The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  And the looks he still gave me, when Darcy wasn’t watching.

  After we’d done a hard nine months on the road with the essence and the scalp food, Tristan judged it time to birth a new Swiney Godiva hair preparation.

  He summoned us to the green parlour, placing two objects on the table, each covered by a snowy handkerchief. He whipped the handkerchief off the first object, revealing a familiar pot: Rowland’s Macassar Oil.

  ‘First made in 1793,’ he announced, ‘and the happy owner of a distinguished literary and royal pedigree. According to its makers, Rowland’s has been used by the Empress of Russia, the Emperor of China and the King and Queen of France. It was mentioned by Lord Byron in his Don Juan. After that, the oil developed even more literary pretensions – it advertised in the first edition of Thackeray’s The Virginians, and has been seen in every possible newspaper or periodical since. Now!’

  He lifted the handkerchief off the second object and turned it round to face us. A green glass pot bore the label: Swiney Godiva Stimulation Oil to Ensure Vigorous Roots.

  Tristan bowed. ‘It does everything that Rowland’s does, but it will do it for the Swiney Godiva Corporation.’

  The back of each bottle was illustrated with a personal testimony by one of us sisters, drawn in black-and-white ink. Reclining among our locks, our likenesses held up a box of the preparation with a smile. We were captioned: I find Swiney Godiva Stimulation Oil exceedingly beneficial and I make a point of using it always.

  The launch of our new product exposed us to the point where we became what Tristan proudly described as ‘eponymical’. Words were coined from our name . . . ‘to Swiney’ your hair meant to have it grow very long. In Ireland, to ‘do a Godiva’ no longer meant to ride a horse naked through Coventry but to let down your hair in public, an event that became as common in the rowdy public houses as dancing on the tables had once been.

  Tristan told me, as if I would be pleased, ‘And they’re saying “as red as Manticory” instead of “as red as blood” these days.’

  Alexander Sardou waited in the wings that same night. He showed me one of the advertisements, dragging it out of his leather case as if it were a dead fish.

  ‘Did you know about this?’ he asked me. ‘Is this how you see yourself ?’

  It was so easy to please Mr Rainfleury and Tristan. All I had to do was be a doll, act like a doll, speak as little as a doll, open and close my eyes when they wished it. To please Mr Sardou seemed almost impossible, and yet it was the one thing I now craved to do.

  Chapter 25

  I did not wish for my blood to be circulated by the mouse’s heart Mr Sardou attributed to me: I made a stand.

  ‘I am out of inspiration for new ways to sell ourselves,’ I told Tristan and Darcy. ‘It is not a decent way to go on. We are selling more than—’

  By the next day, Darcy had made a convenience of my squeamishness. She herself devised a crude horror of a show whereby each Swiney impersonated one of the Seven Deadly Sins. She reserved Lust for herself. I was forced into Envy. But Pertilly as Greed attracted too much ribald attention. So that act was swiftly disinvented in favour of Tristan’s idea of striking a series of ‘mute attitudes’ such as had been performed by Emma Hamilton, mistress of the hero of Trafalgar. Our ‘attitudes’, of course, were always to do with hair: the original Berenice lining the temple with her hair, Ariadne spinning her web, Lorelei luring men to their death, Medusa striking a man to petrifaction. An ingenious lantern swung across the stage, illuminating one Swiney sister at a time and plunging the others into darkness.

  As long as we did not move, Tristan insisted that we could dare some quite provocative material, though only of course during shows staged in the later evening. Oona posed as Botticelli’s Venus on a papier mâché scallop shell. In the same pink costume, with flowers in her hair, she impersonated the goddess Flora. Berenice took on Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet, Jesus being played by Tristan. She dipped her hair in a large-labelled bottle of Swiney Godiva Hair Essence before approaching Tristan’s shapely bare foot. Enda was Delilah cutting the hair of the sleeping Samson, also played by Tristan, while smiling at the Philistine soldiers waiting in the shadows, an effect executed with shadow puppets. Pertilly was Charlotte Corday having her long hair cut off before she faced our home-made guillotine, glinting in tin foil and fresh cranberry sauce.

