by Mervyn Peake
‘Oh, that is of no avail.’
‘Do you mean “of no account”?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Irma.
‘But how embarrassing! Won’t they feel it keenly, my dear – or will you put on rags, in an overflow of love and sympathy?’
‘There will be no women.’
‘No women!’ cried her brother, genuinely startled.
‘I must be alone,’ his sister murmured, pushing her black glasses further up the bridge of her long, pointed nose … ‘with them – the males.’
‘But what of the entertainment for your guests?’
‘I shall be there,’ said Irma.
‘Yes, yes; and no doubt you will prove ravishing and ubiquitous; but, my love, my love, think again.’
‘Alfred,’ said Irma, standing up and lowering one of her iliac crests and raising its counterpart so high that her pelvis looked thoroughly dangerous – ‘Alfred,’ she said, ‘how can you be so perverse? What use could women be? You haven’t forgotten what we have in mind, have you? Have you?’
Her brother was beginning to admire her. Had she all this long while been hiding beneath her neuroticism, her vanity, her childishness, an iron will?
He rose and, cupping his hands over her hips, corrected their angle with the quick jerk of a bonesetter. Then, sitting back in his chair and fastidiously crossing his long, elegant, cranelike legs while going through the movements of washing his hands: ‘Irma, my revelation, tell me but this …’ he raised his eyes quizzically – ‘who are these males – these stags – these rams – these torn cats – these cocks, stoats and ganders that you have in mind? And on what scale is this carousal to be?’
‘You know very well, Alfred, that we have no choice. Among the gentry, who are there? I ask you, Alfred, who are there?’
‘Who, indeed?’ mused the Doctor, who could think of no one. The idea of a party in his house was so novel that the effort of trying to people it was beyond him. It was as though he were trying to assemble a cast for an unwritten drama.
‘As for the size of the party, Alfred – are you listening? I have in mind a gathering of some forty men.’
‘No! no!’ shouted her brother, clutching at the arms of his chair, ‘not in this room, surely? It would be worse than the white cats. It would be a dog fight.’
Was that a blush that stole across his sister’s face?
‘Alfred,’ she said after a while, ‘it is my last chance. In a year my glamour may be tarnished. Is it a time to think of your own personal comfort?’
‘Listen to me.’ Prunesquallor spoke very slowly. His high voice was strangely meditative. ‘I will be as concise as I can. Only you must listen, Irma.’
She nodded.
‘You will have more success if your party is not too large. At a large party the hostess has to flutter from guest to guest and can never enjoy a protracted conversation with anyone. What is more, the guests continually flutter towards the hostess in a manner calculated to show her how much they are enjoying themselves.
‘But at a smaller party where everyone can easily be seen the introductions and general posturing can be speedily completed. You will then have time to size up the persons present and decide on those worth giving your attention to.’
‘I see,’ said Irma. ‘I am going to have lanterns hanging in the garden, too, so that I can lure those whom I think fit out into the apple orchard.’
‘Good heavens!’ said Prunesquallor, half to himself. ‘Well, I hope it won’t be raining.’
‘It won’t,’ said Irma.
He had never known her like this. There was something frightening in seeing a second side of a sister whom he had always assumed had only one.
‘Well, some of them must be left out, then.’
‘But who are they? Who are they?’ he cried. ‘I can’t bear this frightful tension. What are these males that you seem to think of en bloc? This doglike horde who at, as it were, a whistle will be ready to stream across the quadrangle and through the hall, through this door and to take up a score of masculine postures? In the name of fundamental mercy, Irma, tell me who they are.’
‘The Professors.’
As Irma uttered the words her hands grappled with one another behind her back. Her flat bosom heaved. Her sharp nose twitched and a terrible smile came over her face.
‘They are gentlemen!’ she cried in a loud voice. ‘Gentlemen! And worthy of my love.’
‘What! All forty of them.’ Her brother was on his feet again. He was shocked.
