The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (26 page)

Darcy sniffed. Tristan frowned, realising he had made a rare wrong move in implying that we Swineys might fail to fascinate. He swiftly changed the subject and expatiated on how important it was to commission a ‘properly foreign’ artist to paint us: ‘No native Irish dauber will do!’

He had one in mind, a Mr Alexander Sardou.

‘You are going too fast,’ Darcy cried.

But at dinner and luncheon the next day Tristan was still masticating on the portrait and its boons.

Darcy continued to raise every possible objection – from the expense to the wasting of valuable Swiney Godiva time in protracted sittings. I realised that she was afraid of this portrait. She dreaded seeing her true likeness up there on the wall. She’d assumed control over all photographs commissioned since Poulaphouca Falls, ordering the destruction of any plates that did not please her. She could not very well have an expensive original oil painting ripped in half. Art, as Tristan had pointed out, was different from photography. Where photography could conceal, art might discover Darcy’s harsh looks. I understood that Darcy feared this foreign painter, this Alexander Sardou, would fall into the grip of some extravagant artistic
estro
, and forget to soften her hard jawline or might emphasise the hooding of her eyes for the sake of drama. He could even fail to understand her pre-eminence among us and place her in the background as a shadowy foil to Oona’s blonde beauty or Enda’s natural elegance.

I, on the contrary, was interested in this new way of telling our story – and in subverting Darcy’s desires too. The quiet month of January stretched out in front of us. The snow always slowed our bookings. I suggested, ‘At least let us meet Mr Sardou. An interview will soon show if he is biddable, no matter how foreign. If he’s headstrong, away with him!’

‘How foreign is he?’ Darcy began. She was beginning to feel the portrait slide into her grasp.

Berenice mused, ‘ “Sardou” sounds French.’

I said, ‘It could also be Italian. But “Alexander”? At all events, shouldn’t we find out more before dismissing the idea entirely?’

‘I’ll have him fetched directly to account for himself personally.’ Tristan threw me a confused but grateful glance, and hurried off to arrange the thing.

Because he was foreign and artistic both, we had expected something swarthy and voluble from Alexander Sardou. But Mr Sardou was blond in Oona’s style – that pure fairness without any dirtying of tawn. He was tall enough to eat his supper off the top of Tristan’s curly head. His kite-shaped torso was even shapelier than the poet’s. There was an attractive shadowing under his eyes; the brows were a soft smudge above them. I noted the unusual intensity of the gaze emitted by eyes as pale as a wolf’s; my eye lingered on the delicate cleft in his chin. The velvet of his jacket became him, clinging to his slender form. His leather case was as perfectly groomed as he was, as if it had not lived at all, despite all his travels. He seemed shy, quite failing to raise those lupine eyes when he dipped his head in the Continental style to acknowledge us. I saw unmelted snowflakes glittering in his hair. I had become accustomed to Tristan’s performative romancing. By virtue of the contrast, the painter seemed quite dazzlingly and authentically gallant.

Tristan fluttered around, introducing us and quite unnecessarily extolling the individual beauties of our hair.

‘An honour,’ Mr Sardou repeated each time quietly, with an accent that darted north, south and east in three syllables. In response to a series of questions, he let it be known, with a maximum economy of words, that his father had been Venetian, his mother was French but that he’d been educated in Geneva and London.

‘It is St Teresa’s Dead Christ come to life!’ exclaimed Ida. ‘Have him lie down,’ she cried, ‘and lay his head on a stone, with the clothes taken off him, and you shall see the twin of Him at chapel!’

‘Listen to her!’ Darcy tried to joke. ‘Two ruches short of a curtain swag! Ida left her senses under a bush in Harristown, and we’re still looking for them.’

In fact, now that Darcy had removed all bottles of scalp food from the house, Ida’s senses were keener than they had been for some time.

Tristan told us, ‘Mr Sardou has brought some reproductions of earlier portraits for your approval.’

