Titus Groan

by Mervyn Peake

  ‘I’ll be with you,’ said Fuchsia from the door. ‘And they won’t take him away from you. Of course, they won’t.’

  Nannie Slagg ran up to her and clung to her arm. ‘They will!’ she cried. ‘Your huge mother said she would. She said she would.’

  ‘Well, they haven’t taken me away, have they?’ said Fuchsia.

  ‘But you’re only a girl!’ cried Nannie Slagg louder than ever.

  ‘You don’t matter. You’re not going to be anything.’

  Fuchsia dislodged the old woman’s hand and walked heavily to the window. The rain poured down. It poured down.

  The voice behind her went on: ‘As though I haven’t poured my love out every day – every day. I’ve poured it all away until I’m hollowed out. It’s always me. It always has been. Toil after toil. Moil after moil; with no one to say “God bless you”. No one to understand.’

  Fuchsia could stand it no longer. Much as she loved her nurse, she could not hear that melancholy, peevish voice and watch the doleful rain and keep herself calm. Unless she left the room she would break something – the nearest breakable thing. She turned and ran, and in her own room once more, fell upon her bed, the skirt of a sacking costume rucked up about her thighs.

  * * *

  Of the Castle’s countless breakfasts that dark morning there were few that tasted well. The steady monotone of the pattering rain was depressing enough, but for it to descend on such a day was sheer gloom. It was as though it defied the Castle’s inmost faith; taunted it with a dull, ignorant descent of blasphemy, as though the undrainable clouds were muttering: ‘What is an Earling to us? It is immaterial.’

  It was well that there was much to do before the hour of twelve, and there were few who were not occupied with some task or another relevant to the Day. The Great Kitchen was in an uproar of activity before eight o’clock had struck.

  The new chef was in great contrast to the old; a bow-legged, mule-faced veteran of the ovens, with a mouthful of brass teeth and tough, dirty grey hair. His head appeared to sprout the stuff rather than grow it. There was something ferocious about it. In the kitchen it was said that he had his head cropped every other day – indeed, there were some who held that they had seen it on the move at the speed of the minute hand of a great clock.

  Out of his mule face and from between the glintings of his teeth a slow, resonant voice would make its way from time to time. But he was not communicative, and for the most part gave his orders by means of gesturing with his heavy hands.

  The activities in the Great Kitchen, where everything relating to the preparation of food in all its aspects seemed to be going on at the same moment, and where the heat was beginning to make the stone hall sweat, were not, in fact, being pursued in readiness for this Day of Earling, but for the morrow; for, alongside the sartorial beggary went a mendicant’s diet, the figures of sacking having only crusts to eat until the next day dawned, when, once more in their own clothes, the symbolic humility in the presence of the new Earl of Gormenghast over, they were able to indulge in a barbecue that rivalled that on the day of Titus’ birth.

  The kitchen staff, man and boy, and the entire servantage in all its forms and both its sexes, were to be ready at half-past eleven to troop down to Gormenghast Lake, where the trees would be in readiness for them.

  The carpenters had been working at the lakeside and among the branches for the last three days. In the cedars had been erected the wooden platforms which had for twenty-two years been leaning against a midnight wall in the depths of the ale vaults. Strangely shaped areas of battened planking, like fragments from an immense jig-saw pattern. They had had to be strengthened, for twenty-two years in the unhealthy cellars had not improved them, and they had, of course, to be repainted – white. Each weirdly outlined platform was so shaped that it might fit perfectly in place among the cedar branches. The varying eccentricities of the trees had many hundreds of years ago been the subject of careful study, so that at all the future Earlings the stages, so ingeniously devised, might be slipped into place with the minimum of difficulty. On the back of each wooden stage was written the name of the tree for which it was constructed and the height of the platform from the ground, so that there would be no confusion.

