Belfast Girls

by Gerry McCullough

  Halfway through the evening, Francis introduced Sheila to Pat Fitzwilliam, the racing driver.

  She had seen Fitzwilliam occasionally on television, winning Formula One races and being interviewed afterwards, or appearing on chat shows.

  He seemed a pleasant, naive young man, with a lock of fair hair falling over his forehead and a friendly grin.

  Sheila found him good company and smiled at his jokes. With this encouragement, he managed to manoeuvre her into one corner and gazed earnestly at her while he talked of his last race and his future prospects.

  “Warm in here, isn't it?” he suggested presently. “How about a bit of fresh air?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sheila firmly. “Tell me some more about New York. I may be going there soon myself.”

  Pat resumed, but the desire to make further progress with Sheila was strong and soon he had thought of another method.

  “This is a very historic house,” he began. “Sally’s father bought it for them from the O’Hara family, and it still has some of the original pictures and trappings. Have you seen the portrait of the Lady O’Hara whose husband was Lieutenant Governor in the nineteenth century? I ask because it’s amazing how like her you are. Only you are so much more beautiful, of course.”

  Sheila laughed.

  “You must come and see it,” Pat said enthusiastically. “It’s just down this corridor.”

  He seized her hand and led her through the nearest door.

  The portrait was further away than Pat had implied.

  Rounding a corner of the passage, Sheila found that they had come to a less well lit part of the house.

  While she had no doubt of her ability to keep Pat under control, there was no sense in asking for trouble.

  “I think we'll leave the portrait viewing for some other time,” she began. “Let’s just go back, now ...”

  Instead, Pat seized her in his arms and began to kiss her passionately.

  Since Sheila had been alert for some such attempt, he succeeded only in kissing one of her ears as she turned her head to one side.

  In another dress, she would have felt like using her knee at this point, but the precious Delmara gown must not run the risk of being ripped.

  Instead, she kicked sideways with the heel of her stiletto shoes and at once distracted Pat Fitzwilliam’s attention to his own shin.

  Hopping on one foot and groaning while he clutched his leg, Pat mumbled incoherently “Ow – sorry – oh – you shouldn’t be so lovely – ow – ”

  Sheila glared down at his bent figure and swept majestically away down the corridor, luckily in the right direction.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Much later, as she listened to the would be witty remarks of two men trying to out vie each other for her attention, she was once more collected by Francis and taken to meet, this time, an older woman.

  This was Roisin Boyd Cassidy, the very elderly widow of Stephen Boyd Cassidy, one of the heroes of the Republic who had taken part in the 1916 Rising.

  Roisin Boyd Cassidy, friend of Yeats and the subject of one of his lesser known poems, looked incredibly old to Sheila.

  Her face was lined but her hair was blue rinsed and carefully set, and her gown was elegant and expensive.

  She had been talking to two young men as Delmara approached, but dismissed them with a wave of her wrinkled, claw-like hand as she turned to greet her friend.

  Sheila caught a brief glimpse of the younger of the two men. For a moment she thought she recognised him. Could it be Charlie Flanagan? Charlie, who had caused her such grief back in her party going, drug taking days? No, surely not.

  She very much hoped not.

  And what would someone like Charlie be doing at an up market gathering like this?

  She must have been mistaken.

  The young man disappeared from sight, leaving her still uncertain. The other man, rather older on closer inspection, was slight and sandy haired, with something indescribably tough about him. Sheila was glad to see him also melting politely away at their approach.

  Mrs. Boyd Cassidy smiled benignly at Sheila and took her hand.

  “So young, so beautiful,” she murmured. “You make me hear Time’s winged chariots, my dear.”

  Sheila smiled politely, at a loss for a reply, but it didn’t matter. The old lady was happy to supply the conversation.

  “You remind me of such happy times,” she continued. “Delmara tells me that you are to model for him. Ah, if only I had had a model like you in the days when I was still designing! Coco Chanel would have had to acknowledge my supremacy then, for my style would have suited you exactly, my dear. But Coco, with her little suits, was always much more ordinary, although she would never admit how much I out-classed her. I was always imaginative, extravagant, in my ideas.

  “To tell you a secret, my dear, naughty Delmara has copied some elements of my style, I really believe. Not any one design, of course, he wouldn’t dare do that, but the whole atmosphere, the ambience, of my gowns – but don’t tell him I said so! He would only deny it. And, after all, since I no longer care to design clothes myself, why should not he, rather than someone else, keep the House of Roisin influence alive?”

  Presently Francis, seeing signs of fatigue in the old lady, returned to take Sheila away.

  “That lady is still one of the most influential people in Ireland. If I can get her support and custom, everyone else will follow like sheep. I think she liked you, which means she will probably come to the Show.”

  “Why is she so important?” Sheila asked later as they sat in a taxi on their way home.

  She had asked very few questions all evening but this one came out before she could stop it.

  How could someone so old still matter?

