The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (29 page)

Ida struggled out of his arms, shrieking, ‘Go away, you Sardou!’

Outside the dressing-room door, I apologised for Ida’s words. He made a dismissive gesture. ‘There is something I’ve meant to ask you. Did Ida always suck her hair? And did Darcy always hurt her for it?’

I sighed, ‘As a child, she would do it unconsciously. Once we had detected her tendency, she would pull her hair only whenever she was out of Darcy’s sight. But it has become so ingrained in Ida now that she does it in her sleep, I fear. And when she is upset she does it anyway. And I’m afraid she still drinks the scalp food too, if she can obtain it. Mr Sardou, I am grateful—’

‘No, do not thank me.’

I wanted to thank him for the look of concern on his face, for speaking to me at all.

Then Darcy slammed out of the dressing room and Mr Sardou held up his sketching block like a shield. He threw a few supple lines on the page that caught her profile. She snorted and ordered me inside ‘to help with Ida’.

I heard her say to Mr Sardou, ‘I cannot imagine why you think you should get a second advance on the busts when you’ve barely started them.’

Inside the dressing room, I looked down sadly on Ida’s contorted face.

‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ she pleaded. ‘Manticory, can we not stop and go back to Harristown?’

I stroked her forehead and shook my head. To allow Ida to retire and rest would dismantle the Swiney Godivas. Darcy had signed us up indefinitely.

Darcy’s argument would be, as it always was, that it would not help Ida to desist from her work. Even more than her fiddle playing, her roles were a relief to her – they took her from her painful self. She was knitted to her stage parts, flesh and bone. In our shows, Ida did not so much impersonate her historical characters as invade them, and inhabit their bodies. Tristan swore that Ida
smelled
of each new role. Her portraits of famous women were homicidal: people came to watch Ida destroy and devour Cleopatra, and to wear her pelt. Of course Ida did not always win these skirmishes with her characters. And those struggles were what made Ida’s face grow hot and churned her language into a witch’s brew of English and Irish, of terrible sense and childlike nonsense, and forced us to drag her off the stage with increasing frequency. Darcy refused to understand the reasons for these episodes, called Ida ‘wilfully mad’.

Mr Sardou was gone away to Paris before I could devise a way to show my proper appreciation for his concern. I resolved to write a poem for him, a nicely judged piece of praise with all my real sentiments tucked up neatly between the syllables. But when I set myself to the task, I found I was not equal to it. I wrote doggerel, fit for dogs to bark at. Even my handwriting sloped and meandered, as if the dowdy words were looking for an escape from the page, so unwilling were they to be seen.

I stared at my production, heavy and yet empty at the same time, a miracle of bathos, a neat piece of cunning, a painted whore of a poem. Yet I had once been able to write.
The Cruel Sister
was mine, and it was beautiful. Everyone had said so. I remembered what the critic had written:
It is enough to knock the heart across you
.

Tristan
, I thought,
I hate you. You have murdered the writing in me. Just when I needed it to breathe
.

Chapter 26

While I was making my despairing translations of bad poetry into good money, our mother Annora was failing. She had fallen to no particular illness. She was simply worn out from living most of her life a potato skin above starvation. In the last year, her own skin had shrivelled on her face, delineating the skull’s presence beneath. We’d rarely seen her in months, being mostly on the road with our shows. We paid duty visits on some Sundays, if we happened to be within an easy train or carriage ride of Harristown.

That Christmas, Ida had showed more interest in the thin geese than in our mother. I suspected that the truth was that she was frightened by Annora’s cadaverous appearance. After spending a visit on the floor with her arms around a pair of geese, she insisted on bringing one back to Pembroke Street.

‘Do not take Phiala!’ begged our mother. ‘Do not take my Phiala away to Dublin, the creature.’

Ida selected an anonymous bird from the flock. In the train carriage, its head quested out of a grey stuff bag between her knees.

‘It is to drop down the chimney, to clean it, you know,’ she explained to Mrs Hartigan, who took the bird admiringly.

