The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  Finally, it had happened, what Alexander had wanted. I was free of the Corporation. But now Alexander did not want me.

  Darcy stormed, ‘In cold blood! But what about the Swiney Godiva Corporation? Rainfleury’s is still a director of that! So he is involved in the essence and the scalp food and all the other poisons. He still has responsibilities to us as long as there’s a drop of Swiney Godiva in a shop! He’ll just have to intrude into his own savings for a change, instead of filching and squandering ours.’

  ‘Don’t be giving up,’ chimed Oona. ‘He speaks just of the dolls. He has had a setback and is emotional. At least we can rely on Tristan not to be emotionally overwrought and to keep working for the good.’

  The next week’s post brought us a new letter from Tristan. The Swiney Godiva Marrow and Daffodil Pomade, he told us, was selling too poorly to maintain its properly improper ingredients. O’Mealy was becoming venal. Meanwhile a lamentable fashion was emerging to unmask quack products for ladies. Two laboratories in England had expressed a desire to analyse the Swiney product. Of course it was Millwillis who had drawn their attention to us, Tristan wrote. It was a dark day you sisters invited him into your house. If only you had not committed that act of folly and brought this storm down upon us.

  Rather than have their contents analysed, Tristan advised the withdrawal of every item. He deducted the funds from our accounts for the removal and destruction of the bottles.

  He wrote:

  It pains me to say so, but we must look at other retrenchments. I have closed the factory, of course. It was bleeding money. But the Corporation’s staff must also be thinned. Out of compassion for their plight, I have been looking to find the people work in other establishments.

  Darcy had begun to hammer these Corporation missives to the wall, so that she might keep them in constant view and spit at them whenever she passed. Into delicately marbled walls and painted panels she pounded Tristan’s and Mr Rainfleury’s letters, fragmenting wood and stone.

  ‘That’s just stupid!’ ranted Darcy. ‘The whole world’s presently falling to shards and dribbles, and your man’s working up a froth about a sliver of the tail-end of a triviality. I will reply at once. Take this down, Manticory! This is a temporary setback. You are acting from irrational, pusillanimous fear! Be a man, Tristan! For all you dress your ringlets like a milkmaid.’

  No, Darcy, it is fundamentally rational, came the cool reply in his flowing hand, with much more painful detail besides. You must now force yourselves to dine upon the bitter herbs of truth, and to swallow them.

  ‘I’ll force them to eat the truth!’ Darcy muttered. ‘They have regaled themselves of us like pigs of acorns!’ Distractedly, she pulled a hammer out of her pocket and beat it on her left palm with her right hand.

  ‘Darcy honey, a hammer like that is mighty apt to hurt a body. Put it away, there’s a good creature honey,’ begged Oona.

  Chapter 44

  We had always felt rich in Venice – at first, rich in personal beauty and capillary attractions, latterly in our palazzo and in our accounts. Venice had seemed poorer than us – we had struggled to find shops grand enough to spend our bounty in.

  Now, suddenly, we were rabbit poor, dirt poor, dirty poor, too poor for soap. Darcy was frank on this subject. Not a penny was to be spent without her authority.

  Darcy went to war on expense. She dismissed the maids, telling them that ‘proper Irish’ replacements were en route from Dublin. Pertilly took on all the work of the household. To wash our hair, Darcy had her save the spoileen, as Annora had done back in Harristown. She sold Ida’s violin. I did not like the way she eyed my new Remington typewriter and took it into my bedroom each night for safety.

  While Darcy saw this new poverty as a foe to be destroyed, the rest of us recognised an old friend. To me, there was a sense of disagreeable rightness about it, as if we had simply risen like a bubble on a droplet, and now the bubble had burst and we were dissolving back into the general swill of poverty, of Irish poverty, of backwoods, backwards poverty, the drabbest and most general poverty in the world. We had known what it was to be poor, with the turf stove and the thin geese and the slow crows. I could find no rampant triumph in parsimony, because I remembered poverty in all its comprehensive boredom, cold and hunger. Perhaps it was inevitable that it would reclaim us. The shock lay in the plummeting nature of our fall.

