Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

Irma turned.

'I must be honest with you, mustn't I, Mr Bellgrove?' she said. 'If I said I could smell it, when I couldn't. I would be false to you, and false to myself. Let us not start 'that' way. No, Mr Bellgrove, I cannot smell it. I have a bit of a cold.'

Bellgrove had the sense of having to start life all over again.

'You women are delicate creatures,' he said after a long pause. 'You must take care of yourselves.'

'Why are you talking in the plural, Mr Bellgrove?'

'My dear madam,' he replied slowly, and then, after a pause, 'my... dear... madam,' he said again. As he heard his voice repeat the three words for the second time, it struck him that to leave them as they were - inconsequent, rudderless, without preface or parenthesis, was by far the best thing he could do. He lapsed into silence and the silence was thrilling - the silence which to break with an answer to her question would be to make a commonplace out of what was magic.

He would not answer her. He would play with her with his venerable brain. She must realize from the first that she could not always expect replies to her questions - that his thoughts might be elsewhere, in regions where it would be impossible for her to follow him - or that her questions were (for all his love for her and her for him) not worth answering.

The night poured in upon them from every side - a million million cubic miles of it. O, the glory of standing with one's love, naked, as it were, on a spinning marble, while the spheres ran flaming through the universe!

Involuntarily they moved together into the arbour and sat down on a bench which they found in the darkness. This darkness was intensely rich and velvety. It was as though they were in a cavern, save that the depths were dramatized by a number of small and brilliant pools of moonlight. Pranked for the most part to the rear of the arbour these livid pools were at first a little disturbing, for portions of themselves were lit up with blatant emphasis. This arbitrary illumination had to be accepted, however, for Bellgrove, raising his eyes to where the vents in the roof let through the moonlight, could think of no way by which he could seal them.

From Irma's point of view the dappled condition of the cavernous arbour was both calming and irritating at the same time.

Calming, in that to enter a cave of clotted midnight, with not so much as a flicker of light to gauge her distance from her partner would have been terrifying even with her knowledge of, and confidence in, so reliable and courteous a gentleman as her escort. This dappled arbour was not so fell a place. The pranked lights, more livid, it is true, than gay, removed, nevertheless, that sense of terror only known to fugitives or those benighted in a shire of ghouls.

Strong as was her feeling of gratification that the dark was broken, yet a sense of irritation as strong as her relief fought in her flat bosom for sovereignty. This irritation, hardly understandable to anyone who has neither Irma's figure, nor a vivid picture of the arbour in mind, was caused by the maddening way in which the lozenges of radiance fell upon her body.

She had taken out a small mirror in the darkness, more from nervousness than anything else and in holding it up, saw nothing in the dark air before her but a long sharp segment of light. The mirror itself was quite invisible, as was the hand and arm that held it, but the detached and luminous reflection of her nose hovered before her in the darkness. At first she did not know what it was. She moved her head a little and saw in front of her one of her small weak eyes glittering like quicksilver, a startling thing to observe under any conditions, but infinitely more so when the organ is one's own.

The rest of her was indistinguishable midnight save for a pair of large and spectral feet. She shuffled them, but this blotch of moonlight was the largest in the arbour and to evade it involved a muscular strain quite insufferable.

Bellgrove's entire head was luminous. He was, more than ever before, a major prophet. His white hair positively blossomed.

Irma, knowing that this wonderful and searching light which was transfiguring the head was something that must not be missed - something in fact that she should pore upon - made a great effort to forget herself as a true lover should - but something in her rebelled against so exclusive a concentration upon her admirer, for she knew that it was 'she' who should be stared at; she who should be poured upon.

Had she spent the best part of a day in titivating herself in order that she might sit plunged in darkness, with nothing but her feet and her nose revealed?

It was insufferable. The visual relationship was wrong; quite, quite wrong.

Bellgrove had suffered a shock when for a moment he had seen ahead of him, in quick succession, a moonlit nose and then a moonlit eye. They were obviously Irma's. There was no other nose in all Gormenghast so knifelike - and no eye so weak and worried - except its colleague. To have seen these features ahead of him when the lady to whom they belonged sat shrouded yet most palpable upon his right hand, unnerved the old man, and it was some while after he had caught sight of the mirror glinting on its return to Irma's reticule that he realized what had happened.

The darkness was as deep and black as water.

'Mr Bellgrove,' said Irma, 'can you hear me, Mr Bellgrove?'

'Perfectly, my dear lady. Your voice is high and clear.'

'I would have you sit upon my right, Mr Headmaster - I would have you exchange places with me.'

'Whatever you would have I am here to have it given,' said Bellgrove. For a moment he winced as the grammatical chaos of his reply wounded what was left of the scholar in him.

'Shall we rise together, Mr Headmaster?'

'Dear lady', he replied, 'let that be so.'

'I can hardly see you, Mr Headmaster.'

'Nevertheless, dear lady, I am at your side. Would my arm assist you at our interchange? It is an arm that, in earlier days...'

'I am quite able to get to my own feet. Mr Bellgrove - 'quite' able, thank you.'

Bellgrove rose, but in rising his gown was caught in some rustic contortion of the garden seat, and he found himself squatting in mid-air. 'Hell!' he muttered savagely, and jerking at his gown, tore it badly. A nasty whiff of temper ran through him. His face felt hot and prickly.

'What did you say?' said Irma. 'I said, what did you say?'

For a moment Bellgrove, in the confusion of his irritation, had unknowingly projected himself back into the Masters' Common room, or into a classroom, or into the life he had led for scores of years...

His old lips curled back from his neglected teeth. 'Silence!' he said. 'Am your headmaster for nothing!'

Directly he had spoken, and had taken in what he had said, his neck and forehead burned.

Irma, transfixed with excitement, could make no move. Had Bellgrove possessed any kind of telepathic instinct he must have known that he had beside him a fruit which, at a touch, might have fallen into his hands, so ripe it was. He had no knowledge of this, but luckily for him, his embarrassment precluded any power on his part to utter a word. And the silence was on his side.

It was Irma who was the first to speak.

'You have mastered me,' she said. Her words, simple and sincere, were more proud than humble. They were proud with surrender.

Bellgrove's brain was not quick - but it was by no means moribund. His mood was now trembling at the opposite pole of his temperament.

This by no means helped to clarify his brain. But he sensed the need for extreme caution. He sensed that his position though delicate was lofty. To find that his act of rudeness in demanding silence from his hostess had raised him rather than lowered him in her eyes, appealed to something in him quite shameless - a kind of glee. Yet this glee, though shameless, was yet innocent. It was the glee of the child who had not been found out.