by Mervyn Peake
FOURTEEN
It was in Bellgrove’s class, one late afternoon, that Titus first thought consciously about the idea of colour: of things having colours: of everything having its own particular colour, and of the way in which every particular colour kept changing according to where it was, what the light was like, and what it was next to.
Bellgrove was half asleep, and so were most of the boys. The room was hot and full of golden motes. A great clock ticked away monotonously. A bluebottle buzzed slowly over the surfaces of the hot window-panes or from time to time zithered its languid way from desk to desk. Every time it passed certain desks, small inky hands would grab at it, or rulers would smack out through the tired air. Sometimes it would perch, for a moment, on an inkpot or on the back of a boy’s collar and scythe its front legs together, and then its back legs, rubbing them, scything them, honing them, or as though it were a lady dressing for a ball drawing on a pair of long, invisible gloves.
Oh, bluebottle, you would fare ill at a ball! There would be none who could dance better than you; but you would be shunned: you would be too original: you would be before your time. They would not know your steps, the other ladies. None would throw out that indigo light from brow or flank – but, bluebottle, they wouldn’t want to. There lies the agony. Their buzz of converse is not yours, bluebottle. You know no scandal, no small talk, no flattery, no jargon: you would be hopeless, for all that you can pull the long gloves on. After all, your splendour is a kind of horror-splendour. Keep to your inkpots and the hot glass panes of schoolrooms and buzz your way through the long summer terms. Let the great clock-ticks play counterpoint. Let the swish of a birch, the detonation of a paper pellet, the whispered conspiracy be your everlasting pards.
Down generations of boys, buzz, bluebottle, buzz in the summer prisons – for the boys are bored. Tick, clock, tick! Young Scarabee’s on edge to fight the ‘Slogger’ – young Dogseye hankers for his silkworms’ weaving – Jupiter minor knows a plover’s nest. Tick, clock, tick!
Sixty seconds in a minute; sixty minutes in an hour; sixty times sixty.
Multiply the sixes and add how many noughts? Two. I suppose. Six sixes are thirty-six. Thirty-six and two noughts is 3,600. Three thousand and six hundred seconds in an hour. Quarter of an hour is left before the silkworms – before the ‘Slogger’ – before the plover’s nest. Buzz-fly, buzz! Tick, clock, tick! Divide 3,600 by four and then subtract a bit because of the time taken to work it all out.
Nine hundred seconds! Oh, marvellous! marvellous! Seconds are so small. One – two – three – four – seconds are so huge.
The inky fingers scrubble through the forelock – the blackboard is a grey smear. The last three lessons can be seen faintly one behind the other – like aerial perspective. A fog of forgotten figures – forgotten maps – forgotten languages.
But while Bellgrove was sleeping – while Dogseye was carving – while the clock ticked – while the fly buzzed – while the room swam in a honey-coloured milky-way of motes – young Titus (inky as the rest, sleepy as the rest, leaning his head against the warm wall, for his desk was flush with the leather) had begun to follow a train of thought, at first lazily, abstractedly, without undue interest – for it was the first train of thought that he had ever troubled to follow very far. How lazily the images separated themselves from one another or adhered for a moment to the tissue of his mind!
Titus became dreamily interested, not in their sequence but in the fact that thoughts and pictures could follow one upon the other so effortlessly. And it had been the colour of the ink, the peculiar dark and musty blue of the ink in its sunken bowl in the corner of his desk, which had induced his eyes to wander over the few objects grouped below him. The ink was blue, dark, musty, dirtyish, deep as cruel water at night: what were the other colours? Titus was surprised at the richness, the variety. He had only seen his thumb-marked books as things to read or to avoid reading: as things that got lost: things full of figures or maps. Now he saw them as coloured rectangles of pale, washed-out blue or laurel green, with the small windows cut out of them where, on the naked whiteness of the first page, he had scripted his name.
