The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  We were all grinning now, the family grin. Phelan Swiney pointed to the Eileen O’Reilly. ‘Who is this? I know the sad fate of Enda, but where is Darcy? This is not Darcy, though she is a lovely girl in herself, I am sure. Where is –?’

  Without a moment’s hesitation, all of us, including Eileen, threw ourselves into his arms and there was no more talking, only weeping and laughter.

  I buried my head in Phelan Swiney’s waistcoat, and did not want to look up from it.

  Our father smelled of fine laundering, of good tobacco, and infinite comfort.

  In the light of the seashell lamp, we were finishing a masterpiece of a meal cooked by Pertilly. A great spending of emotion had kindled a fierce famine in our bellies, as well as an unselfconscious desire to break bread together as a family. Pertilly had rushed to the market, her pockets heavy with the money Phelan had forced into them.

  Now, when we could eat no more, the conversation turned at last to Millwillis, and to Darcy.

  ‘You know I was on his trail,’ said Phelan Swiney, ‘frankly wishing to do him a disservice if I could, and indeed make the great weasel of a creature know the meaning of fear. So imagine my surprise when I found someone had already avenged my daughters for me. And more emphatically than I was planning. I cannot say I am sorry for it, either.’

  ‘I cannot believe anyone is,’ I told him.

  ‘It is a credit to you, my sweethearts, that not one of you has for a second questioned my innocence in this matter of Millwillis’s death,’ Phelan Swiney said.

  ‘There is a reason for that,’ remarked Ida. ‘We know you did not do it.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because Darcy did.’

  He swallowed. ‘I had always been afraid that she would turn in that direction. I should not have called her by the name of Darcy. You know it means ‘darkness’? And then there was the truly dark thing that befell the poor girl when she was eight. It cannot but have damaged her mind. Your dear mother always feared – but where is Darcy? Does she hide? Is this why? I did not want to ask—’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ida. ‘She is hidden. Very much so.’

  I interrupted. ‘What happened to Darcy when she was eight?’

  ‘It is the saddest of sad stories. Your mother gave birth to a little girl in November of that year. A new little daughter would normally have been a matter of joy for me. But I still feared my Fenian shenanigans bringing the law down on my family. So I was away in America then: I made my secret visits back only when I knew I might see my latest sweetheart of a daughter and choose her name for her. However, this little baby decided to arrive three months early and in a tearing hurry. When your mother saw how it was going with herself, she sent the twins away mushrooming, so that they would not hear the screams. She shut the younger ones – I suppose that would be you, Oona, Pertilly and Manticory – in the barn with a blanket and some buttermilk. Ida, of course, was not born yet.

  ‘Your mother locked Darcy in the room with her, in case she would need help with the little one. She blamed herself for what she imposed on our eldest. You know she ever after denied herself the consolations of Mass by way of a penance, poor creature?’

  We nodded.

  ‘When Annora started screaming with the birthing pains, Darcy hid under the bed. Your mother was delirious, nearly dead from pain and loss of blood, but afterwards she always remembered the curses she screamed. Darcy must have thought they were directed at her, for tucking herself away. But there was nothing to be done anyway. The baby was born dead. It was not her time.

  ‘In spite of her fever and her pain, your mother’s head was full of the thought that, without me there, she herself was to come up with a name for the dead child. She called her “Phiala”. But of course little Phiala, being stillborn, was in Limbo.

  ‘The bleeding went on. Annora fainted more times than she could remember. She thought of the little ones shut in the barn, but she was too weak to rise. She told me that all she could do was ask Darcy to take the poor creature in a bucket and to bury her before the twins should return and be terrified by the sight of the corpse and all the blood. Annora had the strength to scratch the initials of the baby’s name and the year on a wooden spoon, which she fashioned into a cross with another spoon tied with rags. She sewed the baby’s name on a pillowcase that she wrapped around the body, to spare Darcy the worst of the looking. And then she fainted again.

