by Mervyn Peake
The doorknob moved and then the door began to open and Flay’s physical opposite began to appear around the opening. For some time, so it seemed to Flay, taut areas of cloth evolved in a great arc and then at last above them a head around the panels and the eyes embedded in that head concentrated their gaze upon Mr Flay.
Flay stiffened – if it is possible for something already as stiff as a piece of teak to stiffen still further – and he lowered his head to the level of his clavicles and brought his shoulders up like a vulture. His arms were absolutely straight from the high shoulders to where the fists were clenched in his trouser pockets.
Swelter, as soon as he saw who it was, stopped dead, and across his face little billows of flesh ran swiftly here and there until, as though they had determined to adhere to the same impulse, they swept up into both oceans of soft cheek, leaving between them a vacuum, a gaping segment like a slice cut from a melon. It was horrible. It was as though nature had lost control. As though the smile, as a concept, as a manifestation of pleasure, had been a mistake, for here on the face of Swelter the idea had been abused.
A voice came out of the face: ‘Well, well, well,’ it said, ‘may I be boiled to a frazzle if it isn’t Mr Flee. The one and only Flee. Well, well, well. Here before me in the Cool Room. Dived through the keyhole, I do believe. Oh, my adorable lights and liver, if it isn’t the Flee itself.’
The line of Mr Flay’s mouth, always thin and hard, became even thinner as though scored with a needle. His eyes looked up and down the white mountain, crowned with its snowy, high cloth hat of office, for even the slovenly Swelter had dressed himself up for the occasion.
Although Mr Flay had avoided the cook whenever possible, an occasional accidental meeting such as today’s was unavoidable, and from their chance meetings in the past Mr Flay had learned that the huge house of flesh before him, whatever its faults, had certainly a gift for sarcasm beyond the limits of his own taciturn nature. It had therefore been Mr Flay’s practice, whenever possible, to ignore the chef as one ignores a cesspool by the side of a road, and although his pride was wounded by Swelter’s mis-pronunciation of his name and the reference to his thinness, Flay held his spiky passions in control, merely striding to the doorway after his examination of the other’s bulk and spitting out of the bay window as though to clear his whole system of something noxious. Silent though he had learned by experience to be, each galling word from Swelter did not fail to add to the growing core of hatred that burned beneath his ribs.
Swelter, as Mr Flay spat, had leaned back in his traces as though in mock alarm, his head folded back on his shoulders, and with an expression of comic concentration, had gazed alternately at Mr Flay and then out of the window several times. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said in his most provoking voice that seemed to seep out of dough – ‘well, well, well – your accomplishments will never end. Baste me! Never. One lives and learns. By the little eel I skinned last Friday night, one lives and one learns.’ Wheeling round he presented his back to Mr Flay and bellowed, ‘Advance and make it sprightly! Advance the triumvirate, the little creatures who have wound themselves around my heart. Advance and be recognized.’
Into the room filed three boys of about twelve years of age. They each carried a large tray stacked with delicacies.
‘Mr Flee, I will introduce you,’ said Swelter, as the boys approached, glueing their frightened eyes on their precarious cargoes. ‘Mr Flee – Master Springers – Master Springers – Mr Flee. Mr Flee – Master Wrattle, Master Wrattle – Mr Flee. Mr Flee – Master Spurter, Master Spurter – Mr Flee. Flee – Springers – Flee – Wrattle – Flee – Spurter – Flee!’
This was brought out with such a mixture of eloquence and impertinece that it was too much for Mr Flay. That he, the first servant of Gormenghast – Lord Sepulchrave’s confidant – should be introduced to Swelter’s ten-a-penny kitchen boys was trying him too hard, and as he suddenly strode past the chef towards the door (for he was in any event due back with his lordship), he pulled the chain over his head and slashed the heavy brass links across the face of his taunter. Before Swelter had recovered, Mr Flay was well on his way along the passages. The chef’s face had suffered a transformation. All the vast media of his head became, as clay becomes under the hand of the modeller, bent to the externalization of a passion. Upon it, written in letters of pulp, was spelt the word revenge. The eyes had almost instantly ceased to blaze and had become like little pieces of glass.
