by Mervyn Peake
Behind him in the dugout sat Flannelcat, a poor oarsman if ever there was one. For Flannelcat to be glum and speechless was nothing new. If Fluke brooded on the death of an armchair, Flannelcat brooded on the death of all things and had done so for as long as anyone could remember. He had always been ineffectual and a misery to himself and others, and so, having plumbed the depths for so long, this flood was a mere nothing to him.
Mulefire, the most difficult of the crew for Perch-Prism to control, sat like a hulk of stupid, bull-necked irritability, immediately behind the miserable Flannelcat, who looked to be in perpetual danger of being bitten in the back of the neck by Mulefire’s tomb-stone teeth, and of being lifted out of his seat and slung away across the ballroom water. Behind Mulefire sat Cutflower; he was the last of them all to admit that silence was the best thing that could happen to them. Chatter was lifeblood – and it was a mere shadow of the one time vapid but ebullient wag who sat now staring at Mulefire’s heavily muscled back.
There were only two other members to this crew: Shred and Swivell. No doubt the rest of the staff had got hold of boats from somewhere, or, like these gentlemen, had constructed something themselves, or even ignored Bellgrove’s ruling, and kept to the upper floors.
Shred and Swivell dipping their mortarboards in the glassy surface were of course the nearest to the approaching raft. Swivell, the bow ‘oar’, turning his ageing face to see who it was that Perch-Prism was hailing, upset for a few moments the balance of the dugout which listed dangerously to the port side.
‘Now then! Now then!’ shouted Perch-Prism from the stern. ‘Are you trying to capsize us, sir?’
‘Nonsense,’ shouted Swivell, colouring, for he hated being reprimanded over the seven heads of his colleagues. He knew that he had behaved in an utterly unworthy way, for a bow oar, but ‘Nonsense’ he shouted again.
‘We will not discuss the matter now sir, if you please!’ said Perch-Prism, dropping the lids over his small black and eloquent eyes, and half turning away his head so that the underside of his porcine nose caught what light there was reflected from the water.
‘I would have thought it were enough that you had endangered your colleagues. But no. You wish to justify yourself, like all men of science. Tomorrow you and Cutflower will change places.’
‘Oh Lord! la!’ said Cutflower, testily. ‘I’m comfy where I am, la!’
Perch-Prism was about to let the ungracious Cutflower into a secret or two on the nature of mutiny when the Doctor came alongside.
‘Good morning, Doctor,’ said Perch-Prism.
The Doctor, starting out of an uneasy sleep, for even after he had heard Perch-Prism’s shout across the water he had been unable to keep his eyes open, forced himself upright on the raft and turned his tired eyes upon the dugout.
‘Did somebody say something?’ cried he, with a valiant effort at jocularity, though his limbs felt like lead and there was a fire in the top of his head.
‘Did I hear a voice across the brine? Well, well, it’s you, Perch-Prism, by all that’s irregular! How are you, admiral?’
But even as the Doctor was flashing one of his Smiles along the length of the dugout, like a dental broadside, he fell back upon the mattress, and the orderly with the long pole, taking no notice of Perch-Prism and the rest, gave a great shove against the ballroom floor and the raft swam forward and away from the Professors in the direction of the hospital, where, he hoped, he could persuade the Doctor to lie down for an hour or two irrespective of the maimed and distressed, the dead and the dying.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Irma had not spared herself over the furnishing of her home. A great deal of work, a great deal of thought – and, in her opinion, a great deal of taste – had been lavished upon it. The colour scheme had been carefully considered. There was not a discordant note in the whole place. It was so tasteful, in fact, that Bellgrove never felt at home. It gave him a sense of inferiority and he hated the powder-blue curtains and the dove-grey carpets, as though it were their fault that Irma had chosen them. But this meant little to her. She knew that he as a mere man would know nothing of ‘artistic’ matters. She had expressed herself, as women will, in a smug broadside of pastel shades. Nothing clashed because nothing had the strength to clash; everything murmured of safety among the hues; all was refinement.
But the vandal water came and the work and the thought and the taste and the refinement, O where was it now? It was too much! It was too much! That all the love she had lavished was drowned beneath the mean, beastly, stupid, unnecessary rain, that this thing, this thing, this useless, brainless element called rain, should turn her artistry to filth and pulp!
‘I hate nature,’ she cried. ‘I hate it, the rotten beast …’
‘Tut, tut,’ muttered Bellgrove as he lolled in a hammock and stared up at one of the beams in the roof. (They had been assigned a small loft where they were able to be miserable in comparative comfort.) ‘You can’t talk about nature like that, my ignorant child. Good gracious, no! Dammit, I should think not.’
‘Nature,’ cried Irma scornfully. ‘Do you think I’m frightened of it! Let it do what it likes!’
‘You’re a piece of nature yourself,’ said Bellgrove after a pause.
‘O don’t be stupid, you … you …’ Irma could not continue.
‘All right, what am I then?’ murmured Bellgrove. ‘Why don’t you say what’s in your empty little woman’s mind? Why don’t you call me an old man like you do when you’re angry with something else? If you’re not nature, or a bit of it, what the hell are you?’
