by Mervyn Peake
Mr Flay was annoyed, even on such a day, by the scene. Although approving in theory, in practice it seemed to him that the spectacle was unpleasant. He remembered, when he had first come across Swelter, how he and the chef had instantaneously entertained a mutual dislike, and how this antipathy festered. To Swelter it was irksome to see the bony straggly figure of Lord Sepulchrave’s first servant in his kitchen at all, the only palliative to this annoyance being the opportunity which it afforded for the display of his superior wit at Mr Flay’s expense.
Mr Flay entered Swelter’s steaming province for one purpose only. To prove to himself as much as to others, that he, as Lord Groan’s personal attendant, would on no account be intimidated by any member of the staff.
To keep this fact well in front of his own mind, he made a tour of the servants’ quarters every so often, never entering the kitchen, however, without a queasiness of stomach, never departing from it without a renewal of spleen.
The long beams of sunlight, which were reflected from the moist walls in a shimmering haze, had pranked the chef ’s body with blotches of ghost-light. The effect from below was that of a dappled volume of warm vague whiteness and of a grey that dissolved into swamps of midnight – of a volume that towered and dissolved among the rafters. As occasion merited he supported himself against the stone pillar at his side and as he did so the patches of light shifted across the degraded whiteness of the stretched uniform he wore. When Mr Flay had first eyed him, the cook’s head had been entirely in shadow. Upon it the tall cap of office rose coldly, a vague topsail half lost in a fitful sky. In the total effect there was indeed something of the galleon.
One of the blotches of reflected sunlight swayed to and fro across the paunch. This particular pool of light moving in a mesmeric manner backwards and forwards picked out from time to time a long red island of spilt wine. It seemed to leap forward from the mottled cloth when the light fastened upon it in startling contrast to the chiaroscuro and to defy the laws of tone. This ungarnished sign of Swelter’s debauche, taking the swollen curve of linen, had somehow, to Mr Flay’s surprise, a fascination. For a minute he watched it appear, and disappear to reappear again – a lozenge of crimson, as the body behind it swayed.
Another senseless bout of foot-stamping and screaming broke the spell, and lifting his eyes he scowled about him. Suddenly, for a moment, the memory of Mr Rottcodd in his dusty deserted hall stole into his consciousness and he was shocked to realize how much he had really preferred – to this inferno of timehallowed revelry – the limp and seemingly disloyal self-sufficiency of the curator. He straddled his way to a vantage point, from where he could see and remain unseen, and from there he noticed that Swelter was steadying himself on his legs and with a huge soft hand making signs to the adolescents below him to hold their voices. Flay noticed how the habitual truculence of his tone and manner had today altered to something mealy, to a conviviality weighted with lead and sugar, a ghastly intimacy more dreadful than his most dreaded rages. His voice came down from the shadows in huge wads of sound, or like the warm, sick notes of some prodigous mouldering bell of felt.
His soft hand had silenced the seething of the apprentices and he allowed his thick voice to drop out of his face.
‘Gallstones!’ and in the dimness he flung his arms apart so that the buttons of his tunic were torn away, one of them whizzing across the room and stunning a cockroach on the opposite wall. ‘Close your ranks and close your ranks and listen mosht attentivesome. Come closer then, my little sea of faces, come ever closer in, my little ones.’
The apprentices edged themselves forward, tripping and treading upon each other’s feet, the foremost of them being wedged against the wine-barrel itself.
‘Thatsh the way. Thatsh jusht the way,’ said Swelter, leering down at them. ‘Now we’re quite a happly little family. Mosht shelect and advanced.’
He then slid a fat hand through a slit in his white garment of office and removed from a deep pocket a bottle. Plucking out the cork with his lips, that had gripped it with an uncanny muscularity, he poured half a pint down his throat without displacing the cork, for he laid a finger at the mouth of the bottle, so dividing the rush of wine into two separate spurts that shot adroitly into either cheek, and so, making contact at the back of his mouth, down his throat in one dull gurgle to those unmentionable gulches that lay below.
The apprentices screamed and stamped and tore at each other in an access of delight and of admiration.
The chef removed the cork and twisted it around between his thumb and forefinger and satisfying himself that it had remained perfectly dry during the operation, recorked the bottle and returned it through the slit into his pocket.
Again he put up his hand and silence was restored save for the heavy, excited breathing.
