The Lightning Cage (24 page)

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More people turned up at the crematorium than I had expected. Even Charles Redmond and Josianne Thring.

‘We hear the bookshop's yours now,' Charles said, trying to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

‘Yes, that's true.'

‘We must come over some time. We could probably do a bit of business.' And after drinks in the nearby pub, the usual chatter started up about editions and prices, and which poor sod's stock was about to be sold off for a song to save him from liquidation, and whether they should all agree between them not to buy at the requested prices anyway, thereby forcing them down even lower. And then it was all over, and I was back in Richmond sitting in a bookshop which was now mine in its entirety. I wished that it weren't.

That night I dreamt that the amice was wrapped about my shoulders, and the alb flapping at my calves. I dreamt that I had prostrated myself as prescribed, and that the sacred laying on of hands had passed on to me the holy orders of priesthood. I was shaken awake by fear, though fear of what I couldn't have told you, but what I woke to was the realisation that my first mass was still postponed for ever, despite the curiosity of my unorthodox absolving of Fordie for his sins. For some reason the smell in my nose was Alice's hair, its tart mixture of peach blossom and turpentine, and it simply wouldn't go away. I lay there and thought of Rome, that parish of ritual slaughter and consecration, where the smell of incense, however pungent, can never quite overcome the smell of the flesh.

One or two people started coming into the shop. I didn't stop them. I was glad for the moment to have people around, even those I'd never seen before. A few of them asked where the grumpy old man was and I told them. Then they fell silent. One Friday afternoon the will was read and produced no surprises. Everything was as agreed, though the two hundred thousand I had paid him to become part of the business appeared to have vanished entirely. I couldn't help wondering where it had gone so quickly, though the fact was, I suppose, it was none of my business. We had made a deal. It took me a few weeks before I opened the desk drawer and took out that piece of paper on which I'd written the combination to Fordie's safe. By then the fridge was stacked with eggs and Chablis because I kept forgetting to change the weekly order.

Another week passed before I could face the safe's contents. My first reaction when that heavy metal door creaked open was a profound shock of disappointment. I had been led to expect a stack of eighteenth-century papers crammed in there, of incalculable rarity and value. The legendary hoard. What I had sold my parents' house to own. And instead there was one folder, a substantial one admittedly, but that was all. On the folder was written in Fordie's hand: Chilford/Pelham. This had cost me a year of my life and one Tooting house. I remembered the last words of Fordie's confession, but then I dismissed the words as scrupulosity. An excess of conscience at the moment of death.

I uncorked a chilled bottle of the Chablis and sat down at the desk where Fordie had always sat. Then I started to read.

A good bibliographer is a historian in miniature, chronicling the journeyings of certain texts through time and space, and Fordie was nothing if not a good bibliographer. And yet this wasn't in fact bibliography, for what was being tracked had never become a book, or never yet anyway, though it soon became apparent to me that Fordie had meant it to, all the same, for what I held in my hands was evidently the book he had once started out to write. Why had he never mentioned it to me? And why, I wondered, had he never finished it? What had made him falter? In the meantime, I was now where he had once been, in that borderland between bibliography and philology, between textual criticism and biography, between religious belief and diagnosable mania.

Fordie's writing was crabbed and difficult, and it took me a while before I managed to start reading it fluently. There was this uneasy preface:

It is certainly arguable that the eighteenth century gave us the terms of modernity with which we've had to live ever since. Somewhere between the bent and crippled Pope, wielding the weight of classical learning to crush his opponents with ridicule, and William Blake and his wife, naked in their garden as they attempted to recapture Eden, we still seem to be rediscovering our dilemma. Pope ridiculed the mad, but for Blake madness was simply the condition of the visionary – no more and no less. He has Cowper come to him in his vision and ask for lessons in insanity: ‘O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane?' It is doubtful that the unfortunate Cowper would have wished to express the matter that way. There is one curiosity worthy of remark, though: how much more hate there is in the orthodox Roman Catholic Pope than in the outrageous antinomian heretic Blake.

