The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy

As he lifted himself up on one elbow, his memory returning in small waves, he could not know that a figure filled the doorway of his room – not so much in bulk as in the intensity of her presence – filled it as a tigress fills the opening of her cave.

And like a tigress she was striped: yellow and black: and because of the dark shadows behind her, only the yellow bands were visible, so that she appeared to be cut in pieces by the horizontal sweeps of a sword. And so she was like some demonstration of magic – a ‘severed woman’ – quite extraordinary and wonderful to see. But there was no one to see her, for Titus had his back to her.

And Titus could not see that her hat, plumed and piratical, sprouted as naturally from her head as the green fronds from the masthead of a date-palm.

She raised her hand to her breast. Not nervously; but with a kind of tense and tender purpose.

Propped upon his elbow with his back to her, his aloneness touched her sharply. It was wrong that he should be so single; so contained, so little merged into her own existence.

He was an island surrounded by deep water. There was no isthmus leading to her bounty; no causeway to her continent of love.

There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.

‘O Titus! Titus, my darling!’ she cried. ‘What are you thinking of?’

He did not turn his head immediately, although at the first sound of her voice he was instantaneously aware of his surroundings. He knew that he was being watched – that Juno was very close indeed.

When at last he turned, she took a step towards the bed and she smiled with genuine pleasure to see his face. It was not a particularly striking face. With the best will in the world it could not be said that the brow or the chin or the nose or the cheekbones were chiselled. Rather, it seemed, the features of his head had, like the blurred irregularities of a boulder, been blunted by the wash of many tides. Youth and time were indissolubly fused.

She smiled to see the disarray of his brown hair and the lift of his eyebrows and the half-smile on his lips that seemed to have no more pigment in them than the warm sandy colour of his skin.

Only his eyes denied to his head the absolute simplicity of a monochrome. They were the colour of smoke.

‘What a time of day to sleep!’ said Juno, seating herself on the edge of the bed.

She took a mirror from her bag and bared her teeth for a moment as she scrutinized the line of her top lip, as though it were not hers but something which she might or might not purchase. It was perfectly drawn – a single sweep of carmine.

She put her mirror away and stretched her strong arms. The yellow stripes of her costume gleamed in a midday dusk.

‘What a time to sleep!’ she repeated. ‘Were you so anxious to escape, my chicken-child? So determined to evade me that you sneak upstairs and waste a summer afternoon? But you know you are free in my house to do exactly what you please, don’t you? To live as you please, how you please, where you please, you know this don’t you, my spoiled one?’

‘Yes,’ said Titus, ‘I remember you saying so.’

‘And you will, won’t you?’

‘O yes, I will,’ said Titus, ‘I will.’

‘Darling, you look so adorable.’

Titus took a deep breath. How sumptuous, how monumental and enormous she was as she sat there close to him, her wonderful hat almost touching, so it seemed, the ceiling. Her scent hung in the air between them. Her soft, yet strong white hand lay on his knee – but something was wrong – or lost; because his thoughts were of how his responses to her magnetism grew vaguer and something had changed or was changing with every passing day and he could only think of how he longed to be alone again in this great tree-filled city of the river – alone to wander listless through the sunbeams.

FORTY- FIVE

‘You are a strange young man,’ said Juno. ‘I can’t quite make you out. Sometimes I wonder why I take so much trouble over you, dear. But then of course I know, a moment later, that I have no choice. Now have I? You touch me so, my cruel one. You know it, don’t you?’

‘You say I do,’ said Titus ‘– though why God only knows.’

‘Fishing?’ said Juno. ‘Fishing again? Shall I tell you what I mean?’

‘Not now,’ said Titus, ‘please.’

‘Am I boring you? Just tell me if I am. Always tell me. And if you are angry with me, don’t hide it. Just shout at me. I will understand. I want you to be yourself – only yourself. That’s how you flower best. O my mad one! My bad one!’

The plume of her hat swayed in the golden darkness. Her proud black eyes shone wetly.

‘You have done so much for me,’ said Titus. ‘Don’t think I am callous. But perhaps I must go. You give me too much. It makes me ill.’

There was a sudden silence as though the house had stopped breathing.

‘Where could you go? You do not belong outside. You are my own, my discovery, my … my … can’t you understand, I love you darling. I know I’m twice your – O Titus, I adore you. You are my mystery.’

Outside her window the sun shone fiercely on the honey-coloured stone of the tall house. The wall fell featurelessly down to a swift river.

On the other side of the house was the great quadrangle of prawn-coloured bricks and the hideous moss- covered statues of naked athletes and broken horses.

‘There is nothing I can say,’ said Titus.