‘Did you lock the door?’ I whispered.
‘Yes,’ he told me. ‘We are safe.’
Then I was afraid. I could not see his face. He had no scent. His mouth on mine had no taste of its own. As he deftly unlaced my nightdress and pulled it over my head, his voice quietly reassured me that I was doing this strange and sticky thing with the person I also loved in letters and looks and by my side in libraries. His hands and mouth were gentle as a hot flannel; he kissed my forehead and told me I was adorable before he turned me over, raised my haunches and pushed my head down into the pillow.
When he roughly unseamed the fabric of my body, put himself inside the tear he’d made, and commenced to move there, I knew he was doing with me what the paying-for men wanted to do to every Swiney Godiva; it was as blunt as the lechery of the beasts in the Harristown fields. I felt as if I was bedded on hot wet earth, rolled in the curses of the world like a newborn snake. Alexander’s hands cupping my breasts were cold and brittle as scallop shells. While we grappled, my hair slipped from the confines of its braid and uncoiled around us, the tendrils weaving us together till we kneeled exhausted inside a cocoon of dark-washed red.
‘You are thinking too much,’ he whispered into the back of my neck. ‘Stop thinking, that is half the pleasure of the thing – it defies thinking.’
And he started again, too hard where I was too tender now.
I should not have been thinking. Alexander was right. It was lovely to feel Alexander’s body aligned with every inch of mine, to feel his skin, that was not pale and delicate in the dark. Without the light, it felt strong and full of the jungle’s breed of darkness.
But it was not quite lovely. For whole seconds at a time it was delicious, and then my thoughts fell out of their clouds. But the constant quickening too quickly died away. The sensations were ticklish to the point of being sickening; Alexander’s pitiless rhythm found no answer in them. So the pain of the impalement would not let itself be forgotten.
I wanted to see Alexander’s face instead of the pillow into which I was being pounded. And that longing spoiled even my bits and pieces of pleasure, rendering them wistful, though we were doing the very thing that was supposed to bind men and women the very closest they could be.
How could I stop thinking? I thought of Eve eating her portion of God in the apple, and my biting down the Body of Christ in the chapel of Harristown after I lost my faith. Alexander had broken faith with his wife to do this with me. And I – who had condemned Tristan and Rainfleury for their lubricious marketing of our bodies – I had just broken faith with the moral creature I’d been in judging them. These fragmented faiths drove my thoughts to Annora. I wondered if she’d known any pleasure in the couplings that created her daughters. Even the first coupling? Was it as awkward as this one? Had Annora learned to stop thinking of God while our father or fathers seeded her with daughters? I then commenced to worry that I might have inherited my mother’s fecundity.
My body made one more cry for completeness, but Alexander growled something in a language I did not know, and collapsed on top of me, pushing my nose into the wood of the bedhead. He wiped my back with the sheet.
I dared not weep, lest he took it personally. I felt nothing but the dumb agony of that collision for a while, and then the loneliness of not being built for the kind of love that Alexander seemed to wish on me.
By the time we arrived in Marseilles, a few hours after Alexander left me, I had abundant, vivid proof that our coupling would be without any tangible issue. I threw the stained sheet out of the window.
I gave him the news as we breakfasted on sweet shared air and newly shy long looks in the dining car. Alexander kissed my hand, spoiling my relief. Perversely, I wanted him to regret it.
My feelings about the act of love were equivocal but I had no doubts that I must have Alexander lying next to me again, stroking my forehead and kissing me. I would get used to the part he seemed to like best, the part where he turned me over. I promised myself that. A first time was bound to be awkward, I told myself.
I did not want him to think that I did not love the way he loved me.
The best way to achieve that was to tell him about the secret back stairs to my Venetian bedroom, and my thoughts on their use, and about the gates that were never locked at the palazzo and the apartment door that might be left slightly ajar last thing at night. His tired eyes widened. He smiled.
‘And will you –?’ I asked brazenly.
‘I shall obtain what is needed, and we shall not worry again. When will you talk to Darcy about freeing yourself ?’
