The Lightning Cage (16 page)

It wasn't long after that I put her in the home. Unfortunately, I couldn't find an affordable one nearby. I can still see the silent reproach in her face as I left her there that day, but what else could I have done? I tried to visit every four or five days, when the state of my back allowed me to drive, but I think mother must have decided that she'd had enough for one lifetime. Her dignity had been mortally offended, I could see that, even as her wits came indisputably astray. But she still swayed in and out of focus and only when she was out of focus entirely did the distress appear to cease. Then she was nobody and nowhere. She was out of focus more and more often. Within a year she was dead.

‘Save you a lot of money in bills anyway,' her sister Agnes said to me at the funeral, from under her freshly purchased, wide-brimmed black hat. ‘Sylvia was always so considerate that way. Though if you'd only got her a home nurse in, I don't doubt she'd still be alive today. And after all that time she spent nursing you, Christopher.'

Right up to the end my mother had kept her silver hair swept back immaculately into a little knot of royal blue silk.

*   *   *

There was no ghost of her left after that in any mirror, for I'd not inherited her features, neither the high cheekbones nor the blue eyes, nor the tall, thin frame. I was once trim and taut enough in my climbing days up in Yorkshire. In fact, I always stayed fit, I had prided myself on it right up to the accident. But as I loped around, it seemed more and more that my body was merely an encumbrance to my mind. I no longer asked much of the flesh, except that it should leave my thoughts free from distraction and discomfort for as long as possible.

But now I had a whole house to myself – a big one, too. I transferred my thoughts completely into the eighteenth century, having nothing further to keep me in the twentieth. I would occasionally catch sight of myself in shop windows, or in the mirrored wall inside the chemist's. A dishevelled and dubious figure. Since I'd retired from public life, I shaved once a week, and that was with my father's old electric razor, so the results could often be sketchy. My clothes had grown rumpled and baggy and seemed suddenly too big for me, for I only ate these days when I occasionally remembered to do so. I had withdrawn, you see, into the world of study and reflection. Even my flesh had withdrawn.

In that ramshackle Edwardian house at the edge of Tooting Common, I lived by myself. I took no lodgers, and I received no visitors. I pursued my true work at last, with no Alice or anyone else to distract me from it. Now that I was seemingly free from both the pleasures and the burdens that the world afforded, I felt I had been left alone at last to elucidate the life and poetry of Richard Pelham, as I had set out to do so many years before.

Melancholy

Black sun of melancholy. They say the sun never sees a shadow, but the black sun never sees anything else.

RICHARD PELHAM
,
Letters

 

By the time Lord Chilford returned to Chilford Villa, many of its contents had been draped and shrouded in muslin dust sheets, even the virginals at which his wife had played so prettily. He had bought them for her as a wedding present from an instrument maker in Deal by the name of Atterbury, a man renowned for the tonal precision of his harpsichords. He would now arrange for Jacob to cut the strings. He found the idea of any other fingers dancing along its keys repugnant.

He walked up and down his geometric stairs and in and out of his perfectly proportioned rooms, halting momentarily to stare at the plasterwork on the grand ceiling. Mermen frolicked in the frozen white as their womenfolk taunted and teased them. In the middle of it all was Chilford in his most luxurious wig, as Lady Chilford's smile beckoned him, both her eyes and her breasts focused relentlessly upon the man who represented the centre of her world. Was it Francesco Vassalli who had done that for him, or had he only been employed on the busts? He could no longer remember, but whichever Italian he had congratulated so enthusiastically on his work, he had hardly thought then that its contemplation could so soon become nothing but a source of nameless grief to him.

He made his way through sad, silent rooms. The multitude of long-case and carriage clocks had all ceased the measured clunks and hammerings which had once sunk so relentlessly through Richard Pelham's soul, for he had instructed Jacob to stop winding them the day after Lady Chilford's death.

