Tristan was not to be deflected. ‘What I was about to say, is that good girls are “as good as gold”. Think of spun gold and spinning wheels; faithful wives at abandoned hearths; spider women at their lures. Golden hairs are glinting fishing lines, catching men. “Reel him in, the Golden Youth, devour him,” whispers the lady spider, dispatching pale gold silk from her fertile thorax.’
‘Spiders?’ mourned Oona. ‘You’d have us spiders, Tristan?’
‘Weavers, combers,’ he answered hastily. ‘Gold for gold, shuttle and comb, in and out, in the sister arts of weaving and hair-combing. I see rolled gold ringlets on napes of necks! The longer, the thicker, the more golden the hair – the more vigorous the bliss promised. Golden labyrinths of hair for men to make their way through or get lost in.’
Darcy glared at Oona as if she had personally generated this obscenity.
Tristan cleared his throat. ‘Now, ladies, now gold has graduated. As you Swiney Godivas have been taking your place in the golden footlights, literature and art have lately decreed that blonde women can, ahem, go either way. For golden hair is fairy hair, sacred and wicked at the same time. A blonde may be a delightful, passive, pure child of a woman, knitting nests of domestic bliss in her fair tresses. Her fair hair might shelter the man who is vulnerable to darkness. Or our blonde might tarnish like brass, and show its same shameful, cheap venality.’
A tear started in Oona’s left eye. She raised a hand but dropped it again. Tristan did not look at her.
How could he ignore her? Onstage, we all knew, the greatest applause was still reserved for Oona. People wanted blonde. Our dolls’ sales sang it. The notorious hair trade confirmed it: the Hairdressers’ Chronicle and Trade Journal observed that false hair was a guinea and a half for blonde, even if indifferent quality, while best brown and black hair struggled to raise a guinea.
‘And hair,’ Tristan said sternly, ‘be it ever so palely soft, is like a hard-hearted woman, for it feels no pain.
‘Now, wrap your long eyes around this!’ He held up a hand-coloured daguerreotype of a painted woman. ‘It is this lady I have been to London to see! She about whom all Brothers of the Hair are gasping. Here is gold for you!’
The woman’s rich curled hair filled and seemed fit to burst out of the confinement of the frame. The corsetless nymph semi-reclined in an available manner, her diaphanous gown slipping from a shoulder. A poppy drowsed in a glass beside her. Her eyes were cast down to her mirror, but the effect of those lowered lids was not to exclude but to beckon.
‘Trollop,’ said Darcy.
‘Sensational,’ countered Tristan. ‘The word they use for her is “stunner”. As in “stunning, sensational success” – which might also, dear ladies, be ours. This is Mr Rossetti’s painting of Lady Lilith, which we saw in Mr Leyland’s house at Prince’s Gate. And this lady’s hair, the artist tells us, was “the first gold”. Gold,’ he repeated, meaningfully.
‘Who?’ Darcy demanded. ‘Do we know a Lilith?’
‘Lilith-the-fair’ – Tristan lowered his voice dramatically – ‘was created from the same handful of dust, and was Adam’s first, wilful wife. Discarded by him, she consorted with devils, with whom she bred still-born babies, while dining on the infants born of innocent humans. She never died, they say, but returns to earth nightly to seduce mortal men in their dreams.’
‘Trollop,’ insisted Darcy.
On Oona’s face I saw the dawning of apprehension. In front of my eyes I saw the words of the Corporation contract and I knew I would not be able to help her. In my bitterness, I asked, ‘So you have forgiven the poets then, Mr Browning and Mr Rossetti and such gentlemen?’
‘Mr Rossetti has done us the favour of writing an explicit sonnet about Lilith’s talent for drawing men into the bright web she wore and wove round the heart of her chosen youth. And he translated a sliver of dear old Faust that is quoted in Mr Swinburne’s essay here.’ He opened a marked page in a volume entitled Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition 1868, and read aloud:
‘Hold though thy heart against her shining hair,
If, by thy fate she spread it once for thee;
For when she nets a young man in that snare,
So twines she him he never may be free.’
‘Oh really?’ drawled Darcy, looking from Tristan to Oona.
