The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

dropped it into Irma’s glass. He decanted a little wine into the glass and handed it to her with the exaggerated graciousness which seldom left him. ‘And I will take some myself,’ he said, ‘and we will drink to each other.’

Irma had collapsed into a chair, and her long marmoreal face was buried in her hands. Her black glasses, which she wore to protect her eyes from the light, were at a rakish slant across her cheek.

‘Come, come, I am forgetting my promise!’ cried the doctor, standing before her, very tall, slender and upright, with that celluloid head of his, all sentience and nervous intelligence, tilted to one side like a bird’s.

‘First a quaff of this delicious wine from a vineyard beneath a brooding hill – I can see it so clearly – and you, O Irma, can you see it, too? The peasants toiling and sweating in the sun – and why? Because they have no option, Irma. They are desperately poor, and their bowed necks are wry. And the husbandmen, like every good husband, tending his love – stroking the vines with his horny hand, whispering to them, coaxing them, “O little grapes,” he whispers, “give up your wine. Irma is waiting.” And here it is; here it is, ha, ha, ha, ha! Delicious and cold and white, in a cut-glass goblet. Toss back your coif and quaff, my querulous queen!’

Irma roused herself a little. She had not heard a word. She had been in her own private hell of humiliation. Her eyes turned to the knife in the ceiling. The thin line of her mouth twitched, but she took the glass from her brother’s outstretched hand.

Her brother clinked his glass against hers and, duplicating the movement of his arm, she raised her own automatically and drank.

‘And now for the little jingle which I threw off in that nonchalant way of mine. How did it go? How did it go?’

Prunesquallor knew that by the third verse the strong, tasteless soporific which had dissolved in her wine would begin to take effect. He sat on the floor at her knees and, quelling a revulsion, he patted her hand.

‘Queen bee,’ he said, ‘look at me, if you can. Through your midnight spectacles. It shouldn’t be too dreadful – for one who had fed on horrors. Now, listen …’ Irma’s eyes were already beginning to close.

‘It goes like this, I think. I called it The Osseous ’Orse.’

Come, flick the ulna juggler-wise

And twang the tibia for me!

O Osseous ’orse, the future lies

Like serum on the sea.

Green fields and buttercups no more

Regale you with delight, no, no!

The tonic tempests leap and pour

Through your white pelvis ever so.

‘Are you enjoying it, Irma?’ She nodded sleepily.

Come, clap your scapulae and twitch

The pale pagoda of your spine,

Removed from life’s eternal itch

What need for iodine?

The Osseous ’orse sat up at once

And clanged his ribs in biblic pride.

I fear I looked at him askance

Though he had naught to hide …

No hide at all … just …

At this point the doctor, having forgotten what came next, turned his eyes once more to his sister Irma; she was fast asleep. The doctor rang the bell.

‘Your mistress’s maid; a stretcher; and a couple of men to handle it.’ (A face had appeared in the doorway.) ‘And be rapid.’ The face withdrew.

When Irma had been put to bed and her lamp had been turned low and silence swam through the house, the doctor unlocked the door of his study, entered and sank back into his arm-chair. His friable-looking elbows rested upon the padded arms. His fingers were twined together into a delicate bunch, and on this bunch he supported his long and sunken jaw. After a few moments he removed his glasses and laid them on the arm of his chair. Then, with his fingers clasped together once again beneath his chin, he shut his eyes and sighed gently.

SEVEN

But he was not destined to more than a few moments of relaxation, for feet were soon to be heard outside his window. Only two of them, it was true, but there was something in the weight and deliberation of the tread that reminded him of an army moving in perfect unison, a dread and measured sound. The rain had quietened and the sound of each foot as it struck the ground was alarmingly clear.

Prunesquallor could recognize that portentous gait among a million. But in the silence of the evening his mind flew to the phantom army it awakened in his leap-frogging brain. What was there in the clockwork stepping of an upright host to contract the throat and bring, as does the thought of a sliced lemon, that sharp astringency to throat and jaw? Why do the tears begin to gather? And the heart to thud?

He had no time to ponder the matter now, so at one and the same time he tossed a mop of grey thatch from his brow and an army-on-the-march from his mind.

Reaching the door before his bell could clang the servants into redundance he opened it, and to the massive figure who was about to whack the door with her fist –