At last he came to his study. Pompeo Batoni's portrait of him in oils still hung opposite the door, painted years back in Rome while Chilford was doing the tour. Batoni had given his sitter the airs and graces of an emperor, in contradiction to all Chilford's true beliefs, but still it had amused him and had become a part of the lore of his lovemaking with his wife, as she would whisper coquettishly into his ear about his pagan Roman customs, and he would oblige her with one or two to which his stay in the Holy City had in fact introduced him. One hot afternoon he had crushed grapes across her shifting thighs and then begun to lick … Ah leave it, he thought, as he turned the canvas to the wall. She's down in the earth with the worms now, so have done with it.

What confronted him next had always struck him before as of merely anatomic significance. One of the écorché studies so popular at that time portrayed a heavily pregnant woman, the flesh of her belly ripped back to reveal a hugely swollen womb, all the other organs neatly arranged like side dishes, as though to garnish the heavily veined and bloated egg they surrounded. Now for the first time it likened itself in his mind to an explosion, or the rising of a bloody planet over devastated, war-torn ground. Now it meant death, not anatomy. Or perhaps anatomy itself had come to mean nothing but death for him. That image, too, he turned quickly to the wall.

Around him were so many of the objects that had filled the mind of Richard Pelham with panic and confusion. The wax models, the flayed man, the skulls, the Byzantine array of medical implements, to hack into this piece of bone or saw through that one. Even a delicate point so finessed it could drill a tiny hole in a man's skull. ‘Is that how you plan to let his spirit escape?' Pelham had asked him. He walked across to the small engraving which hung behind his desk, acquired while journeying through Nuremburg: Albrecht Dürer's
Melencolia.
He looked at it intently now, as he had never looked before.

It pictured a winged woman, the emblematic figure of the melancholy state, gazing off into impossibility, as around her were strewn all the tools of possibility, left immobile by her mystic stare. An hourglass trapped her wing. A magic square was incised in the wall above her head, its arcane promise of hidden knowledge and unworldly power somehow as muted and despairing as all the worldly implements of building and geometry scattered about her feet. Though her face was dark, the eyes were of a startling brilliancy. Watercress and ranunculus wreathed her head – watery flowers to offset the dry and earthy humour. Medieval superstitions creeping into the new learning. But he had been intrigued once by Marsilio Ficino's distinction between
melancolia candida bilis,
or the white bile melancholy, and
melancolia atra bilis,
or black bile melancholy. The one was said to produce genius and the other mania. Indeed, he had once thought he might well need to apply the distinction to Richard Pelham himself, to show how a single personality could contain both states, or at least how one type might in time degenerate into the other. The compasses in Melancholy's hand could no more measure out a new state house or a basilica than they could fathom the bottomless dimensions of saturnine gloom.

On the table stood the pile of letters in Pelham's wild hand, which Jacob had told him had been arriving over the previous months. Chilford pulled the tug-rope and a bell rang elsewhere in the house. Jacob arrived with Josephine a foot or two behind him. She began to sob as she entered the room and her employer walked across and took her in his arms.

‘I'm so sorry, my Lord. I'm so sorry for your trouble.'

‘Thank you, Josephine. But we cannot stand about and grieve all day. Jacob, despite my previous instructions, I intend to move back here to the villa for a while, after all, and I'm arranging for my son and his nurse to join me shortly. Would you start making the necessary arrangements?'

Jacob's face brightened, despite the heavy fact of the death of her ladyship in childbirth, as he realised that the villa was not to be shut up after all. He had grown attached to it, he and his wife.

‘You'll be able to help, no doubt, with the raising of the boy, Josephine.'

‘I'd be honoured, my Lord.' It was one of the sadnesses of their marriage that they had not been blessed with children.

‘Good. Then that's settled.' Chilford pointed briskly to the pile of letters on his desk, and Jacob nodded.

‘Those are the ones I told you of.'

‘How long have they been coming?'

‘Over six months now.'

