by Mervyn Peake
‘I’ve brought his Lordship for you to see,’ shouted Nannie Slagg, a little less nervously.
‘Oh, you have, have you? You’ve brought his lordship. So you want to come in, do you? With his lordship.’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘What for? What have you brought him to me for?’
‘For you to see, if you please, my lady,’ replied Nannie Slagg. ‘He’s had his bath.’
Lady Groan relaxed still further into the pillows. ‘Oh, you mean the new one, do you?’ she muttered.
‘Can I come in?’ cried Nannie Slagg.
‘Hurry up then! Hurry up then! Stop scratching at my door. What are you waiting for?’
A rattling at the door handle froze the birds along the iron bed-rail and as the door opened they were all at once in the air, and were forcing their way, one after another through the bitter leaves of the small window.
A GOLD RING FOR TITUS
Nannie Slagg entered, bearing in her arms the heir to the miles of rambling stone and mortar; to the Tower of Flints and the stagnant moat; to the angular mountains and the lime-green river where twelve years later he would be angling for the hideous fishes of his inheritance.
She carried the child towards the bed and turned the little face to the mother, who gazed right through it and said:
‘Where’s that doctor? Where’s Prunesquallor? Put the child down and open the door.’
Mrs Slagg obeyed, and as her back was turned Lady Groan bent forward and peered at the child. The little eyes were glazed with sleep and the candlelight played upon the bald head, moulding the structure of the skull with shifting shade.
‘H’m,’ said Lady Groan, ‘what d’you want me to do with him?’
Nannie Slagg, who was very grey and old, with red rims around her eyes and whose intelligence was limited, gazed vacantly at her ladyship.
‘He’s had his bath,’ she said. ‘He’s just had his bath, bless his little lordship’s heart.’
‘What about it?’ said Lady Groan.
The old nurse picked the baby up dexterously and began to rock him gently by way of an answer.
‘Is Prunesquallor there?’ repeated Lady Groan.
‘Down,’ whispered Nannie, pointing a little wrinkled finger at the floor, ‘d-downstairs: oh yes, I think he is still downstairs taking punch in the Coldroom. Oh dear, yes, bless the little thing.’
Her last remark presumably referred to Titus and not to Doctor Prunesquallor. Lady Groan raised herself in bed and looking fiercely at the open door, bellowed in the deepest and loudest voice, ‘SQUALLOR!’
The word echoed along the corridors and down the stairs, and creeping under the door and along the black rug in the Coldroom, just managed, after climbing the doctor’s body, to find its way into both his ears simultaneously, in a peremptory if modified condition. Modified though it was, it brought Doctor Prunesquallor to his feet at once. His fish eyes swam all round his glasses before finishing at the top, where they gave him an expression of fantastic martyrdom. Running his long, exquisitely formed fingers through his mop of grey hair, he drained his glass of punch at a draught and started for the door, flicking small globules of the drink from his waistcoat.
Before he had reached her room he had begun a rehearsal of the conversation he expected, his insufferable laughter punctuating every other sentence whatever its gist.
‘My lady,’ he said, when he had reached her door and was showing the Countess and Mrs Slagg nothing except his head around the door-post in a decapitated manner, before entering. ‘My lady, ha, ha, he he. I heard your voice downstairs as I er – was –’
‘Tippling,’ said Lady Groan.
‘Ha, ha – how very right you are, how very very right you are, ha, ha, ha, he, as I was, as you so graphically put it, ha, ha, tippling. Down it came, ha, ha – down it came.’
‘What came?’ interrupted the Countess loudly.
‘Your voice,’ said Prunesquallor, raising his right hand and deliberately placing the tips of his thumb and little finger together, ‘your voice located me in the Coldroom. Oh yes, it did!’
The Countess stared at him heavily and then dug her elbows into the pillow.
Mrs Slagg had rocked the baby to sleep.
Doctor Prunesquallor was running a long tapering forefinger up and down a stalactite of wax and smiling horribly.
‘I called you’, said the Countess, ‘to tell you, Prunesquallor, that tomorrow I get up.’
‘Oh, he, ha, ha, oh ha, ha, my ladyship, oh, ha, ha, my ladyship – tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow,’ said the Countess, ‘why not?’
