‘Who’d buy her suds?’ asked Pertilly.
‘Frankly, my dear, the women would buy pressed dung beetles in a bottle, so long as it bore a Swiney Godiva label. Because it would be the wish and the promise of Swiney Godiva hair that they’d be buying. And the genius of it is that we shall have them needing two products, one being no use without the other, thus doubling the purchase.’
‘I still don’t understand what exactly we are purchasing from you, Mister Poet?’ Darcy rapped.
Tristan Stoker offered me his card. I read aloud for my sisters:
‘Stoker Vitreous Manufacture
Fine Glass Bottles &
Discreet Sanitary Necessities for Discriminating Ladies’
‘I’ll supply the essence for washing the hair and the scalp food, the bottles, the labels and the handbills for the advertising. And perform the miracle of having it distributed to every dispensary and general store in Ireland.’
‘And we?’
‘Must sit for some photographs at my direction, my lovely Medusas, to be printed on the labels and the handbills. And—’
‘And?’
‘A merest nothing. Sing some new songs with a mere slight mention of the product at judicious intervals. Wash a dolly’s hair in Swiney Godiva Hair Essence on stage, perhaps. Sit in a shop window or two surrounded by my – your – bottles, just to reinforce the connection in the public’s mind between Swiney Godiva Hair Essence and Swiney Godiva hair.’
‘What do you put in scalp food, your honour?’ asked Pertilly, licking her lips.
‘A little nothing, bay rum-based, put together by a respectable pharmacist named O’Mealy. It will not harm the ladies, or aggravate their credulous scalps at all. Only because they’ll not be putting it on their heads.’
O’Mealy, I thought. Standish O’Mealy, no doubt! The same one who supplies Mr Rainfleury’s vulcanised rubbers. Tristan Stoker and Mr Rainfleury . . . do they –?
Ida was asking, ‘Where shall they put that scalp food then?’
‘Down their throats. And the more they drink of it, the better they shall feel for it. And the more easily they shall be pleased with their hair.’
‘And the more they shall be craving it?’ Darcy raised pleased eyebrows.
‘Exactly. And the better their hair shall look to them, especially when washed in Swiney Godiva Hair Essence.’
While my sisters were digesting the Mr Stoker’s idea – and apparently finding it palatable, from their grins – I was growing concerned for the literary aspect. I asked, ‘Mr Stoker, being as you are a poet, will you be writing these new songs with the mere slight mentions of the essence and the scalp food? All I was thinking—’
Tristan Stoker smiled reassuringly. ‘In my capacity as poet, I would venture to compose some material, but in close collaboration with the resident Shakespearess of the Swiney Godivas, of course, who occupies no mean place among songsters.’
‘She could do with some help,’ observed Darcy. ‘Manticory’s hardly good at all.’
‘But she writes all our shows, Darcy honey,’ protested Oona. ‘And don’t they clap them in the halls?’
Darcy paused for five beats of my heart. Then she replied, ‘Just because a chicken has wings doesn’t mean it can fly.’
She turned back to the poet. ‘But even if, even if the Swiney Godivas agree to help you out with this project, you must share your snack of the new profits, Mr Stoker. We already have a business partner. The Corporation is managed—’
‘That it is, by Mr Rainfleury of the dolls. As it happens, I took the liberty of discussing this matter with him before I came to you with it.’
‘How dare you?’ demanded Darcy, for once voicing my own thoughts. ‘Going over our heads like that?’
‘But Mr Rainfleury is also family, is he not? I spoke to him as your protector, the moral head of your household. He wanted me to present the idea to you myself—’
‘I wonder why,’ drawled Darcy, glaring at Oona.
‘You will find Mr Rainfleury a staunch supporter of this proposal. In fact, we have agreed to produce miniature bottles of the essence to put in the boxes with the dolls. And the dolls shall be put in every shop window that makes a display of your essence and scalp food. It is a masterpiece.’
‘A darling idea!’ Oona clapped her hands and gazed on Tristan Stoker with eyes aglow with adoration.
Enda tried to look wise, as if her husband had already informed her of this new development. Berenice laughed at her twin’s obvious failure to be confided in. ‘Didn’t Augustus tell you?’
