Titus Groan

by Mervyn Peake

  ‘No, I am not afraid,’ she said. ‘It is I who am choosing what I shall do.’

  The old man lifted his rough head. His eyes in the lamplight appeared as wells of brown light.

  ‘The child will come to me when she is ready,’ he said. ‘I will always be here.’

  ‘It is the Dwellers,’ said Keda. ‘It is they.’ Her left hand drew involuntarily to beneath her heart, and her fingers wavered there a moment as though lost. ‘Two men have died for me; and I bring back to the Bright Carvers their blood, on my hands, and the unlawful child. They will reject me – but I shall not mind, for still … still… my bird is singing – and in the graveyard of the outcasts I will have my reward – oh father – my reward, the deep, deep silence which they cannot break.’

  The lamp trembled and shadows moved across the room, returning stealthily as the flame steadied.

  ‘It will not be long,’ he said. ‘In a few days’ time you shall begin your journey.’

  ‘Your dark-grey mare,’ said Keda, ‘how shall I return her to you, father?’

  ‘She will return,’ he replied, ‘alone. When you are near to the Dwellings, set her free and she will turn and leave you.’

  She took her hand from his arm and walked to her room. All night long the voice of a little wind among the reeds cried: ‘Soon, soon, soon.’

  On the fifth day he helped her to the rough blanket saddle. Upon the mare’s broad back were slung two baskets of loaves and other provender. Her path lay to the north of the cabin, and she turned for a moment before the mare moved away to take a last look at the scene before her. The stony field beyond the high trees. The roofless house, and to her west, the hillocks of pale hair, and beyond the hillocks the distant woods. She looked her last upon the rough grass enclosure; the well, and the tree which cast its long shadow. She looked her last at the white goat with its head of snow. It was sitting with one frail white foreleg curled to its heart.

  ‘No harm will come to you. You are beyond the power of harm. You will not hear their voices. You will bear your child, and when the time has come you will make an end of all things.’

  Keda turned her eyes to him. ‘I am happy, father. I am happy. I know what to do.’

  The grey mare stepped forward into darkness beneath trees, and pacing with a strange deliberation turned eastwards along a green path between banks of fern. Keda sat very still and very upright with her hands in her lap while they drew nearer with every pace to Gormenghast and the homes of the Bright Carvers.

  EARLY ONE MORNING

  Spring has come and gone, and the summer is at its height.

  It is the morning of the Breakfast, of the ceremonial Breakfast. Prepared in honour of Titus, who is one year old today, it piles itself magnificently across the surface of a table at the northern end of the refectory. The servants’ tables and benches have been removed so that a cold stone desert spreads southwards unbroken save by the regular pillars on either side which lead away in dwindling perspective. It is the same dining-hall in which the Earl nibbles his frail toast at eight o’clock every morning – the hall whose ceiling is riotous with flaking cherubs, trumpets and clouds, whose high walls trickle with the damp, whose flagstones sigh at every step.

  At the northern extremity of this chill province the gold plate of the Groans, pranked across the shining black of the long table, smoulders as though it contains fire; the cutlery glitters with a bluish note; the napkins, twisted into the shape of doves, detach themselves from their surroundings for very whiteness, and appear to be unsupported. The great hall is empty and there is no sound save the regular dripping of rainwater from a dark patch in the cavernous ceiling. It has been raining since the early hours of the morning and by now a small lake is gathered halfway down the long stone avenue between the pillars, reflecting dimly an irregular section of the welkin where a faded cluster of cherubs lie asleep in the bosom of a mildew’d cloud. It is to this cloud, darkened with real rain, that the drops cling sluggishly and fall at intervals through the half-lit air to the glaze of water below.

  Swelter has just retired to his clammy quarters after casting his professional eye for the last time over the breakfast table. He is pleased with his work and as he arrives at the kitchen there is a certain satisfaction in the twist of his fat lips. There are still two hours to run before the dawn.

  Before he pushes open the door of the main kitchen he pauses and listens with his ear to the panels. He is hoping to hear the voice of one of his apprentices, of any one of his apprentices – it would not matter which – for he has ordered silence until his return. The little uniformed creatures had been lined up in two rows. Two of them are squabbling in thin, high whispers.