‘I’m a woman,’ screamed his wife, her eyes filling with tears. ‘And my home is under … under … the vile … rainwater …’
With a great effort Mr Bellgrove worked his emaciated legs over the side of the hammock and when they touched the floor, rose shakily to his feet and shambled uncertainly in his wife’s direction. He was very conscious of doing a noble action. He had been very comfortable in the hammock; he knew that there was a very slender chance of his chivalry being appreciated, but that was life. One had to do certain things to keep up one’s spiritual status, but apart from that, her terrible outburst had unnerved him. He had to do something. Why did she have to make such an unpleasant noise about it all? Her voice went through his head like a knife.
But oh it had been pathetic too: railing against Nature. How maddeningly ignorant she was. As though nature should have turned back when it reached as far as her boudoir. As though a flood would whisper to itself, ‘Sh … sh … sh … less noise … less … noise … this is Irma’s room … lavender and ivory you know … lavender and ivory’ – Tut-tut-tut, what a wife to be saddled with in all conscience … and yet … and yet … was it only pity that drew him to her? He did not know.
He sat down by her side beneath a small top window, and he put his long, loose arm about her. She shuddered a moment and then stiffened again. But she did not ask him to remove his arm.
In the small loft with the great castle beneath them like a gigantic body with its arteries filled with water, they sat there side by side, and stared at where a piece of plaster had fallen from the opposite wall, and had left a small grey pattern the shape of a heart.
SEVENTY-FIVE
It was not that Fuchsia did not struggle against her mounting melancholia. But the black moods closing in on her ever more frequently were becoming too much for her.
The emotional, loving, moody child had had small chance of developing into a happy woman. Had she as a girl been naturally joyous yet all that had befallen her must surely have driven away the bright birds, one by one, from her breast. As it was, made of a more sombre clay, capable of deep happiness, but more easily drawn to the dark than the light, Fuchsia was even more open to the cruel winds of circumstances which appeared to have singled her out for particular punishment.
Her need for love had never been fulfilled; her love for others had never been suspected, or wanted. Rich as a dusky orchard, she had never been discovere
d. Her green boughs had been spread, but no travellers came and rested in their shade nor tasted the sweet fruit.
With her mind for ever turning to the past, Fuchsia could see nothing but the ill-starred progress of a girl who was, in spite of her title and all it implied, of little consequence in the eyes of the castle, a purposeless misfit of a child, hapless and solitary. Her deepest loves had been for her old nurse Nannie Slagg, for her brother, for the Doctor, and in a strange way for Flay. Nannie Slagg and Flay were both dead; Titus had changed. They loved one another still but a wall of cloud lay between them, something that neither had the power to dispel.
There was still Dr Prune. But he had been so heavily overworked since the flood that she had not seen him. The desire to see the last of her true friends had weakened with every black depression. When she most needed the counsel and love of the Doctor, who would have left the world bleeding to help her, it was then that she froze within herself and locking herself away, became ill with the failure of her life, the frustration of her womanhood, and tossing and turning in her improvised bedroom twelve feet above the flood, conceived, for the first time, the idea of suicide.
What was the darkest of the causes for so terrible a thought it is hard to know. Her lack of love; her lack of a father or a real mother? Her loneliness. The ghastly disillusion when Steerpike was unmasked, and the horror of her having been fondled by a homicide. The growing sense of her own inferiority in everything but rank. There were many causes, any one of which might have been alone sufficient to undermine the will of tougher natures than Fuchsia’s.
When the first concept of oblivion flickered through her mind, she raised her head from her arms. She was shocked and she was frightened. But she was excited also.
She walked unsteadily to the window. Her thought had taken her into a realm of possibility so vast, awe-inspiring, final and noiseless that her knees felt weak and she glanced over her shoulder although she knew herself to be alone in her room with the door locked against the world.
When she reached the window she stared out across the water, but nothing that she saw affected her thought or made any kind of visual impression on her.
All she knew was that she felt weak, that she was not reading about all this in a tragic book but that it was true. It was true that she was standing at a window and that she had thought of killing herself. She clutched her hands together over her heart and a fleeting memory of how a young man had suddenly appeared at another window many years ago and had left a rose behind him on her table, passed through her mind and was gone.
It was all true. It wasn’t any story. But she could still pretend. She would pretend that she was the sort of person who would not only think of killing herself so that the pain in her heart should be gone for ever, but be the kind of person who would know how to do it, and be brave enough.
And as she pondered, she slid moment by moment even deeper into a world of make-believe, as though she were once more the imaginative girl of many years ago, aloft in her secret life. She had become somebody else. She was someone who was young and beautiful and brave as a lioness. What would such a person do? Why, such a person would stand upon the window-sill above this water. And … she … would … and as the child in her was playing the oldest game in the world, her body, following the course of her imagination, had climbed to the sill of the window where it stood with its back to the room.