‘Now tell me thish, my stenching cherubs. Tell me this and tell me exshtra quickly, who am I? Now tell me exshtra quickly.’
‘Swelter,’ they cried, ‘Swelter, sir! Swelter!’
‘Is that all you know?’ came the voice. ‘Is that all you know, my little sea of faces? Silence now! and lishen well to me, chief chef of Gormenghast, man and boy forty years, fair and foul, rain or shine, sand and sawdust, hags and stags and all the resht of them done to a turn and spread with sauce of aloes and a dash of prickling pepper.’
‘With a dash of prickling pepper,’ yelled the apprentices hugging themselves and each other in turn. ‘Shall we cook it, sir? We’ll do it now, sir, and slosh it in the copper, sir, and stir it up. Oh! what a tasty dish, Sir. Oh! what a tasty dish!’
‘Shilence,’ roared the chef. ‘Silensh, my fairy boys. Silence, my belching angels. Come closer here, come closer with your little creamy faces and I’ll tell you who I am.’
The high-shouldered boy, who had taken no part in the excitement, pulled out a small pipe of knotted worm-wood and filled it deliberately. His mouth was quite expressionless, curving neither up nor down, but his eyes were dark and hot with a mature hatred. They were half closed but their eloquence smouldered through the lashes as he watched the figure on the barrel lean forward precariously.
‘Now lishen well,’ continued the voice, ‘and I’ll tell you exactly who I am and then I’ll shing to you a shong and you will know who’s shinging to you, my ghastly little ineffectual fillets.’
‘A song! A song!’ came the shrill chorus.
‘Firshtly,’ said the chef leaning forward and dropping each confidential word like a cannon ball smeared with syrup. ‘Firshtly. I am none other than Abiatha Swelter, which meansh, for you would not know, that I am the shymbol of both excellence and plenty. I am the father of exchellence and plenty. Who did I shay I was?’
‘Abafer Swelter,’ came the scream.
The chef leaned back on his swollen legs and drew the corners of his mouth down until they lost themselves among the shadows of his hot dewlaps.
‘Abiatha,’ he repeated slowly, stressing the central ‘A’. ‘Abiatha. What did I shay my name wash?’
‘Abiatha,’ came the scream again.
‘Thatsh right, thatsh right. Abiatha. Are you lishening, my pretty vermin, are you lishening?’
The apprentices gave him to understand that they were listening very hard.
Before the chef continued he applied himself to the bottle once again. This time he held the glass neck between his teeth and tilting his head back until the bottle was vertical, drained it and spat it out over the heads of the fascinated throng. The sound of black glass smashing on the flagstones was drowned in screams of approval.
‘Food,’ said Swelter, ‘is shelestial and drink is mosht entrancing – such flowers of flatulence. Sush gaseous buds. Come closer in, steal in, and I will shing. I will lift my sweetest heart into the rafters, and will shing to you a shong. An old shong of great shadness, a most dolorous piece. Come closer in.’
It was impossible for the apprentices to force themselves any closer to the chef, but they struggled and shouted for the song, and turned their gl
istening faces upwards.
‘Oh what a pleasant lot of little joints you are,’ said Swelter, peering at them and wiping his hands up and down his fat hips. ‘What a very drippy lot of little joints. Oh yesh you are, but so underdone. Lishen cocks, I’ll twisht your grandmas so shweetly in their graves. We’ll make them turn, my dears, we’ll make them turn – and what a turn for them, my own, and for the worms that nibble. Where’s Steerpike?’
‘Steerpike! Steerpike!’ yelled the youths, the ones in front twisting their heads and standing upon their toes, the ones in the rear craning forward and peering about them. ‘Steerpike! Steerpike! He’s somewhere here, sir! Oh there he is sir! There he is sir! Behind the pillar sir!’
‘Silence,’ bellowed the chef, turning his gourd of a head in the direction of the pointed hands as the high-shouldered boy was pushed forward.
‘Here he is, sir! Here he is, sir!’
The boy Steerpike looked impossibly small as he stood beneath the monstrous monument.
‘I shall shing to you, Steerpike, to you,’ whispered the cook, reeling and supporting himself with one hand against the stone pillar that was glistening with condensed heat, little trickles of moisture moving down its fluted sides. ‘To you, the newcomer, the blue mummer and the slug of summer – to you the hideous, and insidious, and appallingly cretinous goat in a house of stenches.’