The lid of the desk itself was sepia, with golden browns and even yellows where the surface had been cut or broken. His pen, with its end chewed into a subdividing tail of wet fronds, shimmered like a fish, the indigo ink creeping up the handle from the nib, the green paint that was once so pristine blurred with the blue of the ink at the pen’s belly, and then the whitish mutilated tail.
He even saw his own hand as a coloured thing before he realized it was part of him; the ochre colour of his wrist, the black of his sleeve; and then … and then he saw the marble, the glass marble beside the inkpot, with its swirling spirals of rainbow colours twisted within the clear, cold white glass: it was wealth. Titus fingered it and counted the coloured threads that spiralled within – red, yellow, green, violet, blue … and their white and crystal world, so perfect, all about them, clear and cold and smooth, heavy and slippery. How it could clink and crack like a gunshot when it struck another! When it skidded the floor and struck! Crack like a gunshot on the round and brilliant forehead of its foe! Oh, beautiful marbles! Oh, blood-alleys! Oh, clouded ones, a-swim in blood and milk! Oh, crystal worlds, that make the pockets jangle – that make the pockets heavy!
How pleasant it was to hold that cold and glittering grape on a hot summer afternoon, with the Professor asleep at his high carved desk! How lovely it was to feel the cold slipping thing in the hot palm of his sticky hand! Titus clenched it and then held it against the light. As he rolled it between his thumb and forefinger the coloured threads began to circle each other: to spiral themselves round and round and in and out in endless convolutions. Red: yellow: green: violet: blue … Red – yellow – green – red … yellow … red … red. Alone in his mind the red became a thought – a colour-thought – and Titus slipped away into an earlier afternoon. The ceiling, the walls, the floor of his thought were red: he was enveloped in it; but soon the walls contracted and all the surfaces dwindled together and came at last to a focus; the blur, the abstraction had gone, and in its place was a small drop of blood, warm and wet. The light caught it as it shone. It was on his knuckle, for he had fought a boy in this same classroom a year ago – in that earlier afternoon. A melancholy anger crept over Titus at this memory. This image that shone out so redly, this small brilliant drop of blood – and other sensations, flitted across this underlying anger and brought on a sense of exhilaration, of self-confidence, and fear also at having spilled this red liquid – this stream of legendary yet so real crimson. And the bead of blood lost focus, became blurred, and then, changing its hazy contour, became a heart … a heart. Titus put his hands against his small chest. At first he could feel nothing, but moving his fingertips he felt the double-thud, and the drumming rushed in from another region of his memory: the sound of the river on a night when he had been alone by the high bulrushes and had seen between their inky, rope-thick columns a sky like a battle.
And the battle-clouds changed their shapes momently, now crawling across the firmament of his imagination like redskins, now whipping like red fish over the mountains, their heads like the heads of the ancient carp in Gormenghast moat, but their bodies trailing behind in festoons like rags or autumn foliage. And the sky, through which these creatures swam, endlessly, in multitudes, became the ocean and the mountains below them were under-water corals, and the red sun became the eye of a subaqueous god, glowering across the sea bed. But the great eye lost its menace, for it became no bigger than the marble in Titus’ hand: for, wading towards him hip deep through the waters, dilating as they neared until they pressed out and broke the frame of fancy, was a posse of pirates.
They were as tall as towers, their great brows beetling over their sunken eyes, like shelves of overhanging rocks. In their ears were hoops of red gold, and in their mouths scythe-edged cutlasses a-drip. Out of the red darkness they emerged, their eyes half closed against the sun
, the water at their waists circling and bubbling with the hot light reflected from their bodies, their dimensions blotted out all else: and still they came on, until their wire-glinting breasts and rocky heads filled out the boy’s brain. And still they came on, until there was only room enough for the smouldering head of the central buccaneer, a great salt-water lord, every inch of whose face was scabbed and scarred like a boy’s knee, whose teeth were carved into the shapes of skulls, whose throat was circled by the tattooing of a scaled snake. And as the head enlarged, an eye became visible in the darkness of its sockets, and in a moment nothing else but this wild and sinister organ could be seen. For a short while it stayed there, motionless. There was nothing else in the great world but this – globe. It was the world, and suddenly like the world it rolled. And as it rolled it grew yet again, until there was nothing but the pupil, filling the consciousness; and in that midnight pupil Titus saw the reflection of himself peering forward. And someone approached him out of the darkness of the pirate’s pupil, and a rust-red pinpoint of light above the figure’s brow became the coiled locks of his mother’s wealth of hair. But before she could reach him her face and body had faded and in the place of the hair was Fuchsia’s ruby; and the ruby danced about in the darkness, as though it were being jerked on the end of a string. And then it, also, was gone and the marble shone in his hand with all its spiralled colours – yellow, green, violet, blue, red … yellow … green … violet … blue … yellow … green … violet … yellow … green … yellow … yellow.
