The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (47 page)

Sometimes I was righteous. I tried to tell myself that I was just not entertained by this pantomime scripted to say that I was dead to him, when it was Alexander who was acting dead, impersonating a man without a heartbeat. He had always been a man without a scent of his own.

But I also told myself that he had been his best true self when he loved me, as I had been. And I believed, or tried to, that he would become bored with pretending not to love me.

And so I kept myself impaled on a fiery pitchfork of hopeless hope, my heart squirming without relief.

Chapter 42

Darcy exchanged her frizzled fringe hairpiece for a more voluminous one. More packages than usual arrived for her from Dublin, but I assumed them part of her continuing retail campaign.

But as the sun rose on the morning of the Assumption festival she had Pertilly rouse me and escort me to her room. It was clear from her pale face that she’d passed a sleepless night, a thing she’d always claimed previously to be the province of hysterics and drunkards and those troubled by a guilty conscience.

‘Manticory,’ she asked, ‘so is there something in your precious books that can explain this?’

She lifted her hairpiece. I took an unwilling step closer. At the top of her head, Darcy had grown two horns. They were not much more than half a finger long, a greyish yellow in colour. They curved to a tapering end, one in each direction, like a small antelope’s. Above her black eyes and sallow face, their symmetry had a diabolic perfection to it.

The Eileen O’Reilly’s voice came into my head after one of her beatings.
You doan frecken me, Darcy Swiney, great divil that you are
.
One on them horned witches of Slievenamon
.

‘An extreme case of chignon fungus?’ I whispered, racking my memory for conditions we claimed cured by Swiney Godiva Scalp Food in our extravagant advertising. ‘
Plica polonica
?’

‘No, you fool,’ she blustered. ‘There is no such thing. Tristan made that up, to frighten women into buying the essence. No. I am horned. They just grew. I didn’t put much consequence on it at first, but—’

When I recovered myself sufficiently, I asked, ‘May I touch?’

The horns were hard, solid, dry and somewhat brittle. The surface was rough, like an old toenail.

I asked, ‘Do they hurt?’

‘Only whenever I try to knock them off,’ she said wryly. ‘And believe me, I’ve not woken in the morning these last months but that I’ve used brutality against them before night.’ She pointed to a battery of bottles, knives and clippers on her dressing table. ‘So has O’Mealy, by long distance. He’s the only other person who knows, apart from Pertilly. He’s sent me everything from Dublin.’

Pertilly had tried to soften the horns with a tincture of hydrochloric acid but they simply grew harder.

‘So,’ demanded Darcy, ‘what are we going to do about it? As the so-called intellectual in the family, I’m assuming you’ll have a brilliant idea.’

I spent the next few days in the medical sections of bookshops and libraries trying to discover sources and cures. My Italian had improved to the extent that I understood very well from the texts that Darcy’s condition was a rarity and considered untreatable. But the tomes I found were aged and dusty. Darcy refused to consult a more modern, living resource – a doctor.

But one night she bent to inspect something floating in her consommé and her wig fell off in front of all of us. After the screaming was over, I insisted that she get a doctor in. This time I was reinforced by Oona, Pertilly and Berenice.

‘Not from Venice, mind! No talk. No talk.’

The first doctor, from Treviso, turned pale and suggested that we call in a priest. A young man arrived in a cassock. His skin was moist and his beard as black as Darcy’s hair. When he offered an exorcism, Darcy dismissed him in a most ungentle way.Then the
Gazzetta
delivered a useful snippet. I translated for Darcy. ‘There’s a dermatological doctor from Austria presently in Venice. He works with the lunatics on San Servolo, on their skin maladies.’

‘Well send for him, then.’

Doctor Morgolos was a dour old man, but his eyes lit up with a youthful flame when he saw Darcy’s bare forehead.

‘Quite the best specimen ever seen!’ he declared with enthusiasm and in flawless English. ‘May I touch?’

