by Mervyn Peake
He had no idea of the significance which was presumably attached to the firing of the cannon. As it was he was served well by his own ignorance and with a pounding heart he ran like a deer, dodging this way and that way through the crowd until he came to the most majestic of the palaces. Racing up the shallow glass pavements and into the weird and lucent gloom of the great halls, it was not long before he had left the custom-shackled hierophants behind him. It is true that there was a great number of persons scattered about the floor of the building who stared at Titus whenever he came into their range of vision. They could not turn their heads to follow him, nor even their eyes because the cannon had boomed, but when he passed across their vision they knew at once he was not one of them and that he had no right to be in the olive palace. And then as he ran on and on the cannon boomed again and at once Titus knew that the world was after him, for the air became torn with cries and counter-cries, and suddenly four men turned a corner of the long glass corridor, their reflections in the glazed floor as detailed and as crisp as their true selves.
‘There he goes,’ cried a voice. ‘There go the rags!’ But when they reached the spot where Titus had halted for a moment they found he was indeed gone and all they had to stare at were the closed doors of a lift shaft.
Titus, who had found himself cornered, had turned to the vast, purring, topaz-studded lift not knowing exactly what it was. That its elegant jaws should have been open and ready was his salvation. He sprang inside and the gates, drawing themselves together, closed as though they ran through butter.
The interior of the lift was like an underwater grotto, filled with subdued lights. Something hazy and voluptuous seemed to hover in the air. But Titus was in no mood for subtleties. He was a fugitive. And then he saw that wavering in his underwater world were rows of ivory buttons, each button carved into some flower, face, or skull.
He could hear the sound of footsteps running and angry voices outside the door and he jabbed indiscriminately among the buttons, and immediately soaring through floor after floor in a whirl of steel the lift all at once inhaled its own speed and the doors slid open of their own accord.
How quiet it was and cool. There was no furniture, only a single palm tree growing out of the floor. A small red parrot sat on one of the upper branches and pecked itself. When it saw Titus it cocked its head on one side and then with great rapidity it kept repeating, ‘Bloody corker told me so!’ This phrase was reiterated a dozen times at least before the bird continued pecking at its wing.
There were four doors in this cool upper hall. Three led to corridors but the last one, when Titus opened it, let in the sky. There, before and slightly below him, lay spread the roof.
TWENTY-ONE
No one found him all that sun-scorched evening and when the twilight came and the shadows withered he was able to steal to and fro across the wide glass roofscape and see what was going on in the rooms below.
For the most part the glass was too thick for Titus to see more than a blur of coloured shapes and shadows but he came at last to an open skylight through which he could see without obstruction a scene of great diversity and splendour.
To say a party was in progress would be a mean and cheese-paring way of putting it. The long sitting-room or salon, no more than twelve or fifteen feet below him, was in the throes of it. Life, of a kind, was in spate.
Music leaped from the long room and swarmed out of the skylight while Titus lay on his stomach on the warm glass roof, his eyes wide with conjecture. The sunken sun had left behind it a dim red weight of air. The stars were growing fiercer every moment, when the music suddenly ended in a string of notes like coloured bubbles and to take their place a hundred tongues began to wag at once.
Titus half closed his eyes at the effulgence of a forest of candles, the sparkle of glass and mirrors, and the leaping reflections of light from polished wood and silver. It was so close to him that had he coughed a dozen faces would, for all the noise in the room, have turned at once to the skylight and discovered him. It was like nothing else he had seen, and even from the first glimpse, it appeared as much like a gathering of creatures, of birds and beasts and flowers, as a gathering of humans.
They were all there. The giraffe-men and the hippopotamus-men. The serpent-ladies and the heron-ladies. The aspens and the oaks: the thistles and the ferns – the beetles and the moths – the crocodiles and the parrots: the tigers and the lambs: vultures with pearls around their necks and bison in tails.
But this was only for a flash, for as Titus, drawing a deep breath, stared again, the distortions, the extremes, appeared to crumble, to slip away from the surge of heads below him, and he was again among his own species.
Titus could feel the heat rising from the long dazzling room so close below him – yet distant as a rainbow. The hot air as it rose was impregnated with scent; a dozen of the most expensive perfumes were fighting for survival. Everything was fighting for survival – with lungs, and credulity.
There were limbs and heads and bodies everywhere: and there were faces! There were the foreground faces; the middle distance faces; and the faces far away. And in the irregular gaps between the faces were parts of faces, and halves and quarters at every tilt and angle.
This panorama in depth was on the move, whole heads turning, now here, now there, while all the while a counterpoint of tadpole quickness, something in the nature of a widespread agitation, was going on, because, for every head or body that changed its position in space there would be a hundred flickering eyelids; a hundred fluttering lips, a fluctuating arabesque of hands. The whole effect had something in the nature of foliage about it, as when green breezes flirt in poplar trees.
