by Mervyn Peake
That Irma knew of an arbour in the garden was not her fault. And it was not her fault that Bellgrove knew it not. Yet she blushed inwardly, as casually turning to left and right at the corners of paths, or under flower-loaded trellises, she guided the headmaster circuitously yet firmly in its direction.
Bellgrove, who had in his mind’s eye just such a place as he was now unwittingly approaching, had felt it better that they should perambulate together in silence, so that when he had a chance to sit and rest his feet, his deep voice, when he brought it forth again from the depths of his chest, should have its full value.
On rounding a great moon-capped lilac bush and coming suddenly upon the arbour, Irma started, and drew back. Bellgrove came to a halt beside her. Finding her face was turned away from him, he gazed absently at the hard boulder-like bun of iron-grey hair which, with not a hair out of place, shone in the moonlight. It was nothing, however, for a man to dwell upon, and turning from her to the arbour which had caused her trepidation, he straightened himself, and turning his right foot out at a rather more aggressive angle, he struck an attitude, which he knew nothing about, for it was the unconscious equivalent of what was going on in his mind.
He saw himself as the type of man who would never take advantage of a defenceless woman, greathearted, and understanding. Someone a damsel might trust in a lonely wood. But he also saw himself as a buck. His youth had been so long ago that he could remember nothing of it but he presumed, erroneously, that he had tasted the purple fruit, had broken hearts and hymens, had tossed flowers to ladies on balconies, had drunk champagne out of their shoes and generally been irresistible.
He allowed her fingers to fall from his arm. It was at moments like this that he must give her a sense of freedom only to draw her further into the rich purdah of his benevolence.
He held the tabs of his white gown near the shoulders.
‘Can you not smell the lilac, madam,’ he said – ‘the moon-lit lilac?’
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 I 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.
They were both standing. This time he did not offer Irma his arm. He groped in the darkness and found hers. He found it at the elbow. Elbows are not romantic, but Bellgrove’s hand shook as he held the joint, and the joint shook in his grasp. For a moment they stood together. Her pineapple perfume was thick and powerful.
‘Be seated,’ he said. He spoke a little louder than before. He spoke as one in authority. He had no need to look stern, magnetic or masculine. The blessed darkness precluded any exertion in that direction. He made faces in the safety of the night. Putting out his tongue; blowing out his cheeks – there was so much glee in him.
He took a deep breath. It steadied him.
‘Are you seated, Miss Prunesquallor?’
‘O yes … O yes indeed,’ came the answering whisper.
‘In comfort, madam?’
‘In comfort, Mr Headmaster, and in peace.’
‘Peace, my dear lady? What kind of peace?’
‘The peace, Mr Headmaster, of one who has no fear. Of one who has faith in the strong arm of her loved one. The peace of heart and mind and spirit that belong to those who have found what it is to offer themselves without reserve to something august and tender.’
There was a break in Irma’s voice, and then as though to prove what she had said, she cried out into the night, ‘Tender! that’s what I said. Tender and Unattached!’
Bellgrove shifted himself; they were all but touching.
‘Tell me, my dearest lady, is it of me that you speak. If it is not, then humble me – be merciless and break an old man’s heart with one small syllable. If you say “no” then, without a word I will leave you and this pregnant arbour, walk out into the night, walk out of your life, and may be, who knows, out of mine also …’
Whether or not he was gulling himself it is certain that he was living the very essence of his words. Perhaps the very use of words themselves was as much a stimulus as Irma’s presence and his own designs; but that is not to say that the total effect was not sincere. He was infatuated with all that pertained to love. He trod breast-deep through banks of thorn-crazed roses. He breathed the odours of a magic isle. His brain swam on a sea of spices. But he had his own thought too.
‘It was of you I spoke,’ said Irma. ‘You, Mr Bellgrove. Do not touch me. Do not tempt me. Do nothing to me. Just be there beside me. I would not have us desecrate this moment.’
‘By no means. By no means.’ Bellgrove’s voice was deep and subterranean. He heard it with pleasure. But he was sensitive enough to know that for all its sepulchral beauty, the phrase he had just used was pathetically inept – and so he added, ‘By no means whatsoever …’ as though he were beginning a sentence.
‘By no means whatsoever, ah, definitely not, for who can tell, when, unawares, love’s dagger …’ but he stopped. He was getting nowhere. He must start again.
He must say things that would drive his former remarks out of her mind. He must sweep her along.
‘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.
‘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 cake-stand. 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.’
