I'm gone – continue with your appraisal of the wisdom of antiquity for a while. I think it preferable, given your condition, to your Hebraic excesses. Studies I mean, forgive me. I had meant to say studies.'

‘I have been reading the Aeschylus you lent me, and have been reflecting on those furies. How merciless the female spirit can be without the intervention of God's grace. I should have thought that a mind can be packed tight enough to explode, simply from the images that these works provide, without any Hebraic excesses whatsoever.'

‘Try not to have your head explode, Pelham,' Lord Chilford said, rising, ‘I've not properly finished writing my account of what goes on inside it yet. Already a source of some excited speculation at the Society.'

‘Were it to explode,' Pelham said, bowing to his patron and taking a step backwards, ‘I doubt the agencies concerned would seek my permission first.'

Once Lord Chilford had moved back to town, Pelham was alone in the house with the servants, who one by one completed their tasks and returned to Piccadilly, leaving only Jacob and Josephine. For a few days he shifted very tenderly about the place, as though the walls had been instructed to fall on top of him should he make a single sharp noise. The self-congratulatory symmetry of Chilford Villa oppressed him. He loved the perfection of crystals, but he knew that the only creatures preserved in crystalline shapes were invariably dead ones.

Jacob and Josephine were both kindly, but had a way of looking at him sometimes and then smiling broadly, one to another. He knew what that meant. For them he was one more inexplicable indulgence acquired by their curious employer. Certainly not the first, but undoubtedly the most peculiar so far. Chilford had left Jacob instructions to allow Pelham anything he requested and to give him the free run of the house. He had not entirely abandoned hope that Pelham's lengthy tranquillity might still be interrupted by one of the incalculable frenzies of which he had heard reports. Even his study, which he normally locked while he was away, was to be kept open to give Pelham access to his library. No feasible stimuli were to be excluded, including the contents of his cellar. He recalled how in Herodotus some had thought Cleomenes touched by the god in his madness, while Cleomenes's own countrymen had been quite sure that his fate was the result of spending altogether too much time with the Scythians, amongst whom he learned to take his wine both neat and in heroic quantities. The same, he strongly suspected, might well be the case with Pelham.

On the rear porch, set into a corner of the balustrade, was one of the objects of the house which filled the poet with genuine dread. It was a model made in serpentine of the sea snake seen by Hans Egede in 1734, just off the south coast of Greenland. Its mane of drenched coils and its leprous, thrashing, scaly tail had been well captured by the anonymous sculptor. Pelham loathed this effigy as though it were alive and actually menaced him with articulate hostility, yet still he was drawn back each day to stare at it. At night it came alive in his dreams, its fluent language of ferocity restored in full. In some of the dark passages of the house there stood other creatures. There was a Roman plaster cast of Artemis at Ephesus. The breasts proliferated wildly from her waist upwards as though she were a burgeoning tree, the fruit of her own sexuality. There was the lion-footed griffin in marble. And there was the skeleton, propped up inside an open coffin, with his jaw dangling in a hideous post-mortem howl of hilarity. The poet came to believe that this ghoulish glee must be directed at him entirely. And this was merely a portion of the bric-à-brac from Chilford's tour.

Often he would go out into the grounds to escape. There was a rookery among the high oaks. Those black creatures screamed inside their own feathered world. A kingdom of appetite, with nothing to halt it except for the weather. Their wide eyes assessed him in brief glints of suspicious intelligence. Then he would withdraw from both grounds and river and sit in silence in Lord Chilford's study. The medical implements there reminded him how much his mind and his flesh feared intrusion. And then he was off again around the house.

While their employer was in attendance, both Jacob and his wife Josephine were careful to keep their noise in the attic storey, where they had their bedroom, to a minimum. The house was an echo chamber. The regular creak of a bed was like a cumbersome piston movement advertising itself. When his lordship was not in attendance, however, and the other servants had gone back to Piccadilly with him, they made the best of the freedom afforded them. They were both dutiful and conscientious in carrying out their tasks, and they were strict with themselves in regard to the hours when they began and ended their work, for Jacob had been too long in service to doubt how swiftly a good position could be forfeited for ever. But once their day was done they felt free to fulfil their marital obligations to one another. Since the only other occupant of the house at that time was the licensed idiot on the rustic floor, they made no effort to contain their cries, though Jacob always kept close to hand the restraints which Thomas Parker had left behind when he deposited Pelham. You may yet need them, he had been told.

Pelham stood by the doorway in the
piano nobile
and listened as their voices swept and soared above him. How close the wails of ecstasy are to those of torture, he thought. His wife had left so suddenly with their young son, never giving him an opportunity to try to cajole her into staying. He would undoubtedly have made the attempt, given the chance, and used all the powers of rhetoric for which he had once won university prizes, but she would have gone all the same. He remembered the silk sway of her breasts in his hands, as her little cotton shift came away, and the motion of her thighs beneath him as she permitted him to sink inside. Susannah. And little Tom, the fruit of their love. He'd not seen either of them since the day she departed. The cries above him were reaching a crescendo. The frenzy of that coupling made him feel dizzy. Was that a sound from heaven or from hell? Angels' bodies could, he had once been taught, interpenetrate entirely. And demons were fallen angels, after all. He had once believed that lovers should be indistinguishable one from another, their identities merged to the outrage of property, like the phoenix and the turtle.