The Lightning Cage (11 page)

LC
: I did not write those words, Richard. They are from scripture, I think.

RP
: Maybe a man's a window pane, however much the glass of his soul has been stained.

LC
: I do not understand.

RP
: I cannot be merely seen through, even Richard Pelham in his confinement can't. I am flesh too.

LC
: You are referring to my attempt to analyse your condition?

RP
: Your trek over my mind.

LC
: I merely believe that the mind and the body are interconnected, Richard, so much so that the torments of the one must aggravate a torment in the other. An imbalance in the mind provokes disquiet in the body, and vice versa. I believe an excess of alcohol in the body might so affect the mind that it even believes itself to have visited hell.

RP
: You cannot see the spirit that comes upon me with your enlarging lenses, so for you it is unreal. By your own confession you are a natural philosopher of the visible.

LC
: And what are you, Richard?

RP
: A sinful fellow, with my lusts and gluttonies on my head, visited at intervals by a spirit in need of a shelter for the night, in an age without words to welcome such visitations. Even in one of your palaces of healing, all they could do the last time that spirit arrived, was to hoist me up.

LC
: Hoist you up?

RP
: Fasten me to the tongue of the storm. That's when they burned the mark into my brow.

LC
: Do you know what it was that wrote on the skin of your chest, Richard?

RP
: Agarith. If he was there inside me again.

LC
: The writing was in your hand.

RP
: The writer was in my body.

LC
: Do you have anything to tell me about my wife, Richard?

RP
: Only that she is a very beautiful woman, my Lord, but then you already know that. And now I believe you are to have a child. My congratulations.

Chilford was impatient with the centuries of superstition, for he could still hear the whispering clamour of all that liturgy behind him. He had, in fact, thought a great deal about bodies and the language in which they utter their imbalances, their trials, their queered and quirky messages. Too premature in the calculus to ponder the writing all over Queequeg's body, and how it announces that he is a visitation from another world, Chilford could see all the same that the writing on Richard Pelham's body seemed to proclaim that this man had been touched by a region elsewhere, but he could only remain unmoved by the utter lack of co-ordinates to establish such a world's location, using any compass reason might tolerate, let alone confirm or ratify. He was inclined therefore to situate the world inside the turbulence of his subject's mind, not outside in any grid of latitude and longitude.

As for Pelham's own great obsession, namely what it was that was written on the body of Jesus himself during the course of that passion which ended with his death on the cross (for that was the true theme of
The Instruments of the Passion
), Chilford had also thought this subject through methodically enough:

1 That his hands, which had been said to transmit such an electric charge of love to the sick and the maimed as to heal them instantly with a single touch, should have nails driven through them so that they might touch no more.

2 That his feet, which had trodden the earth already created through him, or so orthodoxy maintained, in whatever species of ontological singularity, should walk no further upon it, fixed one upon the other now unto death. (Chilford had no reason to doubt the fact of the crucifixion, and could therefore only conclude that Jesus of Nazareth was at this point drowning inside himself, his breath a diminishing torrent of protest at the forces about it, as they pressed ineluctably inwards, his body both uninhabitable and inescapable at the same time.)

3 And that, finally, his heart, which was said to have at its centre an unending upswelling of the love of the Father, should now contain merely a lance of the imperial soldiery, courtesy of one Longinus.

He who had abrogated the law of condemnation in pity's name, thus to redeem all those who truly sought redemption, hung there writhing at last on the nails of the law, unable even to write in the dust with his finger, as he had done once (according to record, anyway) so as to repel the dread agents of righteousness. When he opened his mouth, only blood came out. Thus, thought Chilford, did the Redeemer's body spout its omega.

Chilford was not alone in his intellectual encroachments on belief. As the universe became more and more of a mechanism, governed by laws whose force was acknowledged to be universal, the requirement for a God to keep the planets turning and the hours moving had seemed to lessen. This age's deity was no longer the passionate and jealous God of Abraham and Isaac, nor the
Abba
of Jesus's prayers and anguished cries; instead he became the
primum mobile,
an intelligence large enough to fashion those laws in the first place, but whose presence was thereafter largely unrequired. For rational and ordered men, this represented something of a comfort, indeed an undoubted progression; but of course, for those still tormented by forces which rationality could neither encompass nor subdue, the age of reason was an age of terror, perhaps a terror even greater than those in the ages which had preceded it. Richard Pelham in the time of his tribulation could find no minister who was even aware of the vocabulary of the powers that visited him, let alone one who could speak their language fluently enough to order them to be gone, assuming he wished them gone, for he never said any such thing. Such talk had after all been dispensed with, along with papish superstitions, and the incense and holy water stoups of more primitive times. Things were looking up. There was deemed to be – it is not putting the matter too strongly – a heliotropic tendency in even the obscurest matter, for everything now yearned towards the light, the light at the centre of the word enlightenment. The black sun of Pelham's
Instruments
was an absurd trick of the imagination, a jest in bad taste, the product of a diseased mind, though it's worth remembering that in 1714 Tobias Swinden produced a paper for the Royal Society entitled
An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell,
in which he established the sun as the only logical, scientific site of hell. Such a combination of size and unrelenting flame was required to roast the vast quantity of damned souls for eternity. But scientific accounts of eschatology like this were not to last much longer.

Chilford read and wrote into the early hours of the morning. He was trying hard to clarify terms.

So Pelham has a demon, does he? he thought. All right, if that's the common usage, then let's go along with it. He turned the pages of his Plato. The word had corrupted into demon now, but the
daimon
that accompanied Socrates was his spiritual guide, not some tormenting and degraded angel. It represented all that was best in the man's spirit. The narrative of how Satan, the wily adversary of Job, had become the foul fiend, the father of lies, the emperor of malignant spirits, was for Chilford the history of a shadow, the shadow any man can study when he turns away from the source of light and looks too studiously in the opposite direction. If you stare long enough into the darkness, your pupils contract. And ultimately your mind does too.