  Swelter is in his best uniform, a habit of exceptional splendour, the high cap and tunic being of virgin silk. Doubling his body he opens the door the merest fraction of an inch and applies his eye to the fissure. As he bends, the shimmering folds of the silk about his belly hiss and whisper like the voice of far and sinister waters or like some vast, earthless ghost-cat sucking its own breath. His eye, moving around the panel of the door, is like something detached, self-sufficient, and having no need of the voluminous head that follows it nor for that matter of the mountainous masses undulating to the crutch, and the soft, trunklike legs. So alive is it, this eye, quick as an adder, veined like a blood-alley. What need is there for all the cumulus of dull, surrounding clay – the slow white hinterland that weighs behind it as it swivels among the doughy, circumscribing wodges like a marble of raddled ice? As the eye rounds the corner of the door it devours the long double line of skinny apprentices as a squid might engulf and devour some long shaped creature of the depths. As it sucks in the line of boys through the pupil, the knowledge of his power over them spreads sensuously across his trunk like a delicious gooseflesh. He has seen and heard the two shrillwhispering youths, now threatening one another with little raw fists. They have disobeyed him. He wipes his hot hands together, and his tongue travels along his lips. The eye watches them, Flycrake and Wrenpatch. They would do very nicely. So they were annoyed with one another, were they, the little dung-flies? How diverting! And how thoughtful of them! They will save him the trouble of having to invent some reason or another for punishing a brace of their ridiculous little brothers.

  The chef opens the door and the double line freezes.

  He approaches them, wiping his hands upon his silken buttocks as he moves forward. He impends above them like a dome of cloud.

  ‘Flycrake,’ he says, and the word issues from his lips as though it were drawn through a filter of sedge, ‘there is room for you, Flycrake, in the shadow of my paunch, and bring your hairy friend with you – there is room for him as well I shouldn’t wonder.’

  The two boys creep forward, their eyes very wide, their teeth chattering. ‘You were talking, were you not? You were talking even more garrulously than your teeth are now chattering. Am I wrong? No? Then come a little nearer; I should hate to have any trouble in reaching you. You wouldn’t like to cause me any trouble, would you? Am I right in saying that you would not like to give me trouble, Master Flycrake? Master Wrenpatch?’ He does not listen for an answer, but yawns, his face opening lewdly upon regions compared with which nudity becomes a milliner’s invention. As the yawn ends and without a suspicion of warning, his two hands swing forward simultaneously and he catches the two little wretches by their ears and lifts them high into the air. What he would have done with them will never be known, for at the very moment when the hanging apprentices are lifted about the level of Swelter’s throat, a bell begins to jangle discordantly through the steamy air. It is very seldom that this bell is heard, for the rope from which it is suspended, after disappearing through a hole in the ceiling of the Great Kitchen, moves secretly among rafters, winding to and fro in the obscure, dust-smelling regions that brood between the ceiling of the ground rooms and the floorboards of the first storey. After having been re-knotted many times, it finally emerges through a wall in Lord Sepulchra
ve’s bedroom. It is very rarely that his Lordship has any need to interview his chef, and the bell as it swings wildly above the heads of the apprentices can be seen throwing from off its iron body the dust of four seasons.

  Swelter’s face changes at the first iron clang of the forgotten bell. The gloating and self-indulgent folds of face-fat redistribute themselves and a sycophantism oozes from his every pore. But only for a moment is he thus, his ears gulping at the sound of iron; for all at once he drops Flycrake and Wrenpatch to the stone slabs, surges from the room, his flat feet sucking at the stones like porridge.

  Without abating the speed of his succulent paces, and sweeping with his hands whoever appears in his path as though he were doing breast-stroke, he pursues his way to Lord Sepulchrave’s bedroom, the sweat beginning to stand out more and more on his cheeks and forehead as he nears the sacred door.

