The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (91 page)

And Titus saw quite clearly not only the great sunflower with its tired, prickly neck which he had seen Fuchsia carrying about for the last two days, but a hand holding it, a hand that was not Fuchsia’s. It held the heavy plant aloft between the thumb and forefinger as though it was the most delicate thing in the world. Every finger of the hand was aflame with gold rings, so that it looked like a gauntlet of flaming metal – an armoured thing.

And then, all at once, blotting it out, a swarm of leaves were swirling through him, a host of yellow leaves, coiling, diving, rising, as they swept forward across a treeless desert, while overhead, like a bonfire in the sky, the sun shone down on the rushing leaves. It was a yellow world: a restless, yellow world: and Titus was beginning to drift into a yet deeper maw of the colour when Bellgrove wakened with a jerk, gathered his gown about him like God gathering a whirlwind, and brought his hand down with a dull, impotent thud on the lid of his desk. His absurdly noble head raised itself. His proud and vacant gaze settled at last on young Dogseye.

‘Would it be too much to ask you,’ he said at last, with a yawn which exposed his carious teeth, ‘whether a young man – a not very studious young man, by name Dogseye – lies behind that mask of dirt and ink? Whether there is a human body within that sordid bunch of rags, and whether that body is Dogseye’s, also.’ He yawned again. One of his eyes was on the clock, the other remained bemusedly on the young pupil. ‘I will put it more simply: Is that really
you
, Dogseye? Are you sitting in the second row from the front? Are you occupying the third desk from the left? And were you – if, indeed, it is you, behind that dark-blue muzzle – were you carving something indescribably fascinating on to the lid of your desk? Did I wake to catch you at it, young man?’

Dogseye, a nondescript little figure, wriggled.

‘Answer me, Dogseye. Were you carving away when you thought your old master was asleep?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Dogseye, surprisingly loudly; so loudly that he startled himself and glanced about him as though for the voice.

‘What were you carving, my boy?’

‘My name, sir.’

‘What, the whole thing, my boy?’

‘I’d only done the first three letters, sir.’

Bellgrove rose swathed. He moved, a benign, august figure, down the dusty aisle between the desks until he reached Dogseye.

‘You haven’t finished the “G”’, he said in a far-away, lugubrious voice. ‘Finish the “G” and leave it at that. And leave the “EYE” for other things …’ – an inane smirk began to flit across the lower part of his face – ‘such as your grammar-book,’ he said brightly, his voice horribly out of character. He began to laugh in such a way as might develop into something beyond control, but he was brought up short with a twinge of pain and he clutched at his jaw, where his teeth cried out for extraction.

After a few moments – ‘Get up,’ he said. Seating himself at Dogseye’s desk he picked up the penknife before him and worked away at the ‘G’ of ‘DOG’ until a bell rang and the room was transformed into a stampeding torrent of boys making for the classroom door as though they expected to find upon the other side the embodiment of their separate dreams – the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance.

‘Very well, then, and so you
shall
!’ cried Alfred Prunesquallor. ‘So you shall, indeed.’

There was a wild and happy desperation in his voice. Happy, in that a decision had been made at all, however unwisely. Desperate, because life with Irma was a desperate affair in any case; but especially in regard to this passion of hers to have a party.

‘Alfred! Alfred! are you serious? Will you pull your weight, Alfred? I say, will you pull your weight?’

‘What weight I have I’ll pull to pieces for you, Irma.’

‘You are resolved, Alfred – I say, you are
resolved
,’ she asked breathlessly.

‘It is you who are resolved, sweet Perturbation. It is I who have submitted. But there it is. I am weak. I am ductile. You
will
have your way – a way, I fear, that is fraught with the possibility of monstrous repercussions – but your own, Irma, your own. And a party we will throw. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

There was something that did not altogether ring true in his shrill laughter. Was there a touch of bitterness in it somewhere?

‘After all,’ he continued, perching himself on the back of a chair (and with his feet on the seat and his chin on his knees he looked remarkably like a grasshopper) … ‘After all, you have waited a long time. A long time. But, as you know, I would never advise such a thing. You’re not the type to give a party. You’re not even the type to go to a party. You have nothing of the flippancy about you that makes a party
go
, sister mine; but you are determined.’

‘Unutterably,’ said Irma.

‘And have you confidence in your brother as a host?’

‘Oh, Alfred, I
could
have!’ she whispered grimly. ‘I
would
have, if you wouldn’t try to make everything sound clever. I get so tired of the way you say things. And I don’t really like the things you say.’

‘Irma,’ said her brother, ‘nor do I. They always sound stale by the time I hear them. The brain and the tongue are so far apart.’

‘That’s the sort of nonsense I
loathe
!’ cried Irma, suddenly becoming passionate. ‘Are we going to talk about the party, or are we going to listen to your silly soufflés? Answer me, Alfred. Answer me at once.’

‘I will talk like bread and water. What shall I say?’

He descended from the chairback and sat on the seat. Then he leant forward a little and, with his hands folded between his knees, he gazed expectantly at Irma through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles. Staring back at him through the darkened glass of her own lenses, the enlargement of his eyes was hardly noticeable.

Irma felt that for the moment she had a certain moral ascendancy over her brother. The air of submission which he had about him gave her strength to divulge to him the real reason for her hankering for this party she had in mind … for she needed his help.

‘Did you know, Alfred,’ she said, that I am thinking of getting married?’

