by Mervyn Peake
‘Yes?’ said Titus.
‘How elegant you are. Just as I used to be. You were a beggar when we saw you last. Like us, you were. Ha, ha, ha! A mouldering mendicant. But look at you now. O la la!’
‘Shut up,’ said Titus.
He stared at them again. Three failures. Pompous as only failures can be.
‘What do you want with me?’ said Titus. ‘I have nothing to give you.’
‘You have everything,’ said Crabcalf. ‘That’s why we follow you. You are different, my lord.’
‘Who called me that?’ whispered Titus. ‘How did you know?’
‘But everybody knows,’ cried Crack-Bell, in a voice that carried to where Cheeta and her father watched every move.
‘How did you know where to find me?’
‘We have kept our ears to the ground, and our eyes skinned, and we used what wits God gave us.’
‘After all you have been watched. You are not unknown.’
‘Unknown!’ cried Crack-Bell. ‘Ha, ha, ha! That’s good!’
‘What’s in the sack?’ said Titus, turning away.
‘My lifework,’ said Crabcalf. ‘Books, scores of them, but every one the same.’ He lifted his head in pride, and tossed it to and fro. ‘These are my “remainders”. They are my centre. Please take one, my lord. Take one with you back to Gormenghast. Look. I will dip for you.’
Crabcalf, brushing Slingshott aside from the wheel-chair tore open the sack, and plunging his arm down its throat, drew forth a copy from the darkness. He took a pace towards Titus, and offered him the enigmatic volume.
‘What’s it about?’ said Titus.
‘Everything,’ said Crabcalf. ‘Everything I know of life and death.’
‘I’m not much of a reader,’ said Titus.
‘There’s no hurry,’ said Crabcalf. ‘Read it at your leisure.’
‘Thanks very much,’ said Titus. He turned over a few pages at random. ‘There are poems too, are there?’
‘Interlarded,’ said Crabcalf. ‘That is very true; there are poems interlarded. Shall I read you one … my lord?’
‘Well …’
‘Ah, here we are … mm … mm. A thought … just a passing thought. Where are we? Are you ready, sir?’
‘Is it very long?’ said Titus.
‘It is very short,’ said Crabcalf, shutting his eyes. ‘It goes thus …
‘How fly the birds of heaven save by their wings?
How tread the stags, those huge and hairy kings
Save by their feet? How do the fishes turn
In their wet purlieus where the mermaids yearn
Save by their tails? How does the plantain sprout
Save by that root it cannot do without?’
Crabcalf opened his eyes. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ he said.
‘What is your name?’ said Titus.
‘Crabcalf.’
‘And your friends?’
‘Crack-Bell and Slingshott.’
‘You escaped from the Under-River?’
‘We did.’
‘And have you been searching for me a long while?’
‘We have.’
‘For what reason?’
‘Because you need us. You see … we believe you to be what you say you are.’
‘What do I say I am?’
The three took a simultaneous step forward. They lifted their rugged faces to the leaves above them and spoke together …
‘You are Titus, the Seventy-Seventh Earl of Groan, and Lord of Gormenghast. So help us God.’
‘We are your bodyguard,’ said Slingshott in a voice so weak and fatuous that the very tone of it negated whatever confidence the words were intended to convey.
‘I do not want a bodyguard,’ said Titus. ‘Thank you all the same.’
‘That is what I used to say when I was a young man,’ said Slingshott. ‘I thought as you did … that to be alone was everything. That is before they sent me to the salt mines … since then, I …’
‘Forgive me,’ said Titus, ‘but I cannot stay. I appreciate your selflessness in searching for me, and your idea of protecting me from this and that … but no. I am, or I’m becoming, one of those damnable selfish so-and-sos, forever biting at the hand that feeds them.’
‘We will follow you, nevertheless,’ said Crack-Bell. ‘We will be, if you like, out of sight. We have no pretensions. We are not easily dissuaded.’
‘And there will be others,’ said Slingshott. ‘Men of spleen and lads of high romance. As time goes on, you’ll have an army, my lord. An invisible army. Ready eternally for the note.’
‘What note?’ said Titus.
‘This one of course,’ cried Crack-Bell, pursing his lips and expelling a note as shrill as a curlew’s. ‘The danger note. Ha, ha, ha, ha! Oh no. You needn’t fear a thing. Your viewless army will be with you, everywhere, save in your sight.’
