Titus Groan

by Mervyn Peake

  ‘Open the door and let that bird in! What are you waiting for, man?’ Then she whistled with a peculiar ventriloquism, and a wood warbler sped, undulating through the long, dark hollow of library air, to land on her finger.

  Irma simply twitched but was too refined to look round, and it was left to the Doctor to make contact with Fuchsia by means of an exquisitely timed wink with his left eye behind its convex lens, like an oyster shutting and opening itself beneath a pool of water.

  Sourdust, disturbed by this unseemly interjection and also by the presence of the wood warbler, which kept distracting his eye by running up and down Lady Gertrude’s arm, lifted his head again, fingering a running bowline in his beard.

  His hoarse and quavering voice wandered through the library like something lost.

  The long shelves surrounded them, tier upon tier, circumscribing their world with a wall of other worlds imprisoned yet breathing among the network of a million commas, semicolons, full stops, hyphens and every other sort of printed symbol.

  ‘We are gathered together,’ said Sourdust, ‘in this ancient library at the instigation of Sepulchrave, 76th Earl to the house of Gormenghast and lord of those tracts of country that stretch on every hand, in the North to the wastelands, in the South to the grey salt marshes, in the East to the quicksands and the tideless sea, and in the West to knuckles of endless rock.’

  This was delivered in one weak, monotonous stream. Sourdust coughed for some time and then, regaining his breath, continued mechanically: ‘We are gathered on this seventeenth day of October to give ear to his Lordship. These nights the moon is in the ascendant and the river is full of fish. The owls in the Tower of Flints seek their prey as heretofore and it is appropriate that his Lordship should, on the seventeenth day of an autumn month, bring forward the matter that is in his mind. The sacred duties which he has never wavered to perform are over for the hour. It is appropriate that it should be now – now, at the sixth hour of the daylight clock.

  ‘I as master of Ritual, as Guardian of the Documents and as Confidant to the Family, am able to say that for his Lordship to speak to you in no way contravenes the tenets of Gormenghast.

  ‘But, your Lordship, and your revered Ladyship,’ said Sourdust in his old singsong, ‘it is no secret to those here gathered that it is towards the child who now occupies pride of place, it is towards Lord Titus that our thoughts will converge this afternoon. That is no secret.’

  Sourdust gave vent to a dreadful chesty cough. ‘It is to Lord Titus,’ he said, gazing mistily at the child and then, raising his voice, ‘it is to Lord Titus,’ he repeated irritably.

  Nannie suddenly realized that the old man was making signs at her, and understood that she was to lift the infant up in the air as though he were a specimen, or something to be auctioned. She lifted him, but no one looked at the exhibit except Prunesquallor, who nearly engulfed Nannie, baby and all with a smile so devouring, so dental, as to cause Nannie to raise her shoulder against it and to snatch Titus back to her little flat chest.

  ‘I will turn my back on you and strike the table four times,’ said Sourdust. ‘Slagg will bring the child to the table and Lord Sepulchrave will –’ here he suffered a more violent fit of coughing than ever, and at the same moment Irma’s neck quivered a little and she in her own way followed suit with five little ladylike barks. She turned her head apologetically in the direction of the Countess and wrinkled her forehead in self-deprecation. She could see that the Countess had taken no notice of her mute apology. She arched her nostrils. It had not crossed her mind there was a smell in the room other than the prevalent smell of musty leather: it was just that her nostrils with their hypersensitive nerveendings were acting on their own accord.

  Sourdust took some time to recover from his bout, but eventually he straightened himself and repeated:

  ‘Slagg will bring the child to the table, and Lord Sepulchrave will graciously advance, following his menial, and on arriving at a point immediately behind me will touch the back of my neck with the forefinger of his left hand.

  ‘At this signal I and Slagg will retire, and Slagg, having left the infant on the table, Lord Sepulchrave will pass behind the table and stand facing us across its surface.’

  ‘Are you hungry, my little love? Is there no grain inside you? Is that it? Is that it?’