  When the ‘attitudes’ grew stale and the audiences took to muttering behind their hands, Darcy began to torment me with finely serrated barbs.

  ‘I thought you wanted to be a writer, Manticory,’ she taunted me. ‘When was ever a backwoods girl given such a chance as this? Still, if you haven’t the ambition, or the talent—’

  To tempt me back to work, Tristan made me the gift of a new Hansen Writing Ball, a metallic hedgehog of a machine invented by a Danish priest. It shot out words in response to violent batterings of tiny circular keys. Once I got used to the dreadful massacre of the quiet, I loved the spiny creature, and would not be parted from it. It was pitifully easy to tempt me. I had missed writing; I missed writing for an audience who applauded and offered attentive silences in expectation of what I delivered. I missed the triumphs of inserting some good phrases and fine words that escaped Darcy’s brutal edits. And I hated to see what Darcy and Tristan were doing to decent behaviour. They’d have the Swiney Godivas out there fully naked, I feared, if they thought it would sell more tickets. And soon enough that was exactly what they dreamed up. Tristan began to speak of acquiring seven wooden horses from a circus and the Swiney Godivas mounting them in nothing but our hair and discreet pink costumes, very tight around the limbs. When I saw his letter to Duffy’s Circus lying in the silver tray in the hall at Pembroke Street, I finally broke, and consented to write, if only we could be spared the indecency of Lady Godiva-ing for the public.

  Thinking to borrow some dignity, I consented to recast short sketches from respectable plays. I also rescripted hair-prone incidents from admired novels. So many writers of our time deployed female hair in fiction: it had got so that a hairless novel would have been greeted with disdain. A good head of hair was as necessary to a heroine as a stainless character and one interesting personality flaw for her hero to save her from. My brutal robberies were conscientiously listed in the programme as ‘tributes’ to the geniuses of Mr Dickens, Mr Thackeray and their colleagues.

  When Mr Sardou reproached me backstage for returning to my Swiney scripts, I was ready with a reply. I told him that I was seeking out stories in which women who happened to be gifted with hair also had cerebral powers of their own – rather than dramas in which we Swineys deployed our bodies to sell hair products. I also pointed out how, in my new works, hair revealed murders, like Mrs Manston’s in Desperate Remedies or how it acquired its own formidable identity, as did Arabella French’s chignon in Mr Trollope’s He Knew He Was Right.

  Mr Sardou looked up into the dust motes above the stage, and shook his head.

  I noticed a small tear in the shoulder of his velvet jacket.

  ‘It is deft,’ he said, ‘and it is clever. You have words to burn, Manticory. But is this what you always hoped for yourself ?’

  I blushed and looked down.

  When I looked up, Mr Sardou’s eyes were on Ida, and his luminous forehead was creased with concern. Pertilly and Oona were also staring helplessly at the spectacle Ida was making of herself. She had stopped speaking her English lines and had disintegrated into gibberish while pulling her hair convulsively and feeding it into her mouth. Darcy dispatched Enda and Berenice to perform one of their duets in front of Ida. Oona and I tiptoed out behind the twins and gently pulled Ida into the wings. Mr Sardou picked her up, covered her mouth with one hand, and carried her off to the dressing room where Darcy was ready with hard words and sal volatile.

  Ida struggled out of his arms, shrieking, ‘Go away, you Sardou!’

  Outside the dressing-room door, I apologised for Ida’s words. He made a dismissive gesture. ‘There is s
omething I’ve meant to ask you. Did Ida always suck her hair? And did Darcy always hurt her for it?’

  I sighed, ‘As a child, she would do it unconsciously. Once we had detected her tendency, she would pull her hair only whenever she was out of Darcy’s sight. But it has become so ingrained in Ida now that she does it in her sleep, I fear. And when she is upset she does it anyway. And I’m afraid she still drinks the scalp food too, if she can obtain it. Mr Sardou, I am grateful—’

  ‘No, do not thank me.’

  I wanted to thank him for the look of concern on his face, for speaking to me at all.

  Then Darcy slammed out of the dressing room and Mr Sardou held up his sketching block like a shield. He threw a few supple lines on the page that caught her profile. She snorted and ordered me inside ‘to help with Ida’.

