by Mervyn Peake
She lowered her lids and found that his dead-pebble eyes were upon hers. With their gaze directed upwards and through the white tangle of the eyebrows they appeared to be caged.
She knew the moment to be enormous – enormous in its implications – in its future – but she knew also as a woman that she must draw her hand away. As the first suspicion of a movement crept through her flaccid fingers, Bellgrove lifted his head, withdrew his big hands from hers and at that moment Irma’s bosom began to slip. In the complex arrangement of strings, safety pins and tape which held the hot water bottle in place. Time had found a weakness.
But Irma, tingling with excitement, was in so elevated a frame of body and mind that, beyond her capacity as it were, her brain was planning for her in advance, those things she should do, and say, in or out of any emergency. And this was one of those moments when the cells of Irma’s brain marched in solid ranks to her rescue.
Her bosom was slipping. She clasped her hands together at her throat so that her forearms might keep the hot water bottle in place, and then with every eye upon her she lifted her head high and began to pace towards the doorway at the far end of the salon. She had not even glanced at her brother, but with a quite overweening confidence had started away, the folds of her evening gown trailing behind her.
The bottle had become horribly cold across her chest. But she revelled in its cruel temperature. Why should she care about such little things? Something on an altogether vaster scale was bearing her on its flood.
The barb had struck. She was naked. She was proud. Had love’s arrow not been metaphorical she would have held it high in the air for all to see. And all this she was making plain, by the very movement of her pacing body, and by the volcanic blush which had turned her marmoreal head into something that might have been found among the blood-red ruins of some remote civilization.
Her jewellery took on another tint. Her blush burned through it.
But her expression bore no relation to the blush. It was strangely articulate, and thus, frighteningly simple.
There was no need for words. Her face was saying, ‘I am in his power; he has awakened me; I, a mere woman, have been blasted into sentience. Whatever the future holds it will not be through me that love goes hungry. I am aware; not only that history is being made, but of my duty, even at this pinnacled moment, and so, I am leaving the room, to re-adjust myself – to compose myself, and to bring back into the salon the kind of woman that the headmaster may admire – no quivering lovestruck damsel, but a dame in all the high sensuousness of her sex, a dame, composed and glorious!’
Irma, directly she had reached the door and had swept out into the hall, flew, a silken spinster, up the flight of stairs to her room. Slamming the door behind her she gave vent to the primeval jungle in her veins and screamed like a macaw, and then, prancing forward towards the bed, tripped over a small embroidered foot-stool and fell spreadeagled across the carpet.
What did it matter? What did anything ridiculous or shaming matter so long as he was not there to see it?
THIRTY-FIVE
There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.
Irma, in her room, could picture Bellgrove at her side as though he were there, but she could also see clean through him, so that his body was pranked with the pattern of the wallpaper beyond. She could see a great host of professors, thousands of them, and all the size of hatpins. They stood upon her bed, a massed and solemn congregation, and bowed to her; but she also saw that her pillow-slip needed changing. She looked out of the window, her eyes wide and un-focused. The moonlight lay in a haze upon the high foliage of an elm, and the elm became Mr Bellgrove again with his distinguished and lordly mane. She saw a figure, no doubt some figment, as it slid over the wall of her grotto’d garden and ran like a shadow to beneath the window of the dispensary. Far away at the back of her mind, there was something that said ‘you have seen that movement before; crouching, rapid movement’ – yet she had, in her transport, no clue as to what was real and what was fantasy.
And so, when she saw a figure steal across the garden below her she had no conception that it was a real, breathing creature, far less that it was Steerpike. The young man who had forced open the window in the room below that in which Irma was standing moonstruck, had, by the light of a candle, wasted no time in finding the drug for which he was looking. The bottles on the packed shelves shone blue and crimson and deadly green as the small flame moved. Within a few moments he had decanted a few thimblefuls of a sluggish liquid into the flask he carried, and returned the doctor’s bottle to the shelf. He corked his own container and within a moment was halfway out of the window.
Above the walls of the garden the upper massives of Gormenghast castle shone in the baleful moonlight. As he paused for a moment before dropping from the window-sill to the ground, he shuddered. The night was warm and there was no cause to shudder save that a twinge of joy, of dark joy can shake the body, when a man is alone, under the moon, on a secret mission, with hunger in his heart and ice in his brain.
THIRTY-SIX
When Irma returned to her guests she paused before she opened the doors of the salon, for a loud and confused noise came from within. It was of a kind that she had never heard before, so happy it was, so multitudinous, so abandoned – the sound of voices at play. She had, of course, in her small way, at gatherings, heard, from time to time, the play of many voices. But what she was hearing now was not the play of voices; it was voices at play; and as such it was novel and peculiar to her ears, in the way that shadow at play (as against the play of shadows) would have been to her eyes. She had, on rare occasions, enjoyed the play of her brother’s brain – but in her salon there was something very different going on and from the few remarks that she could distinguish through the panels of the door it was obvious that here there was no play of language, no play of thought, but language playing on its own; enfranchised notions playing by themselves, the truants of the brain.
