by Mervyn Peake
This seemed to do the Doctor a lot of good. He stared at the youth.
‘You do interest me, I must admit that much, Master Steerpike,’ he said. ‘Oh yes, I’ll go that far, ha, ha, ha! You interest me, or rather you tantalize me in a pleasant sort of way. But whether I want to have you hanging around my house is, as you with your enormous brain will readily admit, quite a different kettle of fish.’
‘I don’t hang about, sir. It is one of those things I never do.’
Fuchsia’s voice came slowly across the room.
‘You hung about in my room,’ she said. And then, bending forward, she looked up at the Doctor with an almost imploring expression. ‘He climbed there,’ she said. ‘He’s clever.’ Then she leaned back in her chair. ‘I am tired; and he saw my own room that nobody ever saw before he saw it, and it is worrying me. Oh, Dr Prune.’
There was a pause.
‘He climbed there,’ she said again.
‘I had to go somewhere,’ said Steerpike. ‘I didn’t know it was your room. How could I have known? I am sorry, your Ladyship.’
She did not answer.
Prunesquallor had looked from one to the other.
‘Aha! aha! Take a little of this powder, Fuchsia dear,’ he said, bringing across to her the white cardboard box. He removed the lid and tilted a little into her glass which he filled again with elderberry wine. ‘You won’t taste anything at all, my dear girl; just sip it up and you will feel as strong as a mountain tiger, ha, ha! Mrs Slagg you will take this box away with you. Four times a day, with whatever the dear child happens to be drinking. It is tasteless. It is harmless, and it is extremely efficacious. Do not forget, my good woman, will you? She needs something and this is the very something she needs, ha, ha, ha! this is the very something!’
Nannie received the box on which was written ‘Fuchsia. One teaspoonful to be taken 4 times a day.’
‘Master Steerpike,’ said the Doctor, ‘is that the reason you wanted to see me, to beard me in my den, and to melt my heart like tallow upon my own hearth-rug?’ He tilted his head at the youth.
‘That is so, sir,’ said Steerpike. ‘With Lady Fuchsia’s permission I accompanied her. I said to her: “Just let me see the Doctor, and put my case to him, and I am confident he will be impressed”.’
There was a pause. Then in a confidential voice Steerpike added: ‘In my less ambitious moments it is as a research scientist that I see myself, sir, and in my still less ambitious, as a dispenser.’
‘What knowledge of chemicals have you, if I may venture to remark?’ said the Doctor.
‘Under your initial guidance my powers would develop as rapidly as you could wish,’ said Steerpike.
‘You are a clever little monster,’ said the Doctor, tossing off another cognac and placing the glass upon the table with a click. ‘A diabolically clever little monster.’
‘That is what I hoped you would realize, Doctor,’ said Steerpike. ‘But haven’t all ambitious people something of the monstrous about them? You, sir, for instance, if you will forgive me, are a little bit monstrous.’
‘But, my poor youth,’ said Prunesquallor, beginning to pace the room, ‘there is not the minutest molecule of ambition in my anatomy, monstrous though it may appear to you, ha, ha, ha!’
His laughter had not the spontaneous, uncontrollable quality that it usually possessed.
‘But, sir,’ said Steerpike, ‘there has been.’
‘And why do you think so?’
‘Because of this room. Because of the exquisite furnishings you possess; because of your calf-bound books; your glassware; your violin. You could not have collected together such things without ambition.’
‘That is not ambition, my poor confused boy,’ said the Doctor: ‘it is a union between those erstwhile incompatibles, ha, ha, ha! – taste and a hereditary income.’
‘Is not taste a cultivated luxury?’ said Steerpike.
‘But yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘But yes. One has the potentialities for taste; on finding this out about oneself, ha, ha! – after a little self-probing, it is a cultivated thing, as you remark.’
‘Which needs assiduous concentration and diligence, no doubt,’ said the youth.
‘But yes; but yes,’ answered the Doctor smiling, with a note in his voice that suggested it was only common politeness in him to keep amused.
‘Surely such diligence is the same thing as ambitiousness. Ambitiousness to perfect your taste. That is what I mean by “ambition”, Doctor, I believe you have it. I do not mean ambition for success, for “success” is a meaningless word – the successful, so I hear, being very often, to themselves, failures of the first water.’
