Titus Groan

by Mervyn Peake

  Flay turns his eyes from Steerpike. It has done him good to watch the red blood bubbling from the upstart’s cheek, but now his satisfaction is at an end, for he is gazing stupefied into the hard eyes of the Countess of Groan.

  Her big head has coloured to a dim and dreadful madder. Her eyes are completely remorseless. She has no interest in the cause of the quarrel between Flay and the Steerpike youth. All she knows is that one of her white cats had been dashed against the wall and has suffered pain.

  Flay waits as she approaches. His bony head is quite still. His loose hands hang gawkily at his sides. He realizes the crime he has committed, and as he waits his world of Gormenghast – his security, his love, his faith in the House, his devotion – is all crumbling into fragments.

  She is standing within a foot of him. The air is heavy with her presence.

  Her voice is very husky when she speaks. ‘I was going to strike him down,’ she says heavily. ‘That is what I intended to do with him. To break him.’

  He lifts his eyes. The white cat is within a few inches of him. He watches the hairs of its back; each one has become a bristle and the back is a hummock of sharp white grass.

  The Countess begins to talk again in a louder voice, but it has become so choked that Flay cannot understand what she is saying. At last he can make out the words: ‘You are no more, no more at all. You are ended.’

  Her hand, as it moves gently over the body of the white cat, is trembling uncontrollably. ‘I have finished with you,’ she says. ‘Gormenghast has finished with you.’ It is hard for her to draw the words from her great throat. ‘You are over … over.’ Suddenly she raises her voice. ‘Crude fool!’ she cries. ‘Crude, broken fool and brute! Out! Out! The Castle throws you. Go!’ she roars, her hands upon the cat’s breast. ‘Your long bones sicken me.’

  Flay lifts his small bony head higher into the air. He cannot comprehend what has happened. All he knows is that it is more dreadful than he can feel, for a kind of numbness is closing in on his horror like a padding. There is a greenish sheen across the shoulders of his greasy black suit, for the morning light has of a sudden begun to dance through the bay window. Steerpike, with a blooddrenched handkerchief wound about his face, is staring at him and rapping the top of a table with his nails. He cannot help but feel that there is something very fine about the old creature’s head. And he had been very quick. Very quick indeed. Something to remember, that: cats for missiles.

  Flay moved his little eyes around the room. The floor is alive and white behind the Countess, around whose feet lies the stilled froth of a tropic tide, the azure carpet showing now here and now there. He feels he is looking at it for the last time and turns to go, but as he turns he thinks of the Breakfast. He is surprised to hear his own mirthless voice saying: ‘Breakfast.’

  The Countess knows that her husband’s first servant must be at the Breakfast. Had he killed every white cat in the world he must still be at the Breakfast in honour of Titus, the 77th Earl of Gormenghast, to be. Such things are cardinal.

  The Countess turns herself about and moves to the bay window after making a slow detour of the room and picking up from a rack near the fireplace a heavy iron poker. As she reaches the window her right arm swings slowly back and forward with the deliberation of a shire-mare’s bearded hoof as it falls into a rain pool. There is a startling split and crash, a loud cascading of glass upon the flag-stones outside the window, and then silence.

  With her back to the room she stares through the star-shaped gap in the glass. Before her spreads the green lawn. She is watching the sun breaking through the distant cedars. It is the day of her son’s Breakfast. She turns her head. ‘You have a week,’ she says, ‘and then you leave these walls. A servant shall be found for the Earl.’

  Steerpike lifts his head, and for a moment he ceases to drum on the woodwork with his fingernails. As he starts tapping again, a kestrel, sweeping through the star of the shattered pane, alights on the shoulder of the Countess. She winces as its talons for a moment close, but her eyes soften.

  Flay approaches a door in three slow, spidery slides. It is the door that opens into the Stone Lanes. He fumbles for his key, and turns it in the lock. He must rest in his own region before he returns to the Earl, and he lets himself into the long darkness.

  The Countess, for the first time, remembers Steerpike. She moves her eyes slowly in the direction where she had last seen him, but he is no longer there nor in any part of the room.

  A bell chimes from the corridor beyond the Room of Cats and she knows that there is but a short while before the Breakfast.

  She feels a splash of water on her hand, and, turning, sees that the sky has become overcast with a blanket of ominous dark rose-coloured cloud, and of a sudden the light fades from the lawn and the cedars.

  Steerpike, who is on his way back to the Earl’s bedroom, stops a moment at a staircase window to see the first descent of the rain. It is falling from the sky in long, upright and seemingly motionless lines of rosy silver that stand rigidly upon the ground as though there were a million harp strings strung vertically between the solids of earth and sky. As he leaves the window he hears the first roar of the summer thunder.

  The Countess hears it as she stares through the jagged star in the bay window. Prunesquallor hears it as he balances the Earl upon his feet at the side of the bed. The Earl must have heard it, too, for he takes a step of his own volition towards the centre of the room. His own face has returned.

  ‘Was that thunder, Doctor?’ he says.

  The Doctor watches him very carefully, watches his every movement, though few would have guessed how intently he was studying his patient had they seen his long ingenious mouth open with customary gaiety.