And Titus saw quite clearly not only the great sunflower with its tired, prickly neck which he had seen Fuchsia carrying about for the last two days, but a hand holding it, a hand that was not Fuchsia’s. It held the heavy plant aloft between the thumb and forefinger as though it was the most delicate thing in the world. Every finger of the hand was aflame with gold rings, so that it looked like a gauntlet of flaming metal – an armoured thing.
And then, all at once, blotting it out, a swarm of leaves were swirling through him, a host of yellow leaves, coiling, diving, rising, as they swept forward across a treeless desert, while overhead, like a bonfire in the sky, the sun shone down on the rushing leaves. It was a yellow world: a restless, yellow world: and Titus was beginning to drift into a yet deeper maw of the colour when Bellgrove wakened with a jerk, gathered his gown about him like God gathering a whirlwind, and brought his hand down with a dull, impotent thud on the lid of his desk. His absurdly noble head raised itself. His proud and vacant gaze settled at last on young Dogseye.
‘Would it be too much to ask you,’ he said at last, with a yawn which exposed his carious teeth, ‘whether a young man – a not very studious young man, by name Dogseye – lies behind that mask of dirt and ink? Whether there is a human body within that sordid bunch of rags, and whether that body is Dogseye’s, also.’ He yawned again. One of his eyes was on the clock, the other remained bemusedly on the young pupil. ‘I will put it more simply: Is that really you, Dogseye? Are you sitting in the second row from the front? Are you occupying the third desk from the left? And were you – if, indeed, it is you, behind that dark-blue muzzle – were you carving something indescribably fascinating on to the lid of your desk? Did I wake to catch you at it, young man?’
Dogseye, a nondescript little figure, wriggled.
‘Answer me, Dogseye. Were you carving away when you thought your old master was asleep?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Dogseye, surprisingly loudly; so loudly that he startled himself and glanced about him as though for the voice.
‘What were you carving, my boy?’
‘My name, sir.’
‘What, the whole thing, my boy?’
‘I’d only done the first three letters, sir.’
Bellgrove rose swathed. He moved, a benign, august figure, down the dusty aisle between the desks until he reached Dogseye.
‘You haven’t finished the “G”’, he said in a far-away, lugubrious voice. ‘Finish the “G” and leave it at that. And leave the “EYE” for other things …’ – an inane smirk began to flit across the lower part of his face – ‘such as your grammar-book,’ he said brightly, his voice horribly out of character. He began to laugh in such a way as might develop into something beyond control, but he was brought up short with a twinge of pain and he clutched at his jaw, where his teeth cried out for extraction.
After a few moments – ‘Get up,’ he said. Seating himself at Dogseye’s desk he picked up the penknife before him and worked away at the ‘G’ of ‘DOG’ until a bell rang and the room was transformed into a stampeding torrent of boys making for the classroom door as though they expected to find upon the other side the embodiment of their separate dreams – the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance.
IRMA WANTS A PARTY
‘Very well, then, and so you shall!’ cried Alfred Prunesquallor. ‘So you shall, indeed.’
There was a wild and happy desperation in his voice. Happy, in that a decision had been made at all, however unwisely. Desperate, because life with Irma was a desperate affair in any case; but especially in regard to this passion of hers to have a party.