The artist rummaged delicately in his leather case, causing a paintbrush and a book to fall out. I lunged for the book to pass it to him, but in truth my purpose was to discover its title: Rhoda Broughton’s latest,
As Red as a Rose Is She
, which I had recently skimmed myself. It did not seem like a foreign gentleman’s book. Discreetly, I showed it to my sisters. Darcy made a face that said, as clearly as if it spoke the words,
a man who reads romantic novels is a piffler
.

The artist flushed, which made him seem even younger – so young that it was hard to believe that he’d put in the years required to execute his long list of important commissions, not to mention his training in four Continental academies of note.

The sample portraits were unimpeachable. Women of uniform prettiness and demureness stared at me from the sheaf of hand-coloured prints. I was momentarily disappointed by their blandness, but Darcy was reassured. Even she could not object to Mr Sardou’s remote, courtly manners or his air of humble compliance. The artist was hired for a sum undisclosed to us by Tristan.

He arrived in the green parlour and set up his easel three days later.

In fact, it seemed to me that Alexander Sardou was no more compliant than a sewing-machine stand. He simply avoided the trap into which people often fell. It was easy to think that if you wanted to have your way with the Swiney Godivas, the friendship of Darcy would be more profitable than the love of any two angels and an apostle beside. But Darcy didn’t really go in for friendship – more for temporary, dedicated, strategic alliances. People who tried to flatter or ingratiate were given the rough of her tongue more quickly than those who, like Alexander Sardou, simply showed an unadorned kind of respect.

Somehow, from that first meeting, Mr Sardou had also divined that if he showed favour to Berenice then Enda would hate him. So he divided any words to the twins into strictly equal rations. He also seemed to know instinctively that it was better not to ask a question of Ida, and that both Oona and Pertilly were inclined to stammer pitifully if put on the spot. As for myself – he contrived ways to barely look at me at all.

The young man of apparently very few words arranged us according to the palette of our hair, from light Oona to dark Darcy, left to right. He’d had Tristan ask us to wear black, and to explain that this uniformity would both confer dignity and emphasise the lively variety of our facial features. Without our being conscious of his gaze, the artist had also worked out a skilful disposition of our heads and shoulders. As we filed into the green parlour on the morning of our first sitting, Mr Sardou was to be seen with his back to us, busy stretching a large canvas over boards. But Tristan held up a captioned sketch explaining how and where we should sit. Mr Sardou’s handwriting was subtle, yet fascinatingly foreign, with tiny extra cross-hatches on some of the consonants. Those of us with the neatest profiles – myself, Oona and Ida – were presented in three-quarter view, while the sisters with slightly larger noses – Enda, Berenice and Darcy – were to sit facing the viewer’s gaze, in a gentle, obliterating light. Pertilly’s double chin was concealed by her being requested to sit on a low stool and gaze upwards.

Even Darcy could not quibble with the illustrated instructions, though she sniffed, ‘Why can’t the man just tell us himself ? Is he too grand for that?’

Tristan replied smoothly, ‘It would be a brave man who tried to tell
you
what to do, Darcy. Indeed, even the sketch may be viewed as a suggestion, I understand.’

Mr Sardou nodded with lowered eyes, and of course we hurried to execute his design in all perfection, Darcy most of all: the light, she quickly saw, would flood her dark curls with rich blue and violet highlights. A quick glance in the mirror showed her that the shadow of her brow, so disposed, lengthened her lashes.

All through the sketching and then the painting sessions, Mr Sardou spoke only if asked a direct question. If he wanted one of us to move, he quickly sketched the desired position, with arrows, and held it up to us. We were, however, allowed to speak among ourselves unless he was working on our own face – indicated with a discreet pointed brush. From slight twitches of his eyes and mouth, I deduced that our conversations were feeding Mr Sardou’s painting with details of our personalities that would enliven our likenesses and lend them the truth of conviction.

