The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (37 page)

‘What will Tristan say to this?’ murmured Oona.

‘Seeing as Tristan is no more poet than I am a lion-tamer, he will say that Pertilly has lost her value – her money-earning power to bewitch – and that it will take her at least a decade to reacquire it,’ I replied.

Darcy put in, ‘By which time she’ll be a long-haired hag and no use to anyone. Without her hair, she will have no pull over the crowd. Do you think they’ve been coming to see Pertilly dance? Or sing? They might as well come to see a cow bawling and swatting at the flies in a field. They want rich, long hair – they want a woman who is gloriously fecund in the head. Not some old barren-headed, thick-ankled foozler of a baby.’

My hand flew into the air; for the first time in my life I wanted to strike Darcy so badly that my body obeyed my feelings. Enda caught and clasped my hand and shook her head.

Darcy jerked her thumb at the sleeping Pertilly. ‘No,’ she declared dramatically, ‘she’s no more use than a bunion presently.’

‘We can wig Pertilly?’ suggested Berenice.

Ida clapped her hands. ‘Yes! Perhaps we can each give a bit of our own hair’ – she yanked out a clump of her own – ‘and make Pertilly a real Swiney wig, so she will still be a Swiney Godiva and . . .’

The rest of us touched our hair for solid comfort, instinctively unhappy at this idea, and relieved when Darcy snapped, ‘Is that so? And what kind of piebald monster would she be with all our hair mixed? Striped like a tiger!’

‘She could have a choice of different ones.
The Hairdressers’ Chronicle and Trade Journal
says that Elizabeth I had eighty different wigs, but everyone knew it was her underneath,’ suggested Berenice.

‘Except Elizabeth had a brain and a title. There would be nothing under Pertilly’s wig.’ Darcy swept out of the room.

‘She’s very upset,’ observed Oona. ‘Even for her.’

I spent the night sitting beside Pertilly’s bed, holding her hand. Ida and Berenice should have done it, but they were too distressed in themselves. Ida was locked in her room, keening on her fiddle.

The old tribal bonds are loosening
, I thought.
Is this the way of things now?

I picked up Pertilly’s work basket. She had charmed fingers at her embroidery, which was as delicate as she was not. I burrowed through it until I found what I wanted: her shearing scissors.

If I cut my hair, there could be no more question of Swiney Godivas. Darcy might be able to somehow deal with one hairless sister, but not two.

I unpinned my chignon and let my hair cascade to the floor. As I had, after the man on the bridge, I held the beak of the scissors over a hank of it. The hair rustled around my throat and elbows. Did I wish to lose this shawl, this shelter I had grown for myself ? Might I be as much of an infant in the world as Pertilly seemed, if I was without it? Would Alexander love me without the hair? He never mentioned it, but it was hair that had brought him to me.

I put the scissors down.

Mr Rainfleury’s suppliers were secretly briefed with the mission of a wig, and he personally made sure that in colour it was indistinguishable from Pertilly’s old hair. But the wig never rooted – in the sense that Pertilly’s face never lost its shaved expression. She was no longer able to sing, except ghost songs, as if the phantom of her real hair flew about her, haunting her. And even then she sometimes forgot the words. Dancing was forbidden, lest it dislodge the fictitious hair.

‘We must retire her and interview a new sister,’ announced Darcy, on the disastrous night when Pertilly returned from the stage with the parting of her wig hanging over her left ear, exposing an inch of the stubbled right side of her head. Enda peered through the curtain and reported people in the audience exchanging looks and whispers, and pointing to their own heads.

The interviews for a new sister were conducted with the utmost discretion. Darcy ordered me to place advertisements in publications where maids looked for work.

‘Maids?’

Darcy explained, ‘We want her humble.’

‘You mean we need her to feel inferior?’

‘And it wouldn’t scald either for her to have a guilty secret entrusted with us,’ mused Darcy.