The three boys had spread the delicacies upon the table, and, leaving in the centre the simple christening bowl, they now cowered in the bay window, longing in their hearts to run, to run as they had never run before, out into the sunshine and across the lawns and over streams and fields until they were far, far away from the white presence with the hectic red marks of the chain-links across its face.
The chef, with his hatred so riveted upon the person of Flay, had forgotten them and did not vent his spleen upon them. His was not the hatred that rises suddenly like a storm and as suddenly abates. It was, once the initial shock of anger and pain was over, a calculated thing that grew in a bloodless way. The fact that three minions had seen their dreaded overlord suffer an indignity was nothing to Swelter at this moment, for he could see the situation in proportion and in it these children had no part.
Without a word he walked to the centre of the room. His fat hands rearranged a few of the dishes nimbly upon the table. Then he advanced to a mirror that hung above a vase of flowers and examined his wounds critically. They hurt him. Catching sight of the three boys as he shifted his head in order to peer again more closely at himself, for he was only able to see portions of his face at one and the same time, he signalled to them to be gone. He followed shortly afterwards and made his way to his room above the bakeries.
By this time the hour was practically at hand for the gathering and from their various apartments the persons concerned were sallying forth. Each one with his or her particular stride. His or her particular eyes, nose, mouth, hair, thoughts and feelings. Self-contained, carrying their whole selves with them as they moved, as a vessel that holds its own distinctive wine, bitter or sweet. These seven closed their doors behind them, terrifyingly themselves, as they set out for the Cool Room.
There were, in the Castle, two ladies, who, though very seldom encountered, were of the Groan blood, and so, when it came to a family ceremony such as this, were of course invited. They were their ladyships Cora and Clarice, sisters-in-law to Gertrude, sisters of Sepulchrave, and twins in their own right. They lived in a set of rooms in the southern wing and shared with each other an all-absorbing passion for brooding upon an irony of fate which decreed that they should have no say in the affairs of Gormenghast. These two along with the others were on their way to the Cool Room.
Tradition playing its remorseless part had forced Swelter and Flay to return to the Cool Room to await the first arrival, but luckily someone was there before them – Sourdust, in his sacking garment. He stood behind the table, his book open before him. In front of him the bowl of water, around which the examples of Swelter’s art sat, perched on golden salvers and goblets that twinkled in the reflected sunlight.
Swelter, who had managed to conceal the welts on his face by an admixture of flour and white honey, took up his place to the left of the ancient librarian, over whom he towered as a galleon above a tooth of rock. Around his neck he also wore a ceremonial chain similar to that of Flay, who appeared a few moments later. He stalked across the room without glancing at the chef, and stood upon the other side of Sourdust, balancing from the artist’s point of view if not the rationalist’s, the components of the picture.
All was ready. The participants in the ceremony would be arriving one by one, the less important entering first, until the penultimate entrance of the Countess harbingered a necessary piece of walking furniture, Nannie Slagg, who would be carrying in her arms a shawl-full of destiny – the Future of the Blood Line. A tiny weight that was Gormenghast, a Groan of the stri
ct lineage – Titus, the Seventy-Seventh.
‘ASSEMBLAGE’
First to arrive was the outsider – the commoner – who through his service to the family was honoured by a certain artificial equality of status, liable at any moment to be undermined – Doctor Prunesquallor.
He entered fluttering his perfect hands, and, mincing to the table, rubbed them together at the level of his chin in a quick, animated way as his eyes travelled over the spread that lay before him.
‘My very dear Swelter, ha, ha, may I offer you my congratulations, ha, ha, as a doctor who knows something of stomachs, my dear Swelter, something indeed of stomachs? Not only of stomachs but of palates, of tongues, and of the membrane, my dear man, that covers the roof of the mouth, and not only of the membrane that covers the roof of the mouth but of the sensitized nerve endings that I can positively assure you are tingling, my dear and very excellent Swelter, at the very thought of coming into contact with these delicious-looking oddments that you’ve no doubt tossed off at an odd moment, ha, ha, very, very likely I should say, oh yes, very, very likely.’
