by Mervyn Peake
‘My name is Steerpike,’ he said, leaning back against the window in the darkness, ‘but I cannot tell you now where the field of stones lies all cold in the clouds. No, I couldn’t tell you that – not yet.’
‘Who are you?’ said Fuchsia again. ‘Who are you in my room?’
‘I have told you,’ he said. ‘I am Steerpike. I have climbed to your lovely room. I like your pictures on the walls and your book and your horrible root.’
‘My root is beautiful. Beautiful!’ shouted Fuchsia. ‘Do not talk about my things. I hate you for talking about my things. Don’t look at them.’ She ran to the twisted and candle-lit root of smooth wood in the wavering darkness and stood between it and the window where he was.
Steerpike took out his little pipe from his pocket and sucked the stem. She was a strange fish, he thought, and needed carefully selected bait.
‘How did you get to my room?’ said Fuchsia huskily.
‘I climbed,’ said Steerpike. ‘I climbed up the ivy to your room. I have been climbing all day.’
‘Go away from the window,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Go away to the door.’
Steerpike, surprised, obeyed her. But his hands were in his pockets. He felt more sure of his ground.
Fuchsia moved gauchely to the window taking up the candle as she passed the table, and peering over the sill, held the shaking flame above the abyss. The drop, which she remembered so well by daylight, looked even more terrifying now.
She turned towards the room. ‘You must be a good climber,’ she said sullenly but with a touch of admiration in her voice which Steerpike did not fail to detect.
‘I am,’ said Steerpike. ‘But I can’t bear my face like this any longer. Let me have some water. Let me wash my face, your Ladyship; and then if I can’t stay here, tell me where I can go and sleep, I haven’t had a cat’s nap. I am tired; but the stone field haunts me. I must go there again after I’ve rested.’
There was a silence.
‘You’ve got kitchen clothes on,’ said Fuchsia flatly.
‘Yes,’ said Steerpike. ‘But I’m going to change them. It’s the kitchen I escaped from. I detested it. I want to be free. I shall never go back.’
‘Are you an adventurer?’ said Fuchsia, who, although she did not think he looked like one, had been more than impressed by his climb and by the flow of his words.
‘I am,’ said Steerpike. ‘That’s just what I am. But at the moment I want some water and soap.’
There was no water in the attic, but the idea of taking him down to her bedroom where he could wash and then go away for food, rankled in her, for he would pass through her other attic rooms. Then she realized that he had, in any event, to leave her sanctum and, saving for a return climb down the ivy the only path lay through the attics and down the spiral staircase to her bedroom. Added to this was the thought that if she took him down now he would see very little of her rooms in the darkness, whereas tomorrow her attic would be exposed.
‘Lady Fuchsia,’ said Steerpike, ‘what work is there that I can do? Will you introduce me to someone who can employ me? I am not a kitchen lackey, my Ladyship. I am a man of purpose. Hide me tonight, Lady Fuchsia, and let me meet someone tomorrow who may employ me. All I want is one interview. My brains will do the rest.’
Fuchsia stared at him, open mouthed. Then she thrust her full lower lip forward and said:
‘What’s the awful smell?’
‘It’s the filthy dregs you drowned me in,’ said Steerpike. ‘It’s my face you’re smelling.’
‘Oh,’ said Fuchsia. She took up the candle again. ‘You’d better follow.’
Steerpike did so, out of the door, along the balcony, and then down the ladder. Fuchsia did not think of helping him in the ill-lit darkness, though she heard him stumble. Steerpike kept as close to her as he could and the little patch of faint candlelight on the floor which preceded her, but as she threaded her way dexterously between the oddments that lay banked up in the first attic, he was more than once struck across the face, by a hanging rope of spiked seashells, by the giraffe’s leg which Fuchsia ducked beneath, and once he was brought to a gasping halt by the brass hilt of a sword.
When he had reached the head of the spiral staircase Fuchsia was already halfway down and he wound after her, cursing.
After a long time he felt the close air of the staircase lighten about him and a few moments later he had come to the last of the descending circles and had stepped down into a bedroom. Fuchsia lit a lamp on the wall. The blinds were not drawn and the black night filled up the triangles of her window.
