Peake, Mervyn - 02 Gormenghast

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.'

'What's the holiday 'for'?' said Fuchsia with her eyes still on the water which was now swaying to and fro across the tank.

'I'm not sure,' said Titus. 'Something to do with Mother, I think. Birthday or something.'

'Oh,' said Fuchsia and then after a pause, 'it's funny how one has to be told everything. I don't remember her having birthdays before. It's all so inhuman.'

'I don't know what you mean,' said Titus.

'No,' said Fuchsia. 'You wouldn't, I suppose. It's not your fault and you're lucky in a way. But I've read quite a lot and I know that most children see a good deal of their parents - more than we do anyway.'

'Well, I don't remember father at all,' said Titus.

'I do,' said Fuchsia. 'But he was difficult too. I hardly ever spoke to him. I think he wanted me to be a boy.'

'Did he?'

'Yes.'

'Oh... I wonder why.'

'To be the next Earl of course.'

'Oh... but 'I' am... so it's all right, I suppose.'

'But he didn't know you were going to be born, when I was a child, did he? He couldn't have. I was about fourteen when you were born.'

'Were you really...'

'Of course I was. And for all that time he wished I was you, I suppose.'

'That's funny, isn't it?' said Titus.

'It wasn't funny at all - and it isn't funny now - is it? Not that it's your fault...'

At that moment there was a knock at the door and a messenger entered. 'What do you want?' said Fuchsia.

'I have a message, my lady.'

'What is it?'

'Her ladyship, the Countess, your mother, wishes Lord Titus to accompany me back to her room. She is going to take him for a walk.'

Titus and Fuchsia stared at the messenger and then at one another. Several times they opened their mouths to speak but closed them again. Then Fuchsia turned her eyes back to the melting snow - and Titus walked out through the half open door, the messenger following him closely.

II

The Countess was waiting for them on the landing. She gestured the messenger to be gone with a single, lazy movement to her head.

She gazed at Titus with a curious lack of expression. It was as though what she saw interested her, but in the way that a stone would interest a geologist, or a plant, a botanist. Her expression was neither kindly nor unkindly. It was simply absent. She appeared to be unconscious of having a face at all. Her features made no effort to communicate anything.

'I am taking them for a walk,' she said in her heavy, abstracted, millstone voice.

'Yes, mother,' said Titus. He supposed she was talking of her cats.

A shadow settled for a moment on her broad brow. The word mother had perplexed her. But the boy was quite right, of course.

Her massive bulk had always impressed Titus. The hanging draperies and scollop'd shadows, the swathes of musty darkness - all this he found most awesome.

He was fascinated by her but he had no point of contact. When she spoke it was in order to make a statement. She had no conversation.

She turned her head and, pursing her lips, she whistled with a peculiar ululation. Titus gazed up at the sartorial mass above him. Why had she wanted him to accompany her? he wondered. Did she want him to tell her anything? Had she anything to tell 'him'? Was it just a whim?

But she had started to descend the stairs and Titus followed her.

From a hundred dim recesses, from favourite ledges, from shelves and draught-proof corners, from among the tattered entrails of old sofas, from the scarred plush of chairs, from under clock-stands, from immemorial sun-traps, and from nests of claw-torn paper - from the inside of lost hats, from among rafters, from rusty casques, and from drawers half-open, the cats poured forth, converged, foamed, and with a rapid pattering of their milk-white feet filled up the corridors, and a few moments later had reached the landing and were on their way, in the wake of their great mistress, down the stairway they obscured.

When they were in the open and had passed through an archway in the outer wall and were able to see Gormenghast Mountain dear before them, with dark grey snow on its cruel heights, the Countess waved her ponderous arm, as though she were scattering grain, and the cats on the instant, fanning out, sped in every direction, and leapt, twisting in the air, curvetting for the very joy of their only release from the castle since first the snow came down. And though a number of them sported together, rolling over one another, or sitting up straight with their heads bridled back, tapped at each other sparring like fighters, only to lose all interest of a sudden, their eyes unfocusing, their thoughts turning - yet for the main the white creatures behaved as though each one were utterly alone, utterly content to be alone, conscious only of its own behaviour, its own leap into the air, its own agility, self-possessed, solitary, enviable and legendary in a beauty both heraldic and fluent as water.

Titus walked by his mother's side. For all the interest in the scene before him he could not help turning his eyes to his mother's face. Its vague, almost mask-like character was something which he was beginning to suspect of being no index of her state of mind. For more than once she had gripped his shoulder in her big hand and led him from the path and without a word she had shown him, all but shrouded by the ivy on a tree stem, a cushion of black star-moss. She had turned off a rough track, and then pointed down a small snow-filled gully to where a fox had rested. Every now and again she would pause and gaze at the ground, or into the branches of a tree, but Titus, stare as he would, could see nothing remarkable.

For all that the birds had died in their thousands, yet as Titus and his mother drew near to a strip of woodland where the snow had melted from the boughs, and small streams were running over the stones and snow-flattened grass, they could see that the trees were far from empty.

The Countess paused, and holding Titus by his elbow, they stood motionless.

A bird whistled and then another, and then suddenly the small kingfisher, like a blue legend, streaked along a stream.

The cats were leagues away. They breathed the sharp air into their lungs. They roamed to the four quarters. They powdered the horizons.