The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

In fact they hardly knew that they had turned. They could see very little of the night-filled room, but when a moment later a lady stepped forward, she brought with her a little light from the hall beyond. It was not much of an illumination but it was strong enough to show Titus and his companion that immediately to their left was a striped couch and on the other side of the room, down-stage as it were, supposing the night to be the auditorium, was a tall screen.

At the sight of the door opening Muzzlehatch plucked the small ape from Titus’ shoulder and muzzling it with his right hand and holding its four feet together in his left, he moved silently through the shadows until he was hidden behind the tall screen. Titus, with no ape to deal with, was beside him in a moment.

Then came the click and the room was immediately filled with coral-coloured light. The lady who had opened the door stepped forward without a sound. Daintily, for all her weight, she moved to the centre of the room, where she cocked her head on one side as though waiting for something peculiar to happen. Then she sat down on the striped couch, crossing her splendid legs with a hiss of silk.

‘He must be hungry,’ she whispered, ‘the roof-swarmer, the skylight-burster … the ragged boy from nowhere. He must be very hungry and very lost. Where would he be, I wonder? Behind that screen for instance, with his friend, the wicked Muzzlehatch?’ There was a rather silly silence.

THIRTY-ONE

While sitting there Juno had opened a hamper which she had filled at the party before following the boy and Muzzlehatch.

‘Are you hungry?’ said Juno, as they emerged.

‘Very hungry,’ said Titus.

‘Then eat,’ said Juno.

‘O my sweet flame! My mulcted one. What are you thinking of?’ asked Muzzlehatch, but in a voice so bored that it was almost an insult. ‘Can you imagine how I found him, love-pot?’

‘Who?’ said Juno.

‘This boy,’ said Muzzlehatch. ‘This ravenous boy.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Washed up, he was,’ said Muzzlehatch, ‘– at dawn. Ain’t that poetic? There he lay, stranded on the water-steps – sprawled out like a dead fish. So I drove him home. Why? Because I had never seen anything so unlikely. Next day I shoo’d him off. He was no part of me. No part of my absurd life, and away he went, a creature out of nowhere, redundant as a candle in the sun. Quite laughable – a thing to be forgotten – but what happens?’

‘I’m listening,’ said Juno.

‘I’ll tell you,’ continued Muzzlehatch. ‘He takes it upon himself to fall through a skylight and bears to the ground one of the few women who ever interested me. O yes. I saw it all. His head lay sidelong on your splendid bosom and for a little while he was Lord of that tropical ravine between your midnight breasts: that home of moss and verdure: that sumptuous cleft. But enough of this. I am too old for gulches. How did you find us? What with our twistings and turnings and doubling back – we should by rights have shaken off the devil himself – but then you wander in as though you’d been a-riding on my tail. How did you find me?’

‘I will tell you, Muzzle-dove, how I found you. There was nothing miraculous about it. My intuition is as non-existent as the smell of marble. It was the boy who gave you both away. His feet were wet and still are. They left a glister down the corridors.’

‘A glister, what’s a glister?’ said Muzzlehatch.

‘It’s what his wet feet left behind them – the merest film. I had only to follow it. Where are your shoes, pilgrim-child?’

‘My shoes?’ said Titus, with a chicken bone in his hand. ‘Why, somewhere in the river, I suppose.’

‘Well then; now that you’ve found us, Juno, my love-trap – what do you want of us? Alone or separately? I, after all, though unpopular, am no fugitive. So there’s no need for me to hide. But young Titus here (Lord of somewhere or other – with an altogether most unlikely name) – he, we must admit, is on the run. Why, I’m not quite sure. As for myself, there is nothing I want more than to wash my two hands of both of you. One reason is the way you haven’t my marrow. I yell for nothing but solitude, Juno, and the beasts I brood on. Another is this young man – the Earl of Gorgon-paste or whatever he calls himself – I must wash my hands of him also, for I have no desire to be involved with yet another human being – especially one in the shape of an enigma. Life is too brief for such diversions and I cannot bring myself to scrape up any interest in the problems of his breast.’

The small ape on Muzzlehatch’s shoulder nodded its head and then began to fish about in the depth of its master’s hair; its wrinkled, yet delicate, fingers probing here and there were as tender yet as inquisitive as any lover’s.