The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  I called the cat Caramella because of her toffee-coloured eyes. Berenice called her Brigid. Oona called her Columba. Darcy, of course, prevailed. The cat was finally named Kitty like every second cat in Ireland (the ones of the male persuasion being called Captain MacMorris). Despite her unreliable looks, the cat proved herself useful. She was particularly prone to hairballs, so that Ida had to be constantly clearing up the acid-sauced missiles that the creature ejected with so much drama and so many unpleasant vocalisations. When she was not engaged in her expectorations, the cat spread herself into seductive odalisque poses. She also dispatched two rats, bringing Ida the heads.

  Ida was quickly cured of sucking her own plaits. I judged the moment right to approach Darcy with the speech I’d rehearsed with Alexander in whispers under the coverlet.

  But then Kitty went missing and was found limp and strangely sodden under Ida’s bed.

  ‘How could she drown on the third floor?’ wept Ida, cradling the cat.

  There ensued a passionate argument about what to do with the corpse. It was Berenice who told us about the lime pit in the garden next door – she had always enjoyed gardens and spent hours daydreaming of Mr Rainfleury, I assumed, as she sat among the flowers with her Italian phrasebook.

  ‘It’s an old well, blocked at the bottom. Someone stole the well head. The neighbour’s maid told me that for years the people in this neighbourhood have brought their dead animals there. There’s even a dipper and a bucket of lime with a lid all ready.’

  ‘In a pit?’ Ida wept. ‘Poor Kitty!’

  She rocked the dead creature in her arms, sobbing.

  I put in, ‘Well, there’s nowhere to bury a body in Venice. You can’t dig a grave – it’s all stone. They take the humans to San Michele island. And after a few years, the dry bones are taken away in boats.’

  ‘Let’s take Kitty to San Michele.’ Ida clapped her hands. ‘Let’s have a grand funeral at midnight with candles and gondolas and flowers and a flautist and . . .’

  ‘Let’s not pretend to be any madder than we are, shall we?’ Darcy snapped. ‘The lime pit shall do very well.’

  She picked up the cat by the tail, whisking it out of Ida’s arms. Her casual handling reminded me that Kitty had accomplished her task some days ago and was in Darcy’s eyes redundant and indeed had the day before committed the crime of chewing the expensive egret feathers off one of her most fearsome hats. I struggled not to suspect Darcy of harming Kitty but gave up. She was chivvying Berenice, ‘Come, show me your vertical cemetery.’

  Ida cried, ‘Give her back! I haven’t finished loving her! Let her lie in peace with me a while longer. There should be prayers at least, and hymns, and we should let our hair down, and I shall play a dirge—’

  ‘I think you need a little drink from the old black bottle, and no, I don’t mean the scalp food!’ Darcy kept a small vial fastened at her waist for whenever Ida showed signs of embarrassing us.

  The laudanum failed to dull her obsession with a cat funeral. When Ida began to rave of a cortège of horses with ostrich plumes, Darcy took her to the island of San Servolo, where Venice kept her lunatics. Ida was admitted for observation. But the doctors made the mistake of taking away her much-thumbed copy of Lady Audley’s Secret. Ida bit and scratched, drawing blood. When we came to visit, she admonished Darcy, ‘There’ll be many a dry eye whenever you’re dead and gone, you white slaver!’

  ‘We can do nothing for her,’ the doctor told us. ‘We could cut her hair, perhaps.’

  ‘Darcy will cut your throat for you if you do,’ remarked Ida.

  The doctor shook his head. ‘The weight of hair may be exerting an unhealthy pressure on her brain.’

  ‘You will hand over our sister,’ Darcy said icily, with me translating.

  Released from San Servolo, Ida took to visiting the railway station.

  ‘To be with the other sad people,’ she told the policeman who found her the first time we reported her missing. The next time she disappeared, we went to the station and there she was. It became her daily excursion, and she was sometimes gone all day. We decided to let her have her way, so long as she bound and hid her hair under a bonnet before she left. The policeman promised to keep an eye on her, and stop any criminal from smuggling her onto a train. As I loved to walk around Venice, I took on the task of going to Santa Lucia to fetch her home for supper every day, walking from Santi Apostoli down to Santa Fosca, still raw with wounds from the new street recently smashed through the ancient clutter of the city.