  I heard her say to Mr Sardou, ‘I cannot imagine why you think you should get a second advance on the busts when you’ve barely started them.’

  Inside the dressing room, I looked down sadly on Ida’s contorted face.

  ‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ she pleaded. ‘Manticory, can we not stop and go back to Harristown?’

  I stroked her forehead and shook my head. To allow Ida to retire and rest would dismantle the Swiney Godivas. Darcy had signed us up indefinitely.

  Darcy’s argument would be, as it always was, that it would not help Ida to desist from her work. Even more than her fiddle playing, her roles were a relief to her – they took her from her painful self. She was knitted to her stage parts, flesh and bone. In our shows, Ida did not so much impersonate her historical characters as invade them, and inhabit their bodies. Tristan swore that Ida smelled of each new role. Her portraits of famous women were homicidal: people came to watch Ida destroy and devour Cleopatra, and to wear her pelt. Of course Ida did not always win these skirmishes with her characters. And those struggles were what made Ida’s face grow hot and churned her language into a witch’s brew of English and Irish, of terrible sense and childlike nonsense, and forced us to drag her off the stage with increasing frequency. Darcy refused to understand the reasons for these episodes, called Ida ‘wilfully mad’.

  Mr Sardou was gone away to Paris before I could devise a way to show my proper appreciation for his concern. I resolved to write a poem for him, a nicely judged piece of praise with all my real sentiments tucked up neatly between the syllables. But when I set myself to the task, I found I was not equal to it. I wrote doggerel, fit for dogs to bark at. Even my handwriting sloped and meandered, as if the dowdy words were looking for an escape from the page, so unwilling were they to be seen.

  I stared at my production, heavy and yet empty at the same time, a miracle of bathos, a neat piece of cunning, a painted whore of a poem. Yet I had once been able to write. The Cruel Sister was mine, and it was beautiful. Everyone had said so. I remembered what the critic had written: It is enough to knock the heart across you.

  Tristan, I thought, I hate you. You have murdered the writing in me. Just when I needed it to breathe.

  Chapter 26

  While I was making my despairing translations of bad poetry into good money, our mother Annora was failing. She had fallen to no particular illness. She was simply worn out from living most of her life a potato skin above starvation. In the last year, her own skin had shrivelled on her face, delineating the skull’s presence beneath. We’d rarely seen her in months, being mostly on the road with our shows. We paid duty visits on some Sundays, if we happened to be within an easy train or carriage ride of Harristown.

  That Christmas, Ida had showed more interest in the thin geese than in our mother. I suspected that the truth was that she was frightened by Annora’s cadaverous appearance. After spending a visit on the floor with her arms around a pair of geese, she insisted on bringing one back to Pembroke Street.

  ‘Do not take Phiala!’ begged our mother. ‘Do not take my Phiala away to Dublin, the creature.’

  Ida selected an anonymous bird from the flock. In the train carriage, its head quested out of a grey stuff bag between her knees.

  ‘It is to drop down the chimney, to clean it, you know,’ she explained to Mrs Hartigan, who took the bird admiringly.

  ‘It might so,’ said the housekeeper. ‘The finest figure of a goose in Dublin, dearie! And how did you find your dear mother?’

  ‘Going on as usual,’ said Darcy disapprovingly.

  The coal man was dispatched to the roof with the goose tucked under his arm. The bird’s beating wings scoured every lump of ash as it plummeted down to the kitchen fireplace. We did not need to wait till the next Michaelmas for roast goose, though as ever I refused it and Ida wept to see it turning on the clockwork roasting jack.

  ‘This is not what I meant for it,’ she moaned at supper.

  ‘There’s still a drumstick wants eating.’ Darcy offered the sleek brown baton to her.

  Annora’s own final descent seemed to come on almost as swiftly as the goose’s. Her mind had begun to wander and to fail. We knew things had worsened, for Mrs Godlin from the Kilcullen dispensary had written to tell us so, in a letter as full of sniffs as spelling mistakes. Our mother had been seen abroad at night in her nightdress, driving the geese over Harristown Bridge with a hawthorn switch, as if she were a young Goose Girl, with the slow crows wheeling overhead. And some mornings she was to be seen on the step rocking her favourite goose, Phiala, in her arms, like a baby.

