The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (39 page)

St John Millwillis pointed to them.

‘The long summer of the Swiney Godivas is over,’ he told me.

Chapter 35

‘He writes for the little people, phooey to him, that Mill
willy
,’ muttered Darcy.

‘For the fairies?’ asked Ida. ‘Is it fairy newspapers there are then?’

‘Have you anything at all working inside your head, Ida? He writes for the nobodies, I mean. I’ve seen his pieces in
The Nation
. The stookawn! The gobdaw!’

‘Your mouth!’ protested Oona. ‘Darcy honey!’

‘
We
are the little people,’ I reminded Darcy, just as Millwillis had reminded me. ‘No one is littler than the Swineys of Harristown. We have no business in Fitzwilliam Square. We are impostors.’

By showing us as little dolls
, I wanted to explain,
Mr Rainfleury has made us strangely larger in the public’s imagination
.

‘Seal those lips,’ shrieked Darcy, ‘before any more lunacy spills out of them. He’s got you all unstuck, Manticory. That wasn’t hard.’

How could I make her see what I meant – that we did not carry our heads lined with memories of nannies, ancestral turrets and miniature pony-carriages? We had in our heads the thin geese, the slow crows; in our noses, the smell of the turf stove and the smallest and gnarliest of potatoes draining in the basket. I could still remember thinking the Kilcullen post office a mansion because it had sash windows. Only our hair carried any natural nobility. Mr Millwillis could return us to our original state in one page, in one paragraph of a book printed a thousand, ten thousand times. And what if he found out about Pertilly? And what of our paternity? And what—

‘I’ll tear out his eye!’ mouthed Darcy. ‘I’ll put it on a toothpick and watch it shrivel day by day!’

‘But you cannot tear out the eyes of all the people who will read his stories, and you cannot stop their tongues from spreading his tales either,’ I said. ‘Why don’t I . . . write that book you spoke of ?’

I surprised myself with my audacity. I did not know if I was capable. I half hoped she’d destroy the idea, which she did.

‘Because you are a fool and you’d never write it right.’

‘You think Millwillis will write it better than me?’ I asked. ‘You’ve been content to act my scripts.’

‘Well, there’s the Tiger Girl on her back legs at last,’ mocked Darcy. ‘You know how to fill a page, anyway. Pray don’t be stopping on the old scripts, Manticory. Or we’d have to rely on Tristan.’

Ida said, ‘Has Manticory died that Darcy is talking so nicely of her?’

I was flattered into muttering, ‘A book is a very different thing from an article. A book is for ever. A book would have Harristown in it, and Annora, and the truth about where we came from.’

It would separate us from Tristan’s advertising, and Mr Rainfleury’s pretensions for us.

Oona whispered, ‘Tristan will save us from a scandal. You don’t have to be writing a great big book there, Manticory honey.’

Berenice added, ‘Augustus will not allow it.’

‘No more he will.’ Enda for once agreed with her.

But Tristan and Mr Rainfleury refused to pursue Millwillis with threats or writs, a thing I could not at first understand. Then, after supper when I went down to retrieve a book forgotten under my chair, I overheard them rumbling and tittering over their brandy in the dining room. I paused outside the door and inclined my ear towards the slight aperture.

‘It could be the making of the dolls, you know,’ said Mr Rainfleury
sotto voce
, ‘this Millwillis business. The public enjoys a bad woman more than a good one. Subtle changes of costume, you know, more red, more black lace—’

All the blood in my heart ran up to my cheeks. I waited for Tristan to respond with all the rightful misgivings. Something in him had an affection for Oona, at least. Surely he’d show pity for Oona and her poor sisters whose reputations would be smashed, and whose private shame would become another line of doll advertising. Surely, even as a poet, he couldn’t allow it.

A hearty guffaw was Tristan’s response.

‘And that could be the making of the essence and the scalp food!’ he crowed. ‘The newsman might be doing us a favour. Dirty rags to sumptuous riches always sells. The more the public’s imagination is exercised about something, the more they’ll lay out on it. Let’s get another good Christmas out of them, at least.’

