The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (50 page)

What does that mean?’ demanded Darcy.

‘That our ancestors were dogs,’ I replied. ‘Starving dogs.’

We stole our neighbours’ pears from their trees.

Darcy went every few days to San Marco to trap a fat pigeon in her skirt and stamp on its head. She rolled it into her reticule with her boot. Too many of our meals were done that way.

‘Those pigeons are sacred to the Venetians,’ I warned her, ‘like the cows of Hindustan.’

‘Why should those fat hogs of birds die of overeating while we starve?’ Darcy retorted, waving a tiny bare wishbone.

Pertilly came to us with a story of a restaurant owner who would never let a woman with long hair go hungry.

‘How did you find out?’ Darcy asked. ‘And where have you been all day?’

We took to dining at Signor Pagin’s dark
trattoria
after he had closed to the public. Pertilly suffered him to stroke her hair after he had passed around the steaming bowls of
zuppa di peoci
in one hand and dishes of
fegato alla Veneziana
with the other. Without being asked, he poured us glasses of
Vermouth amaro
and even De Luze champagne. He didn’t ask for money payment, but if he was allowed to wash our hair for us in one of his vast pastry basins, then we might take home a food parcel that would last for days, even though the whiff of garlic, embedded in his fingernails, also floated about our hair until the next wash. But we were frankly grateful for the hot water on our scalps, as Darcy had forbidden even that at home now.

And it was truly lovely to hear him talk of Pertilly. ‘It is,’ Signor Pagin told us frequently, ‘as if Tiziano painted her hair and Rubens her body.’

And Pertilly blushed and cast her eyes down like a Bellini Madonna.

Darcy allowed him to talk like this because we survived on Signor Pagin’s generosity – until the real cold came. Then even his devotion did not suffice to keep us in health and out of absolute misery.

That first winter of poverty: how the wind shook the
palazzo
, how the cold inched up the walls and up our legs to the very core of us.

The rugs had been taken away the previous summer so that the fleas would not colonise them. That winter they did not come back. I imagined that Pertilly had turned the proceeds into soup. Our shoes were not up to the cold of those
terrazzo
floors. We took cushions from the armchairs and placed them on the floor, making islands from which to jump, so that the ice of the floor did not touch our shivering feet.

We were down to one fur, and so we took turns to go out to be fed by Signor Pagin. I hunched over my food in the
trattoria
, grateful that the restaurateur, with frank pity, wanted only to wash my hair and not to stroke it. His hands were brisk and the water was warm, and I was so tired from fighting the hunger that I felt nothing more than gratitude.

The cold grew more extreme. The bora wind descended from Siberia, and worried the town in its wolfish teeth. We did not go out, except for Pertilly, who seemed to stand it better than the rest of us. We wore the fur indoors too, each of us rationed to four hours inside it, like taking turns to be eaten by a bear. We took to the Venetian
scaldino
, an earthenware pot of hot charcoal, which we rested on our laps so that it could warm us from the middle outwards, like the pot we used to place under our scrawny haunches in Harristown. But the fumes gave me a constant headache. As did the melancholy weight of gelid humidity and the remorseful chiming of the church bells in the clear frozen air. We let down our hair and wore it like shawls, trailing it in the bitter dust of the frozen floor. We stayed more and more in bed, wrapped in hair cocoons and thoughts made vague by hunger.

Pertilly disappeared for long periods of the day, and returned not just with extra morsels from Signor Pagin but even with a small chicken or sack of polenta or a single candle for the seashell lamp. She refused to say where she had been or how she had earned the food. It seemed unlikely that she had descended into exchanging her body for these items, though Darcy was not slow in suggesting it. I supposed that she had undertaken some menial duties at the restaurant for Signor Pagin, in exchange for some hours of warmth by the fire, and for the food she shared with us.

Darcy seemed to feel the weight of our unspoken recriminations, or at least felt obliged to refute them.

