The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (28 page)

It is the least of the distances between us
, I thought.
And they are growing longer not shorter by the minute, that’s the pity of it
.

I had not calculated aloud, and yet he corrected me, ‘I was seventeen, and had run away from . . . home. There are not so many years between you and me.’

The distances suddenly shortened as if viewed from the wrong end of the telescope. Both of us caught our breaths. Then Mr Sardou was talking about the scalp food again, but with a slight flush staining his white throat.

Our argument over quackery spilled into another about Mr Dickens’s golden-haired ‘Fairy’ and ‘Angel’ heroines – so sugared, so ignorant, so passive, in his view. Mr Sardou, it appeared, was a great reader of novels. He spoke dismissively of ‘Girls like cows, who let cleverer people milk their hair! How can they do it? Sideshow hair – worse! Makes a sideshow out of women! Is this art? No, it is farming and manufacture. And if we look at the moral dimension, the use of the female body, well—’

His face flooded with dark colour.

He spoke up for Mr Dickens’s witches and Medusas, even for women like Madame Defarge: ‘Free to roam the streets and have adventures of their own devising,’ he said approvingly.

Mr Sardou had read and thought about long feminine hair at least as much as I had. In what way, I wanted to ask him, was his thinking higher than mine?

I challenged, ‘But do not strictly commercial sculptures like these ridiculous busts make you a stranger to great art? A hair-farmer yourself ? A sideshow ring-master?’

‘Yes, indeed. But that is not why I accepted the frightful commission, Manticory.’

Again he had said it, my name, my private label, the thing that made me not one of my sisters, ‘Manticory’. His hand reached towards mine.

Darcy’s voice boomed from the corridor, ‘Manticory! Where are you?’

Mr Sardou added quietly, ‘And nor is it why I am so often in the wings, watching you. Your Darcy makes the running, but it is
you
who makes the weather in the room. Yet—’

Darcy’s heavy foot was audible on the stairs. ‘Manticory! What is it you are about?’

When I turned to excuse myself, Mr Sardou was already gone.

Chapter 24

Darcy mocked me for missing the best of the supper and informed me that there was not a crumb left of the cherry cake, which ‘was the best thing you could imagine’.

‘I’m too tired to be hungry,’ I told her. I forced out a theatrical yawn.

I could not wait to go to bed and be alone with Mr Sardou’s words.

His disparagements had not pleased me. I preferred to linger on the individual mouthfuls rather than the too-bitter general flavour of the conversation. I had never before met someone who spoke the way I would have loved to write, with the sinuous byways to his phrases and satire aflame between the syllables. I’d learned to blunt my instruments when writing material for our shows. But I still felt pain at every large and beautiful word I sacrificed to popular taste, and every literary allusion that was snapped off at the stalk before it could flower into a telling analogy.

Mr Sardou could make good words without my putting them into his mouth. The fact that he wrote his own script meant of course that he had said things I did not wish to hear. Why had he sought to diminish me in my own estimation? And so lightly, as if my shame were a pleasant subject for his wit? Yet his diagnosis of my moral state matched my own. I could not fight for a better view of myself. This line of thought being sadly uncomfortable, I preferred to dwell on his final comments.

And nor is it why I am so often in the wings, watching you.

The obvious construction was that he was watching me because he liked to do so. But there were undercurrents to those words, pitfalls in his final
Yet—
. The negative of my fears was not easily dragged into an uncompromised positive. But, as I lay sleepless hours in my bed, my own desire began to fashion certainties out of obscurity. I grew vain on what I imagined.

And there was no gainsaying
It is you who makes the weather in the room
.

None.

After that, Mr Sardou was even more often in the wings. Darcy was watching me, and I could not linger to talk to him after the shows. But I could steal looks. And so could he. He had a way of looking at me with an expression my imagination interpreted as frank longing and a tint of irony too, at his own unconditional surrender.

I never knew when I would see him. Sometimes it was once a week, sometimes a month passed without him. I longed for him so much that I was capable of imagining him there in pale corporality when he was known to be in Galway doing a coal heiress in marble.

