The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (49 page)

It is not just the fashion for
bébés
: it is your protracted absence that has killed the ‘Miss Swineys’ dead as Henry VIII. Without your cultivating desire for them, the dolls have lost their retail attraction. Your tangible presence was required town by town, street by street, to keep you visible. By the effort
they
put in to attend you, by the money
they
spent on the shows, our customers used to love you. Now they may not put themselves in your paths, they have disinvested their interest and their love for you, and find other objects, closer to hand, to admire and believe in. As you persist in staying in Venice for reasons that cannot be explained to your former customers, you must understand that Rainfleury & Masslethwaite cannot go on supporting you.

With great regret, I must give you the statutory six months’ notice of the dissolution of the Swiney Godiva Corporation contract. If you were sensible girls, you would thank me. By thinking ahead, I have enabled the Corporation to wash its face – we’ll not be coming after you for compensation. Now I must think of the company and our employees, poor Irish souls. For their sakes alone, it is only prudent for me to involve myself in other, healthier business ventures at this juncture.

Finally, it had happened, what Alexander had wanted. I was free of the Corporation. But now Alexander did not want me.

Darcy stormed, ‘In cold blood! But what about the Swiney Godiva Corporation? Rainfleury’s is still a director of that! So he is involved in the essence and the scalp food and all the other poisons. He still has responsibilities to us as long as there’s a drop of Swiney Godiva in a shop! He’ll just have to intrude into his own savings for a change, instead of filching and squandering ours.’

‘Don’t be giving up,’ chimed Oona. ‘He speaks just of the dolls. He has had a setback and is emotional. At least we can rely on Tristan not to be emotionally overwrought and to keep working for the good.’

The next week’s post brought us a new letter from Tristan. The Swiney Godiva Marrow and Daffodil Pomade, he told us, was selling too poorly to maintain its properly improper ingredients. O’Mealy was becoming venal. Meanwhile a lamentable fashion was emerging to unmask quack products for ladies. Two laboratories in England had expressed a desire to analyse the Swiney product. Of course it was Millwillis who had drawn their attention to us, Tristan wrote.
It was a dark day you sisters invited him into your house. If only you had not committed that act of folly and brought this storm down upon us.

Rather than have their contents analysed, Tristan advised the withdrawal of every item. He deducted the funds from our accounts for the removal and destruction of the bottles.

He wrote:

It pains me to say so, but we must look at other retrenchments. I have closed the factory, of course. It was bleeding money. But the Corporation’s staff must also be thinned. Out of compassion for their plight, I have been looking to find the people work in other establishments.

Darcy had begun to hammer these Corporation missives to the wall, so that she might keep them in constant view and spit at them whenever she passed. Into delicately marbled walls and painted panels she pounded Tristan’s and Mr Rainfleury’s letters, fragmenting wood and stone.

‘That’s just stupid!’ ranted Darcy. ‘The whole world’s presently falling to shards and dribbles, and your man’s working up a froth about a sliver of the tail-end of a triviality. I will reply at once. Take this down, Manticory!
This is a temporary setback. You are acting from irrational, pusillanimous fear! Be a man, Tristan! For all you dress your ringlets like a milkmaid
.’

No, Darcy, it is fundamentally rational
, came the cool reply in his flowing hand, with much more painful detail besides.
You must now force yourselves to dine upon the bitter herbs of truth, and to swallow them
.

‘I’ll force
them
to eat the truth!’ Darcy muttered. ‘They have regaled themselves of us like pigs of acorns!’ Distractedly, she pulled a hammer out of her pocket and beat it on her left palm with her right hand.

‘Darcy honey, a hammer like that is mighty apt to hurt a body. Put it away, there’s a good creature honey,’ begged Oona.

Chapter 44

We had always felt rich in Venice – at first, rich in personal beauty and capillary attractions, latterly in our
palazzo
and in our accounts. Venice had seemed poorer than us – we had struggled to find shops grand enough to spend our bounty in.

Now, suddenly, we were rabbit poor, dirt poor, dirty poor, too poor for soap. Darcy was frank on this subject. Not a penny was to be spent without her authority.

Darcy went to war on expense. She dismissed the maids, telling them that ‘proper Irish’ replacements were en route from Dublin. Pertilly took on all the work of the household. To wash our hair, Darcy had her save the spoileen, as Annora had done back in Harristown. She sold Ida’s violin. I did not like the way she eyed my new Remington typewriter and took it into my bedroom each night for safety.

While Darcy saw this new poverty as a foe to be destroyed, the rest of us recognised an old friend. To me, there was a sense of disagreeable rightness about it, as if we had simply risen like a bubble on a droplet, and now the bubble had burst and we were dissolving back into the general swill of poverty, of Irish poverty, of backwoods, backwards poverty, the drabbest and most general poverty in the world. We had known what it was to be poor, with the turf stove and the thin geese and the slow crows. I could find no rampant triumph in parsimony, because I remembered poverty in all its comprehensive boredom, cold and hunger. Perhaps it was inevitable that it would reclaim us. The shock lay in the plummeting nature of our fall.

I retrieved the seashell lamp from its hiding place in my trunk and hung it from the rafters in the dining room, the only place in which we now kept a fire. Darcy had insisted that one candle was all we burned at night; I became accustomed to the spectral vision of my sisters flitting uncertainly through the dark rooms. We sat at the table under the seashell until the candle guttered, and then we shuffled back to our bedrooms in a wretched shadow of our former chorus line on the stage.

‘Why is this happening to us?’ asked Berenice. ‘We haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘Except spend money like water,’ retorted Darcy. ‘Now you must take your punishment.’

Except it was you who controlled all the money
, I thought.
It was you who did all the spending, you who gambled. The rest of us had pocket money, that is all we had.

