Gormenghast (57 page)

       The Countess was using her powerful brain as though for the first time. The Doctor had never known her like this. Had her cats entered the room or a bird descended flapping to her shoulder it is doubtful whether, at this moment, she would have noticed them. Her thoughts were so concentrated upon the seizure of Steerpike that she had not moved a muscle since she and the Doctor had started talking. Only her lips had moved. She had talked very slowly and quietly but there was a thickness in her voice.

       'I shall outwit him,' she said. 'The ceremonies shall continue.'

       'The Day of the Bright Carvings?' queried the Doctor. 'Shall it proceed as usual?'

       'As usual.'

       'And the Outer-dwellers be allowed within the gates?'

       'Naturally,' she said. 'What could stop them?'

What could stop them? It was Gormenghast that spoke. A fiend might be wandering the castle with dripping hands, but the traditional ceremonies were at the back of it all, enormous, immemorial, sacrosanct. In a fortnight's time it was their day, the day of the Mud Dwellers, when all along the white stone shelf at the foot of the long courtyard wall the coloured carvings would be displayed; and at night, when the bonfires roared and all but the three chosen statues were turned to ash in their flames, Titus standing on the balcony with the Outer Dwellers below him in the fire-lit darkness, would hold aloft in turn, each masterpiece. And as each was raised above his head, a gong would clash. And after the echoes of the third reverberation had died away he would order them to be taken to the Hall of Bright Carvings where Rottcodd slept and the dust collected and the flies crawled over the tall slatted blinds.

       Prunesquallor rose to his feet. 'You are right,' he said. 'There must be no difference, your ladyship, save for an eternal vigilance, and unflagging pursuit.'

       'There is never any difference,' she replied. 'There is never any difference.' Then she turned her head for the first time and looked at the Doctor. 'We will have him,' she said. Her voice, as soft and heavy and thick as velvet, was in so grim and incongruous a contrast to the merciless pin-head of light that glittered in her narrowed eyes that the doctor made for the door. He was in need of an atmosphere less charged. As he turned the door-handle he caught sight of the smashed window, and saw through the jagged star-shaped opening the towers floating. The white mist seemed lovelier than ever, and the towers more fairy-like.

SIXTY

Bellgrove and his wife sat opposite one another in their living room, Irma, very upright, as was her habit, her back as straight as a yard of pump-water. There was something irritating in this unnecessary rigidity. It was, perhaps, ladylike, but it was certainly not feminine. It annoyed Bellgrove for it made him feel that there was something wrong in the way that he had always used a chair. To his mind an armchair was something to curl up in, or to drape oneself across. It was a thing for human delectation. It was not built to be perched on.

       And so he curled his old spine and draped his old legs and lolled his old head, while his wife sat silently and stared at him.

       '... And why on earth should you think that he would dream of risking his life in order to attack you?' the old man was saying. 'You deceive yourself, Irma. Peculiar as he is, there is no reason why he should flatter you to the extent of killing you. To climb in at your bedroom window would be highly hazardous. The entire castle is on the watch for him. Do you really imagine that it matters to him whether you are alive or dead, any more than whether I am alive or dead, or that fly up there on the ceiling is alive or dead? Good grief, Irma, be reasonable if you can, if only for the sake of the love that once I bore you.'

       There is no need for you to speak like that: Irma replied, in a voice as clipped as the sound of castanets, 'Our love has nothing to do with what we are talking about. Nor is it anything to mock at. It has changed, that is all. It is no longer green.'

       'And nor am I,' murmured Bellgrove.

       'What an obvious thing to say!' said Irma, with forced brightness. 'And how very trite - I said how very trite!'

       'I heard you, my dear.'

       'And this is no time for shallow talk. I have come to you as a wife should come to her husband. For guidance. Yes, for guidance. You are old, I know, but...'

       'What the hell has my age got to do with it?' snarled Bellgrove, lifting his magnificent head from a cushion. The milk-white locks were clustered on his shoulders. 'You were never one to ask for advice. You mean you're terrified.'