She was pouring from a jug the water which Steerpike so urgently needed. The smell was beginning to affect him, for as he had stepped down into the room he had retched incontinently, with his thin, bony hands at his stomach.
At the gurgling sound of the water as it slopped into the bowl on Fuchsia’s washstand he drew a deep breath through his teeth. Fuchsia, hearing his foot descend upon the boards of her room, turned, jug in hand, and as she did so she overflooded the bowl with a rush of water which in the lamplight made bright pools on the dark ground. ‘Water,’ she said, ‘if you want it.’
Steerpike advanced rapidly to the basin and plucked off his coat and vest, and stood beside Fuchsia in the darkness very thin, very bunched at the shoulders, and with an extraordinary perkiness in the poise of his body.
‘What about soap?’ said Steerpike, lowering his arms into the basin. The water was cold, and he shivered. His shoulder blades stood out sharply from his back as he bent over and shrugged his shoulders together. ‘I can’t get this much off without soap and a scrubbing-brush, your Ladyship.’
‘There’s some things in that drawer,’ said Fuchsia slowly. ‘Hurry up and finish, and then go away. You’re not in your own room. You’re in my room where no one’s allowed to come, only my old nurse. So hurry up and go away.’
‘I will,’ said Steerpike, opening the drawer and rummaging among the contents until he had found a piece of soap. ‘But don’t forget you promised to introduce me to someone who might employ me.’
‘I didn’t,’ said Fuchsia. ‘How do you dare to tell such lies to me? How do you dare!’
Then came Steerpike’s stroke of genius. He saw that there was no object in pressing his falsehood any further and, making a bold move into the unknown he leapt with great agility away from the basin, his face now thick in lather. Wiping away the white froth from his lips, he channelled a huge dark mouth with his forefinger and posturing in the attitude of a clown listening he remained immobile for seven long seconds with his hand to his ear. Where the idea had come from he did not know, but he had felt since he first met Fuchsia that if anything were to win her favour it was something tinged with the theatre, the bizarre, and yet something quite simple and guileless, and it was this that Steerpike found difficult. Fuchsia stared hard. She forgot to hate him. She did not see him. She saw a clown, a living limb of nonsense. She saw something she loved as she loved her root, her giraffe leg, her crimson dress.
‘Good!’ she shouted, clenching her hands. ‘Good! good! good! good!’ All at once she was on her bed, landing upon both her knees at once. Her hands clasped the footrail.
A snake writhed suddenly under the ribs of Steerpike. He had succeeded. What he doubted for the moment was whether he could live up to the standard he had set himself.
He saw, out of the corner of his eye, which like the rest of his face was practically smothered in soap-suds, the dim shape of Lady Fuchsia looming a little above him on the bed. It was up to him. He didn’t know much about clowns, but he knew that they did irrational things very seriously, and it had occurred to him that Fuchsia would enjoy them. Steerpike had an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it. He was almost entirely cerebral in his approach. But this could not easily be perceived; so shrewdly, so surely he seemed to enter into the heart of whatever he wished, in his words or his deeds, to mimic.
From the ludicrous listening posture he s
traightened himself slowly, and with his toes turned outwards extravagantly he ran a few steps towards a corner of Fuchsia’s room, and then stopped to listen again, his hand at his ear. Continuing his run he reached the corner and picked up, after several efforts at getting his hand to reach as far down as the floor, a piece of green cloth which he hobbled back with, his feet as before turned out so far as to produce between them a continuous line.
Fuchsia, in a transport, watched him, the knuckles of her right hand in her mouth, as he began a thorough examination of the bed rail immediately below her. Every now and then he would find something very wrong with the iron surface of the rail and would rub it vigorously with his rag, stand back from it for a longer view, with his head on one side, the dark of the soapless mouth drooping at each corner in anguish, and then polish the spot again, breathing upon it and rubbing it with an inhuman concentration of purpose. All the time he was thinking. ‘What a fool I am, but it will work.’ He could not sink himself. He was not the artist. He was the exact imitation of one.
