The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

‘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 souffles? 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?’