The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (33 page)

People gathered to watch the photography, but were shooed away by the barefoot boys specially hired by Signor Bon. I was sorry whenever the boys succeeded, for I loved to look at the Venetians, particularly the females. The working women adopted a fetching hairstyle: their dark hair was fanned to fullness around their faces before being gently drawn back and fastened in a high topknot. Curls and tendrils were freely allowed to escape. Whether they were young girls lithe as ferrets or squat barrels of grandmothers, the women all dressed the same way. Their skirts were often a dirty cream colour, made to look dirtier by contrast with the grey-white of their stockings underneath. The men looked dashing as matadors in their knee-length dark capes and their felt hats.

I was fascinated by the Venetian ladies’ ways with their long-fringed shawls. A few wore red, fewer white; black was overwhelmingly chosen. Some of them wrapped their fabric tightly round their torsos in shapely figures of eight. Others draped their shawls loose around their shoulders and let them fall to their knees, with the extravagant fringes undulating like waves in night canals. The women’s hands were always at work on those shawls, sometimes lifting them to cover their heads, other times tucking a stray curl into the hood.

Catching my eye on one woman’s hands, Signor Bon smiled. ‘Graceful, yes? The shawl is called a “
sial
” in our dialect.’

The next morning he brought me one as a gift. ‘Just do not ask me to find one for that horrible doll of yours,’ he muttered.

I answered, ‘No. I’d rather get her a shroud.’

The Venetians loved their city – their ferocious affection for it was contagious. Each seagull, it seemed, had its own bit of Venice that it defended with beak and claw.

I too was forced to defend the place.

Darcy’s staunch position, asserted every time something beautiful appeared by way of reflections under a mossy bridge or a tumble of geraniums on a balcony, was that Venice was not notably different from Manchester.

‘It’s also black inconvenient with the canals all over waiting to be fallen into,’ she observed. ‘Dirty as a dirty girl’s bathwater.’

Venice did not charm Enda and Berenice, who saw very little beyond Mr Rainfleury’s moustache. Oona pined palely for Tristan. If she might not share Venice with him, she could barely experience the place. Pertilly was dizzied by the dancing light of the water and clung to every balustrade. Ida fell into peals of laughter at the sight of the Basilica of San Marco. ‘That is not a church!’ she cried with glee, ‘that is a fairground tent!’

‘No, more of a reliquary,’ I told her. I dragged her in and choked her on the bones of more saints than even Annora would have been able to believe in. The phial of Virgin’s Milk in the crypt made me gladder than ever that Tristan was not with us, as it might have bred untenable ideas in him.

For all the briefness of the glimpses I’d been allowed of it, I alone among the Swineys had formed a hot love of Venice inside me by the end of our first week. I was greedy for it, and woke before dawn, stealing away from the Danieli. Some mornings, Alexander met me at pre-assigned places. We had precious minutes murmuring our lovely nonsense together in quiet alleys – not so much streets as mere fissures in the marble – or we stood close together on bridges to gaze at towers whose leprous feet paddled in the green water and whose bony spires disappeared into opalescent skies.

‘How could you ever leave it?’ I asked, hoping he would reply, ‘Because Elisabetta is here.’

But he just smiled and held the rationed finger of my hand more tightly.

In Venice, we started again. We were learning to touch, just a few fingers at a time and our shoulders aligned or my hand tucked up under his arm. We hovered around one another’s faces with our lips. We would, by mutual but silent agreement, eke out more of this churning, uncertain time before we took to anything more than these Venetian almost-kisses. At the Antico Panada, Florian, the Orientale, we kept on at not kissing, devotedly. We always left separately. When he left first, I nursed the dregs of his coffee, sipping them till the last grains embittered my tongue.

He still had not told me where he lived or if he saw his wife, so I needed something to withhold too. By a carefully casual question to Signor Bon, I found out where Elisabetta Sardou dwelled – a tall and pretty
palazzo
on the Corte de la Vida near San Samuele. I had found many reasons to walk down the street that passed through it, and once I caught sight of a woman I believed to be Elisabetta herself, a small robust figure with strong features and a taste for bright colours. She wore that expression of magisterial discontent that only married women are allowed to show on their faces.