Once I had imagined that he entertained warm thoughts towards me, my imagination became greedy and shockingly sensual. Contaminated by my own scripts, I grew Gothic in my imaginings. I craved a lock of his babyfine hair, which was quite unlike what a man usually has. I saw him waking up with my hair in his mouth. I dreamed of my hair growing from the floorboards beneath his feet.

Mr Sardou gave me not a filament’s more substance with which to nourish my imaginings. After those words behind the curtains, our encounters had not stretched to another conversation. I was still feeding on the memories of the first one.

And the looks he still gave me, when Darcy wasn’t watching.

After we’d done a hard nine months on the road with the essence and the scalp food, Tristan judged it time to birth a new Swiney Godiva hair preparation.

He summoned us to the green parlour, placing two objects on the table, each covered by a snowy handkerchief. He whipped the handkerchief off the first object, revealing a familiar pot: Rowland’s Macassar Oil.

‘First made in 1793,’ he announced, ‘and the happy owner of a distinguished literary and royal pedigree. According to its makers, Rowland’s has been used by the Empress of Russia, the Emperor of China and the King and Queen of France. It was mentioned by Lord Byron in his
Don Juan
. After that, the oil developed even more literary pretensions – it advertised in the first edition of Thackeray’s
The Virginians
, and has been seen in every possible newspaper or periodical since. Now!’

He lifted the handkerchief off the second object and turned it round to face us. A green glass pot bore the label:
Swiney Godiva Stimulation Oil to Ensure Vigorous Roots
.

Tristan bowed. ‘It does everything that Rowland’s does, but it will do it for the Swiney Godiva Corporation.’

The back of each bottle was illustrated with a personal testimony by one of us sisters, drawn in black-and-white ink. Reclining among our locks, our likenesses held up a box of the preparation with a smile. We were captioned:
I find Swiney Godiva Stimulation Oil exceedingly beneficial and I make a point of using it always
.

The launch of our new product exposed us to the point where we became what Tristan proudly described as ‘eponymical’. Words were coined from our name . . . ‘to Swiney’ your hair meant to have it grow very long. In Ireland, to ‘do a Godiva’ no longer meant to ride a horse naked through Coventry but to let down your hair in public, an event that became as common in the rowdy public houses as dancing on the tables had once been.

Tristan told me, as if I would be pleased, ‘And they’re saying “as red as Manticory” instead of “as red as blood” these days.’

Alexander Sardou waited in the wings that same night. He showed me one of the advertisements, dragging it out of his leather case as if it were a dead fish.

‘Did you know about this?’ he asked me. ‘Is this how you see yourself ?’

It was so easy to please Mr Rainfleury and Tristan. All I had to do was be a doll, act like a doll, speak as little as a doll, open and close my eyes when they wished it. To please Mr Sardou seemed almost impossible, and yet it was the one thing I now craved to do.

Chapter 25

I
did not wish for my blood to be circulated by the mouse’s heart Mr Sardou attributed to me: I made a stand.

‘I am out of inspiration for new ways to sell ourselves,’ I told Tristan and Darcy. ‘It is not a decent way to go on. We are selling more than—’

By the next day, Darcy had made a convenience of my squeamishness. She herself devised a crude horror of a show whereby each Swiney impersonated one of the Seven Deadly Sins. She reserved Lust for herself. I was forced into Envy. But Pertilly as Greed attracted too much ribald attention. So that act was swiftly disinvented in favour of Tristan’s idea of striking a series of ‘mute attitudes’ such as had been performed by Emma Hamilton, mistress of the hero of Trafalgar. Our ‘attitudes’, of course, were always to do with hair: the original Berenice lining the temple with her hair, Ariadne spinning her web, Lorelei luring men to their death, Medusa striking a man to petrifaction. An ingenious lantern swung across the stage, illuminating one Swiney sister at a time and plunging the others into darkness.