  She has a great trouble on her, the creature, wrote Mrs Godlin. If it were not for Eileen and myself, she’d perish of loneliness, you know.

  Eileen? I thought. The same Eileen?

  Annora denied all knowledge of the nightdress incident when we arrived to investigate.

  ‘Sure that Mrs Godlin has been having herself some odd dreams, may I never die in sin. She’s failing in her wits, you know. They say she takes herself a taste of the chloroform under the counter, God rest her.’ Annora tried to laugh.

  Despite Darcy’s threats, Annora still refused to move to Dublin. She demanded, ‘And how would your father find me when he comes back?’

  I held her hand and looked into her eyes, afraid of what I’d see. But she looked back at me steadily.

  Despite the funds we sent her, despite Darcy’s rage, Annora kept a thin goose and laundered to the last.

  ‘I cannot stop, it would kill me, the idleness,’ she protested, when Darcy told her what would happen if the hacks of the popular press found out how she lived.

  ‘They would say that rich and famous as the Swiney sisters are, they don’t keep their old mother as they should. It would be a festival for the slimy newspapermen. They’d slither all over it! The Eileen O’Reilly would love to talk to a reporter about it, if one were to find his way to this place. She says so loudly on every occasion. I’ve had letters from Mrs Godlin informing me.’

  ‘You’ve such a great spite for that O’Reilly girl, Darcy,’ murmured Annora. ‘Yet she’s very pleasant in herself, if you give her a smile and half a small hour. She takes it hard that you’ve risen so high above her. You know, she comes to visit me still, and brings a bit of lard or a crubeen from time to time. Last Tuesday she brought me three rashers tied in brown paper, curled up like three blind mice in there and sweet as love to taste they were later with a bit of bread.’

  ‘You let her in my house?’ shouted Darcy. ‘That knacky little monkey? For bacon? When we send you enough money to buy your own hog?’

  ‘I do not leave the girl outside the door, and she so lonely and alone, and young-seeming. For all she’s filled out, she’s still so small that the crows wouldn’t bother themselves to pick her bones. Peace, she cannot touch you. All she ever wanted was to be about the place. But with the contrary way you have on you, you’d never let her near you except to beat her. For shame. An only child like that, with the parents on her that unfeeling and so much drink taken besides, so much left to her own devices in the woods and lanes. She might have been—’

  Yes, I thought, she might have been.
I remembered the kindness of her smock to blow my nose on. It was only Darcy that the Eileen O’Reilly made war on – until I myself turned my back on her, when all she’d tried to do was be in Enda’s tribe against Berenice.

  Annora kept her hands in the tub, even as Darcy bellowed, ‘That filthy get of a girl, she’ll not disoblige a Swiney again!’

  Our mother did not reply or move. It was as if she had become amphibious, breathing only through her hands in the cold water.

  Annora died that way. She was found by Joe the seaweed boy, slumped against the tub, her head in the cooled water of a pillowcase wash, her hair swirling in the expiring suds, and the thin geese in a consternation outside the window.

  We arrived at the cottage to find that Mrs Godlin and Father Maglinn had already made all the usual Harristown arrangements. Annora was laid out on a deal board and covered by a white sheet, with her feet aligned to the east and her head to the west. Her form barely raised the linen above the table, at the head of which burned three candles sprigged with rosemary for the Trinity. The clock had been stopped at the hour of her presumed death, and the one small mirror was swagged with black crape.

  I lifted the sheet to kiss Annora’s face. I stroked her brow, smooth now it had been released from its corrugations of worry. Mrs Godlin had seen to it that Annora’s hands were clasped together, wound with a rosary and holding a cross. Her fingers were still wrinkled from their final long immersion. Her skin smelled of soap and salt. She was wearing a white robe with a ruffle at the neck and frilled cuffs.

  Mrs Godlin sobbed, ‘She prepared it for herself, the creature. She told me where to find it just a week ago, and she said, “Let my girls see me in this at the last.” She must have known she was failing.’

  ‘Did she confess?’ I asked quietly.

  ‘Not at all, it came on so sudden,’ replied Mrs Godlin. ‘And she with so much to tell.’