The apprentices rocked with joy.
‘To you, only to you, my core of curdled cat-bile. To you alone, sho hearken diligentiums. Are you sharkening? Are you all lishening for this his how’s it goesh. My shong of a hundred yearsh ago, my plaintivly mosht melancholic shong.’
Swelter seemed to forget he was about to sing, and after wiping the sweat from his hands on the head of a youth below him, peered for Steerpike again.
‘And why to you, my ray of addled sunshine? Why to you aslone? Shtaking it for granted, my dear little Steerpike – taking it for more than for mosht granted, that you, a creature of lesh consequence than stoat’s-blood, are sho far removal’d from anything approaching nature – yet tell me, more rather, don’t tell me why your ears which musht originally have been deshigned for fly-papers, are, for shome reason butter known to yourself, kept imodeshtly unfurled. What do you proposhe to do next in thish batter? You move here and there on your little measly legs, I have sheen you at it. You breathe all over my kitchen. You look at thingsh with your insholent animal eyes. I’ve sheen you doing it. I have sheen you look at me. Your looking at me now. Shteerpike, my impatient love-bird, what doesh it all mean, and why should I shing for you?’
Swelter leaned back and seemed to be considering his own question a moment as he wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his forearm. But he waited for no reply and flung his pendulent arms out sideways and somewhere on the orbit of an immense arc something or other gave way.
Steerpike was not drunk. As he stood below Mr Swelter, he had nothing but contempt for the man who had but yesterday struck him across the head. He could do nothing, however, except stay where he was, prodded and nudged from behind by the excited minions, and wait.
The voice recurred from above. ‘It is a shong, my Steerpike, to an imaginawary monshter, jusht like yourshelf if only you were a twifle bigger and more monshtrous shtill. It is a shong to a hard-hearted monshter sho lishen mosht shfixedly, my pretty wart. Closher, closher! Can’t you come a little closher to a dirgeous mashterpeesh?’
The wine was beginning to redouble its subversive activity in the chef ’s brain. He was now supporting himself almost the whole of the while against the sweating pillar and was sagging hideously.
Steerpike stared up at him from under his high bony brow. The cook’s eyes were protruding like bloodshot bubbles. One arm hung, a dead-weight, down the fluted surface of the support. The enormous area of the face had fallen loose. It glistened like a jelly.
A hole appeared in the face. Out of it came a voice that had suddenly become weaker.
‘I am Shwelter,’ it repeated, ‘the great chef Abiatha Shwelter, scook to hish Lordshipsh, boardshipsh and all shorts of ships that shail on shlippery sheas. Abiafa Shwelter, man and boy and girls and ribbonsh, lots of kittensh, forty year of cold and shunny, where’sh the money, thick and hairy, I’m a fairy! I’m a shongshter! Lishen well, lishen well!’
Mr Swelter lowered his head downwards over his wine-raddled breast without moving his shoulders and made an effort to see whether his audience was sufficiently keyed up for his opening chords. But he could make out nothing below him saving the ‘little sea of faces’ which he had alluded to, but the little sea had now become practically obliterated from him by a swimming mist.
‘Are you lishening?’
‘Yes, yes! The song, the song!’
Swelter lowered his head yet again into the hot spindrift and then held up his right hand weakly. He made one feeble effort to heave himself away from the pillar and to deliver his verses at a more imposing angle, but, incapable of mustering the strength he sank back, and then, as a vast inane smile opened up the lower half of his face, and as Mr Flay watched him, his hard little mouth twisted downwards, the chef began gradually to curl in upon himself, as though folding himself up for death. The kitchen had become as silent as a hot tomb. At last, through the silence, a weak gurgling sound began to percolate but whether it was the first verse of the long awaited poem, none could tell for the chef, like a galleon, lurched in his anchorage. The great ship’s canvas sagged and crumpled and then suddenly an enormousness foundered and sank. There was a sound of something spreading as an area of seven flagstones became hidden from view beneath a catalyptic mass of wine-drenched blubber.
THE STONE LANES
Mr Flay’s gorge had risen steadily and, as the dreadful minutes passed, he had been filled with a revulsion so consuming that but for the fact that the chef was surrounded by the youths he would have attacked the drunkard. As it was he bared his sand-coloured teeth, and fixed his eyes for a last moment on the cook with an expression of unbelievable menace. He had turned his head away at last and spat, and then brushing aside whoever stood in his path, had made his way with great skeleton strides, to a narrow doorway in the wall opposite that through which he had entered. By the time Swelter’s monologue was dragging to its crapulous close, Mr Flay was pacing onwards, every step taking him another five feet further from the reek and horror of the Great Kitchen.