Commanding as was Titus’ view of the human sea below him, yet however hard he tried he could not discover who the hosts might be. Presumably an hour or two earlier when even a deep breath was possible without adding to the discomfort of some shoulder or adjacent bosom – presumably the ornate flunkey (now pinned against a marble statue) had announced the names of the guests as they arrived; but all that was over. The flunkey, whose head, much to his embarrassment, was wedged between the ample breasts of the marble statue, could no longer even see the door through which the guests arrived, let alone draw breath enough to announce them.
Titus, watching from above, marvelled at the spectacle and while he lay there on the roof, a half-moon above him, with its chill and greenish light, and the warm glow of the party below him, was able not only to take in the diversity of the guests but, in regard to those who stood immediately below him, to overhear their conversation …
TWENTY-TWO
‘Thank heavens it’s all over now.’
‘What is?’
‘My youth. It took too long and got in my way.’
‘In your way, Mr Thirst? How do you mean?’
‘It went on for so long,’ said Thirst. ‘I had about thirty years of it. You know what I mean. Experiment, experiment, experiment. And now …’
‘Ah!’ whispered someone.
‘I used to write poems,’ said Thirst, a pale man. He made as if to place his hands upon the shoulder of his confidant, but the crush was too great. ‘It passed the time away.’
‘Poems,’ said a pontifical voice from just behind their shoulders, ‘… should make time stand still.’
The pale man, who had jumped a little, merely muttered, ‘Mine didn’t,’ before he turned to observe the gentleman who had interpolated. The stranger’s face was quite inexpressive and it was hard to believe that he had opened his mouth. But now there was another tongue at large.
‘Talking of poems,’ it said, and it belonged to a dark, cadaverous, over-distinguished nostril-flaring man with a long blue jaw and chronic eyestrain, ‘reminds me of a poem.’
‘I wonder why,’ said Thirst irritably, for he had been on the brink of expansion.
The man with eyestrain took no notice of the remark.
‘The poem which I am reminded of is one which I wrote myself.’
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A bald man knitted his brows; the pontifical gentleman lit a cigar, his face as expressionless as ever; and a lady, the lobes of whose ears had been ruined by the weight of two gigantic sapphires, half opened her mouth with an inane smirk of anticipation.
The dark man with eyestrain folded his hands before him.
‘It didn’t come off,’ he said, ‘– although it had something –’ (he twisted his lips). ‘Sixty-four stanzas in fact.’ (He raised his eyes) ‘– Yes, yes – it was very, very long and ambitious – but it didn’t come off. And why …?’
He paused, not because he wanted any suggestions, but in order to take a deep, meditative breath.
‘I will tell you why, my friends. It didn’t come off because you see, it was verse all the time.’
‘Blank verse?’ inquired the lady, whose head was bent forward by the weight of the sapphires. She was eager to be helpful. ‘Was it blank verse?’
‘It went like this,’ said the dark man, unclasping his hands before him and clasping them behind him, and at the same time placing the heel of his left shoe immediately in front of the toe of his right shoe so that the two feet formed a single and unbroken line of leather. ‘It went like this.’ He lifted his head. ‘But do not forget it is not Poetry – except perhaps for three singing lines at the outside.’
‘Well, for the love of Parnassus – let’s have it,’ broke in the petulant voice of Mr Thirst who, finding his thunder stolen, was no longer interested in good manners.
‘A-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ mused the man with the long blue jaw, who seemed to consider other people’s time and patience as inexhaustible commodities like air, or water, ‘a-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ (he lingered over the word like a nurse over a sick child), ‘there were those who said the whole thing sang; who hailed it as the purest poetry of our generation – “incandescent stuff” as one gentleman put it – but there you are – there you are – how is one to tell?’
‘Ah,’ whispered a voice of curds and whey. And a man with gold teeth turned his eyes to the lady with the sapphires, and they exchanged the arch expression of those who find themselves, however unworthily, to be witnesses at an historic moment.
‘Quiet please,’ said the poet. ‘And listen carefully.’
A mule at prayer! Ignore him: turn to me
Until the gold contraption of our love
Rattles its seven biscuit boxes, and the sea
Withdraws its combers from the rhubarb-grove.
This is no place for maudlin-headed fays
To smirk behind their mushrooms! ’t is a shore
For gaping daemons: it is such a place,
As I, my love, have long been looking for.
Here, where the rhubarb-grove into the wave
Throws down its rueful image, we can fly
Our kites of love, above the sandy grave
Of those long lost in ambiguity.
For love is ripest in a rhubarb-grove
Where weird reflections glimmer through the dawn:
O vivid essence vegetably wove
Of hues that die, the moment they are born.
Lost in the venal void our dreams deflate
By easy stages through green atmosphere:
Imagination’s bright balloon is late,
Like the blue whale, in coming up for air.
It is not known what genus of the wild
Black plums of thought best wrinkle, twitch and flow
Into sweet wisdom’s prune – for in the mild
Orchards of love there is no need to know.
What use to cry for Capricorn? it sails
Across the heart’s red atlas: it is found
Only within the ribs, where all the tails
The tempest has are whisking it around.
