The Lightning Cage (27 page)

Pelham's immersion in often barbarous and fanciful modes of thought and literature, whether of a devotional, theological or poetical kind, exacerbated a form of disjunction between himself and observable reality which grew more acute during his periods of affliction. The Society has been only too aware of the pernicious function of fanciful language in the process of mis-perception, and the remarkable retentiveness of Pelham's mind meant that this grand language-hoard, standing so aslant to the actual world, created in effect a massive screen, which could at times protect him from unwanted stimuli, but at other times could isolate him inside his own dreadful confinement.

It is quite possible that this misalignment with general perception is precisely what enabled some of the unfortunate poet's more notable observations, but I have no doubt that the Members will be in agreement with me when I say that such mental deformations are surely not a price worth paying for these, increasingly exiguous, achievements.

When writing moves from mind to flesh, it is perhaps because it has become unworthy of that higher realm.

Richard Pelham Concluded

Edward Allingham

In his notes, Fordie had written:

Any student of the mind's morbidity, the spirit's contagions and infections, must end up sooner or later with a simple question – does the mind in its bleakest and blackest descent reflect a reality or create one? Either way, it strikes me, the mystery is by no means diminished. Either way the consequences appear to be just as dreadful for humanity.

Then there was a further note, in Fordie's margin:
Might Chilford himself have been mad?
And he had answered his own question thus:
I don't think so. Not yet, anyway.

*   *   *

Now my roof was finished. All that had been required of me was one more trip to the building society. I had resolved now not to think about money. Fordie had assured me that he never did, though he had been astute enough in acquiring mine. When money worries take command of the mind, he had said, the whole of life translates itself into that loveless language. I knew this, I'd been here once before, with sandwiches half-eaten turning back suddenly into the price you paid for them, or a mouthful of beer becoming metallic on your tongue as it solidifies into the coins you just handed over to have it poured. And I remembered again Fordie's utter contempt for those who make nothing but money: better to make none at all, he had said, and I tried harder than ever now to believe him. I didn't want to think about money and I didn't want to think about Pelham or Chilford for a few days either. I might have had the first hint as to why Fordie had put it all away in that safe of his and left it there for so long. I, too, was beginning to feel contaminated.

I locked the bookshop door and set out walking. Without even considering the matter I went off down the river in the direction of Twickenham. I'd never spent much time on or near the Thames. We lived too far away and didn't go to it often. It was simply a river I occasionally encountered in making my way across London. But for Pelham it was the mystic snake of life itself. I looked at it, but I couldn't see whatever it was that he saw. It was only as I came towards the town that I realised where I was heading, and I turned off into the centre. I didn't want to stand before the ghost site of Chilford Villa again at the moment, so I was simply meandering, no more, when I stopped in front of the little gallery window. Ten seconds later, the man at the desk looked up affably from the table where he sat.

‘The painting over there,' I said, ‘the
Chimera
painting, I wonder if it might be possible to get the artist's address. We were once great friends, you see, but we seem to have lost contact over the years.' He disguised his irritation that I wasn't about to buy something and riffled through a drawer until he found a piece of paper, which he then handed to me and turned back to his magazine. And I wrote down the following:

Alice Ashe

47 Bingham Road

Whitby

There were a number of restaurants in Richmond where Fordie had signed a bookshop cheque for our food. That evening I took my own Tewk chequebook and set off to the Italian one, hoping the time for the cheques to start bouncing had not yet arrived. The owner had heard about Fordie's death and was solicitous. I placed Fordie's order: ‘Anything. Anything at all, so long as it's without eggs. And the usual wine.' He smiled sadly, and went off to provide for me a meal of the sort he had provided for Fordie over so many years. Then, between the drinks and the food, I wrote my letter to Alice. It ended like this:

So, discovering to my surprise that I don't seem to want to kill you any more, I now find I'd like to see you instead. I'm so pleased that you're still painting. I'm not the man you left behind in Tenby, believe me. Stopped running. These days I don't even drive. I now own the bookshop whose address is printed at the top of this page. But please don't imagine that means I'm wealthy. The opposite is increasingly the case. But I do have a fridge full of white wine and eggs. Should you ever be passing through London, I'll give you some of both.