From the shame in her eye, he’d clearly omitted to tell Berenice as well.
Tristan Stoker was busy returning Oona’s moist gaze. ‘Of course Mr Rainfleury wants the Swiney Godivas to ascend to a higher echelon of admiration and fame! Out of love for you, he could not turn me away – even if he had wanted to, which he patently does not. He too desires to have your names and your stories on everyone’s lips.’
‘Everyone’s lips,’ mouthed Oona.
Darcy pulled a wing of blonde hair aside and whispered in Oona’s naked ear, ‘You are setting yourself up for a staring-mad fool. It’s long sorry you’ll be for letting your heart go at the first sight of a big-eyed man.’
After that, things moved so fast that I suspected the pharmaceutical arm of the Swiney Godiva Corporation had been set in motion some time before it was presented to the Swiney Godivas themselves.
The first handbills showed our likenesses from behind: cascades of hair, with just a hint of our profiles. Immediately below was a decorative text:
SWINEY GODIVA HAIR ESSENCE
An invigorating, healthful restorative for all those who long for
BEAUTIFUL HAIR
like that of the sensational Swiney sisters from Old Ireland
SWINEY GODIVA HAIR ESSENCE
will cause your hair to grow to extravagant lengths.
It will impart the natural vigour of youth and the freshness of dew, communicating a brilliant lustre and delicate softness.
Meanwhile, dandruff and scurf will not survive a single dose of
SWINEY GODIVA SCALP FOOD
which also cures weak and thin eyelashes on the instant.
Refined as the Sisters themselves
this Secret Irish Formula is captured in a bottle for the first time.
Used strictly in combination, these products are
positively the finest hair dressings available –
unrivalled in agreeableness, surpassing all pomades and greases,
so efficacious that they will make hair grow on bald heads.
Demonstrating just how imaginative his poetry could be, Tristan Stoker had added in small print at the bottom:
Supplied by direct command to HM the Queen of Romania,
HRH Princess Victoria of Schaumburg-Lippe,
HRH Princess Hohenlohe
1s, 2s 6d and (triple 2s 6d size) 4s 6d per bottle
We were bemused by these extravagant prices.
‘No one will buy it!’ fretted Pertilly.
But Tristan Stoker soothed us. ‘The more expensive it is, the better the ladies will imagine it to be. That is the poetry of the thing.’
Of course Tristan Stoker himself wrote poems the way Mr Swinburne ploughed cabbage fields – not at all. He was the consummate poet in his velveteen waistcoat, in his lacquered curls and in the magnificent droop of his moustache, in his long-lashed brown eyes and in his fluid gestures. He was a poet in the way he loped into a room, and in his lingering glance. He was a poet in the way he lifted a soup spoon, and most of all in the way he ran an elegant finger down the column of his account book.
We were Tristan Stoker’s creatures now, so we were poets too. Like literature, he assured us, we Swiney Godivas transcended social barriers. ‘Never forget that by the poetry of your hair, you are transforming yourselves directly from peasant girls into goddesses. The stench of your childhood poverty shall be finally extirpated, for you shall have t
hat precious quality of celebrity to sterilise your humble origins.’
‘Away with your stench and humble!’ snapped Darcy and she kicked Oona who was mouthing the poet’s words after him.
We would earn 10,000 guineas in the first year of Tristan’s essence and ‘perfectly innoxious’ scalp food. We earned it hard, performing four nights a week, travelling constantly, and posing in shop windows for face-tightening hours on end.
Tristan Stoker rejoiced. ‘Your hair is becoming a metaphor for Empire and Industry.’
We bought outright our townhouse in Dublin, hired an extra maid, and began to call ‘Tristan’ by his Christian name.
More money flowed from the essence and the scalp food than even Tristan’s poetic mind could have dreamed of. And the popularity of Tristan’s products had a stimulating effect on the dolls’ sales. And that in turn sold more tickets to our shows.
