The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (32 page)

‘Don’t you be trying to get round me. The cheek of you! Somewhere better,’ said Darcy, marching stiff-legged back to the gondola and settling herself into it. Again, Signor Bon’s eyes searched out mine. I shrugged, hoping to save him the trouble of arguing with Darcy, and the inevitable humiliation that would follow the unpleasantness.

As our gondolas loped like long black wolves from palace to palace, the mist began to coat everything with an uncertainty that seemed thrillingly spiritual, as if a thousand delicate lamps were uttering ectoplasm like the famous lady mediums back in London. The water seemed to smoke and boil beneath us. The buildings steamed, dripping with this strange false cold heat, as if Venice were a Gothic Atlantis pulled suddenly from the freezing-hot depths. Gulls wavered in the thickened air. The mist chewed at painted walls, darkening the pale ones, bleaching the vivid.

The boat-bound Venetians made friends with the mist, singing crooning lullabies to it and holding aloft lanterns that made but tiny incursions of happiness into the gloom.

‘What is that caterwauling?’ demanded Darcy. ‘Is someone slaughtering a goat?’

‘We have our special fog songs,’ explained Signor Bon.

The photographer pointed out Ca’ d’Oro, which hosted a private well of fog inside its fretted coffer of a courtyard. The side canals were abysses of darkness, with just a few white ghosts of walls to bear witness to the finiteness of things. The Grand Canal was transformed into a tunnel. Even the prows of our own gondolas were blunted by the mist. And the empty palaces, which seemed to dominate the city, grinned like rows of skulls, their eyeballs dark on the brain.

By the time we had been rowed to another three establishments, we were creatures of the mist, our minds clouded with it, our lungs soaked with it, our hair darkly stained by it, our imaginations rife with it. Darcy was finally placated by a brocaded, balconied apartment at 90 lire in the Albergo Reale Danieli. Signor Bon’s face showed a mixture of amusement and pain. I commanded my own features to remain bland when he said, ‘I shall advise Signor Sardou of your final lodgement here.’

He waved up at the elegant staircase. Like Annora’s, his fingers were pallid – from constant immersion in the liquids of his trade, I guessed. I noticed that he stooped a tint, perhaps from habitually accommodating low doorways in Venice, or from passing so much time under the black-velvet hood of his photographic apparatus. I wanted to ask if I might see his studio, but he quickly bade us goodnight – addressing me alone in Italian. From the safe privacy of the Italian tongue, I longed to ask him how well he knew Alexander.

Instead, I asked, ‘How you come to speak such excellent English, Signor Bon?’

Making sure that I could follow him, he told me in simple slow words that he had learned my tongue from a priest who served the expatriate Church of England community. He had refined it by many conversations with the ‘
anglosassone
’ tourists who came to him as clients.

‘They want to be married to Venice for ever, in an image, so I suppose I am a priest myself,’ he smiled.

In English or Italian, his voice was never static. The words came out like the shine brushed into hair, a roughness shed at the point of delivery yet that still gave a sense of energy to the quiescence. There was a trapped hilarity inside it, even when he spoke gravely. Now, without changing his expression, he told me confidentially, ‘But I never had such a subject as your sister Darcy before. She makes one long for the tender manners of Attila the Hun. I would not like to watch her eating meat.’

Up in our private parlour, Oona remonstrated gently, ‘That seemed a rather hard introduction for Signor Bon, Darcy. He must think we are very spoiled, the way you carried on there.’

Mr Rainfleury added reproachfully, ‘I hope he does not reconsider his offer. It has put the Corporation to considerable expense to get you all here.’

‘In fact, the first place was acceptable,’ said Darcy, ‘but it was important to show this Bon-Bon how we are to be treated before he starts pointing that nasty black thing at us and blowing our heads off with its explosions.’

Alexander arrived within half an hour. His mouth was bent all out of shape, and even the sight of me did not bring a smile to it. No wonder he looked out of sorts, I reasoned indulgently. He must have longed to be the one to introduce me to the Grand Canal. Meanwhile I longed to tell him my polished impressions of Monet, Cézanne, Renoir and their debates with light and shade.