The next day I posted it, and as I came back to the shop I saw a man in a white raincoat standing on the far side of the road, staring up at the building and then making notes in his little book. When he saw me unlocking the door, he came over and introduced himself.

‘Mr Harrison,' he said, ‘from Hamgate. You wrote to us.'

‘Did I?' I said, opening the door and stepping inside.

‘We are the head lessors.'

‘Ah yes.'

‘Any chance of a look around?'

‘Feel free,' I said. ‘I've just forked out for the roof, but I've kept the receipts, well some of them anyway, so if you've brought your chequebook with you, maybe we could settle up.' So off Mr Harrison went on his inspection. When he came back down half an hour later, he was putting his notebook into his pocket.

‘It's worse than I thought,' he said.

‘What do you intend to do about it?'

Mr Harrison sat down on the chair by the side of Fordie's table and placed his folded white raincoat across his knees. He was a short man with attractive regular features and a healthy mop of black hair. There probably wasn't much real difference between us in age, but with his hair so unimpeachably black and mine now so irreversibly white, we looked as though we came from different generations.

‘Have you actually read your lease, Mr Bayliss?'

‘No,' I said, ‘I have a low boredom threshold.'

‘Well then, let me explain something. It is what is known as a full-repairing lease. And its ten-year period is about to expire in six months.'

‘Fordie said they were always renewed,' I said.

‘Indeed, they always have been. But we did warn Mr Tewk last time around that the state of repair had become a major cause for concern. Of course, he did nothing about it, we didn't really expect him to. We suspected he'd become something of an institution around these parts, to be honest, so we decided to do nothing about it ourselves, until…' He stopped.

‘Until he died?'

‘Let's say until there was a substantial change in the situation.'

‘And now there's been one.'

‘What I think I'd better do, Mr Bayliss, is to have a schedule of necessary works properly prepared and sent to you.'

‘And what do I do with it?'

‘You effect it, sir, by the time of the expiry of the lease.'

‘Or?'

‘First, your lease will not be renewed. Second, you'll be held liable for all the works deemed to be necessary. I should warn you that a rent-review is imminent, in any case. Given this property's worth now, if realistically valued…' I had already walked into the back room and I was opening a bottle of Chablis. At least we still had plenty of that left.

‘I'd offer you a glass, Mr Harrison,' I said, ‘but I have the feeling that I can't afford it any more. Wouldn't you agree?'

‘I don't actually drink,' he said, ‘and I have to leave now, in any case. We'll be in touch shortly.'

*   *   *

That night in a dream I pulled hard at Harry's hearing aid and more and more of something came out, some long intestine of white flesh that kept winding out of his ear the more I pulled. Ectoplasm. I woke then, and remembered the last words Fordie had spoken to me, the last item in his confession. ‘And I cheated you,' he had said. I hadn't wanted to think about it, but now it was impossible not to. But even if Fordie's gold had turned out to have all disappeared except for the Chilford papers, the stock of books must have considerable value, surely. And with that thought to comfort me I managed finally to sink back into a fitful sleep.

The sound of the motors outside whirring and thrumming up and down the road from the bridge abraded memories, eroded certainties, like a circle of fifths making a ghost of tonality.

Idle Fellowes

How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe.