‘Leave me!’ cried Titus. ‘Go! You are over-reaching yourselves. There is only one thing you can do for me.’
For a while the three sat glumly, staring at Titus. Then Crabcalf said …
‘What is it we can do?’
‘Scour the world for Muzzlehatch. Bring news of him, or bring the man himself. Do that, and you can share my wanderings. But for now, please GO, GO, GO!’
EIGHTY-THREE
The three from the Under-River melted into the woods, and Titus was left alone, or so he thought. He broke and re-broke a small branch in his hands, and then turned away and began to retrace his steps in the direction of the scientist’s daughter. It was then that he suddenly saw her.
A few minutes earlier Cheeta had stepped from the car, and her father had turned it about and slid silently away, so that Titus and Cheeta found themselves drawing closer to one another with every step they took.
Anyone standing halfway between the approaching figures would have seen, as he turned his head this way and that, how similar were their backgrounds; for the tree-walled avenue was flecked with gold and green, and Cheeta and Titus were themselves flecked also, and floated, it almost seemed, on the slanting rays of the low sun.
Their past which made them what they were and nothing else, moved with them, adding at each footfall a new accretion. Two figures: two creatures: two humans: two worlds of loneliness. Their lives up to this moment contrasted, and what was amorphous became like a heavy boulder in their breasts.
Yet in Cheeta’s bearing, as she moved down the avenue, there was no sign of passion or of the ice in her heart and Titus could only marvel at the way she moved, inevitably, smoothly, like the approach of a phantom.
The merest shred she was: slender as an eyelash, erect as a little soldier. But O the danger of it! To fill her clay with something that leaps higher and throws its wild and flickering shadow further than the blood’s wisdom knows. How dangerous, how desperate and how explosive for such a little vessel.
As for Titus, she held him steadily in her eye. She saw it all and at once, his somewhat arrogant, loose-jointed walk, his way of tossing his nondescript hair out of his eyes, his bloody-mindedness, implicit in the slouch of his shoulders, and that general air of detachment which had been so great a stumbling block to the young ladies in his past, who saw no fun in the way he could become abstracted at the oddest moments. That was the irritating thing about him. He could not force a feeling, or bring himself to love. His love was always elsewhere. His thoughts were fastidious. Only his body was indiscriminate.
Behind him, whenever he stood, or slept, were the legions of Gormenghast … tier upon cloudy tier, with the owls calling through the rain, and the ringing of the rust-red bells.
EIGHTY-FOUR
When Cheeta and Titus came abreast, they stopped dead, for the idea of cutting one another would have been ludicrously dramatic. In any event, as far as Cheeta was concerned, there was never any question of letting the young man go by like a cloud, never to return. She was not finished with him. She had hardly started. She recognized in the sliding moments, a quality that
set this day apart from others. It was a febrile day, not to be gainsaid; a day, perhaps of insight and heightened apprehension.
And yet at the same time there was, in spite of the tension, a feeling in both of them that there was nothing new in what was happening; that they had shared in years gone by, an identical situation, and that there was no escape from the fate that overhung them.
‘Thank you for stopping,’ said Cheeta, in her slow and listless way. (Titus was always reminded when she spoke of dry leaves rustling.)
‘What else could I do?’ said Titus. ‘After all, we know each other.’
‘Do you think so?’ said Cheeta. ‘Perhaps that would be a good reason to avoid one another.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Titus. The avenue hummed with silence.
‘Who were they?’ said Cheeta at last. The three short syllables of her question drifted away one by one.
‘Who do you mean?’ said Titus. ‘I’m in no mood for riddles.’
‘The three beggars.’
‘Oh them! Old friends of mine.’
‘Friends?’ whispered Cheeta, as though to herself. ‘What are they doing in Father’s grounds?’
‘They came to save me,’ said Titus.
‘From what?’
‘From myself I suppose. And from women. They are wise. Wise men are the beggars. They think you are too luscious for me. Ha, ha, ha, ha! But I told them not to worry. I told them you were frozen at the very tap-root. That your sex is bolted from the inside; that you are as prim as the mantis, that gobbles up the heads of her admirers. Love’s so disgusting, isn’t it?’
Had Titus not been ranting with his head thrown back, he might for a split second have seen, between the narrowing eyelids of the scientist’s daughter, a fleck of terrible light.
