The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (48 page)

‘I do not need a prince or a knight,’ I told him.

‘I am pleased to hear you say those words, so pleased!’ he smiled. ‘Princes and knights are not reliable gentlemen even in the fairy stories. Very often and very easily a convenient nymph or a fairy will take this hero from the path of rightness, even if the knight looks bright as the sun in his silver suit and even if he
speaks
so very much of what is right to his lady with his pretty tongue.’

‘Or a nymph
and
a fairy,’ I muttered. ‘And I don’t want a prophet either.’

‘Those prophetic gentlemen too are more speaking than doing. Even when they take the glitter out of the stars for you.’

‘Particularly the false prophets. It’s easier to wag your finger than to lift your finger,’ I agreed. ‘Telling you who not to be, as if you had a choice.’

Signor Bon hesitated. Then he said, ‘Forgive me. But it is as if
this
prophet was food and drink to you. I see you diminishing without him. Were you so thirsty for love that you have become drunk on such an object? A man who lets his wife keep him, and trifles with vanity projects and the affections of . . . a person of ten times his value.’

I knew he spoke of Alexander, as I did. Signor Bon’s animosity towards Alexander was these days barely concealed. I wanted to tell him that Alexander truly loved me but I knew the words would sound desperate, and shabby. I did not want to see the cynicism closing up Signor Bon’s open face.

Signor Bon did not cease to call for me in the boat at dawn, or to row my silence and my misery around Venice. He took me to stand under the wall of wisteria at Ca’ Foscari, and to listen to the eerie echo that poured out of the House of the Spirits in certain winds.

‘Is it effective yet?’ he sometimes asked hopefully. ‘Does the shine start to come back?’

‘No,’ I would say. ‘But can we try again tomorrow?’

He laughed quietly, and then looked at me gravely. ‘Why, Miss Manticory, are you all over “no”?’ he asked me. ‘It seems to me that all you ever wanted was to say “no” to your sister Darcy, “no” to your hair and body being sold in crude ways, “no” to the losing of a man – forgive me – who has not loved you as you deserved. If your life is only about saying “no” – to what will you say “yes”? Is that not more important at this moment? Why must you put yourself in the thighs of the Gods with only the power of saying “no”?’

‘The thighs of the Gods,’ I snapped, ‘are not as comfortable to the spirits as Venice on a misty dawn.’

‘A woman no longer loved by one man, and such a poor specimen of a man, is not a woman who is unlovable. One should look at the blindness of the man, if he treats you like this, and see what else is wrong with him. And you will find a great deal. But you cannot hate him – that is my privilege. Instead you must think that he is not responsible for how much you chose to adore him.’

I was startled at Signor Bon’s discovery of my thoughts. I should not have been. He so often guessed them.

‘There is a proverb,’ he told me. ‘ “A true friend’s eye is a good mirror.” ’

But I did not want a friend or a proverb; my griefs were too ugly for a mirror. They made me behave in an ugly way.

‘I was not looking for philosophy today. Just a ride in a boat,’ I said with quiet cruelty.

‘You play words at me.’ Signor Bon frowned. ‘It cost me something of braveness to say these things to you.’

‘It is kind,’ I said, ‘too kind. But I am a wild thing now, a hard thing, not absorbent of kindness at the moment.’

‘If it is just a question of the moment,’ replied Signor Bon, ‘then Venice and I, we shall wait for you. If you are determined to be a wild thing, then the kindest thing is to let you hunt and kill your sadness for yourself.’

Chapter 43

Tristan had for some months been baffling us with highly metaphorical references to collaterised bank loans, exceptionally venal and vulturine creditors, sudden swooping depredations of a tax inspector.

He drew our attention to a rival preparation born to an anonymous corporation trading somewhere west of Dublin. To illustrate their ‘Growant’, these shady makers used Titian’s
Portrait of a Woman at her Toilet
from the Louvre, which we had visited, and upon which was based one of my own Venetian poses for Saverio Bon’s postcards. The name of Growant’s manufacturer was nowhere visible on the packaging, which we examined minutely when Tristan, who had not been to Venice for some months, sent a package of Growant handbills, labels and even a bottle of the product itself.

