The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (61 page)

‘Come back to me,’ he moaned, turning to face me.

‘Very well. But would you greatly mind removing your shirt?’ I asked him. ‘Linen and buttons are rough, and you’d not like to be kissed by a cat’s mouth, would you?’

Saverio said, ‘No. Why do you sigh, Manticory?’

I was sighing because I understood at last.
Your skin’s supposed to feel like soap shedding its veils in warm water and the space between the blades of your shoulders is meant to feel a surge of feathers and your mouth is bound to fill, over and over, like an oyster, with salt and sweet
.

Saverio, I did not need to tell those things. He had as much human nature in him as I did.

We began to rake off our clothes, helping one another with buttons and the progress of linen over our knees and ankles, scrabbling with feet and toes.

When that was done, we lay flat on our backs, breathing quietly like lizards, looking at the water’s shadows dancing on the ceiling.

‘Let us not be solemn now,’ Saverio said at last. ‘It is the most inappropriate time to be solemn.’

‘So it is,’ I agreed softly.

Unable not to look at him, unable not to be closer to him, I burrowed my shoulder under his and kissed my way over the hairs of his chest till I found his nipple and fixed my lips on it. My tongue knew exactly what to describe upon it, and there was nothing solemn in that at all. My hand took his and asked it what to do and where to go, and was quickly helped there.

I held him quite tranquilly, despite the heat and hardness of him growing under my fingers and the audible clatter of the waves in my own blood, quickening and muting, quickening more.

When they were too much for me, I half rose and crawled to the centre of the bed, placed my forehead against the pillow and raised my hips, as I had always done.

Saverio climbed up on the bed too. But he eased my body round and laid me upon my back, so that I looked up at him, his skin filling the frame of my view entirely. Carefully, he placed his long thighs between mine, and grazed my face with his own.

‘I would rather not go on with this,’ he said sadly, ‘than do it without looking at you.’

I drew his mouth to my lips, and then to my breasts, each in turn.

He looked up at me. ‘You have not been sweetnessed here before,’ he told me. I nodded. ‘Or this way.’

It was I who shifted and gyred till he was inside me and above me.

I had thought it would take years to settle my skin into someone who was not Alexander, but it took less than seconds. With Alexander, desire had been like a bird that flittered through my body without alighting, leaving a tickling feather behind. Now desire fell on me as the swan fell on Leda, as a hawk falls on a rabbit, and it held me down, despite my writhing, intent on inflicting pleasure until I was utterly spent. And Saverio never stopped kissing me until I had to pull away from him so as not to cry into his mouth. And even then I wanted him back, because I wanted his voice, his nest of a voice with beating wings in it, inside me as well.

Afterwards I lay on Saverio’s shoulder, encircled by his arm, his lips pressed against my hair, my skin. I breathed the sweet sweat I had generated on his skin. My heart still beat mightily, like a great festival rampaging through a village. I had never been so tired, I thought. I could feel the marrow seething inside my bones; my teeth felt raw and tender; my fingers seemed to have elongated by inches with all they’d encompassed. I wanted to sleep like a fisherman’s cat, fat and slick with all I’d desired inside me, but I wanted to be awake too, to see what words could do to polish the afternoon’s perfection, sidelined and forgotten, as the words had been these minutes numberless without number, Irish minutes tumbled with Venetian ones, minutes that grew to hours.

And Saverio began to talk then, of things past and to come, and I began to answer. Eventually the words grew quieter, our breaths longer and deeper.

Untangling

It is one year now since that day and the soft night that followed it.

The next morning there came a brief interruption to our pleasures when Viaro returned to the
palazzo
wishing to interview the Phelan Swiney, Mariner, who had written threatening letters to the dead journalist Millwillis. While the policeman was committing our father to a holding cell – showing him every courtesy and expressing his regret – Saverio took himself quietly to Mestre and examined the books of the carriage company that had brought our father to Venice on his mission of revenge. They proved that Phelan Swiney had indeed arrived in Venice the day after Millwillis met his death. This information chimed happily with the persuasive scenario the Eileen O’Reilly had in the meanwhile embedded in Viaro’s mind of a hairy gentleman who looked entirely different to Phelan Swiney, Mariner, in every manner except regarding the quantity of hair. The policeman announced himself delighted to release our father with no taint to his character. Our father walked out of the prison immediately, and was again praising Pertilly’s cooking three hours later.