But at the same time he could see the logic of Irma’s choice. Who else was there for a party with this hidden end in view? As for their being ‘gentlemen’ – perhaps they were. But only just. If their blood was bluish, so for the most part were their jaws and fingernails. If their backgrounds bore scrutiny, the same could hardly be said for their foregrounds.
‘What a vista opens out before us! How old are you, Irma?’
‘You know very well, Alfred.’
‘Not without thinking,’ said the Doctor. ‘But leave it. It’s what you look like that matters. God knows you’re clean! It’s a good start. I am trying to put myself in your place. It takes an effort – ha ha! – I can’t do it.’
‘Alfred.’
‘My love?’
‘How many do you think would be ideal?’
‘If we chose well, Irma, I should say a dozen.’
‘No, no, Alfred, it’s a party! It’s a party! Things happen at parties – not at friends’ gatherings. I’ve read about it. Twenty, at least, to make the atmosphere pregnant.’
‘Very well, my dear. Very well. Not that we will include a mildewed and wheezy beast with broken antlers because he comes twentieth on the list when the other nineteen are stags, are virile and eligible. But come, let us go into this matter more closely. Let us say, for sake of argument, that we have whittled the probable down to fifteen. Now, of this fifteen, Irma, my sweet co-strategist, surely we could not hope for more than six as possible husbands for you. – No, no, do not wince; let us be honest, though it is brutal work. The whole thing is very subtle, for the six you might prefer are not necessarily the six that would care to share the rest of their lives with you; oh no. It might be another six altogether whom you don’t care about one little bit. And over and above these interchangeables we must have the floating background of those whom I have no doubt you would spurn with your elegantly cloven hooves were they to make the least advance. You would bridle up, Irma: I’m sure you would. But nevertheless they are needful, these untouchables, for we must have a hinterland. They are the ones who will make the party florid, the atmosphere potential.’
‘Do you think we could call it a soirée, Alfred?’
‘There is no law against it that I know of,’ answered Prunesquallor, a little irritably perhaps, for she had obviously not been listening. ‘But the Professors, as I remember them, are hardly the types I would associate with the term. Who, by the way, do comprise the Staff these latter days? It is a long time since I last saw the flapping of a gown.’
‘I know that you are cynical, Alfred, BUT I would have you know that they are my choice. I have always wished for a man of learning to be my own. I would understand him. I would administer to him. I would protect him and darn his socks.’
‘And a more dexterous darner never protected the tendo achilles with a double skein!’
‘Alfred!’
‘Forgive me, my own. By all that’s unforeseeable I am getting to like the idea. For my part, Irma, I will see to the wines and liqueurs, the barrels and the punchbowl. For your part the eatables, the invitations, the schooling of the staff – our staff, not the luminaries’. And now, my dear, when? This is the question – when?’
‘My gown of a thousand frills, with its corsage of hand-painted parrots will be ready within ten days, and …’
‘Parrots!’ cried the Doctor in consternation.
‘Why not?’ said Irma, sharply.
‘But,’ wavered her brother, ‘h
ow many of them?’
‘What on earth does it matter to you, Alfred? They are brightly coloured birds.’
‘But will they chime in with the frills, my sweet one? I would have thought if you must have hand-painted creatures on your corsage, as you call it – that something calculated to turn the thoughts of the Professors to your femininity, your desirability, something less aggressive than parrots might be wise … Mind you, Irma, I’m only …’
‘Alfred!’ Her voice jerked him back to his chair.
‘My, province, I think,’ she said, with heavy sarcasm. ‘I imagine when it comes to parrots you can leave them to me.’
‘I will,’ said her brother.
‘Will ten days give us time, Alfred?’ she said, as she rose from her chair and approached her brother, smoothing back her iron-grey hair with her long, pale fingers. Her tone had softened. To the Doctor’s horror she sat on the arm of his chair.
Then, with a sudden kittenish abandon, she flung back her head so that her over-long yet pearl-white neck was tautened in a backward curve and her chignon tapped her between her shoulder-blades in so peremptory a way as to make her cough. But directly she had ascertained that it was not her brother being wilful, the ecstatic and kittenish expression came back to her powdered face, and she clapped her hands together at her breast.