With the proceeds divided between Tristan, Mr Rainfleury and Mr Millwillis
, I thought,
their new secret but far-from-silent partner
.

‘Let’s drink to that, old fellow,’ said Mr Rainfleury. ‘And how are you enjoying little Oona these days?’

I heard Tristan giggle, and Berenice’s name was mentioned.

Glasses clinked.

To the gutter with us, is it?
I raged silently.
One of us is your wife. And two of the others are your mistresses
.

I retreated to the green parlour, where my sisters were gathered at the window, looking at Mr Millwillis dawdling under a lamp-post below.

Darcy made a noise deep in her throat. ‘Look at him, the old bosthoon.’

Millwillis waved gaily at us and took a stride in the direction of our door. Oona and Enda squealed, stepping backwards.

‘If he so much as touches the doorbell,’ Darcy shouted, ‘the divil a bone in his body but I’ll powder it and blow it up the chimney!’

Oona said, ‘Tristan would never let him in.’

I thought sourly,
Tristan has already given him the key to the house
.

‘Anyway, we’re off to London next week,’ Darcy said. ‘He’ll not follow us past Kingstown.’

But Millwillis pursued us on our new English tour. He staked out every hotel. He was to be seen strolling backwards and forwards outside our quarters in the early hours. In London, he followed the fake Pertilly on an excursion to Harrods and cornered her in the hat department. She came back to our rooms incoherent with fear.

Eventually, after Darcy slapped her face, and Oona administered the sal volatile, she stammered, ‘He knows I am no Swiney. He told me my real name. He knows about . . . my little one. He’s going to put it in the newspaper. By way of building an excitement for his book, he said.’

‘Nonsense,’ barked Darcy. ‘He has no evidence.’

‘He has the records of the lying-in hospital where I . . . He has spoken to a woman called Craughn, your old hairdresser. He showed her photographs. She confirmed that I am not the girl Pertilly whose hair she used to dress.’

‘Miss Craughn was with us for all of four weeks. Her head is muddled with sniffing the frizzle tonic. Servants always bear a grudge. No one sensible will believe her.’

‘He says you are but poor bastard girls from Harristown, born in abject poverty. Pieces of Irish nothing. All feathers and no hat. Not fit for life outside a swinish sty.’

‘He’ll be stopped,’ retorted Darcy.

‘He said to tell you that his breath will always be on the back of your swinish necks and that the click of every deathwatch beetle in the night will remind you of the sound of his pen scribbling.’

‘Away with him and his deathwatch beetle,’ scoffed Darcy. ‘Grow a spine, girl.’

But the next morning, the new Pertilly’s bed was empty. Her wardrobe, however, was full. She had left all her stage clothes. We cut short our tour and fled, myself with a secret copy of Millwillis’s biography of Julia Pastrana wrapped in my nightdress. He had mutilated the poor Baboon Lady in death, as the press had in life. He had faithfully recorded every disgusted comment, every accusation of beastliness, every mocking cartoon ever published about her, and added a gloss of sneering and innuendo about her sexual appetites and her feeding habits.

Back in Dublin, we tried to find a third Pertilly, this time advertising with height and waist measurements to accommodate the costumes already made. We were forced to take on a girl with inadequate hair, which had to be supplemented with hanks of Mr Rainfleury’s so-called silk. I feared she would not last – and she did not. Darcy tried to keep her indoors, but the girl was restless. Soon Millwillis was whispering in her ear in a tea shop, and she too was gone.

Mr Rainfleury reluctantly agreed to send the Swiney Godivas into
temporary reposeful retirement after an exhausting round of superbly successful engagements
.

While we reposefully retired, Tristan experimented with a male product, taking in all the competitors to see if we could create a more pleasing mixture than the ever-popular Pommade Hongroise.
For Fixing the Moustache or Beard in any Desired Position
. Mr Rainfleury was unhappy with the results, which hardened his own productions to an enamelled texture and caused the precious hairs to fall out. The project faded away.

