The Glorious Guinness Girls by Emily Hourican

Author:Emily Hourican [HOURICAN, EMILY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

London now, with Baby, without Gunnie, is a different place. All that great gray solid façade of monumental buildings, with its invariable ballrooms and oppressive staircases, dissolves like sherbet and in their place is a different city. A city of cunning houses and flats and mews, of tiny two-seater motorcars quite unlike the lengthy purring beasts that Cloé and Ernest favor. Of hilarity like the lash of a whip. Invitations sent on a whim and parties got up out of nothing more than eagerness. Of cocktails at 4 p.m. instead of tea, White Russians and Gin-and-Its, of Sidecars and French 75s, cocktails again at 7 p.m. while dressing, at 8 p.m., and all through the evenings that end at dawn with the promise of “again!” already rising in the morning air.

This is the London Maureen had been waiting for, had given up hope of; where Baby, Zita and their friends chatter and exclaim like so many small birds, hopping from conversation to conversation, pecking once or twice—“Too funny!” “How perfectly sweet!”—then moving on. Here, Maureen’s odd, confrontational humor is appreciated. She is an instant success. The new London has new manners, new ways of walking, talking, standing, drinking that are immediately hers. Aileen’s too, but she doesn’t launch herself quite like Maureen does—perhaps, I think, it is because Aileen did not know months of misery and rejection the way Maureen did. Instead, Aileen continues as she was—in pleasant harmony with Gunnie and Cloé, moving from one thing to the next in a way that leaves everything half-done; “I’ll finish that later,” she says, whether it be a letter she’s writing, a magazine she’s reading, flowers to be arranged. Rarely does she come back to finish any of them. Oonagh, meanwhile, has grown quieter, but I almost don’t notice because there is so much clamor made by Maureen.

I watch her set forth to conquer, and she makes me think of one of Ernest’s pleasure crafts, a determined, sturdy yacht, gay with lights and bright with flags, putting out to sea under nothing but the power of the wind swelling its sails, nose turned toward the new land. Sometimes she ducks from sight, dwarfed by some massive swell of water, so that it seems she might capsize, but always she emerges again, righted by her own determination, plunging up and forward with a laugh.

To me, this new London is as strange as the paintings of Mr. Picasso—that is to say, incomprehensible—and I wish I had someone to talk them over with, someone like Richard, but he is in Dublin at the brewery far more than he is here, or Mildred, but she is too busy.

Like Mr. Picasso’s paintings, all the usual bits of society that I understand have here been cut up and rearranged. Here, the girls are angular and sometimes harsh, and the young men are soft and yielding like Bryan, or wild and troubling like the poet Brian Howard. Some are downright frightening. There is a prizefighter, a great

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