Behind the perfect façades of the Augustan manner we can always hear the inmates' cries at Bedlam. This is not a metaphor, it is actual fact. Many of the eighteenth century's poetic voices speak to us from inside one species of asylum or another. Cowper raving, Collins in distress, Smart incarcerated, as Clare was to be later. Even Johnson, that massive arbiter of Augustan measure, in constant fear of madness, constantly praying to be saved the ultimate indignity of insanity. The great sloth that would descend upon him amounted to an autism of the spirit, whose sole antidote was the clatter and clamour of London. It was Johnson's ‘vile melancholy', which ‘made him mad all his life, at least not sober', what he himself called ‘this dismal inertness of disposition'.

We have the dreadful prospect of Swift contemplating his end, knowing that he would die like a tree: from the head down.

If the study of the relatively unknown work of Richard Pelham might teach us anything, it might be to be wary of imagining that we explain much when we use words like melancholy, any more than we can approach the pathos of Nietzsche with his arms around that beleaguered horse in Turin by using the word syphilis. It is interesting to note how many of the Palladian houses built in England at that time had grottoes beneath them, as though acknowledging the Gothic terrors that accompany always the classical lines of perfect proportion.

The eighteenth century is not a distant time, not in this regard anyway. Remember how many of our own poets have been afflicted with the same conditions: madness, alcoholism, suicide. Hart Crane re-joining his sailors, Sylvia Plath, back in Pelham's London, with her head in the gas oven, Lowell's mind divided between the bottle and the psychotic ward, Berryman crashing through the ice on the Mississippi, Paul Celan diving into the Seine – poets do seem very fond of water when the time comes for them to leave us.

Then the first section began, a history of the manuscripts. It seemed that in his seclusion at Twickenham after his wife's death, Lord Chilford had completed his study of Pelham's melancholy condition and his madness. And then he had sent his essay to the Royal Society.

The President of the Royal Society at that time was Martin Folkes. His portrait had been painted by Hogarth. Folkes had gained a certain notoriety from marrying Lucretia Bradshaw, an actress much applauded at the Haymarket and Drury Lane.
The History of the English Stage
of 1741 called her ‘one of the greatest and most promising genii of her time'. Folkes took her off the stage though, the better to facilitate what he called her ‘exemplary and prudent conduct'. By the time Folkes died, she had been confined in Chelsea for many years, her mind having long since sunk into derangement. In the margin Fordie had written, ‘Seems as though Pelham was in good company then. Half of England was barking.' According to Fordie, Folkes did not appear to have been one of the Society's more inspiring presidents. The wits of the time had put it thus:

If ere he chance to wake in Newton's chair

He wonders how the devil he got there.

There was a grand sale of the Folkes collection in 1756. The library, gems, drawings, coins and prints fetched between them the considerable sum for those days of £3,090 in a sale that went on for fifty-six days, and in amongst those items was Chilford's study of Pelham.

It appeared that, as Lord Chilford's noble family had begun its decline, so the line of Pelham began to prosper. Thomas Pelham, the poet's son, returned from Ireland to London a wealthy man, having established for himself a lucrative practice as an architect in Georgian Dublin. Jealous of his family's reputation, and probably at least partly at the bidding of his adored mother, he set about retrieving any biographical data concerning his father which might one day find itself set in print. Curll's pamphlet was by that stage already a rarity, and the Pelhams wished Richard to be remembered as a poet of some distinction, not as an intermittently violent lunatic. It was Thomas Pelham who acquired the Chilford lot at the sale of the Folkes collection. And there he doubtless read of the ‘correspondence in my possession' with his father, which Chilford off-handedly mentions in a footnote.

Lord Chilford would not grant Pelham an audience, despite repeated requests, but he did make him a curious promise: namely, that he would bequeath all the material relating to his father to him, so that it should all become his or his family's shortly after Chilford's own death, as long as no further attempt was made to contact him during his lifetime. This agreement was kept on both sides. In the intervening years Thomas Pelham continued busily about his appointed task, even tracking down the relevant portions of the Chelsea Asylum log for the period of his father's incarceration.

