The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [116]
She stopped as she came to the light, nor in doing so and waiting was there anything unusual, for such was the not infrequent habit of those who were nearing the lamps and was, in fact, considered an act of politeness. She moved through the glow of the lamp so that on turning about the rays would illumine her face, and the approaching figure would then both see her and be seen the more easily.
In passing under the lamp the light wavered on her dark brown hair lighting its highest strands almost to the colour of barley, and her body, though full and rounded, was upright and lithe, and this evening, under the impact of her new emotion had in it a buoyancy, an excitement, that through the eyes attacked the one who followed.
The evening was electric and unreal, and yet perhaps, thought Keda, this is reality and my past life has been a meaningless dream. She knew that the footsteps in the darkness which were now only a few yards away were a part of an evening she would not forget and which she seemed to have enacted long ago, or had foreseen. She knew that when the footsteps ceased and she turned to face the one who followed she would find that he was Rantel, the more fiery, the more awkward of the two who loved her.
She turned and he was standing there.
For a long time they stood. About them the impenetrable blackness of the night shut them in as though they were in a confined space, like a hall, with the lamp overhead.
She smiled, her mature, compassionate lips hardly parting. Her eyes moved over his face – over the dark mop of his hair, his powerful jutting brow, and the shadows of his eyes that stared as though fixed in their sockets, at her own. She saw his high cheekbones and the sides of his face that tapered to his chin. His mouth was drawn finely and his shoulders were powerful. Her breast rose and fell, and she was both weak and strong. She could feel the blood flowing within her and she felt that she must die or break forth into leaves and flowers. It was not passion that she felt: not the passion of the body, though that was there, but rather an exultation, a reaching for life, for the whole of the life of which she was capable, and in that life which she but dimly divined was centred love, the love for a man. She was not in love with Rantel: she was in love with what he meant to her as someone she could love.
He moved forward in the light so that his face was darkened to her and only the top of his ruffled hair shone like wire.
‘Keda,’ he whispered.
She took his hand. ‘I have come back.’
He felt her nearness; he held her shoulders in his hands.
‘You have come back,’ he said as though repeating a lesson. ‘Ah, Keda – is this you? You went away. Every night I have watched for you.’ His hands shook on her shoulders. ‘You went away,’ he said.
‘You have followed me?’ said Keda. ‘Why did you not speak to me by the rocks?’
‘I wanted to,’ he said, ‘but I could not.’
‘Oh, why not?’
‘We will move from the lamp and then I will tell you,’ he said at last. ‘Where are we going?’
‘Where? To where should I go but to where I lived – to my house?’
They walked slowly. ‘I will tell you,’ he said suddenly. ‘I followed you to know where you would go. When I knew it was not to Braigon I overtook you.’
‘To Braigon?’ she said. ‘Oh Rantel, you are still as unhappy.’
‘I cannot alter, Keda; I cannot change.’
They had reached the square.
‘We have come here for nothing,’ said Rantel, coming to a halt in the darkness. ‘For nothing, do you hear me, Keda? I must tell you now. Oh, it is bitterness to tell you.’
Nothing that he might say could stop a voice within her that kept crying: ‘I am with you, Keda! I am life! I am life! Oh, Keda, Keda, I am with you!’ But her voice asked him as though something separate from her real self were speaking:
‘Why have we come for nothing?’
‘I followed you and then I let you continue here with me, but your house, Keda, where your husband carved, has been taken from you. You can do nothing. When you left us the Ancients met, the Old Carvers, and they have given your house to one who is