The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [149]
‘THE BURNING’
Although it was Lord Sepulchrave who had summoned the Gathering, it was to Sourdust that the party turned when they had all arrived in the library, for his encyclopaedic knowledge of ritual gave authority to whatever proceedings were to follow. He stood by the marble table and, as the oldest, and in his opinion, the wisest person present, had about him a quite understandable air of his own importance. To wear rich and becoming apparel no doubt engenders a sense of well-being in the wearer, but to be draped, as was Sourdust, in a sacrosanct habit of crimson rags is to be in a world above such consideration as the price and fit of clothes and to experience a sense of propriety that no wealth could buy. Sourdust knew that were he to demand it the wardrobes of Gormenghast would be flung open to him. He did not want it. His mottled beard of alternate black and white hairs was freshly knotted. The crumpled parchment of his ancestral face glimmered in the evening light that swam through the high window.
Flay had managed to find five chairs, which he placed in a line before the table. Nannie, with Titus on her lap, took up the central position. On her right Lord Sepulchrave and on her left the Countess Gertrude sat in attitudes peculiar to them, the former with his right elbow on the arm of the chair and his chin lost in the palm of his hand, and the Countess obliterating the furniture she sat in. On her right sat the Doctor, his long legs crossed and a footling smile of anticipation on his face. At the other end of the row his sister sat with her pelvis at least a foot to the rear of an excited perpendicular – her thorax, neck and head. Fuchsia, for whom, much to her relief, no chair was to be found, stood behind them, her hands behind her back. Between her fingers a small green handkerchief was being twisted round and round. She watched the ancient Sourdust take a step forward and wondered what it must feel like to be so old and wrinkled, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever be as old as that,’ she thought; ‘an old wrinkled woman, older than my mother, older than Nannie Slagg even.’ She gazed at the black mass of her mother’s back. ‘Who is there anyway who isn’t old? There isn’t anybody. Only that boy who hasn’t any lineage. I wouldn’t mind much, but he’s different from me and too clever for me. And even he’s not young. Not like I’d like my friends to be.’
Her eyes moved along the line of heads. One after the other: old heads that didn’t understand.
Her eyes rested at last on Irma.
‘She hasn’t any lineage, either,’ said Fuchsia to herself, ‘and her neck is much too clean and it’s the longest and thinnest and funniest I’ve ever seen. I wonder if she’s really a white giraffe all the time, and pretending she isn’t.’ Fuchsia’s mind flew to the stuffed giraffe’s leg in the attic. ‘Perhaps it belongs to her,’ she thought. And the idea so appealed to Fuchsia that she lost control of herself and spluttered.
Sourdust, who was about to begin and had raised his old hand for the purpose, started and peered across at her, Mrs Slagg clutched Titus a little tighter and listened very hard for anything further. Lord Sepulchrave did not move his body an inch, but opened one eye slowly. Lady Gertrude, as though Fuchsia’s splutter had been a signal, shouted to Flay, who was behind the library door:
‘Open the door and let that bird in! What are you waiting for, man?’ Then she whistled with a peculiar ventriloquism, and a wood warbler sped, undulating through the long, dark hollow of library air, to land on her finger.
Irma simply twitched but was too refined to look round, and it was left to the Doctor to make contact with Fuchsia by means of an exquisitely timed wink with his left eye behind its convex lens, like an oyster shutting and opening itself beneath a pool of water.
Sourdust, disturbed by this unseemly interjection and also by the presence of the wood warbler, which kept distracting his eye by running up and down Lady Gertrude’s arm, lifted his head again, fingering