The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [123]
‘My convulsions,’ said Clarice earnestly. ‘When my left arm became starved for the first time. You remember, Cora, don’t you? When we had our first fits? I rather liked them.’
Cora rustled up to her and raised a forefinger in front of her sister’s face. ‘Clarice Groan,’ she said, ‘we finished talking about that long ago. We’re talking about Power now. Why can’t you follow what we’re talking about? You are always losing your place. I’ve noticed that.’
‘What about the Room of Roots?’ asked Steerpike with affected gaiety. ‘Why is it called the Room of Roots? I am most intrigued.’
‘Don’t you know?’ came their voices.
‘He doesn’t know,’ said Clarice. ‘You see how we’ve been forgotten. He didn’t know about our Room of Roots.’
Steerpike was not kept long in ignorance. He followed the two purple ninepins through the door, and after passing down a short passage, Cora opened a massive door at the far end whose hinges could have done with a gill of oil apiece, and followed by her sister entered the Room of Roots. Steerpike in his turn stepped over the threshold and his curiosity was more than assuaged.
If the name of the room was unusual there was no doubt about its being apt. It was certainly a room of roots. Not of a few simple, separate formations, but of a thousand branching, writhing, coiling, intertwining, diverging, converging, interlacing limbs whose origin even Steerpike’s quick eyes were unable for some time to discover.
He found eventually that the thickening stems converged at a tall, narrow aperture on the far side of the room, through the upper half of which the sky was pouring a grey, amorphous light. It seemed at first as though it would be impossible to stir at all in this convoluting meshwork, but Steerpike was amazed to see that the twins were moving about freely in the labyrinth. Years of experience had taught them the possible approaches to the window. They had already reached it and were looking out into the evening. Steerpike made an attempt at following them, but was soon inextricably lost in the writhing maze. Wherever he turned he was faced with a network of weird arms that rose and fell, dipped and clawed, motionless yet alive with serpentine rhythms.
Yet the roots were dead. Once the room must have been filled with earth, but now, suspended for the most part in the higher reaches of the chamber, the thread-like extremities clawed impotently in the air. Nor was it enough that Steerpike should find a room so incongruously monopolized, but that every one of these twisting terminals should be hand-painted was even more astonishing. The various main limbs and their wooden tributaries, even down to the minutest rivulet of root, were painted in their own especial colours, so that it appeared as though seven coloured boles had forced their leafless branches through the window, yellow, red and green, violet and pale blue, coral pink and orange. The concentration of effort needed for the execution of this work must have been considerable, let alone the almost superhuman difficulties and vexations that must have resulted from the efforts to establish, among the labyrinthic entanglements of the finer roots, which tendril belonged to which branch, which branch to which limb, and which limb to which trunk, for only after discovering its source could its correct colour be applied.
The idea had been that the birds on entering should choose those roots whose colours most nearly approximated to their own plumage, or if they had preferred it to nest among roots whose hue was complementary to their own.
The work had taken the sisters well over three years, and yet when all had been completed the project for which all this work had been designed had proved to be empty, the Room of Roots a failure, their hopes frozen. From this mortification the twins had never fully recovered. It is true that the room, as a room, gave them pleasure, but that the birds never approached it, let alone settled and nested there, was a festering sore at the back of what minds they had.
Against this nagging disappointment