As long as we did not move, Tristan insisted that we could dare some quite provocative material, though only of course during shows staged in the later evening. Oona posed as Botticelli’s Venus on a papier mâché scallop shell. In the same pink costume, with flowers in her hair, she impersonated the goddess Flora. Berenice took on Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet, Jesus being played by Tristan. She dipped her hair in a large-labelled bottle of Swiney Godiva Hair Essence before approaching Tristan’s shapely bare foot. Enda was Delilah cutting the hair of the sleeping Samson, also played by Tristan, while smiling at the Philistine soldiers waiting in the shadows, an effect executed with shadow puppets. Pertilly was Charlotte Corday having her long hair cut off before she faced our home-made guillotine, glinting in tin foil and fresh cranberry sauce.

When the ‘attitudes’ grew stale and the audiences took to muttering behind their hands, Darcy began to torment me with finely serrated barbs.

‘I thought you wanted to be a writer, Manticory,’ she taunted me. ‘When was ever a backwoods girl given such a chance as this? Still, if you haven’t the ambition, or the talent—’

To tempt me back to work, Tristan made me the gift of a new Hansen Writing Ball, a metallic hedgehog of a machine invented by a Danish priest. It shot out words in response to violent batterings of tiny circular keys. Once I got used to the dreadful massacre of the quiet, I loved the spiny creature, and would not be parted from it. It was pitifully easy to tempt me. I had missed writing; I missed writing for an audience who applauded and offered attentive silences in expectation of what I delivered. I missed the triumphs of inserting some good phrases and fine words that escaped Darcy’s brutal edits. And I hated to see what Darcy and Tristan were doing to decent behaviour. They’d have the Swiney Godivas out there fully naked, I feared, if they thought it would sell more tickets. And soon enough that was exactly what they dreamed up. Tristan began to speak of acquiring seven wooden horses from a circus and the Swiney Godivas mounting them in nothing but our hair and discreet pink costumes, very tight around the limbs. When I saw his letter to Duffy’s Circus lying in the silver tray in the hall at Pembroke Street, I finally broke, and consented to write, if only we could be spared the indecency of Lady Godiva-ing for the public.

Thinking to borrow some dignity, I consented to recast short sketches from respectable plays. I also rescripted hair-prone incidents from admired novels. So many writers of our time deployed female hair in fiction: it had got so that a hairless novel would have been greeted with disdain. A good head of hair was as necessary to a heroine as a stainless character and one interesting personality flaw for her hero to save her from. My brutal robberies were conscientiously listed in the programme as ‘tributes’ to the geniuses of Mr Dickens, Mr Thackeray and their colleagues.

When Mr Sardou reproached me backstage for returning to my Swiney scripts, I was ready with a reply. I told him that I was seeking out stories in which women who happened to be gifted with hair also had cerebral powers of their own – rather than dramas in which we Swineys deployed our bodies to sell hair products. I also pointed out how, in my new works, hair revealed murders, like Mrs Manston’s in
Desperate Remedies
or how it acquired its own formidable identity, as did Arabella French’s chignon in Mr Trollope’s
He Knew He Was Right
.

Mr Sardou looked up into the dust motes above the stage, and shook his head.

I noticed a small tear in the shoulder of his velvet jacket.

‘It is deft,’ he said, ‘and it is clever. You have words to burn, Manticory. But is this what you always hoped for yourself ?’

I blushed and looked down.

When I looked up, Mr Sardou’s eyes were on Ida, and his luminous forehead was creased with concern. Pertilly and Oona were also staring helplessly at the spectacle Ida was making of herself. She had stopped speaking her English lines and had disintegrated into gibberish while pulling her hair convulsively and feeding it into her mouth. Darcy dispatched Enda and Berenice to perform one of their duets in front of Ida. Oona and I tiptoed out behind the twins and gently pulled Ida into the wings. Mr Sardou picked her up, covered her mouth with one hand, and carried her off to the dressing room where Darcy was ready with hard words and sal volatile.