She said, ‘I am a victim more than anyone. I had more, so I had more to lose. Did that even occur to you in your heads?’

Oona took her hand. ‘Poor Darcy! You just didn’t understand the money, did you? You didn’t want to show them that you didn’t know. Mr Rainfleury ran circles around you.’

‘Was I supposed to know anything about money?’ sniffed Darcy. ‘I thought it was my
vision
that was prized.’

‘And your Gorgon-ness, for getting what you want,’ Berenice observed.

‘For destroying the world,’ put in Pertilly.

‘Sure Darcy’s always been destroying the world, but isn’t she so very good at doing it?’ said Oona. ‘Would you have her do something she’s not good at?’

I watched my sisters enclose Darcy in the old tribal interiority. She looked over their heads at me, proud and hard as a stone gargoyle who fully believes that the congregation inside his church is assembled to worship himself alone.

It was just of a piece with the rest of our bad luck that now it commenced to freeze and to snow.

While Darcy was recasting herself as a victim, the snow was like a witch endlessly unwinding slanting coils of white hair. The lagoon froze over and ice floes patrolled the Grand Canal. The squares were white blotters, scribbled with careful footprints. I looked with envy at the
facchini
who kept warm and paid by shovelling snow from the banked-up streets into the canals – cushions of white flumping into the water. Even the boats were softly upholstered with snow and rose up to their bottom seams above the frozen small canals where the ice was pocked with bubbles of fish breath and the tracks of tiny birds.

Then there blew a wind that would hoist a dead sow out of the mud and make it fly the width of the world. The snow settled to a white stitching at the seams of every roof. In the wintry flood tides, the water was the colour of the shadow inside a dying lily. The wooden
bricole
pointed up in desperation like the tips of a dying man’s fingers.

I had used to love it whenever the snow lingered a moment on my red hair, spotting it with white. Now I grew to hate the snow and the ice. I hated it for the pain in my chilblained extremities and because it cost me my boat trips with Saverio. Although I had shown him but scant appreciation, I found that I could ill spare the lulling serenity of them and his quiet company nearby.

The cold made the Swineys even more pagan than we had been – we avoided the church at San Tomà where the cold would martyr a polar bear.

Our blood ran slow with cold; we’d do anything that would put a bit of heat in us. It got so that we all slept in Darcy’s bed, barely breathing in the icy air that fell down the chimney. Feeling my sisters’ bodies beside me under the covers brought cruel memories of being in Alexander’s arms. Darcy reported that she had seen him near the
trattoria
.

‘With his wife,’ she said, looking at me. ‘And what would suit the creature but to go charging off in the other direction at the sight of me! Dragging the poor woman behind him, and the belly on her stretched to its giddy limit. Imagine, Manticory! That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Imagining?’

I rose and stumbled out of the bed, slipping on the icy floor.

‘Darcy, could you not be even a little bit kind?’ begged Oona. ‘And Manticory suffering so that she’d rather break her legs than stay warm beside you?’

‘I’ll try,’ sniffed Darcy, ‘but I’m not promising a great deal. Come back to bed, Manticory. There’s no use in lying there like a nun on a church floor.’

Surrounded by the thin bones of my sisters, I dreamed that night of all the Swiney Godivas, even Enda, as seven ice queens in the moonlight. We were standing barefoot and naked in a garden, our loosened hair enfolding us. Saverio might have photographed us like that, I thought on waking, with our hair transformed into a cascade of brittle crystal that joined us to the frozen earth beneath our feet.

Somehow, we lived through that winter and into the next spring. We ate just enough to keep the cruelty of the weather from killing us. We kept ourselves in heart by singing, warming our throats with old songs from County Kildare. Darcy even gained a little weight. I suspected that she had enjoyed some unaccustomed luck at her gambling, but took care to eat it on the way home so as to avoid sharing.