Long-haired, unmarried maids seeking an interesting new situation
were invited to send photographs and hair measurements to the post office box.
Hair must fall below knees
, specified the advertisement,
and be of a genuine chestnut colour
. Surprisingly, the post office box filled up with replies, but few offered the vital details of their hair length, apparently believing that they could distract us with glowing characters from previous employers. Those few candidates who claimed the requisite hair length and colour were lured to the post office. There I, my own hair hidden in a bonnet, would accost them first, and draw them into apparently random pleasantries, while Darcy approached and listened. If she found the girl’s answers and looks acceptable, she would push a note into her hand, requesting another meeting on a park bench at St Stephen’s Green.

Those meetings proved unsuccessful, or so it seemed from Darcy’s dark mood as she returned home. Anxious weeks of cancelled engagements passed. We advertised Pertilly as ‘indisposed with the influenza’ and other illnesses that seemed serious without being life-threatening.

The last girl I met in the post office had more than long hair of the perfect chestnut shade and a pleasant scent of Otto of Roses about her – she also had a swelling below her bodice. I hardly thought that Darcy would interest herself in a girl in such a contentious state. I was wrong. I saw the corners of Darcy’s mouth seize up in one of her horrible smiles; the rare brutal highlights appeared in her eyes. She rushed forward and pushed the prepared note into the pregnant girl’s hand, saying, ‘Three p.m. sharp, mind!’

The next morning she announced, ‘We have a new Pertilly. She will join us in four months. We must fend off the curious until then, and perhaps even have ourselves a small holiday.’

‘But the girl is expecting a child,’ I protested when I had Darcy alone in the music room later.

‘And is therefore bound to us for ever. We shall see to the confinement and the little bastard will be placed properly. In exchange, we buy her infinite secrecy. And she has some months to become used to her new name, and to learn to sing. And to do the thing properly, or I’ll eat her without salt.’

The desistering of Pertilly was as abrupt as her haircut.

The real Pertilly, Darcy announced, was to become our dresser and hairdresser.

‘We shall give her a new name, Pudel, like an Austrian maid. And she must learn to speak with a German accent. Manticory, next time you are mooning around a bookshop, try doing something useful and buy her a German phrasebook.’

I did. And I coached her as best I could. But Pertilly’s ‘
jawohl
’s were always ‘yarvel’s and her ‘
bitte schön
’s were always ‘beetle shun’s. The accent would never quite come off, but her new name suited Pertilly very well, perhaps because there had always been an element of Tyrolean milkmaid about her complexion and figure. ‘Pudel’ cut the front of her wig to create some nose-tickling frizzled bangs. In her case, the fringe did not travel with any baggage of beauty beneath, however. Darcy referred to it as ‘the antimacassar’ or ‘the brothel lampshade’, but only when Pertilly was out of the room.

Alexander’s presence was requested to retouch Pertilly’s face in a new likeness. Two weeks later he was back in Dublin, being sworn to secrecy by Darcy.

We all assembled to watch him repaint our sister’s face, using a photograph of the new Pertilly supplied by Darcy.

‘Are you sure?’ was all he asked, with brush hovering over our sister’s nose.

‘I am not,’ I whispered.

‘Just get on with it,’ said Darcy.

Later, at the library, he wrote to me:
It felt like killing
.

And I was only happy because at that time every act that bound him to the Swineys, even the murder of Pertilly’s face, was one that kept him closer to me. He eked out the new features for as long as he dared, and then he was off again, taking my happiness with him.

Chapter 33

By the time the new Pertilly, nervous and pale, was installed in the house, it was hard to remember that Pudel was anything but a maid. If any of us called her ‘Pertilly’, she was the first to remind us not to do so. ‘You have forgot yourself, ma’am. I believe you mean “Pudel”, ma’am.’

She insisted on moving down to the lower ground floor. A storeroom next to Mrs Hartigan’s quarters was set up as a bedroom and parlour for her. She looked perfectly the part in her white cap.

Pudel was happier than Pertilly had ever been.

