The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (126 page)

Standing upon the lid of his desk Titus was in the unusual position of looking down at the face of this authority who had suddenly appeared as though out of the floor, like an apparition. The face looked up at him, a wry smile upon the lips, the eyebrows raised a little, and a certain expectancy in the features, as though denoting that although Steerpike realized that it was impossible for the boy to have guessed who it was that had tapped him on the back, and was therefore guiltless of insolence, yet, an apology was called for. It was unthinkable that the Master of Ritual should be spoken to in this way by anyone – let alone a small boy – whatever his lineage.

But no apology came. For Titus, directly he realized what had happened – that he had cried ‘
shut-up
’ to the arch-symbol of all the authority and repression which he loathed – knew instinctively that this was a moment in which to dare the blackest hell.

To apologize would be to submit.

He knew in the darkness of his heart’s blood that he must not climb down. In the face of peril, in the presence of officialdom, age-old and vile, with its scarlet hands, and its hunched shoulders, he must not climb down. He must cling to his dizzy crag until, trembling but triumphant in the enormous knowledge of his victory, he stood once more upon solid ground, secure in the knowledge that as a creature of different clay he had not sold his birthright out of terror.

But he could not move. His face had gone white as the paper on the desk. His brow was sticky with sweat and he was heavy with a ghastly tiredness. To cling to his crag was enough. He had not the courage to stare into the dark red eyes that, with the lids narrowed across them, were fixed upon his face. He had not the courage to do this. He stared over the man’s shoulder, and then he closed his eyes. To refuse to say he was sorry was all that his courage could stand.

And then, all at once he felt himself to be standing at a strange angle, and opening his eyes he saw the rows of desks begin to circle in formation through the air and then a far voice shouted as though from miles away as he fell heavily to the floor in a dead faint.

‘I am having the most moving time, Alfred. I said I am having the most
moving
time – are you listening or not? O it’s
too
galling the way a woman can be courted so splendidly, so nobly by her lover, only to find that her own brother is about as interested as a fly upon the wall. Alfred, I said a fly upon a
wall
!’

‘Flesh of my flesh,’ said the Doctor after a pause (he had been lost in rumination) ‘what is it that you want to know?’

‘
Know
,’ answered Irma, with superb scorn. ‘Why should I want to
know
anything?’

Her fingers smoothed the back of her iron-grey hair, and then of a sudden, pounced upon the bun at the nape of her neck where they fiddled with an uncanny dexterity. It might have been supposed that her long nervous fingers had an eye apiece so effortlessly did they flicker to and fro across the contours of the hirsute knob.

‘I was not
asking
you a question, Alfred. I sometimes have thoughts of my own. I sometimes make
statements
. I know you think very little of my intellect. But not everyone is like you – I can assure you. You can have no idea, Alfred, of what is being done to me. I am being drawn out. I am finding treasures in myself. I am like a rich mine, Alfred. I know it, I know it. And I have brains I haven’t even used yet.’

‘Conversation with you, Irma’, said her brother, ‘is peculiarly difficult. You leave no loops, dear one, at the end of your sentences, nothing to help your loving brother, nothing for his ever willing, ever eager, ever shining hook. I always have to start afresh, sweet trout. I have to work my passage. But I will try again. Now, you were saying …?’

‘O Alfred. Just for one moment, do something to please me. Talk
normally
. I am so tired of your way of saying things with all its figures of eight.’

‘Figures of
speech
! speech! speech!’ cried the Doctor, rising to his feet and wringing his hands, ‘why do you always say figure of
eight
? O bless my soul, what is the matter with my nerves? Yes, of course I’ll do something to please you. What shall it be?’

But Irma was in tears, her head buried in a soft grey cushion. At last she raised it and taking off her dark glasses, ‘It’s too
much
,’ she sobbed. ‘When even one’s brother snaps one up. I did trust
you
!’ she shouted, ‘and now
you’re
letting me down too. I only wanted your advice.’

‘Who has let you down?’ said the Doctor sharply. ‘Not the Headmaster …?’

Irma dabbed her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief the size of a playing card.

‘It’s because I told him his neck was dirty, the dear, sweet lord …’

‘
Lord
!’ cried Prunesquallor, ‘you don’t call him
that
, do you?’

‘Of course not, Alfred … only to myself … after all he is my lord, isn’t he?’

‘If you say so,’ said her brother, passing his hand across his brow. ‘I suppose he could be anything.’

‘O he is. He is. He’s anything – or rather, Alfred, he’s everything.’

‘But you have shamed him, and he feels wounded – proud and wounded, is that it, Irma, my dear?’

‘Yes, O yes. It is that exactly. But what can I
do
? What can I
do
?’

The doctor placed the tips of his fingers together.

‘You are experiencing already, my dear Irma,’ he said, ‘the stuff of marriage. And so is he. Be patient, sweet flower. Learn all you can. Use what tact God gave you, and remember your mistakes and what led up to them. Say nothing about his neck. You can only make things worse. His resentment will fade. His wound will heal in time. If you love him, then simply love him and never fuss about what’s dead and gone. After all you love him in spite of all your
faults
, not
his
. Other people’s faults can be fascinating. One’s own are dreary. Be quiet for a bit. Don’t talk too much and can’t you walk a little less like a buoy in a swell?’

Irma got up from her chair and moved to the door.

‘Thank you, Alfred,’ she said and disappeared.