Darcy nodded. He ran his fingers along Darcy’s horns, with an expression that reminded me of Mr Rainfleury’s stare whenever his hands were amid Enda’s hair.

‘The best specimen of what?’ I asked.

‘
Cornu cutaneum
!’ he pronounced triumphantly. ‘A cutaneous horn! A pathology of aberrant female sensuality.’

‘Aberrant!’ shrilled Darcy. ‘There’s nothing aberrant about me. Or sensual! I am a respectable spinster. Away with your aberrant, man! I want hard fact, and plenty of it for your fee.’

He said, ‘Technically, such a horn is a circumscribed hypertrophy of the epidermis, projecting an outgrowth of horny consistence. Closely agglutinated epidermic cells form small columns or rods. In the base, we find hypertrophic papillae and some blood vessels. They have their starting-point in the
rete mucosum
, either from that lying above the papillae or that lining the follicles and glands.’

‘For the love of Jesus and Mary’ – Darcy resorted to Annora’s language – ‘close his evil mouth.’

But Doctor Morgolos was not to be silenced. ‘The lady is quite young – forty, is it?’

‘Thirty!’ screamed Darcy.

‘Er – for such a pronounced growth. Horns are usually met with very late in life, and are mostly seated upon the face and scalp. Also, the pudenda. Do you . . . ?’

‘Absolutely not, what a hideous and impertinent idea!’ shouted Darcy. So we knew she had horns in the folds of her groin too. I flinched for her, remembering how awkwardly she had been sitting recently.

‘
Why
does this happen?’ I asked. ‘I think
how
is too much for my sister.’

The doctor spoke cautiously. ‘We do not yet know. Though some speak of the contamination lurking in foreign hairpieces, I see this growth is entirely indigenous.’

‘Will they get bigger?’ asked Berenice.

‘I imagine these have taken quite a while to achieve this impressive size. Their growth is usually slow. But when they have finished growing, they will stop. They might even become loose and fall off.’

‘Oh please!’ breathed Pertilly.

‘But in that case they almost inevitably grow back.’

Darcy slumped against her dressing table. ‘Why?’ she asked heavily. ‘Simple words only.’

Simple words only?
I thought.
Ida would need to be here to say them. She would say, ‘You have grown horns because you are a devil.’ I would say, ‘You have grown horns because of the lies you told Alexander that have turned him away from me, because of what you did to Enda, for the harm you did everywhere and for whoever is buried under the crossed spoons in Harristown.’

The doctor bowed. ‘The cause is not known in the case of the head horns. Those that appear about the lower parts of the body usually develop from acuminate warts. As I mentioned, there are some who speak of excessive but unrequited libido manifesting in this way.’ He added hastily, ‘Obviously, not in this case. I presume you have tried to detach the base? Or break them off ?’

Darcy’s lowered head confirmed such an attempt and such a failure.

‘An irresponsible physician would prescribe any of the well-known caustics, such as potash, chloride of zinc or even the galvano cautery. For your dear sister I would not advise such painful and unproven treatments. I literally beg you not to undertake them.’

Pertilly, laboriously writing it all down, crossed out the words.

‘Another method is to amputate the base from the root, as it were. This necessitates,’ he coughed, ‘however, considerable loss of tissue. And blood. Obviously, I would not recommend it here.’

‘So you are entirely useless to me,’ Darcy mourned.

When Doctor Morgolos had gone, Darcy remounted her latest frizzled fringe and her ferocity. ‘Stop staring at me like a calf in a field,’ she snapped at me. ‘Get out of my room.’

The trauma of her horns manifested perversely in her, as was to be expected. Darcy decided to rely on drama to distract the beholder. She began to trick herself out in the girlish ringlets of a bygone age – both hers and the decades’ past. She rouged her cheeks to appley roundness. For me, there was something intensely sad about this masquerade of juvenile femininity, for if Darcy must mask, then there was something underneath of a different essence – of uncertain gender, of decrepitude, of death. Her looks became theatrical, increasingly borrowed from the rouge pot and the charcoal stick. This, I should have warned her, only drew closer looks and closer looks might reveal what was wrong under the wig.