  I soon realised that Ida was just one of a tribe of women who attended the station every day, smartly dressed and armed with reticules and expectant expressions. They scoured the disembarking crowds for a face. These women were not prostitutes, but, like us, poor in menfolk, poor in diversions and poor in human affection. I guessed that they hoped to find someone who, even for a second, even if mistaking them for someone else, would be pleased to see them. Stations are the loneliest places in the world if you are alone, so these brave ladies went to the epicentre of loneliness to confront it and do battle with it. The one thing they did not do, however, was acknowledge one another. So Ida never waved goodbye to them as I escorted her out of the station, and they pretended not to watch her. Some of the older ladies had daughters or nephews of their own who came to take them home after a long day’s longing.

  Those with children were the fortunate ones. It seemed to me that ageing ladies gravitated to Venice in those days, probably because she delivered living proof that one may be decrepit and yet still seductive. The staled skin and bunchy lips of the old ladies were pleasantly set off by the peeling paint and fading colour of Venetian walls. But there was a difference. Life had devoured Venice with gusto. There were traces of the pleasure of consumption everywhere, in the tired leaning of the buildings and the exhausted state of the sheets hung out to dry. Unlike the ladies, Venice did not spoil as she rotted. She ripened, continually.

  And sadly, not all the ageing ladies at the station had been devoured or even nibbled. Many, I guessed, were under-tasted and would die that way. Unfortunately it does not dull the sensibilities and the ego to become older and less lovely. The unadmired hour is longer and more painful by far than the youthful, flirting one. But even these dull, unadmired ladies, reeking of low esteem for themselves, of not being needed, even these women found their abbreviated, tight little joys in Venice, and I was happy for them.

  Darcy did not agree with me that Ida’s new occupation was harmless. When Ida started playing her fiddle at the station, and people began throwing coins into her case, Darcy commenced a voluminous correspondence with a ‘private hospital’ in Dorset. A month later, we were waving Darcy and Ida goodbye at Santa Lucia Station. Alexander accompanied us.

  For some reason, Darcy wanted to take Ida all on her own.

  She was leaving without giving me a chance to say what I needed to say about my money.

  ‘She knows what you want,’ Alexander said quietly to me, while waving and smiling at Ida, who perched happily inside the carriage. ‘Your sister’s malady is convenient for her. She’s trying to avoid you till she calculates how to deal with you.’

  ‘No,’ I told him, forgetting to whisper in my panic. ‘It is more likely that Ida’s inconveniences have put her in Darcy’s black books.’

  Oona looked at me with horror; Berenice too.

  ‘Hold tight to the rails on the boat,’ I called up to Ida. ‘Do not lean out of the window on the trains.’

  Darcy appeared behind Ida, her ghastly black hat like a pirate ship on her head.

  She saluted us without a smile and pulled down the blind.

  Chapter 38

  Letters came from Darcy, who had taken rooms in a boarding house next door to the private hospital that she now openly referred to as an asylum. I was shocked but also relieved. There could have been another outcome, the one that I had suddenly feared at the station.

  Like the doctors at San Servolo, she wrote, the English physi
cians claimed that the heaviness of her hair was distressing Ida’s poor brain and causing an imbecility of the stomach. Moreover, Ida’s capillary system stood accused of uttering secretions that had exposed her entire function to derangement. Darcy fiddlesticked and phooeyed these ideas with her usual bravura, but I thought her handwriting showed signs of lowered spirits in the uncertain rhythms of its descenders. Usually Darcy slashed at the paper like a swordsman.

  The doctors at the asylum, Darcy reported, saw Ida’s hair as a kind of excrement. Her femininity is as a disease to her because of it, they say, dirty dogs themselves! And with what I’m laying out on the place, too!

  Hat money, I thought. The asylum is costing Darcy hats.

  Darcy’s next letter told us that the doctors had overruled her and shorn Ida’s hair. I came in this morning and found the thing done! she wrote in angry strokes.

  Done in the night. They did not ask my permission. They are sorry now. Oona, do not tell Tristan. I forbid it.

