by Mervyn Peake
Nor did she ever know for her body, working independently from the brain, rose and moved out of the arbour like a ship leaving harbour.
Now she was on the daisy’d lawn: now she was leaving the shear’d box behind: now she was meandering into pastures where dragonflies hovered and darted.
On and on she wandered, hardly taking in her surroundings, until she came to the dark cedar grove. She had not noticed it approaching for her eyes were all but sightless as she moved. But when she was within a short distance of the dark grove she found the verge of a wide glaze of dew.
Now fully awake, she stared into the depths and saw, inverted, a haunt of her girlhood – the almost legendary cedar grove.
Her first sensation was that she was upside down: but this belief was shattered when she raised her head. But before she raised it she saw someone lounging, upside down on the underside of a great cedar-bough and defying, as he did so, the law of gravity. But when Juno raised her head and tried to locate the man on his branch, it was not so easy. At first she could see nothing but the green terraces of foliage, but suddenly she saw the man again. He was nearer to where she stood than she had expected.
Directly the man realized he had been noticed he dropped to the ground and bowed, his dark red hair falling over his eyes like a mop.
‘What are you doing in my cedar grove?’ she said.
‘Trespassing,’ said the man.
Juno shielded her eyes and gazed steadily at the man – with his dark red hair and his boxer’s nose.
‘Well, “trespasser”: what do you want?’ she said at last. ‘Is this a favourite haunt of yours or am I being ambushed?’
‘You are being ambushed. If I have startled you, I am profoundly sorry. I would not have you startled. No, not by so much as an ant on your wrist, or the buzz of a bee.’
‘I see,’ said Juno.
‘But I have waited for the devil of a long while,’ said the man, screwing up his forehead, ‘Great Heaven, I have indeed.’
‘Who have you waited for?’ said Juno.
‘For this moment,’ said the man.
Juno lifted an eyebrow.
‘I have waited for you to be deserted. And alone. As you are now.’
‘What has my life to do with you?’ said Juno.
‘Everything and nothing,’ said the tousled man. ‘It is your own of course. So is your unhappiness. Titus is gone. Muzzlehatch is gone. Not for ever perhaps, but for a long while. Your house by the river, fine as it is, is now a place of echoes and of shades.’
Juno joined her hands together at her breast. There was something in his voice that belied his mop of dark red hair and general air of brigandage. It was deep, husky – and unbelievably gentle.
‘Who are you?’ she said at last, ‘and what do you know of Titus?’
‘My name is of no account. As for Titus, I know very little. Very little. But enough. Enough to know that he left the city out of hunger.’
‘Hunger?’
‘The hunger to be always somewhere else. This and the pull of his home, or what he thinks of as his ancestral home (if he ever had one). I have seen him in this cedar grove, alone. Beating the great branches with his fists. Beating the boughs as though to let his soul out.’
The Trespasser stepped forward for the first time, his feet breaking the mirror of green dew.
‘You cannot sit and wait for either of them. Neither for Titus nor for Muzzlehatch. You have a life of your own, lady. Something that starts from now. I have watched you long before this Titus ever came upon the scene, I watched you from the shadows. Were it not that “Muzzle” whipped your heart away, I would have trailed you to the ends of the earth. But you loved him. And you loved Titus. As for me, now, you can see I’m no ladies’ man – I’m a rough and ready one – but give me half a hint and I’ll companion you. Companion you until the doors swing open – door after door from dawn till dusk and each fresh day will be a new invention!
‘If you want me I will be here, somewhere among these cedars.’
He turned upon his heel, walked quickly away, and a few moments later he was lost in the forest and all that was left of him by way of proof were his footsteps like black smudges in the dazzling dew.
SIXTY-SIX
So Juno returned to her home, and it was true that it had already become a place of echoes, shadows, voices; moments of pause and suspense; moments of vague suffering or dwindling laughter, where the staircase curved from sight; moments of acute nostalgia where she stood all unwittingly at a window in a haze of stars; or of sweetness hardly to be borne when the shadow of Titus came between her and the sun as it rose through the slanting rain.
