The Lightning Cage by Alan Wall

none of the ‘sudden fits of insanity’ noted by others. I had hoped to distil the essence of this phenomenon from the superstitious dross which has surrounded it. I shall not tire the patience of other members with some of the cant of darker and earlier ages to which I have been treated on this subject.
    Pelham, despite his considerable gifts, is evidently in a state of intellectual incompetence, exacerbated by scriptural and theological obsession. It is hard to envisage him ever making a full enough recovery to take much part in life, public or otherwise, in any rewarding manner.
    THIS PAPER TO BE CONTINUED
    Pelham read this document twice and then he went to his room, where he collected some of the money that he still had in his possession, despite the bribes he had given weekly to the keepers at the Chelsea Asylum, and walked out of the house and the grounds. There were no instructions to say that he should not do this, but it was the first time that he had, all the same. He walked up the road to where Strawberry Hill was being Gothicised, and he slipped in unnoticed through the gate. Walpole had already finished feeding his birds and squirrels for that day and had set out for the House of Commons. And Pelham stared about him at what Lord Chilford once described as ‘that fop’s gimcrack castle, spirited out of the ghost of a past that never even existed in the first place’. With his dusty clothes and the buttons missing from his waistcoat, Pelham had about him the look of a cultivated foreman, and he simply stepped through the open door. The library was being completed. The famous pierced Gothic arches of the bookshelves had not yet received any volumes, but the borrowings from Westminster Abbey and old St Paul’s were obvious enough to Pelham’s eye and he saw what was going on immediately, with his first brief glance at the fake groinings above him. Gothic had been turned into a pretty confection for some fellow’s private amusement. It was altogether too delicate, with its traceries and fretwork, and nothing else grand enough to offset the delicacy. An environment for priests, but without any priests to put inside it, either to consecrate or shrive. It lacked the awesome proportions of belief. It was devoid of reverence or terror. As he was leaving, he said to a workman, ‘Don’t trust this building, it’s telling you lies.’ Both Ruskin and Pugin were to say more or less the same thing when they arrived for their own visits a century later.
    The Thames had always been a living thing for Pelham, from its source somewhere in Gloucestershire, not far from where he had been born, all the way to Gravesend, where, as he once wrote, fresh water and salt engaged in tidal dalliance, and the river opened its mouth on the sea, like a long, coiling fish. He watched its changing moods, and the joy or displeasure with which it allowed the boats to ride its back, or froze to virgin linen for ice-fairs. Now he walked along the towpath, noting the occasional didapper and asking the good Lord to spare him the cup he sensed was about to be offered.
    And offered it was, at the first gin shop he came to in Teddington. Without hesitation he took it. The liquor burned away his guilt and increased his anger. That was to begin with, then he took more, until his anger had disappeared too, along with his guilt, until his mind became one with the gin and his thoughts translucent fish that moved about inside the sea of it, luminous spirits silently swerving this way then that inside the great cold aquarium of intoxication. He slept the first night on a pallet in the back of a tavern, and the second in a ditch beside the river, where he was terrified by a gang of lobcocks braying at some little local victory or outrage.
    (Pelham’s appetite for gin is at least worth a footnote here. It was not a gentleman’s drink, but then Pelham was not really a gentleman. And even if he had been, the