But he did not see it. All he saw when he looked down at her was something rare and flawless, as a rose or a bird.
The eyes that had blazed for a moment were now as luminous with love as the eyes of a monkey-eating eagle.
‘And yet you said you loved me. That is the spice of it.’
‘Of course I love you,’ said Cheeta, throwing the words away like dead petals. ‘Of course I do, and I always will. That is why you must go.’ She drew her pencilled eyebrows together, and at once became another creature, a creature in every way as unique and bizarre as before. She turned her head away, and there she was again, or was she someone else?
‘Because I love you, Titus; so much, I can hardly bear it.’
‘Then tell me something,’ said Titus in so casual a voice that it was all that Cheeta could do to control a spurt of rage, which, had she given vent to it, might have ruined her carefully laid plans. For above all Titus must not be allowed to leave as he intended on the evening of this very day.
‘What is it you want to ask me?’ She drew herself close to him.
‘Your father …’
‘What about him?’
‘Why does he dress like a mute? Why is he so dreary? What’s in his factory? Why is his brow like a melon? Are you sure he is your father? Whose are those faces that I saw? Thousands of them, and all of them the same, staring like waxworks? What was that stink that crept across the lake? What is it he’s making there? For, by God, the very look of the place turns me up. Why is it surrounded by guards?’
‘I never asked him. Why should I?’ said Cheeta.
‘Has he not told you anything at all? And what about your mother?’
‘She’s … What’s that?’
There was a faint sound of footsteps, and they drew into the hem of the woods together, and were only just in time, for as they moved, two figures lifted their heads in perfect yet unaffected unison, and slid over the soft turf. On their heads they wore helmets that smouldered in the low rays of the sun.
As they passed, there was yet another sound, apart from the whisper of their feet on the grass. Titus (whose heart was thudding, for he recognized the enigmatic pair) was able for the first time to hear yet another noise. It was a low and horrible hissing. It seemed as though a deep-seated anger had at last found vent for itself through the teeth of these identical figures. Their faces showed no sign of excitement. Their bodies were as unhurried as ever. They had control of every muscle. But they could do nothing about the tell-tale hissing which argued so palpably the anger, the ferment and the pain that was twisted up inside them.
They passed by, and the hissing died away, and all that could be seen were the sunbeams glancing from their studded helmets.
As soon as they were far enough away, the fauna of the woods crept out from their hiding places in the boles of trees, or in among the roots and burrows, clustered together on the dappled ride, their private enmities forgotten as they stared at the retreating figures.
‘Who were they?’
‘Were?’ said Titus. ‘They’re in the present tense, God help me.’
‘Who are they, then?’
‘They sleuth me. I must go.’
Cheeta turned to look at him. ‘Not yet,’ she said.
‘At once,’ said Titus.
‘Impossible,’ said Cheeta. ‘All is ready.’
The shadow of a leaf trembled on her cheekbones. Her eyes were huge; as though they were sunk for one purpose only … to drown the unwary … to gulp him down to where the wet ferns drip … a world away; down, down into the cold. She hated him because she could not love him. He was unattainable. His love was somewhere else, where dust blossomed.
Cheeta bit her pretty lips. In her head was malice, like a growth. In her heart was a kind of yearning, because passion was not part of her life. Even as she stared she could see the lust in his eyes; that stupid male lust that cheapened everything.
Titus leant forward suddenly, and caught her lower lip between his own.
‘You are almost without substance,’ he said, ‘save for the bits of you that you call your body. I’m off.’ As he raised his head he ran his tongue along her throat, and cupped her perfect little breast in his left hand. ‘I’m away,’ he whispered. ‘Away for good.’
‘You cannot go,’ she said. ‘Everything is ready … for you.’
‘Me? What do you mean? Everything is ready for what?’
‘Take your hand away.’ She turned at the sound of her own words so that Titus could not see an expression pass across her face. It was lethal.
‘They will all be there,’ she said.
‘Who, in God’s name?’
‘Your friends. Your early friends.’
‘Who? Who? What early friends?’
‘That would be telling, wouldn’t it?’
There was something sickening about the way this glib childish phrase was delivered in that same laconic drawl. ‘But it is all for you.’
‘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.
EIGHTY-FIVE
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.
