The Lightning Cage (7 page)

That was the first time he had gone down the spiral stone steps that led to the cellar. The room was a hexagon, all painted white. Lord Chilford's wines were kept in eight big casks there. Good claret was his chief requirement. Pelham held the pot against the barrel and knocked out the wooden bung with the small hammer that hung on a length of bristling string. And that was where Jacob found him sleeping the next morning, his lips and teeth still livid from the juice of the grape.

The Price of Alice

Weave a circle round him thrice

For he on honey-dew hath fed

And drunk the milk of Paradise.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
, ‘Kubla Khan'

 

I suppose that if I had stopped to think about it at all, I wouldn't have done it. A whole lifetime spent in avoidance of sharing the same space day in day out with any one person, and now, within a month, I had invited Alice to join me in the fastness of my own retreat and bring all her worldly possessions with her. Not that there were too many of those.

I hadn't been the only one who went out there to those women while we were ordinands in Rome. We called them cousins. They had a particular fondness for priests and priests in training. I think they thought some magic still accrued to us, so they might kiss it from our skin, as though to make love to us was a kind of sacrament in itself. As though we could enter them as Christ had once entered Jerusalem. There were a few scattered here and there around the centre of the city, but I always travelled to the suburbs to meet mine.

‘How tidily you sin,' my confessor had said to me one day, as with head bowed I told him of my latest journey by bus to the realm of the forbidden. ‘How neatly you separate the sacred from the profane.'

Within a month of arriving in Leeds I had met Jane, and two months later we were sharing a flat. Just the two of us and her little boy. He was only four then, the solitary offspring of her disastrous marriage to Roger. I had grown fond of the little boy and I was more than fond of Jane. She seemed as intelligent in her body as in her mind. She had a flare of red hair that settled half-way down her back and covered her breasts when she was naked. Our lovemaking was better than anything I had ever known with any cousin in the Roman suburbs. At night when she slept I would lift up the sheets to look at her body. In the neon light that leaked through our scanty curtains from the street outside, her hair was flame and her skin milk. Uncovered, she looked like one of the creatures in Alma-Tadema's
Tepidarium.
I remember that picture – we reproduced it in one of our gallery brochures. Those Victorians were smart: they camouflaged their pornographic canvases as research into antiquity. Then one night, on the top rung of passion, a second before you step out into space and start falling, she had whispered in my ear, ‘I want your baby,' and nothing had ever been the same again. I found myself watching Roger intently when he came on his weekly visits to see his son, and saw the look in the boy's eyes as he welcomed his daddy into the little space of his life.

I hadn't started all this around me, you see. I needed to plan things, to get them right. I couldn't just drop into the middle of the lives of so many other people and begin as though from the beginning. I hadn't yet got to the beginning, so how was I supposed to get started?

‘I just need some time to think things through,' I said as I stood on the doorstep with my bags in my hand.

‘I'm not expecting you back, Chris,' Jane said quietly. ‘We'll miss you.' As I said, she was as intelligent in her mind as in her body. Didn't seem to need to divide things up between them. And she was right, of course: I didn't go back. I thought of her often, and of the boy too, but I never did go back.

After Jane, I watched myself. The minute anyone murmured between the sheets in a way that might end in a crescendo of ‘I want to have your baby', I made sure I finished things quickly. The women who spent any time in my flat always remarked on its tidiness, impressed by how efficiently I conducted my domestic life. The cooking, the ironing, the cleaning, the pressed clothes hanging ready in the wardrobe.

‘You don't need a wife. Unlike most men, you don't even need a housekeeper,' Sally Leiris said on the day of her departure. ‘What do you need, Chris?' And now it seemed I had suddenly decided the answer to that question must be Alice. Except that I hadn't decided anything at all. For once, I had simply acted. Normally I only did that on my way out, not on my way in. But if I didn't need a housekeeper, she certainly did. I had handed her my other set of keys, and had set to work with hammer and hooks and tacks, hanging her pictures on my walls. And when she said on that first night, ‘Do you want some spliff?' I had nodded and said, ‘Why not?'