And while she lay stretched upon her bed one silent afternoon her hands behind her head, her eyes closed, her thoughts following one another in a sad cavalcade, Muzzlehatch, by now a hundred miles from Juno, was sitting at a rickety, three-legged table in another shaft of the same hot, ambient sun.
To right and left of him lay stretched the straggling street. Street? It was more of a track, for in keeping with everything else within Muzzlehatch’s range of vision, it was half-finished and forsaken. Abandoned projects littered the land. Never reaching completion, it is never doomed. This gimcrack village that might have been a township ten times over. It had never had a past, nor could ever have a future. But it was full of happenings. The sliding moment blossomed febrile at one extreme and, at the other, was thick with human sleep. Bells rang, and were quickly stifled.
Children and dogs squatted hip-bone deep in the white dust. Elaborate trenches that were once the foundation of envisaged theatres, markets or churches, had become, for the children of this place, a battleground beyond the dreams of normal childhood.
The day was drowsy. It was a day of tacit somnolence. To work on such a day would be an insult to the sun.
The coffee tables curved away to the north, and to the south, as rickety a line of perspective as can well be imagined, and at these tables sat groups of multifarious face, frame and gesture. Yet there was a common denominator that strung these groups together. Of all the outspread company there was not one member who did not look as though he had just got out of bed.
Some had shoes, but no shirts; others had no shoes but wore hats of endless variety, at endless angles. Bygone headgear, bygone capes and jerkins and nightgowns drawn together at the waist with leather belts. In this company Muzzlehatch was very much at home, and sat at a table beneath a half-finished monument.
Hundreds of sparrows twittered and flapped their wings in the dust, the boldest of them hopping about on the coffee tables where the traditional handle-less coffee cups and saucers gleamed vermilion in the sun.
Muzzlehatch was not alone at his table. Apart from a dozen sparrows, which he brushed clear of the table top from time to time, with the back of his hand, as though he were brushing away crumbs … apart from these there was a crowd of human stragglers. A crowd divided loosely into three. The first of these segregations loitered about the person of Muzzlehatch himself, for they had never seen a man so relaxed, or so indifferent to their stares; a man so sprawled in his chair, and at such an indolent state of supreme collapse.
Masters as they were in the art of doing nothing, they had seen, nevertheless, nothing in their lives to compare with the scale on which this huge vagrant deported himself. He was, it seemed, a symbol of all that they unconsciously believed in and they stared at him, as though at a prototype of themselves.
They noted that great rudder of a nose: that arrogant head. But they had no notion that it was filled with a ghost. The ghost of Juno. And so it was his gaze was far away.
Next to Muzzlehatch, as magnet in the soft, hot light, was his car. The same, recalcitrant, hot-blooded beast. As was his custom he had tied her up, for she was apt at unforeseeable moments to leap a yard or so in a kind of reflex, the water bubbling in her rusty guts. Today he had for bollard the unfinished monument half-erected to some all but forgotten anarchist. And there she stood lash’d and
twitching. The very personification of irritability.
The third of the three centres of interest was at the back of the car, where Muzzlehatch’s small ape lay asleep in the sun. No one hereabouts had ever seen an ape before and it was with the wildest speculation, not without fear, that they boggled at the creature.
This animal had become, since the tragedy, a companion closer than ever, and had indeed become a symbol of all he had lost. Not only this but it kept doubly alive in a bitter region of the mind, the memory of that ghastly holocaust when the cages buckled, and his birds and animals cried out for the last time.
Who would have guessed that behind the formidable brow of his, which appeared to be made of some kind of rock, there lay so strange a mixture of memories and thoughts? For he lay sprawling in such a way as to suggest that nothing whatever was taking place in his head. Yet there, in the cerebral gloom, held in by the meridian of the skull, his Juno wandered in the cedar grove: his Titus moving by night, sleeping by day, made his way … where …? His ape lay coiled asleep, with one eye open, and scratched his ear. The silence droned like a bee in the heart of a flower.
The small ape gazers: the car gazers: and those that peered from short range at Muzzlehatch himself now turned their united attention to the lounging stranger; for Muzzlehatch, gripping the sides of his chair, all but bursting it, levered himself into an upright position.