  There were four of these wooden inventions, and they were now in place. The four cedars to which they belonged were all thigh deep in the lake, and against the great boles of these trees ladders were erected which sloped across the shallow water from the shore to a foot or so below the level of the platforms. Similar but ruder structures were wedged in among the branches of ash and beech, and where possible among the closely growing larches and pines. On the opposite side of the lake, where the aunts had paddled from the sand to the dripping Steerpike, the trees were set too far back from the water’s edge to afford the necessary vantage; but in the densely wooded hangar were a thousand boughs among the convolutions of which the menials could find themselves some kind of purchase or another.

  A yew tree in a clearing, rather farther back from the water than the rest of the inhabited trees, had the wedge-faced poet as its guest. A great piece had been torn from its side, and in the cleft the rain bubbled and the naked flesh of the tree was crimson. The rain fell almost vertically in the breathless air, stippling the grey lake. It was as though its white, glass texture of yesterday was now composed of a different substance – of grey sandpaper – a vast granulated sheet of it. The platforms ran with films of the rain. The leaves dripped and splashed in the films. The sand on the opposite shore was sodden. The Castle was too far to be seen through the veil of endless water. There was no individual cloud to be seen. It was a grey sky, unbroken, from which the melancholy strings descended.

  The day drew on, minute after raining minute; hour after raining hour, until the trees of the steep hanger were filled with figures. They were to be found on practically every branch that was strong enough to support them. A great oak was filled with the kitchen staff. A beech, with the gardeners, Pentecost sitting majestically in the main dividing fork of the slippery trunk. The stable lads were perching themselves precariously among the branches of a dead walnut and, cat-calling and whistling, were pulling each other’s hair at every opportunity or kicking out with their feet. For every tree or group of trees, its trade or status.

  Only a few officials moved about at the water’s edge, awaiting the arrival of the principal figures. Only a few officials among the trees, but on the further shore, and along the strip of dark sand, there was gathered a great congregation. It stood in complete silence. Old men, old women, and clusters of strange striplings. There was about them a complete silence. They were apart. They were the Mud Dwellers – the denizens of the Outer Wall – the forgotten people – the Bright Carvers.

  There was a woman by the shore. She stood a little apart from a group. Her face was young and it was old: the structure youthful, the expression, broken by time – the bane of the Dwellers. In her arms was an infant with flesh like alabaster.

  The rain came down on all. It was warm rain. Warm melancholy and perpetual. It laved the little alabaster body of the child and still it laved it. There was no ending, and the great lake swelled. In the high branches of the dead walnut tree the whistling and scuffling had ceased, for horses were moving through the conifers of the adjacent shore. They had reached the water’s edge and were being tethered to the low sweeping arms of the cedars.

  On the first horse, a great grey hunter by any normal standard, was seated, side-saddle, the Countess. She had been hidden among leaves, only the horse showing itself; but immediately she became exposed to view her mount became a pony.

  The symbolic sacking hung about her in vast, dripping folds. Behind her, a roan bore Fuchsia, with her legs astride. She was patting its neck as she came through the trees. It was like patting soaked velvet. Its black mane was like a repetition of Fuchsia’s hair. Lank with the rain, it clung to the forehead and the throat.

  The aunts were in a pony trap. That they were not in pu
rple seemed extraordinary. Their dresses had always been as indigenous and inevitable a part of them as their faces. They seemed uncomfortable in the sacking and kept plucking at it with their limp hands. The thin man who led the pony brought it to a halt at the lake side, and at the same moment another trap, of similar design but painted a dark and unpleasant orange, trundled through the pines, and there was Mrs Slagg, sitting as upright as she could, her proud attitude (as she supposed it) nullified by the terrified look of her face, which protruded like some kind of wizened fruit from the coarse folds of the garment. She could remember the Earling of Sepulchrave. He had been in his teens. He had swum out to the raft, and there had been no rain. But – oh, her poor heart! – this was so different. It would never have rained at an ‘Earling’ when she was a young girl. Things were so different then.

