The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake [374]
There was a break in Irma’s voice, and then as though to prove what she had said, she cried out into the night, ‘Tender! that’s what I said. Tender and Unattached!’
Bellgrove shifted himself; they were all but touching.
‘Tell me, my dearest lady, is it of me that you speak. If it is not, then humble me – be merciless and break an old man’s heart with one small syllable. If you say “no” then, without a word I will leave you and this pregnant arbour, walk out into the night, walk out of your life, and may be, who knows, out of mine also …’
Whether or not he was gulling himself it is certain that he was living the very essence of his words. Perhaps the very use of words themselves was as much a stimulus as Irma’s presence and his own designs; but that is not to say that the total effect was not sincere. He was infatuated with all that pertained to love. He trod breast-deep through banks of thorn-crazed roses. He breathed the odours of a magic isle. His brain swam on a sea of spices. But he had his own thought too.
‘It was of you I spoke,’ said Irma. ‘You, Mr Bellgrove. Do not touch me. Do not tempt me. Do nothing to me. Just be there beside me. I would not have us desecrate this moment.’
‘By no means. By no means.’ Bellgrove’s voice was deep and subterranean. He heard it with pleasure. But he was sensitive enough to know that for all its sepulchral beauty, the phrase he had just used was pathetically inept – and so he added, ‘By no means whatsoever …’ as though he were beginning a sentence.
‘By no means whatsoever, ah, definitely not, for who can tell, when, unawares, love’s dagger …’ but he stopped. He was getting nowhere. He must start again.
He must say things that would drive his former remarks out of her mind. He must sweep her along.
‘Dear one,’ he said, plunging into the rank and feverish margin of love’s forest. ‘Dear one!’
‘Mr Bellgrove – O, Mr Bellgrove,’ came the hardly audible reply.
‘It is the headmaster of Gormenghast, your suitor, who is speaking to you, my dear. It is a man, mature and tender – yet a disciplinarian, feared by the wicked, who is sitting beside you in the darkness. I would have you concentrate upon this. When I say to you that I shall call you Irma, I am not asking for permission from my love-light – I am telling her what I shall do.’
‘Say it, my male!’ cried Irma, forgetting herself. Her strident voice, quite out of key with the secret and muted atmosphere of an arbour’d wooing, splintered the darkness.
Bellgrove shuddered. Her voice had been a shock to him. At a more appropriate moment he would teach her not to do things of that kind.
As he settled again against the rustic back of the seat he found that their shoulders were touching.
‘I will say it. Indeed I will say it, my dear. Not as a crude statement with no beginning or ending. Not as a mere reiteration of the most lovely, the most provocative name in Gormenghast, but threaded into my sentences, an integral part of our conversation, Irma, for see, already it has left my tongue.’
‘I have no power, Mr Bellgrove, to remove my shoulder from yours.’
‘And I have no inclination, my dove.’ He lifted his big hand and tapped her on the shoulder she had referred to.
They had been so long in darkness that he had forgotten that she was in evening dress. In touching her naked shoulder he received a sensation that set his heart careering. For a moment he was deeply afraid. What was this creature at his side? and he cried out to some unknown God for delivery from the Unknown, the Serpentine, from all that was shameless, from flesh and the devil.
The tremendous gulf between the sexes yawned – and an abyss, terrifying and thrilling, sheer and black as the arbour in which they sat; a darkness wide, dangerous, imponderable and littered with the wrecks of broken bridges.
But his hand stayed where it was. The muscle of her shoulder was tense as a bowstring, but the skin was like satin. And then his terror fled. Something masterful