by Mervyn Peake
None of this was in his mind. It was far away, in another pocket of his being. What was important, now, with her eyes bent upon him, and the shadow of a branch trembling across her breast, was the immemorial game of love: no less a game for being grave. No less grave for being wild. Grave as a great green sky. Grave as a surgeon’s knife.
‘So you thought you’d come back, my wicked one. Where have you been?’
‘In hell,’ said Titus. ‘Swigging blood and munching scorpions.’
‘That must have been great fun, my darling.’
‘Not so,’ said Titus, ‘hell is overrated.’
‘But you escaped?’
‘I caught a plane. The slenderest thing you ever saw. A million years slid by in half a minute. I sliced the sky in half. And all for what?’
‘Well … what?’
‘To batten on you.’
‘What of the slender plane?’
‘I pressed a button and away she flew.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘It is very good. We don’t want to be watched, do we? Machines are so inquisitive. You’re rather far away. May I come up?’
‘Of course, or you’ll disjoint yourself.’
‘Stay, stay where you are. Don’t go – I’m on my way,’ and with a mad and curious tilt of the head he disappeared from the statue’d garden and a few minutes later Juno could hear his feet on the stairs.
He was no longer entangled in a maze of moods. Whatever was happening to his subconscious, it made no attempt to break surface. His mind fell asleep. His wits fell awake. His cock trembled like a harp-string.
As he flung open the door of her room he saw her at once; proud, monumental, relaxed; one elbow on the mantelpiece, a smile on her lips, an eyebrow raised a little. His eyes were so fixed upon her that it was not surprising that he tripped up on a footstool that stood directly in his path, and trying to recover his balance tripped again and fell headlong.
Before he could recover she was already sitting on the floor beside him.
‘This is your second time to crash at my feet. Have you hurt yourself, darling? Is it symbolic?’ said Juno.
‘Bound to be,’ said Titus – ‘absolutely bound to be.’
Had he known her less well this absurd fall might well have distracted him from his somewhat unoriginal purpose, but with Juno hovering above him and smelling like paradise, his passion, far from being quenched, took on a strange quality – something ridiculous and lovable – so that to laugh became a part of their tenderness.
When Juno laughed the process began like a child’s gurgle.
As for Titus he shouted his laughter.
It was the death-knell of false sentiment and of any cliché, or recognized behaviour. This was a thing of their own invention. A new compound.
A spasm caught hold of him. It sidled across his diaphragm and skidded through his entrails. It shot up like a rocket to the back of his throat; it radiated into separate turnings. It converged again, and capsized through him, cart-wheeled into a land of near-lunacy, where Juno joined him. What they were laughing at they had no idea, which is more shattering than a world of wit.
Titus, turning over with a shout, flung out his hand and a moment later found it resting upon Juno’s thigh, and suddenly his laughter left him, and hers also, so that she rose to her feet and when he had done so also they put their arms around one another and they wandered away to the doorway and up the stairs and along a corridor and into a room whose walls were filled with books and pictures, suffused with the light of the autumn sun.
There was a sense of peace in this remote room, with the long shafts of sunlight a-swim with motes. Without any form of untidiness, this library was strangely informal. There was the remoteness of a ship at sea – a removal from normal life about it, as though it had never been put together by carpenters and masons, but was a projection of Juno’s mind.
‘Why?’ said Titus.
‘Why what, my sweet?’
‘This unexpected room?’
‘You like it?’
‘Of course, but why the secrecy?’
‘Secrecy?’
‘I never knew it existed.’
‘It doesn’t really, not when it’s empty. It only comes to life when we are in it.’
‘Too glib, my sweet.’
‘Brute.’
‘Yes; but don’t look sad. Who lit the fire? And don’t say the goblins, will you?’
‘I will never mention goblins again. I lit it.’
‘How sure you are of me!’
‘Not really. I feel a nearness, that’s all. Something holds us together. In spite of our ages. In spite of everything.’
‘O, age doesn’t matter,’ said Titus, taking hold of her arms.
‘Thank you,’ said Juno. A wry little smile came to her lips and then withered away. Her sculptured head remained. The lovely room grew soft with evening light as Juno and Titus slid from their clothes, and, trembling, sank to the floor together and began to drown.
The firelight flickered and grew dim; danced and died again. Their bodies sent one shadow through the room. It swarmed across the carpet; climbed a wall of books, and shook with joy across the solemn ceiling.
FORTY-THREE
A long while later when the moon had risen and while Juno and Titus were asleep in each other’s arms by the dying fire, Muzzlehatch, in roguish mood, having found no answer to his knocking, had climbed the chestnut tree whose high branches brushed the library window, and had, at great risk to life and limb, made a lateral leap in the dark and had landed on the window-sill of Juno’s room, catching hold, as he did so, of the open frame.
More by luck than skill he had managed to keep his balance and in doing so had made no noise at all save for the swish of the returning leaves and a faint rattle of the window-sash.
For some while now, he had seen little of Juno. It is true that for a few days following the unforeseen twinge of heart, when he had watched her move away from him down the drive of her home, he had seen something of her; he had realized that the past can never be recaptured, even if he had wished it, and he turned his life away from her, as a man turns his back upon his own youth.