‘Irma!’ cried her brother. ‘You aren’t!’

‘Oh, yes, I am,’ muttered Irma. ‘Oh yes, I am.’

Prunesquallor was about to inquire who the lucky man was when a peculiar twinge of sympathy for her, poor white thing that she was, sitting so upright in the chair before him, caught at his heart. He knew how few her chances of meeting men had been in the past: he knew that she knew nothing of love’s gambits save what she had read in books. He knew that she would lose her head. He also knew that she had no one in view. So he said:

‘We will find
just
the man for you. You deserve a thoroughbred: something that can cock his ears and whisk his tail. By all that’s unimpeachable, you do indeed. Why …’

The Doctor stopped himself: he had been about to take verbal flight when he remembered his promise: so he leant forward again to hear what his sister had to say.

‘I don’t know about cocking his ears and frisking his tail,’ said Irma, with the suggestion of a twitch at one corner of her thin mouth; ‘but I would like you to know, Alfred – I said I would like you to know, that I am glad you understand the position. I am being wasted, Alfred. You realize that, don’t you – don’t you?’

‘I do, indeed.’

‘My skin is the whitest in Gormenghast.’

‘And your feet are the flattest,’ thought her brother: but he said:

‘Yes, yes, but what we must
do
, sweet huntress – (O virgin through wild sex’s thickets prowling)’ (he could not resist this image of his sister) ‘what we must
do
is to decide whom to ask. To the Party, I mean. That is fundamental.’

‘Yes, yes!’ said Irma.

‘And when we will ask them.’

‘That’s easier,’ said Irma.

‘And at what time of the day.’

‘The evening, of course,’ said Irma.

‘And what they shall wear.’

‘Oh, their evening clothes, obviously,’ said Irma.

‘It depends on whom we ask, don’t you think? What ladies, my dear, have dresses as resplendent as yours, for instance? There’s a certain cruelty about evening dress.’

‘Oh, that is of no avail.’

‘Do you mean “of no account”?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Irma.

‘But how embarrassing! Won’t they feel it keenly, my dear – or will you put on rags, in an overflow of love and sympathy?’

‘There will be no women.’

‘No women!’ cried her brother, genuinely startled.

‘I must be alone,’ his sister murmured, pushing her black glasses further up the bridge of her long, pointed nose … ‘with
them
– the males.’

‘But what of the entertainment for your guests?’

‘I shall be there,’ said Irma.

‘Yes, yes; and no doubt you will prove ravishing and ubiquitous; but, my love, my love, think again.’

‘Alfred,’ said Irma, standing up and lowering one of her iliac crests and raising its counterpart so high that her pelvis looked thoroughly dangerous – ‘Alfred,’ she said, ‘how can you be so perverse? What use could women be? You haven’t forgotten what we have in mind, have you? Have you?’

Her brother was beginning to admire her. Had she all this long while been hiding beneath her neuroticism, her vanity, her childishness, an iron will?

He rose and, cupping his hands over her hips, corrected their angle with the quick jerk of a bonesetter. Then, sitting back in his chair and fastidiously crossing his long, elegant, cranelike legs while going through the movements of washing his hands: ‘Irma, my revelation, tell me but this …’ he raised his eyes quizzically – ‘who are these males – these stags – these rams – these torn cats – these cocks, stoats and ganders that you have in mind? And on what scale is this carousal to be?’

‘You know very well, Alfred, that we have no choice. Among the gentry, who are there? I ask you, Alfred, who are there?’

‘Who, indeed?’ mused the Doctor, who could think of no one. The idea of a party in his house was so novel that the effort of trying to people it was beyond him. It was as though he were trying to assemble a cast for an unwritten drama.

‘As for the size of the party, Alfred – are you listening? I have in mind a gathering of some forty men.’

‘No! no!’ shouted her brother, clutching at the arms of his chair, ‘not in
this
room, surely? It would be worse than the white cats. It would be a dog fight.’

Was that a blush that stole across his sister’s face?

‘Alfred,’ she said after a while, ‘it is my last chance. In a year my glamour may be tarnished. Is it a time to think of your own personal comfort?’

‘Listen to me.’ Prunesquallor spoke very slowly. His high voice was strangely meditative. ‘I will be as concise as I can. Only you must listen, Irma.’

She nodded.

‘You will have more success if your party is not too large. At a large party the hostess has to flutter from guest to guest and can never enjoy a protracted conversation with anyone. What is more, the guests continually flutter towards the hostess in a manner calculated to show her how much they are enjoying themselves.

‘But at a smaller party where everyone can easily be seen the introductions and general posturing can be speedily completed. You will then have time to size up the persons present and decide on those worth giving your attention to.’

‘I see,’ said Irma. ‘I am going to have lanterns hanging in the garden, too, so that I can lure those whom I think fit out into the apple orchard.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Prunesquallor, half to himself. ‘Well, I hope it won’t be raining.’

‘It won’t,’ said Irma.

He had never known her like this. There was something frightening in seeing a second side of a sister whom he had always assumed had only one.

‘Well, some of them must be left out, then.’

‘But who
are
they? Who
are
they?’ he cried. ‘I can’t bear this frightful tension. What are these males that you seem to think of
en bloc
? This doglike horde who at, as it were, a whistle will be ready to stream across the quadrangle and through the hall, through this door and to take up a score of masculine postures? In the name of fundamental mercy, Irma, tell me who they are.’