I now purchased any book I so much as fancied for cash money, without even glancing at the price. I could never quite get over myself in a bookshop, spending and spending. We were all in a fever of retail, Enda with her Belleek, Darcy with her glacé-button calf-galoshed hand-sewn kid boots and Baretta court shoes, Berenice with her carved boxes, Oona with her quack preparations for lightening the voice, Pertilly with her baroque tortoiseshell combs, and myself with the books. Ida’s purchases were more eccentric and less consistent. She might come home with anything from a horrid grinning fox stole to a cone of fried fish and potatoes from one of the Italian street stalls. She insisted that we send Joe the seaweed boy a waterproof driving cape and found a vulcanised India rubber hot-water pillow for Annora.
In fact, we were so busy spending what the essence and the scalp food earned that we never saw the danger to Ida, who, as we would discover too late, had taken to swallowing a drop of scalp food whenever she was affected in her faculties. The drop soon escalated to a spoonful, and the spoonful to a long swig direct from the neck of the bottle. And after drinking it, she would take to her fiddle, filling Pembroke Street with melodious howls to break your heart and send it out of your body in pieces.
Chapter 21
Tristan would go ahead to each town, posting signs. As promised, he’d give the local stores a sample and a doll – almost always ‘Miss Oona’ – to decorate the window and associate the shop with the Swiney Godiva sensation, of which the most sensational part remained Oona’s white-blonde hair.
On the nights we performed he’d stand in the lobby too, uttering his familiar thrilling warnings that married hair to bodily love and love to death.
As well as a fixture onstage and in the railway carriage returning from our shows, Tristan became a regular inhabitant of our parlour. Mrs Hartigan automatically set a place for him at supper, beside Oona. He appropriated a desk by the withdrawing-room window for his literary labours, claiming our company for his muse. But the desk opened out from a cabinet with mirrored doors to its upper part, and I noticed that Tristan took his most visible inspiration from his handsome face reflected in them. Oona was never far away from him, and her eyes were never off him. She was allowed to accompany Tristan on quite frequent excursions to buy pen-nibs and blotters. I would have been amazed that Darcy permitted this, except that I was growing to believe that Tristan had chosen Oona for his bride.
He was taking an unconscionable time to mention it, however.
‘Why does he not . . . speak?’ Oona searched my face in the mirror. I was brushing her hair before bed. Even in the grandeur of Pembroke Street, we continued to perform this service for one another as we had always done back in Harristown.
‘Tristan?’ I paused mid-stroke. ‘He does nothing but speak. I’m exhausted at the words gushing out of the man.’
‘Why doesn’t he speak up for me? That’s what I mean. I am certain that he, so. I mean, I have had certain . . . proofs . . . of his affection for me.’
I dropped the brush, upsetting Oona’s green bottle of Breidenbach’s Eau de Cologne. Leaving the puddle to infuse the rug, I gently turned her face round so that I could look into her eyes. ‘You’re just seventeen, Oona! Does he not know that? And is he as prudent in his proofs as he should be? Has he sent away for the . . . necessary?’
Oona nodded, her blush whitening into tense misery. She turned away from me.
I resumed punishing her head in silence with the brush until she moaned, ‘What do you think, Manticory honey? Have I ruined it so?’
‘I think,’ I said carefully, ‘that what you have done was not clever of you.’
‘I read in the Freeman’s Journal on Tuesday that if you want to marry within a year then you must hop barefoot round the Shipwreck Tower at Tramore.’
‘Oona, please do not utter that thought to anyone but me. Tristan does not want you doing anything poetic. Don’t be giving up yet. Perhaps he’s just distracted by his poem.’
Tristan claimed to be working on a grand hairy epic of his own. But Tristan was a covetous, lamenting kind of poet, and continually distracted by Mr Rossetti’s and Mr Browning’s productions. He claimed that they stole his best lines, forcing him to waste months of work.
‘This,’ he declared in the parlour, waving Mr Browning’s Pauline, ‘this is grand larceny from my own canon! Alas, as yet unpublished and now already thwarted.’
He flung Pauline across the room.
I picked it up and read aloud the passage he had scored through with an untidy pen:
‘Pauline, mine own, bend o’er me – thy soft breast
Shall pant to mine – bend o’er me – thy sweet eyes,
And loosened hair, and breathing lips, arms
Drawing me to thee – these build up a screen
To shut me in with thee, and from all fear . . .’
