The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (53 page)

And then I went to my bedroom and tore his long letter in half, and then quarters, and strewed the pieces in the Grand Canal along with the mutilated roses.

I did not return to the quiet discipline of Saverio’s studio. I had no need of his coffee or his kindness. Accepting his sympathy would denote believing in Alexander’s death, and that was not acceptable to me. And I feared my rage would cause his glass plates to explode if they caught my reflection in the sun.

Whenever Oona or Berenice pressed platitudes about time healing, I wished sudden, multiple and cruel bereavements on them. I did this silently. They would never guess that my eyes glittered with the acid of hate and not the softness of tears. I refused to light candles for Alexander or mutter prayers in memory. It was a sight too fierce and dirty for that, what I felt. This was a rubbishing, roustabout, rabid, untidy kind of grief. It was more like what I remembered from the Famined days in Ireland, when those about to perish from their hunger had laid themselves down in the street to be walked over, so that someone could witness them dying. I too felt that my grief required acknowledgement, but I did not know whose – I just knew that it was not that of the tourists, nor of the quiet-eyed Venetians, nor of my sisters. I strode the streets, my eyes scanning the people I passed as if one of them might provide the witness I needed.

Whenever Pertilly or Oona gently asked me how I was, I couldn’t very well answer the truth:
I hate everyone who is alive who is not Alexander, and that includes myself. And nor can I escape the fact that Darcy is right and I was dead to him before he died himself
.

So I murmured that I was doing well and soon hoped to be better.

‘Why don’t you take yourself back to the studio, Manticory?’ Oona asked. ‘It would do you some good, honey. Signor Bon has been asking for you.’

‘I’ll eat less, if you need the money,’ I snapped.

We Swiney Godivas had once made a pretty thing of mourning, piously picturesque around Darcy’s coffin and stuffed black cat; decorative and expensive with Ida’s hair and mourning jewellery. Enda’s ugly death had emptied these things of decency. The image of her last fall and of Alexander pointing the little pistol at his brain intertwined in my mind with the memory of Ida waiting for love at the railway station and her abrupt removal from us. If Ida were with us, I thought, she would understand the simple butchery of my feelings. She would understand that death had little to do with the songs that the Swiney Godivas had warbled in our day. It had no business with delicate jet earrings, or willows or wreaths, or weeping angels. There was nothing pretty about it, or gentle. Death was like a kick in the belly from a vicious horse, its withers dripping with yellow dung. Death was the ugliest brute in the bar, the one with his wife’s blood on his knuckles, the most stinking clot of sawdust on the butcher’s floor. Death was someone taking your hair and tearing off your scalp without a blade to ease its passage.

I suddenly saw the point of wine, and brandy, and even beer, or any liquid that would help the pain flow out of my brain in long dribbles of tears. After some days, Pertilly said mildly, ‘Will you have a morsel of food with your supper, Manticory?’

‘You were snoring like bagpipes last night,’ reported Darcy. ‘It floated right across the garden like a bear roaring. I put it in my black book.’

‘Will you have a tint of feeling, Darcy honey?’ reproved Oona. ‘Or at least pretend.’

‘You wouldn’t want to mind me,’ said Darcy. ‘You don’t, do you, Manticory? Good, I knew you didn’t. Carry on acting the tragedy queen till your heart bursts and showers us all with its giblets. But not in public, please. It’s not as if you were married. Even if he was.’

God rains on the wet, they say, somewhere with a superior line in proverbs. So there were pictures of Alexander everywhere, to remind me of the pale hair on his head, the slanted shadow under his lower lashes, the perfect kite of his torso.

Artist slaughtered in earthquake
, wrote the
Gazzetta
.
Young widow and son, distraught
.

I should have expected the
and son
, yet it hurt me like a fall on ice.

Out of respect, no one overpasted Alexander’s billboards, and indeed many became shrines, with flowers and candles left underneath to remind me that I was of the common herd of Alexander’s worshippers. I did not attend the funeral. I did not wish to see Elisabetta playing his grieving widow any more than I had relished the thought of her being his wife.

Did Elisabetta wonder what had become of his ring?

I took the ring out of my pocket and slipped it on my thumb, the only finger it would consent to stay on. It had an attraction to plugholes and drains and would slip away from me if it could.