‘
I’ve had it analysed and it’s just soap and water with a drop of bay rum
.’ Oona read Tristan’s accompanying letter aloud.

‘The genius is all in the way that they sell it. They rely simply on advertising – no personal appearances by highly strung and problematic ladies, and so, sorry to say, no risks of exploded reputations or madness or dramatic deaths or disappearances to threaten the income, and no division of the profits: just a simple lyrical flow of money to the manufacturer.

‘Despite its inefficacy, it pains me exceedingly to tell you that Growant has made grievous inroads into the Swiney Godiva Corporation profits. Therefore, I have been forced to make some adjustments to the partitioning of the accounts. No carrying on, please, my dears. The business has been kinder to you than a fairy godmother, and you’d be the ungratefulest of girls not to think of the luck that’s befallen you, with very little effort on your own behalf, given how the hair storms out of your heads gratis.’

‘Adjustments?’ Darcy began to pace the floor.

‘For why is Tristan putting on the poor mouth?’ asked Pertilly.

I could hear Tristan’s poetic soul tapping on its pencil as it amended a row of figures to cut the Swiney Godivas out of the Swiney Godiva profits. Darcy’s eyes looked far away, as if she too heard that busy tapping. ‘The Divil choke him for that same,’ she muttered. ‘Dropping us like a hat.’

I extracted a final sheet of paper from the brown-paper package. The statement on Swiney Godiva products showed minus figures under our names. I wondered, ‘But where has our money gone? The money that was earned
before
the Growant?’

Oona noticed, ‘There’s a postscript on the back of the letter there.’

Darcy snatched it up.

‘It is something that must be faced, my dears, the fact that profits never go on rising for ever. There is a cycle, as with everything in our bounteous Goddess Nature. In the meanwhile I am in talks with certain parties to amortise our misfortunes by selling some of our manufactory equipment, at a vast loss, of course. And I must ask you to send us the deeds of the
palazzo
, as we shall need them for security.’

‘Never!’ I said. ‘Send him the Dublin deeds.’

Darcy smashed Tristan’s letter down on a fly.

‘Why did he not warn us about the risks before?’ she raged. ‘We are down on the deal. Now he thinks he can just scoop out handfuls of
our
cash to save
his
skin.’

‘He would have said it was poetical detail too sophisticated for us to understand,’ I told her. ‘That our complacency and stupid lack of curiosity allowed him to keep us in the dark. And the brutal amounts of money dazzled us.’

Darcy said, ‘There’s more!’ She read:

‘And I will leave it to you sisters to work out the most equitable way of sharing out what assets are left to you. Of course you have the nest-egg accumulated over the years. The house in Pembroke Street might be sold. I suggest that Ida be moved to a less expensive establishment, as her share should surely be less than anyone’s, given her lack of contribution and her age.’

‘No!’ exclaimed Pertilly. ‘That is fair in no way!’

‘Ida should come home,’ said Berenice. ‘And have her share too.’

Darcy crooned, ‘Of course I should have the largest share. I have put in the greatest number of years, ideas and strategy.’

‘Strategy has brought us to this,’ said Berenice quietly. ‘And taken Ida away from us.’

‘Anyway,’ Darcy said quickly, ‘when Tristan talks of the old nest-egg, I am sure I don’t know what he means. And I sold Pembroke Street last year. The rent is paid by the month now. Barely, I might add. Not that any of you have ever worried your empty heads about how to manage on our income.’

Oona asked, ‘You sold our home. You didn’t tell Tristan?’

Berenice asked, ‘So that was the bank man who came here from Ireland? Not a priest after all? If you sold the house for cash money, then have we not great grand reserves in the bank back in Dublin, Darcy?’

