by Mervyn Peake
‘Lord! Lord!’ he thought, ‘why, out of all the globe’s creatures, should I, innocent of murder, be punished in this way?’
He grinned again. This time there was nothing of the yawn left in the process. His jaws opened out like a crocodile’s. How could any human head contain such terrible and dazzling teeth? It was a brand-new graveyard. But oh! how anonymous it was. Not a headstone chiselled with the owner’s name. Had they died in battle, these nameless, dateless, dental dead, whose memorials, when the jaws opened, gleamed in the sunlight, and when the jaws met again rubbed shoulders in the night, scraping an ever closer acquaintance as the years rolled by? Prunesquallor had smiled. For he had found relief in the notion that there were several worse things imaginable than being saddled with his sister metaphorically, and one of them was that he should have been saddled with her in all its literal horror. For his imagination had caught a startlingly vivid glimpse of her upon his back, her flat feet in the stirrups, her heels digging into his flanks as, careering round the table on all fours with the bit in his mouth and with his haunches being cross-hatched with the flicks of her whip, he galloped his miserable life away.
‘When I ask you a question, Alfred – I say when I ask you a question, Alfred, I like to think that you can be civil enough, even if you are my brother, to answer me instead of smirking to yourself.’
Now if there was one thing that the doctor could never do it was to smirk. His face was the wrong shape. His muscles moved in another way altogether.
‘Sister mine,’ he said, ‘since thus you are, forgive, if you can, your brother. He waits breathlessly your answer to his question. It is this, my turtle-dove. What did you say to him? For he has forgotten so utterly that were his death dependent on it, he would be forced to live – with you, his fruit-drop, with you alone.’
Irma never listened beyond the first five words of her brother’s somewhat involved periods, and so a great many insults passed over her head. Insults, not vicious in themselves, they provided the Doctor with a form of verbal self-amusement without which he would have to remain locked in his study the entire time. And, in any case, it wasn’t a study, for although its walls were lined with books, it held nothing else beyond a very comfortable arm-chair and a very beautiful carpet. There was no writing-desk. No paper or ink. Not even a waste-paper basket.
‘What was it you asked me, flesh of my flesh? I will do what I can for you.’
‘I have been saying, Alfred, that I am not without charm. Nor without grace, or intellect. Why is it I am never approached? Why do I never have advances made to me?’
‘Are you speaking financially?’ asked the doctor.
‘I am speaking spiritually, Alfred, and you know it. What have others got that I haven’t?’
‘Or conversely,’ said Prunesquallor, ‘what haven’t they got that you already have?’
‘I don’t follow you, Alfred. I said I don’t follow you.’
‘That’s just what you do do,’ said her brother, reaching out his arms and fluttering his fingers. ‘And I wish you’d stop it.’
‘But my deportment, Alfred. Haven’t you noticed it? What’s wrong with your sex – can’t they see I move well?’
‘Perhaps we’re too spiritual,’ said Doctor Prunesquallor.
‘But my carriage! Alfred, my carriage!’
‘Too powerful, sweet white-of-egg, far too powerful; you lurch from side to side of life’s drear highway: those hips of yours rotating as you go. Oh, no, my dear one, your carriage scares them off, that’s what it does. You terrify them, Irma.’
This was too much for her.
‘You’ve never believed in me!’ she cried, rising from the table, and a dreadful blush suffusing her perfect skin. ‘But I can tell you’ – her voice rose to a shrill scream – ‘that I’m a lady! What do you think I want with men? The beasts! I hate them. Blind, stupid, clumsy, horrible, heavy, vulgar things they are. And you’re one of them!’ she screamed, pointing at her brother, who, with his eyebrows raised a little, was continuing with his drawing of the ostrich from where he had left off. ‘And you are one of them! Do you hear me, Alfred, one of them!’
The pitch of her voice had brought a servant to the door. Unwisely, he had opened it, ostensibly to ask whether she had rung for him, but in reality to see what was going on.
Irma’s throat was quivering like a bowstring.
‘What have ladies to do with men?’ she screamed; and then, catching sight of the face of the servant at the door, she plucked a knife from the table and flung it at the face. But her aim was not all it might have been, possibly because she was so involved in being a lady, and the knife impaled itself on the ceiling immediately above her own head, where it gave a perfect imitation of the shuddering of her throat.
The doctor, adding with deliberation the last vertebra to the tail of the skeleton ostrich, turned his face firstly to the door, where the servant, his mouth hanging open, was gazing spellbound at the shuddering knife.
‘Would you be so kind as to remove your redundant carcass from the door of this room, my man,’ he said, in his high, abstracted voice; ‘and keep it in the kitchen, where it is paid to do this and that among the saucepans, I believe … would you? No one rang for you. Your mistress’ voice, though high, is nothing like the ringing of a bell … nothing at all.’
The face withdrew.
‘And what’s more,’ came a desperate cry from immediately below the knife, ‘he never comes to see me any more! Never! Never!’
