Read The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Online
Authors: Michelle Lovric
‘There’s a sweet sister for you, Mr Husband,’ Enda smirked at Berenice. ‘Mrs Hartigan will be hours whitening that cloth next door. As they say, it is a lonely wash that has no man’s shirt in it.’
That is one for Enda
, I thought.
Mr Rainfleury choked on his wine, coughing till the tears spilled out from under his lids. He rose and stumbled over to his wife. He reached for a hank of Enda’s hair to wipe his eyes, allowing a sudden shocking insight into their matrimonial intimacy. At the sight of it, Berenice upended her chair and ran downstairs. We heard a door slam, and boots battering the cobbles abroad. When we came home, Berenice was locked in her room and would talk to none of us for two days.
But she was eloquent about her feelings in the note I intercepted in the post office coat, which smelled of lies in its armpits and pain in the pocket where Berenice had left a letter and a shredded rose. The tear-stained page throbbed with:
This killing, killing betrayal, the worst yet in a line of betrayals! Why must you live within an ass’s roar of us, so that Enda can flaunt you at me every day?
Mr Rainfleury replied with due tenderness, and promises of a special treat. He concluded:
If only the toss of the coin had gone the other way, my darling. But it did not, and here we are. There were always three figures in the Garden of Eden, poppet. We must manage as best we can.
I thought,
And who is the corrupting serpent
?
So Berenice’s happiness and Enda’s marriage had been murdered by the toss of a coin. I resolved to write such a scenario into our next show, and began the sketch immediately. I took a hate upon that coat of his that knew too much. The next time he took tea with us, I asked, ‘Mr Rainfleury, did you know that you have forgotten your brown coat in our hall press? With the summer coming in so early this year and the evenings so light, perhaps you’d like to take it to your own home?’
Berenice whispered, ‘It does no harm here,’ and Mrs Hartigan dropped the teapot. In the wet mess and exclamations that followed, the coat was no more mentioned. But it never again held any secrets. The guilty couple and Mrs Hartigan must have found themselves a new post office, one I never discovered, despite industrious investigations.
The marriage between Mr Rainfleury and Enda proved barren for more months than one might expect, at least to listen to Enda’s many and indelicate hints about their mutual sensual felicity, each one of them sending Ida and Oona into fits of wriggling and grimacing. Berenice’s face was taut with keeping in her fury.
I saw the doctor arriving next door every few weeks and noted Enda’s anxious face at certain times of the month. Enda admitted to Oona and myself, ‘Just a little baby, is all I want. Do you not want to be favourite aunts yourselves?’
Perhaps to deflect attention from the lack of an interesting event, Enda regaled us with stories of Mr Rainfleury’s collection of portable moustache-curlers with heating devices, and the protector he wore at night to keep its supple walrus droop. The masterpiece was the German-made
Schnurbartbinde
, a device confected of silk, two leather straps and soft twin webs, which kept the precious taches in a state that King
Wilhelm
himself would not have despised, despite his well-known facility for sneering. We could also see for ourselves that whenever he must imbibe, Mr Rainfleury produced his moustache cup, which prevented any liquid from running down his whiskers.
On the last Sunday in August, Mr and Mrs Rainfleury arrived at Number 1 for a family dinner, with Enda looking happier than usual. Leaving Mr Rainfleury to his post-prandial cigar, we were scarcely out of the room before his wife was yawning theatrically. ‘Didn’t get a wink last night.’ She taunted Berenice with sundry sunny observations of married intimacy and its blessings. I knew she would die rather than hurt anyone else that way. With Berenice alone, Enda lacked decency or mercy. ‘Do you know what he says? He says he climbs up my hair to my narrow tower, just like a prince. He says it is because of my hair that he can ascend. My hair gives him
potency
!’
Berenice shot back, ‘The prince who climbed up the tower and had doings with Rapunzel left her with child. Manticory wrote it, remember? So when the witch cast her out in the wilderness, Rapunzel gave birth to twins. If Augustus is so potent with you, why is it that you beget
bother-all
, Enda?’
