The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

‘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 and even dashing began to possess him.

‘Irma,’ he whispered huskily. ‘Is this a desecration. Are we blotting the whitest of all love’s copybooks? It is for you to say. For myself I am walking among rainbows – for myself I …’ But he had to stop speaking for he wished, more than anything else to lie on his back and to kick his old legs about and to crow like a barn-cook. As he could not do this he had no option but to put his tongue out in the darkness, to squint with his eyes, to make extravagant grimaces of every kind. Excruciating shivers swarmed his spine.

And Irma could not reply. She was weeping with joy. Her only answer was to place her hand upon the headmaster’s. They drew together – involuntarily. For a while there was that kind of silence all lovers know. The silence that it is sin to break until of its own volition, the moment comes, and the arms relax and the cramped limbs can stretch themselves again, and it is no longer an insensitive thing to inquire what the time might be or to speak of other matters that have no place in Paradise.

At last Irma broke the hush.

‘How happy I am,’ she said very quietly. ‘How very happy, Mister Bellgrove.’

‘Ah … my dear … ah,’ said the Headmaster very slowly, very soothingly … ‘that is as it should be … that is as it should be.’

‘My wildest, my very wildest dreams have become real, have become something I can touch’ (she pressed his hand). ‘My little fancies, my little visions – they are no longer so, dear master, they are substance, they are you … they are You.’

Bellgrove was not sure that he liked being one of Irma’s ‘little fancies, little visions’ but his sense of the inappropriate was swamped in his excitement.

‘Irma!’ He drew her to him. There was less ‘give’ in her body than in a cake-stand. But he could hear her quick excited breathing.

‘You are not the only one whose dreams have become a reality, my dear. We are holding one another’s dreams in our very arms.’

‘Do you mean it, Mr Bellgrove?’

‘Surely, ah, surely,’ he said.

Dark as it was Irma could picture him at her side, could see him in detail. She had an excellent memory. She was enjoying what she saw. Her mind’s eye had suddenly become a most powerful organ. It was, in point of fact, stronger, clearer and healthier than those real eyes of hers which gave her so much trouble.

And so, as she spoke to him she had no sense of communing with an invisible presence. The darkness was forgotten.

‘Mr Bellgrove?’

‘My dear lady?’

‘Somehow, I knew …’

‘So did I … so did I.’

‘It is more than I dare dwell upon – this strange and beautiful fact – that words can be so unnecessary – that when I start a sentence, there is no need to finish it – and all this, so very suddenly. I said, so very suddenly.’

‘What would be sudden to the young is leisurely for us. What would be foolhardy in them is child’s-play itself, for you, my dear, and for me. We are mature, my dear. We are ripe. The golden glaze, that patina of time, these are upon us. Hence we are sure and have no callow qualms. Let us admit the length of our teeth, lady. Time, it is true, had flattened our feet, ah yes, but with what purpose? To steady us, to give us balance, to take us safely along the mountain tracks. God bless me … ah. God bless me. Do you think that I could have wooed and won you as a youth? Not in a hundred years! And why … ah … and why? Inexperience. That is the answer. But now, in half an hour or less, I have stormed you; stormed you. But am I breathless? No. I have brought my guns to bear upon you, and yet my dear, have scores of roundshot left … ah yes, yes, Irma my ripe one … and you can see it all? … you can see it all? … dammit, we have equipoise and that is what it is.’

Irma’s mental sight was frighteningly clear. His voice had sharpened the edges of his image.

‘But I’m not very old, Mr Bellgrove, am I,’ said Irma, after a pause. To be sure she felt as young as a fledgeling.

‘What is age? What is time!’ said Bellgrove – and then answering himself in a darker voice. ‘They’re hell!’ he said. ‘I hate ’em.’