The Lightning Cage Read Online Free Page A

opium.
    *   *   *
    As I stared at the site where the villa once stood, and where now there was another unimpeachably geometric building, a block of flats, I suddenly knew that I would never go back to Leeds, and never return to my thesis. In truth, it had already ended six months before, but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to admit it. Maybe I’d simply started on the wrong topic. I had certainly come to suspect that the unweeded data of the life and work of this man would resist rationalisation, and there was also perhaps something about him that I did not wish to get any closer to. There was no space in my mind where I could easily house him or the anarchy of his torments. I knew that my engagement with Mr Richard Pelham was now finished, for ever I thought at the time. But I was wrong.

Supply and Demand
    O! may thy Virtue guard thee through the Roads
    Of Drury’s mazy Courts and dark Abodes,
    The Harlots’ guileful Paths, who nightly stand,
    Where Catherine-street descends into the Strand.
    RICHARD PELHAM , ‘Temptation’
    Â 
    Gradually I edged up the speed of the Rover. It accelerated a little crossly, with a bad grace, but I kept pushing. Then one day I drove off down the A303 to Stonehenge, and I had my foot flat down for much of the way. When I arrived back and put the car in my father’s garage, it wouldn’t shut up. Its fan kept wheezing and there were angry scalding drips splashing down from the radiator. The car was breathing heavily in indignation at me, and for a moment I had the distinct and unsettling notion that some part of my father’s identity had been incorporated into its rubber and steel. I certainly knew I was being told off, and that night I informed my mother I was going to look for a job, so I could buy my own car. I also informed her that I’d soon be taking a flat of my own. She looked at me and smiled serenely. We both knew what she wasn’t saying: ‘Priests don’t have to go looking for flats. They live in big houses next to churches, and the car’s provided at the Lord’s discretion.’
    â€˜You’re definitely not going back to Leeds?’
    â€˜No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’
    â€˜Something else you’ve started and not finished then, Chris.’
    I remember the late Richard Nixon once announcing to the nation, in that tone of hunched sincerity he had made his own, ‘I am not a quitter.’ I am, I suppose. I had quit on my training for the priesthood and now I was quitting on my thesis too. My mother was not slow in pointing out the connection. On both occasions, I felt nothing but a mild sense of exhilaration and relief. Perhaps freedom really did come from renouncing commitments, even though one wasn’t permitted to mention the fact. I had also quit on Jane some time before, but I’ll have to come back to that. I can’t face talking about her just yet.
    Anyway, I started supply teaching in schools around Streatham. As any teacher will tell you, you can always get supply work, and it doesn’t take long to discover why. You’re the maverick figure in the staff room, the Johnny-come-lately who’ll soon be gone. I watched the faces of the teachers who’d made a lifetime’s job of it. It was visible in their expressions how their early enthusiasm (for I was sure that most had had some) was changing into a merely competent professionalism, and how even that in some of the older ones was now sliding into an increasing weariness of spirit, a melancholy resignation imprisoned in a timetable. I started to pick up something of the same gloomy fatalism myself, though I had only been at it for a few months. The sound of a crowd of children bestirring themselves into mayhem, even from a long way off, caused bad, black weather to gather inside my mind. I never disliked them, don’t get me wrong. One or two I would cheerfully have killed, like any other