  So off it came [she continued]. Ida screaming like a piglet, you’ll not be surprised to hear. It took four nurses to hold her down, they tell me. Now she looks like a gormless little boy in a nightshirt. And she wanted to send the whole lot to Mr Rainfleury for the dolls. Imagine! Now we are looking for some kind of useful employment for her, to stop her dwelling on the cutting.

  As Oona read out that letter, irrigating it with her sorrow, I imagined the sound of the shears at their work, the dark snakes winding themselves around Ida’s feet. I wondered what it would feel like to be without the soft cloak we’d all worn since childhood. Pertilly did not need to imagine. She cried openly, remembering the attack on her in Dublin.

  The shearing cure did not work as the doctors had promised. Inside Ida’s clipped head, her brain continued to grind like old men’s teeth. Darcy’s next letter told us she would stay a while longer and extract some kind of compensation from the doctors.

  ‘It’s to avoid you she’s doing this,’ insisted Alexander. ‘There’s no reason for her to stay. It’s clearly not out of tenderness for Ida. Darcy has bone where her heart should lie.’

  Of course Oona could not resist whispering the tale of Ida’s shorn head to Tristan, who was in Venice on a brief visit to collect our signatures for some banking documents: she would do anything that might loop an intimacy around him. It had the opposite effect. She came home alone from Caffè Florian with reddened eyes. Tristan would not speak civilly to any of us the next day. When we accompanied him to the station, he was still muttering darkly that the cutting of Ida’s hair was but a re-enactment of evil Oriental practices.

  ‘Ridiculous superstitions. Ida won’t be any less mad without her hair. All she’s lost is her womanliness and her modesty. They might as well throw away the key. The loss of her liberty is nothing compared to the castration of her hair! If this gets out, the essence sales will be castrated too.’

  ‘Tristan honey,’ began Oona. ‘Let us not be having that language there.’

  ‘I but evoke the ancients. In the sanctuary of Astarte in Byblas, the women were obliged to shave their heads annually, to mourn the beautiful murdered beloved Adonis. If they refused to give up their hair, they were forced to service the men – strangers to them – who clustered at the temple at that time, and to sacrifice the earnings from these copulations to the goddess.’

  ‘Copulations there?’ said Oona faintly.

  I pointed out, ‘Darcy says there are only women patients there. There are no men clustering in the expectation of prostituting madwomen.’

  But Ida found a man in the asylum: the butcher.

  Darcy’s letter arrived the day Tristan left. I read it out to my sisters. ‘Ida has already acquired a dreadful reputation for being no end of a girl after the men about the place.’

  ‘I thought Darcy said there were no men there,’ worried Oona.

  I raised my eyebrows and kept reading:

  ‘So when she started making sheep’s eyes at the butcher – a great haunch of a fellow himself – I steeled myself for some painful discipline. But it turned out she was more interested in the meat. As we all know, she’s good with her hands, and she has a talent for dressing veal and pork, trimming the fat, dicing the lamb for stews. The doctors regard Ida as a small risk with the old hatchet and she turns out to be quite a creditable bone-chopper. She spends her day among the dead pigs and sheep without a flinch. The only thing is that she will talk to the leg or the ribs as she cleaves them, saying, “Take that, sir!” ’

  Her way with a cutlet or a ribcage was astoundingly neat. The butcher, Darcy told us, regarded Ida as a prodigy and left her to these one-sided conversations.

  ‘It is beyond vile!’ squealed Berenice. ‘Ida up to her armpits in dead animals there.’

  No, I thought, it makes sense. Ida is of the earth: she liked watching the geese getting married, she scented my animal attraction to Alexander. She is physically strong, too, and the exercise of it will help calm her.

  Darcy meanwhile sought to revive Ida’s interest in a more decorous pursuit – her old talent for sewing with hair. At first, Ida used her own shorn hair for these projects. Her early work consisted of simple braids in patterns, but soon she was embroidering. The hair was woven and stitched into an album. Darcy reported how when other inmates came to visit Ida, she would demand snippets of their hair, which she would incorporate into her work. Sometimes she would chop the hair to powder and glue it on like tinted pigment. Or she would lay colourless wax paper spread with glue over pulverised hair, and then cut the hairy page into mosaics with which to make patterns. She graduated to jewellery, embroidered cushions, tiaras woven from hair.