I could see the same thoughts inscribed on my sisters’ faces, and the same lack of appetite to voice them.

‘Are there
no
savings, Darcy honey?’ appealed Oona. ‘Something kept back for a rainy day?’

Darcy glared.

I blew out the flame in the seashell lamp, and in the safety of darkness asked Darcy, ‘And what of Phelan Swiney, Mariner? Do you remember the money he wrote about, the deposit he made for us in the La Touche Bank in Dublin. Do you think—’

‘I do not,’ she bellowed. ‘That subject shall not be raised again. I told you! That money was merely a honey trap, left by a feathered snake of a faker, a Hair Despoiler even, to buy his way into our lives. I cut him off at the knees. And now he is in prison. There’s no more coming from there.’

Or does he lie under crossed spoons in the clover field at Harristown?

Whoever or wherever he was, it was clear as Waterford crystal that he could not help us now.

The smiles of strangers in the street seemed to mask a patronising pity. Pertilly shopped at Rialto at the end of the day, when things were cheap, bringing home distressing portions of animals wrapped in bloodied newspaper. Or she went on long excursions, she told us, to islands where she bought direct from farmers or fishermen. She haggled for fish on the turn, vegetables furry with mould. Everything had a grey tinge, or perhaps our eyes were failing as we rapidly descended into our own private Irish famine on the Grand Canal.

Of course we starved in the utmost elegance, in our extravagantly painted rooms. If paint had been edible, we might have taken ourselves a taste.

Gone were our 4-franc, six-course breakfasts at Quadri in the Piazza and our long suppers at the Cappello Nero in the Merceria. Even coffee at the Orientale on the Riva was 20 centesimi, and we could not respectably linger, for soldiers and sailors played draughts in the big golden room. We persuaded ourselves that we needed to patronise the
caramei
men with their skewers of candied fruit, dropping precious coins on their brass trays – for the sake of our morale and for the sake of the
caramei
’s often-cited starving children. We went to the sideshows and circuses at the Riva and watched the acrobats and exotic animals because the entry fees were so tiny compared with the good they did our spirits.

To support us in these necessary luxuries, we began to sell things: jewels, furs, even our boots, at prices that were a fraction of what we’d paid.

When our breakfasts were attenuated to tea, we copied the street urchins and went to stand next to the three-legged braziers of the roasters of spiced pumpkin, hot pears and chestnuts, to steal a little warmth. They did not give us free tastes: we were already too diminished in substance, a company of rackabones, with a telltale looseness in our clothes. They gave encouraging samples only to people who could afford to be plump.

We hadn’t the price of a meal in our purses. The sight of us would frighten a bowl of macaroni, so hungry were we, hungry enough to eat the shell off a snail like the slow crows back in Harristown. As we grew thinner, our skin fitted too tightly to our bodies, and our teeth, like Annora’s, became more prominent. I realised now that she had denied herself food so that there was more for her hungry daughters. Our eyes bulged, sometime inadvertently rounding at the sight of an apple, forbidden because of its cost, at a
fruttivendolo
.

Signor Bon, handing me into the boat, observed sadly, ‘There is less of you, Miss Manticory. May I do any small thing to help?’

‘Call me “Manticory”, I beg you. The “Miss” is too much of a mockery.’

His eyes met mine. He knew exactly what I confessed by that. I saw that he hated to know the extent of my lost intimacy with Alexander Sardou. But I saw his face change too, into acceptance, then sympathy and finally back to his usual affectionate approval.

‘I do not consider this a mockery, to call you by your name, Manticory. If I ask you to call me “Saverio”, shall you consider me as mocking myself ?’

I smiled, unwillingly. ‘Saverio, then,’ I said.

We continued on our journeys through Venice, almost in silence. I sat with my hands on the wooden rim of the boat, feeling the water through my whole body, sweeping cleanly around my kidneys and my stomach.

Formerly Saverio had always been behind me, but now he was not. I could not remember when I became aware of a desire to turn and face him, and watch him row, and see Venice filtered through the silhouette of his long limbs.

But now, on all our boat journeys, I sat that way, and watched him.

There was a story he told me again and again, about a bridge made of glass, and my own journey upon it. He told it as a parent tells a child, and I received it as I would a fairy story contrived especially soothe the ache of my own repertoire of nightmares.

‘Manticory, see yourself crossing a bridge,’ Saverio told me. ‘Close your eyes and feel it under your feet. See it woven of glass, transparent fairy threads from Murano. As you cross the bridge, the steps behind you melt like spun sugar in the sun. It becomes a three-quarters bridge, a half bridge, a quarter bridge of glass. Then turn, and look back and see what you have left behind. See him standing there with his cloud of contempt darkening the ground around him. With the canal between you and him, tell him that he may not pass, that you wish him well, but he is in your past now. Turn and face towards San Marco, and the whole life of this city, and walk towards it, with the sun warming your back.’

The waves applauded Saverio’s story, slapping the boat with appreciation.

But I could not. I did not want the sun or life or the fairy threads of glass.

We wrestled bravely with our hunger but it had too many arms and too many pinching fingers, more than all the remaining Swiney sisters’ put together. Darcy fought the fiercest, of course. It became the day’s triumph if she was able to terrorise more credit out of the shops that still deigned to deal with us, or a jug of milk out of the tall cans of one of the
lattivendole
. We could not afford to wash our sheets – Darcy became adept at stealing clean ones from the laundresses of San Polo, who hung their work from slender poles in the square, which resembled a lake adrift with sailing boats. It was a poor day if she came home empty-handed.

‘I tried to knock another chop out of the butcher, but his wife wouldn’t have it,’ she’d scowl. ‘I made her sorry.’

After that, the butcher swore when he saw us coming. ‘
Che cani dei to morti. Cani affamati
.’