Doctor Prunesquallor smiled and exhibited two brand new rows of gravestones between his lips, and darting his beautiful white hand forward with the little finger crooked to a right angle, he lifted a small emerald cake with a blob of cream atop of it, as neatly off the top of a plate of such trifles as though he were at home in his dissecting room and were removing some organ from a frog. But before he had got it to his mouth, a hissing note stopped him short. It came from Sourdust, and it caused the doctor to replace the green cake on the top of the pile even more swiftly than he had removed it. He had forgotten for the moment, or had pretended to forget, what a stickler for etiquette old Sourdust was. Until the Countess herself was in the room no eating could begin.
‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, very very right and proper Mr Sourdust, very right and proper indeed’, said the doctor, winking at Swelter. The magnified appearance of his eyes gave this familiarity a peculiar unpleasantness. Very, very right indeed. But that’s what this man Swelter does to one, with his irresistible little lumps of paradise – ha, ha, he makes one quite barbarian he does, don’t you Swelter? You barbarize one, ha, ha, don’t you? You positively barbarize one.’
Swelter, who was in no mood for this sort of badinage, and in any case preferred to hold the floor if there was to be any eloquence, merely gave a mirthless twitch to his mouth and continued to stare out of the window. Sourdust was running his finger along a line in his book which he was re-reading, and Flay was a wooden effigy.
Nothing, however, seemed to be able to keep the mercury out of Doctor Prunesquallor, and after looking quickly from face to face, he examined his fingernails, one by one, with a ridiculous interest; and then turning suddenly from his task as he completed the scrutiny of the tenth nail, he skipped to the window, a performance grotesquely incongruous in one of his years, and leaning in an over-elegant posture against the window frame, he made that peculiarly effeminate gesture of the left hand that he was so fond of, the placing of the tips of thumb and index finger together, and thus forming an O, while the remaining three fingers were strained back and curled into letter C’s of dwindling sizes. His left elbow, bent acutely, brought his hand about a foot away from him and on a level with the flower in his buttonhole. His narrow chest, like a black tube, for he was dressed in a cloth of death’s colour, gave forth a series of those irritating laughs that can only be symbolized by ‘ha, ha, ha,’ but whose pitch scraped at the inner wall of the skull.
‘Cedars,’ said Doctor Prunesquallor, squinting at the trees before him with his head tilted and his eyes half closed, ‘are excellent trees. Very, very excellent. I positively enjoy cedars, but do cedars positively enjoy me? Ha, ha – do they, my dear Mr Flay, do they? – or is this rather above you, my man, is my philosophy a trifle above you? For if I enjoy a cedar but a cedar does not, ha, ha, enjoy me, then surely I am at once in a position of compromise, being, as it were, ignored by the vegetable world, which would think twice, mark you, my dear fellow, would think twice about ignoring a cart load of mulch, ha, ha, or to put it in another way …’
But here Doctor Prunesquallor’s reflections were interrupted by the first of the family arrivals, the twin sisters, their ladyships Cora and Clarice. They opened the door very slowly and peered around it before advancing. It had been several months since they had ventured from their apartments and they were suspicious of everyone and of everything.
Doctor Prunesquallor advanced at once from the window. ‘Your ladyships will forgive me, ha, ha, the presumption of receiving you into what is, ha, ha, after all more your own room than mine, ha, ha, ha, but which is nevertheless, I have reason to suspect, a little strange to you if I may be so extraordinarily flagrant; so ludicrously indiscreet, in fact …’
‘It’s the doctor, my dear,’ the lady Cora whispered flatly to her twin sister, interrupting Prunesquallor.
Lady Clarice merely stared at the thin gentleman in question until anyone but the doctor would have turned and fled.
‘I know it is,’ she said at last. ‘What’s wrong with his eyes?’
‘He’s got some disease of course, I suppose. Didn’t you know?’ replied Lady Cora.