Doctor Prunesquallor sank back on the couch by the window, and with an ease, quite astonishing, dismissed his sister’s problem from his mind and was once more in the cogitative reverie from which she had interrupted him.

He had been thinking of Steerpike’s accession to the key position that he now occupied. He had also been reflecting upon the way he had behaved as a patient. His fortitude had been matchless and his will to live quite savage. But for the most part, the Doctor was turning over in his mind something that was quite different. It was a phrase, which, at the height of Steerpike’s delirium, had broken loose from the chaos of his ravings – ‘
And the Twins will make it five
,’ the young man had shouted – ‘
and the Twins will make it five
.’

One dark winter morning, Titus and his sister sat together on the wide window-seat of one of Fuchsia’s three rooms that overlooked the South Spinneys. Soon after Nannie Slagg had died Fuchsia had moved, not without much arguing and a sense of dire uprooting, to a more handsome district – and to a set of rooms which, in comparison with her old untidy bedroom of many memories, were full of light and space.

Outside the window the last of the snow lay in patches across the countryside. Fuchsia, with her chin on her hands and her elbows on the window-sill, was watching the swaying motion of the thin stream of steel-grey water as it fell a hundred feet from the gutter of a nearby building – for a small, restless wind was blowing erratically and sometimes the stream of melted snow as it fell from the high gutter would descend in a straight and motionless line to a tank in the quadrangle below, and sometimes it would swing to the north and stay outstretched when a gust blew angrily, and sometimes the cascade would fan out in a spray of innumerable leaden drops and fall like rain. And then the wind would drop again and the steady tubular overflow would fall once more vertically, like a stretched cable, and the water would spurt and thud within the tank.

Titus, who had been turning over the pages of a book, got to his feet.

‘I’m glad there’s no school today, Few,’ he said – it was a name he had started giving her – ‘it would have been Perch-Prism with his foul chemistry and Cutflower this afternoon.’

‘What’s the holiday
for
?’ said Fuchsia with her eyes still on the water which was now swaying to and fro across the tank.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Titus. ‘Something to do with Mother, I think. Birthday or something.’

‘Oh,’ said Fuchsia and then after a pause, ‘it’s funny how one has to be told everything. I don’t remember her having birthdays before. It’s all so inhuman.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Titus.

‘No,’ said Fuchsia. ‘You wouldn’t, I suppose. It’s not your fault and you’re lucky in a way. But I’ve read quite a lot and I know that most children see a good deal of their parents – more than we do anyway.’

‘Well, I don’t remember father at
all
,’ said Titus.

‘I do,’ said Fuchsia. ‘But he was difficult too. I hardly ever spoke to him. I think he wanted me to be a boy.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh … I wonder why.’

‘To be the next Earl of course.’

‘Oh … but
I
am … so it’s all right, I suppose.’

‘But he didn’t know you were going to be born, when
I
was a child, did he? He couldn’t have. I was about fourteen when you were born.’

‘Were you really …’

‘Of course I was. And for all that time he wished I was you, I suppose.’

‘That’s funny, isn’t it?’ said Titus.

‘It wasn’t funny at all – and it isn’t funny now – is it? Not that it’s your fault …’

At that moment there was a knock at the door and a messenger entered.

‘What do you want?’ said Fuchsia.

‘I have a message, my lady.’

‘What is it?’

‘Her ladyship, the Countess, your mother, wishes Lord Titus to accompany me back to her room. She is going to take him for a walk.’

Titus and Fuchsia stared at the messenger and then at one another. Several times they opened their mouths to speak but closed them again. Then Fuchsia turned her eyes back to the melting snow – and Titus walked out through the half open door, the messenger following him closely.

The Countess was waiting for them on the landing. She gestured the messenger to be gone with a single, lazy movement to her head.

She gazed at Titus with a curious lack of expression. It was as though what she saw interested her, but in the way that a stone would interest a geologist, or a plant, a botanist. Her expression was neither kindly nor unkindly. It was simply absent. She appeared to be unconscious of having a face at all. Her features made no effort to communicate anything.

‘I am taking them for a walk,’ she said in her heavy, abstracted, millstone voice.

‘Yes, mother,’ said Titus. He supposed she was talking of her cats.

A shadow settled for a moment on her broad brow. The word mother had perplexed her. But the boy was quite right, of course.

Her massive bulk had always impressed Titus. The hanging draperies and scollop’d shadows, the swathes of musty darkness – all this he found most awesome.

He was fascinated by her but he had no point of contact. When she spoke it was in order to make a statement. She had no conversation.

She turned her head and, pursing her lips, she whistled with a peculiar ululation. Titus gazed up at the sartorial mass above him. Why had she wanted him to accompany her? he wondered. Did she want him to tell her anything? Had she anything to tell
him
? Was it just a whim?

But she had started to descend the stairs and Titus followed her.

From a hundred dim recesses, from favourite ledges, from shelves and draught-proof corners, from among the tattered entrails of old sofas, from the scarred plush of chairs, from under clock-stands, from immemorial sun-traps, and from nests of claw-torn paper – from the inside of lost hats, from among rafters, from rusty casques, and from drawers half-open, the cats poured forth, converged, foamed, and with a rapid pattering of their milk-white feet filled up the corridors, and a few moments later had reached the landing and were on their way, in the wake of their great mistress, down the stairway they obscured.