Tristan was not to be deflated. ‘Not only have I forgiven Mr Rossetti and his friends, but I have decided to parley with them, for the greater glory of the Swiney Godivas. Manticory, you and I shall henceforth anthologise a little, associate with the other poetical Brothers of the Hair. I’ll help,’ he smiled. He pointed to the pile of books he had brought with him. I consulted the spines: German Fairy Tales, The Rape of the Lock, and Paradise Lost. There were already slivers of paper inserted at several pages.
‘It’s certain Tristan knows what is best,’ murmured Oona disconsolately.
But you stand to lose the most, I wanted to warn her.
‘The ledger agrees with you.’ Darcy accepted Oona’s primacy in that spirit, for with the essence and the scalp food she’d made sure from the start that we all profited equally from Oona’s sales.
Tristan started Oona gently with a soberly clad Portia, whose hair was a golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men/Faster than gnats in cobwebs.
He had Pertilly sprinkle Oona with silver dust for her role as Frau Holda of the fairy tales, a white witch of the spinning wheel who teaches good girls to comb their hair so that pearls and rubies drop into their virtuous laps.
Next Oona’s hair was piled in a towering style and she was dressed in a dusty panniered confection to be Belinda of Mr Pope’s poem. The audiences loved the strange contrast between Oona’s deep voice reciting her lines and the moonlight hair that massed around her face, ‘insnaring’ men to rape her locks.
She also received a standing ovation for Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost, though I could not be sure whether this was for the poetry or the tight pink costume she’d been sewn into, and its three anxiously large fig leaves. Oona did her best to look wanton as she spoke of ringlets that curled like the tendrils of a vine.
Tristan set up a ‘Floral Tributes’ stall so men could throw flowers when Oona played a loosely robed Circe of the glorious hair, another weaver. Here again her hair rippled loose – not neatly braided or pinned, but cascading down in a way that was only suitable in the privacy of the married bedroom.
I carped, ‘Won’t the public be sick of seeing Oona’s hair always on full display?’
‘True,’ said Tristan. ‘Let’s have a plait for a change.’
As Rapunzel, Oona’s hair made a ladder for both a prince with a virile sword, played by Tristan, who had taken to joining her on the stage, and the diabolic witch, played by Ida, the possessor of the Swineys’ most harrowing laugh.
Oona’s short tableau of the blonde demon in Lady Audley’s Secret was such a success that Tristan devised a whole show in which, via quick changes of costume and hairstyle, she portrayed a series of fair horrors from the latest sensation novels – libidinous, yellow-haired calculating machines for meshing money with sensual gratification. Tender-hearted men were their fuel. Ruined men, hollowed and exsanguinated, were the debris they left behind them.
Oona was never able to conjure enough ancient evil to do justice to these roles. So Tristan reconfigured the cast, with Berenice or Darcy narrating while Oona did her straining utmost to look the part.
And from prose Tristan moved easily into publicity. Oona was dazzlingly perfect in a Swiney Godiva Scalp Food newspaper advertisement that cleverly alluded to Mr Rossetti’s Lady Lilith without being so derivative as to get us into trouble. Oona was required to perform the feat of impersonating an ensorcelling lady cannibal and, at the same time, communicating our scalp food’s healthful properties to our customers.
It was small wonder to me that she cried so hard after her day in the photographer’s studio.
Tristan was not going to put himself in the way of Darcy’s t
ongue again if he could help it. So he took care to have me include a series of poetic effusions for night-haired, death-loving heroines in our shows.
The lights would dim and he would whisper offstage, ‘Hair! Women’s hair! It lies against their throats like a lover. A dying lover. Hair lives beyond death . . . Is it not the lure of the grave itself that gives raven-winged hair its irresistible, supernatural lustre?’
The lights rose to show Darcy glowering over a pomegranate as Mr Rossetti’s Proserpine, the shades of Hell darkening her eyes and the serpentine gyre of her neck and hair showing all her power. She was Mr Sandys’ Medea, clutching a blood-red necklace, and also his Rosamund, her murderous hair as black and tumultuous as her soul. In a shadowy background, a prone Tristan played the husband she had just slain, while I, in the wings, sent a skull spilling wine spinning across the stage. Darcy’s most celebrated role was as Medusa, using an ingenious device adapted from an egg-beater to raise wiggling snakes in her hair.
