The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (24 page)

This was the first time Darcy had treated Tristan to the full length of her tongue. This unexpected assault instantly fossilised him. The rest of us forgot about breathing; Tristan sat with his pen raised in one hand and his mouth open. Oona began to speak, but Darcy silenced her with a cutting gesture, saying, ‘We’ll come to you in a minute. I have not finished with our poet yet.

‘Oh yes,’ continued Darcy, ‘I am sure it is dim and hushed inside Oona’s hair tent. I am sure the tousle-haired poet nourishes his muse in the private weather in there. But does he actually write poetry when he is sighing so close to Oona’s breathing lips and counting the heartbeats pumping out between her two breasts? Is it any wonder we’ve had nothing more than a slim volume from you yet, Stoker? Did it never occur to your poetic brain that a marriage proposal – in writing – would be briefer and more manageable and more to the point?’

Tristan made a glowering exit, refusing to meet Oona’s pleading eyes. She fixed on his shapely back with desperate regret.

‘How do you like that coward?’ demanded Darcy. ‘He has put the fool on you, Oona. It had to be said.’

‘It did not at all have to be said,’ I told her.

I was heartsick in the days that followed to see that Darcy’s intervention had done nothing but harm. Tristan did not look straight at Oona any more. The excursions for pen-nibs and blotters continued but Oona now had to beg Tristan to allow her to accompany him. Then he came to announce his departure to pursue poetical business in the glass factories of Blackfriars and visit ‘a place of interest’ in London.

Oona stared at Tristan as if memorising him, as well she might. He had still not made any move in a matrimonial direction, and the life-blood was dripping out of her. She cared not a whisker that the audience loved her best every night. She only wanted Tristan to love her. As I brushed her hair, she confided to me that she had imagined romantic evenings dandering arm-in-arm along the Thames with Tristan. Our eyes met sadly in the mirror.

Mr Rainfleury had also deserted us for a ‘hair fair’ in Paris, and proclaimed a passion for viewing the same ‘walls of a certain private drawing room in London as Tristan’. Mr Rainfleury left both his wives at home, rather than take Enda with him. I guessed that he could not but disappoint one of them, so he had decided to disappoint them both.

When Tristan did speak again, it was not of marriage but of golden hair.

Hotfoot back from London, he had us assemble in the dining room, with Mr Rainfleury hovering supportively in the background. Tristan held a pile of books in his arms. He placed them solemnly on the table and asked us to sit.

‘Ladies,’ he announced, with the lyrical jut of his chin that always prefigured a commercial speech, ‘there is something that you shall need to understand for the sake of our continued collaborations. Ladies, let us think on the richness and fineness of golden hair. Such as Mr Rainfleury and myself have just been privileged to see in the home of Frederick Leyland, a collector of certain works of art, and a Brother of the Hair—’

‘Ahem, whether he knows it or not,’ mentioned Mr Rainfleury.

‘A Brother, if there ever was one,’ pronounced Tristan. ‘And a lover of yellow hair. Yellow hair: the colour of light; the colour of gold. Gold is a precious rarity; men will kill and die for it; gold is power.’ He waved the
Freeman’s Journal
. ‘Look here. The Gold Rush in California has caused eggs to sell at $10 a dozen. A pinch of gold dust buys a man a glass of tawny yellow whisky.’

‘And no doubt,’ interrupted Darcy, ‘pays the purchase of a good-time girl with golden hair.’

Tristan was not to be deflected. ‘What I was about to say, is that
good
girls are “as good as gold”. Think of spun gold and spinning wheels; faithful wives at abandoned hearths; spider women at their lures. Golden hairs are glinting fishing lines, catching men. “Reel him in, the Golden Youth, devour him,” whispers the lady spider, dispatching pale gold silk from her fertile thorax.’

‘Spiders?’ mourned Oona. ‘You’d have us spiders, Tristan?’

‘Weavers, combers,’ he answered hastily. ‘Gold for gold, shuttle and comb, in and out, in the sister arts of weaving and hair-combing. I see rolled gold ringlets on napes of necks! The longer, the thicker, the more golden the hair – the more vigorous the bliss promised. Golden labyrinths of hair for men to make their way through or get lost in.’

