The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  And my writing weaves it too, of course. Women are forever weaving their own narratives out of the growings of their own bodies, fashioning their own accounts, knitting new characters into their own stories. Even a tongueless woman – even a creature of regrets and impotence like me, Manticory – may embroider messages and stories with self-grown filaments of truth.

  And one more strand, back in our Harristown cottage, was our mother, Annora, still pounding the threads of the laundry she took in, for she could never bring herself to spend the money that we sent her, even refusing when I offered to take her to Lourdes to see the Virgin lately glimpsed there.

  Our visits to Harristown were increasingly rare, and it was perhaps kinder that way. Our aggrandised corporeality seemed to frighten our mother – we were plumper as well as taller than we had been when in her care. In our fine, voluminous dresses, we were too big for the cottage. We could not fit around her table. Our hats grazed the roof. Our elbows sent jugs flying. No, we did not in any way fit now. Our senses of ourselves were too vast as well.

  The La Touches had diverted the railway line to run through their estate. But somehow, our landlord and his family never did happen upon us, no matter how much we made ourselves worth the seeing in our finery. We disembarked unseen and trudged unseen by them the short distance to Annora’s cottage. I sometimes thought I saw the Eileen O’Reilly flitting through the trees beside us, but she’d grown too cunning and lithe to let Darcy catch sight of her. And she still, it seemed, did not want to be seen by me. We carried with us Mrs Hartigan’s sponge cake in a basket. Our tastes had been flattered by the delicacies our housekeeper prepared for us. Once we had craved Annora’s oat scones but now we regarded them with disdain. She’d never lost the habit of stretching the batter with stale breadcrumbs.

  In the beginning, I had kept my promise to Annora. I wrote letters for Mrs Godlin to read aloud to our mother, to keep her apprised of our own great doings, of the crowds in Dame Street, of the latest fashions of our dolls, the trinkets we bought, the Frangipani soaps with which we washed our hands, the Domecq Manzanilla sherry we sipped, the grand dinners we ate. Sadly but baldly, I recorded the deaths of each of Enda’s babies.

  Mrs Godlin was a willing scribe, but Annora rarely replied. Although she herself had begged for them, perhaps she dreaded my missives – so I think now – for she wished to live alone with her memories of seven little daughters who had briefly lived only because she had birthed and fed them, and who’d not been devoured from the head downwards only because she saved them from the nits with the combs she had carved herself.

  I tried to weave our mother into one of our shows, as a wise old lady who sews spells and proverbs onto finest silk under the light of a candle in a seashell. But the image would not fly. I could not write Annora wise or magical. And none of my sisters would want to play her, anyway. When my mind strayed to our mother, I thought of myself as one of the spiders who wove their stories in the rafters, watching her at her lonely work. It was no comfort to be that spider, so I gradually stopped visiting Annora in my thoughts.

  All writers are spiders, knitting patterned tissues of life out of what grows inside themselves. Their webs also knit together diverse entities. Did you never see a tree married to a lamp-post by an industrious spider? Such miscegenations does a writer also create, as I did, first by writing the humble Swiney sisters into myth and legend for our stage shows, weaving a wild tribe of Irish starvelings into Lady Godivas who were not real ladies, and then weaving impossible desires for hair like ours into the hopeful hearts of the women who came to watch us.

  ‘Clever girl, Manticory,’ Mr Rainfleury told me. ‘Keep working out those happy endings.’

  Happy? I looked at Mr Rainfleury with despair that even my contempt could not enliven.

  Is it any wonder that writers, and spiders, are disliked?

  As Madame Defarge at her knitting was disliked?

  But everyone loves a poet.

  Do they not?

  Chapter 19

  I was not the only industrious spider among the Swineys. Ida, though never shining in brains, had hands that were a credit to her. Using the combings we laid nightly in our hair-receivers, she embroidered a large picture on white velvet. It was of a tree with seven branches, each one sewn from real Swiney Godiva hair. A daguerreotype in a locket nodded at the end of every branch. The trunk was sketched with a pencil. It should, of course, have been made of Annora’s hair, of which precious little was to be spared. It was too brittle for sewing, anyway, and its greyness was discouraging. The hair of Phelan Swiney, Mariner, had never been available to us.

