Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

'I heard you, my dear.'

'And this is no time for shallow talk. I have come to you as a wife should come to her husband. For guidance. Yes, for guidance. You are old, I know, but...'

'What the hell has my age got to do with it?' snarled Bellgrove, lifting his magnificent head from a cushion. The milk-white locks were clustered on his shoulders. 'You were never one to ask for advice. You mean you're terrified.'

'That is so,' said Irma. She said it so simply and so quietly that she did not recognize her own voice. She had spoken involuntarily. Bellgrove turned his head sharply in her direction. He could hardly believe that it was she who had spoken. He rose from his chair and crossed the ugly carpet to where she sat bolt upright. He squatted on his heels before her. A sense of pity stirred in him. He took her long hands in his.

At first she tried to withdraw them but he held them tightly. She had tried to say 'don't be ridiculous' but no words came.

'Irma,' he said at last. 'Let us try again. We have both changed - but that is perhaps as it should be. You have shown me sides of your nature which I never knew existed. Never. How could I ever have guessed, my dear, that you should for instance have thought that half my staff were in love with you - or that you could become so irritated with my innocent habit of falling asleep? We have our different spirits, our different needs, our different lives. We are fused, Irma, it is true; we are integrated - but not all that much. Relax your back, my dear. Relax your backbone. It makes it easier for me to talk. I've asked you so often - and in all humility - knowing as I do that your spine is your own.'

'My dearest husband,' said Irma. 'You are talking overmuch. If you could leave a sentence alone, it would be so much stronger.' She bowed her head to him. 'But I will tell you something,' she continued, 'it makes me happy to see you there, crouched at my feet. It makes me feel young again - or it 'would' do, it would do, if they could only lay their hands on him and end the suspense. It is too much - 'too' much... night after night... night after night... Oh can't you see how it racks a woman? Can't you? Can't you?'

'My brave one,' said Bellgrove. 'My lady love; pull yourself together. Sinister as the business is, there is no need for you to take the whole thing personally. You are nothing to him, Irma, as I have said before. You are not his foe, my dear, 'are' you? Nor yet his accomplice? Or 'are' you?'

'Don't be ridiculous.'

'Quite so. I am being ridiculous. Your husband, the headmaster of Gormenghast, is being ridiculous. And why? Because I have caught the germ. I have caught it from my wife.'

'But in the darkness... in the darkness... I seem to 'see' him.'

'Quite so,' said Bellgrove. 'But if you did see him you would feel worse still. Except of course that we could claim a reward, you know!'

Bellgrove found that his legs were aching so he rose to his feet.

'My advice, Irma, is to put a little more trust in your husband. He may not be perfect. There may be husbands with finer qualities. With nobler profiles for instance, eh? Or with hair like almond blossom. It is not for me to say. And of course there may be husbands who have even become headmasters, or whose intellect is wider, or whose youth was more dazzling in its gallantry. It is not for me to say. But such as I am I have become yours. And such as you are you have become mine. And such as we both are we have become one another's.

And what does this lead to? It leads to this. That if all this is so, and yet you quake at every sound of the night, then I take it that your trust in me has waned since those early days when I had you at my feet. O you have schemed... schemed...!'

'How 'dare' you!' cried Irma. 'How dare you!'

Bellgrove had forgotten himself. He had forgotten what his argument was intended to prove. A little whiff of temper springing from some unformulated thought had caught him unaware. He tried to recover.

''Schemed',' he continued, 'for my happiness. And you have very largely succeeded. I like you sitting there, if you weren't so upright. Can't you melt, my dear one... just a little. One grows so very tired of straight lines. As for Steerpike, take my advice; make use of 'me' when you are frightened. Run to 'me'. Fly to 'me'. Press yourself against my chest; run your fingers through my locks. Be comforted. If he ever 'did' appear before me, you know very well how I would deal with him.'

Irma looked at her venerable husband. 'I certainly do 'not',' she said. 'How would you?'

Bellgrove, who had even less idea than Irma, stroked his long chin, and then a sickly smile appeared on his lips.

'What I would do,' he said, 'is something that no gentleman could possibly divulge. Faith: that is what you need. Faith in me, my dear.'

'There would be nothing you could do,' said Irma, ignoring her husband's suggestion that she should have faith in him. 'Nothing at all. You are too old.'

Bellgrove, who had been about to resume his seat, remained standing. His back was to his wife. A dull pain began to grow beneath his ribs. A sense of the black injustice of bodily decay came over him, but a rebellious voice crying in his heart ''I am young, I am young',' while the carnal witness of his three score years and ten sank suddenly at the knees.

In a moment Irma was at his side. 'Oh my dear one! What is it? What 'is' it?' She lifted his head and put a cushion beneath it. Bellgrove was fully conscious. The shock of finding himself suddenly on the floor had upset him for a moment or two and had taken his breath away, but that was all.

'My legs went,' he said, looking up at the earnest face above him with its wonderfully sharp nose. 'But I am all right again.'

Directly he had made this remark he was sorry for it, for he could have done with an hour of nursing.

'Perhaps you had better get up in that case, my dear,' said Irma. 'The floor is no place for a headmaster.'

'Ah, but I feel very...'

'Now, now!' interrupted Irma. 'Let me have no nonsense. I shall go and see whether the doors have been locked. When I return I expect to find you in your chair again.' She left the room.

After kicking his heels irritably on the carpet, the headmaster struggled to his feet, and when he was in his chair again he put out his tongue at the door through which Irma had passed, but immediately he had done so he blushed for shame and blew a kiss in the same direction from the wasted palm of his hand.

SIXTY-ONE

There was a part of the outer wall which was so deeply hidden with canopies of creeper that for over a hundred years no eyes had seen the stones of the wall itself but the eyes of insects, mice and birds. These undulating acres of hanging foliage over-looked a certain lane which lay so close to the outer wall of Gormenghast that had the mice or the hidden birds been capable of tossing a twig out of the leafy darkness it would have fallen into this lane that lay below.

It was a narrow way, in deep shadow for most of the day. Only in the late evening, as the sun sank over Gormenghast forest, a quiverful of honey-coloured beams would slant along the alley and there would be pools of amber where all day long the chill, inhospitable shadows had brooded.

And when these amber pools appeared the curs of the district would congregate out of nowhere and would squat in the golden beams and lick their sores.

But it was not in order to watch those half-wild dogs or to marvel at the sunbeams that the Thing had taken to working her way through the dense growth of the wall-draped creepers, threading the vertical foliage with the noiseless ease of a snake until twenty feet above the ground she moved outward from the wall to such a position that she could look down upon certain sections of the lane. It was for a reason more covetous. It was because the solitary carver who shared this evening hour with the dogs and the sunbeams never failed to be at his accustomed place at sundown. It was then that he worked upon the block of jarl-wood. It was then that the image grew under his chisel. It was then that the Thing watched, with her eyes wide as a child's, the evolution of the wooden raven. And it was for this carving that she pined angrily, impatiently. It was so that she might snatch it from its maker, and then away, in a breath, to the hills, that she crouched there evening after evening, watching greedily from the loose ivy, for the completion of so pretty a toy.