By night now I dressed like a Venetian woman in my fringed
sial
and went to cafés and wine shops, begging credit so I could nurse a glass of sullen red wine at a corner table, watching how life was lived by those who thought it worth living. I looked at real families in which the men were little sultans surrounded by adoring wives and children. If any man tried to approach me, I showed him Alexander’s ring, and laughed until he skulked away.

Until one night it was Saverio whom I saw when I looked up.

‘Come,’ he said quietly, holding out his hand. ‘There are better places than this. And there is work to be done.’

Chapter 48

A
month after the earthquake, the post brought Matron Tar’s quarterly report about Ida.

I was reading it aloud, over a supper I had brought home from Saverio’s studio, when I reached an item on the second page that stole my voice and made my hand tremble. The matron mentioned a visit by that kind gentleman, our cousin Matthew. I forced myself to read on.

‘The dear man was most distressed to discover your sister Ida in a condition of what he opined to be ‘lonely, cruel and humiliating’ confinement, and felt that you should have informed him. He considered her elegant accomplishments in the creation of hair ornaments to be ‘outright slavery’ and demanded to see the receipts of sales.

I regret to say that Ida is at present in a state very much removed from reality, and she did not even recognise her own cousin. But he bravely persisted in his visit, and eventually she quietened, and listened to him, though she did not talk. However, I am afraid he also persuaded her to show him her work in the butcher’s kitchen. By the way, may I remind you that the quarterly fee is overdue by six months?’

Darcy spluttered.

‘What Cousin Matthew?’ asked Oona.

‘You imbecile, it is either that wheedling fortune-hunter, the so-called Phelan Swiney, Mariner, or the bastardly Millwillis, impersonating a member of the family,’ snarled Darcy.

‘I thought you said Phelan Swiney was in prison,’ I reminded her. ‘For despoiling Pertilly’s hair.’

‘So it must be Millwillis then. The one time he came to Pembroke Street, Ida was in the music room. You and I were the only ones who laid eyes on him, so Ida wouldn’t recognise him now. At least Ida did not talk. He will have gone away without any fresh muck to spread. He won’t waste any more time with her.’

‘Shouldn’t I write to Matron to say that he’s an impostor and make sure he’s forbidden access to her?’ I fretted.

Darcy snapped, ‘Ignore the letter. We are supposed to be in Russia again anyway, so how could we have received it yet? He’ll be long gone by now. Millwillis has no patience, and he’ll not want to spend hours in that hideous place, without heat, wretched and dirty, in danger of his life from twenty shades of homicidal delusionists and rapists.’

Oona cried, ‘But, Darcy, you always said it was a lovely, gentle place there, with no dangerous patients, and no men, and just poor nervous ladies like Ida. You said we shouldn’t visit because she needed to remain in absolute tranquillity—’

‘I was thinking she was lucky to be there while we starved in Venice,’ said Berenice. ‘It was a comfort to think of her in luxury.’

‘Well, I didn’t want you in a state too, did I? Yes, it has its share of murderers, like any other establishment of that kind. And it doesn’t do to make these places too cosy, or the lunatics get used to it and think of all kinds of excuses to stay, putting a burden on their families with the expenses,’ Darcy said firmly. ‘No, old Millwillis won’t go back a second time. Was I ever wrong yet?’

‘We should fetch her away here anyway,’ said Oona. ‘She does not chew her hair any more, does she?’

‘No,’ admitted Darcy. ‘But where would I find the cost of train tickets at this time? When our luck turns, and when Millwillis has given up haunting Ida, I’ll fetch her.’

But ‘Cousin Matthew’ proved most devoted. Matron’s next letter told us how he made a point of visiting once a week. Ida had begun to recognise him, or at least acknowledge him as her ‘old new cousin’. Her sense of time, Matron told us, was distorted by her illness.

She has accommodated him as part of her childhood, and prattles to him of mutual memories that seem to make her happy.

‘God, there’s no knowing what she will spill. Once she starts talking, she’s as flowy as the cholera,’ moaned Darcy. ‘Manticory, write something to Matron that will have him chased away.’

Dear Matron Tar.