In the Pembroke Street drawing room, Tristan constantly pestered me to darken my songs for Darcy. ‘Threats of hair violence,’ he advised, ‘bring on fear and fear opens purses. Never let them forget that hair is a frontier, a precarious place of danger. Our bodies are contained in their skin-clad lineaments, except where the hair gushes forth,’ he declaimed. ‘The only other things that spill out of our bodies are the liquids of excretion or exertion—’
Ida began to cry.
‘That is enough right there, Tristan Stoker,’ said Darcy. ‘If that is not an outrage, get me one! Step along with yourself! Go! And take your excreting with you! Look at Ida crying fit to fall in pieces from your botherations.’
Tristan’s smile never faded. ‘Ida’s tears merely prove what can be done by way of stimulation of the imagination. I am sorry I let the poetry take me a bit beyond myself there. It is for Corporation reasons that we must remind your audiences that hair is a risky object. We must alert them to the consequences of not dealing with it! We want them to hate their own hair! Then they will buy the liquid solution for the destruction of what they hate and fear about it.’
He gestured to a sketch on his desk, showing a wife with tangled lank locks watching helplessly while her husband leered at a luxuriantly tressed beauty. The caption was simple: Will he dispense with your services?
When his sketch was turned into a photograph, Tristan was perceptive and cruel enough to have the spurned wife modelled by Enda and the coveted mistress by Berenice.
Having exhausted every moral shade of blonde and black, Tristan turned his attention to red hair, and to me. He had seen what I wished not to see – that red might sell and that I might sell red.
Red hair had been licensed for popularity by the disorderly young men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. I suppose Millais started it, even painting the young Christ himself as a redhead, but Mr Rossetti was mostly to blame with his lubricious flame-haired heroines. Until then redheads had been decried as rare and unfortunate ‘carrots’.
Once we were endowed with licentiousness, redheads became irresistible. This prompted the novelists to turn us evil. Mr Collins created Lydia Gwilt, the wicked, bigamous, rotten, bloody, heart-shattering redhead in Armadale. Within a year of her appearance, flaming heroines were ubiquitous in novels. So of course, I was Lydia Gwilt’s impersonator, uttering terrifying monologues of her letters, in which she joked of how she craved a child to beat and loved to watch summer insects killing themselves in the candle flame.
And, just as I had always feared, Tristan had me ‘do’ Lizzie Siddal. In 1869, Lizzie, Mr Rossetti’s late wife and model, had been exhumed at her husband’s request. He had buried a book of his poems with her. But the poet had changed his mind and wanted his valuable work back.
‘As poetic as Tristan then,’ I muttered when I heard this.
There had arisen a rumour that Lizzie’s opened coffin had overspilled with luxuriant curls that kept growing at a furious pace even as the corpse decomposed. One copper curl had twined itself around the book of poems. The creeping curl was cut off and lifted from the grave along with the book.
Tristan decreed that I must re-enact Lizzie’s posthumous part using the coffin that Darcy carried around on all our tours. The coffin was too large for me, adding to the pathos of the sight of me inside it, clutching my husband’s poems jealously to my breast. The mahogany box was mounted on a gurney that slowly raised it upright while my sisters chanted funereal hymns. I kept my eyes shut until the last moment, when I opened them on a terrified audience, and recited a Rossetti love poem, as if I were the artist’s plundered wife lamenting in her grave.
The women screamed dutifully. The men gaped greedily at my hair as if they longed to stuff it into their open mouths.
There was no one to tug their sleeves and tell them not to. According to Tristan’s handbills, every look they bestowed on our hair was an education for their minds, even if they felt us with their bodies. It was not the Swiney Godivas’ fault if evil passions were aroused in men who thereby rendered themselves self-evidently unworthy to be present at such an exclusive and culturally irreproachable event as a Swiney Godiva performance.
With Tristan back from a second private view he’d finagled of Mr Leyland’s ‘stunners’, I was set to impersonating the woman in Mr Rossetti’s La Pia de Tolomei, the russet-haired wife left to die in staring melancholy in the malarial swamps of Maremma while the slow crows wheeled around her and the sundial’s shadow chased an eternity of trapped torment.