Darcy glared at Oona as if she had personally generated this obscenity.

Tristan cleared his throat. ‘
Now
, ladies, now gold has graduated. As you Swiney Godivas have been taking your place in the golden footlights, literature and art have lately decreed that blonde women can, ahem, go either way. For golden hair is fairy hair, sacred and wicked at the same time. A blonde may be a delightful, passive, pure child of a woman, knitting nests of domestic bliss in her fair tresses. Her fair hair might shelter the man who is vulnerable to darkness. Or our blonde might tarnish like brass, and show its same shameful, cheap venality.’

A tear started in Oona’s left eye. She raised a hand but dropped it again. Tristan did not look at her.

How could he ignore her? Onstage, we all knew, the greatest applause was still reserved for Oona. People wanted blonde. Our dolls’ sales sang it. The notorious hair trade confirmed it: the
Hairdressers’ Chronicle and Trade Journal
observed that false hair was a guinea and a half for blonde, even if indifferent quality, while best brown and black hair struggled to raise a guinea.

‘And hair,’ Tristan said sternly, ‘be it ever so palely soft, is like a hard-hearted woman, for it feels no pain.

‘Now, wrap your long eyes around this!’ He held up a hand-coloured daguerreotype of a painted woman. ‘It is this lady I have been to London to see! She about whom all Brothers of the Hair are gasping. Here is gold for you!’

The woman’s rich curled hair filled and seemed fit to burst out of the confinement of the frame. The corsetless nymph semi-reclined in an available manner, her diaphanous gown slipping from a shoulder. A poppy drowsed in a glass beside her. Her eyes were cast down to her mirror, but the effect of those lowered lids was not to exclude but to beckon.

‘Trollop,’ said Darcy.

‘Sensational,’ countered Tristan. ‘The word they use for her is “stunner”. As in “stunning, sensational success” – which might also, dear ladies, be ours. This is Mr Rossetti’s painting of Lady Lilith, which we saw in Mr Leyland’s house at Prince’s Gate. And this lady’s hair, the artist tells us, was “the first gold”.
Gold
,’ he repeated, meaningfully.

‘Who?’ Darcy demanded. ‘Do we know a Lilith?’

‘Lilith-the-fair’ – Tristan lowered his voice dramatically – ‘was created from the same handful of dust, and was Adam’s first, wilful wife. Discarded by him, she consorted with devils, with whom she bred still-born babies, while dining on the infants born of innocent humans. She never died, they say, but returns to earth nightly to seduce mortal men in their dreams.’

‘Trollop,’ insisted Darcy.

On Oona’s face I saw the dawning of apprehension. In front of my eyes I saw the words of the Corporation contract and I knew I would not be able to help her. In my bitterness, I asked, ‘So you have forgiven the poets then, Mr Browning and Mr Rossetti and such gentlemen?’

‘Mr Rossetti has done us the favour of writing an explicit sonnet about Lilith’s talent for drawing men into the bright web she wore and wove round the heart of her chosen youth. And he translated a sliver of dear old
Faust
that is quoted in Mr Swinburne’s essay here.’ He opened a marked page in a volume entitled
Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition 1868
, and read aloud:

‘Hold though thy heart against her shining hair,

If, by thy fate she spread it once for thee;

For when she nets a young man in that snare
,

So twines she him he never may be free.’

‘Oh really?’ drawled Darcy, looking from Tristan to Oona.

Tristan was not to be deflated. ‘Not only have I forgiven Mr Rossetti and his friends, but I have decided to parley with them, for the greater glory of the Swiney Godivas. Manticory, you and I shall henceforth anthologise a little, associate with the other poetical Brothers of the Hair. I’ll help,’ he smiled. He pointed to the pile of books he had brought with him. I consulted the spines:
German Fairy Tales, The Rape of the Lock
, and
Paradise Lost
. There were already slivers of paper inserted at several pages.

‘It’s certain Tristan knows what is best,’ murmured Oona disconsolately.

But you stand to lose the most
, I wanted to warn her.