Why then this visitation late at night to his one-time love? Why was he standing on the sill, blocking out the moon and staring at the embers of the fire? Because he longed to talk. To talk like a torrent. To put into words the scores of strange ideas that had been clamouring for release; clamouring to set his tongue on fire. All day he had longed for it.
The morning, afternoon and evening had been spent in moving from cage to cage in his inordinate zoo.
But love them as he did, he was not with his animals tonight. He wanted something else. He wanted words, and in his wish, he realized as the sun went down, was the image of the only person in the wide world at the foot of whose bed he could sit; bolt upright, his head held very high, his jaw thrust forward, his face alight with an endless sequence of ideas. Who else but Juno?
He had thought he had had from her all that she had to give. They had grown tired of each other. They knew too much about each other; but now, quite unexpectedly, he needed her again. There were the stars to talk about, and the fishes of the sea. There were demons and there were the wisps of down that cling to the breasts of the seraphim. There were old clothes to ponder and terrible diseases. There were the flying missiles and the weird workings of the heart. There was all … all to be chosen from. It was talking for its own mad, golden sake.
So Muzzlehatch, ignoring his ancient car, chose from his animals a great smelling llama; saddled it and cantered from his courtyard and away across the hills to Juno’s house, singing as he went.
He had no wish to disturb the other sleepers, but, as there was no reply to the pebbles he flung up at her window he was forced to knock upon the door. As this bore no results, and as he had no intention of bashing his way in, or of prising a window open, he decided to climb the chestnut tree whose branches fingered the windows on the s
econd floor. He tethered the llama to the foot of the chestnut and began to climb and eventually to make the jump.
Standing on the sill, with a thirty-foot drop below him, he continued to stare for some while at the glow of embers in the grate, before he climbed carefully at last over the sash and down into the darkness of the room.
He had been in this room before, several times, but long ago, and it seemed very different tonight. He knew that Juno’s bedroom was immediately below and he started to make for the shadowy door.
He grinned to think what a surprise it would be for her. She was wonderful in the way she took surprises. She never looked surprised. She just looked happy to see you – almost as though she had been waiting for you. Waking out of a deep sleep she had often surprised Muzzlehatch by turning her head to him and smiling with almost unbearable sweetness before she had even opened her eyes. It was this that he wished to see again before the burning words came tumbling out.
It was when he was but a few steps from the door that he heard the first sound. With a reflex stemming from far earlier times his hand moved immediately to his hip pocket. But there was no revolver there and he brought back his empty hand to his side. He had swung in his tracks at the sound and he faced the last few vermilion embers in the grate.
What he had heard exactly he did not know, but it might have been a sigh. Or it might have been the leaves of the tree at the window except that the sound seemed to have come from near the fireplace.
And then it came again: this time it was a voice.
‘Sweet love … O, sweet, sweet love …’
The words were so soft that had they not been whispered in the profound silence of the night they would never have been heard.
Muzzlehatch, motionless in the seemingly haunted room, waited for several long minutes, but there were no more words and no sound save for a long sigh like the sigh of the sea.
Moving silently forward and a little to the right Muzzlehatch became almost immediately aware of a blot of darkness more intense than the surrounding shades and he bent forward with his hands raised as though ready for action.
What kind of a creature would lie on the floor and whisper? What kind of monster was luring him forward?
And then there was a movement in the darkness by the dulling embers and then silence again and no more stirrings.
The moon broke free of the clouds and shone into the library, lighting up a wall of books – lighting up four pictures: lighting up a patch of carpet and the sleeping heads of Juno and the boy.
Walking with slow, silent strides to the window; climbing through; jumping for the chestnut tree; lowering himself branch by branch; slipping and bruising his knee; reaching the ground; untying the llama and riding home – all this was a dream. The reality was in himself – a dull and sombre pain.
FORTY-FOUR
The days moved by in a long, sweet sequence of light and air. Each day an original thing. Yet behind all this there was something else. Something ominous. Juno had noticed it. Her lover was restless.
‘Titus!’
His name sprang up the stairs to where he lay.
‘Titus!’
Was it an echo, or a second cry? Whichever one it was it failed to wake him. There was no movement – save in his dream, where, tumbling from a tower, a skewbald beast fell headlong.
The voice was twelve treads closer.
‘Titus! My sweet!’
His eyelid moved but the dream fought on for life, the blotched beast plunging and wheeling though sky after sky.
The voice had reached the landing –
‘My mad one! My bad one! Where are you, poppet?’
Through the curtained windows of the bedroom, a flight of sunbeams, traversing the warm, dark air, forced a pool of light on the pillow. And beside that pool of light, in the ash-grey, linen shadow, his head lay, as a boulder might lie, or a heavy book might lie; motionless; undecipherable – a foreign language.
The voice was in the doorway; a cloud moved over the sun; and the sunbeams died from the pillow.
But the rich voice was still a part of his dream, though his eyes were open. It was blended with that rush of images and sounds which swarmed and expanded as the creature of his nightmare, falling at length into a lake of pale rainwater, vanished in a spurt of steam.