Gathering the long wreaths of her gown about her she crouched for a moment with her eyes to the keyhole but could see no more than the smoky midnight of the gowns.
What had happened, she wondered, while she had been upstairs? When she had left, in the motionless silence, like a queen, the room had throbbed with her single personality, the silence, the flattering and significant silence, had been her setting, as the great sky is the setting for the white flight of a gull. But now, the stretched drum-skin of the atmosphere had split – and the professors, exultant that this was so, had, each in his own way, erected within himself the romantic image of what he fondly imagined himself to be. For the long lost glories, that never in fact existed save in the wishfulness of their brains, were being remembered with a reality as vivid, if not more so, as truth itself. False memories flowered within them. The days of brilliance when their lances shone, when they leapt into the gold saddle quick as thought and galloped through the white rays of the dawn; when they ran like stags, swam like fish and, laughing like thunder, woke the swaddled towers. Ah Lord, the callow days; the cocky days, the days of sinew and the madcap evenings – the darkness at their elbows, co-conspirator, muffling their firetipped follies.
That but few of the Professors had ever tasted the heady mead of youth in no way dulled the contours of their self-portraits which they were now painting of themselves. And it had all happened so rapidly, this resurgence; this hark-back. It was as though some bell had been struck, some mountain-bell to which their guts responded. They had for so long a time made their evening way to their sacred, musty, airless quadrangle, that to be, for a whole evening in a new atmosphere was like sunrise. True, there was only Irma on the female side, but she was a symbol of all femininity, she was Eve, she was Medusa, she was terrible and she was peerless; she was hideous and she was the lily of the prairies; she was that alien thing from another world – that thing called
woman.
Directly she had left the room a thousand imaginary memories had beset them of women they had never known. Their tongues loosened, and their limbs also, and the Doctor found there was no need to launch the evening. For the flame was alight and the professorial torpor had been burned away, and they were back, all at once in a time when they were brilliant, omniscient and devastating and as dazzlingly attractive as the Devil himself.
With their brains illumined by these spurious and flattering images, the swarming gownsmen trod on air, and bridled up their hot and monstrous heads, flashed their teeth, or if toothless, grinned darkly, their mouths slung across their faces like hammocks.
As Irma turned the handle, taking a deep breath which all but destroyed her bust, she straightened herself and stood for a moment motionless, yet vibrant. As she opened the door and the gay thunder of their voices doubled its volume – she raised an eyebrow. Why, she wondered, should such potent happiness coincide with her absence? It was almost as though she had been forgotten, or worse, that her departure from the room had been welcomed.
She opened the door a little wider and peered around the corner, but in doing so her powdered head created all unknowingly so graphic a representation of something detached that a professor who happened to be staring in the direction of the door, let fall his lower jaw with a clank, and dropped the plate of delicacies to his feet.
‘Ah no, no!’ he whispered, the colours draining from his face … ‘not now, dire Death, not now … I am not ready … I …’
‘Ready for what, sweet trout,’ said a voice beside him. ‘By hell, these peacock-hearts are excellent. A little pepper, please!’
Irma entered. The man who had dropped his jaw swallowed hard and a sick grin appeared on his face. He had cheated death.
As Irma took her first few paces into the room her fear that the gracious authority of her presence had been undermined during her short absence was dispelled, for a score of professors, ceasing their chatter, and whipping their mortar-boards from their heads, cupped them over their hearts.
Swaying slightly as she proceeded towards the centre of the room, she, in her turn, bowed with a superb and icy grandeur now to left, now to right, as the dark festooning draperies of the professorial jungle opened, at her every step, its musty avenues.
Veering to east and west in gradual curves like a ship that has no precise idea as to which port it is making for, she found all about her, wherever she was, a hush, most gratifying. But the avenues closed behind her, and the conversation was resumed with an enthusiasm.
And then, all of a sudden, there was Bellgrove, not a dozen feet away. A long glass of wine was in his hand. He was in profile; and what a profile – ‘grandeur’ she hissed excitedly! ‘That’s what it is – grandeur.’ And it was then, at her third convulsive stride in the headmaster’s direction that something happened which was not only embarrassing but heart-rending in its simplicity, for a hoarse cry, out-topping the general cacophony, silenced the room and brought Irma to a standstill.
It was not the kind of cry that one expects to hear at a party. It had passion in it – and urgency. The very tone and timbre was a smack in the face of propriety, and broke on the instant all those unwritten laws of social behaviour that are the result – the fine flower – of centuries.
As every head was turned in the direction of the sound a movement became apparent in the same quarter where, from a group of professors, something appeared to be making its way towards its rigid hostess. Its face was flushed and its gestures were so convulsive that it was not easy to realize that it was Professor Throd.
On sighting Irma, he had deserted his companions Splint and Spiregrain, and on obtaining a better view of his hostess had suffered a sensation that was in every way too violent, too fundamental, too electric for his small brain and body. A million volts ran through him, a million volts of stark infatuation.
