The Lightning Cage (23 page)

‘Fordie.'

‘Mmm.'

‘I went to see the solicitor today. There's always been a family connection, so you must understand he's not being difficult.'

‘And?'

‘Would there be any chance of an inventory?' Fordie looked at me with some disappointment.

‘What do you think, Christopher?'

‘We are talking about a large sum of money here. Everything I own in the world, to be precise about it.'

‘I was under the impression that it involved everything I own in the world too.'

‘I know that.'

‘Did you show him the proposed new draft of my will?'

‘Yes. He was very impressed, but he did keep saying that we had somehow to establish the worth of some of the stock and archive here, at least up to the value of the house. He said it was only prudent.'

Fordie sat back and eyed me dispassionately.

‘Prudent? You do remember what Blake had to say about that?
Prudence is a rich old maid courted by incapacity.
There are things here no one has seen but me, and no one will until you do. What do you think an independent assessor is, Christopher? Do you imagine they don't live on this planet, or have tongues in their mouths; do you think that people employed to assess the value of books have nothing to do with the book trade? It's up to you, entirely up to you. But you must either take my word, or we'll forget the whole thing.'

So it seemed that I had to choose between what my solicitor wanted and what Stamford Tewk wanted, and I soon realised that there could be no choice, whatever the risks. I asked, ‘Can I at least see my quarters, then?' Fordie smiled and led me up the stairs to the small bedroom overlooking the road, across the corridor from his. Every wall was covered with books, most of them eighteenth century. Even the sides of the staircase were solid with obscure titles. On the way back down I stopped before the safe set into the wall.

‘Yes,' Fordie said brushing past me, ‘that's where I keep the stuff. Fordie's gold, they call it. Now let's go and talk theology, to make sure you're qualified for this job.'

*   *   *

So it was that, after listening three times to my solicitor's exasperated warnings about the reckless folly of the course of action on which I was embarking (he had evidently begun to wonder if I was truly my father's son) I sold the house, and gave the better part of the proceeds to Fordie, who then made himself scarce for a day or two. When he returned he gave me a chequebook for an account called Tewk Bookshop, which had two printed signatories, namely myself and him. The solicitor had looked carefully over the new will Fordie had made out, which stipulated that in the event of his death all the assets and liabilities of his business passed to me in their entirety, but without specifying them. So there we were.

I used the car to carry my own books over to Richmond, then I sold it. My whiplash injury had stopped bothering me so much over the previous six months, though it's true that I'd learnt to avoid any sudden movement or exertion. But the whole palaver of moving brought it on again, and when I was finally settled at the shop the first thing I did was to go to my room, rig myself up and lie down. Fordie came to take a whimsical look at me, supine on my new bed. He offered me a glass of wine, which I refused. I had learnt in any case not to try to match him glass for glass. He asked what I was doing and I explained about the
TENS
, then he went downstairs again. A few minutes later he came back up, brandishing a book. He read the passage out to me, a little gleefully I thought, given my discomfort:

‘
I advised one who had been troubled many years with a stubborn paralytic disorder, to try a new remedy. Accordingly she was electrified, and found immediate help.
John Wesley's journal, Sat 20th, 1753. Here's the machine he had made for himself,' he said, as he sat down on the bed and showed me an old sepia frontispiece with a picture of Wesley's electrical device. ‘Yours is a lot neater, but you are shamming aren't you, Bayliss? All this is nothing but eighteenth-century research disguised as pathology.' He left the book with me and I started reading it as I lay there. It seemed that Wesley was in the habit of prescribing the use of electricity for stomach pains and angina. The current flowed like the Holy Spirit, according to him, and often removed all diseased obstacles in its path. It was an aspect of the healing portion of creation. He even used it on some of the troubled young women who made the pilgrimage to see him. Wesley had his own recharging box then, just as I did.

