Titus Awakes

by Maeve Gilmore

  In his hand he carried, as though a toy, a double-handed cleaver.

  At his shoulder stood something that was hard to define. It was taller than Swelter, and gave forth a sense of timber and of jagged power. But it was not this that caught the senses, but the sound of knee-joints cracking.

  For a moment they beamed at one another, this dire couple in a mixture of sweat and leather – and then their mutual hatred settled in again, like a foul plant or fungus. Yet they held hands, and as they moved across the arena of Titus’s brain they sang to one another. Swelter in a thin fluted voice, and Flay reminiscent of a rusty key turning in a lock.

  They sang of joy, with murder in their eyes. They sang of love, with bile upon their tongues.

  Those tongues. Of Swelter’s it is enough to say that it protruded like a carrot. Of Flay’s that it was a thing of corroded metal.

  What of the third character? The lurker in the shade of Swelter’s belly? Its tongue was green and fiery. A shape not easily found. It was for the main part hidden by a bush of mottled hair.

  This third apparition, a newcomer to Titus’s brain, remained in the shadow, a diminutive character who reached no higher than Swelter’s knee-joint.

  While the other two danced, their hands joined, the tiny creature was content to watch them in their foul perambulations, until loosening their grip upon one another Swelter and Flay rose to full height upon their toes and struck one another simultaneously, and Titus in his dream twisted away from them.

  Mervyn Peake, July 1960

  2

  Titus Among the Snows

  TITUS AWOKE FROM a haunted sleep. The uncanny light of whiteness began to permeate his brain. Snow fell silently. Its gentle falling was cruel, condemning him to continue in his solitude, and his hunger. The door of the barn could not be moved. The owl had frozen to death. It seemed to Titus that he was the only creature in the world left alive, and as the brilliant whiteness hit the barn, he saw around him the small corpses of birds and mice, food for what he knew would be his own incarceration.

  Despite his hunger and the aching cold in his limbs, a warmth of love glowed in his memory: the withdrawn magnitude of his mother whom he could not love, but whose mental elegance chastened him – his dead sister Fuchsia, passionate, ugly and beautiful all at the same time, loving him to the point of pain, for herself and for him. Nannie Slagg, so petulant and so pathetic to all but herself. Dr Prunesquallor, whose wit did not hurt. Bellgrove, his schoolmaster, trying to muster a dignity he did not possess, and then, because physical love bears with it the power to deny all other love the ‘Thing’ – callous, cruel, mocking and alone, done to death by a flash of lightning before fruition, but leaving Titus so vulnerable that he carried the scar for the rest of his life.

  He thought back to Muzzlehatch, a man whose hurt when his animals were destroyed by science rendered a brilliant mind oblique and nulled by shock. The pain of his mental collapse and death was more than Titus could withstand. Juno he had not loved, but with what heart he had left, he wished that he had been able to. Everything she offered Titus was generous and without intent. She gave. He received, but could not return. He was a blind man who could not hear – a deaf man who could not see. A stump of a man who did not know how to use what little he had left of his human frame. And so, with the cruelty of youth, the cruelty of a man who knew that he was loved, he left her, and never gave her another thought.

  Cheetah he hated, but with less virulence than the hatred he felt for Steerpike.

  Titus was engulfed by loneliness. Despite his past, and the emptiness the future promised, he did not want to die, alone, in an unknown barn, surrounded by rodents which lay, almost beautiful in the translucent light, with their claws drawn up to their frozen faces so pitifully.

  He searched the barn for the smallest shred of comfort; his eyes were as sharp as had been those of the dead owl, which still clung frozen to its rafter.

  The wind howled and the tears of self-pity froze like intemperate glaciers on his cheeks. As he stretched, knowing that the thrushes, starlings and woodland creatures that had entered the barn before his incarceration crept closer to him, he heard a sound that was not animal. At this strange, unexpected screeching of the barn door being feebly pushed, his frozen body gave a leap and what was left of his heart pumped chilled blood through his whole being.