I did not ask Alexander for confirmation as that would have necessitated a confession of my shameful spying.

Even when he could not meet me, I still rose before dawn to see more of the city. I loved the chimneys that looked like ice-cream papers rolled for a scoop, the wooden buckets clustering around the sculpted well-heads in each square, the loose-lipped onion girls, the diminutive stone kings at the entrance to the Doges’ Palace, the way each gull interviewed the water with the shadow of its wings before deciding to slide its yellow feet into it. And how magical in the mist were those marriage-breaking snores emitted by steam ferries on the Grand Canal in the last shreds of the night.

And the colours: the scalding pinks, the skin-warm terracottas, the angelica greens – at first I could understand them only as the opposite of the colours I had grown up with. Harristown colours – I remembered them all in sepia, even the forty Irish shades of green were tinged with muddiness. Now they appeared in my mind’s eye as if someone had spilled coffee on a dimming watercolour and then wept over the damage for a long time.

I used the
traghetti
, standing up in the gondolas like a Venetian. I loved to be afloat the little golden fists of waves shaking hands with one another while knees of blue and elbows of vivid emerald poked up between them. And how different it felt to have the water coming up beneath instead of constantly falling on top of me as in Ireland. When no one was looking, I could not refrain from wriggling my shoulders luxuriously in the unaccustomed sun.

The morning after the doll photographs Signor Bon passed me at the San Tomà
traghetto
. He turned his green boat in a graceful arc, raising a serpent ridge of water in his wake. He beckoned me over, smiling frankly.

‘It is very early, Miss Manticory! I suspect you of coming out to drown your doll, perhaps.’

‘And I suppose,’ I smiled, ‘you have a perfectly rational reason for being out so early, some errand, perhaps?’

‘You have caught me, Miss Manticory. I confess to wanting to see the sunrise from the water before I bury my head under the black velvet. Would you care to join me?’

Signor Bon seated me in front of him so that my view was unimpeded. He rowed, as he explained, ‘
alla Veneziana
’, standing behind me, stooping rhythmically over a pair of oars. On the back of my neck, I felt the warm air disturbed by his efforts.

It was worth all Darcy’s anger, all Mr Rainfleury’s clucking and even worth keeping a secret from Alexander, the hour I was late for breakfast, the hour I spent as the sun rose above the city being rowed by the photographer around the back canals of Venice, dipping under trailing vines, being enveloped in the sudden shadows of bell towers, following the sugar-scented bakers’ boats. The ferry stops snapped their crisp striped awnings at us. I watched the women throwing ropes into the water to teach their young children to swim. I listened to the happy chatter of the bead-stringers of Castello sorting the treasures in the wide wooden trugs on their laps.

I never once saw Alexander, no matter how hard I looked.

By a mutual understanding, Signor Bon and I did not talk, but at times the pleasure was so great that it needed to be shared. Then I could not refrain from twisting round so that our eyes met. When I did so, he nodded with a solemn smile like a benign priest who has made a convert of an unlikely sinner.

I loved Venice so much that I probably should have confessed to idolatry at the moonlight-white church of San Tomà, where the priest was said by Mr Rainfleury to speak English, and indeed did so, richly and baroquely. His penances were far lighter than those the priests at St Teresa’s in Dublin had thought to give us – and he did not need to hold my hair through the grate like Father Maglinn in Harristown.

I did not tell him,
I am on fire for a married man of this town, and I pass tranced hours in desirous memories of him, and bitter minutes of knowing I may not have him for my own. This is the cost I knowingly pay for loving Alexander Sardou, and I had not realised that it would be beyond even my Swiney-fattened means. Meanwhile I take morning boat trips with another man, who may well be married. I am so wanton these days that I have neglected even to ask him. His intelligence and kindness come free of cost, and so I do not value them properly. Even that is a sin in itself.