‘And this place,’ I asked. ‘Have you staked our lease too? You have, haven’t you?’

Oona mourned, ‘We have no home in all the world.’

Darcy sputtered, ‘Don’t be harassing me, or it’ll be the worse for you!’

‘You mean you spent it all? Everything?’ I asked. ‘It must have been you who did it. Because you didn’t share it with us.’

‘Do you think you ate and dressed yourselves for nothing all these years? With your poor excuses for looks, did you think the cosmetic preparations were free? Do you think the railway clerks gave your first-class tickets for the pleasure of your company?’ blustered Darcy. ‘Do you—’

‘We did not eat or dress or travel hundreds of thousands of pounds,’ said Berenice. ‘Where did it go, the money?’

‘I invested it. But—’

I remembered Darcy’s feverish looks when she bought the
cartelle
for the
tombola notturna
from the lady seated in the shadow of the Procuratie Vecchie. I saw her grasping the tickets for the lottery as we waited for the draw under the foot of the Campanile in San Marco. I remembered Signor Bon’s warning about the little house where huge sums were staked.

‘I believe we shall find that Darcy has gambled the money away,’ I said quietly.

I thought,
Like a snake, she has swallowed all our money alive
. My mind’s eye saw Darcy engulfing the coins and notes of our fortune, putting herself outside of it, distended with it, disappearing with it into the dark places of the earth, and then coming back for more, the snake in our Garden of Eden in Venice, the author of our Fall. Credulous as Eve, we had enacted her will.

‘You gambled?’ Berenice’s voice trembled. ‘Our money?’

‘You scrattocks!’ Darcy said quickly. ‘Tristan
wants
us to fight to the death! With each other! He counts on us to fall into disarray over this. So we shall not think to blame
him
.’

‘Or is it Growant who is our true enemy?’ asked Oona, fearful of any more scissoring the shreds of Darcy’s good graces. ‘Not Tristan at all.’

‘Oh, Oona,’ I sighed. ‘There is a time to show a body understanding, and there is a time to be your own woman.’

We bent over the fluttering pile of Growant handbills and labels. Our years in the business had taught us how to read them better than any merchant’s wife. Growant’s advertising was more extreme than ours, and yet it appeared that the gullible public was persuaded to believe its claims, some stolen from rivals’ handbills, that it would
make hair grow on an egg, If a particle of hair matter exists, it will be found, nurtured, fertilised and encouraged by this Growant
.

There was something familiar about the grandiosity of these words, something that nagged at me. Had I not been distracted by other miseries, I might have listened more closely to Growant’s lyricism.

But I was sorely distracted. For by unfortunate coincidence, Mr Rainfleury’s doll factory was also struggling. When he wrote, it was without the usual endearments and increasingly in the stark language of business. He no longer painted a world starving for Swiney Godiva hair but informed us of the blossoming fancy in the gentlemen collectors’ market for little girl and baby dolls, which had almost overnight eased mature models out of the shops. Suddenly – and not unhelped by a few unpleasant editorials planted by Growant’s canny manufacturers – British girls were waking up to the fact that it was perhaps a tint ridiculous, not to say aberrant, for them to be seen cuddling dolls that depicted mature females.

No, babies are the thing now
, Mr Rainfleury confirmed.
Any girl might be seen fondling a baby without reprehension. Such a spectacle represents a charming rehearsal of every rosebud female’s desire for maternity
.

Within a few months, the Swiney Godiva dolls had ceased manufacture, and Mr Rainfleury’s clerk was delegated to write to us of an entire warehouse gathering dust and eating up the rent. In fact, the detail was yet more horrible, as Mr Rainfleury finally brought himself to explain. To save space and recoup losses, the dolls had been decapitated. Once their distinctively Swiney heads were removed, the composition bodies of our dolls were re-equipped with the coveted
bébé
faces. I imagined our severed heads lying in sacks on the warehouse floor.

Yet Mr Rainfleury made it seem as if we Swineys had enacted self-murders in his warehouse: