The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

and through the white tangle of the eyebrows they appeared to be caged.

She knew the moment to be enormous – enormous in its implications – in its future – but she knew also as a woman that she must draw her hand away. As the first suspicion of a movement crept through her flaccid fingers, Bellgrove lifted his head, withdrew his big hands from hers and at that moment Irma’s bosom began to slip. In the complex arrangement of strings, safety pins and tape which held the hot water bottle in place. Time had found a weakness.

But Irma, tingling with excitement, was in so elevated a frame of body and mind that, beyond her capacity as it were, her brain was planning for her in advance, those things she should do, and say, in or out of any emergency. And this was one of those moments when the cells of Irma’s brain marched in solid ranks to her rescue.

Her bosom was slipping. She clasped her hands together at her throat so that her forearms might keep the hot water bottle in place, and then with every eye upon her she lifted her head high and began to pace towards the doorway at the far end of the salon. She had not even glanced at her brother, but with a quite overweening confidence had started away, the folds of her evening gown trailing behind her.

The bottle had become horribly cold across her chest. But she revelled in its cruel temperature. Why should she care about such little things? Something on an altogether vaster scale was bearing her on its flood.

The barb had struck. She was naked. She was proud. Had love’s arrow not been metaphorical she would have held it high in the air for all to see. And all this she was making plain, by the very movement of her pacing body, and by the volcanic blush which had turned her marmoreal head into something that might have been found among the blood-red ruins of some remote civilization.

Her jewellery took on another tint. Her blush burned through it.

But her expression bore no relation to the blush. It was strangely articulate, and thus, frighteningly simple.

There was no need for words. Her face was saying, ‘I am in his power; he has awakened me; I, a mere woman, have been blasted into sentience. Whatever the future holds it will not be through me that love goes hungry. I am aware; not only that history is being made, but of my duty, even at this pinnacled moment, and so, I am leaving the room, to re-adjust myself – to compose myself, and to bring back into the salon the kind of woman that the headmaster may admire – no quivering lovestruck damsel, but a dame in all the high sensuousness of her sex, a dame, composed and glorious!’

Irma, directly she had reached the door and had swept out into the hall, flew, a silken spinster, up the flight of stairs to her room. Slamming the door behind her she gave vent to the primeval jungle in her veins and screamed like a macaw, and then, prancing forward towards the bed, tripped over a small embroidered foot-stool and fell spreadeagled across the carpet.

What did it matter? What did anything ridiculous or shaming matter so long as he was not there to see it?

THIRTY-FIVE

There are times when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.

Irma, in her room, could picture Bellgrove at her side as though he were there, but she could also see clean through him, so that his body was pranked with the pattern of the wallpaper beyond. She could see a great host of professors, thousands of them, and all the size of hatpins. They stood upon her bed, a massed and solemn congregation, and bowed to her; but she also saw that her pillow-slip needed changing. She looked out of the window, her eyes wide and un-focused. The moonlight lay in a haze upon the high foliage of an elm, and the elm became Mr Bellgrove again with his distinguished and lordly mane. She saw a figure, no doubt some figment, as it slid over the wall of her grotto’d garden and ran like a shadow to beneath the window of the dispensary. Far away at the back of her mind, there was something that said ‘you have seen that movement before; crouching, rapid movement’ – yet she had, in her transport, no clue as to what was real and what was fantasy.

And so, when she saw a figure steal across the garden below her she had no conception that it was a real, breathing creature, far less that it was Steerpike. The young man who had forced open the window in the room below that in which Irma was standing moonstruck, had, by the light of a candle, wasted no time in finding the drug for which he was looking. The bottles on the packed shelves shone blue and crimson and deadly green as the small flame moved. Within a few moments he had decanted a few thimblefuls of a sluggish liquid into the flask he carried, and returned the doctor’s bottle to the shelf. He corked his own container and within a moment was halfway out of the window.

Above the walls of the garden the upper massives of Gormenghast castle shone in the baleful moonlight. As he paused for a moment before dropping from the window-sill to the ground, he shuddered. The night was warm and there was no cause to shudder save that a twinge of joy, of dark joy can shake the body, when a man is alone, under the moon, on a secret mission, with hunger in his heart and ice in his brain.

THIRTY-SIX

When Irma returned to her guests she paused before she opened the doors of the salon, for a loud and confused noise came from within. It was of a kind that she had never heard before, so happy it was, so multitudinous, so abandoned – the sound of voices at play. She had, of course, in her small way, at gatherings, heard, from time to time, the play of many voices. But what she was hearing now was not the play of voices; it was voices at play; and as such it was novel and peculiar to her ears, in the way that shadow at play (as against the play of shadows) would have been to her eyes. She had, on rare occasions, enjoyed the play of her brother’s brain – but in her salon there was something very different going on and from the few remarks that she could distinguish through the panels of the door it was obvious that here there was no play of language, no play of thought, but language playing on its own; enfranchised notions playing by themselves, the truants of the brain.

Gathering the long wreaths of her gown about her she crouched for a moment with her eyes to the keyhole but could see no more than the smoky midnight of the gowns.

What had happened, she wondered, while she had been upstairs? When she had left, in the motionless silence, like a queen, the room had throbbed with her single personality, the silence, the flattering and significant silence, had been her setting, as the great sky is the setting for the white flight of a gull. But now, the stretched drum-skin of the atmosphere had split – and the professors, exultant that this was so, had, each in his own way, erected within himself the romantic image of what he fondly imagined himself to be. For the long lost glories, that never in fact existed save in the wishfulness of their brains, were being remembered with a reality as vivid, if not more so, as truth itself. False memories flowered within them. The days of brilliance when their lances shone, when they leapt into the gold saddle quick as thought and galloped through the white rays of the dawn; when they ran like stags, swam like fish and, laughing like thunder, woke the swaddled towers. Ah Lord, the callow days; the cocky days, the days of sinew and the madcap evenings – the darkness at their elbows, co-conspirator, muffling their firetipped follies.

That but few of the Professors had ever tasted the heady mead of youth in no way dulled the contours of their self-portraits which they were now painting of themselves. And it had all happened so rapidly, this resurgence; this hark-back. It was as though some bell had been struck, some mountain-bell to which their guts responded. They had for so long a time made their evening way to their sacred, musty, airless quadrangle, that to be, for a whole