  Before he knocks he wipes the sweat from his face with his sleeve, and then listens with his ear at the panels. He can hear nothing. He lifts his hand and strikes his folded fingers against the door with great force. He does this because he knows from experience that it is only with great difficulty that his knuckles can make any sound, the bones lying so deeply embedded within their stalls of pulp. As he half expected, all to be heard is a soft plop, and he resorts unwillingly to the expedient of extracting a coin from a pocket and striking it tentatively on the panel. To his horror, instead of the slow, sad, authoritative voice of his master ordering him to enter, he hears the hooting of an owl. After a few moments, during which he is forced to dab at his face, for he has been unnerved by the melancholy cry, he strikes again with the coin. This time there is no question that the high, long-drawn hoot which answers the tapping is an order for him to enter.

  Swelter glances about him, turning his head this way and that, and he is on the point of making away from the door, for fear has made his body as cold as jelly, when he hears the regular crk, crk, crk, crk, of Flay’s knee-joints approaching him from the shadows to his rear. And then he hears another sound. It is of someone running heavily, impetuously. As the sound approaches it drowns the regular staccato of Mr Flay’s knee joints. A moment later as Swelter turns his head the shadows break apart and the sultry crimson of Fuchsia’s dress burns as it rushes forward. Her hand is on the handle of the door at once and she flings it open without a moment’s hesitation or a glance at Swelter. The chef, a mixture of emotions competing within him as might a group of worms make battle for sovereignty in the belly of an ox, peers over Fuchsia’s shoulder. Not until he has recoiled from what meets his eye can the secondary, yet impelling impulse to watch for the approach of Flay appease itself. Dragging his eyes from the spectacle before him he is in time to shift his bulk a little to the right and so to impede the thin man’s progress, for Flay is now immediately behind him. Swelter’s hatred of Lord Sepulchrave’s servant has now ripened into a festerpatch, and his one desire is to stop the breathing for once and for all of a creature so fleshless, and of one who raised the welts upon his face on the Christening day.

  Mr Flay, presented with the doming back and the splay-acred rear of the chef, is on edge to see his master who has rung his bell for him, and is in no mood to be thwarted, nor to be terrified at the white mass before him, and although for many a long stony night he has been unable to rest – for he is well aware of the chef’s determination to kill him during his sleep – yet now, presented with the materialization of his nocturnal horror, he finds himself as hard as ironwood, and he jerks his dark, sour, osseous head forward out of his collar like a turtle and hisses from between his sand-coloured teeth.

  Swelter’s eyes meet those of his enemy, and never was there held between four globes of gristle so sinister a hell of hatred. Had the flesh, the fibres, and the bones of the chef and those of Mr Flay been conjured away and away down that dark corridor leaving only their four eyes suspended in mid-air outside the Earl’s door, then, surely, they must have reddened to the hue of Mars, reddened and smouldered, and at last broken into flame, so intense was their hatred – broken into flame and circled about one another in ever-narrowing gyres and in swifter and yet swifter flight until, merged into one sizzling globe of ire they must surely have fled, the four in one, leaving a trail of blood behind them in the cold grey air of the corridor, until, screaming as they fly beneath innumerable arches and down the endless passageways of Gormenghast, they found their eyeless bodies once again, and re-entrenched themselves in startled sockets.

  For a moment the two men are quite still, for Flay has not yet drawn breath after hissing through his teeth. Then, itching to get to his master he brings his sharp, splintery knee up suddenly beneath the balloon-like overhang of the chef’s abdomen. Swelter, his face contracting with pain and whitening so that his blanched uniform becomes grey against his neck, raises his great arms in a clawing motion as his body doubles involuntarily for relief. As he straightens himself, and as Flay makes an effort to get past him to the door, with a jabbing movement of his shoulder, they are both frozen to the spot with a cry more dreadful than before, the long, dolorous cry of the death-owl, and the voice of Fuchsia, a voice that seems to be fighting through tears and terror, cries loudly:

  ‘My father! My father! Be silent and it will be better, and I will take care of you. Look at me, father! Oh, look at me! I know what you want because I do know, father – I do know, and I will take you there when it is dark and then you will be better. – But look at me, father – look at me.’

