The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [342]
But he met no one and took no notice of Irma’s cry.
When he got back to his room he poured the poison into a beautiful little cut-glass vessel, placed it against the light of the window where it shone. Then he stood back from it with his head on one side, stepped forward again to move it a little to the left, in the interest of symmetry, and then returning to the centre of the room ran his tongue along his thin lips as he peered with his eyebrows at the little flask of death. Suddenly he stretched his arms out on either side, the fingers splayed like starfish as though he were wakening them to a kind of hypersentience of tingling life.
Then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he lowered his hands to the ground, threw up his slender legs and began to perambulate the room on the palms of his hands with the peculiarly stilted, rolling and predatory gait of a starling.
TWENTY-EIGHT
It was on the following afternoon that Mrs Slagg died. She was found lying upon her bed, towards evening, like a little grubby doll. The black dress was awry as though she had struggled. Her hands were clasped at her shrunken breast. It was hard to imagine that the broken thing had once been new; that those withered, waxen cheeks had been fresh and tinted. That her eyes had long ago glinted with laughter. For she had been sprightly once. A vivacious pert little creature. Bright as a bird.
And here she lay. It was as though the doll-sized body had been thrown aside as too old and decrepit to be of any further use.
Fuchsia, directly she had been told, rushed to the small room that she knew so well.
But the doll on the bed was no longer her nurse. It was not Nannie Slagg, that little motionless bundle. It was something else. Fuchsia closed her eyes and the poignantly familiar image of her old nurse who had been the nearest thing to a mother that Fuchsia had ever known, swam through her mind in a gush of memory.
It was in her to turn again to the bed and to take the beloved relic in her arms in a passion of love, but she could not. She could not. And she did not cry. Something, for all the vividness of her memory, had gone dead in her. She stared again at the shell of all that had nursed her, adored her, smacked her and maddened her.
In her ears, the peevish voice kept crying – ‘Oh my weak heart, how could they? How could they? Anyone would think I didn’t know my place.’
Turning suddenly from the bed Fuchsia saw for the first time that she had not been alone in the room. Dr Prunesquallor was standing by the door. Involuntarily she turned to him, raising her eyes to his odd yet strangely compassionate features.
He took a step towards her. ‘Fuchsia, my dearest child,’ he said. ‘Let us go together.’
‘O doctor,’ she said. ‘I don’t feel anything. Am I wicked, Doctor Prune? I don’t understand.’
The door was suddenly filled by the figure of the Countess who, although she stared at her daughter and at the doctor, did not appear to realize who they were, for no expression appeared on her big pale face. She was carrying over her arm a shawl of rare lace. She moved forward treading heavily on the bare boards. When she reached the bed she gazed for a moment as though transfixed, at the pathetic sight below her, and then, spreading the beautiful black shawl over the body, she turned and left the room.
Prunesquallor, taking Fuchsia’s hands, led her through the door which he closed behind them.
‘Fuchsia dear,’ he said as they began to move together down the corridor, ‘have you heard anything of Titus?’
She stopped dead and let go the doctor’s hand. ‘No,’ she said, ‘and if nobody finds him I will kill myself.’
‘Tut, tut, tut, my little threatener,’ said Prunesquallor. ‘What a tedious thing to say. And you such an original girl. As though Titus won’t reappear like a jack-in-the-box,