There had been plenty of the stuff around up in Leeds when I had been there, but I'd only smoked a few times. I didn't like tobacco for one thing and I was always particular about my physical health. We'd all get drunk from time to time, and that was enough. It turned out that I didn't have to worry about the tobacco, since Alice rolled her joints using some herbal mix. And as I breathed deeply and the music opened up the space inside my head, I looked across at Alice, sitting at the table by the window, and realised that she was even more beautiful than I had thought. Beethoven's Violin Concerto was playing and I was startled suddenly to hear the strings laughing and dancing one over another. Why had I never noticed that before?

Alice had already set her easel up by the window and placed a primed canvas on it. She sat silently and stared through the glass. My flat was on the fifth floor and you could look out of the window and see across Battersea Park to the Peace Pagoda and the river and rows of houses beyond, including the house of Andrew and Helena, which now seemed like another country, one in which people spoke a different language entirely. I would take Alice to see them all the same. I could hardly keep her to myself up there for ever.

Later that night Alice went to the fridge and left the door hanging open as she walked backwards away from it all.

‘What's the matter?' I said.

‘I can't live in a house with meat in it, I should have told you. I'll dream about it now. There'll be blood in my sleep.'

Half an hour later, I carried a large black bag containing all the meat in my fridge down the five flights of my block of flats, since there was no lift, and put them into the large bin at the back of the building. The price of Alice, I supposed.

I prepared that brochure lovingly. The principal specified some piece of flat abstraction for the cover. I said nothing. When I supervised the printing, I put Alice's picture back on the front where I had first placed it, then I told them to print the lot.

The principal shook his head when I laid it out before him.

‘But I was quite explicit. I told you I wanted Edward Holt's abstract, not this picture by Alice Ashe.'

‘I pasted up new instructions,' I said, ‘but I suppose they must have been torn off. The old ones were still underneath. That's probably what happened. It's unfortunate. I can pulp the lot if you insist, but I'm afraid at the prices I'm holding I just can't afford to run it out again for you. It's your choice.'

And as I had suspected, he shrugged and sighed, and said he supposed he'd have to take them as they were. That night I went back to Battersea with a whole batch of the brochures in my car boot for Alice. I had assumed she would be delighted. She stared at them for a moment, apparently without interest, and then turned back to her canvas.

She had started painting the park. Or rather, she had started turning the park into
Chimera #7,
which was, perhaps, not the same thing at all. Later that night, two joints later to be precise, I told her how I had smuggled her on to the front cover. I was laughing as I told the tale.

‘You shouldn't have done that,' she said, and through the haze of my well-being I felt the sudden sting of her rebuke. It seemed as though her face was focused steadily on mine for the first time, though she didn't appear to be looking at me so much as straight through me.

Months went by and I almost grew used to Alice, even when I had to pick up her underclothes from the floor where she had let them drop, noting out of the corner of my eye as I flung them into the washing machine the small, mysterious, often indeterminate stains that would occasionally appear upon them. I was always cleaning up after Alice, for Alice left items in her wake wherever she went. I could never entirely understand how someone who possessed almost nothing could so consistently strew floors and chairs and beds with such an abundance of debris. Every day I laid fresh newspapers underneath her easel in the hope that the paint that she dripped in her abstraction would land there, not on my immaculate fitted carpet.

After the first week I gave up waiting for her to volunteer to do the washing up and simply got on with it. Once I suggested she might prepare a meal and we had half a banana and half a mango each, both sprinkled with sliced grapes. At least it meant fewer utensils to clean afterwards. Alice didn't seem interested in food. When I wasn't there I don't think she ate at all. If in doubt, Alice would roll another joint and sit there spliffing away by the window, midway between her vision of the park and the canvas before her. The same canvas. I began to wonder how Alice had ever managed to finish any of her paintings. This chimera kept disappearing back into whatever it had arisen out of. No sooner was some part of the park coloured in than it was coloured out again. It became part of the routine of our life together. I didn't resent it. Or at least I resented other things a lot more.

