‘I hope not,’ interrupted Darcy. ‘That was already quite sufficient. Ida and Oona are still children, you know.’
‘Indeed, I was coming to children. The little dears. Who doesn’t love a long-haired little girl?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ snapped Darcy. ‘And?’
‘And this brings me to the subject in hand, that is, children’s playthings that even a grown person may love and fondle. In this climactic epoch of hair-love, there is no more perfect and economical way of a lady possessing her private acreage of hair than to own it in miniature on her very own doll. For every hair-love, there is doll-love – for what woman or girl does not want an immortally tressed beauty on her dressing table? What husband or father does not long to purchase it for her?’
Darcy snatched the paper from him and read aloud, ‘Rainfleury & Masslethwaite—who’s Masslethwaite?’
‘My late partner.’
Darcy nodded and continued, ‘Rainfleury & Masslethwaite shall, on payment of an agreed fee—’
Darcy interrupted herself, ‘What fee? No! Whisper to me alone.’
Mr Rainfleury leaned over and gave her a breathy sentence in her ear.
Clearly, he didn’t affront her by that sentence. Indeed Darcy looked like a woman in receipt of a bouquet. Wordless, she handed him the contract and waved at him to continue with the reading:
‘Rainfleury & Masslethwaite shall, on payment of an agreed fee, produce a set of seven different dolls, each to the full likeness of one of the Swiney Godivas, complete in verisimilitude as to the eye colour, comparative height and the colour and texture of the hair. The dolls, named for their muses, shall be sold separately so that they may be collected by an enthusiastic feminine public.’
He lowered the paper and let his eyes pass over us again. ‘There is, ahem, also an opening for the gentleman collector in this new line.’
I imagined a gentleman, not dissimilar to Mr Rainfleury, gazing avidly at a long-haired naked doll seated on his grand mahogany desk. Surely, I thought, Darcy would never allow this obscenity, but she nodded as Mr Chops continued, ‘The Swiney Godivas shall agree to show these dolls in all their future acts, and to endorse them at every opportunity.’
‘Endorse?’ asked Pertilly.
‘Personally recommend, associate yourselves and generally show admiration of,’ supplied Mr Rainfleury.
Pertilly began to weep in earnest. ‘I don’t want to cut my hair off for to have it stuck upon a doll so. You cannot make me—’
‘Neither I need, you ass,’ bellowed Darcy. ‘Will you stop battering the ears of our man here and listen? He’ll not take a hair off our heads. Will you, Mr Rainfleury? You’ll need hundreds of heads of hair. Your men’ll cut something off a silky old horse, no doubt. Or buy it from a French maid. Am I not right, Mr Rainfleury? You’d not shave our heads and spoil our show for us, is it? Not when there’s hair being sold by the bale in every poor street on the Continent.’
My mental teeth ground out, ‘Mr Scissorthief!’ ‘Mr Despoilerator!’ For everyone knew about the trade in women’s hair. There were even hair markets where impoverished girls lined up to sell the only treasure they had. Poor women’s hair was refashioned by other poor women – the lowly posticheurs and boardworkers – into convincing fake pieces to amplify heads of rich ladies of fashion. If you read the newspaper editorials, the hair trade was generally considered shameful – a kind of capillary cannibalism – and it was also deemed filthy, as if poverty endowed the sold hair with disease and vermin.
Yet the hair trade was outstandingly profitable – so much so that there were regular outbreaks of hair crime in London. Girls with visibly abundant hair had been set upon in the street and barbered by men who sold their booty for profit. I flinched from our supposed benefactor. Didn’t Darcy realise that by making us famous he would also be making us targets for ‘hair despoilers’, as these thieves were known?
Mr Despoilerator stammered, ‘Well, of course the bulk will be from . . . a special source of my own. I’d not for the world compromise your own personal splendours. I am . . . in the process of . . . patenting a new form of artificial hair spun from silk and extracts of rare plants. It imitates real hair to a nicety and totally obviates the need to dabble in the unwholesome human hair trade, where a respectable businessman like myself would never in any case dip a finger.’