Berenice had fallen into a trap.
‘Actually,’ said Enda, showing all her teeth as she did only when talking to her twin, ‘the doctor has just confirmed it. And my baby will grow up to hurt you better than I ever could, brown bitch heifer.’
Berenice sat down sharply, her mouth working but nothing coming out.
‘Enda!’ said Oona. ‘That is surely no way to introduce a dear little baby there!’
Darcy mused, ‘I reckon you can still dance until the sixth month, Enda. Then Manticory will write you sitting-down parts. With cloaks. We needn’t lose any bookings at all before your confinement.’
I protested, ‘But what if Enda does not feel so well in herself ?’
‘You can write death scenes for her. We’ll put her in a bed under a quilt. She can groan to her heart’s content.’
Berenice clutched her own belly and vomited. In fact, for the next two months, it was she who exhibited all the heinous signs of morning sickness: the faintness and disembowelling nausea. Enda prospered, fattened and bloomed on her triumph, carrying her belly like a precious vessel in front of her.
The baby died inside Enda in the fourth month.
Enda curled herself up in a cocoon of unbound hair and wept.
Her husband and her twin disappeared for long hours. I cursed Mr Rainfleury and Berenice even more. Where were they? It was not a time to steal a triumph.
And
, I wanted to tell Berenice,
this triumph is tawdry, screwed out of a dead baby
.
But Berenice suffered too, every time Mr Rainfleury left her at the door to Number 1. And of course I could not utter a word of my bitterness to Enda, who was still bravely pretending not to know what was going on between her husband and her twin. Enda lost the next baby, and the one after, and every other child conceived inside the marriage. Those babies who might have been conceived on Berenice were prevented by Mr Rainfleury’s vulcanised rubber.
In the interweaving of Swiney hair and Swiney destiny, that first foetus and all the other dead babies who followed it were other strands in the plait of hatred and intimacy that bound Enda and Berenice.
And my writing weaves it too, of course. Women are forever weaving their own narratives out of the growings of their own bodies, fashioning their own accounts, knitting new characters into their own stories. Even a tongueless woman – even a creature of regrets and impotence like me, Manticory – may embroider messages and stories with self-grown filaments of truth.
And one more strand, back in our Harristown cottage, was our mother, Annora, still pounding the threads of the laundry she took in, for she could never bring herself to spend the money that we sent her, even refusing when I offered to take her to Lourdes to see the Virgin lately glimpsed there.
Our visits to Harristown were increasingly rare, and it was perhaps kinder that way. Our aggrandised corporeality seemed to frighten our mother – we were plumper as well as taller than we had been when in her care. In our fine, voluminous dresses, we were too big for the cottage. We could not fit around her table. Our hats grazed the roof. Our elbows sent jugs flying. No, we did not in any way fit now. Our senses of ourselves were too vast as well.
The La Touches had diverted the railway line to run through their estate. But somehow, our landlord and his family never did happen upon us, no matter how much we made ourselves worth the seeing in our finery. We disembarked unseen and trudged unseen by them the short distance to Annora’s cottage. I sometimes thought I saw the Eileen O’Reilly flitting through the trees beside us, but she’d grown too cunning and lithe to let Darcy catch sight of her. And she still, it seemed, did not want to be seen by me. We carried with us Mrs Hartigan’s sponge cake in a basket. Our tastes had been flattered by the delicacies our housekeeper prepared for us. Once we had craved Annora’s oat scones but now we regarded them with disdain. She’d never lost the habit of stretching the batter with stale breadcrumbs.
In the beginning, I had kept my promise to Annora. I wrote letters for Mrs Godlin to read aloud to our mother, to keep her apprised of our own great doings, of the crowds in Dame Street, of the latest fashions of our dolls, the trinkets we bought, the Frangipani soaps with which we washed our hands, the Domecq Manzanilla sherry we sipped, the grand dinners we ate. Sadly but baldly, I recorded the deaths of each of Enda’s babies.