  The voice came forth so suddenly and heavily and so closely upon the quavering accents of Sourdust that everyone felt for the first few moments that the remark was addressed to them personally; but on turning their heads they could see that the Countess was addressing herself exclusively to the wood warbler. Whether the warbler made any reply was never ascertained for not only was Irma seized with a new and less ladylike bout of short dry coughs, but her brother and Nannie Slagg, joining her, filled the room with noise.

  The bird rose into the air, startled, and Lord Sepulchrave stopped on his passage to the table and turned irritably to the line of noisy figures; but as he did so a faint smell of smoke making itself perceptible for the first time caused him to raise his head and sniff the air in a slow, melancholy way. At the same time Fuchsia felt a roughness in her throat. She glanced about the room and wrinkled her nose, for smoke though still invisible was infiltrating steadily through the library.

  Prunesquallor had risen from beside the Countess and with his white hands wound about each other and with his mouth twisted into a quizzical line he permitted his eyes to move rapidly around the room. His head was cocked on one side.

  ‘What’s the matter, man?’ asked the Countess heavily from immediately below him. She was still seated.

  ‘The matter?’ queried the Doctor, smiling more emphatically but still keeping his eyes on the move. ‘It is a case of atmosphere, as far as I can dare to judge at such very, very short notice, your Ladyship, as far as I dare to judge. ha, ha, ha! It is a case of thickening atmosphere, ha, ha!’

  ‘Smoke,’ said the Countess heavily and bluntly. ‘What is the matter with smoke? Haven’t you ever smelt it before?’

  ‘Many and many a time, your Ladyship,’ answered the Doctor. ‘But never, if I may say so, never in here.’

  The Countess grunted to herself and settled deeper into the chair.

  ‘There never is smoke in here,’ said Lord Sepulchrave. He turned his head to the door and raised his voice a little:

  ‘Flay.’

  The long servant emerged out of the shadows like a spider.

  ‘Open the door,’ said Lord Sepulchrave sharply; and as the spider turned and began its return journey his Lordship took a step towards old Sourdust, who was by now doubled over the table in a paroxysm of coughing. His Lordship taking one of Sourdust’s elbows beckoned to Fuchsia, who came across the room and supported the old man on the other side, and the three of them began to make their way to the door in Flay’s wake.

  Lady Groan simply sat like a mountain and watched the little bird.

  Dr Prunesquallor was wiping his eyes, his thick glasses pushed for the moment above his eyebrows. But he was very much on the alert and as soon as his spectacles were again in place he grinned at everyone in turn. His eye lingered for a moment on his sister Irma, who was systematically tearing an expensively embroidered cream-coloured silk handkerchief into small pieces. Behind the dark lenses of her glasses her eyes were hidden from view, but to judge from the thin, wet, drooping line of her mouth and the twitching of the skin on her pointed nose it might be safely assumed that they were making contact with, and covering the inner side of, the lenses of her spectacles with the moisture with which the smoke had filmed them.

  The Doctor placed the tips of his fingers and thumbs together and then, separating the tapering extremities of the index fingers, he watched them for a few seconds as they gyrated around one another. Then his eyes turned to the far end of the room where he could see the Earl and his daughter, with the old man between them, approaching the library door. Someone, presumably Flay, seemed to be making a great deal of noise in wrestling with the heavy
iron door handle.

  The smoke was spreading, and the Doctor, wondering why in the devil’s name the door had not been thrown open, began to peer about the room in an effort to locate the source of the ever-thickening wreaths. As he took a step past Nannie Slagg he saw that she was standing by the table from whose marble surface she had plucked Titus. She was holding him very closely to herself and had wrapped him in layers of cloth which had completely hidden him from view. A sound of muffled crying could be heard coming from the bundle. Nannie’s little wrinkled mouth was hanging open. Her streaming eyes were redder than usual with the stinging smoke. But she stood quite still.

  ‘My very dear good woman,’ said Dr Prunesquallor, turning on his heel as he was about to float past her, ‘my very dear Slagg, convey his minute Lordship to the door that for some reason that is too subtle for me to appreciate remains shut. Why, in the name of Ventilation, I don’t know. But it does. It remains shut. Take him nevertheless, my dear Slagg, to the aforesaid door and place his infinitesimal head at the keyhole (surely THAT’S still open!), and even if you cannot squeeze the child right through it you can at least give his Lordship’s lungs something to get on with.’