Instead Tristan assaulted the press with a round of Swiney Godiva advertising.

‘Are we not paying to put money in Millwillis’s pocket, rather?’ I asked. ‘We are giving advance publicity to his book.’

He waved me aside. ‘Leave the strategy of things to me, Manticory.’

Tristan set up a Swiney Godiva Marrow and Daffodil Pomade, which was advertised as
Perfumed with precious
extrait
distilled from the choicest flowers and steeped in that excellent transdermal carrier, alcohol
. This was followed by a Lotion for Setting Perfect Swiney Curls.
To be poured into a saucer and applied with a sponge to the roots of the hair before curling
. And a Swiney Godiva Dry Vegetable Shampoo Powder with its own patent sprinkler.
Frees the hair from grease and dirt as effectively as wet-wash
.

None of this feverish production assuaged my fears about the ways in which Tristan meant to capitalise on Millwillis’s scandal. I waited tensely for the threatened red costumes, the black lace – but they were not imposed.

It was only gradually that I began to understand that the truth was that Tristan had lost the run of himself. He – and Mr Rainfleury too – far from being sanguine, were now in a white-knuckle panic about Millwillis. Both had longed for the newspaper inches of publicity; neither had feared for the polluting of the Swiney Godivas’ reputations. But, in observing the newsman’s greed for detail, and his guile, they had finally realised that Tristan’s less than gallant behaviour towards Oona might be exposed alongside Mr Rainfleury’s failings as a faithful husband. The rash of new products was to milk the Swiney hair for all its gold as quickly as possible: the source might yet be dried up by Millwillis’s book. Tristan was too exercised to think clearly about the havoc to our funds and the damage we were doing to the original essence and scalp food. The new products entered a market that was already too crowded. Their very number and variety smacked of desperation, it seemed to me, of overselling.

Then Millwillis published his first article.

Oona came trembling to breakfast, with a bastinade of newsprint in her fist. ‘Here is the paper; and ’tisn’t much good for us you’ll find in it. And you’ll never guess who’s big with Millwillis now.’

The headline across the centre pages read:

SWINEY GODIVA HAIR SHOCKER – LICE! WORMS! MADNESS! LIES! COMPULSIVE GAMBLING! HEAD-SHAVING!

THE SEVEN SISTERS’ SECRETS REVEALED

A sensational discovery by St John Millwillis

‘Compulsive gambling?’ I asked.

‘Any lie will do!’ said Darcy.

We craned over the paper, flinching, groaning, exclaiming and eventually falling silent.

The worst of it was that most of his story was based on frank information gained by colloguing with the Eileen O’Reilly. Who’d have thought it ever back in our Harristown days that the butcher’s runt would have been sent to a finishing school in Switzerland at a rich butchering uncle’s bequest when he retired on the sale of his abattoirs in Howth. But I knew that was true – Mrs Godlin from the dispensary had written to tell us. And we’d heard from Mrs Godlin too that the newly finished Eileen O’Reilly had been employed in the uncle’s salami and olive import business.

A reliable informant, a close companion of their schoolyard days, reports that far from being the possessors of preternaturally fertile and healthy scalps, the poor Swiney sisters were riddled with vermin, and often half bald with the ringworm.

‘No one,’ added Eileen O’Reilly, a young lady of business, ‘wanted to sit next to a Swiney Nitster in the classroom. Not only were their lice bigger and more plentiful than anyone had ever seen, so they were, but the creatures were also great acrobats and could propel themselves halfway across the classroom, even into the hair of respectable girls like myself. It was something shocking, so it was. It was not their fault, the creatures. The oldest sister, Darcy, was too mean to spend on treatments in case it cost her the price of another frightful new hat for herself. And then of course everyone in Harristown knew that Darcy Swiney was mad as a bull with the staggers and twice as like to go at you. It is the wonder of the world to me that Darcy Swiney’s not yet finished in an asylum or a prison. And then we all know the Swineys are descended from a mad king who was condemned to wander Ireland insane and naked till he was put an end to.’