As for me, it was pleasantly and shockingly indecent to have so close a view of a man at his profession. We never really saw what Tristan or Mr Rainfleury did: their business was largely transacted in offices we were not invited to visit, or behind the closed doors of this very room. Mr Sardou worked in front of us, much as a performing bear might labour for an audience. I wondered if he resented this exposure. Perhaps his absorption in his task blotted out any subsidiary discomforts. It occurred to me that even Mr Sardou’s quietness was a performance of sorts. He performed his silent rituals with his subtle tools. Yet his very silence was compelling. It put him very much in the room because it made a body ponder on his unspoken thoughts. I breathed in the woody smell each time he opened one of his collapsible tubes of oil, noted the delicacy with which he replaced it in its japanned tin box.

I watched his long fingers restless at the canvas; I followed his eyes measuring my sisters’ features; I gazed at his profile when he consulted the sun’s progress through the window. I watched him all the time, only dropping my own eyes whenever it was my turn to be observed.

In his positional sketch, Mr Sardou had shown my eyes downcast: a feathering of pencil. But, when it came to painting them, he asked me to raise them. It was as if he knew that this must be achieved discreetly, for the request was transacted silently, without the pointed brush, but merely by looking at me and drawing my lids up with an almost perceptible nod.

Mr Sardou painted our hair with polished walnut brushes wigged in sable. I imagined the sensation of his brush on my face; it made my nose twitch. Sitting by sitting, something unaccountably pleasurable was taking a stake in me, without my allowing it to happen. I was grateful that Darcy was positioned where she could not see its traces on my face; she would have killed it instantly.

I was exquisitely sensitive to every nuance in the artist’s own features. His eyelids twitched if we ruptured our pose. His brow furrowed minutely the moment the sun shifted. From a slight flare of the nostril, I noticed that Mr Sardou did not relish Tristan’s frequent visits and smug pronouncements. ‘So how is our masterpiece of sisterly love coming along then? Ah, good, good.’

The end of a session was announced by Mr Sardou covering his work with a sheet and bowing before leaving the room as quietly as he had occupied it. We sisters were not privy to the artist’s progress. When Darcy strode over to the easel during a pause, he quickly swivelled it away from her, murmuring, ‘It is better not to observe the initial and transitional stages as early impressions may contaminate the impact of the finished work by casting a memory over it.’

This was a speech of unprecedented length from him, uttered with assurance and authority.

Darcy said crisply, ‘Be at ease with yourself on that score, so. We would not dream of it.’

I dreamed of it. I wanted to see what his fingers had made of my face. I longed for it, and feared it too.

Too quickly – in a matter of three weeks – Mr Sardou’s work was done, and the painter was bending again over our hands, this time murmuring his thanks for our patience. Then he was picking up his strangely neat leather case for the last time. He had covered up his work, as usual, with a sheet, and seemed about to make the most casual of departures. A shivery, shaky heat ran down my spine. I could not simply ease myself into thought of his disappearance from our lives.

Darcy could. ‘Before you go, aren’t you going to be showing us what you’ve kept us locked up in here all these weeks to do, cricking our necks and ruining our backs?’

I thought I saw him smile momentarily. To Darcy, he said, ‘But of course, Miss Swiney.’

He drew the cover from his work and presented it to us, retreating back behind the easel.

Even Darcy was stunned to silence on the first view – and for Darcy to be silenced was a phenomenon that almost ran up to a miracle. Tristan rushed forward to pump Mr Sardou’s hand. But the artist cast his eyes to the floor and had no response for Tristan’s poetical effusions about the number of bottles this portrait would sell.

It was indeed the most commercial of portraits. Mr Sardou had not neglected his role as flatterer. Darcy’s Medusan brows were feathered to softness and her hips were as sinuous as a snake’s in her tight black dress; Enda and Berenice’s differences were brought to light; Pertilly’s face glowed with a wisdom simple and pure as soap; Ida’s bald patches were hidden. My red hair, centrally placed, fell in demure coils into my lap, leading the gaze of the beholder down to the floor and back up to my face. The red he had chosen was a single blazing shade of russet. My green eyes were the speaking heart of the portrait. Darcy shot me an accusing look.

‘How did
that
happen?’