  Nannie Slagg was never very good at interpreting the Doctor’s long sentences, especially when coming through a haze of smoke, and all that she could gather was that she should attempt to squeeze her tiny Lordship through the keyhole. Clutching the baby even tighter in her thin arms, ‘No! no! no!’ she cried, retreating from the doctor.

  Dr Prunesquallor rolled his eyes at the Countess. She was apparently aware of the state of the room at last and was gathering together great swathes of drapery in a slow, deliberate manner preparatory to rising to her feet.

  The rattling at the library door became more violent, but the indigenous shadows and the smoke combined to make it impossible to see what was going on.

  ‘Slagg,’ said the Doctor, advancing on her, ‘go to the door immediately, like the intelligent woman you are!’

  ‘No! no!’ shrieked the midget, in so silly a voice that Doctor Prunesquallor after taking a handkerchief from his pocket lifted her from her feet and tucked her under his arm. The handkerchief enveloping Nannie Slagg’s waist prevented the nurse’s garments from coming in contact with the Doctor’s clothes. Her legs, like black twigs blown in the wind, gesticulated for a few moments and then were still.

  Before they had reached the door, however, they were met by Lord Sepulchrave, who emerged darkly from the smoke. ‘The door has been locked from the outside,’ he whispered between fits of coughing.

  ‘Locked?’ queried Prunesquallor. ‘Locked, your Lordship? By all that’s perfidious! This is becoming intriguing. Most intriguing. Perhaps a bit too intriguing. What do you think, Fuchsia, my dear little lady? Eh? ha, ha! Well, well, we must become positively cerebral, mustn’t we? By all that’s enlightened we really must! Can it be smashed?’ He turned to Lord Sepulchrave. ‘Can we breach it, your Lordship, battery and assault and all that delicious sort of thing?’

  ‘Too thick, Prunesquallor,’ said Lord Sepulchrave: ‘four-inch oak.’

  He spoke slowly in strange contrast to Prunesquallor’s rapid, ejaculatory chirping.

  Sourdust had been propped near the door, where he sat coughing as though to shake his old body to bits.

  ‘No key for the other door,’ continued Lord Sepulchrave slowly. ‘It is never used. What about the window?’ For the first time a look of alarm appeared on his ascetic face. He walked quickly to the nearest bookshelves and ran his fingers along the spines of calf. Then he turned with a quickness unusual for him. ‘Where is the smoke thickest?’

  ‘I’ve been searching for its origin, your Lordship,’ came Prunesquallor’s voice out of the haze. ‘It’s everywhere so thick that it’s very difficult to say. By all the pits of darkness it most damnably is. But I’m looking, ha, ha! I’m looking.’ He trilled for a moment like a bird, then his voice came again. ‘Fuchsia, dear!’ he shouted. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes!’ Fuchsia had to swallow hard before she could shout back, for she was very frightened, ‘Yes, Dr Prune.’

  ‘Slagg!’ shouted the Doctor, ‘keep Titus near the keyhole. See that she does, Fuchsia.’

  ‘Yes,’ whispered Fuchsia; and went in search of Mrs Slagg.

  It was just then that an uncontrolled scream rang through the room.

  Irma, who had been tearing her cream-coloured handkerchief, now found that she had ripped it into such minute particles that with nothing left to tear, and with her hands in forced idleness, she could control herself no longer. Her knuckles had tried to stifle the cry, but her terror had grown too strong for such expedients, and at the final moment she forgot all she had learnt about decorum and about how to be a lady, and clenching her hands at her thighs she had stood on tip-toe and screamed from her swanlike throat with an effect calculated to freeze the blood of a macaw.