‘The ledger agrees with you.’ Darcy accepted Oona’s primacy in that spirit, for with the essence and the scalp food she’d made sure from the start that we all profited equally from Oona’s sales.

Tristan started Oona gently with a soberly clad Portia, whose hair was
a golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men/Faster than gnats in cobwebs
.

He had Pertilly sprinkle Oona with silver dust for her role as Frau Holda of the fairy tales, a white witch of the spinning wheel who teaches good girls to comb their hair so that pearls and rubies drop into their virtuous laps.

Next Oona’s hair was piled in a towering style and she was dressed in a dusty panniered confection to be Belinda of Mr Pope’s poem. The audiences loved the strange contrast between Oona’s deep voice reciting her lines and the moonlight hair that massed around her face, ‘insnaring’ men to rape her locks.

She also received a standing ovation for Eve in Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, though I could not be sure whether this was for the poetry or the tight pink costume she’d been sewn into, and its three anxiously large fig leaves. Oona did her best to look wanton as she spoke of ringlets that curled like the tendrils of a vine.

Tristan set up a ‘Floral Tributes’ stall so men could throw flowers when Oona played a loosely robed Circe of the glorious hair, another weaver. Here again her hair rippled loose – not neatly braided or pinned, but cascading down in a way that was only suitable in the privacy of the married bedroom.

I carped, ‘Won’t the public be sick of seeing Oona’s hair always on full display?’

‘True,’ said Tristan. ‘Let’s have a plait for a change.’

As Rapunzel, Oona’s hair made a ladder for both a prince with a virile sword, played by Tristan, who had taken to joining her on the stage, and the diabolic witch, played by Ida, the possessor of the Swineys’ most harrowing laugh.

Oona’s short tableau of the blonde demon in
Lady Audley’s Secret
was such a success that Tristan devised a whole show in which, via quick changes of costume and hairstyle, she portrayed a series of fair horrors from the latest sensation novels – libidinous, yellow-haired calculating machines for meshing money with sensual gratification. Tender-hearted men were their fuel. Ruined men, hollowed and exsanguinated, were the debris they left behind them.

Oona was never able to conjure enough ancient evil to do justice to these roles. So Tristan reconfigured the cast, with Berenice or Darcy narrating while Oona did her straining utmost to
look
the part.

And from prose Tristan moved easily into publicity. Oona was dazzlingly perfect in a Swiney Godiva Scalp Food newspaper advertisement that cleverly alluded to Mr Rossetti’s
Lady Lilith
without being so derivative as to get us into trouble. Oona was required to perform the feat of impersonating an ensorcelling lady cannibal and, at the same time, communicating our scalp food’s healthful properties to our customers.

It was small wonder to me that she cried so hard after her day in the photographer’s studio.

Tristan was not going to put himself in the way of Darcy’s tongue again if he could help it. So he took care to have me include a series of poetic effusions for night-haired, death-loving heroines in our shows.

The lights would dim and he would whisper offstage, ‘Hair! Women’s hair! It lies against their throats like a lover. A dying lover. Hair lives beyond death . . . Is it not the lure of the grave itself that gives raven-winged hair its irresistible, supernatural lustre?’

The lights rose to show Darcy glowering over a pomegranate as Mr Rossetti’s
Proserpine
, the shades of Hell darkening her eyes and the serpentine gyre of her neck and hair showing all her power. She was Mr Sandys’
Medea
, clutching a blood-red necklace, and also his
Rosamund
, her murderous hair as black and tumultuous as her soul. In a shadowy background, a prone Tristan played the husband she had just slain, while I, in the wings, sent a skull spilling wine spinning across the stage. Darcy’s most celebrated role was as Medusa, using an ingenious device adapted from an egg-beater to raise wiggling snakes in her hair.

In the Pembroke Street drawing room, Tristan constantly pestered me to darken my songs for Darcy. ‘Threats of hair violence,’ he advised, ‘bring on fear and fear opens purses. Never let them forget that hair is a frontier, a precarious place of danger. Our bodies are contained in their skin-clad lineaments, except where the hair gushes forth,’ he declaimed. ‘The only other things that spill out of our bodies are the liquids of excretion or exertion—’