I guessed that Darcy needed to masquerade because she was driven to even greater fury by her inability to control what grew out of her body. Whatever had been hard in Darcy hardened now.

Her barbs about Alexander grew more frequent and harsher.

Pertilly scuttled away to the kitchen at the sight of her. Oona lowered her eyes.

She certainly frightened the grave grey-haired man who came from Dublin to see her. He looked most unwilling when she cloistered him away in the dining room.

‘What was the gentleman about at all?’ I dared to ask after his gondola had taken him away in the direction of the station.

‘A priest,’ said Darcy, ‘on God’s own parish business.’

‘He does not look like a priest,’ said Oona. ‘What business of what parish?’

‘God doesn’t please that you should know that,’ Darcy said firmly.

Mr Rainfleury decided to come to Venice for a few weeks, being in no state to carry on his work.

He continued to droop over the wig of Enda’s hair, claiming that something of his poppet still clung to it. It was placed in the chair beside him at meals. I could not bear to look, and Oona refused to take her customary place as it was too close to Mr Rainfleury. None of us wanted to be near him. The Venetian heat brought him out in a swelter. He refrained from wearing toilet water or using perfumed soaps so as not to dilute the essence of olfactory Enda.

Berenice began to accept her demotion and no longer looked to him for any recognition. If she addressed him at all, Mr Rainfleury did not hesitate to make her understand, most forcefully, that she was the lesser twin, and it was she who should have died. Her lips, tormented with loneliness, had drawn downwards and no longer thought of kissing. I inspected myself in the mirror, fearing to see my own mouth in the same state. I practised smiles, even if they looked like death’s head grins.

Mr Rainfleury was still trying to
feel
Enda’s severed hair into feeling something back. His forefinger was red and swollen, because he had a tendril plaited into a ring that was too tight, so he could feel Enda on his skin at all times. He continued to exist in these two states of contradictory reality. I hated to have him in the
palazzo
. By night, when the windows were open, we could all hear him talking to Enda’s wig. He took both sides of the conversation.

‘Do not close your eyes, my precious poppet,’ he pleaded.

Then the falsettoed Enda replied, ‘But, dear husband, I close them only to keep out the sting of the smoke. Can you not smell it, dear? Is there a fire?’

‘No, there’s nothing burning. It’s just a tint hotter than is altogether pleasant,’ soothed Mr Rainfleury in his own voice. ‘All the Swiney Godivas are safe in their satin beds. Do not shut your eyelids, dearest . . .’

‘I’m burning,’ wept Enda’s voice from her husband’s mouth. ‘Quick, fetch your Wilson’s Whiskerine and douse me!’

I practised smiles on Signor Bon when I was with him. But I failed to fool him entirely. He asked me if I was quite well. He had undertaken to improve my Italian with weekly lessons. My grasp of the language was faltering under the consciousness that Alexander surely now hated the sound of my voice.

‘I do not see you in
ottima forma
,’ the photographer told me sadly. ‘And this grieves me. I can perhaps guess why, apart from the loss of your dear sister, but it would not be discreet to say. Can I offer you a dawn
giro
in my boat, perhaps? Would that cheer you? It used to make you . . . shine? Is that the word?’

It did not make me shine. I sat brooding in the prow. Whatever I saw that was beautiful only reminded me of what was not mine any longer, not even on loan.

Exhaustion made me feel like a lemon rind denatured in alcohol, nothing left of the flavourful essence, only the tedious crust of its former existence still evident. I wished I had been allowed to rot, disintegrate, disappear. But my doleful consciousness was like Enda’s hair – it did not wither and it kept living after the death of Alexander’s love.

‘Do not thank me,’ insisted Signor Bon as he helped me onto our jetty. ‘It was not effective. Grief is a violent sickness. It breaks you apart, and complicatings set in where it is broken. I am so very sorry. I would love to have saved you from – no, that is not the right word. I do not pretend to be—’