The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [227]
Stopping for a moment (as though something very important had occurred to him) in the middle of a tiny, drunken totter, he turned his head to Mrs Slagg. His eyebrows were drawn down over the unique violet of his eyes, and there was a mixture of the pathetic, the ludicrous, and the sage in the expression of his pippin face. Even a suspicion of the pompous for a moment as he swayed and sat down suddenly having lost his balance – and then, having collapsed, a touch of the august. But, suddenly, in a sideways crawl, one leg thrusting him forward, his arms paddling wrist-deep through the sand and his other leg making no effort to play its part, content only to trail itself beneath and behind its energetic counterpart, he forsook the phlegmatic and was all impetuousness; but not a smile crossed his lips.
When he had reached the rust-coloured rug he sat quite still a few feet from Mrs Slagg and scrutinized the old lady’s shoe, his elbow on his knee and his chin sunk in his hand, an attitude startlingly adult and inappropriate in a child of less than eighteen months.
‘Oh, my poor heart! how he does look,’ came Mrs Slagg’s thin voice. ‘As though I haven’t loved him and toiled to make him joyous. Worn myself out to the marrow for his little Lordship, I have, day after day, night after night, with this after this and that after that piling ag’ny on ag’ny until you’d think he would be glad of love; but he just goes on as though he’s wiser than his old Nannie, who knows all about the vacancies of babies,’ (‘vagaries’, she must have meant), ‘and all I get is naughtiness from his sister – oh, my weak heart, naughtiness and spleen.’
Fuchsia raised herself on her elbow and gazed at the brooding conifers on the far side of the lake. Her eyes were not red from crying: she had cried so much lately that she had drained herself of salt for a little. They had the look of eyes in which hosts of tears had been fought back and had triumphed.
‘What did you say?’
‘That’s it! that’s it!’ Mrs Slagg became petulant. ‘Never listens. Too wise now to listen, I suppose, to an old woman who hasn’t long to live.’
I didn’t hear you,’ said Fuchsia.
‘You never try,’ replied Nannie. ‘That’s what it is – you never try. I might as well not be here.’
Fuchsia had grown tired of the old nurse’s querulous and tearful admonishments. She shifted her gaze from the pines to her brother, who had begun to struggle with the buckle of one of her shoes, ‘Well, there’s a lovely breeze, anyway,’ she said.
The old nurse, who had forgotten she was in the middle of chastening Fuchsia, jerked her wizened face toward the girl in a startled way. ‘What, my caution dear?’ she said. And then remembering that her ‘caution’ had been in her disfavour for some reason which she had forgotten, she pursed her face up with a ridiculous and puny haughtiness, as much as to say: ‘I may have called you “my caution dear”, but that doesn’t mean that we’re on speaking terms.’
Fuchsia gazed at her in a sullen sadness. ‘I said there’s a lovely breeze,’ she repeated.
Mrs Slagg could never keep up her sham dignity for long, and she smacked out at Fuchsia, as a final gesture, and misjudging the distance, her blow fell short and she toppled over on her side. Fuchsia, leaning across the rug, re-established the midget as though she were setting an ornament and left her arm purposely within range, for she knew her old nurse. Sure enough, once Nannie Slagg had recovered and had smoothed out her skirt in front of her and reset her hat with the glass-grapes, she delivered a weak blow at Fuchsia’s arm.
‘What did you say about the breezes, dear? Nothing worth hearing, I expect, as usual.’
‘I said they were lovely,’ said Fuchsia.
‘Yes, they