Fordie's arrangements with regard to food were curious: he seemed to eat nothing but eggs. I asked him about this, and it transpired that he had shopped for some years at the supermarket a quarter of a mile down the road, but then one day he noticed that everything had been rearranged. Though irritated, he made the effort to reorient himself and once more memorised the positioning of all the items he needed. Then, a week later, everything was moved again. He took the matter up with the management, who were finally driven by Fordie's relentless questioning into admitting that the company's retail psychologist advised on these moves, which were due to continue, and which were said to increase overall sales.

‘Retail psychologist,' Fordie said with wonder, shaking his head at the very fact of it. Anyway, that had been enough as far as he was concerned, and he had decided to trim his requirements, so he made arrangements with a local store to supply his newly simplified needs. Now a delivery arrived once a week: fourteen bottles of dry white wine, five boxes of eggs, a few loaves and some salad. And that was his diet. He boiled four eggs close to hardness every morning, until the yolk had the texture of friable yellow soil. One he ate warm with toast for breakfast. Two he ate with a tomato and a few sprigs of lettuce for lunch, and one he would have for his dinner. He had a whole repertoire of exotic things he might do with that one. White wine accompanied all these meals except breakfast. Once a week he might venture out, and then he would eat anything, as long as it had no egg in it. So, vegetarian that I was, I simply joined in. Fordie merely doubled his previous order.

Letters arrived all the time inviting him to take part in interviews regarding his Soho past. One arrived from a graduate student asking for the opportunity to talk to him about English surrealism.

‘English surrealism,' he growled, throwing the letter on to the table. ‘He might as well write a thesis on English bullfighting.'

‘Wasn't there any, then?' I asked.

‘Oh, it was in the air when I was a young man, of course. There were even those of my circle who wrote what I believe was called surrealist verse. It was tedious enough then, and I'd have thought it entirely unreadable now, though I suppose people will go to the most extraordinary lengths to get themselves called doctor. I can't help thinking that anything based on relentless novelty is tedious. The random and disconnected is only shocking for about two minutes, then it becomes completely predictable. It's the battle between intellectual control and disorder that makes for interesting writing – or interesting anything else, if it comes to that. It seemed terribly exotic, of course, Rimbaud's systematic derangement of the senses. I suppose drugs seemed terribly exotic too, though we had to make do with booze on the whole. Not quite so exotic, though I don't doubt we managed to be every bit as tiresome as most highly intoxicated people are.

‘Outside Fortnum & Mason, on a little wooden box on the Piccadilly pavement, an old fellow sits playing the harmonica. He's been there day in and day out for the last thirty years, blowing and sucking and sucking and blowing. And he's never been known to master a single tune. Every so often you might catch a glimmer or a fragment of something recognisable – “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”, or “Once in Royal David's City”, but never for more than three or four notes, then he's off again, howling away at his discords. He actually has a number of different mouth organs, so that he can shift the key of these tuneless drones, for variety's sake I suppose. Witty slogans are chalked on a board:
All Music Half-Price Today
and
Quiet Please, Concert in Progress.
He keeps a hat in front of him which always appears to have three coins in it. Never two and never four.

‘He strikes me as a living disproof of those devotees of the random who used to proclaim that an infinite number of monkeys left to themselves with typewriters would one day produce the collected works of William Shakespeare. What they would produce of course would be an infinite amount of gibberish. Issue them all with a harmonica apiece and you would probably bring about the collapse of the universe. The deafness of the gods. Oblivion.

‘Now, give me again that definition of final impenitence.' I was as reluctant to talk Catholic theology with Fordie as he was to memorialise Soho with me, but he simply wouldn't let me escape.

*   *   *

Thus did I settle down to life with Stamford Tewk: the endless conversations, the boiled eggs, the Chablis seven days a week. I even started to put on weight. Fordie's diet might have been eccentric, but it was considerably more regular than what I'd grown used to in Tooting. So, at his insistence, I started to walk up to Richmond Park each morning when the weather permitted. I had to bring back with me a clutch of fallen leaves and we would match them up against the hand-coloured illustrations in his copy of
The Botanist.