Prunesquallor, staring up, horrified at yet another facet of her character coming to light, noticed that one of her molars needed filling, but decided it was not the moment to mention it.
‘Oh Alfred! Alfred!’ she cried. ‘I am a woman, aren’t I?’ The hands were shaking with excitement as they gripped one another. ‘I’ll show them I am!’ she screamed, her voice losing all control. And then, calming herself with a visible effort, she turned to her brother and, smiling at him with a coyness that was worse than any scream – ‘I’ll send their cards to them tomorrow, Alfred,’ she whispered.
FIFTEEN
Three shafts of the rising sun, splintering through the murk, appeared to set fire to the earth where they struck it. The bright impact of the nearest beam exposed a tangle of branches which clawed in a craze of radiance, microscopically perfect and adrift in darkness.
The second of these floodlit islands appeared to float immediately above the first, for the sky and the earth were a single curtain of darkness. In reality it was as far away again, but hanging as it did gave no sense of distance.
At its northern extremity there grew from the wasp-gold earth certain forms like eruptions of masonry rather than spires and buttresses of natural rock. The sunshaft had uncovered a mere finger of some habitation which, widening as it entered the surrounding darkness to the North, became a fist of stones, which, in its turn, heaving through wrist and forearm to an elbow like a smashed honeycomb, climbed through darkness to a gaunt, time-eaten shoulder only to expand again and again into a mountainous body of timeless towers.
But of all this nothing was visible but the bright and splintered tip of a stone finger.
The third ‘island’ was the shape of a heart. A coruscating heart of tares on fire.
To the dark edge of this third light a horse was moving. It appeared no bigger than a fly. Astride its back was Titus.
As he entered the curtain of darkness which divided him from his citylike home he frowned. One of his hands gripped the mane of his mount. His heart beat loudly, in the absolute hush. But the horse moved without hesitation, and he was quietened by the regular movement beneath him.
All at once a new ‘island’ of light, undulating as it ran from the east, enlarging its mercurial margins all the while as though to push away the darkness, created in the gloom a fantastic kaleidoscope of fleeting rocks and trees and valleys and ridges – the fluctuating ‘coastline’ flaring in sharp and minute tracery. This flow of radiance was followed by another and another. Great saffron gaps had appeared in the sky – and then, from skyline to skyline, the world was naked light.
Titus shouted. The horse shook its head; and then, over the land of his ancestors, he galloped for home.
But in the excitement of the gallop Titus turned his head from the castle towers, which lifted themselves momently higher above the horizon, turned it to where, away in the cold haze of the dawn Gormenghast Mountain with its claw-like peak threw out its challenge across the thrilling air – ‘Do you dare?’ it seemed to cry. ‘Do you dare?’
Titus leaned back in the stirrups and tugged his horse to a standstill, for a rare confusion of voices and images had made a cockpit of his panting body. Forests as wet and green as romance itself heaved their thorned branches through him as he sat there shuddering, half turned on the saddle. Swathes of wet foliage shuffled beneath his ribs. In his mouth he tasted the bitterness of leaves. The smell of the forest earth, black with rotted ferns and pungent with fermentation, burned for a moment in his nostrils.
His eyes had travelled down from the high, bare summit of Gormenghast Mountain to the shadowy woods, and then again had turned to the sky. He stared at the sun as it climbed. He felt the day beginning. He turned his horse about. His back was towards Gormenghast.
The mountain’s head shone in a great vacancy of light. It held within its ugly contour either everything or nothing at all. It awakened the imagination by its peculiar emptiness.
And from it came the voice again.
‘Do you dare? Do you dare?’
And a host of voices joined. Voices from the sun-blotched glades. From the marshes and the gravel beds. From the birds of the green river reaches. From where the squirrels are and the foxes move and the woodpeckers thicken the drowsy stillness of the day with their far arcadian tapping: from where the rotten hollow of some tree, mellow with richness, glows as though lit from within by the sweet and secret cache of the wild bees.