  He was unable to lift himself, to call out, to come to the aid of whatever it was that trespassed on that silent atmosphere. He opened his mouth to whistle his presence, but nothing came from the pursed lips. He watched, mesmerised, as the barn door slowly – gratingly – with the shriek of pain and the difficulty of a cripple, slowly opened and let in the freezing snow.

  The grating of the door was an echo of the chalk on the blackboard, so long ago when he was a boy at school. Another screech, and another and another, until the hideous sound was no longer bearable. Like the breaking of the waters, it was pushed with the imperative need of a baby to escape from its mother’s womb, and the dark birth lay prostrate.

  Titus knew that here was another human, whether male or female he could not tell. He dragged himself across the frozen dust to the shapeless lump. His hands and legs were bound with rags, his head wrapped with whatever he had been able to twist round it, and his body, bound with straw and other matter, now twice its normal size. All he knew was that he must close the door and shut out the blizzard.

  If he had not known that there was another living being whose life depended on him, he might have loosened the small and dwindling grasp he had on life. With the ungainliness that comes from disease he dragged himself nearer the door and the miraculous hexagonal snowflakes and what might in normal circumstances have taken half a second, now took what felt like an hour.

  To force the door shut again took reserves of his energy that were fast dwindling. He had never possessed personal vanity, only a supreme arrogance of the importance of his inheritance, which during his wanderings grew more powerful. Forsaking this birthright, Titus entered this new world of his own free will. Anyone from his past would neither have recognised him nor cared for what they saw; a neuter, covered in rags. He dragged himself across the other heap of humanity, gradually stretching his arms to push or pull at the barn door. All he could hear, through the woollen filth that covered his ears, was so muffled – it must have been from another world. Panting, he at last reached the door and lay, arms outstretched. He pulled at a cord attached to the door, but the cord was frozen and so brittle that it snapped. Tears of frustration froze on his cheeks. With one great effort Titus pulled the door closed, letting in a gust of snow.

  So much effort could only have one result – exhaustion.

  3

  Sacrifice. Behold

  LIGHT FLOODED THE barn. There were sounds outside. Sounds that Titus began to discern as voices, although still distant. Titus felt half-mad from a slumber so numbed by cold, the sound of bells pierced his ears.

  He could not speak.

  He could not make out what lay some yards away from him; was it a hummock or a being?

  The bells continued to plague him, making sounds he should understand, but could not.

  Through his swollen lids he saw shapes moving. Hidden behind his frozen swaddling, which was beginning to drip, he could hear again what he remembered as voices. Yet the language was not what he could understand as language. Noises – and in his mind they were like the sound a mother lulls her child to sleep with.

  The sounds were still distant and the hummock rose, but not of its own volition. A huge shape stood over him. He was insulated, yet engulfed. He was in a dream and he was not in a dream. He felt a trickle of water make its way into a stomach aching for sustenance, but fearful.

  If he had had words with which to think he would have said to himself: ‘That is a dog, and those other shapes are men.’ Without words he understood faintly what he saw, as a feeble light made its way across the carnage to where he lay, he felt his body being lifted with the gentleness
of a lepidopterist pinning his captured beauty to a board, before enclosing it in its glass case.

  Voices came and went like the tides; no rough seas here, but rhythmic and peaceful. He knew that such peace might never be his again. His thoughts came and went with the tides and he floated, a piece of flotsam back and forth, into voices and out again.

  The cargo that had been jettisoned in his barn was gone. Now, he – Titus – was going to follow.

  There was a light, not of this world: pink, rosy, gleaming, brilliant. There was still the murmur of voices.

  No roughness. Sometimes a gliding, and sometimes a sliding, and the uncanny sound of a mountain horn, not a warning as that of a horn in a sea mist.

  It was to occur to him, very much later, that he was the cause of danger to the intrepid men with their mountain dog, and it was only then that he could begin to think of repayment. But how?