  “Her husband was an important politician until his death twenty years ago,” Francis told her. “She herself was a famous dress designer, as you no doubt gathered, which makes her opinion in matters of fashion still valued, but also she has great clout because of her own links to the government. Then there are the rumours. She’s incredibly rich. People wonder where she got her money. How she still gets it. As to that I couldn’t say. But it all adds to her celebrity status, people being what they are. All we need to know is that her influence can help to make the reputation of Delmara Fashions – and to make yours too, beautiful.” He smiled as if something had amused him.

  “Did you notice the man she was talking to when I took you over? Sandy-haired fella. That was Sean Joyce. One of the most notorious people in Dublin. Used to be an IRA activist. From the North, of course, as most of them were, but he had to shift down here early on. They say he’s moved into drugs in a big way these days. Who knows? But it’s knowing people like him, keeping in touch with them, that gives Roisin her slightly dodgy reputation.”

  Sheila found it hard to believe. Was Delmara really serious?

  But, tired out and half asleep, she asked no more questions that evening.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Delmara Fashions held its dress show early in January, several weeks after Francis and Sheila and the rest of the team had arrived in Dublin.

  Delmara had hired a large function room at the Gresham and invited everyone he could think of.

  His advance introduction of Sheila to the fashionable world had paid off. Everyone was eager to see the beautiful new model who had attracted so much attention.

  Those who had already met her wanted to see her again.

  Those who had missed her wanted to catch up on the latest sensation.

  The clothes were very much a secondary consideration. Delmara gambled on the fact that most of his prospective clientèle would fall for the dresses as soon as they saw them, particularly when they saw them worn by Sheila.

  He was right. The evening was a triumph. Suddenly, everyone wanted to look like Sheila Doherty. Everyone wanted to dress like Sheila Doherty.

  Delmara Fashions were booming.

  Francis Delmara was plea
sed with his strategy and its success.

  He was especially pleased when Roisin Boyd Cassidy came to the opening night and bought two of his evening gowns.

  Afterwards, he made a point of speaking to her at some length to show his appreciation.

  “Your little girl, the model,” Mrs Boyd Cassidy said abruptly, after a few minutes of fashion talk. She was rubbing the palm of one incredibly wrinkled hand with the fingers of the other in an agitated manner. “Who is she?”

  Francis was thrown. “Her name is Doherty. Sheila Doherty,” he ventured.

  “Yes – you told me her name. She looks so like –” She broke off and sighed. “Never mind. She reminded me of someone. Bring her to see me when you can get away from here, if it’s not too late.”

  Francis bowed his acquiescence to the order, for such it was.

  He had expected a gathering in the Boyd Cassidy town house, but instead the old lady was alone. When they were shown in, she looked up and smiled.

  “Come and sit here, my dear,” she said to Sheila. “You, Delmara, you can go and look at my early collections, the photo albums in the library. Reilly will show you.”

  Reilly, the tall, grim-faced maid who had been in Roisin Boyd Cassidy’s service for most of her life-time, held the door for Delmara, and perforce he followed her out and along the passage to the library where the records of the famous designer’s early triumphs were laid out in album after album of fading photographs.

  Mrs Boyd Cassidy turned confidentially to Sheila. “I wanted to speak to you alone, my dear, because I am so struck by your resemblance to a dear friend of mine. I am sure you must be related to her in some way. Do you mind telling me a little about your family?”

  Sheila tried not to look surprised. “My family? We’re very ordinary people,” she said. “What can I tell you?”

  “I wondered –” said the old lady. She paused. “But I am behaving badly. I haven’t offered you refreshment. What would you like? Tea, coffee, a liqueur? I have an excellent liqueur brandy which, alas, my doctors have now forbidden me to drink. You would be doing me a favour by having some – removing temptation from my way.” She laughed vivaciously, showing some rather decayed looking teeth. Sheila did her best not to feel repulsed.

  “The liqueur sounds lovely, thank you,” she managed.

  Mrs Boyd Cassidy touched the bell on the low table beside her armchair and presently Reilly reappeared.

  “The liqueur brandy, Reilly. A glass for Miss Doherty. And bring the decanter.”

  Reilly went out, looking cross. But then, she had looked like that when showing Sheila and Francis in, so perhaps it was her normal expression.

  In a few moments she returned with the brandy and two glasses on a tray which she placed on the table beside her mistress.

  She poured a glass, offered it to Sheila, and then went out.

  As soon as she had gone, Mrs. Boyd Cassidy, with a roguish glance at Sheila, whispered, “And now I’m going to be very naughty. Reilly would scold me if she knew, but we won’t tell her.”

  She lifted the decanter in her thin, spindly hands with the utmost concentration and poured herself a glass while Sheila watched, fascinated, expecting any moment to see the decanter drop and spill.

  At last the manoeuvre was complete and the glass was raised to Sheila.

  “To you, my dear. And now, tell me …”

  “Anything I can,” said Sheila. “But, really, I know very little about my family. I take after my father’s side, I’m told, in looks. He was a County Clare man, and his grandmother’s family name was O’Hara, but I never knew either her or my great grandfather Doherty. They both died when my father was still a child or so he’s told me several times.”

  “I knew it!” Roisin Boyd Cassidy burst out triumphantly. “You're an O’Hara to your fingertips, my dear. Let me show you something.”