But now my sisters began to appear in the dining car, tousled and lamenting the jolting night they’d passed in their travelling beds. Ida did not appear.
‘Better she does not, the creature,’ whispered Oona. ‘She’s in a bad way there.’
All through the night, Ida had suffered continual convulsions. Oona reported, ‘In the end, I gave her from the laudanum bottle, and now she sleeps at last. I hope I did right.’
Saverio Bon was waiting at the station, with all the practical arrangements already made. As soon as he saw Ida, he called for two porters to improvise a stretcher.
He bowed stiffly to Alexander. On me, he unleashed a frank smile which, given the night’s events, I found impossible to return without blushing.
‘Welcome home to Venice, ladies,’ he said, looking at me with concern.
‘We’ll see about that,’ sniffed Darcy. ‘It’s only your Manticory that’s happy as a cat in a tripe shop here. The rest of us come strictly on sufferance.’
Signor Bon was unable to contain his amusement.
‘Why,’ demanded Darcy, ‘is the man grinning like a robber’s dog?’
Oona nudged me. ‘He’s not laughing at Darcy,’ she whispered. ‘It’s her calling you “his” Manticory that has his face split in half with joy.’
Alexander glowered beside me, his eyes little chips of ice.
My plans to demand my share of the money were set aside because of Ida’s illness.
‘Temporarily set aside,’ I told Alexander that night. ‘It would be heartless to provoke Darcy when Ida needs all our attention.’
Seeing the doubt tightening his eyes, I told him, ‘Stop thinking.’
I myself was trying to stop thinking when we lay together. I did not care for my thoughts, especially those concerning my own hypocrisy, where Alexander would eventually lay his head and what would be said of me if this behaviour were found out. I put those unlovely images aside, and listened to Alexander whispering from behind me that I was a sweet creature. I heard myself telling him I loved him, and his answer of, ‘Yes.’
The creaks and groans of the old palazzo, which were continual, masked our own noises. Again I found myself carried to the brink of not hearing anything – but then some movement of Alexander’s, or some pause, returned me unwelcomely to sentience, and I felt him inside me as I had known the grinding of prayers in chapel and the fumbling of hunger in my belly as a child.
The nights continued so. The only difference was that sometimes the familiar Venetian earth tremors rocked us, releasing little showers of white stucco. And then we heard Ida weeping in her bedroom, and Oona soothing her with tender words soon afterwards.
Ida had taken immediately to her bed, rising only to rush to the water closet for mysterious and vociferous purgings, which she would allow no one to witness. The fiddle was strangely silent. Whatever she vomited up had a strange effect on the palazzo’s drains, which seized up. For several days, there was always a plumber in the place, disconsolately bent over a pipe or lifting the floor for a hopeless inspection.
We came in a convoy to demand an explanation from Ida.
‘What is the matter with you?’ demanded Darcy. ‘The next plumber’s account will come out of your postcard stipend.’
Oona pleaded, ‘Ida honey, you are in the worst discomfort there. If you won’t tell us, will you explain to a physician? Surely it is some wicked t
hing strangled inside you and there’ll be a bottle of something that will soothe it on its way.’
Darcy mused, ‘The photographer says the Scottish surgeon by the bridge is reasonable in his rates.’
Ida lay silently in the bed, sucking the end of her plait, until Darcy, as ever, yanked it out of her mouth.
The next morning, Ida locked herself in the water closet again. Oona and I stood outside pleading, while she retched for two hours and then fell silent. Darcy, who would have wrenched the lock out of the door with the strength of her fury, was engaged with fittings at the hat-maker’s, so I sent for the plumber and he sent for two gondoliers, and they called in a carpenter, who summoned his apprentice boy, who – now properly supported by four other specimens of manliness – assaulted the door with an axe until the lock dangled on a pin. Ida was found collapsed with her head halfway down the aperture of the water closet and the wooden lid half closed on her head. She had stuffed the torn pages of three newspapers into the bowl. In the meantime, I had summoned the Scottish surgeon, who had her carried over to his nearby rooms on a litter.
‘I must open her up,’ he told Oona and myself half an hour later. Ida lay on a wheeled bed in the next room, convulsing, with the plait still in her mouth.