  But the Earl will not look at her. He is sitting huddled in the centre of the broad carven mantelpiece, his head below the level of his shoulders. Fuchsia, standing below him with her hands shaking as they grip the marble of the mantel, tilts herself towards him. Her strong back is hollowed, her head is thrown back and her throat taut. Yet she dare not touch him. The austerity of the many years that lay behind them – the chill of the mutual reserve they had always shown to one another, is like a wall between them even now. It seemed as though that wall were crumbling and that their frozen love was beginning to thaw and percolate through the crevices, but now, when it is most needed and most felt, the wall has closed again and Fuchsia dares not touch him. Nor dare she admit to herself that her father has become possessed.

  He makes no answer, and Fuchsia, sinking to her knees, begins to cry, but there are no tears. Her body heaves as she crouches below Lord Sepulchrave as he squats on the mantelpiece, and her throat croaks, but no tears relieve her. It is dry anguish and she becomes older during these long moments, older than many a man or woman could ever understand.

  Flay, clenching his hands, moves into the room, the hair standing out rigidly like little wires all over his scanty flesh. Something had crumpled up inside him. His undeviating loyalty to the House of Groan and to his Lordship is fighting with the horror of what he sees. Something of the same feeling must have been going on inside Swelter for as he and Flay gaze at the Earl there is upon their faces the same emotion translated, as it were, into two very different languages.

  His Lordship is dressed in black. His knees are drawn up almost to his chin. His long, fine white hands are curled slightly inwards as they hang over his knees, between which, and his supported chin, the wrists are wedged. But it is the eyes which strike a chill to the centre of those who watch, for they have become circular. The smile which played across his lips when Fuchsia had been with him in the pine wood is gone forever. His mouth is entirely expressionless.

  Suddenly a voice comes from the mouth. It is very quiet:

  ‘Chef.’

  ‘Your Lordship?’ says Swelter trembling.

  ‘How many traps have you in the Great Kitchen?’

  Swelter’s eyes shift to left and right and his mouth opens, but he can make no sound.

  ‘Come, Chef, you must know how many traps are set every night – or have you become slovenly?’

  Swelter holds his podgy hands together. They tremble before him as he works his fingers between one another.

  ‘Sir,’ says
Swelter… ‘there must be forty traps in the Great Kitchen… forty traps, your gracious Lordship.’

  ‘How many were found in the traps at five o’clock today? Answer me.’

  ‘They were all full, your Lordship – all except one, sir.’

  ‘Have the cats had them?’

  ‘The… the cats, your –’

  ‘I said, have the cats had them?’ repeats Lord Sepulchrave sadly.

  ‘Not yet,’ says the Chef. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then bring me one… bring me a plump one… immediately. What are you waiting for, Mr Chef?… What are you waiting for?’

  Swelter’s lips move wetly. ‘A plump one,’ he says. ‘Yes, my Lord… a… plump … one.’

  As soon as he has disappeared the voice goes on: ‘Some twigs, Mr Flay, some twigs at once. Twigs of all sizes, do you understand? From small branches downwards in size – every kind of shape, Flay, every kind of shape, for I shall study each in turn and understand the twigs I build with, for I must be as clever as the others with my twigs, though we are careless workmen. What are you waiting for, Mr Flay? . . .’

  Flay looks up. He has been unable to keep his eyes on the transformed aspect of his master, but now he lifts them again. He can recognize no expression. The mouth might as well not be there. The fine aquiline nose appears to be more forceful and the saucer-like shape of the eyes hold within either sky a vacant moon.

  With a sudden awkward movement Flay plucks Fuchsia from the floor and flings her high over his shoulder and, turning, he staggers to the door and is soon among the passages.

  ‘I must go back, I must go back to him!’ Fuschia gasps. Flay only makes a noise in his throat and strides on.

  At first Fuschia begins to struggle, but she has no strength left for the dreadful scene has unnerved her and she subsides over his shoulder, not knowing where she is being taken. Nor does Flay know where he is taking her. They have reached the east quadrangle and have come out into the early morning when Fuchsia lifts her head.