Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

       'Dear one,' he said, plunging into the rank and feverish margin of love's forest. ''Dear' one!'

       'Mr Bellgrove - O, Mr Bellgrove,' came the hardly audible reply.

       'It is the headmaster of Gormenghast, your suitor, who is speaking to you, my dear. It is a man, mature and tender - yet a disciplinarian, feared by the wicked, who is sitting beside you in the darkness. I would have you concentrate upon this. When I say to you that I shall call you Irma, I am not asking for permission from my love-light - I am telling her what I shall do.'

       'Say it, my male!' cried Irma, forgetting herself. Her strident voice, quite out of key with the secret and muted atmosphere of an arbour'd wooing, splintered the darkness.

       Bellgrove shuddered. Her voice had been a shock to him. At a more appropriate moment he would teach her not to do things of that kind.

       As he settled again against the rustic back of the seat he found that their shoulders were touching.

       'I will say it. Indeed I will say it, my dear. Not as a crude statement with no beginning or ending. Not as a mere reiteration of the most lovely, the most provocative name in Gormenghast, but threaded into my sentences, an integral part of our conversation, Irma, for see, already it has left my tongue.'

       'I have no power, Mr Bellgrove, to remove my shoulder from yours.'

       'And I have no inclination, my dove.' He lifted his big hand and tapped her on the shoulder she had referred to.

       They had been so long in darkness that he had forgotten that she was in evening dress. In touching her naked shoulder he received a sensation that set his heart careering. For a moment he was deeply afraid. What was this creature at his side? and he cried out to some unknown God for delivery from the Unknown, the Serpentine, from all that was shameless, from flesh and the devil.

       The tremendous gulf between the sexes yawned - and an abyss, terrifying and thrilling, sheer and black as the arbour in which they sat; a darkness wide, dangerous, imponderable and littered with the wrecks of broken bridges.

       But his hand stayed where it was. The muscle of her shoulder was tense as a bowstring, but the skin was like satin. And then his terror fled. Something masterful and even dashing began to possess him.

       'Irma,' he whispered huskily. 'Is 'this' a desecration. Are we blotting the whitest of all love's copybooks? It is for you to say. For myself I am walking among rainbows - for myself I...' But he had to stop speaking for he wished, more than anything else to lie on his back and to kick his old legs about and to crow like a barn-cook. As he could not do this he had no option but to put his tongue out in the darkness, to squint with his eyes, to make extravagant grimaces of every kind. Excruciating shivers swarmed his spine.

       And Irma could not reply. She was weeping with joy. Her only answer was to place her hand upon the headmaster's. They drew together - involuntarily. For a while there was that kind of silence all lovers know. The silence that it is sin to break until of its own volition, the moment comes, and the arms relax and the cramped limbs can stretch themselves again, and it is no longer an insensitive thing to inquire what the time might be or to speak of other matters that have no place in Paradise.

       At last Irma broke the hush.

       'How happy I am,' she said very quietly. 'How very happy, Mister Bellgrove.'

       'Ah my dear... ah,' said the Headmaster very slowly, very soothingly 'that is as it should be... that is as it should be.'

       'My wildest, my very 'wildest' dreams have become real, have become something I can touch' (she pressed his hand). 'My little fancies, my little visions - they are no longer so, dear master, they are substance, they are you... they are You.'

       Bellgrove was not sure that he liked being one of Irma's 'little fancies, little visions' but his sense of the inappropriate was swamped in his excitement.

       'Irma!' He drew her to him. There was less 'give' in her body than in a cakestand. But he could hear her quick excited breathing.

       'You are not the only one whose dreams have become a reality, my dear. We are holding one another's dreams in our very arms.'

       'Do you mean it, Mr Bellgrove?'

       'Surely, ah, surely,' he said.

       Dark as it was Irma could picture him at her side, could see him in detail. She had an excellent memory. She was enjoying what she saw. Her mind's eye had suddenly become a most powerful organ. It was, in point of fact, stronger, clearer and healthier than those real eyes of hers which gave her so much trouble.

       And so, as she spoke to him she had no sense of communing with an invisible presence. The darkness was forgotten.

       'Mr Bellgrove?'

       'My dear lady?'

       'Somehow, I knew...'

       'So did I... so did I.'