‘Professionally speaking –’ began Doctor Prunesquallor.
‘Why not?’ repeated the Countess interrupting him.
‘Ha, ha, most abnormal, most unusual, ha, ha, ha, most unique, so very soon.’
‘So you would docket me, would you, Prunesquallor? I thought you would; I guessed it. I get up tomorrow – tomorrow at dawn.’
Doctor Prunesquallor shrugged his narrow shoulders and raised his eyes. Then placing the tips of his fingers together and addressing the dark ceiling above him, ‘I advise, but never order,’ he said, in a tone which implied that he could have done any amount of ordering had he thought it necessary. ‘Ha ha, ha, oh no! I only advise.’
‘Rubbish,’ said the Countess.
‘I do not think so,’ replied Prunesquallor, still gazing upwards. ‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh no! not at all.’ As he finished speaking his eyes for a second travelled downwards at great speed and took in the image of the Countess in bed and then even more rapidly swam up the glasses. What he had seen disquieted him, for he had found in her expression such a concentration of distaste that as he deflected his gaze away from her he found that his feet were moving backwards one after the other and that he was at the door before he knew that he had decided what to do. Bowing quickly he withdrew his body from the bedroom.
‘Isn’t he sweet, oh isn’t he the sweetest drop of sugar that ever was?’ said Mrs Slagg.
‘Who?’ shouted the Countess so loudly that a string of tallow wavered in the shifting light.
The baby awoke at the sound and moaned, and Nannie Slagg retreated.
‘His little lordship,’ she whimpered weakly, ‘his pretty little lordship.’
‘Slagg,’ said the Countess, ‘go away! I would like to see the boy when he is six. Find a wet nurse from the Outer Dwellings. Make him green dresses from the velvet curtains. Take this gold ring of mine. Fix a chain to it. Let him wear it around his wry little neck. Call him Titus. Go away and leave the door six inches open.’
The Countess put her hand under the pillow and drew forth a small reed, placed it in her vast mouth and gave it breath. Two long sweet notes sang out through the dark air. At the sound, Mrs Slagg, grabbing the gold ring from the bedclothes, where the Countess had thrown it, hurried as fast as her old legs could carry her from the room as though a werewolf were at her heels. Lady Groan was leaning forward in bed, her eyes were like a child’s: wide, sweet and excited. They were fixed upon the door. Her hands were gripping the edges of her pillow. She became rigid.
In the distance, a vibration was becoming louder and louder until the volume seemed to have filled the chamber itself, when suddenly there slid through the narrow opening of the door and moved into the fumid atmosphere of the room an undulation of whiteness, so that, within a breath, there was no shadow in all the room that was not blanched with cats.
SEPULCHRAVE
Every morning of the year, between the hours of nine and ten, he may be found, seated in the Stone Hall, it is there, at the long table that he takes his breakfast. The table is raised upon a dais, and from where he sits he can gaze down the length of the grey refectory. On either side and running the entire length, great pillars prop the painted ceiling where cherubs pursue each other across a waste of flaking sky. There must be about a thousand of them all told, interweaving among the clouds, their fat limbs for ever on the move and yet never moving, for they are imperfectly artic
ulated. The colours, once garish, have faded and peeled away and the ceiling is now a very subtle shade of grey and lichen green, old rose and silver.
Lord Sepulchrave may have noticed the cherubs long ago. Probably when a child he had attempted more than once to count them, as his father had done, and as young Titus in his turn will try to do; but however that might be, Lord Groan had not cast up his eyes to the old welkin for many years. Nor did he ever stare about him now. How could he love this place? He was a part of it. He could not imagine a world outside it; and the idea of loving Gormenghast would have shocked him. To have asked him of his feelings for his hereditary home would be like asking a man what his feelings were towards his own hand or his own throat. But his lordship remembered the cherubs in the ceiling. His great grandfather had painted them with the help of an enthusiastic servant who had fallen seventy feet from the scaffolding and had been killed instantly. But it seemed that Lord Sepulchrave found his only interest in these days among the volumes in his library and in a knob of jade on his silver rod, which he would scrutinize for hours on end.