She and her sister were dressed in purple, with gold buckles at their throats by way of brooches, and another gold buckle each at the end of hatpins which they wore through their grey hair in order apparently to match their brooches. Their faces, identical to the point of indecency, were quite expressionless, as though they were the preliminary lay-outs for faces and were waiting for sentience to be injected.
‘What are you doing here?’ said Cora, staring remorselessly.
Doctor Prunesquallor bent forward towards her and showed her his teeth. Then he clasped his hands together. ‘I am privileged,’ he said, ‘very, very much so, oh yes, very, very much.’
‘Why?’ said Lady Clarice. Her voice was so perfect a replica of her sister’s as might lead one to suppose that her vocal cords had been snipped from the same line of gut in those obscure regions where such creatures are compounded.
The sisters were now standing, one on either side of the doctor, and they stared up at him with an emptiness of expression that caused him to turn his eyes hurriedly to the ceiling, for he had switched them from one to the other for respite from either, but had found no relief. The white ceiling by contrast teemed with interest and he kept his eyes on it.
‘Your ladyships,’ he said, ‘can it be that you are ignorant of the part I play in the social life of Gormenghast? I say the social life, but who, ha, ha, ha, who could gain say me if I boast that it is more than the social life, ha, ha, ha, and is, my very dear ladyships, positively the organic life of the castle that I foster, and control, ha, ha, in the sense that, trained as I undoubtedly am in the science of this, that, and the other, ha, ha, ha, in connection with the whole anomatical caboodle from head to foot, I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generations to the old – the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished – oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased. And this ceremony today, my very dear ladyships, is a result of my professional adroitness, ha, ha, ha, on the occasion of a brand new Groan.’
‘What did you say?’ said Lady Clarice, who had been staring at him the whole time without moving a muscle.
Doctor Prunesquallor closed his eyes and kept them closed for a very long time. Then opening them he took a pace forward and breathed in as much as his narrow chest would allow. Then turning suddenly he wagged his finger at the two in purple.
‘Your ladyships,’ he said. ‘You must listen, you will never get on in life unless you listen.’
‘Get on in life?’ said Lady Cora at once, ‘get on in life, I like that. What chance have we, when Gertrude has what we ought to have?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said the other, like a continuation of her sister’s voice in another part of the room. ‘We ought to have what she has.’
‘And what
is that, my very dear ladyships?’ queried Doctor Prunesquallor, tilting his head at them.
‘Power,’ they replied blankly and both together, as though they had rehearsed the scene. The utter tonelessness of their voices contrasted so incongruously with the gist of the subject that even Doctor Prunesquallor was for a moment taken aback and loosened his stiff white collar around his throat with his forefinger.
‘It’s power we want,’ Lady Clarice repeated. ‘We’d like to have that.’
‘Yes, it’s that we want,’ echoed Cora, ‘lots of power. Then we could make people do things’, said the voice.
‘But Gertrude has all the power,’ came the echo, ‘which we ought to have but which we haven’t got.’
Then they stared at Swelter, Sourdust and Flay in turn.
‘They have to be here, I suppose?’ said Cora, pointing at them before returning her gaze to Doctor Prunesquallor, who had reverted to examining the ceiling. But before he could reply the door opened and Fuchsia came in, dressed in white.
Twelve days had elapsed since she had discovered that she was no longer the only child. She had steadily refused to see her brother and today for the first time she would be obliged to be with him. Her first anguish, inexplicable to herself, had dulled to a grudging acceptance. For what reason she did not know, but her grief had been very real. She did not know what it was that she resented.
Mrs Slagg had had no time to help Fuchsia to look presentable, only telling her to comb her hair and to put her white dress on at the last minute so that it should not be creased, and then to appear in the Cool Room at two minutes past three.
The sunlight on the lawns and the flowers in the vases and the room itself had seemed pleasant auguries for the afternoon before the entrance of the two servants, and the unfortunate incident that occurred. This violence had set a bitter keynote to the ensuing hours.
Fuchsia came in with her eyes red from crying. She curtseyed awkwardly to her mother’s cousins and then sat down in a far corner, but she was almost at once forced to regain her feet, for her father, followed closely by the Countess, entered and walked slowly to the centre of the room.