All at once he removed with his forefinger a plump sud of soap from the centre of his forehead, leaving a rough, dark circle of skin where it had been, and tapped his frothy finger along the footrail three times at equal intervals, leaving about a third of the soap behind at each tap. Waddling up and down at the end of the bed, he examined each of these blobs in turn and, as though trying to decide which was the most imposing specimen, removed one after the other until, with only the central sud remaining, he came to a halt before it, and then, kicking away one of his feet in an extraordinarily nimble way, he landed himself flat on his face in a posture of obedience.
Fuchsia was too thrilled to speak. She only stared, happy beyond happiness. Steerpike got to his feet and grinned at her, the lamplight glinting upon his uneven teeth. He went at once to the basin and renewed his ablutions more vigorously than ever.
While Fuchsia knelt on her bed and Steerpike rubbed his head and face with an ancient and grubby towel, there came a knock upon the door and Nannie Slagg’s voice piped out thinly:
‘Is my conscience there? Is my sweet piece of trouble there? Are you there, my dear heart, then? Are you there?’
‘No, Nannie, no, I’m not! Not now. Go away and come back again soon, and I’ll be here,’ shouted Fuchsia thickly, scrambling to the door. And then with her mouth to the keyhole: ‘What d’you want? What d’you want?’
‘Oh, my poor heart! what’s the matter, then? What’s the matter, then? What is it, my conscience?’
‘Nothing, Nannie. Nothing. What d’you want?’ said Fuchsia, breathing hard.
Nannie was used to Fuchsia’s sudden and strange changes of mood; so after a pause in which Fuchsia could hear her sucking her wrinkled lower lip, the old nurse answered:
‘It’s the Doctor, dear. He says he’s got a present for you, my baby. He wants you to go to his house, my only, and I’m to take you.’
Fuchsia, hearing a ‘Tck! tck!’ behind her, turned and saw a very clean-looking Steerpike gesturing to her. He nodded his head rapidly and jerked his thumb at the door, and then, with his index and longest finger strutting along the washstand, indicated, as far as she could read, that she should accept the offer to walk to the Doctor’s with Nannie Slagg.
‘All right!’ shouted Fuchsia, ‘but I’ll come to your room. Go there and wait.’
‘Hurry, then, my love!’ wailed the thin, perplexed voice from the passage. ‘Don’t keep him waiting.’
As Mrs Slagg’s feet receded, Fuchsia shouted: ‘What’s he giving me?’
But the old nurse was beyond earshot.
Steerpike was dusting his clothes as well as he could. He had brushed his sparse hair and it looked like dank grass as it lay flatly over his big forehead.
‘Can I come, too?’ he said.
Fuchsia turned her eyes to him quickly.
‘Why?’ she said at last.
‘I have a reason,’ said Steerpike. ‘You can’t keep me here all night, anyway, can you?’
This argument seemed good to Fuchsia and, ‘Oh, yes, you can come, too,’ she said at once. ‘But what about Nannie,’ she added slowly. ‘What about my nurse?’
‘Leave her to me,’ said Steerpike. ‘Leave her to me.’
Fuchsia hated him suddenly and deeply for saying this, but she made no answer.
‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘Don’t stay in my room any more. What are you waiting for?’ And unbolting the door she led the way, Steerpike following her like a shadow to Mrs Slagg’s bedroom.
AT THE PRUNESQUALLORS
Mrs Slagg was so agitated at the sight of an outlandish youth in the company of her Fuchsia that it was several minutes before she had recovered sufficiently to listen to anything in the way of an explanation. Her eyes would dart to and fro from Fuchsia to the features of the intruder. She stood for so long a time, plucking nervously at her lower lip, that Fuchsia realized it was useless to continue with her explanation and was wondering what to do next when Steerpike’s voice broke in.
‘Madam,’ he said, addressing Mrs Slagg, ‘my name is Steerpike, and I ask you to forgive my sudden appearance at the door of your room.’ And he bowed very low indeed, his eyes squinting up through his eyebrows as he did so.
Mrs Slagg took three uncertain steps towards Fuchsia and clutched her arm.
‘What is he saying? What is he saying? Oh, my poor heart, who is he, then? What has he done to you, my only?’
