The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [264]
‘Or conversely,’ said Prunesquallor, ‘what haven’t they got that you already have?’
‘I don’t follow you, Alfred. I said I don’t follow you.’
‘That’s just what you do do,’ said her brother, reaching out his arms and fluttering his fingers. ‘And I wish you’d stop it.’
‘But my deportment, Alfred. Haven’t you noticed it? What’s wrong with your sex – can’t they see I move well?’
‘Perhaps we’re too spiritual,’ said Doctor Prunesquallor.
‘But my carriage! Alfred, my carriage!’
‘Too powerful, sweet white-of-egg, far too powerful; you lurch from side to side of life’s drear highway: those hips of yours rotating as you go. Oh, no, my dear one, your carriage scares them off, that’s what it does. You terrify them, Irma.’
This was too much for her.
‘You’ve never believed in me!’ she cried, rising from the table, and a dreadful blush suffusing her perfect skin. ‘But I can tell you’ – her voice rose to a shrill scream – ‘that I’m a lady! What do you think I want with men? The beasts! I hate them. Blind, stupid, clumsy, horrible, heavy, vulgar things they are. And you’re one of them!’ she screamed, pointing at her brother, who, with his eyebrows raised a little, was continuing with his drawing of the ostrich from where he had left off. ‘And you are one of them! Do you hear me, Alfred, one of them!’
The pitch of her voice had brought a servant to the door. Unwisely, he had opened it, ostensibly to ask whether she had rung for him, but in reality to see what was going on.
Irma’s throat was quivering like a bowstring.
‘What have ladies to do with men?’ she screamed; and then, catching sight of the face of the servant at the door, she plucked a knife from the table and flung it at the face. But her aim was not all it might have been, possibly because she was so involved in being a lady, and the knife impaled itself on the ceiling immediately above her own head, where it gave a perfect imitation of the shuddering of her throat.
The doctor, adding with deliberation the last vertebra to the tail of the skeleton ostrich, turned his face firstly to the door, where the servant, his mouth hanging open, was gazing spellbound at the shuddering knife.
‘Would you be so kind as to remove your redundant carcass from the door of this room, my man,’ he said, in his high, abstracted voice; ‘and keep it in the kitchen, where it is paid to do this and that among the saucepans, I believe … would you? No one rang for you. Your mistress’ voice, though high, is nothing like the ringing of a bell … nothing at all.’
The face withdrew.
‘And what’s more,’ came a desperate cry from immediately below the knife, ‘he never comes to see me any more! Never! Never!’
The doctor rose from the table. He knew she was referring to Steerpike, but for whom she would probably never have experienced the recrudescence of this thwarted passion which had grown upon her since the youth had first dispatched his flattering arrows at her all too sensitive heart.
Her brother wiped his mouth with a napkin, brushed a crumb from his trousers, and straightened his long, narrow back.
‘I’ll sing you a little song,’ he said. ‘I made it up in the bath last night, ha! ha! ha! ha! – a whimsy little jangle, I tell myself – a whimsy little jangle.’
He began to move round the table, his elegant white hands folded about one another. ‘It went like this, I fancy …’ But as he knew she would probably be deaf to what he recited, he took her glass from beside her plate and – ‘A little wine is just what you need, Irma dear, before you go to bed – for you are going straight away, aren’t you, my spasmic one, to Dreamland – ha, ha, ha! where you can be a lady all night long.’
With the speed of a professional conjurer he whipped a small packet from his pocket and, extracting a tablet, dropped it into Irma’s glass. He decanted a little wine into the glass and handed it to her with the exaggerated graciousness which seldom left him. ‘And I will take some myself,’ he said, ‘and we will drink to each other.’
Irma had collapsed into a chair, and her long marmoreal face was