‘And what manner of thing are you meaning by that?’ Darcy’s voice was low with menace.
Mrs Godlin backed away, blushing.
Annora had already commissioned her own coffin and her tombstone, to save us troubling ourselves over them. The coffin awaited her under the deal table. Mrs Godlin showed us the granite tablet leaning against the wall by the water butt. Annora, who refused to spend money on herself, had spent a fortune having all our long and wild names carved into the stone. Mother of Darcy, Berenice, Enda, Manticory, Pertilly, Oona and Idolatry. She had not dared to have herself carved in the usual formula of Beloved & Sorely Missed. She would not presume so. But she wanted it recorded that she had borne us. In very small letters underneath were the words: Wife of Phelan Swiney, Mariner.
‘Should we keen? And tear our hair?’ asked Ida as we followed Joe’s cart bearing the coffin along the sodden crow-haunted track to the ruined chapel at Harristown.
‘Absolutely not,’ hissed Darcy. ‘It is a vulgar habit.’
Mrs Godlin was the only other mourner, apart from some shadows that flitted through the trees behind us and hovered by the back of the chapel. One of them, I assumed, was the Eileen O’Reilly, though she did not trouble us with her tongue on that day. I was ready, despite my sadness, to parley with her, and to tell her I was grateful for the times and the bacon she had shared with Annora in their mutual loneliness. Yet she did not come close. I could not guess the other figure, a large man from the glimpse I had. Darcy did not miss the furtive figures and shook her fist at them.
Mrs Godlin wept quietly through the service and disappeared before the end, when Ida fiddled a funereal melody of her own composing, full of dissonance and heart-hurting cadences. We put Annora to rest in a field outside the derelict chapel, for Catholics were still not permitted a decent burial. In the carriage on the way to Harristown, I had suggested the clover field near the house, but Darcy, as I’d quite expected, erupted in incoherent fury at the suggestion.
‘Why not?’ I dared. ‘It is a lovely spot, if haunted with the souls of a thousand rabbits you killed there.’
If I expected Darcy to break then, and tell me the story of PS and his grave, I was wrong. She insisted that Father Maglinn already had Joe digging the chosen spot, and would I waste the seaweed boy’s labours for one of my Shakespearean whims?
The moment Annora was laid in the hole he’d dug, Joe fled to hide his tears, with Father Maglinn screeching at him in unchristian terms. We left the priest heaping the sodden earth over our mother, muttering prayers under his breath.
Back at the cottage, we found Mrs Godlin wiping her eyes on the tea towel. A Harristown meal of bread and lard was laid out on the table vacated by Annora’s corpse. We stood in silence looking at the food and at one another, and at a jar of salt-crusted pennies Mrs Godlin had placed in the middle of the meagre spread.
‘Your mother asked me to do this,’ Mrs Godlin said. ‘It was her last wish.’
I reached out for the jar but Darcy, out of habit, pocketed it.
Darcy sold the lease on the Harristown cottage, including all Annora’s basins, moulds, drips and crocks and pans.
We made one final visit to Harristown. Darcy personally killed the thin geese, saving Phiala for last. She burned Annora’s threadbare fringed shawls. She emptied every drawer, overturned each mouldy mattress. I knew she was searching for the money that Annora had never spent, and from a cry of triumph in the bedroom, I knew she had found it. My sisters quietly took up their old shoe dollies. I was able to salvage only the seashell lamp from Darcy’s Viking progress through the place. I whipped it down and secreted it under my coat when Darcy was applying her fingers to the neck of the goose.
With Phiala’s throat tendons, our last connection with Harristown was severed. We Swineys were extinct there now. We were Dubliners; we had no way back. There was no retreat now from the empire of Tristan and Rainfleury. I no longer had the right to the comfort of my image of home, of our cottage wrapped in autumn mist so it glittered like a fairy lantern in the dark, or of dawn’s dew trails on the window next to Annora’s crucifix, or the smell of warm straw from inside my mattress ticking. I would never again bury my head in Annora’s apron, or stir the seaweed soup while reading Bible verses to her. All the missing I should have done in Dublin now arrived in a concentration of grief. Ida felt it too: I saw it in the glooming of her face and heard it in the keening of her violin.