Pertilly has married her Almoro Pagin. We dine better than we have ever done. Pertilly dresses the hair of Saverio’s grand clients; Berenice teaches English to children from the church. It is enough to pay our rent, and a little – a grateful little – more. And Pertilly expects her first child, a Christmas gift for us all.

Ida is at peace. She assists Signor Pagin in the kitchen, dressing his cutlets and joints.

Not one of us has ever feared a thing from Ida. That one death was all she had ever needed to commit, and she is calm now, which we read in the thick dark-brown hair that has lately reached her knees once again. Ida still strums on the breastbone harp, supplying the mournful notes with her voice, when the mood takes her. And we do not stop her. That harp, that song, like our hair, occupies that liminal country between a sentient being and stuff, between living and dead, between the imperatives of nature and of conscience, between sister and enemy, between culture and biology. Who are we to decide what must be forgotten, and what can be?

No one expects to see Darcy in Venice – or in Dublin. We tell our Venetian friends that Darcy disliked Venice, and that she has returned to keep house in Dublin. On our rare visits to Dublin, we tell people that Darcy prefers to stay in Venice, being so wedded to the place with her heart, as we say.

My first book, now six months old, sells well and better than well. Readers love a scandal, especially one with love-making and immorality and young girls led astray by men for money. And yes, the public’s imagination will always thrive on superabundant quantities of hair.

Whoever owns the words tells the story – that old lesson of my childhood comes back now with a new flavour of truth. I have owned the words and told the story. And I have discovered my red wildness lies not in my hair, nor in the love I made with Alexander, but in my writing, and in the nights I spend with Saverio.

Of course the ends of Millwillis and Darcy have no place in my book, though the return of Phelan Swiney is a great episode in it, as in life.

The Venetian policeman’s suspicions have put Rainfleury and Tristan under a charge of conspiracy to murder. My book has left their characters shattered. The Eileen O’Reilly wrote persuasively to her uncle Declan that they must separate Growant and themselves from the filthy contamination of Messrs Stoker and Rainfleury. The gentlemen were made to surrender their Growant shares at the tiniest of prices. Declan O’Reilly has kindly diverted the proceeds to the Swiney sisters who had been so black betrayed by way of moral recompense for the frauds practised on them.

Rainfleury and Tristan were last heard of in Australia, where they had fled under false names. The outlaws were trying to train a native woman hairier and more simian than the poor Baboon Lady Julia Pastrana. I have written to the ‘Australian Monstrosity’ with a copy of my book, and some newspaper cuttings about the alleged murderers, to ensure that the expense of their travel will not be rewarded. They may not return to Europe, as they have rewards on their heads in both Italy and Ireland.

It was my idea to spend a small part of the Growant money improving the formula with genuinely health-giving ingredients.

Oona has stopped pining after Tristan. It was one more blessed thing that came from my book. When she read my account of what had happened, she could not avoid seeing what he was and what a beguiled innocent she had been. Because she truly loved him, she knew immediately how to hate him, cleanly and thoroughly. It is a joy to hear her stretching her vocabulary with denouncing him.

‘It is a woeful dry shrivelled thing that Tristan has inside himself,’ she says now, ‘where you’d expect to find a poet’s heart, all moist and mighty there.’

Now there is a handsome Venetian merchant who pays Oona court and treats her like a princess. He has made a better offer at love than Tristan ever conjured in his shabby verse.