  ‘When she awoke, Darcy was in the room with her, mopping up the blood. The bucket with the baby had vanished. So had the cross. She asked Darcy where she had buried the body, so that she might give the infant a proper burial in time, but the girl refused to answer her. In fact, Darcy would never talk of it again, and pretended that it had never happened. She denied all knowledge of it. And eventually, I suspect, she forgot what had happened, and where the corpse had been laid.’

  I pictured Darcy’s fat childish fingers digging with a wooden spoon into the sodden soil. I told him, ‘Darcy never forgot. She buried the baby in the clover field. And she hated anyone to go there. She would punish you, if you did.’

  ‘From what I heard, Darcy was quite a one for punishing,’ said our father. ‘Your mother said that Phiala’s death changed her. Darcy had been a whole-souled child then. Somewhat inclined to contrariness, but no great harm to her. After that, she grew morbidly interested in all things to do with death. But she also became more angry, with more violence about her too. Your mother worried about how she would beat the rest of you, how she seemed to lack any human sympathies—’

  ‘The baby was found with a shoe dolly,’ I remembered.

  ‘That must have been Darcy’s own idea,’ he said. ‘And it must have been her own dolly. Perhaps it was the last time she showed anyone a kindness. I would say that she buried a part of herself with Phiala.’

  ‘The better part,’ said the Eileen O’Reilly, holding one side of her head against the remembered blows of Darcy’s fists.

  ‘Your mother tried her hardest to tame Darcy’s blackness. But it only grew the worse. Annora claimed that a devil had jumped out of the hole where Darcy buried Phiala, and had climbed into her breast.

  ‘She longed to put it right, your poor mother. She wanted to console Darcy, but Darcy would not consent to be consoled for something she could not admit to. Your mother tried to find the grave, hoping she could draw Darcy’s memories back to that day, and correct them. Annora never stopped looking for it. She would call for dead baby Phiala around the place when she could, as if her little soul might hear her in Limbo.’

  ‘The goose!’ Oona said. ‘That was why she always called a goose “Phiala”. So that she might call the name to her heart’s content, and no one would think her mad.’

  ‘Darcy always liked to strangle that goose, when she could,’ Ida remembered.

  Phelan Swiney nodded. ‘Don’t be thinking that Annora didn’t notice that thing too. And then when you began to talk of going off to Dublin in all your grandness, she told me that she would never leave her lost baby, not until she found the grave. She never did. And now she’s gone too, leaving you motherless, one and all.’

  Footsteps rang in the corridor. Saverio’s tall body, Saverio’s kind face were approaching.

  ‘Who is this fine gentleman?’ asked Phelan Swiney. ‘He has a great look of family about him. Did I inadvertently sire a son?’

  Oona looked at me. ‘If you want Saverio,’ she said quietly, ‘and if you promise you can recover if he is not after all what you want, then have at him.’

  Ida and Berenice smiled at me. Eileen nodded.

  Then Saverio was with us, his eyes on me.

  ‘Manticory,’ he said, in that voice that always said twice as much as words.

  I rose and kissed him on the mouth, long and tenderly, until we both remembered to breathe, at the very last second. Otherwise I believe we would have died happily like that.

  When we stopped, I saw that Phelan Swiney, Mariner, was weeping.

  ‘Your mother used to ki
ss me that way,’ he told me.

  Chapter 56

  Each time I had bent my body under Alexander’s, I wondered if he still found in me what he wanted. And I had feared that he would not. But I was sure of Saverio’s esteem. I had never needed to wait for rationed portions of it. It was always there. For months, I had worn it as a garment, like a better, more hopeful version of my own skin. I had accustomed myself to its warmth without even knowing that it was Saverio who was making me feel less cold.

  So we did not go at it raw, this business of kissing, Saverio and I. We went at it with the kiss half entered already, and I was free to think only of my senses, because Saverio, with that letter he had given me, had already made sense of love – love not as Alexander practised it, tactically and selfishly, but love as human animals properly make it – untidily, thoroughly, with the feelings spilling over into the thinking and the tasting knitted to the touching.