  * * * * *

  HE OPENED HIS eyes and felt himself. His legs and arms were there. He could see and, as he shouted, he knew he could hear. He could make noises, and he repeated to himself the names of the people who had been his childhood, and those who had been his youth, and those who had come and gone again like ghosts in his young manhood. He called up the rooms he had known – he counted the dead. He called and called for his sister Fuchsia, and as he slowly held out his arms and found an emptiness, he knew that he was alive.

  ‘I am awake,’ he shouted. ‘I am Titus Groan – where am I?’

  An old woman swam into his vision. She smiled and shook her head. She pointed her finger to the further corner of the room.

  He saw a shape. He thought, perhaps I cannot see, or what I see is not there. He looked again. This time there was a little more comprehension. It was the face of a woman. He called out, ‘Fuchsia?’

  His violet eyes sought out the shape across the room. Something came into focus, but what it was he could no longer tell. There was an echo of something familiar, but it was hidden beneath the layers of memory as delicately poised as mille-feuilles. He dared not enquire yet into the mystery, which lay as inert as he himself.

  The return of sentience is so slow and so painful that there are those who wish to delay it, and others who wish it never to return, but Titus had, for all the pains he had endured in his own home and out of it, clung to life.

  4

  Titus’s Awakening

  A WARMTH OF body lit up his whole spirit. His eyes opened willingly, for the first time since his incarceration in the freezing barn.

  He knew himself to be in a room that was a room of poverty. His eyes searched and saw it all. There was so little to see. A rafter with a ham that brought back to him other rafters in vaster places, with a rat that had been crunched to death by a man so vile that he closed his eyes to forget.

  When he opened them again, at the side of his pallet bed he saw an old woman holding a bowl to his lips, urging his mouth to open. Her eyes were red-rimmed by age, and as he opened his mouth to receive the blessing of food, she smiled and her toothless gums were sweeter at that moment than any young woman’s lips. Liquid from the rough-hewn wooden bowl was gently poured down his throat by means of an equally rough spoon. Thus cared for, Titus enjoyed the sense of peace of an infant at its mother’s breast, although this was something that had not been his to know. How could he remember being suckled by Keda, his wet-nurse from the ‘Outer Dwellings’ of Gormenghast? He could only recall the insatiable, unsatisfied love he had felt for her daughter – his own foster sister – the ‘Thing’, and the world of Gormenghast to which he clung, hated and loved.

  As the last spoonful trickled down into his whole being, he closed his eyes and a sigh of more than physical satisfaction broke the silence of the poor room. As a blind man could sense, so did he. He knew that in this room was another being, apart from the old woman, who also needed succour. ‘I must open my eyes. I must be a part of everything.’

  The back of the old woman hid from view what he wished to see. He could only discern her movements. The old black-robed arm moved with the regularity of a tin soldier hitting his drum, up and down, but noiselessly. When the old woman ceased and moved from where she had been crouching, succouring another being, the light fell on two dark burning eyes, luminous as the snow had been. Eyes, huge and as yet unseeing. Titus felt such a yearning that his stomach, which had been hollow for so long, turned over, and the sickness he had hitherto known as lust he realised was some kind of love.

  ‘Who are you? We were in the barn together. Your hair is still shaved, but your eyes are beautiful. They’re burning me. Somewhere in my memory is a story of burning – but what it is I cannot remember. Perhaps I never knew, perhaps it is only a memory that never existed except in my own mind – or something that Fuchsia . . .’

  Titus closed his eyes to recall the sister who could only love with her whole being, and then only a few chosen people, and of the few, her brother most of all. ‘I’ll never see her again – I’ll never know again the ardour of a love that knows no physical desire.’

  Daylight shone through the small latticed window, and it seemed as though there was nothing in the room but those two huge identical midnight pools of water, with twin half-circles of light that searched him out. The light from the pools shone with such brightness that Titus could not but be charged by them. The eyes continued their search and found his face and his eyes, so different, so knowledgeable. He wanted them to smile, and he wanted the smile to be returned. Four eyes searching.