No time for tears: it is enough, today,
That we, meandering these granular shores
Should watch the ponderous billows at their play
Like midnight beasts with garlands in their jaws …
It was obvious that the poem was still in its early stages. The novelty of seeing so distinguished-looking a man behave in a manner so blatant, so self-centred, so withdrawn at one and the same time had intrigued Titus so keenly that he had outlasted at least thirty guests since the poem started. The lady with the sapphires and Mr Thirst had long since edged away, but a floating population surrounded the poet who had become sightless as he declaimed, and it would have been all the same to him if he had been alone in the room.
Titus turned his head away, his brain jumping in his skull with words and images.
TWENTY-THREE
Now that the poem was gone, and gone with it the poet, for truly he seemed to follow in the wake of something greater than himself, Titus became aware of a strange condition, a quality of flux, an agitation; a weaving or a threading motion – and then, all at once, one of those tidal movements that occur from time to time at crowded parties, began to manifest itself. There is nothing that can be done about them. They move to a rhythm of their own.
The first sensation perceived by the guest was that he or she was off-balance. There was a lot of elbow-jogging and spirit-spilling. As the pressure increased a kind of delicate stampeding began. Apologies broke loose on every side. Those by the walls were seriously crushed, while those in the centre leaned across one another at intimate angles. Tiny, idiotic footsteps were taken by everyone as the crowd began to surge meaninglessly, uncontrollably, round and round the room. Those who were talking together at one moment saw no sign of one another a few seconds later, for underwater currents and cross-eddies took their toll.
And yet the guests were still arriving. They entered through the doorway, were caught up in the scented air, wavered like ghosts and, hovering for a moment on the coiling fumes, were drawn into the slow but invincible maelstrom.
Titus, who had not been able to foresee what was about to happen, was now able to appreciate in retrospect the actions of a couple of old roués whom he had observed a few minutes earlier, seated by the refreshment table.
Long versed in the vicissitudes of party phenomena, they had put down their glasses and, leaning back, as it were, in the arms of the current, had given themselves up to the flow, and were now to be seen conversing at an incredible angle as they circled the room, their feet no longer touching the floor.
By the time some balance was restored it was nearly midnight, and there was a general pulling down of cuffs, straightening of garments, fingering of coifs and toupees, a straightening of ties, a scrutiny of mouths and eyebrows and a general state of salvage.
TWENTY-FOUR
And so, by a whim of chance, yet another group of guests stood there beneath him. Some had limped and some had slid away. Some had been boisterous: some had been aloof.
This particular group were neither and both, as the offshoots of their brain-play merited. Tall guests they were, and witless that through the accident of their height and slenderness they were creating between them a grove – a human grove. They turned, this group, this grove of guests, turned as a newcomer, moving sideways an inch at a time, joined them. He was short, thick and sapless, and was most in appropriate in that lofty copse, where he gave the appearance of being pollarded.
One of this group, a slender creature, thin as a switch, swathed in black, her hair as black as her dress and her eyes as black as her hair, turned to the newcomer.
‘Do join us,’ she said. ‘Do talk to us. We need your steady brain. We are so pitifully emotional. Such babies.’
‘Well I would hardly –’
‘Be quiet, Leonard. You have been talking quite enough,’ said the slender, doe-eyed Mrs Grass to her fourth husband. ‘It is Mr Acreblade or nothing. Come along dear Mr Acreblade. There … we are … there … we are.’
The sapless Mr Acreblade thrust his jaw forward, a sight to be wondered at, for even when relaxed his chin gave the impression of a battering ram; something to prod with; in fact a weapon.
‘Dear Mrs Grass,’ he said, ‘you a
re always so unaccountably kind.’
The attenuate Mr Spill had been beckoning a waiter, but now he suddenly crouched down so that his ear was level with Acreblade’s mouth. He did not face Mr Acreblade as he crouched there, but swivelling his eyes to their eastern extremes, he obtained a very good view of Acreblade’s profile.
‘I’m a bit deaf,’ he said. ‘Will you repeat yourself? Did you say “unaccountably kind”? How droll.’
‘Don’t be a bore,’ said Mrs Grass.
Mr Spill rose to his full working height, which might have been even more impressive were his shoulders not so bent.
‘Dear lady,’ he said. ‘If I am a bore, who made me so?’
‘Well who did darling?’
‘It’s a long story –’
‘Then we’ll skip it, shall we?’
She turned herself slowly, swivelling on her pelvis until her small conical breasts, directed at Mr Kestrel, were for all the world like some kind of delicious threat. Her husband, Mr Grass, who had seen this manoeuvre at least a hundred times, yawned horribly.
‘Tell me,’ said Mrs Grass, as she let loose upon Mr Kestrel a fresh broadside of naked eroticism, ‘tell me, dear Mr Acreblade, all about yourself.’
Mr Acreblade, not really enjoying being addressed in this off-hand manner by Mrs Grass, turned to her husband.
‘Your wife is very special. Very rare. Conducive to speculation. She talks to me through the back of her head, staring at Kestrel the while.’
‘But that is as it should be!’ cried Kestrel, his eyes swimming over with excitement, ‘for life must be various, incongruous, vile and electric. Life must be ruthless and as full of love as may be found in a jaguar’s fang.’