The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy (185 page)

‘
What
is? O jumping hell!’

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Cheeta, ‘and then you’ll have no option. It’s only one night, and there’s only a little time to wait for it. A night in your honour. A farewell party. A feast. Something for you to remember as long as you live.’

‘I don’t want a party,’ said Titus. ‘I want …’

‘I know,’ said Cheeta. ‘I do indeed know. You are eager to forget me. To forget that I found you destitute and nursed you back to health. You have forgotten all this. What did you do for me, except be horrible to my friends? Now you are strong again, you think you’ll go. But there is one thing that you must not forget, and that is that I worship you.’

‘Spare me that,’ said Titus.

‘Yes, worship you, my darling.’

‘I am going to be sick,’ said Titus.

‘Why should you not be? I am also sick. To the very roots of myself. But can I help it? Can I? When I love you without hope?’

Mixed with her loathing of what she was saying was a shred of truth, that, small as it was, was yet enough to make her hands tremble, like the wings of humming-birds.

‘You cannot desert me, Titus. Not now, when all is prepared for you. We will laugh and sing, and drink and dance, and go mad with all that one night can give us.’

‘Why?’

‘Because a chapter will be over. Let us end it in a flourish. Let us end it not with a full stop, dead as death, but with an exclamation mark … a leaping thing.’

‘Or a question mark?’ said Titus.

‘No. All questions will be over. There will be only the facts. The mean, sharp, brittle facts, like the wild bits of bone, and us, the two of us, riding the human storm. I know you cannot stand it any longer. This house of my father’s. This way of living. But let me have one last night with you, Titus; not in some dusky arbour where all the ritual of love drags out for hours, and there is nothing new; but in the bright invention of the night, our egos naked and our wits on fire.’

Titus, who had never heard her say so much in so short a time, turned to her.

‘Our star has been unlucky,’ she said. ‘We were doomed from the beginning. We were born in different worlds. You with your dreams …’

‘My dreams?’ cried Titus. ‘I have no dreams! O God! I have no dreams! It is you who are unreal. You and your father and your factory.’

‘I will be real for you, Titus. I will be real on that night, when the world pours through the halls. Let us drain it dry at a gulp and then turn our backs on one another, forever. Titus, oh Titus, come to the barbecue.
Your
barbecue. Tell me that you’ll be there. If for no other reason than that I would follow your tousled head to the ends of the earth.’

Titus pulled her towards him gently, and she became like a doll in his arms, tiny, exquisite, fragrant, infinitely rare.

‘I will be there,’ he whispered, ‘never fear.’

The great dreaming trees of the ride stretched away into the distance, sighing; and as he held her to him a spasm passed across her perfect features.

When at last they parted, Cheeta making her way down the aisle of oak trees, and Titus slanting obliquely through the body of the forest, the three vagrants, Crack-Bell, Slingshott, and Crabcalf got to their feet, and followed at once, and were now no more than forty feet from their quarry.

It was no easy task for them to keep track of him, for Crabcalf’s books weighed heavily.

As they stole through the shadows they were halted by a sound. At first the three vagrants were unable to locate it; they stared all about them. Sometimes the noise came from here, sometimes from there. It was not the kind of noise they understood, although the three of them were quick in the ways of the woods, and could decipher a hundred sounds, from the rubbing together of branches to the voice of a shrew.

And then, all at once, the three heads turned simultaneously in the same direction, the direction of Titus, and they realized that he was muttering to himself.

Crouching down together, they saw him, ringed by leaves. He was wandering listlessly in the half-darkness and, as they watched, they saw him press his head against the hard bole of a tree. As he pressed his head he whispered passionately to himself, and then he raised his voice and cried out to the whole forest …

‘O traitor! Traitor! What is it all about? Where can I find me? Where is the road home? Who are these people? What are these happenings? Who is this Cheeta, this Muzzlehatch? I don’t belong. All I want is the smell of home, and the breath of the castle in my lungs. Give me some proof of me! Give me the death of Steerpike; the nettles; give me the corridors. Give me my mother! Give me my sister’s grave. Give me the nest; give me my secrets back … for this is foreign soil. O give me back the kingdom in my head.’

Juno has left her house by the river. She has left the town once haunted by Muzzlehatch. She is driving in a fast car along the rim of a valley. Her quiet companion sits beside her. He looks like a brigand. A hank of dark red hair blows to and fro across his forehead.

‘It is an odd thing,’ says Juno, ‘that I still don’t know your name. And somehow or other I don’t want to. So I must call you something of my own invention.’

‘You do that,’ says Juno’s companion, in a gentle growl of such depth and cultivation that it is hard to believe that it could ever issue from so piratical a head.

‘What shall it be?’

‘Ah, there I can’t help you.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Then I must help myself. I think I will call you my “Anchor”,’ says Juno. ‘You give me so deep a sense of safety.’

Turning to look at him she takes a corner at unnecessary speed, all but overturning the car.

‘Your driving is unique,’ says Anchor. ‘But I cannot say it gives me confidence. We will change places.’

Juno draws in to the side of the road. The car is like a swordfish. Beyond it the long erratic line of the amethyst-coloured mountains. The sky overhanging everything is cloudless save for a wisp way down in the far south.

‘How glad I am that you waited for me,’ says Juno. ‘All those long years in the cedar grove.’

‘Ah,’ says the Anchor.

‘You saved me from being a sentimental old bore. I can just see myself with my tear-stained face pressed against the window-panes … weeping for the days long gone. Thank you, Mr Anchor, for showing me the way. The past is over. My home is a memory. I will never see it again. For look, I have these sunbeams and these colours. A new life lies ahead.’

‘Do not expect too much,’ says the Anchor. ‘The sun can be snuffed without warning.’

