The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [124]
They turned their eyes from its branches and looked around for Steerpike. He was still not unravelled. ‘Can you assist me, my dear Ladyships?’ he called, peering through a skein of purple fibres.
‘Why don’t you come to this window?’ said Clarice.
‘He can’t find the way,’ said Cora.
‘Can’t he? I don’t see why not,’ said Clarice.
‘Because he can’t,’ said Cora. ‘Go and show him,’
‘All right. But he must be very stupid,’ said Clarice, walking through the dense walls of roots which seemed to open up before her and close again behind her back. When she reached Steerpike, she walked past him and it was only by practically treading on her heels that he was able to thread his way towards the window. At the window there was a little more space, for the seven stems which wedged their way through its lower half protruded some four feet into the room before beginning to divide and subdivide. Alongside the window there were steps that led up to a small platform which rested on the thick horizontal stems.
‘Look outside,’ said Cora directly Steerpike arrived, ‘and you’ll see It.’
Steerpike climbed the few steps and saw the main trunk of the tree floating out horizontally into space and then running up to a great height, and as he saw it he recognized it as the tree he had studied from the roof tops, half a mile away near the stone sky-field.
He saw how, what had then seemed a perilous balancing act on the part of the distant figures, was in reality a safe enough exercise, for the bole was conveniently flat on its upper surface. When it reached that point where it began to ascend and branch out, the wooden highway spread into an area that could easily have accommodated ten or twelve people standing in a close group.
‘Definitely a tree,’ he said. ‘I am all in favour of it. Has it been dead as long as you can remember it?’
‘Of course,’ said Clarice.
‘We’re not as old as that,’ said Cora, and as this was the first joke she had made for over a year, she tried to smile, but her facial muscles had become, through long neglect, unusable.
‘Not so old as what?’ said Clarice.
‘You don’t understand,’ said Cora. ‘You are much slower than I am. I’ve noticed that.’
‘INKLINGS OF GLORY’
‘I want some tea,’ said Clarice; and leading the way she performed the miraculous journey through the room once more, Steerpike at her heels like a shadow and Cora taking an alternative path.
Once more in the comparatively sane living room where the tapers had been lit by the old woman, they sat before the fire and Steerpike asked if he might smoke. Cora and Clarice after glancing at each other nodded slowly, and Steerpike filled his pipe and lit it with a small red coal.
Clarice had pulled at a bell-rope that hung by the wall, and now as they sat in a semi-circle about the blaze, Steerpike in the centre chair, a door opened to their right and an old dark-skinned lady, with very short legs and bushy eyebrows, entered the room.
‘Tea, I suppose,’ she said in a subterranean voice that seemed to have worked its way up from somewhere in the room beneath them. She then caught sight of Steerpike and wiped her unpleasant nose with the back of her hand before retiring and closing the door behind her like an explosion. The embroideries flapped outwards in the draught this occasioned, and sank again limply against the walls.
‘This is too much,’ said Steerpike. ‘How can you bear it?’
‘Bear what?’ said Clarice.
‘Do you mean, your Ladyships, that you have become used to being treated in this offhand and insolent manner? Do you not mind whether your natural and hereditary dignities are flouted and abused – when an old commoner slams the doors upon you and speaks to you as though