‘The bulk?’ Darcy glanced down the contract. ‘Oh, I see. “Rainfleury & Masslethwaite will guarantee to customers that each doll contains one genuine hair from the head of a Swiney Godiva.” ’
She sneered. ‘And is it also an unmentioned condition that Mr Rainfleury himself must choose that single hair?’
He nodded eagerly.
‘In other words,’ said Darcy, ‘he may spend as long as he likes handling the full lengths of our hair while he chooses those single strands at leisure. Is that it, Mr Rainfleury? Do I have it nutshelled here, is it?’
I mentioned quickly, ‘But we can collect the hair ourselves in our hair-receivers whenever we comb it. There’s always plenty there, especially after a wash. He doesn’t need to—’
Ida said, ‘And what about the Day of Judgement? When we must assemble all our lost hairs? How will we get them back then? Mam will—’
‘We won’t be plaguing Mam with such details,’ said Darcy firmly. ‘And God will be too busy to account for every single Swiney hair on Judgement Day.’
I thought, No, He’ll be busying Himself with looking into how PS got buried in the clover field.
Now Berenice and Oona were crying. ‘We don’t want to have our hair handled either.’
‘So much the worse for you, then. You’ll be made into a doll, and you’ll be handled if I tell you to,’ rapped Darcy. ‘In fact, Mr Rainfleury, please help yourself to another head of hair just to see if it’s satisfactory. Whom shall you be having next?’
Now Ida too erupted into tears. ‘Will I not be getting a doll at all? But doll men will be getting me? I don’t understand! And will the gentleman be putting nits in the dolls so they are really Swineys?’
Darcy clapped one hand over Ida’s mouth, and slapped her rump hard with the other. ‘Just Ida’s idea of a joke,’ Darcy guffawed. ‘You’ll find nothing living above the neck here.’
‘That’s a lie of you!’ Ida struggled free.
‘Do not speak of the nits,’ whispered Berenice. ‘It will just remind them to come back. There is nothing a nit likes better than to be spoke of.’
‘An unfortunate plague upon decent girls,’ burbled Mr Rainfleury, ‘and no doubt provoked by the low company you’ve been obliged to keep while your talents have been so underexploited. Small blame to you on that score, of course. One does not hear of nits and worms in genteel, prosperous circumstances in Dublin Town. Such as you shall soon – with my help – be among.’
Darcy muttered, ‘Company does not get lower than the Eileen O’Reilly.’
Dublin Town. I thought of the freckled muzzle of the butcher’s runt pressed against our window. Mr Rainfleury’s plans would remove us from her view, perhaps without my ever having a chance to forgive her and be forgiven.
‘Dublin Town itself!’ breathed Oona.
‘To be dolls so,’ said Ida sadly.
My face was reddening and my fists were clenching because I knew Mr Rainfleury should never dare to ask a decent girl to be a doll. Would Mr Rainfleury bring his shiny case and his contract up the grand steps of Harristown House to ask the ladies there for their likenesses in bisque? Would he be so tranquilly sure of carrying all before him?
No, at Harristown House he’d be slung out on his porky ear for insulting the ladies so.
But we Swineys were his for the asking.
Part Two
Dublin
Chapter 13
No matter how much he winked and gargoyled at Darcy with his tufty head on one side, Mr Rainfleury got no more than one sister to handle at a time until the doll contracts were signed.
We were presently fo
llowing a season of Fleadh Cheoils around the country, learning the old Gaelic songs for our own turns on the stage. Mr Rainfleury and his avid mouth were there as often as they ever could be. Having myself limp-fingered by Mr Flittergoblin felt worse to me than exposing my hair onstage, but I dared not say against it. To my relief, although I had been his first choice, Mr Rainfleury soon made a firm favourite of Berenice, who indeed began to show a precocious liking for his breathy attentions. Whenever I ballyragged her about Mr Rainfleury’s near-baldness, she reproved me, ‘And be quiet yourself, Manticory. The mighty brain on him has worn out the poor hair roots. You know what they say: “Grass does not grow on a busy street.” ’
Berenice’s defence attracted Enda’s suspicion, and then her jealousy until she too declared that Mr Rainfleury might have his way with her hair at any time, even offering to take the places of less willing sisters like myself. Guiltily, I permitted Enda’s sacrifice. And this had the predictable result of rousing Berenice’s ire, to the extent that she plaited dried strands of goose doings into Enda’s hair one night while her twin lay sleeping, a thing that ended very badly with pulled ears and eyes near scrabbed out all round.