  On her lap was Titus – drenched. Even so the smock she had been so carefully ironing looked miraculously white, as though it gave forth light instead of receiving it. He sucked his thumb as he stared about him. He saw the figures peering down at him from the trees. He did not smile: he simply stared, turning his face from one to another. Then he became interested in a golden bangle which the Countess had sent him the same morning, pulling it as far up his arm as he could, then down to his plump, wrinkled wrist, studying it seriously all the while.

  The Doctor and his sister had a sycamore to themselves. Irma took some time being hoisted, and was not at all happy about the whole business. She disliked having her hips wedged between rough branches even in the cause of symbolism. The Doctor, seated a little above her, looked like some form of bird, possibly a plucked crane.

  Steerpike had followed Nannie Slagg in order to impress the crowd. Although he should have been in a pine-for-four, he now selected a small ash, where he could both be seen and could see with equal advantage to himself and the rest of Gormenghast.

  The Twins were keeping their mouths tightly shut. They repeated to themselves every thought as it occurred to them, to find whether the word ‘fire’ could possibly have crept into it, and when they found it hadn’t, they decided in any event to keep it to themselves, in order to be on the safe side. Thus it was that they had not spoken a word since Steerpike left them in their bedroom. They were still white, but not so horribly so. The breath of a yellow reflection had infiltrated itself into their skin and this was nasty enough. Nothing could have been more truly spoke than when Steerpike (as Death) had cried that he would be forever with them. They held each other tightly as they waited to be helped from the trap, for Death had not left them since that curdling night and his livid skull was before their eyes.

  By well-proportioned mixtures of brute-strength and obsequious delicacy the officials had at last established the Countess Gertrude upon her stage in the enormous swarthy boughs of the cedar tree. A red carpet had been spread over the woodwork of the platform. The waders and lakeside birds of many breeds which had been disturbed by the activities of the Day, after flying distractedly hither and thither over the forest in swarms, had, as soon as the Countess was seated in the enormous wickerwork chair, flocked to her tree, in which they settled. Angling and disputing for positions at her feet and over various parts of her accommodating body were a whitethroat, a fieldfare, a willow-wren, a nuthatch, a tree-pipit, a sand martin, a red-backed shrike, a goldfinch, a yellow bunting, two jays, a greater spotted woodpecker, three moorhens (on her lap with a mallard, a woodcock, and a curlew), a wagtail, four misselt hr ushes, six blackbirds, a nightingale and twenty-seven sparrows.

  They fluttered themselves, sending sprays of varying dimensions according to their wing-spans through the dripping air. There was more shelter beneath the cedars with their great outstretched hands spread one above the other in dark-green, dripping terraces, than was the case for those in alternative vegetation.

  At this extreme the stable boys in the top branches of the walnut might as well have been sitting in the lake, they could not have been wetter.

  It was the same for the Dwellers on the shore – that proud, impoverished congregation. They cast no reflection in the water at their feet – it was too triturated by the pricking of the rain.

  Getting Barquentine established on his stage was the trickiest and most unpleasant task which fell to the lot of the officials. It took place to the accompaniment of such hideous swearing as caused his withered leg to blush beneath the sacking. It must have been hardened by many years of oaths, but this morning an awakened sense of shame at what the upper part of the body could descend to, raddled it from hip to toe. Its only consolation was that the contaminating influence had not descended lower than the lungs, and what diseases the withered leg experienced were entirely physical.

  When he was seated on the high-backed ‘Earling’ chair he pushed his crutch irritably beneath it and then began to wring out his beard. Fuchsia was by now in her cedar. She had one to herself and it was comparatively dry, a thick foliage spreading immediately above the stage – and she was gazing across the water at the Dwellers. What was it about them that quickened her – those people of the Outer Wall? Why did she feel ill at ease? It was as though they held a dark secret of which, one day, they would make use; something which would jeopardize the security of the Castle. But they were powerless. They depended upon the grace of Gormenghast. What could they do? Fuchsia noticed a woman standing a little apart from a group. Her feet were in the lake. In her arms she held a child. It seemed, as Fuchsia watched, that she could see for a quick moment the dark strands of rain through the limbs of the child. She rubbed her eyes and again she stared. It was so far. She could not tell.