As has been said, a great deal of the motivation for all this activity was undoubtedly propriety. The material was being gathered in by the family so that it might never again become available for public scrutiny or ridicule. A rumour of insanity in a family's lineage was already becoming a grave social handicap. By the end of the nineteenth century the Pelhams were wealthy and established, and once more based in England. In the best Victorian tradition, business was used to finance scholarship, and Alexander Pelham became one of the most promising young scholars of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. He also took it upon himself to edit the collected works of his forebear. His summers throughout the Edwardian years were spent at what was now the family seat, Guisely Manor in Oxfordshire, working his way through all the material Thomas had so carefully retrieved. After the edition finally emerged in 1912, the manuscripts were donated to the British Museum. Or at least some of them were. There were occasional references in the Clarendon introduction and notes which suggested other material had been consulted, material that seemed to have been made available to the editor alone. There was one particularly cryptic note which said merely, ‘If that scientific age treated him badly in life, it treated him no less disgracefully in death.' This could be read simply as a protest against the oblivion into which Pelham's reputation swiftly sank, but there might have been another way of reading it.

Perhaps Alexander Pelham had been considering a further volume of Pelham's work, or even a definitive life. It is possible he had retained some material for this purpose, without ever clarifying the matter. But by 1914 he had acquired the status of Captain Alexander Pelham, and his life was soon to be lost leading his men into battle at the Somme. Now whatever was left of the archive was lodged with his wife and, after she died in 1940, with his only child Amelia, who had been a mere three years old when her father the captain was killed. Fordie's notes made it seem likely that she had left the materials in her father's study exactly where they were, as her mother had before her, to gather dust and provide a domicile for spiders. But Amelia too grew old and frail in her turn and her inherited rentier income became more and more flimsy. Her one foray into romance had failed long before the prospect of an engagement could flower, and Guisely Manor could now no longer be adequately sustained for its sole occupant. And so she had put the entire building, with most of its contents intact, up for auction, on the assumption that with the money gained by the sale, she could take herself off to a retirement home in Hove and live comfortably there for her remaining years.

But this had been during Stamford Tewk's glory days, the time when his formidable reputation had been established, and little escaped his attention then. He had seen the announcement of the auction, and he had registered the name Pelham. The next day he was there and managed to talk the old lady round to giving him access to her father's papers. He only needed to read a few pages to know that he wished to buy them. He gave her a reasonable sum too, far more than she could have expected or would have agreed to, and this peripheral sale made no difference whatsoever to the price finally agreed at auction. But all this had been years back. Many years back. I found it extraordinary, as I turned the pages, that he had not published any of the material. I flicked forward to the manuscripts at the back of the folder. Pelham's writing. He was obviously crazed by then, but it
was
his writing. But I would work through what was before me in the order in which Fordie had left it to me – I felt firmly obliged to do this, though I'm not sure I could have told you why.

The doorbell rang. I hesitated for a moment, then decided that I needed a break. The figure that confronted me might have stepped out of the mirrored wardrobe at Tooting. The grey hair that fell to his shoulders and the shabby clothes. Also an unfocused look I had occasionally noticed in myself back then, as though there were nothing in the field of vision that the eye could rest on. Except for words on a page. I stood there silently and after a moment he spoke.

‘Hello,' he said hesitantly, though the voice was deep and almost seductive. ‘My name's Shadwell. We have some mutual friends in Charles and Josianne.'

We sat down together and I soon saw why Josianne's face shifted into a smile whenever his name was mentioned. There was beneath the vagueness an indisputable charm, though charm is a quality that normally makes me dubious. (It was a quality that Fordie had come to detest. He spoke of it with the same contempt that he used when talking of those who made nothing but money.) There was enough charm, in any case, for him to help me through a bottle of the Chablis and to sell me two signed editions of Lawrence Durrell, a writer I have never had any interest in whatsoever, and even a signed first edition of his own book of verse,
Megalith,
which seemed to be much preoccupied with the question of prehistoric Wales. Then he went, leaving me to consider the fact that I had just parted with the better part of fifty pounds and a bottle of wine. I felt suddenly exhausted. Not merely exhausted, but irritated at the time it had taken up. So it was not a good time for Shadwell to return, which was what he did ten minutes later. He stood in the doorway, neither coming in nor going out.