The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (47 page)

‘You must wear it
today
!’ Mrs Slagg almost screamed. ‘Today, today, you naughty thing, when everyone’s there. You will look as pretty as a flowering lamb, my big, untidy thing.’

‘No, Nannie, I won’t wear it like that. Not when it’s a day like today. I shall wear it only when I’m alone or when I meet a man who reverences me.’

The Doctor, meanwhile, lay in a state of perfect contentment in a hot bath filled with blue crystals. The bath was veined marble and was long enough to allow the Doctor to lie at full length. Only his quill-like face emerged above the perfumed surface of the water. His hair was filled with winking lather-bubbles; and his eyes were indescribably roguish. His face and neck were bright pink as though direct from a celluloid factory.

At the far end of the bath one of his feet emerged from the depths. He watched it quizzically with his head cocked so far upon one side that his left ear filled with water. ‘Sweet foot,’ he cried. ‘Five toes to boot and what-not in the beetroot shoot!’ He raised himself and shook the hot water gaily from his ear and began swishing the water on either side of his body.

The eyes closed and the mouth opened and all the teeth were there shining through the steam. Taking a great breath, or rather, a deep breath, for his chest was too narrow for a great one, and with a smile of dreadful bliss irradiating his pink face, the Doctor emitted a whinny of so piercing a quality, that Irma, seated at her boudoir table, shot to her feet, scattering hairpins across the carpet. She had been at her toilet for the last three hours, excluding the preliminary hour and a half spent in her bath – and now, as she swished her way to the bedroom door, a frown disturbing the powder on her brow, she had, in common with her brother, more the appearance of having been plucked or peeled, than of cleanliness, though
clean
she was, scrupulously clean, in the sense of a rasher of bacon.

‘What on earth is the matter with you; I said, what on earth is the matter with you, Bernard?’ she shouted through the bathroom keyhole.

‘Is that you my love? Is that you?’ her brother’s voice came thinly from behind the door.

‘Who
else
would it be: I said, who
else
would it be,’ she yelled back, bending herself into a stiff satin right angle in order to get her mouth to the keyhole.

‘Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,’ came her brother’s shrill, unbearable laughter. ‘Who else indeed? Well, well, let us think, let us
think
. It might be the moon goddess, but that’s improbable, ha, ha ha; or it might be a sword swallower approaching me in my professional capacity, ha, ha, that is
less
improbable – in fact, my dear taproot, have you by any chance been swallowing swords for years on end without ever telling me, ha, ha? Or haven’t you?’ His voice rose: ‘Years on end, and swords on end – where will it end, if our ears unbend – what shall I spend on a wrinkled friend in a pair of tights like a bunch of lights?’

Irma who had been straining her ears cried out at last in her irritation: ‘I suppose you know you’ll be late – I said: “I suppose you –”’

‘A merry plague upon you, O blood of my blood,’ the shrill voice broke in. ‘What is Time, O sister of similar features, that you speak of it so subserviently? Are we to be the slaves of the sun, that second-hand, overrated knob of gilt, or of his sister, that fatuous circle of silver paper? A curse upon their ridiculous dictatorship! What say you, Irma, my Irma, wrapped in rumour, Irma, of the incandescent tumour?’ he trilled happily. And his sister rose rustling to her full height, arching her nostrils as she did so, as though they itched with pedigree. Her brother annoyed her, and as she seated herself again before the mirror in her boudoir she made noises like a lady as she applied the powder-puff for the hundredth time to her spotless length of neck.

‘Sourdust will be there, too,’ said Mrs Slagg, ‘because he knows all about things. He knows what order you do things in, precious, and when you must
start
doing them, and when you ought to
stop
.’

‘Is that everyone?’ asked Fuchsia.

‘Don’t hurry me,’ replied the old nurse, pursing her lips into a prune of wrinkles. ‘Can’t you wait a minute? Yes, that makes five, and you make six, and his little Lordship makes seven …

‘And you make eight,’ said Fuchsia. ‘So you make the most.’

‘Make the most what, my caution?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Fuchsia.

While, in various parts of the Castle, these eight persons were getting ready for the Gathering the twins were sitting bolt upright on the couch watching Steerpike drawing the cork out of a slim, dusty bottle. He held it securely between his feet and bending over with the corkscrew firmly embedded was easing the cork from the long black cormorant throat.

Having unwound the corkscrew and placed the undamaged cork on the mantelpiece, he emptied a little of the wine into a glass and tasted it with a critical expression on his pale face.

The aunts leaned forward, their hands on their knees, watching every movement.

Steerpike took one of the Doctor’s silk handkerchiefs from his pocket and wiped his mouth. Then he held the wineglass up to the light for a long time and studied its translucence.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ said Clarice slowly.

‘Is it poisoned?’ said Cora.

‘Who poisoned it?’ echoed Clarice.

‘Gertrude,’ said Cora. ‘She’d kill us if she could.’

‘But she can’t,’ said Clarice.

‘And that’s why we’re going to be powerful.’

‘And proud,’ added Clarice.

‘Yes, because of today.’

‘Because of
today
.’

They joined their hands.

‘It is a good vintage, your Ladyship. A very adequate vintage. I selected it myself. You will, I know, appreciate it fully. It is not poisoned, my dear women. Gertrude, though she has poisoned your lives, has not, as it so happens, poisoned this particular bottle of wine. May I pour you out a glassful each, and we will drink a toast to the business of the day?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Cora. ‘Do it now.’

Steerpike filled their glasses.

‘Stand up,’ he said.

The purple twins arose together, and as Steerpike was about to propose the toast, his right hand holding the glass on the level of his chin and his left hand in his pocket, Cora’s flat voice broke in:

‘Let’s drink it on our Tree,’ she said. ‘It’s lovely outside. On our Tree.’