His black suit, patched on the elbows and near the collar with a greasy sepiacoloured cloth, fitted him badly but belonged to him as inevitably as the head of a tortoise emerging from its shell or the vulture’s from a rubble of feathers belong to that reptile or that bird. His head, parchment coloured and bony, was indigenous to that greasy fabric. It stuck out from the top window of its high black building as though it had known no other residence.
While Mr Flay was pacing along the passages to that part of the castle where Lord Sepulchrave had been left alone for the first time for many weeks, the curator, sleeping peacefully in the Hall of the Bright Carvings, snored beneath the venetian blind. The hammock was still swinging a little, a very little, from the movement caused by Mr Rottcodd’s depositing himself therein directly he had turned the key on Mr Flay. The sun burned through the shutters, made bands of gold around the pedestals that supported the sculpture and laid its tiger stripes across the dusty floorboarding.
The sunlight, as Mr Flay strolled on, still had one finger through the kitchen window, lighting the perspiring stone pillar which was now relieved of its office of supporting the chef for the soak had fallen from the wine-barrel a moment after the disappearance of Mr Flay and lay stretched at the foot of his rostrum.
Around him lay scattered a few small flattened lumps of meat, coated with sawdust. There was a strong smell of burning fat, but apart from the prone bulk of the chef, the Grey Scrubbers under the table, and the gentlemen who were suspended from the beam, there was no one left in the huge, hot, empty hall. Every man and boy who had been able to move his legs had made his way to cooler quarter
s.
Steerpike had viewed with a mixture of amazement, relief and malignant amusement the dramatic cessation of Mr Swelter’s oratory. For a few moments he had gazed at the wine-spattered form of his overlord spread below him, then glancing around and finding that he was alone he had made for the door through which Mr Flay had passed and was soon racing down the passages turning left and right as he ran in a mad effort to reach the fresh air.
He had never before been through that particular door, but he imagined that he would soon find his way into the open and to some spot where he could be on his own. Turning this way and that he found that he was lost in a labyrinth of stone corridors, lit here and there by candles sunk in their own wax and placed in niches in the walls. In desperation he put his hands to his head as he ran, when suddenly, as he rounded the curve of a wall a figure passed rapidly across the passage before him, neither looking to right or left.
As soon as Mr Flay – for it was his lordship’s servant on his way to the residential apartments – as soon as he had passed from sight, Steerpike peered around the corner and followed, keeping as much as possible in step to hide the sound of his own feet. This was almost impossible, as Mr Flay’s spider-like gait besides being particularly long of stride, had like the slow-march, a time-lag before the ultimate descent of the foot. However, young Steerpike, feeling that here at any rate was his one chance of escaping from these endless corridors, followed as best he could in the hope that Mr Flay would eventually turn into some cool quadrangle or open space where get-away could be effected. At times, when the candles were thirty or forty feet apart, Mr Flay would be lost to view and only the sound of his feet on the flagstones would guide his follower. Then slowly, as his erratic shape approached the next guttering aura he would begin by degrees to become a silhouette, until immediately before the candle he would for a moment appear like an inky scarecrow, a mantis of pitch-black cardboard worked with strings. Then the progression of the lighting would be reversed and for a moment immediately after passing the flame Steerpike would see him quite clearly as a lit object against the depths of the still-to-be-trodden avenues of stone. The grease at those moments shone from the threadbare cloth across his shoulders, the twin vertical muscles of his neck rose out of the tattered collar nakedly and sharply. As he moved forward the light would dim upon his back and Steerpike would lose him, only hearing the cracking of his knee-joints and his feet striking the stones, until the ensuing candle carved him anew. Practically exhausted, first by the unendurable atmosphere of the Great Kitchen and now with this seemingly endless journey, the boy, for he was barely seventeen, sank suddenly to the ground with exhaustion, striking the flags with a thud, his boots dragging harshly on the stone. The noise brought Flay to a sudden halt and he turned himself slowly about, drawing his shoulders up to his ears as he did so. ‘What’s that?’ he croaked, peering into the darkness behind him.