by Mervyn Peake
When he had closed the door behind him he tucked his stick smartly under his arm and bowed.
‘Your Ladyships,’ he said, ‘my unwarranted intrusion upon your privacy, with but the summary knock at the panels of your door as my mediator, must be considered the acme of impertinence were it not that I come upon a serious errand.’
‘Who’s died?’ said Cora.
‘Is it Gertrude?’ echoed Clarice.
‘No one has died,’ said Steerpike, approaching them. ‘I will tell you the facts in a few minutes; but first, my dear Ladyships, I would be most honoured if I were permitted to appreciate your embroideries. Will you allow me to see them?’ He looked at them both in turn inquiringly.
‘He said something about them before; at the Prunesquallors’ it was,’ whispered Clarice to her sister. ‘He said he wanted to see them before. Our embroideries.’
Clarice had a firm belief that as long as she whispered, no matter how loudly, no one would hear a word of what she said, except her sister.
‘I heard him,’ said her sister. ‘I’m not blind, am I?’
‘Which do you want to see first?’ said Clarice. ‘Our needlework or the Room of Roots or the Tree?’
‘If I am not mistaken’, said Steerpike by way of an answer, ‘the creations of your needle are upon the walls around us, and having seen them, as it were, in a flash, I have no choice but to say that I would first of all prefer to examine them more closely, and then if I may, I would be delighted to visit your Room of Roots.’
‘“Creations of our needle”, he said,’ whispered Clarice in her loud, flat manner that filled the room.
‘Naturally,’ said her sister, and shrugged her shoulders again, and turning her face to Steerpike gave to the right-hand corner of her inexpressive mouth a slight twitch upwards, which although it was as mirthless as the curve between the lips of a dead haddock, was taken by Steerpike to imply that she and he were above making such obvious comments.
‘Before I begin,’ said Steerpike, placing his innocent-looking swordstick on a table, ‘may I inquire out of my innocence why you ladies were put to the inconvenience of bidding me to enter your room? Surely your footman has forgotten himself. Why was he not at the door to inquire who wished to see you and to give you particulars before you allowed yourselves to be invaded? Forgive my curiosity, my dear Ladyships, but where was your footman? Would you wish me to speak to him?’
The sisters stared at each other and then at the youth. At last Clarice said:
‘We haven’t got a footman.’
Steerpike, who had turned away for this very purpose, wheeled about, and then took a step backwards as though struck.
‘No footman!’ he said, and directed his gaze at Cora.
She shook her head. ‘Only an old lady who smells,’ she said. ‘No footman at all.’
Steerpike walked to the table and, leaning his hands upon it, gazed into space.
‘Their Ladyships Cora and Clarice Groan of Gormenghast have no footman – have no one save an old lady who smells. Where are their servants? Where are their retinues, their swarms of attendants?’ And then in a voice little above a whisper: ‘This must be seen to. This must end.’ With a clicking of his tongue he straightened his back. ‘And now’, he continued in a livelier voice, ‘the needlework is waiting.’
What Steerpike had said, as they toured the walls, began to re-fertilize those seeds of revolt which he had sown at the Prunesquallors’. He watched them out of the corner of his eyes as he flattered their handiwork, and he could see that although it was a great pleasure for them to show their craft, yet their minds were continually returning to the question he had raised. ‘We do it all with our left hands, don’t we, Cora?’ Clarice said, as she pointed to an ugly green-and-red rabbit of intricate needlework.
‘Yes,’ said Cora, ‘it takes a long time because it’s all done like that – with our left hands. Our right arms are starved, you know,’ she said, turning to Steerpike. ‘They’re quite, quite starved.’
‘Indeed, your Ladyship,’ said Steerpike. ‘How is that?’
‘Not only our left arms,’ Clarice broke in, ‘but all down our left-hand sides and our right-hand legs, too. That’s why they’re rather stiff. It was the epileptic fits which we had. That’s what did it and that’s what makes our needlework all the more clever.’