Then, very slowly, he tilted back his head, until his face was level with the sky. But his eyes, as though to prove that they were not to be gainsaid by the angle of the face that lodged them, were downward cast, their line of vision grazing like a scythe the pale field of hair that made of his cheekbone, what would be for a gnat, a barley field.
Yet what he saw was not the scene before him with all its detail, but a memory of other days, no less vivid, no less real.
He saw, afloat, as it were, in the whorls of his boyhood, a string of irrelevant images; the days before he had ever heard of Juno, let alone a hundred others. Days flamboyant; days at large, and days in hiding, when he lay stretched on his back upon the high rocks, or lolled in glades until he took their colour; his arrogant nose, like a rudder, pointing at the sky. And as he lounged there, leaning precariously backwards in his chair, surrounded by a horde of ragged gapers, as might well have unnerved friend Satan himself, an old voice cried …
‘Buy up the sunset! Buy it up! Buy it up! Buy … buy … buy. A copper for a seat, sirs. A copper for the view.’ The croaking of the voice seemed to hack its way out of the arid throat of the ticket vendor, a diminutive figure dressed in nondescript black. His head protruded out of his torn collar much as the head of the tortoise protrudes from its shell, the throat unwrinkling, the eyes like beads, or pips of jet.
SIXTY-SEVEN
Between each strangulated cry the old man turned his head, and spat, swivelled his eyes, threw back his little bony head and barked at the sky like a dog.
‘Buy it! Buy it! A seat for the sunset. Take your pick of ’em! every one. They say it will be coral, green and grey. Twenty coppers! Only twenty coppers.’
Threading his way through the tables, it was not long before he came upon Muzzlehatch. The old man paused, his jaws apart, but no sound came for some little while, so sharply was his attention taken by the sight of a new face at the tables.
The shadows of leaves and branches lay upon the table like grey lace and moved imperceptibly to and fro. The delicate shadow of an acacia frond fluctuated as it lay like a living thing upon Muzzlehatch’s bony brow.
At last the old ticket vendor closed his jaws and then started again.
‘A seat for the sunset, coral, green and grey. Two coppers for the standing! Three coppers for the sitting! A copper in the trees. The sunset at your bloody doorstep, friends! Buy it up! Buy! Buy! Buy!’
As Muzzlehatch stared through half-closed eyes at the old man the silence came down again, warm and thick with the sweetness of death in it.
At last Muzzlehatch muttered softly, ‘What does he mean, in the name of mortality and all her brood … what does he mean?’
There was no answer. The silence settled down again, and seemed appalled at the notion that anyone could be ignorant of what the old man meant.
‘Coral, green and grey,’ continued Muzzlehatch as though mumbling to himself. ‘Are these the colours of the sky tonight? Do you pay, my dears, to see the sunset? Ain’t the sunset free? Good God, ain’t even the sunset free?’
‘It’s all we have,’ said a voice, ‘that, and the dawn.’
‘You can’t trust the dawn,’ said another, with such pathos that it seemed he held a personal grudge against tinted atmosphere.
The ticket seller leaned over and peered at Muzzlehatch from closer range.
‘Free, did you say?’ he said. ‘How could it be free? With colours like the jewelled breasts of queens. Free indeed! Isn’t there nothing sacred? Buy a chair, Mr Giant, and see it comfortable – they say there may be strokes of puce as well, and curdled salmon in the upper ranges. All for a copper! Buy! Buy! Buy! Thank you, sir, thank you. For you, the cedar benches, sir. Hell, bless you.’
‘What happens if the wind decides to veer?’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘What happens to your green and coral, then? Do I get my coppers back? What if it rains? Eh? What if it pours?’
Someone spat at Muzzlehatch, but he took no notice beyond smiling at the man with such a curious angle of the lips that the spitter felt his spine grow cold as death.
‘Tonight there is no wind,’ said a third voice. ‘A puff or two. The green will be like glass. Maybe a slaughtered tiger will float southwards. Maybe his wounds will drip across the sky … but no …’
‘No! Not tonight! Not tonight! Green, coral, grey.’