Immediately the troll on Harristown Bridge sauntered into my mind, his designs on me a perfect illustration of this verse. I dropped the book. Tristan nodded in misconceived appreciation of my gesture. ‘Quite right, Manticory! A shocking theft!’
It was Darcy who answered him, pelting words from the corner where she presided over the Hairdressers’ Chronicle and Trade Journal. ‘If there is any theft that has gone on here, it is of virtue. We all know it, Tristan, you’ve been making hair bowers and grottoes and screens and tents with Oona for months now. And if real poets like Browning make such fantasies revoltingly explicit, then who is it you are – you posing poodle – to object?’
This was the first time Darcy had treated Tristan to the full length of her tongue. This unexpected assault instantly fossilised him. The rest of us forgot about breathing; Tristan sat with his pen raised in one hand and his mouth open. Oona began to speak, but Darcy silenced her with a cutting gesture, saying, ‘We’ll come to you in a minute. I have not finished with our poet yet.
‘Oh yes,’ continued Darcy, ‘I am sure it is dim and hushed inside Oona’s hair tent. I am sure the tousle-haired poet nourishes his muse in the private weather in there. But does he actually write poetry when he is sighing so close to Oona’s breathing lips and counting the heartbeats pumping out between her two breasts? Is it any wonder we’ve had nothing more than a slim volume from you yet, Stoker? Did it never occur to your poetic brain that a marriage proposal – in writing – would be briefer and more manageable and more to the point?’
Tristan made a glowering exit, refusing to meet Oona’s pleading eyes. She fixed on his shapely back with desperate regret.
‘How do you like that coward?’ demanded Darcy. ‘He has put the fool on you, Oona. It had to be said.’
‘It did not at all have to be said,’ I told her.
I was heartsick in the days that followed to see that Darcy’s intervention had done nothing but harm. Tristan did not look straight at Oona any more. The excursions for pen-nibs and blotters continued but Oona now had to beg Tristan to allow her to accompany him. Then he came to announce his departure to pursue poetical business in the glass factories of Blackfriars and visit ‘a place of interest’ in London.
Oona stared at Tris
tan as if memorising him, as well she might. He had still not made any move in a matrimonial direction, and the life-blood was dripping out of her. She cared not a whisker that the audience loved her best every night. She only wanted Tristan to love her. As I brushed her hair, she confided to me that she had imagined romantic evenings dandering arm-in-arm along the Thames with Tristan. Our eyes met sadly in the mirror.
Mr Rainfleury had also deserted us for a ‘hair fair’ in Paris, and proclaimed a passion for viewing the same ‘walls of a certain private drawing room in London as Tristan’. Mr Rainfleury left both his wives at home, rather than take Enda with him. I guessed that he could not but disappoint one of them, so he had decided to disappoint them both.
When Tristan did speak again, it was not of marriage but of golden hair.
Hotfoot back from London, he had us assemble in the dining room, with Mr Rainfleury hovering supportively in the background. Tristan held a pile of books in his arms. He placed them solemnly on the table and asked us to sit.
‘Ladies,’ he announced, with the lyrical jut of his chin that always prefigured a commercial speech, ‘there is something that you shall need to understand for the sake of our continued collaborations. Ladies, let us think on the richness and fineness of golden hair. Such as Mr Rainfleury and myself have just been privileged to see in the home of Frederick Leyland, a collector of certain works of art, and a Brother of the Hair—’
‘Ahem, whether he knows it or not,’ mentioned Mr Rainfleury.
‘A Brother, if there ever was one,’ pronounced Tristan. ‘And a lover of yellow hair. Yellow hair: the colour of light; the colour of gold. Gold is a precious rarity; men will kill and die for it; gold is power.’ He waved the Freeman’s Journal. ‘Look here. The Gold Rush in California has caused eggs to sell at $10 a dozen. A pinch of gold dust buys a man a glass of tawny yellow whisky.’
‘And no doubt,’ interrupted Darcy, ‘pays the purchase of a good-time girl with golden hair.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 17