‘A small incision,’ he promised. ‘I have located the source of the difficulty. I can feel a lump the size of an egg. It is probably undigested food of some kind, but it may be a malignant growth. I must have your permission, ladies.’
‘Cut Ida?’ said Oona faintly. ‘In the middle of her?’
‘Come, dear! I am no butcher. It will all be done with the utmost humanity and liberal amounts of chloroform, and a lady nurse in attendance. I would go as far as to say that if you do not permit me to do this, then I cannot answer for your sister still being alive by midnight.’
A particularly eloquent paroxysm twisted Ida’s body at that moment, seeming to beg us to release her from the pain.
‘We must let him do it, Manticory honey.’ Oona tugged my sleeve. ‘We cannot lose her, the honey. And if Ida dies before Darcy gets back, it will be our fault there. And haven’t you the brains of the world in your head, and so you must know what to do.’
By the time Darcy returned from the hat-maker’s the sun had set – and Darcy was, I noted, without any sign of a new hat and looking rueful. Hot on her heels were the surgeon and his apprentices with Ida on the stretcher and something in a glass jar. He settled Ida in her red room. Then we received him in the library. He set the glass jar on the table under the foaming chandelier.
Oona had to rush from the room, but the rest of us gathered round to peer inside the jar, where a neat brown sphere floated in a clear liquid. A small tail trailed underneath it, like the plume of a bedraggled hat.
‘Ladies, I present a trichobezoar of sizeable proportions. In layman’s terms, this is what you might term a “human hairball”. Your sister has Rapunzel syndrome,’ announced the surgeon. ‘This is an intestinal condition in humans that results from the eating of hair, a condition recently named as trichophagia. The eaten hair accumulates in the stomach, eventually causing distress. I was obliged to remove the main offender from her stomach, and extract its tail from her small bowel.’
Darcy pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and covered the jar. ‘So that’s the end of it,’ she announced.
‘I’m afraid not,’ said the doctor. ‘Trichophagia is sometimes associated with a known hair-pulling disorder. I took the liberty of examining your sister while she was under the chloroform, and I discovered that she is unusually hairless about the arms and legs, and in the private areas where hair is normally manifested. There were inflamed patches of skin that seemed to result from violent depilation. I must ask you, her closest and dearest, does your sister Ida pull her hair?’
‘Darcy usually pulls it for her,’ muttered Berenice. ‘Her head hair, anyway. Ida also does it herself, when she’s scalded in her feelings.’
‘Which is quite a deal of the time,’ I observed.
Enda added, ‘And ’tisn’t today or yesterday that it’s been happening with her. It has been so since Ida had hair enough to pull. That’s how long she’s been pulling it there.’
‘Aha,’ said the surgeon. ‘Then it is no wonder. Both conditions are a rarity, I must say. I have not personally come across either before.’
‘This is not the kind of rarity we want to be!’ Darcy snapped. Then her expression mellowed. ‘But it might be useful, I suppose. Can we keep the hairball, Doctor? It could be described as a “Phenomenon Never Before Seen”.’ She muttered to herself, ‘Perhaps we can present old Ida as the “Human Cat”?’
The doctor raised his grizzled brows. ‘I feel that you are not quite grasping the seriousness of the thing. Your sister might easily have died. Trichobezoars are gravely hazardous since human hair cannot be digested. By which I mean that it will not pass through, and, ahem, be excreted from the human gastrointestinal system. As your poor sister demonstrated, vomiting, while effective in cats, cannot remove a hair mass from the human stomach. If your sister continues with this, and another hairball forms, I cannot answer for her surviving it.’
‘Can Ida be made to understand her habits are suicidal?’ I worried.
‘Self-inflicted!’ raged Darcy. ‘Sabotage! We would not survive losing another sister!’
Darcy seemed to believe that her aggression could keep the Swiney Godivas functioning. I wondered at what point she would give up conniving and contriving our continued existence. Pertilly’s scalping had not deflected her. Millwillis had not dampened her belief. Anyone else would have long since given up. But then Darcy was not troubled by doubt.