  Why was it that now, as he lay immobilised, his past returned to him in the memory of a girl called ‘Black Rose’? She was a victim, and she shared the same look, the translucent skin and enormous black globes, and who, he had been told, died as her head touched the white pillow, and her emaciated body lay between virgin sheets. Titus asked himself if he would for ever only be able to see things present in terms of his own past. Would he never free himself?

  Those black brilliant eyes hunted him out, concentrating on him like the sun’s rays burning a piece of glass. He felt his cheeks flush, his mouth open, and a spasm of desire rendered him nearly insensible.

  ‘My name is Titus,’ he said in a cracked voice.

  The eyes continued without blinking to search his face.

  ‘I am Titus Groan.’

  ‘I am Titus – I am Titus,’ and his voice became shrill with impotence.

  He pushed all the bed coverings away from him in a determination to move. He looked at himself and did not recognise what he saw. Two stick insects to support his torso, and at their furthermost end a pair of feet, white, unused and wrinkled. He threw the insects over the bed and, as his feet touched the cold stone, he fell ignominiously. There was no strength in him.

  He raised his head to the eyes that were impelling him – the head raised upon an arm so thin that he knew his own incarceration was as nothing compared to what had reduced the once-rounded whiteness of flesh to the pathetic bone-covered skin he saw opposite him.

  He had intended to violate that flesh. He had wanted to hurt, because of his own hurt, but his weakness forbade him, and instead of the insolent virility of young manhood, he felt his body rendered down to the feebleness of age, and he no longer cared that he was a ludicrous sight.

  5

  As the Spring Awakes, So Do the Two Strangers

  SUNLIGHT, AN INTRUDER in the solitary room, rippled on the bare walls, mysterious and beautiful. Time had ceased to have meaning. The old woman who was both nurse and maid fed Titus and his companion. As the food became more solid, so Titus felt his strength returning.

  He had ceased to call out his name, and had used the long hours of silence to return over and over again to his childhood, and to his more immediate past, conscious always of the dark beauty watching him. There was no communication, only silence, which he realised was no longer lonely. He learned to enjoy the quiet but his youthful spirit could not be damped down or put out like the dying embers of a fire. He longed to rejoin life, to tread the perilous path
of the living.

  There came a day when the old toothless woman placed in front of him food that he was to tackle himself. Like a clown, she mimed the movements of eating and as she watched his clumsy, inelegant jostling of food into his mouth, she nodded her head with pleasure. A great soft cream paw laid itself gently on his knees, and he saw what he must have heard when he was lifted out of oblivion: a huge but gentle dog. A soft, sensuous muzzle nudged his cheek, yelped a little and nestled under his chin.

  I am me . . . I am alive . . . I am beginning again.

  ‘Who are you?’ he shouted, knowing that his question would remain unanswered. ‘What can I do to bring life into these limbs?’

  As Titus pushed back the coverings of his pallet bed, this time his two sticks felt a quiver of sentience in them. He was careful – he knew that it was only time that would bring back to him the movements he had always taken for granted.

  The dog bounced excitedly, like a child filled with joy at the promise of a feast and his eyes turned expectantly on Titus.

  A door was open and through it came a world from outside, a mild sun, a small breeze, a gentle tongue that licked his cheeks and his unused legs.

  Oh, I want to live. I want to be alive.

  Longing to stretch from foot to crown, Titus launched himself on to the stone floor and this time he did not fall. He had somewhere to go. Although his movements were that of an old man, his brain, and all his stirrings – his body and its needs – were those of a young man, deprived for too long of its necessities.

  He clung to the huge dog, his arms round its neck, as it propelled him, screaming inwardly with desire, towards the bed opposite. The limping journey from pallet to pallet seemed to take an eternity.