‘And never any return address?' Jacob shook his head. ‘Right, let's all make a start then, shall we?' Jacob and Josephine stepped out of the room and about their business, and Lord Chilford gazed out of the window at the river. The recent storms had converted the field in front of his house into a whin. He suddenly turned, as it seemed to him momentarily that he caught a breath of his wife's perfume. An absurdity, of course: no more than a trick of undischarged memory intruding on the mind's present calculations. No scent's particles could sustain themselves even in such static air for such a duration. Then he sat down at his desk and started on the unwelcome task of reading Richard Pelham's letters.

Catalogues and Litanies

A fine stock of poetry, biography, letters …

REDMOND & THRING
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Medical treatises. Memoirs. Obscure works of theology. Volumes of letters so long forgotten that only antiquarian booksellers and lizard-grey librarians knew they still existed. Diaries printed privately in limited editions. All those distant, rolling mists of recollection. Faded obituaries in long-defunct journals. Holograph texts inserted into warped vellum bindings. Marginalia whose sepia inks were dying slowly in the intermittent light.

The only thing that ever took me out of the house these days, apart from simple provisions, was my forays in pursuit of my manuscripts and books among the dealers. I had tried but quickly given up on the London and the British Libraries. I found even the breathing of other people deafened me to the words of the text I was studying. A cough at the next table could end my concentration for the day. I had begun to realise that if I was ever to say anything of substance about this poet who had sunk into such universal oblivion, I was going to have to own some serious material, share my living space with it night and day, stare at it slowly as it stared slowly back, exchange intimate details, date of birth and year of publication, home town and place of printing. For borrowed texts, I had begun to understand, can be very coy in yielding up their secrets. Intercourse with books requires that you should marry them, and the sacrament is money (or theft, whichever one costs you the most), the estate possession. Books need to be owned and treasured, or even abused, not scanned swiftly and coldly in public places as though they were government statistics or pornography. It's no good wrapping them in dirty polythene coats and passing them from one subscriber's hand to another. Books offer illumination only to those they choose, and where and when they choose. A paperback wrapper is a mere illusion of availability, but then so is a luxurious leather binding, like the fur coat a whore wears in winter. Many who read, and often the richest among them, are given nothing whatsoever. The spirit of the text might be retained, however grand and stately the transaction, even while the letter is given. Books must always cost you a little more than you can afford, otherwise they'll keep themselves to themselves, hunch frigid and impenetrable inside their covers, shroud their secrets with a chilling baffle of propriety. And who wouldn't, after all? Whoever taught us to assume that the hearts of books should be easier to come by than our own? Or that their souls should be for sale at a lower price than anyone else's passport to eternity? What is a book, when all's said and done, but someone's heart, someone's soul?

Pelham himself was acutely aware of this. He wrote to his fellow poet James Thomson that whenever he looked at one of Lord Chilford's books, he sensed the presence of the man, the severe crouch of his precision, beside him in the room. The one possession Pelham was never separated from, even in his last days in Grub Street, was his sextodecimo
Psalms
in the authorised version. A binding of red goatskin over birchwood boards. Tooled into the leather was an image of David playing the lyre, while Saul looked on from his throne, hoping the notes of the music could calm the unfathomed terror and torment that churned inside him.

I'd come to see that books are bound in time as surely as they are inside their covers, which was why my prize possession up to now was a first edition of the
Psalms of Solace,
with handwritten corrections, quibbles and second thoughts. In the margins were written fractions of comments, all inscribed in a tiny, cryptic, eighteenth-century hand. Whose? I needed each day to touch this book, for it was a physical link. The original years, Pelham's years, had rubbed off, they clung to its pages – they were still turning there. It hadn't yet been reset in modernity's font. When I held that book I took the poet's hand across the centuries.

But such items, it has to be said, did not come cheaply. And my appetite for them grew. My mother had left a small amount of money when she died, but not much. That had soon gone. And I was afraid of breaking into my building society account, since the interest on it was, after all, my only income. So one day I took a good look around the house.