‘I have seen sunsets black like soot, awash in the western spaces, stirred with cats’ blood. I have seen sunsets like a flock of roses: drifting they were … their pretty bums afloat. And once I saw the nipple of a queen … the sun it was … as pink as …’
SIXTY-EIGHT
Later that evening, Muzzlehatch and the small ape shook themselves free of the gaping crowd and drove the car slowly at the tail of a ragged cavalcade that, winding this way and that, finally disappeared into a birdless forest. On the other side of these woods lay stretched a grass terrace, if such a word can be used to describe the rank earthwork upon whose western side the land dropped sheer away for a thousand feet to where the tops of miniature trees, no longer than lashes, hovered in the evening mist.
When the two of them had reached the terrace with its swathing vistas spreading like sections of the globe itself away and away into a great hush of silence and distance mixed, as though to form a new element, they left their car, and took their seats on one of the cedar benches. These benches, forming a long line, from north to south, were placed within a few feet of the edge of the precipice. Indeed there were those whose legs were on the long side and whose feet, as a result, hung loosely over the edge of the terrifying drop.
The small ape must have sensed something of the danger for it stayed no more than a few moments before leaping from its seat on to Muzzlehatch’s lap, where it made faces at the sunset.
No one noticed this. And no one noticed Muzzlehatch’s strong-fingered hand as it caressed the little ape beneath its jaw. All the attention and interest these ragged people had lavished upon the stranger and his ape was now a thing of the past. Every face was tinted with an omnipresent hue. Every eye was the eye of a connoisseur. A hush as of the world ceasing to breathe came down upon the company, and Muzzlehatch tossed his head in the silence, for something had touched him; some inner thing that he could not understand. An irritant … a catch of the heat … a bubble of air in a vast aorta … for he found himself, all of a sudden, spellbound by what he saw above him. A coloured circus caught in a whirl of air had disintegrated and in its place a thousand animals of cloud streamed through the west.
At the backs of the watchers, and very close stood up the flanks of the high woods lit up by th
e evening sun, save where the shadows of the watchers were ranged against it. Before the watchers and below them the faraway valley had drawn across itself another veil of cloud. Above, the sunset-watchers saw the beasts: all with their streaming manes, whatever the species: great whales no less than lions with their manes; tigers no less than fawns.
The sky was animals from north to south. Beasts of the earth and air, lifting their heads to cry … to howl … to scream, but they had no voices, and their jaws remained apart, gulping the fast air.
And it was then that Muzzlehatch rose to his feet. His face was dark with a sudden pain, a pain he was only half able to understand.
He stood at his full height in the spellbound silence, his whole body trembling. For some while, his eyes were fixed upon the sky where the animals changed shape before his gaze, melting from species to species but always with the manes propelling them.
A few feet to Muzzlehatch’s side a great dusty bush of juniper clung on the verge of the precipice. One step took Muzzlehatch to this solitary object and he wrenched it free of the earth, and, raising it above his head, slung it out into the emptiness of the air where it fell and went on falling.
Now every head was turned to him. Every head from near or far away: they all turned. When they saw him there, standing trembling, they could not understand that he was looking through these animals of clouds to another time and another place: to a zoo of flesh and blood. Nor did they know that the gaunt visitor was feeling for the first time the utmost agony of their death. Beast after beast of the upper air recalled some most particular one of feather, scale or claw, some most particular one of beauty or of strength … some symbol of the unutterable wilds.
They had been his joy in a world gone joyless. Now they were not even mouldering, these beasts of his. Nor were they turned into ash, nor any part of earth. Science had eliminated them, and there was no trace. His brindled heron with its broken foot: where was he now? And the lemur, five months gone, yet with so wistful a face, and a jaw so full of needles. O liquidation! And for every one his own particular story. For each the divers capture: and as the cloudscape thronged itself with figures: with humps: with fins: with horns, and his mind with the images of mortality, so he trembled the more, for Muzzlehatch knew that the time had come for him to return to the scene of supreme wickedness, foul play, and death. For it was there that they lived or partly lived in cells, sealed from the light of day.