  The picture was framed behind glass and displayed on a cherry-wood easel beside the ticket desk wherever we were to perform. It built up the excitement nicely.

  It was after our first show at the newly opened Gaiety Theatre in South King Street that we witnessed a young man unabashedly tracing the stitches of Ida’s picture with a dancing light in his eye and a stagey tremor in his hands. We were waiting for our carriage in a corridor concealed by a curtain. We liked listening to the audience talking after the show. In this way we heard many pleasant things about the wonders of our hair and I was able to calculate adjustments to my scripts.

  The large-eyed handsome young man, whose own curls were notable, appeared to be not quite exactly singing our praises.

  ‘Looks so innocent, so soft,’ he was telling a small group of bystanders, ‘but this silky extrusion is a deadly danger. Hair! The thrilling, killing human instrument – the half animal, half stuff – that plays men’s hearts more sweetly than a harp.’

  His audience – who had just been ours – drew closer to him.

  ‘Beware these hirsute projections’ – the man described a ringlet with a twirling finger – ‘of midnight black, of seething red, of primeval brown – they have been the death of a power of young men. Hair like this will wrap itself around your heart, your eyes, your soul, until you are choking to death on its delicious spun-silk witchery.’

  Darcy bristled, ‘Oho, he’ll be asking for money next, you’ll see. The Devil boil him a black pudding!’

  It took six pairs of arms to restrain her from rushing out of our hiding place. Oona pleaded, ‘Let us hear him, Darcy honey. He is a grand talker. And is he not a romantic figure of a man there?’

  ‘I don’t want to marry him, fool,’ Darcy retorted. ‘I just want to stop him from frightening the audience. Some of them are repeaters. Choking to death indeed!’

  But I had been observing the audience closely, as was my habit. I tugged Darcy’s sleeve. ‘I don’t believe he’s in the way of hurting us.’

  The young man intoned, ‘It began with Homer’s sirens, swooping down on sailors’ ears with songs that told of their long locks. Were those sailors’ hearts as hard as Ballyknocken granite, they’d not be resisting that siren hair. These young ladies should be called the Swiney Sirens!’

  The crowd, rapidly swelling, shivered pleasurably. Our speaker leaned towards a pair of men confidentially, saying, ‘Sixpence a ticket? A shilling? What a negligible amount to buy the chance to flirt with your very lives!’

  Darcy jerked forward. ‘Hoy! That’s going too far. He’s talking manure at them. I’ll have his liver—’

  But now Oona laid a hand on Darcy’s shoulder. ‘Look at that queue by the ticket desk there.’

  Even as the crowd deserted him for the ticket desk, the young man bowed, kissed his hands to his admirers and slipped away – in our direction. Boldly, he parted the curtain and wove past it, right into our corridor, where he bowed theatrically. He’d clearly known all along that we were part of his audience.

  ‘If I may, my Sweet Sirens, I’ll make you famous,’ he said. ‘And rich.’

  ‘Is that so? We’re already famous, and fairly rich,’ snapped Darcy. ‘Without your help.’

  ‘But Darcy honey, did you see what the gentleman just did to those people there?’ asked Oona. ‘He put an enchantment on them!’

&nb
sp; ‘Like a cannibal witch doctor in Africa. Frightening them into worshipping us?’ I mused. ‘People love to be frightened. You should know that, Darcy.’

  ‘I suppose not entirely unlike,’ the man replied. ‘Indeed those primitives in Africa will fashion a goddess out of wood to adorn their savage altars. Then they make themselves forget that they made that object with their own mortal hands. By means of the clever urgings of their witch doctor, they start to believe in the wooden idol as if she were a divine creature who dropped down from the moon or rose up from the sea. They bring her tribute – precious stones, essences, gold. Essences, liquid essences, in the name of the goddess, that’s what I have in mind. Highly marketable essences. A little drop of liquid goddess that everyone can afford. Are you perhaps getting my drift, ladies?’

  ‘A divine creature who dropped down from the moon? Sounds expensive,’ smiled Darcy.

  ‘Be thinking of rolls of money and piles of coins,’ he answered, ‘and the ledgers filling up with long lyrical lines of profit.’