I guessed Pertilly had ever thought herself inferior because of her ungainly figure, and it must have been a desperately painful thing for her to impersonate – as she felt it – a magnificent Swiney Godiva, without feeling worthy of being one, to faux-elevate herself from her own estimate of herself – regularly reinforced by Darcy – as bovine, graceless and uninteresting. As Pudel, though, she could lower herself comfortably into the humble role for which she secretly thought herself fit. As Pertilly, she had been a cumbrous nullity; as Pudel, she shone, and her plain looks were a neat emblem of her incontestable efficiency. If anything, her stock rose in the old tribal alignments. Berenice and Ida were proud of her, for the first time.

Pudel was especially attentive to the new Pertilly, grooming the girl’s chestnut hair to a living simulacrum of her own former locks. When the new Pertilly developed the first of a series of head-colds, Pudel prepared scalteen for her, boiling a mixture of whisky, water, sugar, butter and caraway seeds in a pot. The new Pertilly was already a far better dancer than Pertilly had been, though some of her gestures were overly florid, and some of the movements of her lower body too frank. Darcy was forever shouting at her, ‘Less harlot, more saint, girl!’

Pudel had by now become something of an asset to the Corporation, not just because of her hairdressing skills, but for her extreme formality in answering the door. No one could usher one of Mr Rainfleury’s business associates into the parlour with more impeccable dignity.

Pertilly’s assailant was arrested six months after the attack. When the constables broke into his home in Wicklow, he was found to have more than thirty switches of long hair in his wardrobe, each plaited and bound with satin ribbons of different colours. I asked to see the prison doctor’s report, choosing not to share it with my sisters:

I see in the current subject one of the race of ‘hair-despoilers’ or ‘plait-cutters’, as they are known – men who infiltrate crowds of young lower-class women at fairs or horse races and use the dense crowd as cover when they cut and make away with the hair, which they then fondle and idolise in private to have and to hold for ever, unencumbered by a whole and possibly inconvenient woman. Some men merely steal ribbons, or hairpins, but there is a solid core of cutters.

The prisoner has confessed to obtaining intense pleasure from handling the disembodied female hair. His erotic malady is that touching a woman excites no urges in him; indeed it discourages them. Only if the hair is separated from its owner can he find delight in it. And the violent act of separating it from its owner is the height of his joy. As he shears off the hair, he experiences his climactic moment – so obliviating that he is often unable to recall the street or the day on which the crime was committed. When he pleasures himself with the hair at home, it is done by remembering the isolated moment of amputation.

The man had seen Pertilly leaving the ostentatious portals of the central post office. It so happened that a long brown curl had escaped when she paused to adjust her bonnet in the shadow of the pediment.
The statues of Hibernia, Mercury and Fidelity
, his confession said,
had seemed to wink at me, urging me to take a closer look at that young woman with a good five feet of hair. I recognised her for a Swiney Godiva, long objects of my erotic imagination, and her fate was sealed
.

His name was not Phelan Swiney, a fact that I paraded to Darcy.

But she said, ‘And do you think that an arrant pretender would use his real name when he tried to tempt us into his clutches? Would he not borrow a name that would attract our attention? It is the same man who wrote those letters, and there is nothing more to be said about it.’

Pertilly’s shearing proved we had crossed a dangerous line of celebrity. We had fallen into just that danger Mr Rainfleury had warned of back in Venice – of being overpraised, a thing guaranteed to attract envious anger, parasites and black hearts. Tristan railed to us, ‘Money, in the quantities you have it, lives in the light, but it casts a dark shadow. Darkness brings on darkness. There stir low forms of life, who feed on darkness, even capturing what is good and dragging it down below to feast upon. These cannibals of human happiness devour what is wholesome, excreting only what is vile onto the pages of their newspapers. Newsprint is black for a reason.’

Our rivals, like the makers of Hall’s Vegetable Sicilian Hair Renewer, had reasons to donate to such a carnivore, or steer his hunting in a certain direction. With every day of our increasing fame, the jealous fates were shaping for us a perfect enemy, a single man who had access to the eyes of many, and who knew how to make every one of them look crooked at seven sisters from Harristown, County Kildare.