[I wrote.]
As ever we remain grateful for all your kindness to our afflicted sister. I apologise for my slow response. As you know, we have been touring in Russia, and a Venetian acquaintance has only just brought us our post including your longed-for news of our dear Ida. I hasten to warn you that no ‘Cousin Matthew’ exists in our family. The impostor is known to us. His only wish is to do poor Ida harm. In the name of all my sisters, I formally request that you deny him access to her. But kindly do not unmask him. That could be dangerous. Please feign to respect him. If she has talked to him, you must assure this man that she is not capable of recounting the truth, and that he must not use her fantasies for any of his purposes, which, we suspect, are malign.

Matron replied by telegram:

REGRET FALSE COUSIN. BUT HAS NOW WILLINGLY REVEALED TRUE IDENTITY. SAYS HE IS IN POSSESSION OF ALL CRUCIAL FACTS. ON HIS WAY TO VENICE TO WAIT FOR YOUR RETURN FROM RUSSIA. DEEPLY SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE BUT FELT IT CORRECT TO SUPPLY YOUR PERMANENT ADDRESS. YOU MUST MAKE OTHER ARRANGEMENTS FOR IDA PRESENTLY. DO NOT WISH PUBLICITY.

From the cold tone, we understood that Millwillis had shared ‘the crucial facts’ and that they had not been to Matron Tar’s liking.

So now Mr Millwillis knew it all, the whole terrible sight of scandals, from the seven nit-ridden fatherless sisters to the fake Pertillys. From his first articles, it was clear he already knew about the fake locks sent out and the letters written as if from us in Mr Rainfleury’s factory. He knew about the ringworm. He knew what was in the essence, and the scalp food. He knew about the adulterous marriage of Mr Rainfleury and Enda. Now that he had talked to Ida, he knew the facts about Enda’s fiery end and even, perhaps, what and who had caused it. He knew we had fled to Venice to save ourselves from him. He would write of the seven sisters, who weren’t really sisters and who had not been seven for some time. He would write about the hair that wasn’t all theirs. Of course now there was the extra shame of poor Ida being confined in a sordid madhouse for him to gloat over. Ida had read Darcy’s black books – perhaps Millwillis would know what was in them now too.

And there could be but two possible reasons why he had wished to empty Ida’s rattling head of all these matters – he wanted either to expose us or blackmail us. He would write the Swiney Godivas up as quacks, adulteresses, liars, fakes and even murderesses – or we would pay him for his silence. He would no doubt plan to live off us for the rest of our lives. The one thing that Millwillis did not know about us was that we were now paupers who could never pay his price. About that one small fact he was crucially uninformed.

As for Mr Millwillis himself, well, we could be expecting him in Venice at any time to put his torment on us, thanks to Matron’s idea of what was correct, which now also had Darcy tongue-cudgelling money out of Pertilly’s savings to pay for train tickets so she could rush off to England and fetch Ida back to us before she let loose any more candid recollections.

Even as Darcy and Ida churned third class on bare benches across the Continent in the train, the next week’s post showed a taste of what was to come. Millwillis had already started publishing his new articles about us. He’d allied himself to an Italian psychologist, Cesare Lombroso, who was writing essays in which he argued (with deft and cunning recourse to the harmless Mr Darwin) that thick dark wavy hair was a sure sign of backwardness and a signpost to a subhumanly criminal, morally debauched nature. Abundant hair in women was condemned as a virile growth, revealing the hirsute female as nearer her ape origins than to civilised man. There were other psychologists ready to associate hairiness with madness, sexual incontinence, insensibility to pain, infanticide and degeneracy. Mr Millwillis found illustrations for all these phenomena in the Swiney Godivas.

‘Who is translating Lombroso for him?’ I asked. ‘
Who
?’

For Millwillis was able to classify, compartmentalise and label each ‘criminaloid’ Swiney sister. Low-browed Neanderthal Darcy was sensual and violent, Berenice impulsive and vindictive; Pertilly had ears of a criminally large size; Enda had been guilty of a monstrous vanity; pale Oona was congenitally frigid; Ida was the passionate imbecile with a sloping forehead who played the fiddle as if the Devil were dancing for her. I myself was a monster of red-haired lust and cold rapacity. Millwillis also used Lombroso to argue that the Swineys, like all women, were more cunning and vicious than any murderer.