Another ending had come too. With Harristown drummed out of us, we would no longer have to do with the Eileen O’Reilly. She had not presented herself for any final farewell. This was a matter of triumph for Darcy, but I felt it as a loss, for the Eileen O’Reilly’s unswerving attentions to the Swiney sisters had been the closest thing to friendship I’d known. Not even Mr Rainfleury looked at us with such intensity. I wished I’d had a chance to make it up with her. Our little feud seemed so sad now, so lacking in real outrage, being based only on a thing I myself had planted in the girl’s brain.
Back in Dublin, with our past expunged, Darcy set herself to making new acquaintances. To have friends, you must have leisure and a home to invite them into. At the dim Harristown cottage, we’d never have dared subject ourselves to the pity or scorn of our schoolfellows, and there was barely enough food for ourselves. Offering hospitality would have been almost suicidal. Now we began to pay terrifying calls in Fitzwilliam Square and to receive stiff reciprocations. But these were not friendships either: we were like street cats carving out territory in which sleek pedigrees predominated.
There was one being, however, whom I was beginning to call ‘friend’.
In the months since our first encounter behind the stage, I saw Mr Sardou nine times, and spoke to him on two more occasions. The total number of new words uttered between us was four hundred and forty-six. But he said his portion so well and looked at me with such penetrating attention as to nourish my imagination for the intervening weeks.
He was often away on other commissions, but he continued his sketches for the unlikely busts. So some nights he was mine, invariably on my side of the wings, his sketchbook like a shield balanced on his hip. We renewed our glances. Just once he started to speak but then Pertilly blundered in, looking for a cardboard sword, and he fled. The next day he was gone back to Brussels to make a portrait of a lawyer.
It almost did not matter. My grief for Annora was being translated into a different feeling, a swooping, searing feeling that replicated and reversed grief as if it were a laundered chemise turned inside out. I was picturesquely melancholic and, at the same time, I was deliriously, wantonly happy, and I knew it, because it was a condition completely unlike any I had ever known before.
Any time Mr Sardou left, I told my stung and throbbing heart he would soon be back. I was not even impatient for his return for I had my fantasies to live out, hour by dreaming hour.
What had formerly been periods of intolerable waiting to go onstage or to finish a rehearsal had become luxurious minutes for thinking of Mr Sardou’s last look or sentence, for re-examining each nuance and scouring it for affection and regard. I counted up the few facts on him I had. I realised that I knew almost nothing except that I wanted him with desperation.
On the day before my twenty-first birthday, at the Gaiety Theatre, with the twins singing on the stage, I felt the thrum of his breath on my neck. I knew its softness by heart by then.
As my gift to myself, I spoke to him without turning to face him. ‘Will you meet me for tea at Mitchell’s as if by accident at three tomorrow? Darcy has a dress fitting in Rathgar.’
I felt him take a step backwards, dangerously close to the stage, where Enda and Berenice were sharing a ballad of love I’d written with Mr Sardou himself in every word and look. An inch more and he’d be in the stage’s blazing light, in full view of those privileged people in the boxes with red velvet curtains and the horseshoe of the balcony with its cushioned rail. With the golden dome above him, and the theatre’s gold-and-white-stucc
oed balconies behind, Mr Sardou looked every inch the hero, not just of the song I had written for him, but as if he were the object of the love of the whole world.
Yet he was silent.
‘It is not convenient, Mitchell’s tomorrow? No matter,’ I faltered.
Then, unable to resist the sight of his face, I turned to him and I threw my fate in the air.
‘Mr Sardou,’ I said, meeting and holding his eyes, ‘it is no use. I love you.’
‘Do you?’ said he in a quiet voice. ‘Dear heart, you don’t love me more than I love you. And probably less.’
And his lips hovered on mine so that I felt the imprint of every delicate, moist fold.
Into my mouth, he murmured, ‘But I am married.’