  She fished down into a large, black leather handbag which was placed on the floor beside her chair.

  “Here.”

  Sheila put out her hand to take the small object the old lady was holding out to her.

  It was a tiny, miniature portrait of a young girl, not much more than sixteen.

  Her red gold hair cascaded in a mass of curls around her shoulders and her green eyes gleamed under black lashes against her white skin.

  Sheila felt an odd sensation, as if she was looking, impossibly, at her own reflection.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Sheila stared at the portrait for some moments, then looked up to see the triumphant expression in her hostess's eyes.

  “You see?” she said. “It’s you, isn’t it?”

  “Not me,” Sheila objected. “She looks like me, yes, I can see that –”

  “Because she was your great grandmother,” the old lady said. “My dearest friend, almost eighty years ago. Brenda O’Hara.”

  Her face softened and she looked at Sheila and smiled.

  Sheila said “You know, there are lots of O’Haras about. I don’t think it’s really all that likely that this is the same family –”

  She was interrupted again.

  “You know it must be! How could anyone look at that portrait, and at you, and doubt it?”

  The old lady was determined to believe that she was right.

  Sheila gave a mental shrug and decided not to argue.

  It wasn’t important.

  Why destroy Mrs Boyd Cassidy’s illusions? If it gave her pleasure to think that she had met the great grand-daughter of her friend, then there seemed little reason to take that pleasure away.

  Who knew, she might even be right? It was certainly possible.

  Call it, Sheila estimated, a ten thousand to one chance.

  “Let me tell you something about her,” Roisin Boyd Cassidy said. “She was the daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Dublin back in the early days of this century – Fitzroy O’Hara, whose grandfather was Lord Lieutenant under Queen Victoria. She was brought up a member of the Ascendancy, but it wasn’t in Brenda to accept blindly all the rules her family taught her. She was eight when I first met her, several years older than me, and already thinking for herself. She and I were thrilled by the 1916 Rising, though we were still children at that time, and in the early twenties we worked together behind the scenes to help get this country established.

  “Brenda, though still in her early teens, was in a position to gather useful information from her family connections. She passed it on to me. I knew the key people on our side and I was able to give them Brenda’s information on a regular basis. Between us, you could say, we changed the course of history.”

  She was a traitor, Sheila thought. I hope she wasn’t any relation of mine.

  But she said nothing aloud.

  The old lady continued, in a dreamy voice. She was living again the days of her youth, full of romance and excitement, untouched by the bitter reality of maturity.

  “It was through me that Brenda met Patrick Stevens, one of the leaders of the Rising. They fell in love at once. Brenda was a very beautiful girl – so like you, my dear – and Patrick was a dashing, good-looking fellow with a reputation for a wild sort of courage, although nearly twenty years older than Brenda or me when we met him in the early Twenties. We were all mad about him, but it was Brenda he fell for.

  “Of course, her family knew nothing about this. There was a well- off young Englishman whom they wanted her to marry – she’d been introduced to him on one of the family’s socialising trips to London – but Brenda would have nothing to do with him, although she couldn’t tell her parents the real reason.

  “Then things came to a head. After the nation won its freedom in 1921, the Free State was set up. There was no place for people like Fitzroy O’Hara under the new regime. He was offered a Government post in London and he told his family that they would be moving there in a matter of a few weeks.

  “Brenda was in despair.

  “She came to me, crying, one night, and said, ‘What am I to do, Roisin?’r />
  “‘Don't go,’ I told her. ‘You and Patrick want to be together. You belong together. Go to him, then. Run away from your family and hide out with your lover until you can get married and be free of them.’

  “It was then that she told me that there was more to it than her reluctance to leave Patrick and go to England.

  “‘I’m pregnant, Roisin,’ she said, looking at me with those huge green eyes, ‘I’m carrying Patrick’s baby.’

  “‘All the more reason to go to him,’ I told her.

  “She accepted that. It was what she wanted to be told.

  “Her family were very angry.

  “And worried, too, no doubt.

  “She left them a note, saying she was going to her lover, but not naming him, in case he got into any trouble from her powerful connections.

  “I didn’t know where she was any more than they did, for months, and I worried about her, I’m sure, at least as much as they did.

  “Then the civil war broke out. We were no longer Irishmen fighting against the English oppressors, but Irish against Irish.

  “Patrick was in the thick of it, I knew, but I never heard where he was based.

  “Then I got a letter from Brenda, with no address. I can remember every word. I still have it. I've read it so many times, I don’t need to read it again.

  “‘My Dearest Roisin,

  I am writing to you because you have always been my closest friend. My baby is due soon, and I am in good health, but I worry constantly about my dear Patrick. The fighting continues all round us, even in this quiet place where we are hiding out. I am frightened for him, he has so many enemies who want him dead. What will I, and the child, do if he is killed?

  Perhaps I will be able to come and see you after my baby is born. Till then, all my love.

  Brenda.’

  “She never came. For a long time, I heard no more.

  “Then, one day, a friend told me that information had come to him in a roundabout way about Patrick Stevens.