The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy полностью

‘Make entry! Come along, come along, my dear fellow! Make entry! What in the name of all that’s rapid are you waiting for?’

The door opened and the servant entered, balancing a tray upon which stood a bottle of elderberry wine and a small white cardboard box. He deposited the bottle and the box upon the table and retired. There was something sullen about his manner. The bottle had been placed upon the table with perhaps too casual a movement. The door had clicked behind him with rather too sharp a report. Steerpike noticed this, and when he saw the Doctor’s gaze return to his face, he raised his eyebrows quizzically and shrugged his shoulders the merest fraction.

Prunesquallor brought a brandy bottle to the table in the centre of the room, but first poured out a glass of elderberry wine which he gave to Fuchsia with a bow.

‘Drink, my Fuchsia dear,’ he said. ‘Drink to all those things that you love best. I know. I know,’ he added with his hands folded at his chin again. ‘Drink to everything that’s bright and glossy. Drink to the Coloured Things.’

Fuchsia nodded her head unsmilingly at the toast and took a gulp. She looked up at the Doctor very seriously. ‘It’s nice,’ she said. ‘I like elderberry wine. Do you like your drink, Nannie?’

Mrs Slagg very nearly spilt her port over the arm of the chair when she heard herself addressed. She nodded her head violently.

‘And now for the brandy,’ said the Doctor. ‘The brandy for Master … Master …’

‘Steerpike,’ said the youth. ‘My name is Steerpike, sir.’

‘Steerpike of the Many Problems,’ said the Doctor. ‘What did you say they were? My memory is so very untrustworthy. It’s as fickle as a fox. Ask me to name the third lateral blood vessel from the extremity of my index finger that runs east to west when I lie on my face at sundown, or the percentage of chalk to be found in the knuckles of an average spinster in her fifty-seventh year, ha, ha, ha! – or even ask me, my dear boy, to give details of the pulse rate of frogs two minutes before they die of scabies – these things are no tax upon my memory, ha, ha, ha! but ask me to remember exactly what you said your problems were, a minute ago, and you will find that my memory has forsaken me utterly. Now why is that, my dear Master Steerpike, why is that?’

‘Because I never mentioned them,’ said Steerpike.

‘That accounts for it,’ said Prunesquallor. ‘That, no doubt, accounts for it.’

‘I think so, sir,’ said Steerpike.

‘But you have problems,’ said the Doctor.

Steerpike took the glass of brandy which the Doctor had poured out.

‘My problems are varied,’ he said. ‘The most immediate is to impress you with my potentialities. To be able to make such an unorthodox remark is in itself a sign of some originality. I am not indispensable to you at the moment, sir, because you have never made use of my services; but after a week’s employment under your roof, sir, I could become so. I would be invaluable. I am purposely precipitous in my remarks. Either you reject me here and now or you have already at the back of your mind a desire to know me further. I am seventeen, sir. Do I sound like seventeen? Do I act like seventeen? I am clever enough to know I am clever. You will forgive my undiplomatic approach, sir, because you are a gentleman of imagination. That then, sir, is my immediate problem. To impress you with my talent, which would be put to your service in any and every form.’ Steerpike raised his glass. ‘To you, sir, if you will allow my presumption.’

The Doctor all this while had had his glass of cognac raised, but it had remained motionless an inch from his lips, until now, as Steerpike ended and took a sip at his brandy, he sat down suddenly in a chair beside the table and set down his own glass untasted.

‘Well, well, well, well,’ he said at last. ‘Well, well, well, well, well! By all that’s intriguing this is really the quintessential. What maladdress, by all that’s impudent! What an enormity of surface! What a very rare frenzy indeed!’ And he began to whinny, gently at first, but after a little while his high pitched laughter increased in volume and in tempo, and within a few minutes he was helpless with the shrill gale of his own merriment. How so great a quantity of breath and noise managed to come from lungs that must have been, in that tube of a chest wedged uncomfortably close together, it is difficult to imagine. Keeping, even at the height of his paroxysms, an extraordinary theatrical elegance, he rocked to and fro in his chair, helpless for the best part of nine minutes after which with difficulty he drew breath thinly through his teeth with a noise like the whistling of steam; and eventually, still shaking a little, he was able to focus his eyes upon the source of his enjoyment.

‘Well, Prodigy, my dear boy! you have done me a lot of good. My lungs have needed something like that for a long time.’