  Saverio had named all the parts of love in that letter of his, in which he had written Irishly as the Harristown rain, scribbling his words all over me, in a sheer profusion that should have drowned my loneliness, if I’d only let it.

  I had not listened then. But I was listening now.

  ‘I’m feeling newborn,’ I told Saverio, in the bedroom of the apartment above his studio.

  We had walked there from the palazzo, as if deer-stepping over liquid crystal in glass slippers, so beautiful and fragile was the tiny space between us.

  His room was large and light, empty of ornament, except the shifting reflections of the canal, Saverio, his bed and his voice. I asked him to lie down with me.

  We lay face to face, kissing, breathing, looking, and kissing again. My fingers explored his face, and his traced mine. Our lips followed our fingers.

  ‘What do you want of me, Saverio?’ I asked him, and I was not afraid of the answer.

  ‘You have given me such a long time to think about that question that the answer has regretfully become rather long.’

  ‘What shall you want in the end, I mean?’

  ‘This is all I want,’ he told me. ‘To have you in my arms, looking at me as if there is nothing else you’d rather see. For the rest, ask me again in two hundred years.’

  After a long slow while, I asked, ‘May I borrow your hand, Saverio? It would be the shame of the world if I knew how only your mouth and eyes taste.’

  ‘The shame would indeed be killing. Yes, you may, if I may borrow yours.’

  We tasted the different flavours of each other’s fingertips, concluding that our thumbs were the saltiest, and the little finger of my left hand was the sweetest.

  I asked next, ‘Could you turn a little?’

  ‘I am unwilling to lose the sight of you.’

  ‘Just for a moment.’

  In a moment I had found the musk tucked in the tiny creases of Saverio’s neck. I thrust myself full length against his back and wrapped my arms around the great warmth and firmness of him, nibbling on the little curls at his nape. I could not help my hips pushing against him, withdrawing, and pushing again.

  ‘Come back to me,’ he moaned, turning to face me.

  ‘Very well. But would you greatly mind removing your shirt?’ I asked him. ‘Linen and buttons are rough, and you’d not like to be kissed by a cat’s mouth, would you?’

  Saverio said, ‘No. Why do you sigh, Manticory?’

  I was sighing because I understood at last. Your skin’s supposed to feel like soap shedding its veils in warm water and the space between the blades of your shoulders is meant to feel a surge of feathers and your mouth is bound to fill, over and over, like an oyster, with salt and sweet.

  Saverio, I did not need to tell those things. He had as much human nature in him as I did.

  We began to rake off our clothes, helping one another with buttons and the progress of linen over our knees and ankles, scrabbling with feet and toes.

  When that was done, we lay flat on our backs, breathing quietly like lizards, looking at the water’s shadows dancing on the ceiling.

  ‘Let us not be solemn now,’ Saverio said at last. ‘It is the most inappropriate time to be solemn.’

  ‘So it is,’ I agreed softly.

  Unable not to look at him, unable not to be closer to him, I burrowed my shoulder under his and kissed my way over the hairs of his chest till I found his nipple and fixed my lips on it. My tongue knew exactly what to describe upon it, and there was nothing solemn in that at all. My hand took his and asked it what to do and where to go, and was quickly helped there.

  I held him quite tranquilly, despite the heat and hardness of him growing under my fingers and the audible clatter of the waves in my own blood, quickening and muting, quickening more.

  When they were too much for me, I half rose and crawled to the centre of the bed, placed my forehead against the pillow and raised my hips, as I had always done.

  Saverio climbed up on the bed too. But he eased my body round and laid me upon my back, so that I looked up at him, his skin filling the frame of my view entirely. Carefully, he placed his long thighs between mine, and grazed my face with his own.

  ‘I would rather not go on with this,’ he said sadly, ‘than do it without looking at you.’

  I drew his mouth to my lips, and then to my breasts, each in turn.

  He looked up at me. ‘You have not been sweetnessed here before,’ he told me. I nodded. ‘Or this way.’

  It was I who shifted and gyred till he was inside me and above me.

