The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

After a few moments – ‘Get up,’ he said. Seating himself at Dogseye’s desk he picked up the penknife before him and worked away at the ‘G’ of ‘DOG’ until a bell rang and the room was transformed into a stampeding torrent of boys making for the classroom door as though they expected to find upon the other side the embodiment of their separate dreams – the talons of adventure, the antlers of romance.

IRMA WANTS A PARTY

‘Very well, then, and so you shall!’ cried Alfred Prunesquallor. ‘So you shall, indeed.’

There was a wild and happy desperation in his voice. Happy, in that a decision had been made at all, however unwisely. Desperate, because life with Irma was a desperate affair in any case; but especially in regard to this passion of hers to have a party.

‘Alfred! Alfred! are you serious? Will you pull your weight, Alfred? I say, will you pull your weight?’

‘What weight I have I’ll pull to pieces for you, Irma.’

‘You are resolved, Alfred – I say, you are resolved,’ she asked breathlessly.

‘It is you who are resolved, sweet Perturbation. It is I who have submitted. But there it is. I am weak. I am ductile. You will have your way – a way, I fear, that is fraught with the possibility of monstrous repercussions – but your own, Irma, your own. And a party we will throw. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!’

There was something that did not altogether ring true in his shrill laughter. Was there a touch of bitterness in it somewhere?

‘After all,’ he continued, perching himself on the back of a chair (and with his feet on the seat and his chin on his knees he looked remarkably like a grasshopper) … ‘After all, you have waited a long time. A long time. But, as you know, I would never advise such a thing. You’re not the type to give a party. You’re not even the type to go to a party. You have nothing of the flippancy about you that makes a party go, sister mine; but you are determined.’

‘Unutterably,’ said Irma.

‘And have you confidence in your brother as a host?’

‘Oh, Alfred, I could have!’ she whispered grimly. ‘I would have, if you wouldn’t try to make everything sound clever. I get so tired of the way you say things. And I don’t really like the things you say.’

‘Irma,’ said her brother, ‘nor do I. They always sound stale by the time I hear them. The brain and the tongue are so far apart.’

‘That’s the sort of nonsense I loathe!’ cried Irma, suddenly becoming passionate. ‘Are we going to talk about the party, or are we going to listen to your silly soufflés? Answer me, Alfred. Answer me at once.’

‘I will talk like bread and water. What shall I say?’

He descended from the chairback and sat on the seat. Then he leant forward a little and, with his hands folded between his knees, he gazed expectantly at Irma through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles. Staring back at him through the darkened glass of her own lenses, the enlargement of his eyes was hardly noticeable.

Irma felt that for the moment she had a certain moral ascendancy over her brother. The air of submission which he had about him gave her strength to divulge to him the real reason for her hankering for this party she had in mind … for she needed his help.

‘Did you know, Alfred,’ she said, that I am thinking of getting married?’

‘Irma!’ cried her brother. ‘You aren’t!’

‘Oh, yes, I am,’ muttered Irma. ‘Oh yes, I am.’

Prunesquallor was about to inquire who the lucky man was when a peculiar twinge of sympathy for her, poor white thing that she was, sitting so upright in the chair before him, caught at his heart. He knew how few her chances of meeting men had been in the past: he knew that she knew nothing of love’s gambits save what she had read in books. He knew that she would lose her head. He also knew that she had no one in view. So he said:

‘We will find just the man for you. You deserve a thoroughbred: something that can cock his ears and whisk his tail. By all that’s unimpeachable, you do indeed. Why …’

The Doctor stopped himself: he had been about to take verbal flight when he remembered his promise: so he leant forward again to hear what his sister had to say.

‘I don’t know about cocking his ears and frisking his tail,’ said Irma, with the suggestion of a twitch at one corner of her thin mouth; ‘but I would like you to know, Alfred – I said I would like you to know, that I am glad you understand the position. I am being wasted, Alfred. You realize that, don’t you – don’t you?’

‘I do, indeed.’

‘My skin is the whitest in Gormenghast.’

‘And your feet are the flattest,’ thought her brother: but he said:

‘Yes, yes, but what we must do, sweet huntress – (O virgin through wild sex’s thickets prowling)’ (he could not resist this image of his sister) ‘what we must do is to decide whom to ask. To the Party, I mean. That is fundamental.’

‘Yes, yes!’ said Irma.

‘And when we will ask them.’

‘That’s easier,’ said Irma.

‘And at what time of the day.’

‘The evening, of course,’ said Irma.

‘And what they shall wear.’