The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (43 page)

‘Copulations there?’ said Oona faintly.

I pointed out, ‘Darcy says there are only women patients there. There are no men clustering in the expectation of prostituting madwomen.’

But Ida found a man in the asylum: the butcher.

Darcy’s letter arrived the day Tristan left. I read it out to my sisters.
‘Ida has already acquired a dreadful reputation for being no end of a girl after the men about the place.’

‘I thought Darcy said there were no men there,’ worried Oona.

I raised my eyebrows and kept reading:

‘So when she started making sheep’s eyes at the butcher – a great haunch of a fellow himself – I steeled myself for some painful discipline. But it turned out she was more interested in the meat. As we all know, she’s good with her hands, and she has a talent for dressing veal and pork, trimming the fat, dicing the lamb for stews. The doctors regard Ida as a small risk with the old hatchet and she turns out to be quite a creditable bone-chopper. She spends her day among the dead pigs and sheep without a flinch. The only thing is that she
will
talk to the leg or the ribs as she cleaves them, saying, “Take that, sir!” 
’

Her way with a cutlet or a ribcage was astoundingly neat. The butcher, Darcy told us, regarded Ida as a prodigy and left her to these one-sided conversations.

‘It is beyond vile!’ squealed Berenice. ‘Ida up to her armpits in dead animals there.’

No
, I thought,
it makes sense. Ida is of the earth: she liked watching the geese getting married, she scented my animal attraction to Alexander. She is physically strong, too, and the exercise of it will help calm her
.

Darcy meanwhile sought to revive Ida’s interest in a more decorous pursuit – her old talent for sewing with hair. At first, Ida used her own shorn hair for these projects. Her early work consisted of simple braids in patterns, but soon she was embroidering. The hair was woven and stitched into an album. Darcy reported how when other inmates came to visit Ida, she would demand snippets of their hair, which she would incorporate into her work. Sometimes she would chop the hair to powder and glue it on like tinted pigment. Or she would lay colourless wax paper spread with glue over pulverised hair, and then cut the hairy page into mosaics with which to make patterns. She graduated to jewellery, embroidered cushions, tiaras woven from hair.

I imagined the hair in Ida’s hands, taut with desires or grief. But I also nightmared of those hands, bloody from the butchery table, ripping the hair from other heads.

Darcy secured a continued supply of hair for Ida by putting an advertisement in
The Times
for ‘hair-readings’. Innocents were invited to send a five-inch tress to a post office box to receive free character readings.

When Ida was set up with enough hair for a large repertoire of projects, Darcy came back to Venice. It was Alexander’s suggestion that I should warn her that the longer she stayed around Ida, the more likely it was that Millwillis would snuffle her out.

‘Darcy has a way of drawing attention to herself,’ he said.

Meanwhile Millwillis was rising. He’d secured a job at the
Pall Mall Gazette
. He’d been distracted from the Swineys for a while by even more exotic assignments including a child slavery scandal and a society divorce.

But I was sure – and Darcy was surer – that it would be only a matter of time before the world dried up its supply of sensations and Millwillis returned to the lucrative Swineys and his book. Meanwhile, Darcy’s insistence that all was now perfectly well with Ida was undermined by a parcel that arrived from the asylum.

Inside were four cuts of an indeterminable meat, being green and putrid from their fortnight’s journey, but perfectly stripped from the bone. Beside them was a triangle made from drumsticks, with a little bone to play it.

Ida had embroidered a letter in hair to accompany it. Stippled with dried blood, it read:
Even the Eileen O’Reilly would think this fine work, no
?

‘God help us if the Eileen O’Reilly ever found out about it,’ said Enda.

‘What makes Ida think of her?’ I asked. ‘And she so long out of our lives?’

‘I hardly know,’ Enda replied. ‘Except that we must think of her with that Millwillis, slaughtering Swineys with all the terrible words in her, butcher’s child that she is.’

Chapter 39

I
was ready with my much-refined speech about my share of the Swiney funds, but the morning after Darcy’s return, I found her leaning over our
palazzo
’s balcony, busily shouting at the passing tourists in their gondolas. ‘Yes, nice house? Very nice house! To be sure your
pensione
is sad and shabby compared to this! And then whenever you go back to your own homes, neither are they as nice as this palace, eh? Yes, gape away, it’s very nice up here. Verrry verrry nice indeed.’

I tried to shush her, hanging back in the shadows of the room. She laughed. ‘Here’s a good one!’

She turned back upon her prey. ‘You peasants! You Sunday trippers! Who cares what you see? Is your pleasure worth anything? Go away, you are cluttering up the canal.’

A pretty woman waved up at Darcy, confused. Darcy screamed, ‘You are more ugly than the Hag of Helistree!’

I tried to warn Darcy that her exuberance might peel away our cover.

‘We’re supposed to be incognito. If you were shouting off the balcony in pure Italian, even then that would draw attention to us. But in English! With Irish curlicues! Do you want Millwillis to hear about this?’

‘What do you suggest?’ she snarled. ‘From the deep well of the brilliant mind in you?’

The speed of panic upon me, I conceived another idea for our concealment, one that was actually an improvement on mere skulking and hiding ourselves. Darcy, I suggested, could wear a maid’s uniform and mob cap like Pertilly’s if she must sit on the balcony and scream. And so must I or Berenice or Oona if we wished to take the sun and the view there. And we were to appear no more than two at a time.

Pertilly, who hated Mr Millwillis more than anyone, because it was she who had first opened the door to him, saw the elegance of the plan and soon had us outfitted. With our hair bundled up in the caps, and in our black stuff dresses with aprons, all of us, and not just Darcy, felt a sense of freedom and naturalness.