Titus had risen an hour before the bell. He had hurried into his clothes without a sound, and had then tip-toed through silent halls to a southern gateway; and then, running across a walled-in courtyard, had arrived at the Castle stables. The morning was black and murky, but he was restless for a world without Walls. He had paused at Fuchsia’s door on his way and had tapped at it.
‘Who’s there?’ Her voice had sounded strangely husky from the other side.
‘It’s me,’ said Titus.
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing,’ said Titus. ‘I’m going for a ride.’
‘It’s beastly weather,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Good-bye.’
‘Good-bye,’ said Titus; and had resumed his tip-toeing along the corridor when he heard the sound of a handle being rattled. He turned and saw, not only Fuchsia disappearing back into her bedroom, but at the same moment something which was travelling very fast through the air and at his head. To protect his face he threw up his arm and, more by accident than adroitness, found he had caught in his hand a large and sticky slice of cake.
Titus knew that he was not allowed out of the Castle before breakfast. He knew that it was doubly disobedient to venture beyond the Outer Walls. As the only survivor of a famous line he had to take more than ordinary care of himself. It was for him to give particulars of when and where he was going, so that should he be late in returning it would be known at once. But, dark as was the day, it had no power to suppress the craving which had been mounting for weeks – the craving to ride and ride when the rest of the world lay in bed: to drink the spring air in giant gulps as his horse galloped beneath him over the April fields, beyond the Outer Dwellings. To pretend, as he galloped, that he was free.
Free …!
What could such a conception mean to Titus, who hardly knew what it was to move from one part of his home to another without being watched, guided or followed and who had never known the matchless privacy of the obscure? To be without a famous name? To have no lineage? To be something of no interest to the veiled eye of the grown-up world? To be a creature that grew, as a redskin creeps: through childhood and youth, from one year to the next, as though from thicket to thicket, from ambush to ambush, peering from Youth’
s tree-top vantages?
Because of the wild vista that surrounded Gormenghast and spread to every horizon as though the castle were an island of maroons set in desolate water beyond all trade-routes: because of this sense of space, how could Titus know that the vague, unfocused dissatisfaction which he had begun to feel from time to time was the fretting of something caged?
He knew no other world. Here all about him the raw material burned: the properties and settings of romance. Romance that is passionate; obscure and sexless: that is dangerous and arrogant.
The future lay before him with its endless ritual and pedantry, but something beat in his throat and he rebelled.
To be a truant! A Truant! It was like being a Conqueror – or a Demon.
And so he had saddled his small grey horse and ridden out into the dark April morning. No sooner had he passed through one of the arches in the Outer Wall and cantered in the direction of Gormenghast forest than he became suddenly, hopelessly lost. All in a moment the clouds seemed to have cut out all possible light from the sky, and he had found himself among branches which switched back and struck him in the darkness. At another time, his horse had found itself up to the knees in a cold and sucking mire. It had shuddered beneath him as it backed with difficulty to find firmer purchase for its hooves. As the sun had climbed, Titus was able to make out where he was. And then, suddenly, the long sunshafts had broken through the gloom and he had seen away in the distance – far further than he would ever have guessed possible – the shining stone of one of the Castle’s western capes.
And then the flooding of the sun, until not a rag was left in the sky, and the thrill of fear became the thrill of anticipation – of adventure.
Titus knew that already he would be missed. Breakfast would be over; but long before breakfast an alarm must have been raised in the dormitory. Titus could see the raised eyebrow of his professor in the schoolroom as he eyed the empty desk, and could hear the chatter and speculation of the pupils. And then he felt something more thrilling than the warm kiss of the sun on the back of his neck: it was a reedy flight of cold April air across his face – something perilous and horribly exciting – something very shrill, that whistled through his qualmy stomach and down his thighs. It was as though it was the herald of adventure that whistled to him to turn his horse’s head, while the soft gold sunlight murmured the same message in a drowsier voice.