Joe Vance had never before used his familiar name. He felt flattered.
“Put it to yourself this way. The landlord has been paid a sum down, not for me to guess at what it might be. Call it a retainer, call it what you like. He contracts to feed her and give her an easy scrubbing job, keep her for a year or whenever she gets a bit of hair below and a bit of swelling up top. Then she can be traded out, and the investment gets paid.”
Claffey rubbed his head. “Do that much more,” Joe said, “and you’ll cause another bald spot. I’ve never known London wear out a man’s hair so fast.”
“I thought,” Claffey said, “that there was a prime trade in little skinless flesh—I mean, not heads, but little girls. So I was told by a man I met in Dover Street. I was told that there are gents who will pay five guineas to force a nine-year-old.”
“You thought you could pass off Mary as nine?”
“She’s very small and low.”
“Oh yes, but Bride Caskey—”
“Is that what she calls herself?”
“Bride, who has the experience, says that she will not do as a nine-year-old or even a twelve-year-old, for those gentlemen want the appearance of innocence if not the reality, and she says Mary hasn’t got it. She says she is tractable as all these girls are, but that she looks puzzled, when she should look frightened. That she will insist on talking, when she should be dumb.”
“And so?”
“So Bride thinks it’s best to fatten her a year, and wait. Till she gets to an age when her expression suits her better.”
Pybus hung around at Spring Gardens. He wanted to give Mary a flower. When she came out the door, though, she was rushing with her flaxen head down like a ram’s, and wearing a hat that belonged to somebody else. She stooped, dashed, she didn’t see him. She had a soiled bedsheet draped round her shoulders, flapping in the heavy air, and she had in her hand something weighted and clanking and skin- like, that is to say, a purse. He barred her way. “Pybus!” she said.
“Is that the Giant’s purse?”
“Did you not see O’Brien bear off his money?”
“True, I did.”
“So?”
“So is this the Derry man’s store?”
“This is my back-wages. Bride told me how much to take.”
“Are you coming with us to Piccadilly then?”
“I’ll be seeing you.” She tore off down the street, her plait whipping over her shoulder like a rope made of light.
The Giant did not care for the rooms at the Hampshire Hod. They lodged close under the roof, and he sometimes had to bend double, his arms swaying, his knuckles on his boots. Claffey declared he looked like the grand-daddy of an ape that he had seen on a chain at Bartholomew. What manner of man was this ape, the Giant asked, interested, and Claffey replied he must be a near relation of yours, Charlie, for he grunts as you do in your sleep, and though he was wide awake nobody could credit a word he spoke.
When that first evening Mary did not arrive, they were forced to make up their own beds and fetch up water. “The Derry man will have her under lock and key,” Joe Vance said. “We must get another scrubber.”
Pybus thought of the meeting in the street. He kept quiet. Good luck to her, he thought. “She might visit us,” said Jankin.
When Bitch Mary had not appeared in three days, Jankin began to fret. Joe tired of his whimpering, and gave him a back-hander. But he did agree that they could go out and walk the streets and call for her, and—stipulating only that they should wait until dusk—that the Giant should come with them. “For you can see over the buildings, Charlie,” Jankin said. “You can see into the back courts and over walls, and look into the high-up windows.”
So it was, in the hour after the lamps were lighted, that Londoners at their supper were surprised by the giant face of an Irishman appearing behind the foggy glass. Some cowered and some cursed, and some called for their watchdog to be let out. “Mary, Bitch Mary!” called Jankin, in his piping voice. Children ran after the Giant—barefoot, bow-legged, toothless children, wilder than any they had seen—and one of them threw a stone which struck Joe smartly on the shoulder. The band did not stop calling until they reached the fields to the west, where they sat down and rested on the rippling black grass. The cold crept into their bones, and the Giant winced as he flexed his fingers, and reached up to knead the back of his neck. They went home to bread and some maggoty cheese. Joe had ceased to order up suppers from the cookshop. “Face it,” he said, “trade’s not what it was. We cannot keep up our standard as aforesaid, unless O’Brien here puts his hand in his sack.”
“But the money is for my own purposes,” the Giant said. “It is not for laying out in mutton pies. That money is to go back to Ireland.”
“For why?” Pybus asked. “It’s not as if you’ve relatives living.”
“It’s for rebuilding Mulroney’s tavern. This time in dressed stone, with columns. That don’t fall down. With marble fireplaces, decorated with urns and wreaths. With lyre-backed chairs for furniture, and marquetry tables inlaid with the fruits of the season.”
“He has started to believe his own stories,” Claffey said.
“With looking glasses surmounted by gilded swans, and consoles supported by gilded ladies with wings and their upper torso bare. With clock cases trimmed with laurel leaves and the sun with a smiling face. With fire screens with Neapolitan vistas on them, and serpentine chests with secret drawers. And a frieze with the nine Muses dancing.”
The next night, Vance stayed at home sulking. He declared he had better things to do than be stoned by street-life. “Like what?” Claffey asked him slyly. “Sit and count the Giant’s money?”