  I retrieved the seashell lamp from its hiding place in my trunk and hung it from the rafters in the dining room, the only place in which we now kept a fire. Darcy had insisted that one candle was all we burned at night; I became accustomed to the spectral vision of my sisters flitting uncertainly through the dark rooms. We sat at the table under the seashell until the candle guttered, and then we shuffled back to our bedrooms in a wretched shadow of our former chorus line on the stage.

  ‘Why is this happening to us?’ asked Berenice. ‘We haven’t done anything wrong.’

  ‘Except spend money like water,’ retorted Darcy. ‘Now you must take your punishment.’

  Except it was you who controlled all the money, I thought. It was you who did all the spending, you who gambled. The rest of us had pocket money, that is all we had.

  I could see the same thoughts inscribed on my sisters’ faces, and the same lack of appetite to voice them.

  ‘Are there no savings, Darcy honey?’ appealed Oona. ‘Something kept back for a rainy day?’

  Darcy glared.

  I blew out the flame in the seashell lamp, and in the safety of darkness asked Darcy, ‘And what of Phelan Swiney, Mariner? Do you remember the money he wrote about, the deposit he made for us in the La Touche Bank in Dublin. Do you think—’

  ‘I do not,’ she bellowed. ‘That subject shall not be raised again. I told you! That money was merely a honey trap, left by a feathered snake of a faker, a Hair Despoiler even, to buy his way into our lives. I cut him off at the knees. And now he is in prison. There’s no more coming from there.’

  Or does he lie under crossed spoons in the clover field at Harristown?

  Whoever or wherever he was, it was clear as Waterford crystal that he could not help us now.

  The smiles of strangers in the street seemed to mask a patronising pity. Pertilly shopped at Rialto at the end of the day, when things were cheap, bringing home distressing portions of animals wrapped in bloodied newspaper. Or she went on long excursions, she told us, to islands where she bought direct from farmers or fishermen. She haggled for fish on the turn, vegetables furry with mould. Everything had a grey tinge, or perhaps our eyes were failing as we rapidly descended into our own private Irish famine on the Grand Canal.

  Of course we starved in the utmost elegance, in our extravagantly painted rooms. If paint had been edible, we might have taken ourselves a taste.

  Gone were our 4-franc, six-course breakfasts at Quadri in the Piazza and our long suppers at the Cappello Nero in the Merceria. Even coffee at the Orientale on the Riva was 20 centesimi, and we could not respectably linger, for soldiers and sailors played draughts in the big golden room. We persuaded ourselves that we needed to patronise the caramei men with their skewers of candied fruit, dropping precious coins on their brass trays – for the sake of our morale and for the sake of the caramei’s often-cited starving children. We went to the sideshows and circuses at the Riva and watched the acrobats and exotic animals because the entry fees were so tiny compared with the good they did our spirits.

  To support us in these necessary luxuries, we began to sell things: jewels, furs, even our boots, at prices that were a fraction of what we’d paid.

  When our breakfasts were attenuated to tea, we copied the street urchins and went to stand next to the three-legged braziers of the roasters of spiced pumpkin, hot pears and chestnuts, to steal a little warmth. They did not give us free tastes: we were already too diminished in substance, a company of rackabones, with a telltale looseness in our clothes. They gave encouraging samples only to people who could afford to be plump.

>   We hadn’t the price of a meal in our purses. The sight of us would frighten a bowl of macaroni, so hungry were we, hungry enough to eat the shell off a snail like the slow crows back in Harristown. As we grew thinner, our skin fitted too tightly to our bodies, and our teeth, like Annora’s, became more prom­inent. I realised now that she had denied herself food so that there was more for her hungry daughters. Our eyes bulged, sometime inadvertently rounding at the sight of an apple, forbidden because of its cost, at a fruttivendolo.

  Signor Bon, handing me into the boat, observed sadly, ‘There is less of you, Miss Manticory. May I do any small thing to help?’

  ‘Call me “Manticory”, I beg you. The “Miss” is too much of a mockery.’

  His eyes met mine. He knew exactly what I confessed by that. I saw that he hated to know the extent of my lost intimacy with Alexander Sardou. But I saw his face change too, into acceptance, then sympathy and finally back to his usual affectionate approval.