‘It might so,’ said the housekeeper. ‘The finest figure of a goose in Dublin, dearie! And how did you find your dear mother?’

‘Going on as usual,’ said Darcy disapprovingly.

The coal man was dispatched to the roof with the goose tucked under his arm. The bird’s beating wings scoured every lump of ash as it plummeted down to the kitchen fireplace. We did not need to wait till the next Michaelmas for roast goose, though as ever I refused it and Ida wept to see it turning on the clockwork roasting jack.

‘This is not what I meant for it,’ she moaned at supper.

‘There’s still a drumstick wants eating.’ Darcy offered the sleek brown baton to her.

Annora’s own final descent seemed to come on almost as swiftly as the goose’s. Her mind had begun to wander and to fail. We knew things had worsened, for Mrs Godlin from the Kilcullen dispensary had written to tell us so, in a letter as full of sniffs as spelling mistakes. Our mother had been seen abroad at night
in her nightdress
, driving the geese over Harristown Bridge with a hawthorn switch, as if she were a young Goose Girl, with the slow crows wheeling overhead. And some mornings she was to be seen on the step rocking her favourite goose, Phiala, in her arms, like a baby.

She has a great trouble on her, the creature
, wrote Mrs Godlin.
If it were not for Eileen and myself, she’d perish of loneliness, you know
.

Eileen?
I thought.
The same Eileen?

Annora denied all knowledge of the nightdress incident when we arrived to investigate.

‘Sure that Mrs Godlin has been having herself some odd dreams, may I never die in sin. She’s failing in her wits, you know. They say she takes herself a taste of the chloroform under the counter, God rest her.’ Annora tried to laugh.

Despite Darcy’s threats, Annora still refused to move to Dublin. She demanded, ‘And how would your father find me when he comes back?’

I held her hand and looked into her eyes, afraid of what I’d see. But she looked back at me steadily.

Despite the funds we sent her, despite Darcy’s rage, Annora kept a thin goose and laundered to the last.

‘I cannot stop, it would kill me, the idleness,’ she protested, when Darcy told her what would happen if the hacks of the popular press found out how she lived.

‘They would say that rich and famous as the Swiney sisters are, they don’t keep their old mother as they should. It would be a festival for the slimy newspapermen. They’d slither all over it! The Eileen O’Reilly would love to talk to a reporter about it, if one were to find his way to this place. She says so loudly on every occasion. I’ve had letters from Mrs Godlin informing me.’

‘You’ve such a great spite for that O’Reilly girl, Darcy,’ murmured Annora. ‘Yet she’s very pleasant in herself, if you give her a smile and half a small hour. She takes it hard that you’ve risen so high above her. You know, she comes to visit me still, and brings a bit of lard or a crubeen from time to time. Last Tuesday she brought me three rashers tied in brown paper, curled up like three blind mice in there and sweet as love to taste they were later with a bit of bread.’

‘You let her in my house?’ shouted Darcy. ‘That knacky little monkey? For bacon? When we send you enough money to buy your own hog?’

‘I do not leave the girl outside the door, and she so lonely and alone, and young-seeming. For all she’s filled out, she’s still so small that the crows wouldn’t bother themselves to pick her bones. Peace, she cannot touch you. All she ever wanted was to be about the place. But with the contrary way you have on you, you’d never let her near you except to beat her. For shame. An only child like that, with the parents on her that unfeeling and so much drink taken besides, so much left to her own devices in the woods and lanes. She might have been—’

Yes
, I thought,
she might have been
. I remembered the kindness of her smock to blow my nose on. It was only Darcy that the Eileen O’Reilly made war on – until I myself turned my back on her, when all she’d tried to do was be in Enda’s tribe against Berenice.

Annora kept her hands in the tub, even as Darcy bellowed, ‘That filthy get of a girl, she’ll not disoblige a Swiney again!’

Our mother did not reply or move. It was as if she had become amphibious, breathing only through her hands in the cold water.