  An enormous figure had loomed out of the smoke a few feet from Lord Sepulchrave, and as he watched the vague head take shape and recognized it as that belonging to the top half of his wife’s body, his limbs had stiffened, for Irma’s scream had rung out simultaneously with the appearance of the head, the untoward proximity of which conjointed with the scream giving ventriloquistic horror to the moment. Added to the frightfulness of a head and a voice, attacking his ear and eye simultaneously though from different distances, was the dreadful conception of Gertrude losing control in that way and giving vent to a scream of such a shrill pitch as to be incompatible with the slack ’cello string that reverberated so heavily in her throat. He knew at once that it was not Gertrude who had screamed, but the very idea that it might have been, filled him with sickness, and there raced through his mind the thought that for all his wife’s uncompromising, loveless weight of character it would be a grim and evil thing were she to change.

  The flat blur of his wife’s head turned itself towards the scream upon a blurred neck, and he could see the vast wavering profile begin to move away from him, inch by inch, and steer into the thickness beyond, charting its course by the shrill shooting-star of Irma’s cry.

  Lord Sepulchrave gripped his hands together convulsively until his knuckles were bloodless and their ten staring crests wavered whitely through the smoke which lay between his hands and his head.

  The blood began to beat a tattoo at his temples, and upon his high white brow a few big beads gathered.

  He was biting at his lower lip, and his eyebrows were drawn down over his eyes as though he were cogitating upon some academic problem. He knew that no one could see him, for by now the smoke was all but opaque, but he was watching himself. He could see that the position of his arms, and the whole attitude of his body was exaggerated and stiffened. He discovered that his fingers were splayed out in a histrionic gesture of alarm. It was for him to control his members before he could hope to organize the activities in the smoke-filled room. And so he watched and waited for the moment to assert himself, and as he watched he found himself struggling. There was blood on his tongue. He had bitten his wrist. His hands were now grappling with one another and it seemed an eternity before the fingers ceased their deadly, interlocked and fratricidal strangling. Yet his panic could have taken no longer than a few moments, for the echo of Irma’s scream was still in his ears when he began to loosen his hands.

  Meanwhile Prunesquallor had reached his sister’s side and had found her bridling her body up in preparation for another scream. Prunesquallor, as urbane as ever, had nevertheless something in his fish-like eyes that might almost be described as determination. One glance at his sister was sufficient to make him realize that to attempt to reason with her would be about as fruitful as to try to christianize a vulture. She was on tip-toe and her lungs were expanded when he struck her across her long white face with his long white hand, the pent breath from her lungs issuing from her mouth, ears and nostrils. There was something of shingle in the sound – of shingle dragged seawards on a dark night.

  Dragging
her across the room swiftly, her heels scraping the floor, he found a chair, after probing around in the smoke with his delicate feet, and sat his sister in it.

  ‘Irma!’ he shouted into her ear, ‘my humiliating and entirely unfortunate old string of whitewash, sit where you are! Alfred will do the rest. Can you hear me? Be good now! blood of my blood, be good now, damn you!’

  Irma sat quite still as though dead, save for a look of profound wonder in her eyes.

  Prunesquallor was on the point of making another effort to locate the origin of the smoke when he heard Fuchsia’s voice high above the coughing that by now was a constant background of noise in the library.

  ‘Dr Prune! Dr Prune! quickly! Quickly, Dr Prune!’

  The Doctor pulled down his cuffs smartly over his wrists, tried to square his shoulders, but met with no success, and then began to pick his way, half running, half walking, towards the door where Fuchsia, Mrs Slagg and Titus had been last seen. When he judged he was about halfway to the door and was clear of the furniture, Prunesquallor began to accelerate his speed. This he did by increasing not only the length of his stride but the height also, so that he was, as it were, prancing through the air, when he was brought to a sudden ruthless halt by a collision with something that felt like an enormous bolster on end.

  When he had drawn his face away from the tallow smelling draperies that seemed to hang about him like curtains, he stretched out his hand tentatively and shuddered to feel it come in contact with large fingers.

  ‘’Squallor?’ came the enormous voice. ‘Is that ’Squallor?’ The mouth of the Countess was opening and shutting within an inch of his left ear.

  The Doctor gesticulated eloquently, but his artistry was wasted in the smoke.