I even took to walking there sometimes in the early evening. My back had stopped giving me so much trouble. I might not have to use my
TENS
for a week at a time. This particular day it took me about twenty minutes to reach Pembroke Lodge. It was the beginning of autumn and I stood facing west. The air between me and the horizon was soaked through by what was left of the sun's rays. The space about my head felt suddenly saturated with light. Down from where I sat I could still see antlered roots torn up by the Great Storm, and one or two charred corpses of trees, fingered by lightning. An occasional wood pigeon crashed out of the leaves; grey squirrels sprinted and posed; crow's claws skirred over the flora's debris. I picked up a leaf from the ones scattered about my feet. A fig like an outstretched hand beseeching from the anorexic stem of its wrist. Another one: the dead leaf of a smoke tree mottled into a small apocalypse of colour, like the carapace of a sinister tropical beetle. There was also a grape vine, parching into the shape of a drying estuary, its veins dehydrating swiftly into sand and sere. Pelham's contemporary Christopher Smart made out the markings of the Hebrew alphabet in the barks of trees.
Aleph
and
zayin
and
lamed
and
taw,
etched there as a sacred lectionary. But then for him the blown spikes of the cornfield spelt out the Tetragrammaton every time the weather grew salty.

Then the children arrived, shouting, followed by a woman with a mobile phone pressed into her cheek. She laughed into it loudly and continuously. I stood up and started walking back home to Richmond. Home. I started to smile to myself. For over two months I'd hardly even thought about the Chilford papers, since it had become evident that Fordie would show them to me when he chose and not a moment sooner, presumably at the same time that he would begin to teach me the business. I had the curious feeling I was very nearly happy, except for the memories of Alice that still lamed my soul. She had taken precisely what she wanted and then gone. She had used one brief unkindness by me to walk away for ever. If I ever found my mind moving in the direction of acknowledging that she had only done to me exactly what I had done to every other woman I'd ever been with, namely stayed around until it no longer suited her, I then had to remind myself that I had paid for everything, cooked everything, driven everywhere, cleaned everything up. Alice had had an easy time of it with me, for all the thanks I'd received. Resentment. Was that resentment? Beware resentment, Fordie always said. Still, apart from Alice's white snake still coiled inside me, I was almost at peace. When I arrived back, I let myself into the shop, and laid the leaves carefully on the table, and it was not until a few moments later that I found Fordie lying at the bottom of the stairs.

The Combination

Combination: The action of combining or joining two or more separate things into a whole.

Oxford English Dictionary

 

I bent over him and gently brushed his face with my hand.

‘I'll get an ambulance,' I said, but with what strength he still had, he held my arm and pulled me down towards him. My face was against his as he whispered his urgent words. I caught the mild reek of his wine breath.

‘No, Fordie, I can't do that. Listen…' But the pull on my arm represented an effort too supreme to ignore, I knew that. So I bent down as requested and heard his confession, and when he had finished I made the sign of the cross over him and said softly, ‘
Ego te absolvo in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. Amen.
' And even then, as I tried to pull away to call that ambulance, he held me and with another effort that cost him too much, he said, ‘Six six, four three, one two.' I stared at him, not understanding, and I could see the life already ebbing out of his features. He said it again, each word separated by a void of his breath. ‘Six … six … four … three … one … two.' And still not understanding, in my confusion I went to the table and wrote the numbers down on a piece of paper. I brought it back to where he lay on the floor and held it above his face. He managed to nod and close his eyes then. Finally I called the ambulance. Fordie died that night in the hospital. He had suffered a massive heart attack.

Back in the shop in the early hours of the morning, I realised as I stared blankly at that number amidst the scattered leaves I had dumped on the table that it was the combination to his safe.