‘Alfred! Alfred! are you serious? Will you pull your weight, Alfred? I say, will you pull your weight?’
‘What weight I have I’ll pull to pieces for you, Irma.’
‘You are resolved, Alfred – I say, you are resolved,’ she asked breathlessly.
‘It is you who are resolved, sweet Perturbation. It is I who have submitted. But there it is. I am weak. I am ductile. You will have your way – a way, I fear, that is fraught with the possibility of monstrous repercussions – but your own, Irma, your own. And a party we will throw. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’
There was something that did not altogether ring true in his shrill laughter. Was there a touch of bitterness in it somewhere?
‘After all,’ he continued, perching himself on the back of a chair (and with his feet on the seat and his chin on his knees he looked remarkably like a grasshopper) … ‘After all, you have waited a long time. A long time. But, as you know, I would never advise such a thing. You’re not the type to give a party. You’re not even the type to go to a party. You have nothing of the flippancy about you that makes a party go, sister mine; but you are determined.’
‘Unutterably,’ said Irma.
‘And have you confidence in your brother as a host?’
‘Oh, Alfred, I could have!’ she whispered grimly. ‘I would have, if you wouldn’t try to make everything sound clever. I get so tired of the way you say things. And I don’t really like the things you say.’
‘Irma,’ said her brother, ‘nor do I. They always sound stale by the time I hear them. The brain and the tongue are so far apart.’
‘That’s the sort of nonsense I loathe!’ cried Irma, suddenly becoming passionate. ‘Are we going to talk about the party, or are we going to listen to your silly soufflés? Answer me, Alfred. Answer me at once.’
‘I will talk like bread and water. What shall I say?’
He descended from the chairback and sat on the seat. Then he leant forward a little and, with his hands folded between his knees, he gazed expectantly at Irma through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles. Staring back at him through the darkened glass of her own lenses, the enlargement of his eyes was hardly noticeable.
Irma felt that for the moment she had a certain moral ascendancy over her brother. The air of submission which he had about him gave her strength to divulge to him the real reason for her hankering for this party she had in mind … for she needed his help.
‘Did you know, Alfred,’ she said, that I am thinking of getting married?’
‘Irma!’ cried her brother. ‘You aren’t!’
‘Oh, yes, I am,’ muttered Irma. ‘Oh yes, I am.’
Prunesquallor was about to inquire who the lucky man was when a peculiar twinge of sympathy for her, poor white thing that she was, sitting so upright in the chair before him, caught at his heart. He knew how few her chance
s of meeting men had been in the past: he knew that she knew nothing of love’s gambits save what she had read in books. He knew that she would lose her head. He also knew that she had no one in view. So he said:
‘We will find just the man for you. You deserve a thoroughbred: something that can cock his ears and whisk his tail. By all that’s unimpeachable, you do indeed. Why …’
The Doctor stopped himself: he had been about to take verbal flight when he remembered his promise: so he leant forward again to hear what his sister had to say.
‘I don’t know about cocking his ears and frisking his tail,’ said Irma, with the suggestion of a twitch at one corner of her thin mouth; ‘but I would like you to know, Alfred – I said I would like you to know, that I am glad you understand the position. I am being wasted, Alfred. You realize that, don’t you – don’t you?’
‘I do, indeed.’
‘My skin is the whitest in Gormenghast.’
‘And your feet are the flattest,’ thought her brother: but he said:
‘Yes, yes, but what we must do, sweet huntress – (O virgin through wild sex’s thickets prowling)’ (he could not resist this image of his sister) ‘what we must do is to decide whom to ask. To the Party, I mean. That is fundamental.’
‘Yes, yes!’ said Irma.
‘And when we will ask them.’
‘That’s easier,’ said Irma.
‘And at what time of the day.’
‘The evening, of course,’ said Irma.
‘And what they shall wear.’
‘Oh, their evening clothes, obviously,’ said Irma.
‘It depends on whom we ask, don’t you think? What ladies, my dear, have dresses as resplendent as yours, for instance? There’s a certain cruelty about evening dress.’