The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [294]
‘We will find just the man for you. You deserve a thoroughbred: something that can cock his ears and whisk his tail. By all that’s unimpeachable, you do indeed. Why …’
The Doctor stopped himself: he had been about to take verbal flight when he remembered his promise: so he leant forward again to hear what his sister had to say.
‘I don’t know about cocking his ears and frisking his tail,’ said Irma, with the suggestion of a twitch at one corner of her thin mouth; ‘but I would like you to know, Alfred – I said I would like you to know, that I am glad you understand the position. I am being wasted, Alfred. You realize that, don’t you – don’t you?’
‘I do, indeed.’
‘My skin is the whitest in Gormenghast.’
‘And your feet are the flattest,’ thought her brother: but he said:
‘Yes, yes, but what we must do, sweet huntress – (O virgin through wild sex’s thickets prowling)’ (he could not resist this image of his sister) ‘what we must do is to decide whom to ask. To the Party, I mean. That is fundamental.’
‘Yes, yes!’ said Irma.
‘And when we will ask them.’
‘That’s easier,’ said Irma.
‘And at what time of the day.’
‘The evening, of course,’ said Irma.
‘And what they shall wear.’
‘Oh, their evening clothes, obviously,’ said Irma.
‘It depends on whom we ask, don’t you think? What ladies, my dear, have dresses as resplendent as yours, for instance? There’s a certain cruelty about evening dress.’
‘Oh, that is of no avail.’
‘Do you mean “of no account”?’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Irma.
‘But how embarrassing! Won’t they feel it keenly, my dear – or will you put on rags, in an overflow of love and sympathy?’
‘There will be no women.’
‘No women!’ cried her brother, genuinely startled.
‘I must be alone,’ his sister murmured, pushing her black glasses further up the bridge of her long, pointed nose … ‘with them – the males.’
‘But what of the entertainment for your guests?’
‘I shall be there,’ said Irma.
‘Yes, yes; and no doubt you will prove ravishing and ubiquitous; but, my love, my love, think again.’
‘Alfred,’ said Irma, standing up and lowering one of her iliac crests and raising its counterpart so high that her pelvis looked thoroughly dangerous – ‘Alfred,’ she said, ‘how can you be so perverse? What use could women be? You haven’t forgotten what we have in mind, have you? Have you?’
Her brother was beginning to admire her. Had she all this long while been hiding beneath her neuroticism, her vanity, her childishness, an iron will?
He rose and, cupping his hands over her hips, corrected their angle with the quick jerk of a bonesetter. Then, sitting back in his chair and fastidiously crossing his long, elegant, cranelike legs while going through the movements of washing his hands: ‘Irma, my revelation, tell me but this …’ he raised his eyes quizzically – ‘who are these males – these stags – these rams – these torn cats – these cocks, stoats and ganders that you have in mind? And on what scale is this carousal to be?’
‘You know very well, Alfred, that we have no choice. Among the gentry, who are there? I ask you, Alfred, who are there?’
‘Who, indeed?’ mused the Doctor, who could think of no one. The idea of a party in his house was so novel that the effort of trying to people it was beyond him. It was as though he were trying to assemble a cast for an unwritten drama.
‘As for the size of the party, Alfred – are you listening? I have in mind a gathering of some forty men.’
‘No! no!’ shouted her brother, clutching at the arms of his chair, ‘not in this room, surely? It would be worse than the white cats. It would be a dog fight.’
Was that a blush that stole across his sister’s face?
‘Alfred,’ she said after a while, ‘it is my last chance. In a year my glamour may be tarnished. Is it a time to think of your own personal comfort?’
‘Listen to me.’ Prunesquallor spoke very