‘And beautiful,’ said Cora.
‘I cannot but agree,’ said Steerpike.
‘But nobody sees them,’ said Clarice. ‘We are left alone. Nobody wants our advice on anything. Gertrude doesn’t take any notice of us, nor does Sepulchrave. You know what we ought to have, don’t you, Cora?’
‘Yes,’ said her sister, ‘I know.’
‘What, then?’ said Clarice. ‘Tell me. Tell me.’
‘Power,’ said Cora.
‘That’s right. Power. That’s the very thing we want.’ Clarice turned her eyes to Steerpike. Then she smoothed the shiny purple of her dress.
‘I rather liked them,’ she said.
Steerpike, wondering where on earth her thoughts had taken her, tilted his head on one side as though reflecting upon the truth in her remark, when Cora’s voice (like the body of a plaice translated into sound) asked:
‘You rather liked what?’
‘My convulsions,’ said Clarice earnestly. ‘When my left arm became starved for the first time. You remember, Cora, don’t you? When we had our first fits? I rather liked them.’
Cora rustled up to her and raised a forefinger in front of her sister’s face. ‘Clarice Groan,’ she said, ‘we finished talking about that long ago. We’re talking about Power now. Why can’t you follow what we’re talking about? You are always losing your place. I’ve noticed that.’
‘What about the Room of Roots?’ asked Steerpike with affected gaiety. ‘Why is it called the Room of Roots? I am most intrigued.’
‘Don’t you know?’ came their voices.
‘He doesn’t know,’ said Clarice. ‘You see how we’ve been forgotten. He didn’t know about our Room of Roots.’
Steerpike was not kept long in ignorance. He followed the two purple ninepins through the door, and after passing down a short passage, Cora opened a massive door at the far end whose hinges could have done with a gill of oil apiece, and followed by her sister entered the Room of Roots. Steerpike in his turn stepped over the threshold and his curiosity was more than assuaged.
If the name of the room was unusual there was no doubt about its being apt. It was certainly a room of roots. Not of a few simple, separate formations, but of a thousand branching, writhing, coiling, intertwining, diverging, converging, interlacing limbs whose origin even Steerpike’s quick eyes were unable for some time to discover.
He found eventually that the thickening stems converged at a tall, narrow aperture on the far side of the room, through the upper half of which the sky was pouring a grey, amorphous light. It seemed at first as though it would be impossible to stir at all in this convoluting meshwork, but Steerpike was amazed to see that the twins were moving about freely in the labyrinth. Years of experience had taught them the possible approaches to the window. They had already reached it and were looking out into the evening. Steerpike made an attempt at following them, but was soon inextricably lost in the writhing maze. Wherever he turned he was faced with a network of weird arms that rose and fell, dipped and clawed, motionless yet alive with serpentine rhythms.
Yet the roots were dead. Once the room must have been filled with earth, but now, suspended for the most part in the higher reaches of the chamber, the thread-like extremities clawed impotently in the air. Nor was it enough that Steerpike should find a room so incongruously monopolized, but that every one of these twisting terminals should be hand-painted was even more astonishing. The various main limbs and their wooden tributaries, even down to the minutest rivulet of root, were painted in their own especial colours, so that it appeared as though seven coloured boles had forced their leafless branches through the window, yellow, r
ed and green, violet and pale blue, coral pink and orange. The concentration of effort needed for the execution of this work must have been considerable, let alone the almost superhuman difficulties and vexations that must have resulted from the efforts to establish, among the labyrinthic entanglements of the finer roots, which tendril belonged to which branch, which branch to which limb, and which limb to which trunk, for only after discovering its source could its correct colour be applied.
The idea had been that the birds on entering should choose those roots whose colours most nearly approximated to their own plumage, or if they had preferred it to nest among roots whose hue was complementary to their own.