‘You interest me,’ said Prunesquallor. ‘I would like to speak to Lady Fuchsia alone. We haven’t been paying very much attention to her, I am afraid. We have deserted her. She is alone in a desert of her own. Only watch her.’
Fuchsia’s eyes were shut as she leaned back in the chair, her knees curled up under her.
‘While I speak with her you will be so very, very good as to leave the room. There’s a chair in the hall, Master Steerpike. Thank you, dear youth. It would be a handsome gesture.’
Steerpike disappeared at once, taking his brandy with him.
Prunesquallor looked at the old woman and the girl. Mrs Slagg, with her little mouth wide open, was fast asleep. Fuchsia had opened her eyes at the sound of the door shutting behind Steerpike.
The Doctor immediately beckoned her to approach. She came to him at once, her eyes wide.
‘I’ve waited so long, Dr Prune,’ she said. ‘Can I have my stone now?’
‘This very moment,’ said the Doctor. ‘This very second. You will not know very much about the nature of this stone, but you will treasure it more than anyone I could possibly think of. Fuchsia dear, you were so distraught as you ran like a wild pony away from your father and me; so distraught with your black mane and your big hungry eyes – that I said to myself: “It’s for Fuchsia”, although ponies don’t usually care much about such things, ha, ha, ha! But you will, won’t you?’
The Doctor took from his pocket a small pouch of softest leather.
‘Take it out yourself,’ he said. ‘Draw it out with this slender chain.’
Fuchsia took the pouch from the Doctor’s hand and from it drew forth into the lamplight a ruby like a lump of anger.
It burned in her palm.
She did not know what to do. She did not wonder what she ought to say. There was nothing at all to say. Dr Prunesquallor knew something of what she felt. At last, clutching the solid fire between her fingers, she shook Nannie Slagg, who screamed a little as she awoke. Fuchsia got to her feet and dragged her to the door. A moment before the Doctor opened it for them, Fuchsia turned her face up to his and parted her lips in a smile of such dark, sweet loveliness, so subtly blended with her brooding strangeness, that the Doctor’s hand clenched the handle of the door. He had never seen her look like this before. He had always thought of her as an ugly girl of whom he was strangely fond. But now, what was it he had seen? She was no longer a small girl for all her slowness of speech and almost irritating simplicity.
In the hall they passed the figure of Steerpike sitting comfortably on the floor beneath a large carved clock. They did not speak, and when they parted with the Doctor Nannie said: ‘Thank you’ in a sleepy voice and bowed slightly, one of her hands in Fuchsia’s. Fuchsia’s fingers clenched the blood-red stone and the Doctor only said: ‘Good-bye, and take care, my dears, take care. Happy dreams. Happy dreams,’ before he closed the door.
A GIFT OF THE GAB
As he returned through the hall his mind was so engrossed with his new vision of Fuchsia that he had forgotten Steerpike and was startled at the sound of steps behind him. A moment or two earlier Steerpike had himself been startled by footsteps descending the staircase immediately above where he had been sitting in the shadowy, tiger stripes of the banisters.
He moved swiftly up to the Doctor. ‘I a
m afraid I am still here,’ he said, and then glanced over his shoulder following the Doctor’s eyes. Steerpike turned and saw, descending the last three steps of the staircase, a lady whose similarity to Dr Prunesquallor was unmistakable, but whose whole deportment was more rigid. She, also, suffered from faulty eyesight, but in her case the glasses were darkly tinted so that it was impossible to tell at whom she was looking save by the general direction of the head, which was no sure indication.
The lady approached them. ‘Who is this?’ she said directing her face at Steerpike.
‘This,’ said her brother, ‘is none other than Master Steerpike, who was brought to see me on account of his talents. He is anxious for me to make use of his brain, ha, ha! – not, as you might suppose, as a floating specimen in one of my jam jars, ha, ha, ha! but in its functional capacity as a vortex of dazzling thought.’
‘Did he go upstairs just now?’ said Miss Irma Prunesquallor. ‘I said did he go upstairs just now?’
The tall lady had the habit of speaking at great speed and of repeating her questions irritably before there had been a moment’s pause in which they might be answered. Prunesquallor had in moments of whimsy often amused himself by trying to wedge an answer to her less complex queries between the initial question and its sharp echo.
‘Upstairs, my dear?’ repeated her brother.