Berenice has likewise recovered from her passion for Augustus Rainfleury. She had wanted him because Enda did, not for the man he was. So now she manages a little regretful tenderness for him, wondering if the Antipodean sun has crisped his delicate pate. She has become religious and says her rosary daily for Enda, especially the Sorrowful Mysteries. I have never asked Berenice if the candle flame on the Pembroke Street stairs was deliberate, because I know Darcy’s push over the banisters was.

We see our father often, though it is never often enough. The road did not fly under us to bring us together. There is too much time, and too much loving, to be caught up with.

His love for the joyous multiplicity of Venetian boats is a thing to see. We are looking into buying him a stake in a shipwright’s business in Pellestrina as a way of keeping him more often among us. He has taken to Eileen with delight, pronouncing her his lost daughter. Indeed, looking at her hair, which grows ever more luxuriant, I sometimes wonder. Her butcher father loved his gin more than he cared for his scrawny daughter. Was Eileen the fair sister we should have had, instead of the cruel Darcy all along?

And it was Phelan Swiney, ex-Mariner, ex-Fenian, who arranged our last trip to Harristown, where we reburied baby Phiala and Annora side by side in a grave by the old chapel, while the slow crows wheeled overhead, mourning the world, the Swineys and all that had passed, all that has been lost.

The Eileen O’Reilly made sure that Phiala’s little coffin held her shoe dolly too. The crossed spoons with her initials – I brought them back to Venice and I have planted them in the garden here, near the clover-sweetened grass where I like to read and write in the perfumed shadow of the wisteria.

Eileen spends her days among her uncle’s purveyors of foodstuffs and brings home a comfortable spread of samples. Her evenings and nights she spends with us.

Venice has become our village more than Harristown ever was. We have friends in every
sestiere
. We have the foreigners’ freedom to mingle between the classes and we are welcome everywhere.

‘
Dénouement
’ – that is the French word for ‘untangling’. The Swiney Godivas are all untangled now, and each sister wears her hair as she pleases. Strangely perhaps, I have not cut mine. I find that I still love the whisper of it about my ears and the cloak it makes around my body, and its fierceness that would spring out and ambush you at any minute were it not plaited or caged inside a snood trussed with a stout pin. Although my book has brought us many requests, we shall never go on the stage again; for us, it was a place of servitude and uncomfortable exposure where we were sent, by Darcy and by our so-called protectors.

As for the original ‘Miss Swiney’ dolls, they too have come to rest in Venice. But they sleep day and night in the dark, in a large trunk never opened, up in the hot eaves in the attic. But those dolls are not as they once were, stiff and splendid. For each doll’s body is inscribed with the fate of the girl she so hollowly imitated.

Enda’s doll consists only of ashes in an urn. We cremated her in the fireplace. Pertilly’s doll is shaven, and Darcy’s has a great dark hole in the breast.

You might think ‘Miss Manticory’ would have a hole there too, since the heart was ripped out of me when Alexander died. Or rather, that the cavity opened when I discovered his betrayal. But I left the ‘Miss Manticory’ doll intact because I intend to heal. And because Saverio is helping me to forget what it is to be disdained and know what it is to be cared for, gently but passionately well. As he rows me around Venice in our green boat, I sometimes see a pale face on a bridge that reminds me of Alexander’s. There is no pain to that vision. With the waves infinitely creative beneath me and love infinitely kind beside me, I think of Alexander as a land creature, and in the end, prosaic.

Land creatures – I’m not sorry there are no foxes in Venice. I still don’t believe I could see one without thinking of Darcy swishing her hand behind her back and in front of her thighs, snatching my memory backwards through the years until it arrived dishevelled, terrified and helpless at the copse by Harristown Bridge.

Venice is full of bridges and maybe a few trolls. But I am up to meeting a gentleman troll now on any bridge and would not hesitate to knock him into the water. It’s the ghosts who still trouble me occasionally. I have moved back to my room of peach and apricot and Chinese pavilions. On hot nights I see the face of Millwillis on the pillow beside me, flattened, with the breath pressed out of him. Then I realise who really lies there, fond and tousled and soft with sleep. Relief and gratitude course around my body like liquid sugar.