  I imagined the hair in Ida’s hands, taut with desires or grief. But I also nightmared of those hands, bloody from the butchery table, ripping the hair from other heads.

  Darcy secured a continued supply of hair for Ida by putting an advertisement in The Times for ‘hair-readings’. Innocents were invited to send a five-inch tress to a post office box to receive free character readings.

  When Ida was set up with enough hair for a large repertoire of projects, Darcy came back to Venice. It was Alexander’s suggestion that I should warn her that the longer she stayed around Ida, the more likely it was that Millwillis would snuffle her out.

  ‘Darcy has a way of drawing attention to herself,’ he said.

  Meanwhile Millwillis was rising. He’d secured a job at the Pall Mall Gazette. He’d been distracted from the Swineys for a while by even more exotic assignments including a child slavery scandal and a society divorce.

  But I was sure – and Darcy was surer – that it would be only a matter of time before the world dried up its supply of sensations and Millwillis returned to the lucrative Swineys and his book. Meanwhile, Darcy’s insistence that all was now perfectly well with Ida was undermined by a parcel that arrived from the asylum.

  Inside were four cuts of an indeterminable meat, being green and putrid from their fortnight’s journey, but perfectly stripped from the bone. Beside them was a triangle made from drumsticks, with a little bone to play it.

  Ida had embroidered a letter in hair to accompany it. Stippled with dried blood, it read: Even the Eileen O’Reilly would think this fine work, no?

  ‘God help us if the Eileen O’Reilly ever found out about it,’ said Enda.

  ‘What makes Ida think of her?’ I asked. ‘And she so long out of our lives?’

  ‘I hardly know,’ Enda replied. ‘Except that we must think of her with that Millwillis, slaughtering Swineys with all the terrible words in her, butcher’s child that she is.’

  Chapter 39

  I was ready with my much-refined speech about my share of the Swiney funds, but the morning after Darcy’s return, I found her leaning over our palazzo’s balcony, busily shouting at the passing tourists in their gondolas. ‘Yes, nice house? Very nice house! To be sure your pensione is sad and shabby compared to this! And then whenever you go back to your own homes, neither are they as nice as t
his palace, eh? Yes, gape away, it’s very nice up here. Verrry verrry nice indeed.’

  I tried to shush her, hanging back in the shadows of the room. She laughed. ‘Here’s a good one!’

  She turned back upon her prey. ‘You peasants! You Sunday trippers! Who cares what you see? Is your pleasure worth anything? Go away, you are cluttering up the canal.’

  A pretty woman waved up at Darcy, confused. Darcy screamed, ‘You are more ugly than the Hag of Helistree!’

  I tried to warn Darcy that her exuberance might peel away our cover.

  ‘We’re supposed to be incognito. If you were shouting off the balcony in pure Italian, even then that would draw attention to us. But in English! With Irish curlicues! Do you want Millwillis to hear about this?’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ she snarled. ‘From the deep well of the brilliant mind in you?’

  The speed of panic upon me, I conceived another idea for our concealment, one that was actually an improvement on mere skulking and hiding ourselves. Darcy, I suggested, could wear a maid’s uniform and mob cap like Pertilly’s if she must sit on the balcony and scream. And so must I or Berenice or Oona if we wished to take the sun and the view there. And we were to appear no more than two at a time.

  Pertilly, who hated Mr Millwillis more than anyone, because it was she who had first opened the door to him, saw the elegance of the plan and soon had us outfitted. With our hair bundled up in the caps, and in our black stuff dresses with aprons, all of us, and not just Darcy, felt a sense of freedom and naturalness.

  I was gratified to see the bait quickly taken by ‘Lady Abroad’, one of the female scribblers who came regularly to Venice. In a column in The Times, which arrived in Venice a few days later, she wrote of the phenomenon of a pair of mad maids known to inhabit a certain palazzo, who, abandoned by their Venetian mistress, had taken to the balconies.

  In the same issue, on a different page, it was reported that the famous Irish Swiney Godivas were on one of their frequent tours of Russia, where they were a great sensation. Tristan fed such stories to the press as often as possible.