‘I said “upstairs”, I think,’ said Irma Prunesquallor sharply. ‘I think I said “upstairs”. Have you, or he, or anyone been upstairs a quarter of an hour ago? Have you? Have you?’
‘Surely not! surely not!’ said the Doctor. ‘We have all been downstairs, I think. Don’t you?’ he said, turning to Steerpike.
‘I do,’ said Steerpike. The Doctor began to like the way the youth answered quietly and neatly.
Irma Prunesquallor drew herself together. Her long tightly fitting black dress gave peculiar emphasis to such major bone formations as the iliac crest, and indeed the entire pelvis; the shoulder blades, and in certain angles, as she stood in the lamplight, to the ribs themselves. Her neck was long and the Prunesquallors’ head sat upon it surrounded by the same grey thatch like hair as that adopted by her brother, but in her case knotted in a low bun at the neck.
‘The servant is out, OUT,’ she said. ‘It is his evening out. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’
She seemed to be addressing Steerpike, so he answered: ‘I have no knowledge of the arrangements you have made, madam. But he was in the Doctor’s room a few minutes ago, so I expect it was he whom you heard outside your door.’
‘Who said I heard anything outside my door?’ said Irma Prunesquallor, a trifle less rapidly than usual. ‘Who?’
‘Were you not within your room, madam?’
‘What of it? what of it?’
‘I gathered from what you said that you thought that there was someone walking about upstairs,’ answered Steerpike obliquely; ‘and if, as you say, you were inside your room, then you must have heard the footsteps outside your room. That is what I attempted to make clear, madam.’
‘You seem to know too much about it. Don’t you? don’t you?’ She bent forward and her opaque-looking glasses stared flatly at Steerpike.
‘I know nothing, madam,’ said Steerpike.
‘What, Irma dear, is all this? What in the name of all that’s circuitous is all this?’
‘I heard feet. That is all. Feet,’ said his sister; and then, after a pause she added with renewed emphasis: ‘Feet.’
‘Irma, my dear sister,’ said Prunesquallor, ‘I have two things to say. Firstly, why in the name of discomfort are we hanging around in the hall and probably dying of a draught that as far as I am concerned runs up my right trouser leg and sets my gluteous maximus twitching; and secondly, what is wrong, when you boil the matter down – with feet? I have always found mine singularly useful, especially for walking with. In fact, ha, ha, ha, one might almost imagine that they had been designed for that very purpose.’
‘As usual,’ said his sister, ‘you are drunk with your own levity. You have a brain, Alfred. I have never denied it. Never. But it is undermined by your insufferable levity. I tell you that someone has been prowling about upstairs and you take no notice. There has been no one to prowl. Do you not see the point?’
‘I heard something, too,’ said Steerpike, breaking in. ‘I was sitting in the hall where the Doctor suggested I should remain while he decided in what capacity he would employ me, when I heard what sounded like footsteps upstairs. I crept to the top of the stairs silently, but there was no one there, so I returned.’
Steerpike, thinking the upstairs to be empty, had in reality been making a rough survey of the first floor, until he heard what must have been Irma moving to the door of her room, at which sound he had slid down the banisters.
‘You hear what he says,’ said the lady, following her brother with a stiff irritation in every line of her progress. ‘You hear what he says.’
‘Very much so!’ said the Doctor, ‘Very much so, indeed. Most indigestible.’
Steerpike moved a chair up for Irma Prunesquallor with such a show of consideration for her comfort and such adroitness that she stared at him and her hard mouth relaxed at one corner.
‘Steerpike,’ she said, wrinkling her black dress above her hips as she reclined a little into her chair.
‘I am at your service, madam,’ said Steerpike. ‘What may I do for you?’
‘What on earth are you wearing? What are you wearing, boy?’
‘It is with great regret that at my introduction to you I should be in clothes that so belie my fastidious nature, madam,’ he said. ‘If you will advise me where I may procure the cloth I will endeavour to have myself fitted tomorrow. Standing beside you, madam, in your exquisite gown of darkness –’
‘ “Gown of darkness” is good,’ interrupted Prunesquallor, raising his hand to his head, where he spread his snow-white fingers across his brow, ‘ “Gown of darkness”. A phrase, ha, ha! Definitely a phrase.’