I was gratified to see the bait quickly taken by ‘Lady Abroad’, one of the female scribblers who came regularly to Venice. In a column in
The Times
, which arrived in Venice a few days later, she wrote of the phenomenon of a pair of mad maids known to inhabit a certain
palazzo
, who, abandoned by their Venetian mistress, had taken to the balconies.

In the same issue, on a different page, it was reported that the famous Irish Swiney Godivas were on one of their frequent tours of Russia, where they were a great sensation. Tristan fed such stories to the press as often as possible.

‘Lady Abroad’ then offered us a nice free advertisement, for our Swiney Godiva Hair Essence, ‘a universal favourite on the Continent’, and for Mr Rainfleury’s dolls, as ‘highly prized as Irish cut glass by foreigners’.

I flung the newspaper in front of Darcy. ‘Look – let us hope that Mr Millwillis is reading that! That’s another month we’re free of him.’

She gave it the barest glance. ‘Look at the time!’ she cried. ‘The lottery draw is in half an hour. Come along, I’ll need you to translate for me when I win.’

I was disturbed by the avidity on her face as she waited among the patient Venetians for the draw, and by the fury when her ticket was not chosen.

On the way home, she bought a sheaf of
cartelle
for the
tombola notturna
from the lady seated at the newspaper-lined table in the shadow of the Procuratie Vecchie.

And when I launched into the first words of my speech about our money, she simply held up her hand. ‘Not now, Manticory.’

With her other hand she was scrabbling in her crocodile reticule, which was crowded to the brim with losing
cartelle
.

‘Has Darcy cast a spell on you, Manticory?’ Alexander asked me in the dark.

I had pulled my head from the pillow, having renounced the waves of wanting, and was contenting myself with adoring his profile and stroking his hair, having insinuated one of my legs across his thighs.

‘All these months, and it is never the right moment, is it?’ He brushed my caressing fingers aside. ‘All I hear are Darcy’s reasons why you should not speak – it’s Ida, then it’s Millwillis, then it’s the lottery she’s just about to win and must not be distracted from. Has she Medusaed your mind, turned your brain to stone?’

‘There is a contract,’ I answered at last. And finally, slowly and hesitantly, I told him about the document that bound me to the Swiney Godivas and the Corporation.

‘A contract? Why can it not be undone?’ He picked up one of my curls and pushed a finger down it, separating the strands in a smoothness of motion.

‘Like this,’ he said. ‘Contracts are not stone. You’re of age.’

‘My sisters don’t know about the contract. I came across it . . . by accident and I never told them. Which was cowardly, I know. But if I break up the Godivas . . . what would be the fate of my sisters if I left them to the tender mercies of Darcy and Mr Rainfleury and Tristan? I would not know where to start with—’

‘You never know how to start, do you?’

Abruptly, Alexander disentangled himself from my limbs, rose and paced naked round the room, running his fingers around the faces in the violent paintings on my walls. The sun was beginning to rise. He picked up his clothes and thrust his limbs inside them angrily.

Wherever he lodged officially, he hardly ever slept there, rising from my bed early in the mornings to creep down the servants’ stairs to the garden.

I’d made him a copy of the gate key by then.

He rifled in a pocket and handed it back to me now, saying, ‘This is not as I pictured it should be between us, Manticory.’

‘Why does it make such a difference, whether I have separate money or not?’ I pleaded. ‘There is nothing to stop us being together, really, is there?’

What I meant was that I accommodated every wrong thing, his unknown lodgings, the secrecy, the lack of a defined future. I accommodated even the act of love. At first I had made love with Alexander because it kept him coming up the stairs, and my bed was the only place we could be alone together. The parts I enjoyed best were still the tender preliminaries, which had become increasingly abbreviated before he turned me on my belly.

‘Nothing to stop us,’ he repeated bitterly. ‘Nothing. If you but knew.’

‘Well, tell me then, what I should know.’

He turned away from me.

‘Where is it you are going? Home?’

I had kept Elisabetta’s
palazzo
under surveillance many times but I never saw Alexander walk back into it or out of it. I had taught myself to believe that he slept in his studio, wherever that was. He never invited me there. Alexander, who owned and knew everything about me, did not answer questions about its whereabouts. I pictured a narrow divan and a shared water closet on the stairwell, with everything ordered as elegantly as his clothing and his hair, which never tousled even on our most vigorous nights.

Elisabetta looked prosperous in her clothes . . . so he stinted on himself, giving her all his earnings so that she might go about in every possible elegance? It made little sense, unless he did it from conscience – yet he seemed to feel no guilt towards her; only resentment.

Alexander’s silence on where he lived made me sympathise with the shadow-wife Berenice had been all those years, the wife without rights either to recognition or information. Nor did I own Alexander; his presence in my life was as fragile as this, our first real difference of opinion.

In the dawn light, his fairness now took on the purity of ice, his hair white as a shroud, the shine of his eyes flat as glass. I remembered how the first time I met him in Dublin the snowflakes had glittered unmelted in his hair.

‘Where are you going?’ I begged him again, holding up the key like a wand.

He did not answer.

I threw the key across the room and curled up in the bed, listening to his light footsteps on the stairs.

Was he on his way to Elisabetta’s
palazzo
? I pictured a dangerous journey for him. He did not quite reach her as he had left me. Along the way, he lost a leg to gangrene and an eye to an attacking gull. In my elaborate fantasy, he did not die, but he became less than he was, and needier. He could no longer paint or go about the world, so he needed the comfort of love. And he realised that the person he needed around him was myself.

The vivid strength of my fantasies only reminded me of my pallid impotence. And at the same time as I cursed Alexander, I was in dread of something happening to him.

Revenge is an imprecise tool, of course.