He listened coolly to my sisters’ laborious descriptions of his own city. He escorted us to a restaurant, making sure to brush his hands against my own at every possible opportunity, sending ripples of pins and needles up my arms which, surprisingly, did not spend themselves until they reached my breasts. He knew. He truly knew. I saw it in the beckoning shapes of his smiles. He suppered with us, ordering simple dishes in a sumptuous Italian. In his native tongue, his voice was elegant; the movements of his head subtly adjusted to accommodate its inflections.

Alexander and I exchanged a telegraph office full of communications under the cover of the drawing block he set on the supper table. Silently, I forgave him for not meeting me at the station. Silently, he told me that he would make it up to me.

‘What do you think of the Swiney Godivas in Venice, Mr Sardou?’ chortled Mr Rainfleury, his poor creature of a moustache lurid with tomato sauce.

‘It suits them beautifully,’ smiled Alexander. ‘I see possibilities for them here.’

He slid his eyes over mine. His smile went trickling down my body, inside my clothes. And all parts south of my waist lurched and churned like water cleaved by a gondola.

There was little time for sightseeing – or Alexander’s possibilities – as Signor Bon desired to put us to work immediately the next day.

‘Wants to recoup all his old expenses at the Danieli,’ Darcy observed acidly, counting the gold Napoleons in her purse.

‘More likely,’ said Mr Rainfleury, ‘Bon doesn’t want the public glimpsing for free what he hopes soon to sell them printed in albumen on board.’

Nevertheless, we squeezed in a few hours of Venice early in the morning and late at night. Our hair tightly coiled in snoods, and our heads covered with hats, we were whisked by our
laquais de place
around Piazza San Marco and led over the Rialto Bridge to the squabbling market. Ida squealed at the fish still flailing on the stalls and crabs curling their red fists at her. The Doges’ Palace was fit for just half an hour of our time, and we covered the Accademia Gallery at a trot. As for more gondola trips, we were told ‘later’, in a mysterious voice by Signor Bon, who had succeeded in a negotiation with Mr Rainfleury, that Alexander might
not
be permitted to sketch while the photographer did his work.

Mr Rainfleury told us, ‘It seems the photography fellow has taken a dislike to Sardou’s portrait. He says he does not sell girls like Mr Sardou does, whatever that means.’

‘I’m sure—’ I commenced indignantly, and then stopped myself before Darcy could see my blush.

In the end, I was relieved that sketching was forbidden, for the work – the part dictated by Tristan and Mr Rainfleury, that is – would have made Alexander pity me, or despise me. Signor Bon’s own compositions were, however, a welcome revelation.

The first photograph was at the Ca’ d’Oro, the palace we had seen on the night of our arrival. By day it seemed to consist mostly of air laced together with slender ribbons of pink and grey stone. We sisters were posed in profile on its monumental first-floor balconies. Then we let our hair down, side-saddle, as it were, so it streamed off the parapets like medieval pennants.

The city might have been designed as a showcase for long hair, which, we now discovered, never looked so soft as when juxtaposed against marble, nor so liquid as when lolling above jade-green waves.

The next day we were made to climb the dusty bell tower of San Vidal, an idea that little pleased my sisters. I volunteered to go to the topmost floor, for the joy of the view over the backbone of Dorsoduro – as Signor Bon explained – to the lagoon and its islands. I was to push my hair out of the belfry, and below me was Darcy, feeding her hair from an arched window, and below her Oona and so on until there were seven Venetian-Irish Rapunzels with their hair hanging down one tower in one multicoloured rope.