And as it sank, fathom by darkening fathom, a great host of heads, foreign yet familiar, arose from the deep and bobbed upon the water – and a hundred strange yet reminiscent voices began to call across the waves until from horizon to horizon he was filled with a great turbulence of sight and sound.
Then, suddenly, his eyes were wide open –
Where was he?
The empty darkness of the wall which faced him gave him no answer. He touched it with his hand.
Who was he? There was no knowing. He shut his eyes again. In a few moments there was no noise at all, and then the scuffling sound of a bird in the ivy outside the tall window recalled the world that was outside himself – something apart from this frightful zoneless nullity.
As he lifted himself up on one elbow, his memory returning in small waves, he could not know that a figure filled the doorway of his room – not so much in bulk as in the intensity of her presence – filled it as a tigress fills the opening of her cave.
And like a tigress she was striped: yellow and black: and because of the dark shadows behind her, only the yellow bands were visible, so that she appeared to be cut in pieces by the horizontal sweeps of a sword. And so she was like some demonstration of magic – a ‘severed woman’ – quite extraordinary and wonderful to see. But there was no one to see her, for Titus had his back to her.
And Titus could not see that her hat, plumed and piratical, sprouted as naturally from her head as the green fronds from the masthead of a date-palm.
She raised her hand to her breast. Not nervously; but with a kind of tense and tender purpose.
Propped upon his elbow with his back to her, his aloneness touched her sharply. It was wrong that he should be so single; so contained, so little merged into her own existence.
He was an island surrounded by deep water. There was no isthmus leading to her bounty; no causeway to her continent of love.
There are times when the air that floats between mortals becomes, in its stillness and silence, as cruel as the edge of a scythe.
‘O Titus! Titus, my darling!’ she cried. ‘What are you thinking of?’
He did not turn his head immediately, although at the first sound of her voice he was instantaneously aware of his surroundings. He knew that he was being watched – that Juno was very close indeed.
When at last he turned, she took a step towards the bed and she smiled with genuine pleasure to see his face. It was not a particularly striking face. With the best will in the world it could not be said that the brow or the chin or the nose or the cheekbones were chiselled. Rather, it seemed, the features of his head had, like the blurred irregularities of a boulder, been blunted by the wash of many tides. Youth and time were indissolubly fused.
She smiled to see the disarray of his brown hair and the lift of his eyebrows and the half-smile on his lips that seemed to have no more pigment in them than the warm sandy colour of his skin.
Only his eyes denied to his head the absolute simplicity of a monochrome. They were the colour of smoke.
‘What a time of day to sleep!’ said Juno, seating herself on the edge of the bed.
She took a mirror from her bag and bared her teeth for a moment as she scrutinized the line of her top lip, as though it were not hers but something which she might or might not purchase. It was perfectly drawn – a single sweep of carmine.
She put her mirror away and stretched her strong arms. The yellow stripes of her costume gleamed in a midday dusk.
‘What a time to sleep!’ she repeated. ‘Were you so anxious to escape, my chicken-child? So determined to evade me that you sneak upstairs and waste a summer afternoon? But you know you are free in my house to do exactly w
hat you please, don’t you? To live as you please, how you please, where you please, you know this don’t you, my spoiled one?’
‘Yes,’ said Titus, ‘I remember you saying so.’
‘And you will, won’t you?’
‘O yes, I will,’ said Titus, ‘I will.’
‘Darling, you look so adorable.’
Titus took a deep breath. How sumptuous, how monumental and enormous she was as she sat there close to him, her wonderful hat almost touching, so it seemed, the ceiling. Her scent hung in the air between them. Her soft, yet strong white hand lay on his knee – but something was wrong – or lost; because his thoughts were of how his responses to her magnetism grew vaguer and something had changed or was changing with every passing day and he could only think of how he longed to be alone again in this great tree-filled city of the river – alone to wander listless through the sunbeams.
FORTY-FIVE
‘You are a strange young man,’ said Juno. ‘I can’t quite make you out. Sometimes I wonder why I take so much trouble over you, dear. But then of course I know, a moment later, that I have no choice. Now have I? You touch me so, my cruel one. You know it, don’t you?’
‘You say I do,’ said Titus ‘– though why God only knows.’
‘Fishing?’ said Juno. ‘Fishing again? Shall I tell you what I mean?’
‘Not now,’ said Titus, ‘please.’
‘Am I boring you? Just tell me if I am. Always tell me. And if you are angry with me, don’t hide it. Just shout at me. I will understand. I want you to be yourself – only yourself. That’s how you flower best. O my mad one! My bad one!’
The plume of her hat swayed in the golden darkness. Her proud black eyes shone wetly.
‘You have done so much for me,’ said Titus. ‘Don’t think I am callous. But perhaps I must go. You give me too much. It makes me ill.’
There was a sudden silence as though the house had stopped breathing.
‘Where could you go? You do not belong outside. You are my own, my discovery, my … my … can’t you understand, I love you darling. I know I’m twice your – O Titus, I adore you. You are my mystery.’
