‘Like a goose, do you mean? Ida!’
‘But you are a great grown girl of twenty now, so if the heart of you is set on him, and you have such a wonderful wish for him, then you should have him.’
I shook my head, but I lied in that.
‘Don’t be dying just to have one kiss off him.’
‘I will not be dying. You’ll not tell, will you, Ida?’
‘I’ll not even remember it,’ she said honestly. ‘It came on me like an airy fit, and it will go again. But I wish you happy, you know that.’
I kissed her cheek and she wandered uncertainly out of my room. When I saw her the next morning, her face was blank again.
Hung over the mantelpiece, the portrait soon began to work for us. Tristan and Mr Rainfleury emerged from meetings well pleased with the results. We succumbed to public demand to print miniatures of the painting on souvenir tickets for our lectures. The rendering of Darcy’s hair was particularly admired. My green eyes were also spoken of.
‘Did you say Mr Sardou is also a sculptor?’ I asked Tristan, so that Darcy could hear.
‘I did. Indeed he is quite fêted for his bronze of St Molaise from the island of Inishmurray,’ smiled Tristan.
And so, without my needing to say anything more, it was decided that the Swiney Godiva Corporation would commission a series of seven bronze busts from the fascinating Mr Sardou. Unfortunately, my discreetly closed mouth had no influence over the style of the sculptures. Commerce and poetry dictated that the busts would be placed on faux-marble columns of papier mâché, with our bronze hair cascading to the ground. These bodiless monsters would travel with us to our performances and stand in the lobby for people to admire, and even touch, before and after our shows. The project seemed to me inescapably vulgar. Was it only myself who pictured how ridiculous they would be, those severed seven heads held up on long hairy stalks? Surely Mr Sardou possessed too refined a sensibility to agree to such a thing? I told myself that I would think the less of him if he accepted, but the truth was that I could not countenance the idea of his refusing.
I took myself to Marsh’s Library in St Patrick’s Close and read about bronze casting until I could imagine Mr Sardou’s hand forming the clay of my cheek, and laying his thumb in the shadow of my eyelid before pouring hot metal into my mould, which would be utterly different from the clay cases that defined each of my sisters.
I was rudely surprised to hear from Tristan that Mr Sardou had professed himself too busy to execute this exciting new commission immediately. He had two countesses and a mayor waiting for his quiet presence in their grand houses.
‘Poor creature himself. Trout-ugly countesses and some hog of a mayor!’ Darcy exclaimed.
‘And of course, he is generally paid as much to do one head as he was to paint your seven,’ Tristan pointed out. ‘We drove a bargain for that group portrait.’
Darcy asserted, ‘He must have wanted to do us, or he wouldn’t have taken the lower stipend. So for the bronze busts, we’ll pay him more. How much will it take to get him back?’
I smiled to see how quickly Darcy had become an addict of her own crafted image.
Tristan returned with the news that Alexander Sardou had consented to sculpt the busts but on two conditions.
‘Conditions!’ sniffed Darcy. ‘Has it come to that?’
‘Let us hear them at least,’ I urged. Suddenly it was very important to me that we should be able to meet whatever conditions Mr Sardou demanded. I glanced around at my sisters, hoping that no one had observed my discomposure.
They were entirely occupied in gazing lovingly at their painted faces above the mantelpiece, seeming just as covetous as myself of a new engagement with Mr Sardou. Pertilly’s eyes looked more focused than normal. Was she guilty of any feeling more visceral than vanity? Mr Sardou’s portrait kindly flattered her more than any of us. Was she too feeling a squirming of her heart when she thought of him? Pertilly’s submissiveness might attract a man, I thought. And Mr Sardou did not seem to place much value on conversation.
Mr Sardou’s conditions were that he could work on the busts only when other commissions allowed and that he must not be placed under any pressure for delivery. The other was that for a sculpture, unlike a painting, he had need to observe us performing, ‘to see how the hair flows and to record the features in the round’. So he requested permission to be allowed backstage to sketch us at any show he might be able to catch between his other commitments.