Signor Bon ferried us in his own green boat to and from our lodgings at the Danieli, his apparatus nestling among us like an eighth dark sister. He brought us the first prints that evening. I had to concede a quiet admiration for his way of telling stories with our hair. He was a better poet than Tristan, because he understood the feel of things, of the sensations to be gleaned at the conjunctures of stone and water and hair. He was sensitive to the potency of the imagery he created, and he was afire with the possibility of creation. For him, our hair had its own things to declare – and they were nuanced, natural, thought-provoking things – not just something hot and vulgar, staged to strike primal fear or envy, rousing all those passions only to sell something else. And then there was his voice. Even talking of a broken hinge on one of his many monstrous pieces of machinery, Mr Bon’s voice told a story that kept your ear pleasurably inclined towards him.

The photographer’s mood darkened the next evening, when it was time to execute the first of Tristan’s ‘delicious ideas’. He had hired seven gondolas and fourteen gondoliers, each more handsome than the last. We were stationed in front of the Corte del Duca, where Signor Bon had set up his apparatus. One Swiney sister was made to stand in the steadying embrace of a gondolier at the bow of every gondola, her hair flowing into the next boat, and so on until there was a procession of seven gondolas going down the Grand Canal, all linked by hair. A skull illuminated by a candle burned at every pair of Swiney feet. The photographs were taken at dusk, each of us holding a ceremonial torch to illuminate our faces and the ends of the hair of the sister we followed.

Signor Bon worked rapidly on two devices, two boys assisting him with the plates. He fired magnesium at us endlessly, until my eyes were afire with stars and dust.

The technique ‘
chiaro di luna
’ he explained, required two photographs of each image, one to capture the light of the background and the other for the buildings. He would combine the images in the studio, one bathed in light, the other dark, on pale blue paper.

The photographer executed his work with his mouth drawn down. This much I already knew from Mr Rainfleury’s comments: Signor Bon loved the aesthetic qualities of our hair, but he did not like us flaunting the sexual allure of it, or hinting at looseness in our characters. He had flinched at the skulls, protesting to Mr Rainfleury. ‘Why must there be death? What is lacking with beauty alone? It is not respect. For love
or
death, to make them be so . . . intimate.’

Signor Bon was no happier with Mr Rainfleury’s order that a second set of gondola photographs be taken in the same way, but by daylight, in which each of us cradled our own ‘Miss Swiney’ as we reclined on a velvet banquette. He regarded the dolls with ill-disguised disgust. We were required to point with pleasure at certain buildings, as if showing our dollies the great beauties of Venice, while, of course, surpassing all of them with our own hirsute kind of loveliness. For the occasion, the dolls were dressed in pinafores embroidered with Celtic crosses by the nuns of the Poor Clares Convent in Kenmare.

‘Make sure you get the detail,’ urged Mr Rainfleury, by which I guessed a private financial connection with the convent that would not appear in the Swiney Corporation books.

And Signor Bon’s expression was positively thunderous when Mr Rainfleury put us Swineys to work in
the
Sala Orientale at Caffè Florian in San Marco. The room hosted seven exotic painted beauties framed in golden arches. One, a Negress, was scandalously clothed only from the waist down. We Swineys undressed our hair, and draped it from the frames of the paintings and nestled back in it, so all that was visible to Signor Bon’s lens was our faces, the lovely features of the painted harem, and a web of variegated curls. The crowd pressing its noses against the window roared with delight. Signor Bon muttered, ‘
Poverine: che insulto!
’ I longed to tell him that he was not the only one who regretted that we Swineys had filled that elegant space with our hair, where Mr Goldoni, Lord Byron and Herr Goethe had filled it with their intellects.

Unlike other photographers and unlike our patrons, Signor Bon always asked permission if he wished to touch our hair, to lift it or drape it. His fingers never lingered, but their movements were agreeably quick and firm. Only his pleasant scent of leather and coffee lingered.

More gondoliers were hired for scenes in which each sister lassoed her cavalier with her hair, wrapping it round his pale neck and drawing him to her. I tried not to meet the hot toffee eyes of my all-too-willing gondolier, and was again extremely grateful for the absence of Alexander.

Poor Oona was also required to act out Mr Browning’s poem ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ in which the narrator, currently lodging in a madhouse cell, tells how he ended the girl’s life:

. . . and all her hair

In one long yellow string I wound

Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her .
. .