Then it was summer again, Austin Healey weather. Each Saturday I checked the oil level and the tyre pressures, gave her a quick clean and then took the hood down. I drove Alice to Hastings, Glastonbury, King's Lynn, Clacton, up through the Cotswolds, down across the Weald. She would sit silently in the passenger seat as we burned rubber, her head immobile as the world blurred by. If the sun came out, she covered her face with a scarf. Something about her skin, she said. I think those drives might have been the happiest moments in my life. Our last trip was to the Black Mountains. I enjoyed picking the small hotels and buying her meals. I made sure we were always within range of a museum or gallery of some sort. I would take a few photographs and collect their printed material. That way all our trips were on expenses. I had been planning a drive to St Ives when she said, ‘Do you mind if we don't go anywhere this weekend, Chris?' I shook my head and shrugged.

‘Not if you don't want to,' I said. ‘I thought you enjoyed it.'

‘I'd just like to be still for a while.'

So that weekend we went nowhere. I continued my study of vegetarian cookery, occasionally looking out of the window and lamenting the waste of such glorious motoring weather, while Alice sat in front of her canvas over by the window. As I said, that painting of hers seemed to go on for ever. I stood behind her, taking a drag of the joint she had just passed back to me. Sometimes there were railings and a pond and grass and swings. There had been a rainbow there the day before, but now that too was gone.

‘Why did you paint over the rainbow? I really liked the rainbow – I thought it gave a shape to everything.' I looked down at Alice. The white clock of her face was measuring out its own slow time. She said nothing as I handed her back the joint.

And on she went, painting in and painting out, blackening the sky or brightening the grass, adding a red van, or deleting the same, only stopping from time to time to roll and smoke some more of her herbal spliff. The music from the hi-fi system swelled and coasted, and for a while there were no hard edges at all in that flat with Alice. All geometry was abolished, as the straight lines and right angles slowly distorted and the ragged scrolls of smoke rose to the ceiling.

The following Monday Andrew made one of his rare appearances at Shipley's. He handed me the invoice for the work at the West London College. That was going back a bit.

‘I hadn't realised we'd started working for charity,' he said. Andrew still had his smile in place, but it had thinned out somehow.

‘Just to get the work,' I said.

‘Hardly seems worth it for five thousand brochures a year, does it? You weren't even quoting at cost. By the way, from now on use CP Transport for all freight and deliveries, all right? I have asked you before.'

‘It was only the other side of London, Andrew. I drove over with the stuff myself.'

‘Thereby giving something else away free. Well done. As I said, from now on use CP for everything. No exceptions.'

‘But they're in Bristol. Surely you don't want me to bring them up here for local deliveries?'

‘For the third time, Chris' – Andrew's voice was now quiet and low, and there was even a hint of menace in it, the first time I'd ever heard it – ‘use CP for everything.' I felt the need to change the subject quickly.

‘By the way, I'm no longer alone.'

‘Did you find Jesus?'

‘No. Alice. She's moved in with me.' Andrew's full smile returned.

‘Alice. Not a dog or a budgie, I take it? A girl?'

‘A girl.'

‘A grown-up one?'

‘A woman, in fact.'

‘Well, how exciting. Bring her over for dinner on Friday. I'm sure Helena will be thrilled. She kept asking where you'd suddenly disappeared to. I told her it must be either sex or religion.'

*   *   *

I don't know how much Alice smoked on an average day. I didn't even know who or where her supplier was, though I had a suspicion. It made her serene, perhaps even a little distant. Occasionally she seemed actually disconnected from everything around her; immersed entirely in the world of her own preoccupations. There were minute time lags between her eyes and her words. What she said often seemed unsynchronised with what she was thinking. At a guess, I would say that she'd already had a good few joints by the time I arrived back that Friday. So when she suggested we share one last one before setting out, I suggested we didn't.