The doctor rose from the table. He knew she was referring to Steerpike, but for whom she would probably never have experienced the recrudescence of this thwarted passion which had grown upon her since the youth had first dispatched his flattering arrows at her all too sensitive heart.
Her brother wiped his mouth with a napkin, brushed a crumb from his trousers, and straightened his long, narrow back.
‘I’ll sing you a little song,’ he said. ‘I made it up in the bath last night, ha! ha! ha! ha! – a whimsy little jangle, I tell myself – a whimsy little jangle.’
He began to move round the table, his elegant white hands folded about one another. ‘It went like this, I fancy …’ But as he knew she would probably be deaf to what he recited, he took her glass from beside her plate and – ‘A little wine is just what you need, Irma dear, before you go to bed – for you are going straight away, aren’t you, my spasmic one, to Dreamland – ha, ha, ha! where you can be a lady all night long.’
With the speed of a professional conjurer he whipped a small packet from his pocket and, extracting a tablet, dropped it into Irma’s glass. He decanted a little wine into the glass and handed it to her with the exaggerated graciousness which seldom left him. ‘And I will take some myself,’ he said, ‘and we will drink to each other.’
Irma had collapsed into a chair, and her long marmoreal face was buried in her hands. Her black glasses, which she wore to protect her eyes from the light, were at a rakish slant across her cheek.
‘Come, come, I am forgetting my promise!’ cried the doctor, standing before her, very tall, slender and upright, with that celluloid head of his, all sentience and nervous intelligence, tilted to one side like a bird’s.
‘First a quaff of this delicious wine from a vineyard beneath a brooding hill – I can see it so clearly – and you, O Irma, can you see it, too? The peasants toiling and sweating in the sun – and why? Because they have no option, Irma. They are desperately poor, and their bowed necks are wry. And the husbandmen, like every good husband, tending his love – stroking the vines with his horny hand, whispering to them, coaxing them, “O little grapes,” he whispers, “give up your wine. Irma is waiting.” And here it is; here it is, ha, ha, ha, ha! Delicious and cold and white, in a cut-glass goblet. Toss back your coif and quaff, my querulous queen!’
Irma roused herself a little. She had not heard a word. She had been in her own private hell of humiliation. Her eyes turned to the knife in the ceiling. The thin line of her mouth twitched
, but she took the glass from her brother’s outstretched hand.
Her brother clinked his glass against hers and, duplicating the movement of his arm, she raised her own automatically and drank.
‘And now for the little jingle which I threw off in that nonchalant way of mine. How did it go? How did it go?’
Prunesquallor knew that by the third verse the strong, tasteless soporific which had dissolved in her wine would begin to take effect. He sat on the floor at her knees and, quelling a revulsion, he patted her hand.
‘Queen bee,’ he said, ‘look at me, if you can. Through your midnight spectacles. It shouldn’t be too dreadful – for one who had fed on horrors. Now, listen …’ Irma’s eyes were already beginning to close.
‘It goes like this, I think. I called it The Osseous ’Orse.’
Come, flick the ulna juggler-wise
And twang the tibia for me!
O Osseous ’orse, the future lies
Like serum on the sea.
Green fields and buttercups no more
Regale you with delight, no, no!
The tonic tempests leap and pour
Through your white pelvis ever so.
‘Are you enjoying it, Irma?’ She nodded sleepily.
Come, clap your scapulae and twitch
The pale pagoda of your spine,
Removed from life’s eternal itch
What need for iodine?
The Osseous ’orse sat up at once
And clanged his ribs in biblic pride.
I fear I looked at him askance
Though he had naught to hide …
No hide at all … just …
At this point the doctor, having forgotten what came next, turned his eyes once more to his sister Irma; she was fast asleep. The doctor rang the bell.
‘Your mistress’s maid; a stretcher; and a couple of men to handle it.’ (A face had appeared in the doorway.) ‘And be rapid.’ The face withdrew.
When Irma had been put to bed and her lamp had been turned low and silence swam through the house, the doctor unlocked the door of his study, entered and sank back into his arm-chair. His friable-looking elbows rested upon the padded arms. His fingers were twined together into a delicate bunch, and on this bunch he supported his long and sunken jaw. After a few moments he removed his glasses and laid them on the arm of his chair. Then, with his fingers clasped together once again beneath his chin, he shut his eyes and sighed gently.
SEVEN
But he was not destined to more than a few moments of relaxation, for feet were soon to be heard outside his window. Only two of them, it was true, but there was something in the weight and deliberation of the tread that reminded him of an army moving in perfect unison, a dread and measured sound. The rain had quietened and the sound of each foot as it struck the ground was alarmingly clear.
Prunesquallor could recognize that portentous gait among a million. But in the silence of the evening his mind flew to the phantom army it awakened in his leap-frogging brain. What was there in the clockwork stepping of an upright host to contract the throat and bring, as does the thought of a sliced lemon, that sharp astringency to throat and jaw? Why do the tears begin to gather? And the heart to thud?
He had no time to ponder the matter now, so at one and the same time he tossed a mop of grey thatch from his brow and an army-on-the-march from his mind.