But I knew that no one cared a handkerchief for the Pia’s or my own suffering. They just wanted my hair, eyefuls of it, and if their eyes could have performed the feat, they would have torn my red hair out of my head.
Mr Rainfleury never protested on our behalf. Just once, I asked him to intervene – when Tristan deemed it necessary for me to lie in a bath with my hair flowing over the edges, like Lizzie Siddal posing for Mr Millais’ Ophelia.
I stayed as close as possible to the door to his study to put my case.
‘But you wear your chemise and are entirely hidden by the bath! Apart from your head and one arm, that is. You show nothing, or show it in a Christian manner.’ Mr Rainfleury’s tone was even. ‘And do you know what it costs to warm the water?’
‘I do not wish the rest of me to be imagined lying in my own bath, naked,’ I explained. ‘You know that is what they are thinking down there in the audience. Your dolls have stolen our identities, and now our whole bodies have been appropriated by Tristan for his advertising.’
Those words had looked so eloquent in my notebook but had come out prissily.
‘What piffle, my dear,’ Mr Rainfleury said tranquilly. ‘You’re a great girl for the suspiciousness, Manticory. I believe it has worn a furrow between your brows that is not at all flattering to one of your colouring. I think I see the permanence of a wrinkle in that shadow. I would not like you to be forgetting that the bit of talent that you have would scarcely be enough to live on, were you to grow ugly. Remember your contractual obligations to the Corporation.’
‘The contract does not say anywhere Denature yourselves,’ I muttered. ‘Or Sell yourselves for money like whores.’
‘Manticory,’ Mr Rainfleury sighed. ‘You are losing the run of yourself. Surely you would not be the mad creature who would put the Corporation in ruins with scruples you certainly weren’t born with? What do you think pays for your home, the steaming platters of food, your books that pile up like ingots of gold all over the house?’
This spiteful tongue, I thought, is what we see in Mr Rainfleury’s mouth when one of his dolls deviates from the game he wants to play with them. What will he do to win that game?
He smiled again. ‘Don’t you see that the Swiney Godivas cannot stop doing what they do? There must be seven Swiney Godivas or none at all. You may be able to earn yourself a pittance as a governess with the great literary genius on you, if only you can keep your stage past a secret – but what of your sisters? Do you think any of them capabl
e of survival without the Corporation to pay their dress accounts? Would you abandon them to destitution? What would they do with themselves back in Harristown, penniless? Would you really leave them to that?’
I was dismissed. I stood outside the door, hating myself and Mr Rainfleury in equal measure.
I marched back in. ‘I will not wear the hairpieces onstage. And neither will my sisters.’
He laughed, as well he might, at the reduced scale of my protest. ‘We’ll see what Darcy says, shall we?’ A shadow fell over the threshold and Darcy slithered into the doorway.
‘Ah, Darcy,’ said Mr Rainfleury, ‘we were just speaking of you. Please to come in.’
He explained what I had said, making it sound like a childish tantrum.
Darcy frowned. ‘Rebellion, is it? A touch of the old foxy red-haired rebel?’
And she swished her hand in front of her, to Mr Rainfleury’s bemusement.
‘Do you think it makes any difference whether we wear Rainfleury’s hair or not?’ she asked me. ‘Do you think that is your problem? Do you think throwing the hairpiece on the ground and stamping on it will make you a girl who never wore a hairpiece? Who never danced on the stage? Who never sold a bottle of scalp food? You’re as moonstruck as Ida if you think that.’
‘I say poor Manticory is not herself,’ said Mr Rainfleury. ‘Indeed it may be a touch of Ida’s malady that she has, spreading between sisters? The blood of the old mad King Swiney himself in your veins? I’ll have Standish O’Mealy mix her a powder.’
Bitter, it was, the powder, and I suspect that its purpose was punishment rather than cure. But I took it, to punish myself, for not having succeeded in my little revolution. Mr Rainfleury and Darcy had found its weak points in a moment.
Ida was not herself most of the time now. At home in Pembroke Street, Mrs Hartigan tied a copper flask to Ida’s middle and kept it filled with hot water. If you asked Ida what ailed her, she would take a hank of hair into her mouth and weep, ‘It is the cold creeping in my bones. Yet I burn.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 18