  And that was how we Swineys got ourselves a poet.

  Chapter 20

  Tristan Stoker declared that he would offer his services for free, almost.

  ‘Just a taste, I’ll take. Nothing more. For isn’t it an honour to myself to help the scintillating Swiney Sirens along their way?’

  He stood us dinner in the Railway Hotel, a small investment on his part, as it turned out – unlike a recent excursion into charity when he had self-published a volume of his verses, a special free edition for the poor. The ungrateful poor had refrained from taking up his offer, leaving him a thousand copies that Relief Committees across Ireland had returned to him, postage paid on delivery, he told us indignantly.

  ‘Perhaps you will appreciate my oeuvre, however, Miss Manticory.’ He handed a slim volume across the table to me, while my sisters – always ravenous as gulls after a show – applied themselves to diamond-bone sirloins that spread themselves out all over the plate, not neglecting to hang over the edges. All of them, that is, except Oona, who looked from the meat to Tristan Stoker and back again continuously and seemed to have forgotten the use of a fork.

  Pushing my plate aside, I applied myself to the book, eager to discover what kind of poet Mr Stoker was. He continued with his autobiographical account, revealing how he had selflessly devoted himself to his family business, pursuing his true passion – poetry – only in his fleeting moments of leisure. After skimming through ‘An Ardour Unabated in the Arbour’ and ‘A Tress Too Far Away’, I was certain he had made a correct division of his labours, though I nodded sympathetically when he sighed, ‘Duty first!’

  ‘Oh yes,’ breathed Oona, ‘duty first.’

  Even if the poetry was lacking from his poetry, Tristan Stoker was a fine poetical figure of a young man with shapely hands, lustrous hair and a melting look to match the lilt of his voice. He was a different proposition entirely from Mr Rainfleury. I watched my sisters one by one putting down their knives to devote themselves to staring frankly, and with no small pleasure, at our host. Had he offered us a new line in cats’ meat to endorse, my sisters would have considered it.

  So intense was their excitement that they could not manage even apple pie with custard. Darcy’s mouth tightened as our poet threw sheep’s eyes at Oona over his brandy. Oona’s neck was mottled with a flush.

  ‘Enough about my tedious self,’ our poet opined, finally. ‘Let us talk about the Swiney Godivas. My diagnosis is that you ladies are not making the most of your gifts. You poor innocent girls have no way of understanding the true and ter­­rible power of your hair,’ he told us. ‘Rainfleury & Masslethwaite have sheltered you from it, keeping you among childish things. Dolls are the mere infantile exposition of your potential. Dolls are bought from doll-purses, from the impulse that buys a gift, and does so only on a special occasion, or but rarely. I want to see you tapping the quotidian pockets of the real engines of economy, the gentlemen and their wives. But first the gentlemen . . .’

  ‘The gentlemen doll collectors?’ Darcy asked harshly. ‘That is but a small pocket.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ laughed Tristan Stoker. ‘I refer to a deeper, richer vein that is throbbing for a tapping. For there is a brotherhood of us, the susceptible men who nurse a strange and disturbing passion for long hair. We rarely speak our love explicitly in public, unless under the mask of poetry, for it is too passionate and wild a thing to contain in mere prose. You have seen the scandals brought down on my brothers-in-art Rossetti and Millais by their daring to expose it. But we Brothers of the Hair know one another, and we silently pray at the temple that could, with a little skilful massaging of the public’s perception, become any place where the Swiney Godivas lay their delicate feet and let loose their torrents of rampant, excessive, killing curls.’

  I stared at him with hatred: that handsome young face hid another troll.

  ‘Killing again, is it?’ Darcy was showing all the signs of being about to dispense with her temper – the shallow breathing, the jerked gestures and the drawing in of her black brows. She began to gather up her reticule and caught our eyes in a sweep of the table so that we automatically half rose to leave.

  ‘Ah, stay, Miss Darcy. Killing is the greatest compliment. Killing is power. Power is money. You can turn a fine fortune on said killing curls. I am about to explain how.’

  Darcy put her reticule down on the floor again.