Reaching the door before his bell could clang the servants into redundance he opened it, and to the massive figure who was about to whack the door with her fist –
‘I welcome your Ladyship,’ he said. His body inclined itself a little from the hips and his teeth flashed, while he wondered what, in the name of all that was heterodox, the Countess thought she was doing in visiting her physician at this time of night. She visited nobody, by day or night. That was one of the things about her. Nevertheless, here she was.
‘Hold your horses.’ Her voice was heavy, but not loud.
One of Doctor Prunesquallor’s eyebrows shot to the top of his forehead. It was a peculiar remark to be greeted with. It might have been supposed that he was about to embrace her. The very notion appalled him.
But when she said: ‘You can come in now,’ not only did his other eyebrow fly up his forehead, but it set its counterpart a-tremble with the speed of its uprush.
To be told he could ‘come in now’ when he was already inside was weird enough; but the idea of being given permission to enter his own house by a guest was grotesque.
The slow, heavy, quiet authority in the voice made the situation even more embarrassing. She had entered his hall. ‘I wish to see you,’ she said, but her eyes were on the door which Prunesquallor was closing. When it had barely six inches to go before the night was locked out and the latch had clicked – ‘Hold!’ she said, in a rather deeper tone, ‘hold hard!’ And then, with her big lips pursed like a child’s, she gave breath to a long whistle of peculiar sweetness. A tender and forlorn note to escape from so ponderous a being.
The doctor, as he turned to her, was a picture of perplexed inquiry, though his teeth were still shining gaily. But as he turned something caught the corner of his eye. Something white. Something that moved.
Between the space left by the all-but-closed door, and very close to the ground, Doctor Prunesquallor saw a face as round as a hunter’s moon, as soft as fur. And this was no wonder, for it was a face of fur, peculiarly blanched in the dim light of the hall. No sooner had the Doctor reacted to this face than another took its place, and close upon it, silent as death, came a third, a fourth, a fifth … In single file there slid into the hall, so close upon each other’s tails that they might have been a continuous entity, her ladyship’s white clowder.
Prunesquallor, feeling a little dizzy, watched the undulating stream flow past his feet as he stood with his hand on the doorknob. Would they never end? He had watched them for over two minutes.
He turned to the Countess. She stood in coiling froth like a lighthouse. By the dim glow of the hall lamp her red hair threw out a sullen light.
Prunesquallor was perfectly happy again. For what had irked him was not the cats, but the obscure commands of the Countess. Their meaning was now self-evident. And yet, how peculiar to have enjoined a swarm of cats to hold their horses!
The very thought of it got hold of his eyebrows again, which had lowered themselves reluctantly while he waited for his chance to close the door, and they had leapt up his forehead as though a pistol had been cracked and a prize awaited the fastest.
‘We’re … all … here,’ said the Countess. Prunesquallor turned to the door and saw that the stream had, indeed, run dry. He shut the door.
‘Well, well, well, well!’ he trilled, standing on his toes and fluttering his hands, as though he were about to take off like a fairy. ‘How delightful! how very, very delightful that you should call, your Ladyship. God bless my ascetic soul! if you haven’t whipped the old hermit out of his introspection. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! And here, as you put it, you all are. There’s no doubt about that, is there? What a party we will have! Mewsical chairs and all! ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’
The almost unbearable pitch of his laughter created an absolute stillness in the hall. The cats, sitting bolt upright, had their round eyes fixed on him.
‘But I keep you waiting!’ he cried, ‘Waiting in my outer rooms! Are you a mere valetudinarian, my dear Ladyship, or some prolific mendicant whose bewitched offspring she hopes I can return to human shape? Of course you are not, by all that’s evident, so why should you be left in this cold – this damp – this obnoxious hell of a hall, with the rain pouring off you in positive waterfalls … and so … and so, if you’ll allow me to lead on …’ – he waved a long, thin, delicate arm with as white a hand on the end of it, which fluttered like a silk flag – ‘… I’ll throw a few doors open, Light a lamp or two, flick away a few crumbs in readiness for … What wine shall it be?’
He began to tread his way to the sitting-room with a curious flicking movement of the feet.
The Countess followed him. The servants had cleared the table of the supper dishes and the room had been left with so serene a composure about it that it was hard to believe that it was but a short while ago in this same room that Irma had disgraced herself.
Prunesquallor flung wide the door of the sitting-room for the Countess to pass through. He flung it with a spectacular abandon: it seemed to imply that if the door broke, or the hinges snapped, or a picture was jerked off the wall, what of it? This was his house; he could do what he liked with it. If he chose to jeopardize his belongings, that was his affair. This was an occasion when such meagre considerations would only enter the minds of the vulgar.
The Countess advanced down the centre of the room and then stopped. She stared about her abstractedly – at the long lemon-yellow curtain, the carved furniture, the deep green rug, the silver, the ceramics, the pale grey-and-white stripes of the wallpaper. Perhaps her mind reverted to her own candle-smelling, bird-filled, half-lit chaos of a bedroom, but there was no expression on her face.