  Even the officials had climbed into the ivy-throttled elm with its broken limb that hung by a sapless tendon.

  The Aunts, on the fourth of the cedar stages, shivered, their mouths tightly closed. Death sat with them and they could not concentrate on the procedure.

  Barquentine had started, his old voice grating its way through the warm downpour. It could be heard everywhere, for no one noticed the sound of the rain any more. It had been so monotonous for so long that it had become inaudible. Had it stopped suddenly the silence would have been like a blow.

  Steerpike was watching Fuchsia through the branches. She would be difficult, but it was only a matter of careful planning. He must not hurry it. Step by step. He knew her temperament. Simple – painfully simple; inclined to be passionate over ridiculous things; headstrong – but a girl, nevertheless, and easy to frighten or to flatter; absurdly loyal to the few friends she had; but mistrust could always be sown quite easily. Oh, so painfully simple! That was the crux of it. There was Titus, of course – but what were problems for if not to be solved. He sucked at his hollow tooth.

  Prunesquallor had wiped his glasses for the twentieth time and was watching Steerpike watching Fuchsia. He was not listening to Barquentine, who was rattling off the catechismic monody as fast as he could, for he was suffering the first twinges of rheumatism. ‘. . . and will forever hold in sacred trust the castle of his fathers and the domain adhering thereto. That he will in letter and in spirit defend it in every way against the incursions of alien worlds. That he will observe its sacred rites, honour its crest, and in due time instil into the first male of his loins, reverence for its every stone until among his fathers he has added, in the tomb, his link to the unending chain of Groans. So be it.’

  Barquentine wiped the water from his face with the flat of his hand and wrung out his beard again. Then he fumbled for his crutch and hoisted himself on to his leg. With his free arm he pushed aside a branch and screamed down through the branches:

  ‘Are you skulks ready?’

  The two Raftmen were ready. They had taken Titus from Nannie Slagg and were standing on the raft of chestnut boughs at the lake’s edge. Titus was sitting at their feet in the middle of the raft, the size of a doll. His sepia hair was stuck to his face and neck. His violet eyes were a little startled. His white smock clung to him so that the form of his little body was divulged.

  The
clinging cloth was luminous.

  ‘Push off, curse you! Push off!’ yelled Barquentine. His voice raked the water’s surface east to west.

  With a long, gradual shoving of their poles the two men propelled the raft into deeper water. Moving up either side of the raft and plunging their poles a dozen or so times brought them near the centre of the lake. In a leather bag hung at his waist the older of the two Raftmen had the symbolic stone, ivy branch and necklace of snail-shells. The water was now too deep for them to strike bottom and they dived over the side and, turning, clasped the edge of the raft. Then, striking out, frog-like with their legs, they had soon brought the raft to the approximate position.

  ‘More to the west!’ screamed Barquentine from the shore. ‘More to the west, idiots!’

  The swimmers splashed themselves around to the adjacent edge of the raft and once more began to kick out. Then they lifted their heads from the rainprodded water and stared in the direction of Barquentine’s voice.

  ‘Hold!’ yelled the unpleasant voice. ‘And hide your damned selves!’

  The two men worked their way around until their heads were very nearly obscured by the thick chestnut rim of the raft on the far side from the trees.

  With only their faces bobbing above the surface they trod water. Titus was alone. He stared about him, bewildered. Where was everybody? The rain streamed over him. His features began to pucker and his lips to tremble, and he was about to burst into tears when he changed his mind and decided to stand up instead. The raft had become quite still and he kept his balance.

  Barquentine grunted to himself. This was good. Ideally speaking, the prospective Earl should be on his feet while being named. In the case of Titus this tenet would naturally have had to be waived if the infant had decided to keep seated or to crawl about.