  ‘I do not consider this a mockery, to call you by your name, Manticory. If I ask you to call me “Saverio”, shall you consider me as mocking myself ?’

  I smiled, unwillingly. ‘Saverio, then,’ I said.

  We continued on our journeys through Venice, almost in silence. I sat with my hands on the wooden rim of the boat, feeling the water through my whole body, sweeping cleanly around my kidneys and my stomach.

  Formerly Saverio had always been behind me, but now he was not. I could not remember when I became aware of a desire to turn and face him, and watch him row, and see Venice filtered through the silhouette of his long limbs.

  But now, on all our boat journeys, I sat that way, and watched him.

  There was a story he told me again and again, about a bridge made of glass, and my own journey upon it. He told it as a parent tells a child, and I received it as I would a fairy story contrived especially soothe the ache of my own repertoire of nightmares.

  ‘Manticory, see yourself crossing a bridge,’ Saverio told me. ‘Close your eyes and feel it under your feet. See it woven of glass, transparent fairy threads from Murano. As you cross the bridge, the steps behind you melt like spun sugar in the sun. It becomes a three-quarters bridge, a half bridge, a quarter bridge of glass. Then turn, and look back and see what you have left behind. See him standing there with his cloud of contempt darkening the ground around him. With the canal between you and him, tell him that he may not pass, that you wish him well, but he is in your past now. Turn and face towards San Marco, and the whole life of this city, and walk towards it, with the sun warming your back.’

  The waves applauded Saverio’s story, slapping the boat with appreciation.

  But I could not. I did not want the sun or life or the fairy threads of glass.

  We wrestled bravely with our hunger but it had too many arms and too many pinching fingers, more than all the remaining Swiney sisters’ put together. Darcy fought the fiercest, of course. It became the day’s triumph if she was able to terrorise more credit out of the shops that still deigned to deal with us, or a jug of milk out of the tall cans of one of the lattivendole. We could not afford to wash our sheets – Darcy became adept at stealing clean ones from the laundresses of San Polo, who hung their work from slender poles in the square, which resembled a lake adrift with sailing boats. It was a poor day if she came home empty-handed.

  ‘I tried to knock another chop out of the butcher, but his wife wouldn’t have it,’ she’d scowl. ‘I made her sorry.’

  After that, the butcher swore when he saw us coming. ‘Che cani dei to morti. Cani affamati.’

  What does that mean?’ demanded Darcy.

  ‘That our ancestors were dogs,’ I replied. ‘Starving dogs.’

  We stole our neighbours’ pears from their trees.

  Darcy went every few days to San Marco to trap a fat pigeon in her skirt and stamp on its head. She rolled it into her reticule with her boot. Too many of our meals were done that way.

  ‘Those pigeons are sacred to the Venetians,’ I warned her, ‘like the cows of Hindustan.’

  ‘Why should those fat hogs of birds die of overeating while we starve?’ Darcy retorted, waving a tiny bare wishbone.

  Pertilly came to us with a story of a restaurant owner who would never let a woman with long hair go hungry.

  ‘How did you find out?’ Darcy asked. ‘And where have you been all day?’

  We took to dining at Signor Pagin’s dark trattoria after he had closed to the public. Pertilly suffered him to stroke her hair after he had passed around the steaming bowls of zuppa di peoci in one hand and dishes of fegato alla Veneziana with the other. Without being asked, he poured us glasses of Vermouth amaro and even De Luze champagne. He didn’t ask for money payment, but if he was allowed to wash our hair for us in one of his vast pastry basins, then we might take home a food parcel that would last for days, even though the whiff of garlic, embedded in his fingernails, also floated about our hair until the next wash. But we were frankly grateful for the hot water on our scalps, as Darcy had forbidden even that at home now.

  And it was truly lovely to hear him talk of Pertilly. ‘It is,’ Signor Pagin told us frequently, ‘as if Tiziano painted her hair and Rubens her body.’

  And Pertilly blushed and cast her eyes down like a Bellini Madonna.

  Darcy allowed him to talk like this because we survived on Signor Pagin’s generosity – until the real cold came. Then even his devotion did not suffice to keep us in health and out of absolute misery.