So, he thought, let us accept the demon, and even speculate that an earlier age might have called it
daimon
instead. Now, let us see what we might make of it.

If a demon has come on a visit, then where has it come from? Whose energy has it tapped into? Whose voice does it speak with? Whose eyes does it look through? Whose flesh does it use, whether to write upon or prod with torments? And should it offer delights, where is the source of the delight? Chilford formulated these questions, but he had no doubt as to the answer in each case: the mind and body of the one afflicted. They were signatures, but distorted signatures, out of the dark part of the mind. Lord Chilford took out the sheet of paper on which he had copied down the lettering on Pelham's chest, and studied it again. He started writing swiftly. Shortly before dawn he finished his narrative thus:

Pelham seems to be telling me that the country inside himself has been invaded, but not so much by Agarith as by those in the Chelsea Asylum, and then by me. He says he has been forced to translate the topography of his soul into a foreign language, and now is confused as to location and locution. When I asked him finally if there was anything he required, he replied, ‘I should be grateful for a little peace now. Could I have some more of the lightning from the bottle?' – this is how he refers to the laudanum, so I woke Jacob and instructed him to make up the tincture, according to my instructions. It appears to render him calm; appears even to afford him some kind of protection, given that he is at times oblivious to the greatest personal discomfort, and at other times so fly-skinned with vulnerability that even a breeze could break his defences.

And then he went to bed, hoping for a deep sleep, though a short one, since the ball he had arranged for Lady Chilford was planned for later that day.

*   *   *

Pelham felt stained from his bingeing and his visitation. He did not know in what precise manner he would be punished, but he had little doubt that punishment of some sort must come. He had been tested with his liberty, and had shown himself unworthy to take hold of it. The preparations for Lord Chilford's party went on noisily, not that Pelham knew anything at all about that. Why, after all, should anyone have told him, even if he had been in a fit condition to be informed? They had already cleared the floor of the
piano nobile,
and Lady Chilford was already on her way from London. She had become very bored during the course of the week as she posed for her portrait in a fashionable studio in Covent Garden. She had even chosen the image of the oak tree which the artist would paint in as a backdrop for the final picture, with her listless, slightly cross expression upstaging the immemorial form. The artist's assistant was at that moment filling in the azure blue of her silk skirt, and the watery rivulets of its creases.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Pelham,' Jacob had said, as he called in on him. That was all he had said, but he had said it with what struck Pelham as a minatory smile. Something was going on, though he had no idea what.

Lord Chilford had based Chilford Villa somewhat loosely upon the Villa Rotunda at Vicenza. Perfect proportions were achieved only by forfeiting practicality and comfort. Pelham's room was small and draughty, and had never been intended as a space for accommodation in any case. When Lord Chilford visited him there around five o'clock, he seemed if anything cheered by the slightly wild demeanour of the poet. This return of the
furor
had meant that his paper on insanity was now being completed to his satisfaction. It might effect Pelham's eventual cure, and the cure of many others too. The poet had always found Chilford's perfunctory bonhomie distressing, but in the light of his own recent drunkenness and loss of self-possession, he now found it truly alarming. What could be his lordship's intentions? Then the carriages started rolling down the drive, one, two, three, four, and Pelham looked quickly about him, as though the walls might contain a mute stony wisdom as to his new predicament. He fell upon his knees once more and began to pray.

Pelham could not imagine why so many people had come to the house, unless it was to discuss his fate. He had stolen wine from the cellar in considerable quantities and had absconded without permission from the villa for two days. Then he had become once more the home for the unhoused spirit. Jacob had obviously reported all this to his master, and his master had even come to see some of it for himself. And then the thunder above his head began, a relentless rolling crash and hammer, and he ran to the window to look out. Sure enough, a full moon was riding the few swift clouds, but there was no sign of any storm. He needed no further sign. Whatever the Lord wanted, He most certainly did not want to see any of his creatures ever again strapped to the star-machine, with grinning faces floating in the sky above them. He collected his few belongings and crept into Chilford's study to steal only two things: the bottle of laudanum and a small lancet engraved with the monogram EA. Then he fled from the house, never even turning back to see the shapes of the dancers in the windows on the floor above his room, as they ceremoniously marched and stamped and twirled to the lyric geometry of the music.

Pelham walked through the night. He was no athlete and it took him six hours and more to reach the edges of town, though he often rested so that he might lie in a ditch and sip some of the opium. Then he would stay awhile. Once again, infernal rats had started to scurry, with their little scratching feet, across his brain. Lady Chilford. He had caught sight of her before he left, as she shimmied down a corridor, bejewelled in billowing folds, the warm breath of her perfume engulfing everyone about her in brief clouds. How could anybody smell so sweet? Had Susannah too once smelt as sweet as that? His nose, in its lengthy exile, had forgotten. Pressing her sumptuous breasts so tightly into her bodice that the flesh appeared ready to explode into a man's hands. Just as Eve had once handed the fruit of damnation to Adam. Her gaze had lighted on him in the corridor, but only en route to somewhere else, as she turned her long neck first this way and then that, sometimes with the imperious bemusement of an ostrich, and at others with the white perfection of a swan.
Our Father, which art in heaven
 … It was only as he approached the fields of Wandsworth on his pilgrim's journey east, that he realised his papers for
The Instruments of the Passion
were still in Lord Chilford's study, where Jacob said he had taken them for his lordship's perusal. He stopped still under the troubled moon for ten minutes while he considered this, which felt like the final catastrophe of all. He knew, of course, that he could not go back. He felt that everything had now been taken from him at last, precisely as he deserved.