The work had taken the sisters well over three years, and yet when all had been completed the project for which all this work had been designed had proved to be empty, the Room of Roots a failure, their hopes frozen. From this mortification the twins had never fully recovered. It is true that the room, as a room, gave them pleasure, but that the birds never approached it, let alone settled and nested there, was a festering sore at the back of what minds they had.
Against this nagging disappointment was the positive pride which they felt in having a room of roots at all. And not only the Roots but logically enough the Tree whose branches had once drawn sustenance into its highest twigs, and, long ago, burst forth each April with its emerald jets. It was this Tree that was their chief source of satisfaction, giving them some sense of that distinction which they were now denied.
They turned their eyes from its branches and looked around for Steerpike. He was still not unravelled. ‘Can you assist me, my dear Ladyships?’ he called, peering through a skein of purple fibres.
‘Why don’t you come to this window?’ said Clarice.
‘He can’t find the way,’ said Cora.
‘Can’t he? I don’t see why not,’ said Clarice.
‘Because he can’t,’ said Cora. ‘Go and show him,’
‘All right. But he must be very stupid,’ said Clarice, walking through the dense walls of roots which seemed to open up before her and close again behind her back. When she reached Steerpike, she walked past him and it was only by practically treading on her heels that he was able to thread his way towards the window. At the window there was a little more space, for the seven stems which wedged their way through its lower half protruded some four feet into the room before beginning to divide and subdivide. Alongside the window there were steps that led up to a small platform which rested on the thick horizontal stems.
‘Look outside,’ said Cora directly Steerpike arrived, ‘and you’ll see It.’
Steerpike climbed the few steps and saw the main trunk of the tree floating out horizontally into space and then running up to a great height, and as he saw it he recognized it as the tree he had studied from the roof tops, half a mile away near the stone sky-field.
He saw how, what had then seemed a perilous balancing act on the part of the distant figures, was in reality a safe enough exercise, for the bole was conveniently flat on its upper surface. When it reached that point where it began to ascend and branch out, the wooden highway spread into an area that could easily have accommodated ten or twelve people standing in a close group.
‘Definitely a tree,’ he said. ‘I am all in favour of it. Has it been dead as long as you can remember it?’
‘Of course,’ said Clarice.
‘We’re not as old as that,’ said Cora, and as this was the first joke she had made for over a year, she tried to smile, but her facial muscles had become, through long neglect, unusable.
‘Not so old as what?’ said Clarice.
‘You don’t understand,’ said Cora. ‘You are much slower than I am. I’ve noticed that.’
‘INKLINGS OF GLORY’
‘I want some tea,’ said Clarice; and leading the way she performed the miraculous journey through the room once more, Steerpike at her heels like a shadow and Cora taking an alternative path.
Once more in the comparatively sane living room where the tapers had been lit by the old woman, they sat before the fire and Steerpike asked if he might smoke. Cora and Clarice after glancing at each other nodded slowly, and Steerpike filled his pipe and lit it with a small red coal.
Clarice had pulled at a bell-rope that hung by the wall, and now as they sat in a semi-circle about the blaze, Steerpike in the centre chair, a door opened to their right and an old dark-skinned lady, with very short legs and bushy eyebrows, entered the room.
‘Tea, I suppose,’ she said in a subterranean voice that seemed to have worked its way up from somewhere in the room beneath them. She then caught sight of Steerpike and wiped her unpleasant nose with the back of her hand before retiring and closing the door behind her like an explosion. The embroideries flapped outwards in the draught this occasioned, and sank again limply against the walls.
‘This is too much,’ said Steerpike. ‘How can you bear it?’
‘Bear what?’ said Clarice.
‘Do you mean, your Ladyships, that you have become used to being treated in this offhand and insolent manner? Do you not mind whether your natural and hereditary dignities are flouted and abused – when an old commoner slams the doors upon you and speaks to you as though you were on her own degraded level? How can the Groan blood that courses so proudly and in such an undiluted stream, through your veins, remain so quiet? Why in its purple wrath is it not boiling at this moment?’ He paused a moment and leant further forward.