Mrs Godlin was a willing scribe, but Annora rarely replied. Although she herself had begged for them, perhaps she dreaded my missives – so I think now – for she wished to live alone with her memories of seven little daughters who had briefly lived only because she had birthed and fed them, and who’d not been devoured from the head downwards only because she saved them from the nits with the combs she had carved herself.
I tried to weave our mother into one of our shows, as a wise old lady who sews spells and proverbs onto finest silk under the light of a candle in a seashell. But the image would not fly. I could not write Annora wise or magical. And none of my sisters would want to play her, anyway. When my mind strayed to our mother, I thought of myself as one of the spiders who wove their stories in the rafters, watching her at her lonely work. It was no comfort to be that spider, so I gradually stopped visiting Annora in my thoughts.
All writers are spiders, knitting patterned tissues of life out of what grows inside themselves. Their webs also knit together diverse entities. Did you never see a tree married to a lamp-post by an industrious spider? Such miscegenations does a writer also create, as I did, first by writing the humble Swiney sisters into myth and legend for our stage shows, weaving a wild tribe of Irish starvelings into Lady Godivas who were not real ladies, and then weaving impossible desires for hair like ours into the hopeful hearts of the women who came to watch us.
‘Clever girl, Manticory,’ Mr Rainfleury told me. ‘Keep working out those happy endings.’
Happy
? I looked at Mr Rainfleury with despair that even my contempt could not enliven.
Is it any wonder that writers, and spiders, are disliked?
As Madame Defarge at her knitting was disliked?
But everyone loves a poet.
Do they not?
I
was not the only industrious spider among the Swineys. Ida, though never shining in brains, had hands that were a credit to her. Using the combings we laid nightly in our hair-receivers, she embroidered a large picture on white velvet. It was of a tree with seven branches, each one sewn from real Swiney Godiva hair. A daguerreotype in a locket nodded at the end of every branch. The trunk was sketched with a pencil. It should, of course, have been made of Annora’s hair, of which precious little was to be spared. It was too brittle for sewing, anyway, and its greyness was discouraging. The hair of Phelan Swiney, Mariner, had never been available to us.
The picture was framed behind glass and displayed on a cherry-wood easel beside the ticket desk wherever we were to perform. It built up the excitement nicely.
It was after our first show at the newly opened Gaiety Theatre in South King Street that we witnessed a young man unabashedly tracing the stitches of Ida’s picture with a dancing light in his eye and a stagey tremor in his hands. We were waiting for our carriage in a corridor concealed by a curtain. We liked listening to the audience talking after the show. In this way we heard many pleasant things about the wonders of our hair and I was able to calculate adjustments to my scripts.
The large-eyed handsome young man, whose own curls were notable, appeared to be not quite exactly singing our praises.
‘Looks so innocent, so soft,’ he was telling a small group of bystanders, ‘but this silky extrusion is a deadly danger. Hair! The thrilling, killing human instrument – the half animal, half stuff – that plays men’s hearts more sweetly than a harp.’
His audience – who had just been ours – drew closer to him.
‘Beware these hirsute
projections
’ – the man described a ringlet with a twirling finger – ‘of midnight black, of seething red, of primeval brown – they have been the death of a power of young men. Hair like this will wrap itself around your heart, your eyes, your soul, until you are choking to death on its delicious spun-silk witchery.’
Darcy bristled, ‘Oho, he’ll be asking for money next, you’ll see. The Devil boil him a black pudding!’
It took six pairs of arms to restrain her from rushing out of our hiding place. Oona pleaded, ‘Let us hear him, Darcy honey. He is a grand talker. And is he not a romantic figure of a man there?’
‘I don’t want to marry him, fool,’ Darcy retorted. ‘I just want to stop him from frightening the audience. Some of them are repeaters. Choking to death indeed!’