These conditions were acceptable to all the Swiney Godivas, particularly myself. After that, I hoped for his quiet presence every night. I hoped it would be my side of the stage where he’d be standing with his drawing block. I hoped he’d look up as I rustled back into the curtains. Very often, he did all these things. But he said no more to me than an enclosed nun.
Yet there he would be, from time to time, leaning his long kite-shaped back against a wall with a foot hooked around a curtain, the paper prettily dirtying under his pencil and the habitual look of concentration on his face.
Even excitable Ida got used to Mr Sardou’s appearing there; I was relieved to see that Pertilly seemed impervious to the scratch of his pencil near by her now. Oona, fully taken up with admiring Tristan, barely noticed Mr Sardou capturing her likeness. Enda and Berenice were there only for one another and Mr Rainfleury, and Darcy’s nerves had been anaesthetised to the artist’s presence by the satisfactory portrait he had produced.
So it seemed to be only myself who was tinglingly sensitive to the appearance of Mr Sardou in close proximity.
That was all before he ever addressed a word to me personally.
And then he did.
Chapter 23
I was last coming off the stage that night. My sisters filed behind the curtains, letting their shoulders drop and their faces fall into tired crumples the moment they became invisible to our greedy audience, who could not get enough, it seemed, of Darcy’s blackbird-wing sheen, Oona’s frolic fair curls, my tigerish pelt, Pertilly’s auburn fronds, Berenice’s and Enda’s Madonna locks and Ida’s chocolate flow.
It was exhausting work to love the sinister little dolls with enough visible passion to stir the customers to buy. I was not the only Swiney who found our unsubtle means of selling the essence and scalp food wearing to the soul and a violent crime against self-respect. After a show, we were desperate to wash as much sweat-crusty powder off our skin as was decently permitted by the ablution arrangements in the dressing rooms. Also, given that we still found it hard to eat before going on stage, the famine in our bellies needed urgent attention. Mr Rainfleury always ensured that a substantial spread awaited us on a checked cloth the moment the applause died out. There was a not quite jocular competition to reach it first, given that there was rarely seven of everything and that some things were generally better than others. Indeed I suspected Mr Rainfleury of orchestrating our rivalrous appetites for his own pleasure, for we always arrived at supper with our hair still down and our eyes afire.
That night I trudged through the velvet corridor, last in the line. Mr Sardou’s slender presence was suddenly available to me, mere and tiny inches away, just as Pertilly’s hair was disappearing round the corner, dragging in the dust.
Despite practising in the mirror for such an opportunity, I had not yet learned to smile at Mr Sardou without a corner of my mouth flittering. Now I was encased in thick powder, so a real smile would have cracked my face like that of a dropped doll. Rather than show the artist my incontinent features, I resisted the urge to linger where I might feel his breath on me. Miserably, I tucked my head down and made to follow Pertilly.
But as I passed him, he murmured, ‘No, wait. Manticory—’
My name in his mouth: that was something I had imagined, along with his fingers on my cheek. And not ‘Miss Swiney’ either. It was my own individual name that he had uttered and it sounded like something fine on his tongue.
Not quite meeting my eye, but with his gaze hovering near it, he asked
, ‘So what is in that scalp food that you sold so heavily tonight? Will the ladies who buy it be made ill by it?’
These were more words than I had ever heard Mr Sardou put together consecutively. I had imagined his conversation to be hesitant, something to be drawn out of him by inches, only, perhaps only in confidential circumstances. But if he wished to banter, then I would banter. Our words might dance a light-hearted jig together while behind the scenes I got myself used to the private act of communication with him. From the tight-fisting of my heart and the tremble in my wrists, it seemed that my mind would become habituated to Mr Sardou’s near presence faster than my body could.
‘Well, if they overdo the thing, our scalp food clients shan’t be feeling so well afterwards.’ I succeeded in matching his faintly sarcastic tone, while thinking sadly of the scalp food’s effect on Ida. ‘O’Mealy the pharmacist swears it cannot kill, except in killing doses – and we make sure it’s too costly for those. Otherwise, it does nothing much, good or bad.’