  ‘Thunder it was, your Lordship. A most prodigious peal. I am waiting for the martial chords which must surely follow such an opening, what? Ha, ha, ha,ha, ha!’

  ‘What has brought you to my bedroom, Doctor? I do not remember sending for you.’

  ‘That is not unnatural, your Lordship. You did not send for me. I was summoned a few minutes ago, to find that you had fainted, an unfortunate, but by no means rare thing to happen to anyone. Now, I wonder why you should have fainted?’ The Doctor stroked his chin. ‘Why? Was the room very hot?’

  The Earl comes across to the Doctor. ‘Prunesquallor,’ he says, ‘I don’t faint.’

  ‘Your Lordship,’ says the Doctor, ‘when I arrived in this bedroom you were in a faint.’

  ‘Why should I have fainted? I do not faint, Prunesquallor.’

  ‘Can you remember what you were doing before you lost consciousness?’

  The Earl moves his eyes from the Doctor. All at once he feels very tired and sits down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘I can remember nothing, Prunesquallor. Absolutely nothing. I can only recall that I was hankering for something, but for what I do not know. It seems a month ago.’

  ‘I can tell you,’ says Prunesquallor. ‘You are making ready to go to your son’s Breakfast Gathering. You were pressed for time and were anxious not to be late. You are, in any event, over-strained, and in your anticipation of the occasion you became overwrought. Your “hankering” was to be with your one-year-old son. That is what you vaguely remember.’

  ‘When is my son’s Breakfast?’

  ‘It is in half an hour’s time, or to be precise, it is in twenty-eight minutes’ time.’

  ‘Do you mean this morning?’ A look of alarm has appeared on Lord Sepulchrave’s face.

  ‘This morning as ever was, as ever is, and as ever will or won’t be, bless its thunderous heart. No, no, my lord, do not get up yet.’ (Lord Sepulchrave has made an attempt to stand.) ‘In a moment or two and you will be as fit as the most expensive of fiddles. The Breakfast will not be delayed. No, no, not at all – You have twenty-seven long, sixty-second-apiece minutes, and Flay should be on his way to get your garments laid out for you – yes, indeed.’

  Flay is not only on his way, but he is at the door,
having been unable to remain in the Stone Lanes any longer than it took him to tear his way through them and up to his master’s room by an obscure passage which he alone knew. Even so he is only a moment or two in advance of Steerpike, who slides under Flay’s arm and through the bedroom door as Flay opens it.

  Steerpike and the servant are amazed to find that Lord Sepulchrave is seemingly his own melancholy self again, and Flay shambles toward his master and drops upon his knees before him with a sudden, uncontrollable, clumsy movement, his knees striking the floor with a crash. The Earl’s sensitive pale hand rests for a moment on the shoulders of the scarecrow, but all he says is: ‘My ceremonial velvet, Flay. Be as quick as you can. My velvet and the bird-brooch of opal.’

  Flay scrambles to his feet. He is his master’s first servant. He is to lay out his master’s clothes and to prepare him for the Great Breakfast in honour of his only son. This is no time or place for the wretched youth to be in his Lordship’s bedroom. Nor for that matter need the Doctor stay.

  With his hand on the wardrobe door he turns his head creakily. ‘I manage, Doctor,’ he says. His eyes move from Prunesquallor to Steerpike, and he draws back his lips in an expression of contempt and disgust.

  The Doctor notices this expression, ‘Quite right. Quite, quite right! His Lordship will improve with every minute that passes, and there is no need for us any longer, most assuredly not, by all that’s tactful I should definitely think not, ha, ha, ha! Oh, dear me, no. Come along, Steerpike. Come along. And, by the way, what’s all that blood on your face? Are you playing at being a pirate or have you had a tiger in bed with you? Ha, ha, ha! But tell me afterwards, dear boy, tell me afterwards.’ And the Doctor proceeds to shepherd Steerpike out of the room.

  But Steerpike dislikes being shepherded and ‘After you, Doctor,’ he says, and insists on Prunesquallor’s preceding him through the door. Before he closes it he turns and, speaking to the Earl in a confidential tone: ‘I will see that everything is in readiness,’ he says. ‘Leave it to me, your Lordship. I will see you later, Flay. Now then, Doctor, let us be on our way.’

  The door closes.

  THE TWINS AGAIN

  The Aunts have been sitting opposite one another for well over an hour with hardly a movement. Surely only vanity could account for so long a scrutiny of a human face, and as it so happens it is Vanity and nothing but Vanity, for knowing that their features are identical and that they have administered the identical amount of powder and have spent the identical length of time in brushing their hair, they have no doubt at all that in scrutinizing one another they are virtually gazing at themselves. They are garbed in their best purple, a hue so violent as to give physical discomfort to any normally sensitive eye.

  ‘Now, Clarice,’ says Cora at last, ‘you turn your lovely head to the right, so that I can see what I look like from the side.’

  ‘Why?’ says Clarice. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you? I’ve got a right to know.’

  ‘So have I, if it comes to that.’