       'That is so,' said Irma. She said it so simply and so quietly that she did not recognize her own voice. She had spoken involuntarily. Bellgrove turned his head sharply in her direction. He could hardly believe that it was she who had spoken. He rose from his chair and crossed the ugly carpet to where she sat bolt upright. He squatted on his heels before her. A sense of pity stirred in him. He took her long hands in his.

       At first she tried to withdraw them but he held them tightly. She had tried to say 'don't be ridiculous' but no words came.

       'Irma,' he said at last. 'Let us try again. We have both changed - but that is perhaps as it should be. You have shown me sides of your nature which I never knew existed. Never. How could I ever have guessed, my dear, that you should for instance have thought that half my staff were in love with you - or that you could become so irritated with my innocent habit of falling asleep? We have our different spirits, our different needs, our different lives. We are fused, Irma, it is true; we are integrated - but not all that much. Relax your back, my dear. Relax your backbone. It makes it easier for me to talk. I've asked you so often - and in all humility - knowing as I do that your spine is your own.'

       'My dearest husband,' said Irma. 'You are talking overmuch. If you could leave a sentence alone, it would be so much stronger.' She bowed her head to him. 'But I will tell you something,' she continued, 'it makes me happy to see you there, crouched at my feet. It makes me feel young again - or it 'would' do, it would do, if they could only lay their hands on him and end the suspense. It is too much - 'too' much... night after night... night after night... Oh can't you see how it racks a woman? Can't you? Can't you?'

       'My brave one,' said Bellgrove. 'My lady love; pull yourself together. Sinister as the business is, there is no need for you to take the whole thing personally. You are nothing to him, Irma, as I have said before. You are not his foe, my dear, 'are' you? Nor yet his accomplice? Or 'are' you?'

       'Don't be ridiculous.'

       'Quite so. I am being ridiculous. Your husband, the headmaster of Gormenghast, is being ridiculous. And why? Because I have caught the germ. I have caught it from my wife.'

       'But in the darkness... in the darkness... I seem to 'see' him.'

       'Quite so,' said Bellgrove. 'But if you did see him you would feel worse still. Except of course that we could claim a reward, you know!'

       Bellgrove found that his legs were aching so he rose to his feet.

       'My advice, Irma, is to put a little more trust in your husband. He may not be perfect. There may be husbands with finer qualities. With nobler profiles for instance, eh? Or with hair like almond blossom. It is not for me to say. And of course there may be husbands who have even become headmasters, or whose intellect is wider, or whose youth was more dazzling in its gallantry. It is not for me to say. But such as I am I have become yours. And such as you are you have become mine. And such as we both are we have become one another's.

       And what does this lead to? It leads to this. That if all this is so, and yet you quake at every sound of the night, then I take it that your trust in me has waned since those early days when I had you at my feet. O you have schemed... schemed...!'

       'How 'dare' you!' cried Irma. 'How dare you!'

       Bellgrove had forgotten himself. He had forgotten what his argument was intended to prove. A little whiff of temper springing from some unformulated thought had caught him unaware. He tried to recover.

       ''Schemed',' he continued, 'for my happiness. And you have very largely succeeded. I like you sitting there, if you weren't so upright. Can't you melt, my dear one... just a little. One grows so very tired of straight lines. As for Steerpike, take my advice; make use of 'me' when you are frightened. Run to 'me'. Fly to 'me'. Press yourself against my chest; run your fingers through my locks. Be comforted. If he ever 'did' appear before me, you know very well how I would deal with him.'

       Irma looked at her venerable husband. 'I certainly do 'not',' she said. 'How would you?'

       Bellgrove, who had even less idea than Irma, stroked his long chin, and then a sickly smile appeared on his lips.

       'What I would do,' he said, 'is something that no gentleman could possibly divulge. Faith: that is what you need. Faith in me, my dear.'

       'There would be nothing you could do,' said Irma, ignoring her husband's suggestion that she should have faith in him. 'Nothing at all. You are too old.'