Once the contracts were signed, Mr Rainfleury was given the run of us. Oblivious to the twins’ feud, or perhaps secretly feeding on its drama, Mr Rainfleury took delight in sitting on a stool behind them so he could weave their hair together into a single plait as thick and muscular as an anaconda. Then he would unravel it slowly. From behind them, of course, he could see neither the grotesque faces his ‘poppets’ pulled at one another nor the eloquent gestures of their fingers.
Darcy, being of age, insisted on signing the contract on our behalf. Each doll would have its own debut night, for which Mr Rainfleury would be obliged to subsidise new costumes all round, and stand a hot rum punch for the customers.
Mr Rainfleury put forward an advance sum, enough for Darcy to pay a year’s rent on a Dublin townhouse of five lofty storeys, from where the Swiney Godivas would take the town’s many theatres by storm. She came back from Dublin full of our new home, which, she told us, was furnished, stuccoed, wallpapered, fanlighted and hung with swarthy oil paintings. It stood in Pembroke Street on the corner of rose-bricked Fitzwilliam Square. ‘It’s entirely grand and cosy at the same time,’ she boasted, ‘and but a quick trot from the La Touches’ Dublin mansion!’
We were to remove there on Midsummer’s Eve, leaving the slow crows and the Eileen O’Reilly far, far behind.
The thought of that separation drove me to seek out the Eileen O’Reilly. I did not want to leave with her hating me, and counting me no better than Darcy.
I followed her home from school, a respectful three yards behind her.
She stiffened her back, never once looking behind.
When she reached the butcher’s shop, she turned to fix me with her eyes.
‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘I know ye’re taking your great selves off to Dublin Town. That’s nothing to me and less than nothing. But I’ll not be the poor little country mouse ye left behind to be sorry for and think of jest occasionally from time to time.’
‘It would not be like that,’ I protested.
‘And why wouldn’t it be? Are ye not Darcy Swiney’s true sister?’
Her voice tore on the last word.
She walked into the shop and slammed the door behind her so hard that it lifted the bloodied clumps of sawdust on the path and closed my eyes with pain.
Annora refused to come to Dublin with us. She had tried her pallid utmost to dissuade us from the enterprise.
She had never been to Dublin, and insisted that it was a city rife with evil ways and that she would not be exposed to its sin and stinks. ‘Indeed, I’m asking myself why should you girls be wanting to leave Harristown at all when we’re snug as in God’s pocket here? My feet are wet with tears that you are even thinking of it, Darcy. Not that it would stop you.’
‘It would not,’ agreed Darcy.
But Annora, her eyes more sunken and her teeth more prominent than ever, showed a rare spirit in refusing to countenance a move for herself. ‘I’ll be stopping peaceable here at home. I’ll be grand with a bit of griddle bread of an evening and Mrs Godlin to visit, awaiting on when you have a mind to come away home.’
I saw Ida open her mouth to say, ‘I’ll stay too,’ and Berenice putting her hand over it to spare Ida a slap.
‘What about us?’ Darcy turned on Annora. ‘What if we never come back?’
Never come back, I thought. Was it not what I had wanted all this time? Yet when I had dreamed of leaving Harristown, it was not to leave Annora and be put under the protection of an oyster-mouthed Mr Rainfleury and reproduced in bisque-faced miniature.
Darcy demanded, ‘How will it look, seven young girls unchaperoned in Dublin while their heartless mother amuses herself at her country residence? And what will you do with yourself without us to tend to?’
Annora plunged her hands into a tubful of laundry and shook her head. ‘I’ll not be sleeping at night over you every day you’re gone, God love you.’
Darcy crooned, ‘Isn’t it the proud woman you’d be, strutting down Dame Street in silk with your seven daughters behind you?’
This last argument did not weigh greatly with Annora. She muttered stubbornly, ‘It’s myself wishes that none of you would ever go away.’
I stood beside her mutely, taking in her smell of soap and sadness. As it had when I was tiny, my hand crept towards hers, finding it in the warm water of the tub.