I was rewarded by an even longer sentence than before.
‘So the Swiney Godivas are nothing more than a gang of lady quacks, who should really be called the Swindling Godivas?’ he asked gravely. ‘Of course your sister Darcy is an easy woman to please so long as the money comes in as fast as she can spend it. And it seems to me that the rest of you have no more courage than is in a mouse’s heart to oppose her bullying. Why do you stand for it?’
The easy twists of his phrasing astonished me. He had absorbed the inflections of Irishness and made them his own. English was his third or fourth language – how might he speak in his milk tongue? Was it in the warmth of his native Italian where the real Mr Sardou was situated, lived and breathed?
The baffling language aside, there was blunt accusation in his words, with no arched eyebrow or smile to make me think he teased. All the banter left me.
‘I am pained that you think it.’ I dipped my head. ‘Though perhaps you are right about the mouse hearts. As to why we stand for it, you can ask that only because you yourself have never tried to oppose Darcy. Only one person I know ever stood up to her, a butcher’s daughter called Eileen O’Reilly, and it went very sore for her—’
‘I don’t blame you.’ His mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile. ‘Or at least I give you one seventh of the blame. It is a well-known fact that a person loses his or her individual moral identity when in a large group. The first things to be let go in a mob are empathy and insight – the qualities that prevent us all behaving like criminals.’
‘Seven,’ I said with dignity, ‘hardly constitutes a mob. And we are every bit separate individuals. You have clearly noticed the differences between us. You painted them.’ He bowed in acknowledgement. ‘But are we the criminals? We have Mr Rainfleury for the dolls, and Mr Stoker and Mr O’Mealy for the liquids—’
‘So you plead to being mere puppet dolls? Does your long hair make you strangers to intellectual rigour and loving friends to inane pastimes, vanity and superficiality?’
Suddenly I was crestfallen. It was obvious why Mr Sardou had never spoken like this in front of Darcy. But did this sudden and dazzling, too-candid eloquence reflect any admiration for my own powers of intellect? Perhaps, in my role as writer, he simply assessed me as the only adequate receptacle for his refrigerating disgust? Did his words, scintillating as sharpened knives, constitute frank disapproval or a piquant form of flirting? It was beginning to hurt, extremely. I wanted to beg, May we not presently desist from this clever game, and speak frankly and simply to one another, with gentleness?
But I was afraid to presume on a chiming desire for kindness in him. So I played on. I forced myself to do what Darcy did, for it never failed: I attacked, borrowing something of her intonation for courage.
‘I am disappointed to hear you endorse the vulgar proverb that women are cerebrally useless in proportion to the length of our hair. You philosophise quite freely on your clients, but what of your own profession? Does it never occur to you that an artist in these troubled times is about as much use as a silver tea-set in a bog? What do you believe in, Mr Sardou? Where is your own use?’
He surprised me yet more then by responding, ‘I have practical uses. I have beliefs. I fought alongside the Irish in Spoleto in 1860. And the siege of Ancona.’
‘Our mother Annora would have loved you for it. Poor as we were, she gave her tithe to the Church for the Pope’s Army.’
My mind’s eye saw him splendid, willowy and elegant in uniform. Relieved at the change of subject, I told him how, during my own childhood, Harristown had been drained of young men gone off to save the Pope and his temporal powers from the nationalists. All the while I was thinking that if Mr Sardou had fought in the Risorgimento, he must have had a bare twenty years at the time. So he was perhaps twelve years older than my twenty.
It is the least of the distances between us, I thought. And they are growing longer not shorter by the minute, that’s the pity of it.
I had not calculated aloud, and yet he corrected me, ‘I was seventeen, and had run away from . . . home. There are not so many years between you and me.’
The distances suddenly shortened as if viewed from the wrong end of the telescope. Both of us caught our breaths. Then Mr Sardou was talking about the scalp food again, but with a slight flush staining his white throat.