Some time in those bitter months Alexander’s child must have been born, a winter baby for a wintry father. If Darcy knew, she manifested her attempt to be kind by not torturing me with the news. As long as I did not know the sex or name of that infant, I could pretend, for whole minutes at a time, that it did not exist.

Pertilly continued to absent herself every afternoon for a few hours and to return with some potatoes or fish. When summer came, we took ferries to the islands and foraged for seaweed and mosses that she turned into soup.

And by that time I was also away from the house by day, employed by Saverio in his
laboratorio
, a graceful room bathed by the light of five tall windows. I did not know if he really needed an assistant to arrange the hands of his portrait customers on the arms of the prayer chair or faux-marble columns. Could he not, I wondered, manage without me standing by him in the small darkened room while he turned the spectral images on his glass plates into living faces? Did he truly require someone else to write the labels for the envelopes that held those plates? Or to trim the blue paper he used to give night scenes their special luminosity? Did he need me to tell stories to his child-subjects in my imperfect Italian, to keep them from fidgeting themselves into a blur?

He paid me the compliment of never requesting me to model for him. Nor did he ask me to animate the eyes of his gentlemen customers by letting down my hair for them.

Feeling guilty for his favours, I offered it to him for some photographs.

‘Thank you, no,’ he told me.

Even though I often found his eyes on me, they were not on my hair.

However, he taught me things about my own hair I’d never known, demonstrating how to hand-tint one of the old Swiney Godiva postcards.

‘Red is not red,’ he told me, squeezing a bewildering array of colours onto his palette. ‘If someone shaved a rusted pipe – the way a careful girl might pare her orange and roll its single rind around her wrist and let the light make yellow lichen of it in parts with the shadows of the foxes and deer lurking there and the glimmer of churning goldfish, a crab’s claw, a brick and a kidney bean besides – if someone did that, they would perhaps
begin
to assemble the colours of red in your hair.’

With a fine brush, he began to apply kidney bean, fox and lichen to his photograph of me.

‘But still,’ he said gravely, ‘this is not your hair. For it would not, forgive me, lie on a lover’s eyelids like clover or shuck like cornsilk between finger and thumb or taste as yours must in the morning.’

For the first time since I’d met him, I looked into Saverio Bon’s green eyes. And he looked back at me. ‘Do I shock you?’

I wanted to say, ‘You delight me,’ but I could not. How soon before Darcy would be telling him too the story of my incontinent lust? I murmured politely, ‘So many stories in one colour. I never knew. Thank you.’

‘Do I bore you?’ he asked anxiously. ‘My love of my work is unreasonable and inexcusable. Yet I do not apologise for it.’

Then the glass plates tinkled in one of the earth tremors that had been frequent in Venice in the last few days, and we rushed to still them before they chipped.

My old hatred and distrust of photography withered and died in that studio of Saverio’s. There I learned what kind of evenings you can have with a person of a nature sympathetic to your own, who is not of your blood but is of your business – for now I considered his profession a storytelling one like my own. Apart from the times with Alexander, I had never even known an intimate conversation outside my sisterly circle. Those conversations with Alexander I kept in easy reach on the shelf of my memory, and frequently took them down to peruse again. That alone should have alerted me to how I had craved friend-talk, and how much I would love it. But those exchanges with Alexander had not in themselves constituted a friendship, no matter how I wore those words to shreds with caressing nostalgia.

Saverio’s words flowed in and out of my mind, not lingering as there was always something new to be said. Little fumes and gurgles of music often punctuated our conversations: a flautist from La Fenice lived downstairs. Sometimes Saverio made me an alchemical cup of coffee from beans he ground himself or a bread roll with Taleggio cheese drizzled with honey and a heart-shaped red apple sliced in two. With Saverio, I’d sit up all night talking at the retouching table, laughing, gulping tiny cups of his intense
espresso
, cramming my mouth with macaroons he bought from the
pasticceria
in his square. I’d creep home at dawn while my sisters still slept.