‘He’s coming, too,’ said Fuchsia, by way of an answer. ‘Wants to see Dr Prune as well. What’s his present? What’s he giving me a present for? Come on. Let’s go to his house. I’m tired. Be quick, I want to go to bed.’
Mrs Slagg suddenly became very active when Fuchsia mentioned her tiredness and started for the door, holding the girl by her forearm. ‘You’ll be into your bed in no time. I’ll put you there myself and tuck you in, and turn your lamp out for you as I always did, my wickedness, and you can go to sleep until I wake you, my only, and can give you breakfast by the fire; so don’t you mind, my tired thing. Only a few minutes with the Doctor – only a few minutes.’
They passed through the door, Mrs Slagg peering suspiciously around
Fuchsia’s arm at the quick movements of the high-shouldered boy.
Without another word between them they began to descend several flights of stairs until they reached a hall where armour hung coldly upon the walls and the corners were stacked with old weapons that were as rich with rust as a hedge of winter beech. It was no place to linger in, for a chill cut upwards from the stone floor and cold beads of moisture stood like sweat upon the tarnished surface of iron and steel.
Steerpike arched his nostrils at the dank air and his eyes travelled swiftly over the medley of corroding trophies, of hanging panoplies, smouldering with rust; and the stack of small arms, and noted a slim length of steel whose far end seemed to be embedded in some sort of tube, but it was impossible to make it out clearly in the dim light. A swordstick leapt to his mind, and his acquisitive instincts were sharpened at the thought. There was no time, however, for him to rummage among the heaps of metal at the moment, for he was conscious of the old woman’s eyes upon him, and he followed her and Fuchsia out of the hall vowing to himself that at the first opportunity he would visit the chill place again.
The door by which they made their exit lay opposite the flight that led down to the centre of the unhealthy hall. On passing through it they found themselves at the beginning of an ill-lit corridor, the walls of which were covered with small prints in faded colours. A few of them were in frames, but of these only a small proportion had their glass unbroken. Nannie and Fuchsia, being familiar with the corridor, had no thought for its desolate condition nor for the mellowed prints that depicted in elaborate but unimaginative detail the more obviously pictorial aspects of Gormenghast. Steerpike rubbed his sleeve across one or two as he followed, removing a quantity of dust, and glanced at them critically, for it was unlike him to let any kind of information slip fr
om him unawares.
This corridor ended abruptly at a heavy doorway, which Fuchsia opened with an effort, letting in upon the passage a less oppressive darkness for it was late evening, and beyond the door a flock of clouds were moving swiftly across a slate-coloured sky in which one star rode alone.
‘Oh, my poor heart, how late it’s getting!’ said Nannie, peering anxiously at the sky, and confiding her thoughts to Fuchsia in such a surreptitious way that it might be supposed she was anxious that the firmament should not overhear her. ‘How late it is getting, my only, and I must be back with your Mother very soon. I must take her something to drink, the poor huge thing. Oh, no, we mustn’t be long!’
Before them was a large courtyard and at the opposite corner was a threestoried building attached to the main bulk of the castle by a flying buttress. By day it stood out strangely from the ubiquitous grey stone of Gormenghast, for it was built with a hard red sandstone from a quarry that had never since been located.
Fuchsia was very tired. The day had been overcharged with happenings. Now, as the last of the daylight surrendered in the west, she was still awake and beginning, not ending, another experience.
Mrs Slagg was clasping her arm, and as they approached the main doorway, she stopped suddenly and, as was her usual habit when flustered, brought her hand up to her mouth and pulled at her little lower lip, her old watery eyes peering weakly at Fuchsia. She was about to say something, when the sound of footsteps caused her and her two companions to turn and to stare at a figure approaching in the darkness. A faint sound as of something brittle being broken over and over again accompanied his progress towards them.
‘Who is it?’ said Mrs Slagg. ‘Who is it, my only? Oh, how dark it is!’
‘It’s only Flay,’ said Fuchsia. ‘Come on. I’m tired.’ But they were hailed from the gloom.
‘Who?’ cried the hard, awkward voice. Mr Flay’s idiom, if at times unintelligible, was anything but prolix.
‘What do you want, Mr Flay?’ shouted Nannie, much to her own and to Fuchsia’s surprise.