Our argument over quackery spilled into another about Mr Dickens’s golden-haired ‘Fairy’ and ‘Angel’ heroines – so sugared, so ignorant, so passive, in his view. Mr Sardou, it appeared, was a great reader of novels. He spoke dismissively of ‘Girls like cows, who let cleverer people milk their hair! How can they do it? Sideshow hair – worse! Makes a sideshow out of women! Is this art? No, it is farming and manufacture. And if we look at the moral dimension, the use of the female body, well—’
His face flooded with dark colour.
He spoke up for Mr Dickens’s witches and Medusas, even for women like Madame Defarge: ‘Free to roam the streets and have adventures of their own devising,’ he said approvingly.
Mr Sardou had read and thought about long feminine hair at least as much as I had. In what way, I wanted to ask him, was his thinking higher than mine?
I challenged, ‘But do not strictly commercial sculptures like these ridiculous busts make you a stranger to great art? A hair-farmer yourself ? A sideshow ring-master?’
‘Yes, indeed. But that is not why I accepted the frightful commission, Manticory.’
Again he had said it, my name, my private label, the thing that made me not one of my sisters, ‘Manticory’. His hand reached towards mine.
Darcy’s voice boomed from the corridor, ‘Manticory! Where are you?’
Mr Sardou added quietly, ‘And nor is it why I am so often in the wings, watching you. Your Darcy makes the running, but it is you who makes the weather in the room. Yet—’
Darcy’s heavy foot was audible on the stairs. ‘Manticory! What is it you are about?’
When I turned to excuse myself, Mr Sardou was already gone.
Chapter 24
Darcy mocked me for missing the best of the supper and informed me that there was not a crumb left of the cherry cake, which ‘was the best thing you could imagine’.
‘I’m too tired to be hungry,’ I told her. I forced out a theatrical yawn.
I could not wait to go to bed and be alone with Mr Sardou’s words.
His disparagements had not pleased me. I preferred to linger on the individual mouthfuls rather than the too-bitter general flavour of the conversation. I had never before met someone who spoke the way I would have loved to write, with the sinuous byways to his phrases and satire aflame between the syllables. I’d learned to blunt my instruments when writing material for our shows. But I still felt pain at every large and beautiful word I sacrificed to popular taste, and every literary allusion that was snapped off at the stalk before it could flower into a telling analogy.
Mr Sardou could make good words without my putting
them into his mouth. The fact that he wrote his own script meant of course that he had said things I did not wish to hear. Why had he sought to diminish me in my own estimation? And so lightly, as if my shame were a pleasant subject for his wit? Yet his diagnosis of my moral state matched my own. I could not fight for a better view of myself. This line of thought being sadly uncomfortable, I preferred to dwell on his final comments.
And nor is it why I am so often in the wings, watching you.
The obvious construction was that he was watching me because he liked to do so. But there were undercurrents to those words, pitfalls in his final Yet—. The negative of my fears was not easily dragged into an uncompromised positive. But, as I lay sleepless hours in my bed, my own desire began to fashion certainties out of obscurity. I grew vain on what I imagined.
And there was no gainsaying It is you who makes the weather in the room.
None.
After that, Mr Sardou was even more often in the wings. Darcy was watching me, and I could not linger to talk to him after the shows. But I could steal looks. And so could he. He had a way of looking at me with an expression my imagination interpreted as frank longing and a tint of irony too, at his own unconditional surrender.
I never knew when I would see him. Sometimes it was once a week, sometimes a month passed without him. I longed for him so much that I was capable of imagining him there in pale corporality when he was known to be in Galway doing a coal heiress in marble.
Once I had imagined that he entertained warm thoughts towards me, my imagination became greedy and shockingly sensual. Contaminated by my own scripts, I grew Gothic in my imaginings. I craved a lock of his babyfine hair, which was quite unlike what a man usually has. I saw him waking up with my hair in his mouth. I dreamed of my hair growing from the floorboards beneath his feet.
Mr Sardou gave me not a filament’s more substance with which to nourish my imaginings. After those words behind the curtains, our encounters had not stretched to another conversation. I was still feeding on the memories of the first one.
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 20