The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters (19 page)

There was something faraway in Enda’s manner when Oona and I brushed her hair at night; something absent-minded in her hugs, which were far less frequent than they had been. We both missed her attention, and I hated the reason for her distraction.

Pertilly resumed her role as hairdresser with a smile of satisfaction playing about her mouth.

It was a small victory over Mr Rainfleury, who worried not at all about the accusation of a harem – I believed he loved that. But he was badly frightened by the thought that the hairdresser might go abroad with stories that the Swiney Godivas were not all quite as sane and sensible as you might want them or that their business manager’s words were not all they should be, or that our hair was a creation of glue, pins and chemical artifice. The extraordinary superfluity of our hair, as we had known from childhood, made us vulnerable to name-calling, to intimations of freakishness. We could not afford to be painted as eccentrics, sensualists or frauds.

With Mr Rainfleury’s money resting on our hair-heavy heads, we could not afford to be anything but perfect.

Chapter 16

At the rate of one a month, the dolls had made their debuts.

Each was celebrated with a new song in which her special qualities were laid out. As far as possible, I matched their virtues to those of my sisters, and I made up some for Darcy.

Over those months, we grew somewhat reconciled to the dolls or at least had come to an outward accommodation in our different ways. ‘Miss Idolatry’ had to be recoiffed several times when her eponymous heroine pulled out all her hair. I myself always placed ‘Miss Manticory’ facing the corner of my bedroom and was not above giving her a kick. She’d already needed a new head after mysteriously falling down the stairs. Although we gave out that we slept with our dolls in our beds, Darcy rejected the nocturnal comforts of hers and had a miniature coffin constructed for it to sleep in. ‘Miss Darcy’ acquired a stack of miniature black books in which were recorded the crimes of her sister dolls. Berenice and Enda, in a rare moment of unity, had swapped their twin dolls, and each claimed herself happy with the new version. Oona liked to croon to her doll whenever practising her new songs. Pertilly rehearsed hairstyles on hers.

‘Now our sweet Godivas are fourteen in number,’ Mr Rainfleury liked to say.

And he sent all fourteen of us on the road, or, that is, on the railway tracks.

In those days, very few Irish people travelled. They waited for the world to come to them. Strange worlds did – circuses, pedlars, sometimes foreign soldiers, all reinforcing a general opinion that the world outside our own county was surely a queer and dangerous place and better left where it was. The Swiney Godivas joined the picturesque itinerants, offering new worlds of hairy strangeness and extremity. We were always invited back.

From Dublin, we could be in Cork or Killarney in just over four hours. We journeyed in comfort and style, never missing a refreshment room at one of the grand stations, and travelling with an abundance of tea baskets, pillows and plaid rugs, courtesy of the Great Southern and Western Railway. We often overnighted in the railway hotels, where dignity and luxury were properly tempered by economy. And nor did we let the railway company limit our journeys, for at the end of branch lines there was always a painted private omnibus to transport us to the stately Royal Marine Hotel at Kilkee or the grand Lake Hotel at Killarney. We jerked along on the hard banquettes watching horses make dark bridges of their bodies on the tops of hills, rehearsing under our breaths, Darcy scribbling in her black book, me working on new scripts, Ida counting geese in barnyards, Pertilly studying new styles in the
Hairdressers’ Chronicle and Trade Journal
.

It was to be Oona’s misfortune that her doll outsold all the others and by a considerable margin. She was the public’s darling on stage too, for the public ever loves a bushel of golden hair and a willowy figure. And the men were intrigued by Oona’s unusually deep voice and her eyebrows, which were straight and darker than her curls and angled in a way that increased the sweetness of her expression.

Oona’s getting all the love going from the audience did not go down well with Darcy.

So it was with an intention of menace that Darcy introduced into our repertoire a performance of the old ballad, ‘The Cruel Sister’, which I reworked to suit. Despite Darcy’s dark intentions,
The Cruel Sister
was my joy and privilege. I wrote it mindful and heartful of my sisters’ outer and inner lives. We sang and acted it as an operetta.