He had seen no woman for thirty-seven years. He gulped her through his eyes as at some green oasis the thirst-tormented nomad gulps the wellhead. Unable to remember any female face, he took Irma’s strange proportions and the cast of her features to be characteristic of femininity. And so, his conscious mind blotted out by the intensity of his reaction, he committed the unforgivable crime. He made his feelings public. He lost control. The blood rushed to his head; he cried out hoarsely, and then, little knowing what he was doing, he stumbled forwards, elbowing his colleagues from his path, and fell upon his knees before the lady, and finally, as though in a paroxysm, he collapsed upon his face, his arms and legs spread-eagled like a starfish.
The temperature of the room dropped to zero, and then, as suddenly it rose to an equatorial and burning heat. Five long seconds went by. It would not have been strange in that intense temperature to have found a python hanging from the ceiling – nor, when the icy spell returned again, at the lapse of the third second, to find the carpet white with arctic foxes.
Would no one make a move to crack the glass; the great transparent sheet that spread unbroken from corner to corner of the long room?
And then a stride took place, a stride that brought Bellgrove’s gaunt body to within four feet of Irma. With his next step he had halved the distances between himself and her – and then, all at once, he was above her and had found himself gazing down into eyes that pleaded. It was as though he had been injected with lion’s blood. Power rushed into him as though from a tap.
‘Most dear Madam,’ he said. ‘Have no fear, I pray you. That one of my staff should be lying below you is shameful, yes, shameful, madam, but lo! is it not a symbol of what we all feel? What shame there is lies in his weakness, madam, not in his passion. Some, dear lady, would have his name expunged from all registers – but no. But no. For he has warmth, madam; warmth above all! In this case it has led to something distasteful, dammit’ (he relapsed into his common tongue) ‘and so, dear hostess, allow me, as headmaster, to have him removed from your presence. Yet forgive him, I implore you, for he recognized quality when he saw it, and his only sin is that in recognizing it too violently he had not the strength to hold his passion captive.’
Bellgrove paused and wiped his forearm across his wet forehead and tossed back his white mane. He had spoken with his eyes shut. A sense of dreamlike strength had filled him. He knew in the self-imposed darkness that Irma’s eyes were upon him; he could feel the intensity of her close presence. He could hear the feet of his staff, as his words continued, shuffling away in tactful pairs, and he could even hear himself talking as though the voice was another’s.
What a deep and resonant organ the man has, he thought to himself, pretending for the moment that it was not his own voice he was hearing, for there was something humble in his nature which, every once in a while, found outlet.
But such thoughts were no more than momentary. What was paramount in him was the realization that here he was again, within a few inches of the lady whom he now intended to pursue with all the cunning of old age and all the steeple-swarming, torrent-leaping, barn-storming impetus of recaptured youth.
‘By the Lord!’ he cried, voicelessly, and to himself yet very loud it sounded, in his own brains – ‘by the Lord, if I don’t show ’em how it’s done! Two arms, two legs, two eyes, one mouth, ears, trunk and buttocks, belly and skeleton, lungs, tripes and backbone, feet and hands, brains, eyes and testicles. I’ve got ’em all – so help me, rightside up.’
His eyes had remained closed, but now he lifted the heavy lids and, peering between his pale eyelashes, he found in the eyes of his hostess so hot and wet a succubus of love as threatened to undermine her marble temple and send its structure toppling.
He glanced about him. His staff, tactful to the point of tactlessness, were gathered in groups and were talking together like those gentlemen of the stage who, in an effort to appear normal, yet with nothing to say, repeat in simulated languor or animation – ‘one … two … three … four’ and so on. But in the case of the professors they mouthed their fatuities with all the
over-emphasis of un-rehearsal. In a far corner of the room a scrum of gownsmen were becoming restive.
‘Talk about a wax giraffe, Cor slice me edgeways!’ muttered Mulefire between his teeth.
‘Certainly not, you hulk of flesh unhallowed,’ said Perch-Prism. ‘I’m ashamed of you!’
‘And so indeed, la! Am I a beetroot? What it is, la, to have known better days and better ways, Heaven shrive me – Am I a beetroot?’ It was the gay Cutflower talking, but there was something ruffled about his tone.
‘As Theoreticus says in his diatribe against the use of the vernacular,’ whispered Flannelcat, who had waited for a long while for the moment when by coincidence he would both have the courage to say something and have something to say.
‘Well, what did the old bleeder say?’ said Opus Fluke.
But no one was interested and Flannelcat knew that his opportunity was gone, for several voices broke in and cut across his nervous reply.
‘Tell me, Cutflower, is the Head still staring at her and why can’t you pass the wine, by the clay of which we’re made, it’s given me the thirst of cactusland,’ said Perch-Prism, his flat nose turned to the ceiling. ‘But for my breeding I’d turn round and see for myself.’
‘Not a twitch,’ said Cutflower. ‘Statues, la! Most uncanny.’
‘Once upon a time,’ broke in the mournful voice of Flannelcat, ‘I used to collect butterflies. It was long ago – in a swallow country full of dry river-beds. Well, one damp afternoon when …’
‘Another time, Flannelcat,’ said Cutflower. ‘You may sit down.’
Flannelcat, saddened, moved away from the group in search of a chair.
Meanwhile Bellgrove had been savouring love’s rare aperitif, the ageless language of the eyes.