Instead, I excavated an older sin, a Harristown sin: I confessed to the Venetian priest that once, on a bridge in Ireland, a man had touched me.

He asked, ‘And did you allow it because you loved him? Or was it for sensuality alone? Or was he an evildoer who wished to hurt you, my poor child? And did this foul thing against your will? If so then he is damned to Hell without my intervention, and your own innocence is unstained.’

He added, ‘And anyone who tells you otherwise is the one who carries the stain.’

Outside, in Campo San Tomà, I looked straight up at the sun, dazzled by my new freedom. And in that moment I wished I might never, ever go back to Ireland.

I even wondered if I should now confess for Darcy, that she had quite possibly murdered our father. I trusted this priest. Would he express the right outrage and comfort me for my loss, and tell me how to set my feelings in order about those crossed spoons over the secret grave in Harristown that my mind kept ever green and tended?

I was still thinking about it the next day when Signor Bon announced that he had discharged his commission in its entirety. Darcy ordered our trunks brought up to our rooms.

Signor Bon took me for one last dawn boat trip around Venice. This time my mood was tragic. The photographer told me, as if he guessed how it hurt me to be leaving, ‘Let the tears out, Miss Manticory. If you rinse your eyes, you shall see more clearly.’

In front of him, I was not ashamed to weep, though it felt wrong that he did not know all my reasons for not wanting to depart.

Two days later we were aboard the train at Santa Lucia Station, with Alexander staring up at me from the platform, getting smaller and smaller.

We travelled back to Dublin first class, stopping in Paris for new gowns and hats, as if born to shopping in glass arcades and dining on
cœurs de filet Rachel
among the better types of American and English travellers behind the impeccable lace curtains at Voisin’s in the rue Saint-Honoré or drinking tea among the crushed-strawberry upholstery, carpets and tapestries of the Ritz in the Place Vendôme.

Signor Bon’s photographs earned us a fee per random dozen – this was the rate agreed with Mr Rainfleury, who had learned the hard way from the dolls that it was better not to let us know when the public chose its favourites. The pictures went to press immediately and were in the Venetian shops in days. Every tourist wanted to take a piece of Venice away with them, despite the tax on photographs – charged by the pound of weight – and now they also took a piece of Swiney Godiva. Signor Bon reported wonderful earnings, especially after Mr Rainfleury set up a discreet mail-order business for Continental gentlemen collectors.

But a problem emerged. With fulsome apologies, Signor Bon revealed that a new convulsion of fiscal law meant that he could not send the money out of Italy. It was safely deposited in the Cassa di Risparmio di Venezia, which, Signor Bon reported, sternly refused to be so unpatriotic as to empty its coffers of Italian currency and send it in the direction of Dublin.

Back in Pembroke Street, Darcy fulminated, ‘I knew he would rob us, the slimy Italian! Too mean to give us a fright! I’ll make him scratch where he doesn’t itch.’

‘It’s not his fault about the money,’ protested Ida. ‘Did you know his first name is “Saverio”? It is like sageness and good savour altogether. And maybe even “saviour”. And he was so sweetly partial to Manticory.’

‘It was only because I tried to speak Italian,’ I protested hastily, for Darcy had turned to fix a black eye on me. ‘And as for the money, why don’t we go back to Venice and spend it there, staying a while?’ I suggested quietly.

A letter from Alexander – sent to a secret post office box I’d rented – had informed me he’d been hired as the painting tutor to a noble Venetian youth, whose brains left him unfitted to other activity. It did not tell me where Alexander was living. If the work came with lodgings, surely he’d have told me? He offered only a
poste restante
address for my replies.

Darcy mimicked my voice, ‘
Why don’t we go back to Venice
? For Manticory to moon over the old photo man? Or the bleached-looking Sardou? Because I don’t care two rows of pins if I never see that dirty place again.
Why don’t we go back to Venice?
Because it’s humid and inconvenient,’ she snapped, ‘and because I don’t wish it. I suppose the money’s safe enough there until we can work out a way of getting at it. It’s not as if we’re not earning in the meantime, anyway.’