JOHN AUBREY
,
Brief Lives

 

The next day, I took the folder out of the safe once more. Fordie had done what work he could on Prince Zabrenus and the Children of Bethany, but the truth was that this obscure sect had simply become more obscure as the years had passed. No one knew much about them. They were part of that antinomian tradition that threads its way through the religious history of these islands. Zabrenus preached an exhilarating freedom from the slavery of both sin and guilt. He preached the redemption of the spirit and stated emphatically that those on whom the spirit had alighted could no longer sin. Their bodies might sin, in their aboriginal attachment to darkness, but such sins could never beslime the anointed soul. If this was bad theology, it appears at least to have been good therapy, where Pelham was concerned at least. Some of his more eirenic letters were dated to this period, including this one, in which he was very nearly friendly to the lord whom he otherwise appeared to consider his tormentor:

My prayers can no more summon the presence or assistance of the Almighty than a hobby-horse can fetch in a fecund season or start to sprout the tiny hairs that grow between a virgin's legs. If my liturgy inclined all one way, my vices leaned always to the other side entirely. I wonder all the same if one might anticipate in Paradise the disreputable noise of gaiety? Perhaps you and I might still expect to be merry there together one day. Or at least to share the ancient haunting ground of English mercies.

Fordie had written in his notes:
Richard Pelham: both mystic and occultist. He believed all darkness had light shrouded within it. Who can say whether or not he was right? Lightning from a black sky. What did Serena see when they put the charge through her?

But Pelham's alcoholism and drug addiction could by this stage have been terminated only by incarceration or death. And the single-line letter he sent Chilford towards the end showed the true terror of his condition:

Self-slaughter in wanhope, without housel or shrift.

I'd had enough for a while. I would have taken a walk, but the weather had turned bad. It was raining in Richmond. A dreary infinity of rain. A relentless drench from the heavens that hammered down in wet insistence upon Fordie's lean-to roof. The autumn was pressing on into winter.

Maybe I lacked Fordie's strength of character, but I couldn't leave whoever it was standing outside and tapping on the door. Not in that rain.

The man shook his umbrella fiercely as he stepped forward, and then smiled a broad, red-faced smile. He looked like a farmer come up to town for the weekend.

‘I came to offer my condolences,' he said.

‘That's kind,' I said. ‘Who are you?'

‘Fordie's vicar,' he said. ‘And you must be the new proprietor.'

‘Here, take your coat off. Can I offer you a drink?' I gave him a glass of wine and he sipped it and laughed.

‘What's funny?'

‘I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be impolite. It's just that it's nice to know some traditions are maintained. It is Chablis, isn't it?'

‘It is.'

‘Always what I was given on my infrequent visits.'

‘How often did you come?'

‘Maybe once a year. Fordie would occasionally come to me.' He paused then for a moment. ‘Correction: Fordie came once to me. And I'm afraid I wasn't a lot of use to him. Though his quest at the time did strike me as a trifle cryptic.' I liked this vicar. He was one of those men who set you entirely at your ease merely by their presence. He'd probably found the right job, I thought.

‘Do you mind if I ask what it was, this cryptic quest? Or would that come under the rubric of secrets of the confessional?'

‘You must be a Roman Catholic,' he said, and I realised that his glass was already empty. I brought the bottle over and filled it. ‘We don't share many secrets of the confessional in our church. No, I don't believe there was any confidentiality in our discussion. Fordie was after information about…' He stopped.

‘About what?'

‘About a demon,' he said finally. ‘Can't remember its name.'

‘Agarith,' I said quietly.

‘Yes, that was it,' he said, mildly startled. ‘How did you know that?'

‘I've picked up his studies where he left off. Let me fill your glass again.'

‘Sorry. Drinking all your nice wine.'

‘There's plenty, believe me.'

‘I've been stomping about out there for hours, but I'm afraid that most of the addresses I visit aren't as hospitable as Tewk's Bookshop. First glass I've been offered all day.

‘I wasn't much use, I'm afraid. In fact, the truth is I was no use at all. A shame really. The only time Stamford Tewk ever went to consult his vicar, and I had to shrug my shoulders and say I didn't have a clue. It's simply not a realm with which we concern ourselves. Not these days, anyway.