Clarice turned to her sister with her mouth open. Her eyes were as expressionless as mushrooms.

‘That’s what we’ll do,’ she said.

Steerpike, instead of being annoyed, was amused at the idea. After all, this was an important day for him. He had worked hard to get all in readiness and he knew that his future hung upon the smooth working of his plan, and although he would not congratulate himself until the library was in ashes, he felt that it was up to him and the aunts to relax for a few minutes before the work that lay ahead.

To drink a toast to the Day upon the boughs of the dead Tree appealed to his sense of the dramatic, the appropriate and the ridiculous.

A few minutes later the three of them had passed through the Room of Roots, filed along the horizontal stem and sat down at the table.

As they sat, Steerpike in the middle and the twins at either side, the evening air was motionless beneath them and around. The aunts had apparently no fear of the dizzy drop. They never thought of it. Steerpike, although he was enjoying the situation to the full, nevertheless averted his eyes as far as possible from the sickening space below him. He decided to deal gently with the bottle. On the wooden table their three glasses glowed in the warm light. Thirty feet away the sunny south wall towered above and fell below them featureless from its base to its summit save for the lateral offshoot of this dead tree, halfway up its surface, on which they sat, and the exquisitely pencilled shadows of its branches.

‘Firstly, dear Ladyships,’ said Steerpike, rising to his feet and fixing his eyes upon the shadow of a coiling bough, ‘firstly I propose a health to
you
. To your steadfast purpose and the faith you have in your own destinies. To your courage. Your intelligence. Your beauty.’ He raised his glass. ‘I drink,’ he said, and took a sip.

Clarice began to drink at the same moment, but Cora nudged her elbow. ‘Not yet,’ she said.

‘Next I must propose a toast to the future. Primarily to the Immediate Future. To the task we have resolved to carry through today. To its success. And also to the Great Days that will result from it. The days of your reinstatement. The days of your Power and Glory. Ladies, to the Future!’

Cora, Clarice and Steerpike lifted their elbows to drink. The warm air hung about them, and as Cora’s raised elbow struck her sister’s and jogged the wineglass from her hand, and as it rolled from the table to the tree and from the tree out into the hollow air, the western sunlight caught it as it fell, glittering, through the void.

Although it was Lord Sepulchrave who had summoned the Gathering, it was to Sourdust that the party turned when they had all arrived in the library, for his encyclopaedic knowledge of ritual gave authority to whatever proceedings were to follow. He stood by the marble table and, as the oldest, and in his opinion, the wisest person present, had about him a quite understandable air of his own importance. To wear rich and becoming apparel no doubt engenders a sense of well-being in the wearer, but to be draped, as was Sourdust, in a sacrosanct habit of crimson rags is to be in a world above such consideration as the price and fit of clothes and to experience a sense of propriety that no wealth could buy. Sourdust knew that were he to demand it the wardrobes of Gormenghast would be flung open to him. He did not want it. His mottled beard of alternate black and white hairs was freshly knotted. The crumpled parchment of his ancestral face glimmered in the evening light that swam through the high window.

Flay had managed to find five chairs, which he placed in a line before the table. Nannie, with Titus on her lap, took up the central position. On her right Lord Sepulchrave and on her left the Countess Gertrude sat in attitudes peculiar to them, the former with his right elbow on the arm of the chair and his chin lost in the palm of his hand, and the Countess obliterating the furniture she sat in. On her right sat the Doctor, his long legs crossed and a footling smile of anticipation on his face. At the other end of the row his sister sat with her pelvis at least a foot to the rear of an excited perpendicular – her thorax, neck and head. Fuchsia, for whom, much to her relief, no chair was to be found, stood behind them, her hands behind her back. Between her fingers a small green handkerchief was being twisted round and round. She watched the ancient Sourdust take a step forward and wondered what it must feel like to be so old and wrinkled, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever be as old as that,’ she thought; ‘an old wrinkled woman, older than my mother, older than Nannie Slagg even.’ She gazed at the black mass of her mother’s back. ‘Who is there anyway who isn’t old? There isn’t anybody. Only that boy who hasn’t any lineage. I wouldn’t mind much, but he’s different from me and too clever for me. And even he’s not young. Not like I’d like my friends to be.’

Her eyes moved along the line of heads. One after the other: old heads that didn’t understand.

Her eyes rested at last on Irma.

‘She hasn’t any lineage, either,’ said Fuchsia to herself, ‘and her neck is much too clean and it’s the longest and thinnest and funniest I’ve ever seen. I wonder if she’s really a white giraffe all the time, and pretending she isn’t.’ Fuchsia’s mind flew to the stuffed giraffe’s leg in the attic. ‘Perhaps it belongs to
her
,’ she thought. And the idea so appealed to Fuchsia that she lost control of herself and spluttered.

Sourdust, who was about to begin and had raised his old hand for the purpose, started and peered across at her, Mrs Slagg clutched Titus a little tighter and listened very hard for anything further. Lord Sepulchrave did not move his body an inch, but opened one eye slowly. Lady Gertrude, as though Fuchsia’s splutter had been a signal, shouted to Flay, who was behind the library door:

‘Open the door and let that bird in! What are you waiting for, man?’ Then she whistled with a peculiar ventriloquism, and a wood warbler sped, undulating through the long, dark hollow of library air, to land on her finger.

Irma simply twitched but was too refined to look round, and it was left to the Doctor to make contact with Fuchsia by means of an exquisitely timed wink with his left eye behind its convex lens, like an oyster shutting and opening itself beneath a pool of water.