  ‘I have watched the faces of my brothers in the audience. They imagine themselves smothered in your hair, choking on it, such sweet deaths as the poets, ahem, such as myself—’

  ‘So we heard already,’ interrupted Darcy. ‘You’ll have to do better than that. Where’s the working part? Where does Tristan Stoker his great poetic self come in? The men pay their shillings anyway to get an eyeful of us. And the women and the girls buy the dolls.’

  ‘But what if there were even more shillings and doll sales to be got?’

  ‘Explain.’ Darcy chopped her wrist on the dining table. ‘But no more poetry! Understood?’

  Oona whimpered quietly.

  But Tristan Stoker nodded. ‘Very well, to business, unadorned. With a heart and a half. Here is the nub of it. Do you think the women are unaware of what thoughts are in their menfolk’s heads whenever they look at the Swiney Godivas’ hair?’

  ‘When was a woman ever unaware of anything?’ agreed Darcy, albeit grudgingly.

  ‘It has recently occurred to the great minds of industry that it is women who undertake most of the domestic shopping. Such small decisions as to the choice of soap or buttons may be safely left to feminine judgement. Now it is generally agreed that the way to a woman’s purse – I speak of a woman of an economically interesting class – merchant and above – is through the craving in her breast for the admiration of her own person. That craving far outstrips her desire to appease the hunger in her husband’s belly with wholesome dinners. She’d far rather have her husband’s passionate adoration than his bloodless compliments on her faultless housekeeping. After a year of matrimony, passionate adoration naturally expires in the hearts of husbands. However, it can be nursed back to life by cunning means and at a certain cost.’

  Enda leaned forward, intent. ‘So how is the poor wife to buy it back?’ she asked.

  The poet smiled. ‘Isn’t it the wish of the feminine world to have hair cascading in torrents like yours? Don’t you think a woman might be wishing her own hair was as flowy and showy and seductive as a Swiney Godiva’s, to bind her man’s thoughts solely to her? And that some portions of the housekeeping funds might well find themselves diverted to that purpose?’

  ‘Mmm, so? Some men like the dolls themselves, but a doll won’t make a man adore his wife. You still haven’t interested me,’ Darcy informed him flatly.

  ‘Let us put the “Miss Swiney” dolls aside for a moment, though I have no intention of denting their graceful profits. Let us imagine that the wives want not just to own your likenesses, but to be like you? With hair lik
e yours? What if there was a patent Swiney Godiva Hair Essence and a Swiney Godiva Scalp Food for sale at a folding table by the door as your entranced audience left your performance? Or better still, what if the ladies had already found on their theatre seats a piece of paper that might be tucked into their pockets for later consideration? A discreet piece of paper with an address to which they might write in order to be supplied with such a product. Such a letter they might write at their own snug correspondence desk, away from the vulgar observation of their neighbours and the general public.’

  An equivocal noise escaped from my mouth. Oona looked at me reproachfully. ‘Are you misdoubting Mr Stoker there, Manticory honey?’

  ‘Devil a hair I care if she is,’ quipped Darcy heavily.

  ‘Of the present generation of young ladies in Ireland, surely your Miss Manticory is the most misdoubting of all.’ Although Mr Stoker’s teeth sparkled, his tone was abrasive.

  How does he know that of me? My suspicions tightened.

  ‘Let him go on,’ Darcy decreed. ‘Until I say.’

  ‘Sweet Sirens,’ Mr Stoker resumed, ‘we are living in the era of improved home plumbing, where a power of women even have bathrooms, where they may use such products in complete privacy, and hide them away in presses with keys. But most importantly – what if this product was said to be the very same magical detersive used by the Swiney Godivas themselves, which causes them to be so marvellously endowed with hair? There is a commercial atmosphere abroad – ladies are in a mood to pay for what they did not receive from their good Maker. Let us disqualify Nature – who lets so many ladies down – and give them Swiney instead.’

  Oona interrupted, ‘We don’t use an essence, Mr Stoker. We always used the soapy water left over from our mother’s laundering, and we do the same now. Mrs Hartigan saves it for us. When we were young we never had the money for the bottled things they sold in the dispensary. Our mother even made her own soap from things you wouldn’t want to talk of.’ She blushed.