The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

dancing run, and putting forward both his hands cupped them over the limp white fingers which Irma had extended.

‘O, la! la!’ he had cried, his voice running all the way back down the salon. ‘This is, my dear Miss Prunesquallor, this positively is …’ and turning to the Doctor, ‘Isn’t it?’ he added as he clasped the outstretched hand, squaring his shoulders and shaking his head happily as he did so.

‘Well, I hope it will become so, my friend,’ cried Prunesquallor. ‘How good to see you! And bye the bye, Cutflower, you give me heart you do … by all that re-vivifies I thank you from its bottom. Don’t disappear now, for the whole evening, will you?’

Irma leaned across her brother and drew her lips apart in a dead, wide and calculated smile.

It was meant to express many things, and among them the sense of how unconditionally she associated herself with her brother’s sentiment. It also tried to imply that for all her qualities as a femme fatale, she was little more than a wide-eyed girl at heart and terribly vulnerable. But it was early in the evening and she knew she must make many mistakes before her smiles came out right.

Cutflower, whose eyes were still on the doctor, was fortunate enough to be unaware of Irma’s blandishment. He was about to say something, when the loud and common voice from the other end of the room brayed forth, ‘Professor Mulefire’, and Cutflower turned his head gaily from his hosts and shielded his eyes in imitation of a look- out man scanning some distant horizon. With a quick, delighted smile and a twirl of his dapper body, he was away to the side tables, where with his elbows raised very high, he worked his ten fingers together into a knot, as he passed his eye along the wines and delicacies. Self-absorbed, he rocked to and fro on the sides of his shoes.

How different was Mulefire with his long clumsy irritable strides! And indeed how disparate were all who followed one another that evening with only the colour of their gowns in common.

Flannelcat, like a lost soul for whom the journey was a mile at least; the heavy, sloppy, untidy Fluke, who looked as though, for all his strength and for all the forward thrust of his loaf-like jaw, he might at any moment fold up at the knees and go to sleep on the carpet. Perch-Prism, horribly alert, his porcine features shining white in the glow of the candles, his button-black eyes darting to and fro as he moved crisply with short aggressive steps.

With this shape and that shape, with this walk and that walk, they emerged from the hall to the tocsin-bray of their names, until Bellgrove found himself alone in the semi-darkness.

As one after another of the professional guests had made their carpet-journey towards her, Irma had had a world of time in which to ruminate on the vulnerability of each to the charm she would so soon be unleashing. Some, of course, were quite impossible – but even as she dismissed them she began to brood with favour upon such phrases as ‘rough diamond’, ‘heart of gold’, ‘still waters’ …

While the sides of the room filled with those who had presented themselves and their conversation became louder and louder as their numbers increased, Irma, standing rigid by her brother, speculating upon the pros and cons of those she had received, was wakened out of a more than usually sanguine speculation by her brother’s voice.

‘And how is Irma, that sister of mine, that sweet throb? Is she cooing? Is she weary of the flesh – or isn’t she? Great spearheads, Irma! How determined, how martial you look! Relax a little, melt within yourself. Think of milk and honey. Think of jellyfish.’

‘Be quiet,’ she hissed out of the corner of a smile she was concocting, a smile more ambitious than she had so far dared to invent. Every muscle in her face was pulling its weight. Not all of them knew in which direction to pull, but their common enthusiasm was formidable. It was as though all her previous contortions were mere rehearsals. Something in white was approaching.

The ‘something in white’ was moving slowly but with more purpose than for over forty years. While he had waited, sitting quietly by himself on the lowest step of the Prunesquallors’ staircase, Bellgrove had repeated to himself, his lips moving to the slow rhythm of his thoughts, those conclusions he had come to.

He had decided, intellectually, that Irma Prunesquallor, dwarfed by lack of outlet for her feminine instincts, could find fruition in a life devoted to his comforts. That not only he, but she, in years to come would bless the day when he, Bellgrove, was man enough, was sapient enough, to lift her from stagnation and set her marching through matrimony towards that equipoise of spirit that only wives can know. There were a hundred rational reasons why she should leap at the chance in spite of his advanced years. But what weight had all these arguments for a fine and haughty lady, sensitive as a blood horse and gowned like a queen, if at the same time there was no love? And Bellgrove remembered as he had crossed the quadrangle an hour ago how it was this point that irked him. But now, it was not the tightness of his reasoning that set his old knees trembling, it was something more. For, from a wise and practical project the whole conception had been shifted into another light. His ideas had suddenly been overlaid with stars. What was precise was now enormous, unsubstant, diaphanous, for he had seen her. And tonight it was not merely the Doctor’s sister that awaited him, but a daughter of Eve, a living focus, a cosmos, a pulse of the great abstraction. Woman. Was her name Irma? Her name was Irma. But what was the name Irma but four absurd little letters in a certain order? To hell with symbols, cried Bellgrove to himself. She is there, by God, from head to foot and matchless!

It was true that he had only seen her from a distance and it is possible that the distance lent an enchantment self-engendered. No doubt, his sight was not as sharp as it used to be – and the fact that he could not remember having seen any other woman for many years gave Irma a flying start.

But he had obtained a general picture, as he peered through a narrow chasm of light that shone between Throd’s and Spiregrain’s bodies.

And he had seen how proudly she held herself. Stiff as a soldier, and yet how feminine! That is what he would like to have about him in the evening. A stately type. He could imagine her, sitting bolt upright, at his side, her face twitching a little from gentle breeding, her snow-white hands darning away at his socks while he pondered on this and that, turning his eyes from time to time to see whether it was really true, that she was really there, his wife, his wife, on the chocolate-coloured couch.

And then suddenly he had found himself alone. The big face was peering for him from the door. ‘Name?’ it whispered hoarsely, for its voice was almost gone.

‘I’m the headmaster, you idiot,’ barked Bellgrove. He was in no mood for fools. Something was in his blood. Whether it was love or not he must find out soon. There was an impatient streak in him – and this was no moment in which to suffer the man gladly.

The creature with the big face, seeing that Bellgrove was the last to be announced, took a deep breath and to get rid of his pent-up irritability (for he was an hour late for his appointment with a blacksmith’s wife) gathered all the forces of his throat together and yelled – but his voice collapsed after the first syllable and only Bellgrove heard