  ‘Well, it will come to that, won’t it? Stupid!’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘You do what I say and then I’ll do it for you.’

  ‘Then I’ll see what my profile’s like, won’t I?’

  ‘We both will, not just you.’

  ‘I said we both will.’

  ‘Well? What’s the matter, then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘Well, go on, then – turn your lovely head.’

  ‘Shall I do it now?’

  ‘Yes. There’s nothing to wait for, is there?’

  ‘Only the Breakfast. It won’t be just yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I heard the bell go in the corridor.’

  ‘So did I. That means there’s a lot of time.’

  ‘I want to look at my profile, Cora. Turn it now.’

  ‘All right. How long shall I be, Clarice?’

  ‘Be a long time.’

  ‘Only if I have a long time, too.’

  ‘We can’t both have a long time, silly.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because there isn’t one.’

  ‘Isn’t one what, dear?’

  ‘Isn’t one long time, is there?’

  ‘No, there’s lots of them.’

  ‘Yes, lots and lots of beautiful long times.’

  ‘Ahead of us, you mean, Clarice?’

  ‘Yes, ahead of us.’

  ‘After we’re on our thrones, isn’t it?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, that’s what you were thinking. Why do you try to deceive me?’

  ‘I wasn’t. I only wanted to know.’

  ‘Well, now you do know.’

  ‘Do know what?’

  ‘You do know, that’s all. I’m not going any deeper for you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because you can’t go as deep as I can. You never could.’

  ‘I’ve never tried, I don’t suppose. It’s not worth it, I shouldn’t think. I know when things are worth it.’

  ‘Well, when are they, then?’

  ‘When are they what?’

  ‘When are they worth something?’

  ‘When you’ve bought something wonderful with your wealth, then it’s always worth it.’

  ‘Unless you don’t want it, Clarice, you always forget that. Why can’t you be less forgetful?’

  There is a long silence while they study each other’s faces.

  ‘They’ll look at us, you know,’ says Cora flatly. ‘We’re going to be looked at at the Breakfast.’

  ‘Because we’re of the original blood,’ says Clarice. ‘That’s why.’

  ‘And that’s why we’re important, too.’

  ‘Two what?’

  ‘To everyone, of course.’

  ‘Well, we’re not yet, not to everyone.’

  ‘But we will be soon.’

  ‘When the clever boy makes us. He can do anything.’

  ‘Anything. Anything at all. He told me so.’

  ‘Me, too. Don’t think he only tells you, because he doesn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t say he did, did I?’

  ‘You were going to.’

  ‘Two what?’

  ‘To exalt yourself.’

  ‘Oh, yes, yes. We will be exalted when the time is ripe.’

  ‘Ripe and rich.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  There is another silence. Their voices have been so flat and expressionless that when they cease talking the silence seems no new thing in the room, but rather a continuation of flatness in another colour.

  ‘Turn your head now, Cora. When I’m looked at at the Breakfast I want to know how they see me from the side and what exactly they are looking at; so turn your head for me and I will for you afterwards.’

  Cora twists her white neck to the left.

  ‘More,’ says Clarice.

  ‘More what?’

  ‘I can still see your other eye.’

  Cora twists her head a fraction more, dislodging some of the powder from her neck.

  ‘That’s right, Cora. Stay like that. Just like that. Oh, Cora!’ (the voice is still as flat), ‘I am perfect.’

  She claps her hands mirthlessly, and even her palms meet with a dead sound.

  Almost as though this noise were a summons the door opens and Steerpike moves rapidly across the room. There is a fresh piece of plaster across his cheek. The twins rise and edge towards him, their shoulders touching as they advance.

  He runs his eyes over them, takes his pipe out of his pocket and strikes a light. For a moment he holds the flame in his hand, but only for a moment, for Cora has raised her arm with the slow gesture of a somnabulist and has let it fall upon the flame, extinguishing it.

  ‘What in plague’s name are you up to?’ shouts Steerpike, for once losing his control. Seeing an Earl
as an owl on a mantelpiece, and having part of one’s face removed by a cat, both on the same morning, can temporarily undermine the self-control of any man.

  ‘No fire,’ says Cora. ‘We don’t have fires any more.’

  ‘We don’t like them any more. No. Not any more.’

  ‘Not after we –’

  Steerpike breaks in, for he knows how their minds have turned, and this is no moment just before the Breakfast for them to start reminiscing. ‘You are awaited! Breakfast table is agog for you. They all want to know where you are. Come along, my lovely brace of ladies. Let me escort you some of the way, at least. You are looking most alluring – but what can have been keeping you? Are you ready?’

  The twins nod their heads.

  ‘May I be so honoured as to give you my right arm, Lady Cora? And, Lady Clarice, my dear, if you will take my left… ?’

  Steerpike, bending his elbows, waits for the Aunts to split apart to take his either arm.

  ‘The right’s more important than the left,’ says Clarice. ‘Why should you have it?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Because I’m as good as you.’

  ‘But not as clever, are you, dear?’

  ‘Yes, I am, only you’re favoured.’

  ‘That’s because I’m alluring, like he says I am.’

  ‘He said we both were.’