Arriving, as was his consistent habit, at exactly nine o’clock every morning, he would enter the long hall and move with a most melancholy air between rows of long tables, where servants of every grade would be awaiting him, standing at their places, their heads bowed.
Mounting the dais he would move around to the far side of the table where hung a heavy brass bell. He would strike it. The servants sitting down at once, would begin their meal of bread, rice wine and cake.
Lord Groan’s menu was otherwise. As he sat, this morning, in his highbacked chair he saw before him – through a haze of melancholia that filmed his brain and sickened his heart, robbing it of power and his limbs of health – he saw before him a snow-white tablecloth. It was set for two. The silver shone and the napkins were folded into the shapes of peacocks and were perched decoratively on the two plates. There was a delicious scent of bread, sweet and wholesome. There were eggs painted in gay colours, toast piled up pagoda-wise, tier upon tier and each as frail as a dead leaf; and fish with their tails in their mouths lay coiled in sea-blue saucers. There was coffee in an urn shaped like a lion, the spout protruding from that animal’s silver jaws. There were all varieties of coloured fruits that looked strangely tropical in that dark hall. There were honeys and jams, jellies, nuts and spices and the ancestral breakfast plate was spread out to the greatest advantage amid the golden cutlery of the Groans. In the centre of the table was a small tin bowl of dandelions and nettles.
Lord Sepulchrave sat silently. He did not seem to notice the delicacies spread before him, nor when for a moment or two at a time his head was raised, did he appear to see the long cold dining-hall nor the servants at their tables. To his right, at the adjacent corner of the board, was arranged the cutlery and earthenware crockery that implied the imminent arrival of his lordship’s breakfast companion. Lord Groan, his eyes upon the jade knob of the rod which he was twisting slowly upon its ferrule, again rang the brass bell and a door opened in the wall behind him. Sourdust entered with great books under his arm. He was arrayed in crimson sacking. His beard was knotted and the hairs that composed it were black and white. His face was very lined, as though it had been made of brown paper that had been crunched by some savage hand before being hastily smoothed out and spread over the tissues. His eyes were deep-set and almost lost in the shadows cast by his fine brow, which for all its wrinkles, retained a sweeping breadth of bone.
The old man seated himself at the end of the table, and stacked the four volumes beside a porcelain decanter, and raising his sunken eyes to Lord Groan, murmured these words in a weak and shaking voice and yet with a certain dignity as though it were not simply a case of having to get through the ritual, but that it was now, as always, well worth getting through.
‘I, Sourdust, lord of the library, personal adviser to your lordship, nonagenarian, and student of the Groan lore, proffer to your lordship the salutations of a dark morning, robed as I am in rags, student as I am of the tomes, and nonagenarian as I happen to be in the matter of years.’
This was delivered in one breath and then he coughed unpleasantly several times, his hand at his chest.
Lord Groan propped his chin on the knuckles of his hands that were cupping the jade knob. His face was very long and was olive coloured. The eyes were large, and of an eloquence, withdrawn. His nostrils were mobile and sensitive. His mouth, a narrow line. On his head was the iron crown of the Groans that fastens with a strap under the chin. It had four prongs that were shaped like arrow heads. Between these barbs small chains hung in loops. The prerogative of precedent on his side, he was wrapped in his dark grey dressing-gown.
He did not seem to have heard Sourdust’s salutations, but focusing his eyes for the first time upon the table, he broke a corner off a piece of toast, and placed it mechanically in his mouth. This he muzzled in his cheek for the major part of the meal. The fish became cold on the plate. Sourdust had helped himself to one of them, a slice of water-melon and a fire-green egg, but all else lost its freshness or its heat upon the ritualistic table.
Below in the long basement of the hall the clattering of the knives had ceased. The rice wine had been passed up and down the table, and the jugs were empty. They were waiting for the sign to go about their duties.
Sourdust, having wiped his old mouth with the napkin, turned his eyes to his lordship, who was now leaning back in the chair and sipping at a glass of black tea, his eyes unfocused as usual. The Librarian was watching the left eyebrow of his lordship. It was twenty-one minutes to ten by the clock at the far end of the hall. Lord Groan appeared to be looking through this clock. Three-quarters of a minute went by, it was ten seconds – five seconds – three seconds – one second – to twenty to ten. It was twenty minutes to ten. Lord Groan’s left eyebrow rose up his forehead mechanically and stayed suspended beneath three wrinkles. Then it slowly lowered itself. At the movement, Sourdust arose and stamped upon the ground with an old thin leg. The crimson sacking about his body shook as he did so and his beard of black and white knots swung madly to and fro.