‘I know, I know. Perhaps I am being too simple.’

‘No,’ says the Anchor. ‘That is hardly the word for an uprooting. Shall we go on?’

‘Let us stay a little longer. It is so lovely here. Then drive. Drive like the wind … into another country.’

There is a long silence. They are completely relaxed; their heads thrown back. Around them lies the coloured country. The golden cornfields; the amethyst mountains.

‘Anchor, my friend,’ says Juno in a whisper.

‘Yes, what is it?’

His face is in profile. Juno has never seen a face so completely relaxed, and without strain.

‘I am so happy,’ says Juno, ‘although there is so much to be sad about. It will take its turn, I suppose … the sadness. But
now
… in this very
now
. I am floating with love.’

‘Love?’

‘Love. Love for everything. Love for those purple hills; love for your rusty forelock.’

She sinks back against the cushions and closes her eyes, and as she does so the Anchor turns his lolling head in her direction. She is indeed handsome with a handsomeness beyond the scope of her wisdom. Majestic beyond the range of her knowledge.

‘The world goes by,’ says Juno, ‘and we go with it. Yet I feel young today; young in spite of everything. In spite of my mistakes. In spite of my age.’ She turns to the Anchor … ‘I’m over forty,’ she whispers. ‘Oh my dear friend, I’m over forty!’

‘So am I,’ says the Anchor.

‘What shall we do?’ says Juno. She clutches his forearm with her jewelled hands, and squeezes him.

‘There is nothing we can do, except live.’

‘Is that why you thought I should leave my home? My possessions? My memories? Everything? Is that why?’

‘I have told you so.’

‘Yes, yes. Tell me again.’

‘We are beginning. Incongruous as we are. You with your mellow beauty that out-glows a hundred damsels, and me with …’

‘With what?’

‘With a kind of happiness.’

Juno turns to him but she says nothing. The only movement comes from the black silk at her bosom where a great ruby rises and sinks like a buoy on a midnight bay.

At last Juno says, ‘The sunlight’s lovelier than it’s ever been, because we have decided to begin. We will pass the days together as they pass. But … Oh …’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s Titus.’

‘What about him?’

‘He is gone. Gone. I disappointed him.’

The Anchor moving with a kind of slow, lazy deliberation takes his place at the wheel. But before the swordfish whips away he says …

‘I thought it was the
future
we were after.’

‘But O, but O, it
is
,’ cries Juno. ‘Oh my dear Anchor, it is indeed.’

‘Then let us catch it by its tail and fly!’

Juno, her face radiant, leans forward in the padded swordfish, and away they go, soundless save for the breath of their own speed.

Shambling his way from the west, came Muzzlehatch. Once upon a time there was no shambling in his gait or in his mind. Now it was different. The arrogance was still there, redolent in every gesture, but added to it was something more bizarre. The rangy body was now a butt for boys to copy. His rangy mind played tricks with him. He moved as though oblivious of the world. And so he was, save for one particular. Just as Titus ached for Gormenghast, ached to embrace its crumbling walls, so Muzzlehatch had set himself the task of discovering the centre of destruction.

Always his brain returned to that mere experiment; the liquidation of his zoo. There was no shape in all that surrounded him, whether branch or boulder, but revived in him the memory of one or other of his beloved creatures. Their death had quickened in him something which he had never felt in early days; the slow-burning, unquenchable lust for revenge.

Somewhere he would find it; the ghastly hive of horror; a hive whose honey was the grey and ultimate slime of the pit. Day after day he slouched from dawn until dusk. Day after day he turned this way and that.

It was as though his obsession had in some strange manner directed his feet. It was as though it followed a path known only to itself.

Out of the fermentations of her brain; out of the chronic hatred she bore him, Cheeta, the virgin, slick as a needle to the outward eye, foul in the inward, had at last conceived a way to bring young Titus to the dust; a way to hurt him.

That there was some part of her which could not do without him, she refused to believe. What might once upon a time have turned to some sort of love, was now an abhorrence. How could a wisp contain such a gall as this? She smarted beneath the humiliation of his obvious boredom … his casual evasion. What did he want from her? The act and nothing else? Her tiny figure trembled with detestation.

Yet her voice was as listless as ever. Her words wandered away. She was all sophistication; desirable, intelligent, remote. Who could have told that joined in deadly grapple beneath her ribs were the powers of fear and evil?

Out of all this, and because of this, she had framed a plan; a terrible and twisted thing, that proved, if it did nothing else, the quality of her inventive brain.

A cold fever of concentration propelled her. It was a state more readily associated with a man’s than with a woman’s mentality. And yet, a sexless thing, it was more dreadful than either.

She had told Titus of the farewell party she was preparing in his honour. She had pleaded with him; she had made her eyes to shine; her lips to pout; her breasts to tremble. Bludgeoned by sex he had said he would be there. Very well, then, her decks were cleared for action. Hers was the flying start; the initiative; the act of surprise; the choice of weapons.

But to put her plan into action necessitated the co-operation of a hundred or more of their guests, besides scores of workmen. The activity was prodigious, yet secret. There was co-operation, yet no one knew they were co-operating; or if they did, who, where, why, or in what way. They only knew their own particular roles.

She had in some magnetic way convinced each particular man and woman that he or she was at the centre of the whole affair. She had flattered them grotesquely, from the lowest to the highest; and such were the varieties of her approach, that no dupe among them but found her orders unique.

At the back of it all was a nebulous, accumulative foreboding; a gathering together in the cumulus sky; a mounting excitement in the heart of secrecy; a thing like a honeycomb which Cheeta alone apprehended in its entirety, for she was no drone, but author and soul of the hive. The insects, though they worked themselves to death, saw nothing but their own particular cells.