The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

the guttering sound that was intended for ‘master’.

But there was something rather fine, rather impressive in the abbreviation. Something less formal, it is true, but more penetrating in the first simple syllable.

‘The Head –!’

The short hammer blow of the monosyllable reverberated along the room like a challenge.

It struck like a drumstick on the membranes of Irma’s ear and Bellgrove, peering forward as he took his first paces into the room, had the impression of his hostess rearing herself up on her hips, tossing her head before it froze into a motionless carving.

His heart, that was already beating wildly, had leapt at the sight. Her attention was riveted upon him. Of that there was no doubt. Not only her attention, but the attention of all those present. He became aware of a lethal hush. Soft as the carpet was, his feet could be heard as they lowered themselves one after another into the grey- green of the pile.

For a moment, as he moved with that fantastic solemnity which the urchins of Gormenghast were so fond of mimicking, he gave his eyes the run of his staff. There they stood, three deep, a solid wine-red phalanx that completely obscured the side-tables. Yes, he could see Perch-Prism, his eyebrows raised, and Opus Fluke with his horse’s mouth half open in a grin so inane that for a moment it was difficult for Bellgrove to regain that composure necessary to the advancement of his immediate interests. So they were waiting to see in what way he would try to evade the ‘predatory’ Irma, were they? So they expected him to back away from her immediately after he had received his formal reception, did they? So they looked for an evening of hide and seek between their hostess and their headmaster, the low curs! By the light of a militant heaven, he would show the dogs! He would show them. And, by the powers, he would surprise them too.

By now he was about halfway along the carpet, already trodden into a recognizable highway, the pile of the carpet throwing out a greener sheen than elsewhere, the pile pressed forward by a hundred feet.

Irma, her eyes weak with peering, could just see him. As he approached and the blurred edges of his swan white gown, and the contours of his leonine head, grew sharper, she marvelled at his god-like quality. She had received so many half-men that she had tired, not of numbers, but of waiting for the kind of male she could reverence. There had been the perky ones, and the stolid ones and the sharp ones and the blunt ones – all males she supposed, but although she had a few of them at the back of her mind for further consideration, yet she had been sadly disappointed. There had been that irritating bachelor quality about them, a kind of dead self-sufficiency, a terrible thing in a man, who is, as every woman knows, a mere tag-end of a thing before the distaff side has stitched him together.

But here was something different. Something old it is true, but something noble. She manoeuvred with her mouth. It had had a good deal of practice by this time and the smile she prepared for Bellgrove reflected to a great extent what she had in mind for it. Above all, it was winsome, devastatingly winsome. For a pretty face to be winsome is normal enough and very winsome it can be, but it is a tepid thing, a negative thing compared with the winsomeness to which Irma could subject her features. With her it was as startling as any foreground symbol set against an incongruous background. Irma’s weak and eager eyes, Irma’s pinnacle of a nose, Irma’s length of powdered face; these were the incongruous background on which the smile deployed its artful self. She played with it for a moment or two, as an angler with a fish, and then she let it set like concrete.

Her body had simultaneously rhythmed itself into a stance both statuesque and snake-like, her thorax, amplified with its hot-water bottle bosom, positioned in air so far to the left of her pelvis as to have no visible means of support. Her snow-white hands were clasped at her throat where her jewellery sparkled.

Bellgrove was almost upon her. ‘This,’ he said to himself, breathing deeply, ‘is one of those moments in a man’s life when valour is tested.’

The years ahead hung on his every move. His staff had shaken hands with her as though a woman was merely another kind of man. Fools! The seeds of Eve were in this radiant creature. The lullabyes of half a million years throbbed in her throat. Had they no sense of wonder, no reverence, no pride? He, an old man (but a not unhandsome one), would show the dogs the way of it – and there she was, before him, the maddeningly feminine bouquet of her pineapple perfume swimming about his head. He inhaled. He trembled, and then, lion-like, he tossed his venerable mane from his eyes, and raising his shoulders as he took her hand in his, he bowed his head above their milky limpness and planted in the damp of her palms, the first two kisses he had given for over fifty years.

To say that the frozen silence contracted itself into a yet higher globe of ice were to under-rate the exquisite tension and to shroud it in words. The atmosphere had become a physical sensation. As when, before a masterpiece, the acid throat contracts, and words are millstones, so when the supernaturally outlandish happens and a masterpiece is launched through the medium of human gesture, then all human volition is withered at the source and the heart of action stops beating.

Such a moment was this. Irma, a stalagmite of crimson stone, knew, for all the riot of her veins that a page had turned over. At chapter forty? O no! At chapter one, for she had never lived before save in a pulseless preface.

How long did they remain thus? How many times had the earth moved round the sun? How many times had the great blue whales of the northern waters risen to spurt their fountains at the sky? How many reed-bucks had fallen to the claws of how many leopards, while that sublime unit of two-figure statuary remained motionless? It is fruitless to ask. The clocks of the world stood still or should have done.

But at last the arctic stillness broke. A professor at the side tables gave forth a sharp scream, whether of laughter or nerves was never established.

The Doctor glanced across at the wine red gowns, his eyebrows raised, his teeth glinting. There were a few beads of moisture on his forehead. He was going through a lot.

Irma had not consciously heard the sharp cry of laughter nor knew what had broken her from a trance, but she found herself inclining her head graciously above the white locks of the headmaster’s reverential poll.

This was it. Something within her was laughing wildly, like cowbells.

It was a pity that the headmaster could not appreciate the amplitude of her graciousness as she hung above him – but, there it was – she couldn’t have it both ways – but wait – what was this?

O sweetest mercy! And the wild thorn-throbs of it! What was he doing, the great, gentle, august, brilliant lion? He was raising his eyes to hers with his lips still pressed against her fingers. It was as though he had divined her most secret thoughts.

She lowered her lids and found that his dead-pebble eyes were upon hers. With their gaze directed upwards