       'It is more than I dare dwell upon - this strange and beautiful fact - that words can be so unnecessary - that when I start a sentence, there is no 'need' to finish it - and all this, so very suddenly. I said, so 'very' suddenly.'

       'What would be sudden to the young is leisurely for us. What would be foolhardy in them is child's-play itself, for you, my dear, and for me. We are mature, my dear. We are ripe. The golden glaze, that patina of time, these are upon us. Hence we are sure and have no callow qualms. Let us admit the length of our teeth, lady. Time, it is true, had flattened our feet, ah yes, but with what purpose? To steady us, to give us balance, to take us safely along the mountain tracks. God bless me... ah. God bless me. Do you think that I could have wooed and won you as a youth? Not in a hundred years! And why... ah... and why? Inexperience. That is the answer. But now, in half an hour or less, I have stormed you; stormed you. But am I breathless? No. I have brought my guns to bear upon you, and yet my dear, have scores of roundshot left... ah yes, yes, Irma my ripe one... and you can see it all?... you can see it all?... dammit, we have equipoise and that is what it is.'

       Irma's mental sight was frighteningly clear. His voice had sharpened the edges of his image.

       'But I'm not very old, Mr Bellgrove, am I,' said Irma, after a pause. To be sure she felt as young as a fledgeling.

       'What is age? What is time!' said Bellgrove - and then answering himself in a darker voice. 'They're 'hell'!' he said. 'I hate 'em.'

       'No, no. I won't have it,' said Irma. 'I won't, Mr Bellgrove. Age and time are what you make them. Let us not speak of them again.'

       Bellgrove sat forward on his old buttocks. 'Lady!' he said suddenly, 'I have thought of something that I think you will agree is more than comic.'

       'Have you, Mr Bellgrove?'

'Pertaining to what you said about Age and Time. Are you listening, my dear?'

       'Yes, Mr Bellgrove... eagerly... eagerly!'

       'What I think would be rather droll would be to say, in a gathering, when the moment became opportune - perhaps during some conversation about clocks - one could work round to it - to say, quite airily... "Time is what you make it."'

       He turned his head to her in the darkness. He waited.

       There was no response from Irma. She was thinking feverishly. She began to panic. Her face was prickling with anxiety. She could make no sound. Then she had an idea. She pressed herself against him a little more closely.

       'How delicious!' she said at last, but her voice was very strained.

       The silence that followed was no more than a few seconds, but to Irma it was as long as that ghastly hush that awaits all sinners when, at the judgement seat, they wait the Verdict. Her body trembled, for there was so much at stake. Had she said something so stupid, that no headmaster, worthy of his office, could ever consider accepting her? Had she unwittingly lifted some hatchway of her brain and revealed to this brilliant man how cold, black, humourless and sterile was the region that lay within?

       No. Ah no! For his voice, rolling from the gloom, had, if possible, even more tenderness in it than she would have dared to hope for in a man.

       'You are cold, my love. You are chilly. The night is not for delicate skins. By hell, it isn't. And I? And what of me? Your suitor? Is he cold also, my dear? Your old gallant? He is. He is indeed. And what is more he is becoming sick of darkness. Darkness that shrouds. That clogs the living lineaments of beauty. That swathes you, Irma. By hell it's maddening and pointless stuff...'

       Bellgrove began to rise... 'it's damnable, I tell you, my own, this arbour's damnable.'

       He felt the pressure of fingers on his forearm.

       'Ah no... no I will not have you swear. I will not have strong language in our arbour our sacred arbour.'

       For a moment Bellgrove was tempted to play the gay dog. His moods flitted across the basic excitement of the wooing. It was so delicious to be chided by a woman. He wondered whether to shock her - to shock her out of the surplus of his love, would be worth the candle. To taste again the sweetness of being reprimanded, the never-before-experienced gushes of sham remorse - would this be worth the lowering of his moral status. No! He would stick to his pinnacle.

       'This arbour,' he said, 'is forever ours. It is the darkness it holds captive; this pitchy stuff that hides your face from me - it is this darkness that I called damnable - and damnable it is. It is your face, Irma, your proud face that I am thirsting for. Can you not understand? By the great moonlight! my love; by the tremendous moonlight! Is it not natural that a man should wish to brood upon his darling's brow?'

       The word 'darling' affected Irma as might a bullet wound. She clasped her hands at her breast and pressing them inwards the tepid water in her false bosom gurgled in the darkness.