‘You have broken in, Alfred!’ said his sister. ‘Haven’t you? haven’t you? I will have a suit cut for you tomorrow, Steerpike,’ she continued. ‘You will be here, I suppose? Where are you sleeping? Is he sleeping here? Where do you live? Where does he live, Alfred? What have you arranged? Nothing, I expect. Have you done anything? Have you? have you?’
‘What sort of thing, Irma, my dear? What sort of thing are you referring to? I have done all sorts of things, I have removed a gallstone the size of a potato, I have played delicately upon my violin while a rainbow shone through the dispensary window; I have plunged so deeply into the poets of grief that save for my foresight in attaching fish-hooks to my clothes I might never again have been drawn earthwards, ha, ha! from those excruciating depths!’
Irma could tell exactly when her brother would veer off into soliloquy and had developed the power to pay no attention at all to what he said. The footsteps upstairs seemed forgotten. She watched Steerpike as he poured her out a glass of port with a gallantry quite remarkable in its technical perfection of movement and timing.
‘You wish to be employed. Is that it? Is that it?’ she said.
‘It is my ardent desire to be in your service,’ he said.
‘Why? Tell me why,’ said Miss Prunesquallor.
‘I endeavour to keep my mind in an equipoise between the intuitive, and rational reasoning, madam,’ he said. ‘But with you I cannot, for my intuitive desire to be of service overshadows my reasons, though they are many, I can only say I feel a desire to fulfil myself by finding employment under your roof. And so,’ he added, turning up the corners of his mouth in a quizzical smile, ‘that is the reason why I cannot exactly say why.’
‘Mixed up with this metaphysical impulse, this fulfilment that you speak of so smoothly,’ said the Doctor, ‘is no doubt a desire to snatch the first opportunity of getting away from Swelter and the unpleasant duties which you have no doubt had to perform. Is that not so?’
‘It is,’ said Steerpike.
This forthright answer so pleased the Doctor that he got up from his chair and, smiling toothily, poured himself yet another glass. What pleased him especially was the mixture of cunning and honesty which he did not yet perceive to be a still deeper strata of Steerpike’s cleverness.
Prunesquallor and his sister both felt a certain delight in making the acquaintance of a young gentleman with brains, however twisted those brains might be. It was true that in Gormenghast there were several cultivated persons, but they very seldom came in contact with them these days. The Countess was no conversationalist. The Earl was usually too depressed to be drawn upon subjects which had he so wished he could have discussed at length and with a dreamy penetration. The twin sisters could never have kept to the point of any conversation.
There were many others apart from the servants with whom Prunesquallor came into almost daily contact in the course of his social or professional duties, but seeing them overmuch had dulled his interest in their conversation and he was agreeably surprised to find that Steerpike, although very young, had a talent for words and a ready mind. Miss Prunesquallor saw less of people than her brother. She was pleased by the reference to her dress and was flattered by the manner in which he saw to her comforts. To be sure, he was rather a small creature. His clothes, of course, she would see to. His eyes at first she found rather monkey-like in their closeness and concentration, but as she got used to them she found there was something exciting in the way they looked at her. It made her feel he realized she was not only a lady, but a woman.
Her own brain was sharp and quick, but unlike her brother’s it was superficial, and she instinctively recognized in the youth a streak of cleverness akin to her own, although stronger. She had passed the age when a husband might be looked for. Had any man ever gazed at her in this light, the coincidence of his also having the courage to broach such a subject would have been too much to credit. Irma Prunesquallor had never met such a person, her admirers confining themselves to purely verbal approach.
As it happened Miss Prunesquallor, before her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of Steerpike’s feet padding past her bedroom door, had been in a state of dejection. Most people have periods of retrospection in which their thoughts are centred upon the less attractive elements in their past. Irma Prunesquallor was no exception, but today there had been something wild about her dejection. After readjusting her glasses irritably upon the bridge of her nose, she had wrung her hands before sitting at her mirror. She ignored the fact that her neck was too long, that her mouth was thin and hard, that her nose was far too sharp, and that her eyes were quite hidden, and concentrated on the profusion of coarse grey hair which swept back from her brow in one wave to where, low down on her neck, it gathered itself into a great hard knot – and on the quality of her skin, which was, indeed, unblemished. These two things alone in her eyes made her an object destined for admiration. And yet, what admiration had she received? Who was there to admire her or to compliment her upon her soft and peerless skin and on her sweep of hair?