Annora died that way. She was found by Joe the seaweed boy, slumped against the tub, her head in the cooled water of a pillowcase wash, her hair swirling in the expiring suds, and the thin geese in a consternation outside the window.

We arrived at the cottage to find that Mrs Godlin and Father Maglinn had already made all the usual Harristown arrangements. Annora was laid out on a deal board and covered by a white sheet, with her feet aligned to the east and her head to the west. Her form barely raised the linen above the table, at the head of which burned three candles sprigged with rosemary for the Trinity. The clock had been stopped at the hour of her presumed death, and the one small mirror was swagged with black crape.

I lifted the sheet to kiss Annora’s face. I stroked her brow, smooth now it had been released from its corrugations of worry. Mrs Godlin had seen to it that Annora’s hands were clasped together, wound with a rosary and holding a cross. Her fingers were still wrinkled from their final long immersion. Her skin smelled of soap and salt. She was wearing a white robe with a ruffle at the neck and frilled cuffs.

Mrs Godlin sobbed, ‘She prepared it for herself, the creature. She told me where to find it just a week ago, and she said, “Let my girls see me in this at the last.” She must have known she was failing.’

‘Did she confess?’ I asked quietly.

‘Not at all, it came on so sudden,’ replied Mrs Godlin. ‘And she with so much to tell.’

‘And what manner of thing are you meaning by that?’ Darcy’s voice was low with menace.

Mrs Godlin backed away, blushing.

Annora had already commissioned her own coffin and her tombstone, to save us troubling ourselves over them. The coffin awaited her under the deal table. Mrs Godlin showed us the granite tablet leaning against the wall by the water butt. Annora, who refused to spend money on herself, had spent a fortune having all our long and wild names carved into the stone.
Mother of Darcy, Berenice, Enda, Manticory, Pertilly, Oona and Idolatry
. She had not dared to have herself carved in the usual formula of
Beloved & Sorely Missed
. She would not presume so. But she wanted it recorded that she had borne us. In very small letters underneath were the words:
Wife of Phelan Swiney, Mariner
.

‘Should we keen? And tear our hair?’ asked Ida as we followed Joe’s cart bearing the coffin along the sodden crow-haunted track to the ruined chapel at Harristown.

‘Absolutely not,’ hissed Darcy. ‘It is a vulgar habit.’

Mrs Godlin was the only other mourner, apart from some shadows that flitted through the trees behind us and hovered by the back of the chapel. One of them, I assumed, was the Eileen O’Reilly, though she did not trouble us with her tongue on that day. I was ready, despite my sadness, to parley with her, and to tell her I was grateful for the times and the bacon she had shared with Annora in their mutual loneliness. Yet she did not come close. I could not guess the other figure, a large man from the glimpse I had. Darcy did not miss the furtive figures and shook her fist at them.

Mrs Godlin wept quietly through the service and disappeared before the end, when Ida fiddled a funereal melody of her own composing, full of dissonance and heart-hurting cadences. We put Annora to rest in a field outside the derelict chapel, for Catholics were still not permitted a decent burial. In the carriage on the way to Harristown, I had suggested the clover field near the house, but Darcy, as I’d quite expected, erupted in incoherent fury at the suggestion.

‘Why not?’ I dared. ‘It is a lovely spot, if haunted with the souls of a thousand rabbits you killed there.’

If I expected Darcy to break then, and tell me the story of
PS
and his grave, I was wrong. She insisted that Father Maglinn already had Joe digging the chosen spot, and would I waste the seaweed boy’s labours for one of my Shakespearean whims?

The moment Annora was laid in the hole he’d dug, Joe fled to hide his tears, with Father Maglinn screeching at him in unchristian terms. We left the priest heaping the sodden earth over our mother, muttering prayers under his breath.

Back at the cottage, we found Mrs Godlin wiping her eyes on the tea towel. A Harristown meal of bread and lard was laid out on the table vacated by Annora’s corpse. We stood in silence looking at the food and at one another, and at a jar of salt-crusted pennies Mrs Godlin had placed in the middle of the meagre spread.