Part Three
Beyond
Chapter 27
It had been an expectation dating from childhood that he would marry his second cousin Elisabetta.
‘How I hate even to say her name!’ he declared, endlessly stirring the sugar in his cup. Through my shoulders, I felt the curious glances of the fashionable ladies of Mitchell’s on his tragic countenance, and their reproving looks at me for making the pale hero so very miserable.
The deed of marriage had been ‘inflicted’ on him when he returned from his precocious soldiering. They had lived ‘as children live together’ for a few years, but the relations had soured, ‘without ever flowering’. There had been no offspring and never would be, he assured me.
‘So you never loved her?’
‘I am full of you.’
‘And you do not see her?’
‘Of course every penny I earn goes to her. It is a matter of pride. And her expectation of tribute.’
‘Have you ever thought of parting . . . officially?’
‘That is something she would never do.’
‘Because of her religion?’
‘Because of pride. Marriages, in her class, are never finished. Form must be observed in Venice, after all. While I believe she entertains an admirer of her own, she maintains a fiction that she joins me on my travels sometimes and so leaves for Paris for a few weeks several times a year, in the secret company of her lover.’
I paid for the coffee and we left Mitchell’s to continue the conversation on a secluded bench in St Stephen’s Green. A great cruelty of bright sun had both of us lowering our heads.
This is surely a day for rain, I thought. Rain and mist and the dirges of slow crows.
‘Do you hope for a reconciliation?’ I asked, finally.
‘There is nothing between us to reconcile. And anyway, now there is you. And yet, we cannot—’
‘We cannot be together,’ I agreed, and I offered him my mouth.
The first sensible thing he said afterwards was, ‘What can I be to you? I cannot even advance you the role of established mistress.’
I flushed at his assumption that this would be acceptable to me and that only practical considerations stood in the way of it.
But he continued, ‘I have no home. I live from commission to commission, with money constantly demanded by Elisabetta. She . . . well, you’ve seen the shabbiness of my clothes.’
In fact, Alexander was always turned out with the utmost elegance. But men’s vanity, I understood fondly, was always to be humoured and they always wished better for themselves.
He continued, ‘Here in Dublin, I have been ashamed to tell you, I lodge with cousins of hers, in a room they give me for little rent. Because Elisabetta—’
‘Let us not hear any more about her now,’ I suggested.
‘Not that I would live on your income,’ he continued, ‘but I am guessing that you are currently bound to the Swiney Godivas by the purse-strings. Darcy, I’ll assume, controls all your money? Your true part of those takings is not distributed to you personally?’
I nodded. ‘Just an allowance. But let us not talk of that either.’
‘And the full takings are enormous?’
‘Vast,’ I told him. ‘But—’
‘So I thought. And anyway – how can I take you from the Swiney Godivas? Without you to write the words, the girls would be entirely scripted by Tristan Stoker and it would all descend to farce and obscenity.’
In his opinion, as I knew, it hovered at the point already.
‘And they’d not find your equivalent in red hair anywhere in the world, would they? If I were to take you, I’d dismember the Swiney Godivas?’ he said in a speculative tone.
‘Six doesn’t have the ring of seven,’ I agreed. Shame stopped me short of telling him about the contract that could be dissolved only at the whim of Mr Rainfleury, and I was too afraid of Mr Sardou’s disapproving words if I did.
Of course there were endless ways to prolong this discussion about why we could not be together, all the while being together.
We were together for at least a few minutes of every day in the next weeks, the transparent hairs along our wrists aligned, sharing the same Dublin air, close as two reeds in a pond. We walked along the quays, passing alternating benches cupping drunks or lovers drunk on one another. We met on Ha’penny Bridge, watching the sun swim the full length of the Liffey towards us. We met among the solemn, dusty students in the dim galleries at Marsh’s Library in St Patrick’s Close, where we might not speak, but only look, and compose letters to one another as we sat side by side, solemnly exchanging them as we parted on the street. When the Black Wind jostled Dublin, we hired a carriage for 1s 3d an hour, with the second hour being 8d, and asked the driver to take us to wherever he fancied, until the horse was tired. We saw nothing of what we passed by. And when I paid the driver, Alexander looked away, too sensitive to bear the reckoning of our time together in coins.