For how long she would have stood there had she not been jerked back into a sudden consciousness of the world – by the sound of someone knocking upon the door of her room, it is impossible to know, but starting at the sound and finding herself dangerously balanced upon a narrow sill above the deep water, she trembled uncontrollably, and in trying to turn without sufficient thought or care, she slipped and clutching at the face of the wall at her side found nothing to grasp, so that she fell, striking her dark head on the sill as she passed, and was already unconscious before the water received her, and drowned her at its ease.
SEVENTY-SIX
Now that the flood had reached its height it was vital that not a moment should be lost in combing the regions in which Steerpike might be lurking – in surrounding them with cordons of picked men who, converging inwards to the centre of each chosen district, by land and water, should, theoretically, sooner or later, close upon the beast. And now above all was the time to throw in every man. The Countess had circled areas of the Gormenghast map with a thick blue pencil. Captains of Search had been given their instructions. Not a cranny was to be left un-scoured – not a drain unprobed. It would be difficult enough, with the flood at its present level to run to earth so sly a quarry, yet with every day that passed the chances of Steerpike’s capture would recede even further – would recede as the flood receded, for as one floor after another began to open up its labyrinthian ways, so the fugitive in the multiplying warrens, would burrow ever deeper into darkness.
It would of course be slow and gradual this going-down of the flood, but the Countess was fiercely conscious of how time was the salient factor: how never again would she have Steerpike within so close a net. Even for the flood to leave a single floor would be for a hundred vistas to spread out on every side with all their countless alleys of wet stone. There was no time to be lost.
As it was the theatre of manoeuvre – the three dry topmost floors and the wet ‘floor of boats’ (where the coloured craft of the carvers sped to and fro, or lay careening beneath great mantelpieces, or tied up to the banisters of forgotten stairways, cast their rich reflections in the dark water) – these theatres of manoeuvre – the three dry levels and the one wet, were not the only areas which had to be considered in the drawing up of the Master Plan. The Countess also had to remember the isolated outcrops of the castle. Luckily most of the widely scattered and virtually endless ramifications of the main structure of Gormenghast were under water, and consequently of no use to the fugitive. But there were a number of towers to which the young man might well have swum. And there was also Gormenghast Mountain.
As far as this latter was concerned, the Countess was not apprehensive of his having escaped there, not merely because she had checked the boats each evening, and was satisfied that there had been no thefts but because a string of boats, like coloured beads, was at her orders in perpetual rotation around the castle summits, and would have cut him off by day or night.
The core of her strategy hinged upon the fact that the young man must eat. As for drink, he had a wet world brimming at his mouth.
That he might already be dead from accident or from starvation was ruled out by the body that on this very day had been discovered floating face downwards alongside an upturned coracle. The man had been no more than a few hours dead. A pebble was lodged in his forehead.
The headquarters of the Countess was now in a long, narrow room that lay immediately and somewhat centrally above the ‘floor of boats’.
There she received all messages: gave all orders: prepared her plans: studied the various maps and gave instructions for new ones to be rapidly prepared of the unplotted districts so that she should have as powerful a grasp upon the smallest details as she had upon the comprehensive sweep of her master-plan.
Her preparations completed she rose from the table at which she had been sitting, and pursing her lips at the goldfinch on her shoulder she was about to move with that characteristically heavy and ruthless deliberation towards the door when a panting messenger ran up to her.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘Lord Titus, my lady … he’s …’
‘He’s what?’ she turned her head sharply.
‘He’s here.’
‘Where?’
‘Outside the door, your ladyship. He says he has important news for you.’ The Countess moved at once to the door and opening it, found Titus sitting upon the floor, his head between his knees, his sodden clothes in rags, his legs and arms bruised and scratched, and his hair grey with grime.
He did not look up. He had not the stren
gth. He had collapsed. In a confused way he knew where he was, for he had been straining his muscles with long and hazardous climbs, struggling shoulder deep through flooded passageways, crawling giddily over slanting roofs, intent upon one thing – to reach this door under which he had slumped. The door of his mother’s room.
After a little time he opened his eyes. His mother was kneeling heavily at his side. What was she doing there? He shut his eyes again. Perhaps he was dreaming. Someone was saying in a far away voice ‘Where is that brandy?’ and then, a little later, he felt himself being raised, the cold rim of a glass at his lips.
When he next opened his eyes he knew exactly where he was and why he was there.
‘Mother!’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Her voice was quite colourless.
‘I’ve seen him.’
‘Who?’
‘Steerpike.’
The Countess stiffened at his side. It was as though something more of ice than of flesh was kneeling beside him.
‘No!’ she said at last. ‘Why should I believe you?’
‘It is true,’ said Titus.
She bent over him and taking his shoulders in her powerful hands, forced them with a deceptive tenderness to and fro, as though to ease some turmoil in her heart. He could feel through the gentle grasp of her fingers the murderous strength of her arms.
At last she said, ‘Where? Where did you see him?’
‘I could take you there … northwards.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Hours … hours … he went through a window … in my boat … he stole it.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you sure of that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Northwards you say. Beyond the Blackstone Quarter?’
‘Far beyond. Nearer the Stone Dogshead and the Angel’s Buttress.’