The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

way a woman can be courted so splendidly, so nobly by her lover, only to find that her own brother is about as interested as a fly upon the wall. Alfred, I said a fly upon a wall!’

‘Flesh of my flesh,’ said the Doctor after a pause (he had been lost in rumination) ‘what is it that you want to know?’

‘Know,’ answered Irma, with superb scorn. ‘Why should I want to know anything?’

Her fingers smoothed the back of her iron-grey hair, and then of a sudden, pounced upon the bun at the nape of her neck where they fiddled with an uncanny dexterity. It might have been supposed that her long nervous fingers had an eye apiece so effortlessly did they flicker to and fro across the contours of the hirsute knob.

‘I was not asking you a question, Alfred. I sometimes have thoughts of my own. I sometimes make statements. I know you think very little of my intellect. But not everyone is like you – I can assure you. You can have no idea, Alfred, of what is being done to me. I am being drawn out. I am finding treasures in myself. I am like a rich mine, Alfred. I know it, I know it. And I have brains I haven’t even used yet.’

‘Conversation with you, Irma’, said her brother, ‘is peculiarly difficult. You leave no loops, dear one, at the end of your sentences, nothing to help your loving brother, nothing for his ever willing, ever eager, ever shining hook. I always have to start afresh, sweet trout. I have to work my passage. But I will try again. Now, you were saying …?’

‘O Alfred. Just for one moment, do something to please me. Talk normally. I am so tired of your way of saying things with all its figures of eight.’

‘Figures of speech! speech! speech!’ cried the Doctor, rising to his feet and wringing his hands, ‘why do you always say figure of eight? O bless my soul, what is the matter with my nerves? Yes, of course I’ll do something to please you. What shall it be?’

But Irma was in tears, her head buried in a soft grey cushion. At last she raised it and taking off her dark glasses, ‘It’s too much,’ she sobbed. ‘When even one’s brother snaps one up. I did trust you!’ she shouted, ‘and now you’re letting me down too. I only wanted your advice.’

‘Who has let you down?’ said the Doctor sharply. ‘Not the Headmaster …?’

Irma dabbed her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief the size of a playing card.

‘It’s because I told him his neck was dirty, the dear, sweet lord …’

‘Lord!’ cried Prunesquallor, ‘you don’t call him that, do you?’

‘Of course not, Alfred … only to myself … after all he is my lord, isn’t he?’

‘If you say so,’ said her brother, passing his hand across his brow. ‘I suppose he could be anything.’

‘O he is. He is. He’s anything – or rather, Alfred, he’s everything.’

‘But you have shamed him, and he feels wounded – proud and wounded, is that it, Irma, my dear?’

‘Yes, O yes. It is that exactly. But what can I do? What can I do?’

The doctor placed the tips of his fingers together.

‘You are experiencing already, my dear Irma,’ he said, ‘the stuff of marriage. And so is he. Be patient, sweet flower. Learn all you can. Use what tact God gave you, and remember your mistakes and what led up to them. Say nothing about his neck. You can only make things worse. His resentment will fade. His wound will heal in time. If you love him, then simply love him and never fuss about what’s dead and gone. After all you love him in spite of all your faults, not his. Other people’s faults can be fascinating. One’s own are dreary. Be quiet for a bit. Don’t talk too much and can’t you walk a little less like a buoy in a swell?’

Irma got up from her chair and moved to the door.

‘Thank you, Alfred,’ she said and disappeared.

Doctor Prunesquallor sank back on the couch by the window, and with an ease, quite astonishing, dismissed his sister’s problem from his mind and was once more in the cogitative reverie from which she had interrupted him.

He had been thinking of Steerpike’s accession to the key position that he now occupied. He had also been reflecting upon the way he had behaved as a patient. His fortitude had been matchless and his will to live quite savage. But for the most part, the Doctor was turning over in his mind something that was quite different. It was a phrase, which, at the height of Steerpike’s delirium, had broken loose from the chaos of his ravings – ‘And the Twins will make it five,’ the young man had shouted – ‘and the Twins will make it five.’

FORTY- NINE

I

One dark winter morning, Titus and his sister sat together on the wide window-seat of one of Fuchsia’s three rooms that overlooked the South Spinneys. Soon after Nannie Slagg had died Fuchsia had moved, not without much arguing and a sense of dire uprooting, to a more handsome district – and to a set of rooms which, in comparison with her old untidy bedroom of many memories, were full of light and space.

Outside the window the last of the snow lay in patches across the countryside. Fuchsia, with her chin on her hands and her elbows on the window-sill, was watching the swaying motion of the thin stream of steel-grey water as it fell a hundred feet from the gutter of a nearby building – for a small, restless wind was blowing erratically and sometimes the stream of melted snow as it fell from the high gutter would descend in a straight and motionless line to a tank in the quadrangle below, and sometimes it would swing to the north and stay outstretched when a gust blew angrily, and sometimes the cascade would fan out in a spray of innumerable leaden drops and fall like rain. And then the wind would drop again and the steady tubular overflow would fall once more vertically, like a stretched cable, and the water would spurt and thud within the tank.

Titus, who had been turning over the pages of a book, got to his feet.

‘I’m glad there’s no school today, Few,’ he said – it was a name he had started giving her – ‘it would have been Perch-Prism with his foul chemistry and Cutflower this afternoon.’