The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

She stopped dead and let go the doctor’s hand. ‘No,’ she said, ‘and if nobody finds him I will kill myself.’

‘Tut, tut, tut, my little threatener,’ said Prunesquallor. ‘What a tedious thing to say. And you such an original girl. As though Titus won’t reappear like a jack-in-the-box, by all that’s typical so he will!’

‘He must! He must!’ cried Fuchsia, and then she began to weep uncontrollably while the Doctor held her against his side and dabbed her flushed cheeks with his immaculate handkerchief.

TWENTY-NINE

Nannie Slagg’s funeral was so simple as to appear almost off-hand; but this seemingly casual dispatch of the old lady’s relics bore no relation to the inherent pathos of the occasion. The gathering at the graveside was out of all proportion to the number of friends on whom, in her lifetime, she would ever have dared to count. For she had become, in her old age, a kind of legend. No one had troubled to see her. She had been deserted in her declining years. But it had been tacitly assumed that she would live for ever. That she would no more pass out of the castle’s life than that the Tower of Flints would pass from Gormenghast to leave a gap in the skyline, a gap never again to be filled.

And so, at her funeral, the majority of the mourners were gathered there, to pay their respects to the memory not so much of Mrs Slagg, as to the legend which the tiny creature had, all unwittingly, allowed to grow about her.

It had been impossible for the two bearers to carry the small coffin across their shoulders, for this necessitated so close a formation one behind the other, that they could not walk without tripping one another up. The little box was eventually carried in one hand by the leading mute, while his colleague, with a finger placed on the lid, to prevent it from swaying, walked to one side and a little to the rear.

The bearer, as he strode along, might have been carrying a bird-cage as he paced his way to the Retainers’ Graveyard. From time to time the man would turn his eyes with a childish, puzzled expression to the box he carried as though to reassure himself that he was doing what was expected of him. He could not help feeling that something was missing.

The mourners led by Barquentine came behind, followed by the Countess, at some distance. She made no effort to keep pace with the rapid, jerking progress of the cripple. She moved ponderously, her eyes on the ground. Fuchsia and Titus followed, Titus having been released from the Fort for the funeral.

With the nightmare memory of his recent adventure filling his mind he moved in a trance, waking from time to time to wonder at this new manifestation of life’s incalculable strangeness – the little box ahead of him, the sunshine playing over the head of Gormenghast Mountain, where it rose, with unbelievable solidity, ahead, like a challenge, on the skyline.

It crowned a region that had become a part of his imaginative being, a region where an exile moved like a stick-insect, through a wilderness of trees, and where, phantom or human, he knew not which, something else was, at this moment, floating again, as he had seen it float before, like a leaf, in the shape of a girl. A girl. Suddenly he broke from his trance at Fuchsia’s side.

The word and the idea had fused into something fire-like. Suddenly the slight and floating enigma of the glade had taken on a sex, had become particularized, had woken in him a sensation of excitement that was new to him. Wide awake, all at once, he was at the same time plunged even deeper into a cloudland of symbols to which he had no key. And she was there – there, ahead of him. He could see, far away, the very forest roof that rustled above her.

The figures that moved ahead of him, Barquentine, his mother, and the men with the little box, were less real than the startling confusion of his heart.

He had come to a halt in a valley filled with mounds. Fuchsia was holding his hand. The crowd was all about him. A figure in a hood was scattering red dust into a little trench. A voice was intoning. The words meant nothing to him. He was adrift.

That same evening, Titus lay wide-eyed in the darkness and stared with unseeing eyes at the enormous shadows of two boys as they fought a mock battle of grotesque dimensions upon an oblong of light cast upon the dormitory wall. And while he gazed abstractedly at the cut and thrust of the shadow-monsters, his sister Fuchsia was crossing to the Doctor’s house.

‘Can I talk to you, Doctor?’ she asked as he opened the door to her. ‘I know it isn’t long since you had to bear with me, and …’ but Prunesquallor, putting his finger to his lips, silenced her and then drew her back into a shadow of the hall, for Irma was opening the door of the sitting-room.

‘Alfred,’ came the cry, ‘what is it, Alfred? I said what is it?’

‘The merest nothing, my love,’ trilled the Doctor. ‘I must get that hank of ivy torn up by its very roots in the morning.’

‘What ivy – I said what ivy, you irritating thing,’ she answered. ‘I sometimes wish that you could call a spade a spade, I really do.’

‘Have we one, sweet nicotine?’

‘Have we what?’

‘A spade, for the ivy, my love, the ivy that will keep tapping at our front door. By all that’s symbolic, it will go on doing it!’

‘Is that what it was?’

Irma relaxed. ‘I don’t remember any ivy,’ she added. ‘But what are you cowering in that corner for? It’s not like you, Alfred, to lurk about in the corner like that. Really, if I didn’t know it was you, well really, I’d be quite …’

‘But you’re not, are you, my sweet nerve-ending? Of course you’re not. So upstairs with you. By all that moves in rapid circles, I’ve had a seismic sister these last few days, haven’t I?’

‘O Alfred. It will be worth it, won’t it? There’s so much to think of and I’m so excited. And so soon now. Our party! Our party!’

‘And that’s why you must go to bed and fill yourself right up with sleep. That is what my sister needs, isn’t it? Of course it is. Sleep … O, the very treacle of it, Irma! So run away my dear. Away with you! Away with you! A … w … a … y!’ He fluttered his hand like a silk handkerchief.