  That first winter of poverty: how the wind shook the palazzo, how the cold inched up the walls and up our legs to the very core of us.

  The rugs had been taken away the previous summer so that the fleas would not colonise them. That winter they did not come back. I imagined that Pertilly had turned the proceeds into soup. Our shoes were not up to the cold of those terrazzo floors. We took cushions from the armchairs and placed them on the floor, making islands from which to jump, so that the ice of the floor did not touch our shivering feet.

  We were down to one fur, and so we took turns to go out to be fed by Signor Pagin. I hunched over my food in the trattoria, grateful that the restaurateur, with frank pity, wanted only to wash my hair and not to stroke it. His hands were brisk and the water was warm, and I was so tired from fighting the hunger that I felt nothing more than gratitude.

  The cold grew more extreme. The bora wind descended from Siberia, and worried the town in its wolfish teeth. We did not go out, except for Pertilly, who seemed to stand it better than the rest of us. We wore the fur indoors too, each of us rationed to four hours inside it, like taking turns to be eaten by a bear. We took to the Venetian scaldino, an earthenware pot of hot charcoal, which we rested on our laps so that it could warm us from the middle outwards, like the pot we used to place under our scrawny haunches in Harristown. But the fumes gave me a constant headache. As did the melancholy weight of gelid humidity and the remorseful chiming of the church bells in the clear frozen air. We let down our hair and wore it like shawls, trailing it in the bitter dust of the frozen floor. We stayed more and more in bed, wrapped in hair cocoons and thoughts made vague by hunger.

  Pertilly disappeared for long periods of the day, and returned not just with extra morsels from Signor Pagin but even with a small chicken or sack of polenta or a single candle for the seashell lamp. She refused to say where she had been or how she had earned the food. It seemed unlikely that she had descended into exchanging her body for these items, though Darcy was not slow in suggesting it. I supposed that she had undertaken some menial duties at the restaurant for Signor Pagin, in exchange for some hours of warmth by the fire, and for the food she shared with us.

  Darcy seemed to feel the weight of our unspoken recriminations, or at least felt obliged to refute them.

  She said, ‘I am a victim more than anyone. I had more, so I had more to lose. Did that even occur to you in your heads?’

  Oona took her hand. ‘Poor Darcy! You just didn’t understand the money, di
d you? You didn’t want to show them that you didn’t know. Mr Rainfleury ran circles around you.’

  ‘Was I supposed to know anything about money?’ sniffed Darcy. ‘I thought it was my vision that was prized.’

  ‘And your Gorgon-ness, for getting what you want,’ Berenice observed.

  ‘For destroying the world,’ put in Pertilly.

  ‘Sure Darcy’s always been destroying the world, but isn’t she so very good at doing it?’ said Oona. ‘Would you have her do something she’s not good at?’

  I watched my sisters enclose Darcy in the old tribal interiority. She looked over their heads at me, proud and hard as a stone gargoyle who fully believes that the congregation inside his church is assembled to worship himself alone.

  It was just of a piece with the rest of our bad luck that now it commenced to freeze and to snow.

  While Darcy was recasting herself as a victim, the snow was like a witch endlessly unwinding slanting coils of white hair. The lagoon froze over and ice floes patrolled the Grand Canal. The squares were white blotters, scribbled with careful footprints. I looked with envy at the facchini who kept warm and paid by shovelling snow from the banked-up streets into the canals – cushions of white flumping into the water. Even the boats were softly upholstered with snow and rose up to their bottom seams above the frozen small canals where the ice was pocked with bubbles of fish breath and the tracks of tiny birds.

  Then there blew a wind that would hoist a dead sow out of the mud and make it fly the width of the world. The snow settled to a white stitching at the seams of every roof. In the wintry flood tides, the water was the colour of the shadow inside a dying lily. The wooden bricole pointed up in desper­ation like the tips of a dying man’s fingers.

  I had used to love it whenever the snow lingered a moment on my red hair, spotting it with white. Now I grew to hate the snow and the ice. I hated it for the pain in my chilblained extremities and because it cost me my boat trips with Saverio. Although I had shown him but scant appreciation, I found that I could ill spare the lulling serenity of them and his quiet company nearby.