The tables were at once emptied and within half a minute the last of the retainers had vanished from the hall, and the servants’ door at the far end had been closed and bolted.
Sourdust re-seated himself, panting a little and coughing in an ugly way. Then he leaned across the table and scratched the white cloth in front of Lord Groan with a fork.
His lordship turned his black and liquid eyes towards the old librarian and adviser. ‘Well?’ he said, in a far-away voice, ‘what is it, Sourdust?’
‘It is the ninth day of the month,’ said Sourdust.
‘Ah,’ said his lordship.
There was a period of silence, Sourdust making use of the interim by re-knotting several tassels of his beard.
‘The ninth,’ repeated his lordship.
‘The ninth,’ muttered Sourdust.
‘A heavy day,’ mused his lordship, ‘very heavy.’
Sourdust, bending his deep-set eyes upon his master, echoed him: ‘A heavy day, the ninth … always a heavy day.’
A great tear rolled down Sourdust’s cheek threading its way over the crumpled surface. The eyes were too deeply set in their sockets of shadow to be seen. By not so much as the faintest sign or movement had Sourdust suggested that he was in a state of emotional stress. Nor was he, ever, save that at moments of reflection upon matters connected with the traditions of the Castle, it so happened that great tears emerged from the shadows beneath his brow. He fingered the great tomes beside his plate. His lordship, as though making the resolve after long deliberation, leaned forward, placed his rod on the table and adjusted his iron crown. Then, supporting his long olive chin with his hands, he turned his head to the old man: ‘Proceed,’ he whispered.
Sourdust gathered the sacking about himself in a quick shaky way, and getting to his feet moved round to the back of his own chair which he pushed a few inches closer to the ta
ble, and squeezing between the table and the chair he re-seated himself carefully and was apparently more comfortable than before. Then with great deliberation, bending his corrugated brow upon each in turn he pushed the varied assortment of dishes, cruets, glasses, cutlery and by now tepid delicacies away from before him, clearing a semi-circle of white cloth. Only then did he remove the three tomes from beside his elbow. He opened them one after the other by balancing them carefully on their vellum spines and allowing them to break open at pages indicated by embroidered book-markers.
The left hand pages were headed with the date and in the first of the three books this was followed by a list of the activities to be performed hour by hour during the day by his lordship. The exact times; the garments to be worn for each occasion and the symbolic gestures to be used. Diagrams facing the left hand page gave particulars of the routes by which his lordship should approach the various scenes of operation. The diagrams were hand tinted.
The second tome was full of blank pages and was entirely symbolic, while the third was a mass of cross references. If, for instance, his lordship, Sepulchrave, the present Earl of Groan, had been three inches shorter, the costumes, gestures and even the routes would have differed from the ones described in the first tome, and from the enormous library, another volume would have had to have been chosen which would have applied. Had he been of a fair skin, or had he been heavier than he was, had his eyes been green, blue or brown instead of black, then, automatically another set of archaic regulations would have appeared this morning on the breakfast table. This complex system was understood in its entirety only by Sourdust – the technicalities demanding the devotion of a lifetime, though the sacred spirit of tradition implied by the daily manifestations was understood by all.
For the next twenty minutes Sourdust instructed his lordship in the less obvious details of the day’s work that lay ahead, in a high cracked old voice, the cross-hatching of the skin at the corners of his mouth twitching between the sentences. His lordship nodded silently. Occasionally the routes marked down for the ‘ninth’ in the diagrams of the first tome are obsolete, as for instance, where at 2.37 in the afternoon Lord Groan was to have moved down the iron stairway in the grey vestibule that led to the pool of carp. That stairway had been warped and twisted out of shape seventy years ago when the vestibule had been razed to the ground in the great fire. An alternative route had to be planned. A plan approaching as far as possible to the spirit of the original conception, and taking the same amount of time. Sourdust scoured the new route shakily on the tablecloth with the point of a fork. His lordship nodded.