The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [372]
He would not answer her. He would play with her with his venerable brain. She must realize from the first that she could not always expect replies to her questions – that his thoughts might be elsewhere, in regions where it would be impossible for her to follow him – or that her questions were (for all his love for her and her for him) not worth answering.
The night poured in upon them from every side – a million million cubic miles of it. O, the glory of standing with one’s love, naked, as it were, on a spinning marble, while the spheres ran flaming through the universe!
Involuntarily they moved together into the arbour and sat down on a bench which they found in the darkness. This darkness was intensely rich and velvety. It was as though they were in a cavern, save that the depths were dramatized by a number of small and brilliant pools of moonlight. Pranked for the most part to the rear of the arbour these livid pools were at first a little disturbing, for portions of themselves were lit up with blatant emphasis. This arbitrary illumination had to be accepted, however, for Bellgrove, raising his eyes to where the vents in the roof let through the moonlight, could think of no way by which he could seal them.
From Irma’s point of view the dappled condition of the cavernous arbour was both calming and irritating at the same time.
Calming, in that to enter a cave of clotted midnight, with not so much as a flicker of light to gauge her distance from her partner would have been terrifying even with her knowledge of, and confidence in, so reliable and courteous a gentleman as her escort. This dappled arbour was not so fell a place. The pranked lights, more livid, it is true, than gay, removed, nevertheless, that sense of terror only known to fugitives or those benighted in a shire of ghouls.
Strong as was her feeling of gratification that the dark was broken, yet a sense of irritation as strong as her relief fought in her flat bosom for sovereignty. This irritation, hardly understandable to anyone who has neither Irma’s figure, nor a vivid picture of the arbour in mind, was caused by the maddening way in which the lozenges of radiance fell upon her body.
She had taken out a small mirror in the darkness, more from nervousness than anything else and in holding it up, saw nothing in the dark air before her but a long sharp segment of light. The mirror itself was quite invisible, as was the hand and arm that held it, but the detached and luminous reflection of her nose hovered before her in the darkness. At first she did not know what it was. She moved her head a little and saw in front of her one of her small weak eyes glittering like quicksilver, a startling thing to observe under any conditions, but infinitely more so when the organ is one’s own.
The rest of her was indistinguishable midnight save for a pair of large and spectral feet. She shuffled them, but this blotch of moonlight was the largest in the arbour and to evade it involved a muscular strain quite insufferable.
Bellgrove’s entire head was luminous. He was, more than ever before, a major prophet. His white hair positively blossomed.
Irma, knowing that this wonderful and searching light which was transfiguring the head was something that must not be missed – something in fact that she should pore upon – made a great effort to forget herself as a true lover should – but something in her rebelled against so exclusive a concentration upon her admirer, for she knew that it was she who should be stared at; she who should be poured upon.
Had she spent the best part of a day in titivating herself in order that she might sit plunged in darkness, with nothing but her feet and her nose revealed?
It was insufferable. The visual relationship was wrong; quite, quite wrong.
Bellgrove had suffered a shock when for a moment he had seen ahead of him, in quick succession, a moonlit nose and then a moonlit eye. They were obviously