There are a good three dozen different versions of this song, but they all agree on the following account of events, as did my Swiney Godiva rendition: a beautiful blonde maiden is preferred over her dark-haired sister by a handsome suitor they both covet. Oona being my tribeswoman, I wrote her lines yielding and irresistible. In her love song with the suitor (played by Enda, pert and inimitably stylish in breeches), Oona’s deep voice plumbed hitherto forbidden depths of passion.

After overhearing the duet, the dark-haired sister, played by Darcy, invites her blonde rival for a walk along the cliffs – cardboard, painted – and pushes her into the sea, the splashes being generated backstage by a ladle in a bucket. Sinking beneath the waves, the fair one pleads for help, offering everything she has, including, finally, her lover.

‘I’ll have him anyway!’ laughs the ink-haired murderess. ‘You shall never come ashore!’ Darcy made these lines intensely credible.

And the blonde girl drowns. Her white body floats as a dead swan on the waves, her hair rippling from her scalp like wheat stalks devastated by a tempest, an effect movingly achieved by use of a long flat trolley on ropes and some blue gauzes flapped from the wings by myself and Enda.

On another shore, on the other side of the stage, two minstrels, played by Berenice and Pertilly, find the sodden corpse. In an act of mixed poetry, butchery and carpentry, they fashion a harp from her breastbone. They string it with filaments of the dead girl’s golden hair. Ida, playing her fiddle backstage, makes the harp sob sounds to melt a heart of stone.

Presently the minstrels are summoned to a grand wedding. It is the nuptials of the dark-haired sister. She is marrying the suitor won by her treachery.

But when the minstrel lifts his harp, the music that comes forth tells the tale of the sistercide, and points a bony finger at the murderess.

The rivalry between Darcy and Oona was so tangible on stage that I feared for my fair sister. Each night Enda was ready with the arnica for there was genuine malice in Darcy’s push that sent Oona tumbling off the cardboard cliff. The audience felt it too. When Oona, backstage, voiced the deep-toned song of the breastbone harp, there was always whimpering in the front rows.

After the show – but only after they were reluctantly persuaded that the Swiney Godivas had absolutely no encores left in them – the public rushed to the doll stall and bought more ‘Miss Oonas’, now equipped with a miniature breastbone harp made from vulcanised rubber.

I wondered that Darcy chose such a story for me to Swiney Godiva, and that she herself elected to impersonate the villainess, until I realised that in this tale the dark-haired sister was the winner, and the one who remained the centre of attention when the blonde sister was reduced to a memory and a plaintive melody. For the wedding scene, Darcy’s black curls were stiffly dressed in impressive battlements and crenellations – her hair was the queen of the stage. Of course Darcy, as if knowing that her hard features and her height made her femininity debatable, never took a male part in our productions.

The rest of us played the chorus. At the final scene, we all held up our hair as we chanted, the motes dancing in the dusty luminescence above our heads:

‘ ’Twas the hair, the hair, the hair that sang.

’Twas the hair that told the tale.

’Tis the hair, the hair, the hair that speaks

On the hair this tale shall hang.

On the hair shall hang the murderess,

And on the hair shall this tale hang.’

The Cruel Sister
was a sensational success. One critic wrote:
It is enough to knock the heart across you
.

More operettas were devised by Darcy – and scripted by myself – and the tale always hung on the hair.

As you might imagine, I never sought a starring role in any of these productions. But Darcy chose me to play the poor Goose Girl – her comment on my pretensions to intellect. Perhaps Darcy also went for the story out of some unconscious nostalgia for the thin geese and slow crows of Harristown, though such a notion may have attributed too much heart to her.

A princess travels to her wedding to a great prince. But on the way she is betrayed by her maid (performed by Pertilly of the spacious hips and peasant ankles), who steals her rich dowry, her amiable talking horse and her fine clothes. The maid compels the princess to take a vow of silence, and to become a Goose Girl. Arriving at Court, the maid marries the gullible prince, played by Oona of the deep voice. The wedding cake, iced, piped and ornamented with cornucopias and horseshoes, is wheeled in, taller than Ida. The wedding guests dance round it.