One month into our discussions of why we might not be together, Mr Rainfleury bustled in with a letter exotically stamped and travel-worn. ‘Girls, I believe this is an opportunity that might appeal. Tristan is all in favour.’
He tapped the envelope smartly on a cherry-wood table. A page of fine handwriting spilled out, along with a note from Tristan, which Oona eyed hungrily.
The letter was from a Brother of the Hair, though not of the usual variety. He was a photographer in Venice, who concerned himself with albumen portraits of stone, water and human forms. One of our photographic trade cards had reached Signor Saverio Bon, and he was proposing to take photographs of the Swiney Godivas and their miraculous hair in various Venetian settings.
Even Darcy could find nothing to object to in the fee offered by Signor Bon, although that did not forfend a great deal of grumbling on her part about the cheek and lunacy of the proposition and the certain prospect of catching or falling to our deaths in a swamp city deprived of carriages.
Ida said, ‘I’d like to try my chance and see what sort of place Venice might be at all.’
‘Well you would not,’ declared Darcy, who had recently seen a stage version of Mr Disraeli’s novel Venetia. ‘It is a louche place where they are too busy loosening their moral elastic to replace a fallen brick or paint a peeling wall.’
‘As for moral elastic, I’ll be coming with you, of course,’ said Mr Rainfleury, ‘at least to settle you in and make sure this Bon character is all he should be. And arrange for a confessor to hear you in English, and other sundry matters. Your dear departed mother would not forgive me if I did not.’
Mr Rainfleury smiled, first at Enda, then at Berenice, mouthing, ‘The most romantic city in the world!’
Oona whispered, ‘And Tristan there? Will he come too?’
He’d been a good six weeks in London, and Oona had received precious few messages from him.
Mr Rainfleury consulted Tristan’s accompanying note and shook his head. ‘He writes of fees, and of use of light on the hair . . . and, oh yes, some technical aspects of the photography for label reproduction. No, nothing about coming to Venice. With business so delightfully pressing in London . . .’
He avoided looking at Oona, and at me, plunging deeper into the letter.
‘Ah,’ he rejoiced, ‘regarding the Venetian Swiney Godivas, Tristan has some ideas for this Signor Saverio Bon. Oh, such delicious ideas, my poppets! You have no conception how delicious.’
Chapter 28
Alexander was less enchanted than I’d expected at the prospect of my visiting the city of his birth. He said little but I read his disapproval in the way he stood arms folded to watch me in the new ‘attitudes’ of women combing their hair. Mr Rainfleury and Tristan were keen to mine the possibilities of ‘Venetian’ Swiney Godivas. We were set to performing tableaux of Titian’s and Tintoretto’s ladies. Tristan thought it an excellent idea for Alexander to repaint some vignettes of those nymphs and saints with our faces.
Alexander declined. Indignantly, he told me, ‘They told me you would wear tight pink chemises for these portraits. I said that the suggestion of nudity was more suggestive than nudity itself. I explained – in small words – that I, as an artist, could look at all the Swiney Godivas naked without an impure thought, but I would not collude in such sensational exploitation for the benefit of men’s impure desires.’
For a moment I let myself laugh silently at Alexander. Did I sound so prudish, so pompous when I railed against these things? Did he realise how it sounded coming from the married mouth that spoke so desirously to me? But I loved the show of jealousy.
I asked, ‘How did Tristan respond?’
‘I didn’t wait to hear. If the man were worth an explanation, I would have also told him that I will not paint gratuitous references to the Bible or myth! Any excuse to have the artist paint a woman in the act of touching her hair, drawing a comb through it. And if she can be naked, apart from the hair, all the better. The raised arm lifts the breast invitingly, offering it to view.’
I too was in possession of a breast and I coloured to think of it that way. He continued, ‘Thus the narcissism and essential indolence of women is satisfyingly exposed.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 22