The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

Within an hour the morning classes were under way. At an ink-stained desk, with his chin cupped in his hands, Titus was contemplating, as in a dream, the chalk marks on the blackboard. They represented a sum in short division, but might as well have been some hieroglyphic message from a moonstruck prophet to his lost tribe a thousand years ago. His mind, and the minds of his small companions in that leather-walled school-room, was far away, but in a world, not of prophets, but of swopped marbles, birds’ eggs, wooden daggers, secrets and catapults, midnight feasts, heroes, deadly rivalries and desperate friendships.

FIVE

Fuchsia was leaning on her window-sill and staring out over the rough roofs below her. Her crimson dress burned with the peculiar red more often found in paintings than in Nature. The window-frame, surrounding not only her but the impalpable dusk behind her, enclosed a masterpiece. Her stillness accentuated the hallucinatory effect, but even if she were to have moved it would have seemed that a picture had come to life rather than that a movement had taken place in Nature. But the pattern did not alter. The inky black of her hair fell motionlessly and gave infinite subtlety to the porous shadow-land beyond her, showing it for what it was, not so much a darkness in itself as something starved for sunbeams. Her face, throat and arms were warm and tawny, yet seemed pale against her red dress. She stared down, out of this picture, at the world below her – at the north cloisters, at Barquentine, heaving his miserable and vicious body forwards on his crutch, and cursing the flies that followed him as he passed across a gap between two roofs and disappeared from sight.

Then she moved, suddenly turning about at a sound behind her and found Mrs Slagg looking up at her. In her hands the midget held a tray weighted with a tumbler of milk and a bunch of grapes.

She was peeved and irritable, for she had spent the last hour searching for Titus, who had outgrown the fussings of her love. ‘Where is he? Oh, where is he?’ she had whimpered, her face puckered up with anxiety and her weak legs, like twigs, that were forever tottering from one duty to another, aching. ‘Where is his wickedness, that naughty Earl of mine? God help my poor weak heart! Where can he be?’

Her peevish voice raised thin echoes far above her as though, in hall after hall, she had awakened nests of fledgelings from their sleep.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Fuchsia, throwing a lock of hair from her face with a quick jerk of her hand. ‘I didn’t know who it was.’

‘Of course, it’s me! Who else could it be, you stupid? Who else ever comes in your room? You ought to know that by now, oughtn’t you? Oughtn’t you?’

‘I didn’t see you,’ said Fuchsia.

‘But I saw you – leaning out of the window like a great heavy thing – and never listening though I called you and called you and called you to open the door. Oh, my weak heart! – it’s always the same – call, call, call, with no one to answer. Why do I trouble to live?’ She peered at Fuchsia. ‘Why should I live for you? Perhaps I’ll die tonight,’ she added maliciously, squinting at Fuchsia again. ‘Why don’t you take your milk?’

‘Put it on the chair,’ said Fuchsia, ‘I’ll have it later – and the grapes. Thank you. Goodbye.’

At Fuchsia’s peremptory dismissal, which had not been meant unkindly, abrupt as it had sounded, Mrs Slagg’s eyes filled with tears. But ancient, tiny and hurt though she was, her anger rose again like a miniature tempest, and instead of her usual peevish cry of ‘Oh, my weak heart! how could you?’ she caught hold of Fuchsia’s hand and tried to bend back the girl’s fingers and, failing, was about to try and bite her ladyship’s arm when she found herself being carried to the bed. Denied of her little revenge, she closed her eyes for a few moments, her chicken bosom rising and falling with fantastic rapidity. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was Fuchsia’s hand spread out before her and, rising on one elbow, she smacked at it again and again until exhausted, when she buried her wrinkled face in Fuchsia’s side.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the girl. ‘I didn’t mean Goodbye in that way. I only meant that I wanted to be left alone.’

‘Why?’ (Mrs Slagg’s voice was hardly audible, so closely was her face pressed into Fuchsia’s dress.) ‘Why? why? why? Anyone would think I got in your way. Anyone would think I didn’t know you inside out. Haven’t I taught you everything since you were a baby? Didn’t I rock you to sleep, you beastly thing? Didn’t I?’ She raised her old tearful face to Fuchsia. ‘Didn’t I?’

‘You did,’ said Fuchsia.

‘Well, then!’ said Nanny’ Slagg. ‘Well, then!’ And she crawled off the bed and made her descent to the ground.