The tongue in Darcy’s mouth flickered. ‘Don’t be so soft, Manticory! If there’s a worse mother in Ireland, I won’t know where to look or ask for her.’
Fashionable magazines began to arrive for Darcy. She studied them by the light of the seashell lamp, practising gracious phrases. She turned down the corners of fat catalogues. Her black books were stacked in a fine new trunk.
On the day of our departure, with the carriage waiting outside, Darcy staged one last attempt on Annora’s resolve. ‘So you’re still content for your poor innocent daughters to wade barefoot and alone through the swirling rivers of Dublin sins and stinks, is it?’ asked Darcy, adding cruelly, ‘With our guardian angels weeping for our souls outside every evil door we motherless innocents might enter? You’re perfectly sure about that now?’
While wincing at Darcy’s crude blackmail, I hoped it might yet sway Annora to come with us.
Annora’s uncomprehending silence annoyed Darcy into a great cruelty. She hissed, ‘Not to mention that our friend Sin has made at least six visitations to Harristown, and indeed overnighted on each occasion at this very cottage.’
This was the first time Darcy had ever mentioned our supposedly various paternal provenance, and the reason for the whispers in the street behind us all our Harristown years.
‘So,’ Darcy continued, ‘sure it is better you stay here in Harristown and let us escape your moral contagion. And do not trouble your old conscience as to the practical matters. Rainfleury’s hired us a cook-housekeeper.’ She waved a dog-eared letter. ‘Mrs Hartigan’s character here says she is known for exercising a wholesome influence on those in her sphere. She shall mother us to perfection, and so much the worse for you.’
Far from being goaded by Darcy’s insults or the prospect of a maternal rival, Annora was defeated by both. She hung her head and stammered for a few moments without ever framing an actual word. Then she went to the ironing basket behind the kitchen table and handed Darcy seven new white pillowcases, each embroidered with one of our names in the red thread she used for mending petticoats. At the finality of this gift, I began to cry.
Darcy stopped her goings-on immediately. She reached into her reticule, pulling out a lozenge of impacted banknotes. She thrust them into Annora’s apron pocket. I thought she looked a tint sorry as she did it. She seemed to hesitate. For a scant moment it seemed she might even embrace our mother.
The moment was lost when a thin goose sighed loudly under th
e window and Ida piped up, ‘Sin and stinks! Sin and stinks! Dirty girls in Dublin! We’ll be famished for a bar of soap so! Don’t be worrying, Mam, we’ll do like St Ita and keep a stag beetle on our bellies to keep the men from ravening us! Except’ – she began to sob – ‘I mightn’t be fit.’
Darcy was required to resume full gladiatorial ferocity, pinning Ida to the table. Before any of us could intervene, she was yanking Ida’s plaits violently, shouting a word for each hard tug, ‘Why is all the sense on the outside of your head, girl?’
The seashell lamp above the table swung to and fro, set aquiver by Darcy’s hot breath. Pertilly lumbered between Darcy and Ida, and took Ida into her arms.
We filed outside, me wiping my eyes and Ida snivelling into Pertilly’s armpit and clutching the hearthbrush made of the latest Phiala’s wings. I glimpsed the Eileen O’Reilly hiding behind the woodpile, with something shining on her face. If Darcy had not been behind me, I would have waved to her.
Instead, I rushed back into the kitchen and swarmed all over Annora with a feverish hug to every limb. ‘I really didn’t think we’d go without you.’
She stroked my hair with her soap-rough hand and whispered, ‘Be gone with you, girl. Darcy’s right. I’m no good to you in your coming grandness. And ’tis you – of all of us – who needs to get away from Harristown, do you not? You’ll not be happy here again, Manticory.’
What does she know? I wondered. Did Darcy tell the troll against me to her too?
Annora tipped my chin up to look at me, and wiped away my tears with her apron. ‘I have a great job of work for you, Manticory. Write to me, will you? Will you do that same? Mrs Godlin will come read to me. A letter every now and sometimes would be a fine thing, and better than butter, may God ease me. A letter in my hand, that will be something to have a hold of. And I’ll know you were thinking of me when you wrote it and that will be a gift in itself.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 10