Will she give up when I make my stand? I thought. When I leave the Swiney Godivas?
‘More to the point, Miss Swiney,’ the doctor reproved Darcy, ‘we must think of the source of the problem, not how to exploit it! Your youngest sister is of a tender and excitable disposition,’ he warned. ‘This mania may be triggered by depression of the spirits or anxiety. Sufferers have recorded an increasing sense of tension before pulling the hair and gratification or relief in the act of ripping out the hairs. Your sister pulls and sucks on her hair, I’ve no doubt, as some small children suck their thumbs.’
‘For which there are known and effective punishments,’ mentioned Darcy.
‘And punishments may be part of the syndrome for her. I would suggest that there is a strong tendency to masochism in your sister. I mean a desire to be hurt by others.’
‘I always thought it was a solid comfort for her to curse her and yank on her hair,’ said Darcy defensively. ‘The worse, the more she likes it.’
‘It may not be so easy to wean her from her disorder.’
Meanwhile, Darcy’s eyes began to glimmer. She marched the doctor to the door, saying, ‘I’m sure you’ll not be feeing us for the privilege of being exposed to two marvellously rare conditions! I’ve an excellent idea for making sure this doesn’t happen again.’ Darcy walked downstairs with the doctor, fastening her bonnet on as if donning a helmet for war.
‘Come with, Manticory,’ she ordered. ‘And bring the sewing basket with the lid that fastens. Oona, fetch some forcemeat from the kitchen. And a lantern.’
That night, we roamed the streets of Venice, looking for cats. Darcy strode resolutely, calling, ‘Mici, mici!’ in an authoritative voice. ‘Where are they?’ she complained. ‘The place is rotten with felines normally.’
It was mild and moonish. Oona and I walked behind Darcy, who undulated like a black snake through the narrow alleys. I was unsure as to whether to rejoice or worry about her newfound interest in the creatures, which she’d previously decried as ‘perfumed rats’, including the stuffed black cat that had supported her coffin act.
Eventually a few cats responded, though with an air of doubt. Even when Darcy spoke in a petting tone, the cats raised their tails and took to their four heels. Darcy was hunting something in particular. She rejected tabbies, marmalades and ca
licos before we found what she was after – a cat of monstrously long fur, sitting on the wall of the Palazzo Soranzo Cappello’s beautiful garden. The cat was soon tempted to earth with the forcemeat, whereupon Darcy bundled it into the sewing basket. Its yowls had windows being thrown open above us.
‘Run!’ gasped Darcy, and we fled to a dark sotoportego, where the cat’s cries echoed.
‘But the creature belongs to someone!’ Oona protested. ‘It’s no stray. It is loved and spoiled. Why, it even has a little paunch there. Someone’s heart will be broken.’
‘We have a need,’ said Darcy. ‘It’s for Ida. It’s her cure. Home!’
She set off resolutely in the wrong direction and it was no small thing to change her mind about the way.
At the palazzo, she performed her straight-legged walk through the garden, not noticing that I, having contrived to trail slightly behind, had left the gate off the latch. Upstairs, Darcy turned right from the main hall towards Ida’s room, with the basket under her arm.
‘Don’t follow!’ she warned.
‘Should we go after her?’ asked Oona.
‘There’s no harm in a cat. I’m so tired,’ I told her impatiently. ‘All that running about. An early night for me.’
A few minutes later, Alexander was climbing the stairs and slipping through the servants’ corridor to my apricot room.
It took us a few days to see what Darcy intended with the cat. I doubted if the creature would be going home so in that interval I left a note at the Soranzo Cappello to say that I had found it dead and buried it in my garden. I hoped to save the cat’s owners the pain of searching for it fruitlessly.
Darcy had delivered the cat to Ida’s bed, where it settled quite happily, with no apparent nostalgia for its Venetian family. Like all long-haired cats, it groomed continuously, and within a few days, dosed with paraffin, it brought forth a spectacular fur-ball directly upon Ida’s counterpane.
‘Clean it up, Ida!’ ordered Darcy. ‘Oh look, there’s another one coming.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 30