The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [359]
How different was Mulefire with his long clumsy irritable strides! And indeed how disparate were all who followed one another that evening with only the colour of their gowns in common.
Flannelcat, like a lost soul for whom the journey was a mile at least; the heavy, sloppy, untidy Fluke, who looked as though, for all his strength and for all the forward thrust of his loaf-like jaw, he might at any moment fold up at the knees and go to sleep on the carpet. Perch-Prism, horribly alert, his porcine features shining white in the glow of the candles, his button-black eyes darting to and fro as he moved crisply with short aggressive steps.
With this shape and that shape, with this walk and that walk, they emerged from the hall to the tocsin-bray of their names, until Bellgrove found himself alone in the semi-darkness.
As one after another of the professional guests had made their carpet-journey towards her, Irma had had a world of time in which to ruminate on the vulnerability of each to the charm she would so soon be unleashing. Some, of course, were quite impossible – but even as she dismissed them she began to brood with favour upon such phrases as ‘rough diamond’, ‘heart of gold’, ‘still waters’ …
While the sides of the room filled with those who had presented themselves and their conversation became louder and louder as their numbers increased, Irma, standing rigid by her brother, speculating upon the pros and cons of those she had received, was wakened out of a more than usually sanguine speculation by her brother’s voice.
‘And how is Irma, that sister of mine, that sweet throb? Is she cooing? Is she weary of the flesh – or isn’t she? Great spearheads, Irma! How determined, how martial you look! Relax a little, melt within yourself. Think of milk and honey. Think of jellyfish.’
‘Be quiet,’ she hissed out of the corner of a smile she was concocting, a smile more ambitious than she had so far dared to invent. Every muscle in her face was pulling its weight. Not all of them knew in which direction to pull, but their common enthusiasm was formidable. It was as though all her previous contortions were mere rehearsals. Something in white was approaching.
The ‘something in white’ was moving slowly but with more purpose than for over forty years. While he had waited, sitting quietly by himself on the lowest step of the Prunesquallors’ staircase, Bellgrove had repeated to himself, his lips moving to the slow rhythm of his thoughts, those conclusions he had come to.
He had decided, intellectually, that Irma Prunesquallor, dwarfed by lack of outlet for her feminine instincts, could find fruition in a life devoted to his comforts. That not only he, but she, in years to come would bless the day when he, Bellgrove, was man enough, was sapient enough, to lift her from stagnation and set her marching through matrimony towards that equipoise of spirit that only wives can know. There were a hundred rational reasons why she should leap at the chance in spite of his advanced years. But what weight had all these arguments for a fine and haughty lady, sensitive as a blood horse and gowned like a queen, if at the same time there was no love? And Bellgrove remembered as he had crossed the quadrangle an hour ago how it was this point that irked him. But now, it was not the tightness of his reasoning that set his old knees trembling, it was something more. For, from a wise and practical project the whole conception had been shifted into another light. His ideas had suddenly been overlaid with stars. What was precise was now enormous, unsubstant, diaphanous, for he had seen her. And tonight it was not merely the Doctor’s sister that awaited him, but a daughter of Eve, a living focus, a cosmos, a pulse of the great abstraction. Woman. Was