‘Your birds have been stolen by Gertrude, the wife of your brother. Your labour of love among the roots, which but for that woman would now be bearing fruit, is a fiasco. Even your Tree is forgotten. I had not heard of it. Why had I not heard of it? Because you and all you possess have been put aside, forgotten, neglected. There are few enough of your noble and ancient family in Gormenghast to carry on the immemorial rites, and yet you two who could uphold them more scrupulously than any, are slighted at every turn.’
The twins were staring at him very hard. As he paused they turned their eyes to one another. His words, though sometimes a little too swift for them, communicated nevertheless their subversive gist. Here, from the mouth of a stranger, their old sores and grievances were being aired and formulated.
The old lady with the short legs returned with a tray which she set before them with a minimum of deference. Then inelegantly waddling away, she turned at the door and stared again at their visitor, wiping, as before, the back of her large hand across her nose.
When she had finally disappeared, Steerpike leaned forward and, turning to Cora and Clarice in turn, and fixing them with close and concentrated eyes, he said:
‘Do you believe in honour? Your Ladyships, answer me, do you believe in honour?’
They nodded mechanically.
‘Do you believe that injustice should dominate the castle?’
They shook their heads.
‘Do you believe it should go unchecked – that it should flourish without just retribution?’
Clarice, who had rather lost track of the last question waited until she saw Cora shaking her head before she followed suit.
‘In other words,’ said Steerpike, ‘you think that something must be done. Something to crush this tyranny.’
They nodded their heads again, and Clarice could not help feeling a little satisfied that she had so far made no mistake with her shakes and nods.
‘Have you any ideas?’ said Steerpike. ‘Have you any plans to suggest?’
They shook their heads at once.
‘In that case,’ said Steerpike, stretching his legs out before him and crossing his ankles, ‘may I make a suggestion, your Ladyships?’
Again, most flatteringly, he faced each one in turn to obtain her consent. One after the other they nodded heavily, sitting bolt upright in their chairs.
Meanwhile, the tea and the scones were getting cold, but they had all three forgotten them.
Steerpike got up and stood with his back to the fire so that he might observe them both
at the same time.
‘Your gracious Ladyships,’ he began, ‘I have received information which is of the highest moment. It is information which hinges upon the unsavoury topic with which we have been forced to deal. I beg your undivided concentration; but I will first of all ask you a question: who has the undisputed control over Gormenghast? Who is it who, having this authority, makes no use of it but allows the great traditions of the castle to drift, forgetting that even his own sisters are of his blood and lineage and are entitled to homage and – shall I say it? – yes, to adulation, too? Who is that man?’
‘Gertrude,’ they replied.
‘Come, come,’ said Steerpike, raising his eyebrows, ‘who is it who forgets even his own sisters? Who is it, your Ladyships?’
‘Sepulchrave,’ said Cora.
‘Sepulchrave,’ echoed Clarice.
They had become agitated and excited by now although they did not show it, and had lost control over what little circumspection they had ever possessed. Every word that Steerpike uttered they swallowed whole.
‘Lord Sepulchrave,’ said Steerpike. After a pause, he continued. ‘If it were not that you were his sisters, and of the Family, how could I dare to speak in this way of the Lord of Gormenghast? But it is my duty to be honest. Lady Gertrude has slighted you, but who could make amends? Who has the final power but your brother? In my efforts to re-establish you, and to make this South Wing once again alive with your servants, it must be remembered that it is your selfish brother who must be reckoned with.’
‘He is selfish, you know,’ said Clarice.
‘Of course he is,’ said Cora. ‘Thoroughly selfish. What shall we do? Tell us! Tell us!’
‘In all battles, whether of wits or of war,’ said Steerpike, ‘the first thing to do is to take the initiative and to strike hard.’