Out in the countryside, the Goose Girl’s radiant red hair attracts the attention of a Goose Boy, voiced by Ida in a sack cap. He tries to pluck some of the glowing treasure from her head. The Goose Girl will have none of it, preserving her hair as she would her virtue. The rejected Goose Boy takes his laments to Court. He reports on the Goose Girl’s arrogant behaviour to the king, whose suspicions have already been aroused by the thick ankles of his son’s new bride.

The king himself (Oona doubling up as
père
and
fils
) comes to spy on the Goose Girl, and immediately realises that such glorious tresses can be the perquisite, symptom and crown of true nobility alone. The impostor is debunked and dismissed, and the Goose Girl takes her rightful place as princess. My goose-beak-coloured hair tumbled about under my wedding veil in the last scene. The guests toasted us: ‘Long life to you, a wet mouth, and death in Ireland!’

As I played my part and accepted Oona’s – the prince’s – soft hand in marriage, I wondered how the Goose Girl would feel, bedding down with a man who had happily lain with her betraying maid. Did she not care about where those princely hands and loins had been?

The Goose Girl
was popular but
The Cruel Sister
remained the true highlight of our repertoire, and was requested universally. And perhaps it was a good and useful thing to let Darcy murder Oona night after night.

It seemed to make her gentler, afterwards.

Chapter 17

Eventually Mr Rainfleury wanted to touch more than our hair.

By that time, all of us had come to womanly maturity – signified by a growth of hair where there had been none, and a consequent sobering and constraining of our heads’ hair into neat, if bulbous, snooded chignons to denote that our newly unleashed feminine hankerings were firmly under control. Of course, I understood that the putting-up of our hair immediately conjured the reversal – pinned up, it had the potential to be let loose, just as it was in our shows.

Both twins had fixed on Mr Rainfleury as their object, but it was Enda whom he chose to wed, making a formal request in writing to Annora for her daughter’s hand. The transaction included a cash settlement, and a field of bitter cabbages besides, with a fee for Joe the seaweed boy to tend them. Given these blandishments, and Enda’s utter willingness, Annora gave her permission, despite a difference of a quarter-century between the groom and his nineteen-year-old bride.

It was not Enda but Mr Rainfleury who broke the news over a specially monumental cake constructed by Mrs Hartigan, who was in on the engagement, and whose views upon it, I suspect, had been softened by a new hat. As Mr Rainfleury spoke and gestured with a tender fork, Enda grinned like Darcy’s crocodile reticule. The rest of us sat frozen in mid-mastication of the four-layered sponge. I suddenly felt as if I was eating a light, sugary tombstone spread with a thickened blood of raspberry jam. I felt for Enda’s soft hand under the table, and found a hard band of metal interrupting her fourth finger. She smiled emptily. My eyes stung with tears. Enda had been privy to all these negotiations but she had kept them secret from me and Oona. For the first time, I felt betrayed by her.

Of course, I worried, Enda’s greatest betrayal was of herself.

I tried to fasten my anger on a more suitable object. Mr Rainfleury had taken my favourite.
Him
, I would never forgive. Indeed I would add this at the top of the list of things for which I would never forgive him. Oona was staring at Enda with horror. Ida shook her fist at Mr Rainfleury, saying, ‘Oh no you don’t!’

Berenice’s mouth stretched in a silent, agonised ‘
Why
?’ meaning, ‘Why not
me
?’

I myself was wondering how exactly the choice had been made between the twins when Darcy observed, ‘Cabbages, Mr Rainfleury? You bought Enda for cabbages, is it?’

Still Enda smiled, the hard, dumb smile of ‘Miss Enda’, a smile of manufacture, not nature. I wanted to take her head between my hands, to shake out whatever madness had made her accept this obscenity of a marriage. Was it simply to spite Berenice? Had all my scripted rivalry led to this?