       For a moment Bellgrove, thinking she was laughing at what he had said, stiffened at her side. But the terrible blush of humiliation that was about to climb his neck was quenched by Irma's voice. The gurgle must have been a sign of love, of some strange and aqueous love that was beyond his sounding, for 'O master,' she said, 'take me to where the moon can show you me.'

       'Show-you-me?' for a short while Bellgrove was quite unable to decipher what sounded to him like a foreign language. But he did not stand still, as lesser men would have done while pondering, but answering the first part of her command he escorted her from the arbour. Instantaneously, they were floodlit - and at the same instant Irma's syntax clarified in the headmaster's mind.

       They moved together, like spectres, like mobile carvings casting their long inky shadows across the little paths, down the slopes of rockeries, up the sides of trellises.

       At last they stopped for a little while where a stone cherub squatted upon the rim of a granite bird-bath. To their left they could see the lighted windows of the long reception room. But they could not see that in the midst of a rapt audience the Doctor was raising his silver hammer as though to put all to the test. They could not know that by a supernatural effort of the will, and the martialling of all his deductive faculties, and the freeing of an irrational flair, the Doctor had come to the kind of decision more usually associated with composers than with scientists - and was now on the brink of success or failure.

       The 'body' had, to aid the physician in his exhaustive search for the cause of the paralysis, been stripped of all clothing save the mortar-board.

       What happened next was something which, however much the stories varied afterwards - for it seemed that every professor present was able to note some minor detail hidden from the rest - was yet consistent in the main. The speed at which it happened was phenomenal. and it must be assumed that the microscopic elaborations of the incident which were to be the main subject of conversation for so long a while afterwards, were no more or less than inventions which were supposed to redound to the advantage of the teller, in some way or other - possibly through the reflected glory which they all felt at having been there at all. However this may be, what was agreed upon by all was that the Doctor, his shirt sleeves rolled well back, rose suddenly on his toes, and lifting his silver hammer into the air, where it flashed with candle-light, let it fall, as it were with a kind of controlled, yet effortless downstroke, upon the nether regions of the spinal column. As the hammer struck, the Doctor leapt back and stood with his arms spread out to his sides, his fingers rigid as he saw before him the instantaneous convulsion of the patient. This gentleman writhing like an expiring eel leapt suddenly high into the air, and on landing upon his feet, was seen to streak across the room and out of the bay windows and over the moonlit lawn at a speed that challenged the credulity of all witnesses.

       And those who, standing grouped about the Doctor, had seen the transformation and the remarkable athleticism that followed so swiftly upon it, were not the only ones to be startled by the spectacle.

       In the garden, among the livid blotches and the cold wells of shadow a voice was saying...

       'It is not meet, Irma my dearest, that on this night, this first night, we should tire our hearts... no, no, it is not meet, sweet bride.'

       ''Bride'?' cried Irma, flashing her teeth and tossing her head. 'O Master, not yet... surely!'

       Bellgrove frowned like God considering the state of the world on the Third Day. A knowing smile played across his old mouth but it appeared to have lost its way among the winkles.

       'Quite so, my delicious helm. Once more you keep me on my course, and for that I revere you, Irma... not 'bride', it is true, but...'

       The old man had jerked like a recoiling firearm, and Irma with him, for she was in his gown-swathed arms. Turning her startled eyes from his she followed his gaze and on the instant clung to him in a desperate embrace, for all at once they saw before them, naked in the dazzling rays of the moon, a flying figure which for, all the shortness of the legs, was covering the ground with the speed of a hare. The tassel of the inky mortarboard, sole claim to decency, streamed away behind like a donkey's tail.

       No sooner had Irma and the headmaster caught sight of the apparition, than it had reached the high orchard wall of the garden. How it ever climbed the wall was never discovered. It simply went up it, its shadow swarming alongside, and the last that was ever seen of Mr Throd, the one time member of Mr Bellgrove's staff, was a lunar flash of buttocks where the high wall propped the sky.

THIRTY-SEVEN

There were at least three hours to be burned. It was unusual for Steerpike to have to think in such terms. There was always something afoot. There were always, in the wide and sinister pattern of his scheduled future, those irregular pieces to find and to fit into the great jig-saw puzzle of his predatory life, and of Gormenghast, on whose body he fed.