  I had thought it would take years to settle my skin into someone who was not Alexander, but it took less than seconds. With Alexander, desire had been like a bird that flittered through my body without alighting, leaving a tickling feather behind. Now desire fell on me as the swan fell on Leda, as a hawk falls on a rabbit, and it held me down, despite my writhing, intent on inflicting pleasure until I was utterly spent. And Saverio never stopped kissing me until I had to pull away from him so as not to cry into his mouth. And even then I wanted him back, because I wanted his voice, his nest of a voice with beating wings in it, inside me as well.

  Afterwards I lay on Saverio’s shoulder, encircled by his arm, his lips pressed against my hair, my skin. I breathed the sweet sweat I had generated on his skin. My heart still beat mightily, like a great festival rampaging through a village. I had never been so tired, I thought. I could feel the marrow seething inside my bones; my teeth felt raw and tender; my fingers seemed to have elongated by inches with all they’d encompassed. I wanted to sleep like a fisherman’s cat, fat and slick with all I’d desired inside me, but I wanted to be awake too, to see what words could do to polish the afternoon’s perfection, sidelined and forgotten, as the words had been these minutes numberless without number, Irish minutes tumbled with Venetian ones, minutes that grew to hours.

  And Saverio began to talk then, of things past and to come, and I began to answer. Eventually the words grew quieter, our breaths longer and deeper.

  Untangling

  It is one year now since that day and the soft night that followed it.

  The next morning there came a brief interruption to our pleasures when Viaro returned to the palazzo wishing to interview the Phelan Swiney, Mariner, who had written threatening letters to the dead journalist Millwillis. While the policeman was committing our father to a holding cell – showing him every courtesy and expressing his regret – Saverio took himself quietly to Mestre and examined the books of the carriage company that had brought our father to Venice on his mission of revenge. They proved that Phelan Swiney had indeed arrived in Venice the day after Millwillis met his death. This information chimed happily with the persuasive scenario the Eileen O’Reilly had in the meanwhile embedded in Viaro’s mind of a hairy gentleman who looked entirely different to Phelan Swiney, Mariner, in every manner except regarding the quantity of hair. The policeman announced himself delighted to release our father with no taint to his character. Our father walked out of the prison immediately, and was again praising Pertilly�
�s cooking three hours later.

  Pertilly has married her Almoro Pagin. We dine better than we have ever done. Pertilly dresses the hair of Saverio’s grand clients; Berenice teaches English to children from the church. It is enough to pay our rent, and a little – a grateful little – more. And Pertilly expects her first child, a Christmas gift for us all.

  Ida is at peace. She assists Signor Pagin in the kitchen, dressing his cutlets and joints.

  Not one of us has ever feared a thing from Ida. That one death was all she had ever needed to commit, and she is calm now, which we read in the thick dark-brown hair that has lately reached her knees once again. Ida still strums on the breastbone harp, supplying the mournful notes with her voice, when the mood takes her. And we do not stop her. That harp, that song, like our hair, occupies that liminal country between a sentient being and stuff, between living and dead, between the imperatives of nature and of conscience, between sister and enemy, between culture and biology. Who are we to decide what must be forgotten, and what can be?

  No one expects to see Darcy in Venice – or in Dublin. We tell our Venetian friends that Darcy disliked Venice, and that she has returned to keep house in Dublin. On our rare visits to Dublin, we tell people that Darcy prefers to stay in Venice, being so wedded to the place with her heart, as we say.

  My first book, now six months old, sells well and better than well. Readers love a scandal, especially one with love-making and immorality and young girls led astray by men for money. And yes, the public’s imagination will always thrive on super­abundant quantities of hair.

  Whoever owns the words tells the story – that old lesson of my childhood comes back now with a new flavour of truth. I have owned the words and told the story. And I have discovered my red wildness lies not in my hair, nor in the love I made with Alexander, but in my writing, and in the nights I spend with Saverio.

  Of course the ends of Millwillis and Darcy have no place in my book, though the return of Phelan Swiney is a great episode in it, as in life.