       Bellgrove, who had been about to resume his seat, remained standing. His back was to his wife. A dull pain began to grow beneath his ribs. A sense of the black injustice of bodily decay came over him, but a rebellious voice crying in his heart ''I am young, I am young',' while the carnal witness of his three score years and ten sank suddenly at the knees.

       In a moment Irma was at his side. 'Oh my dear one! What is it? What 'is' it?' She lifted his head and put a cushion beneath it. Bellgrove was fully conscious. The shock of finding himself suddenly on the floor had upset him for a moment or two and had taken his breath away, but that was all.

       'My legs went,' he said, looking up at the earnest face above him with its wonderfully sharp nose. 'But I am all right again.'

       Directly he had made this remark he was sorry for it, for he could have done with an hour of nursing.

       'Perhaps you had better get up in that case, my dear,' said Irma. 'The floor is no place for a headmaster.'

       'Ah, but I feel very...'

       'Now, now!' interrupted Irma. 'Let me have no nonsense. I shall go and see whether the doors have been locked. When I return I expect to find you in your chair again.' She left the room.

       After kicking his heels irritably on the carpet, the headmaster struggled to his feet, and when he was in his chair again he put out his tongue at the door through which Irma had passed, but immediately he had done so he blushed for shame and blew a kiss in the same direction from the wasted palm of his hand.

SIXTY-ONE

There was a part of the outer wall which was so deeply hidden with canopies of creeper that for over a hundred years no eyes had seen the stones of the wall itself but the eyes of insects, mice and birds. These undulating acres of hanging foliage over-looked a certain lane which lay so close to the outer wall of Gormenghast that had the mice or the hidden birds been capable of tossing a twig out of the leafy darkness it would have fallen into this lane that lay below.

       It was a narrow way, in deep shadow for most of the day. Only in the late evening, as the sun sank over Gormenghast forest, a quiverful of honey-coloured beams would slant along the alley and there would be pools of amber where all day long the chill, inhospitable shadows had brooded.

       And when these amber pools appeared the curs of the district would congregate out of nowhere and would squat in the golden beams and lick their sores.

       But it was not in order to watch those half-wild dogs or to marvel at the sunbeams that the Thing had taken to working her way through the dense growth of the wall-draped creepers, threading the vertical foliage with the noiseless ease of a snake until twenty feet above the ground she moved outward from the wall to such a position that she could look down upon certain sections of the lane. It was for a reason more covetous. It was because the solitary carver who shared this evening hour with the dogs and the sunbeams never failed to be at his accustomed place at sundown. It was then that he worked upon the block of jarl-wood. It was then that the image grew under his chisel. It was then that the Thing watched, with her eyes wide as a child's, the evolution of the wooden raven. And it was for this carving that she pined angrily, impatiently. It was so that she might snatch it from its maker, and then away, in a breath, to the hills, that she crouched there evening after evening, watching greedily from the loose ivy, for the completion of so pretty a toy.

SIXTY-TWO

When Fuchsia heard the news of Steerpike's treachery and when she realized how her first and only affair of the heart had been with a murderer, an expression of such sickness and horror darkened her face that her aspect was, from that moment, never wholly free of that corrosive stain.

       For a long while she spoke to no one, keeping herself to her room, where, unable to cry, she became exhausted with the emotions that fought in her to find some natural outlet. At first there was only the sense of having been physically struck, and the pain of the wound. Her arms gave little jerks and tingled. A depression of utter blackness drowned her. She had no wish to live at all. Her breast pained her. It was as though a great fear filled the cage of her ribs, a globe of pain that grew and grew. For the first week after the crushing news she could not sleep. And then a kind of hardness entered her. Something she had never housed before. It came as a protection. She needed it. It helped her to grow bitter. She began to kill at birth all thoughts of love that were natural to her. She changed and she aged as she wandered to and fro across her solitary room. She began to see no reason why others, as well as Steerpike, should not be double-faced and merciless. She hated the world.