The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters

by Michelle Lovric

  Berenice took to wearing a long white dress around Number 1 Pembroke Street at all times, and decorating her hair with flowers and bits of net. If Mr Rainfleury came to visit, she would take every possible opportunity to swoon into his arms.

  ‘Save it for the stage, you mimsy mare,’ Darcy told her tartly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Enda disdainfully, ‘spare us.’

  On the night before the wedding, Oona and I stole into Enda’s bed, where we lay compressed like three ‘Miss Swineys’ in a single box. I cried into Enda’s neck, hating to imagine, but unable to prevent myself from doing so, that the next night it would be Mr Rainfleury lying against her, smelling the lavender on her skin.

  The wedding breakfast was a small affair in a private room at the Shelbourne, attended by a few business associates of the bridegroom. On the Swiney side, there were most of the sisters of the bride along with the Harristown priest, Father Maglinn, who had been persuaded to take the branch line to Dublin for the first time in his middle-aged life. Annora would not leave Harristown. It was the priest who gave Enda away. You could tell he wished he hadn’t.

  Outside the snow fell in thick threads. I wondered what Berenice was breaking at home, apart from her own heart.

  Over the fish course, Mr Rainfleury told his new sisters-in-law that we must henceforward call him ‘Augustus’. None of us – except Berenice – would ever manage it, and not just because Mr Rainfleury could not fulfil the lineaments of an ‘Augustus’, which should of course properly include height, thick tawny hair and something awake and leonine about the eyes. My new brother-in-law could barely rise to a ‘Jerome’, in my opinion. That day even Enda referred to her husband as ‘Mr Rainfleury’, at least in our presence, to my relief. That way I could pretend that she was not now subject to his private empire as well as his business one.

  When the time came to leave Enda to her bridegroom, she embraced me and Oona last of all. ‘Oh, look at your faces. It will not change anything between us. Come here!’ And she drew us to her breast, and away from the others.

  ‘It has already changed everything between us,’ I murmured, ‘that you will lie with Mr Rainfleury, and that you don’t seem to be sick on the thought of it, as I am.’

  We Swineys considered ourselves very up on all the matters of animal generation as we’d seen the geese and the slow crows and the Harristown goats at their courtships and wedding nights.

  ‘But a man has a very different idea of the thing to a goat, Manticory,’ Enda insisted. I thought her voice lacking in conviction. She hugged me more tightly and kissed the top of Oona’s head.

  Mr Rainfleury consummated his love of Enda’s hair in the bridal suite of the Shelbourne Hotel. The next afternoon, Enda dragged me and Oona down to a bench in Fitzwilliam Square. We were safe from Darcy’s scrutiny: she was signing something at the bank again. Enda described to us breathlessly how her bridegroom laid out her hair in seven points of a star on the bed before lifting his own nightshirt. And he himself, she giggled, turned out to be hairy in hitherto unsuspected parts of his anatomy, including, but not exclusively so, his back and his chest.

  For all her laughter, I thought Enda looked pale. And she could not stop me imagining the coarse shadow of a billy at his labours on her bedroom wall by moonlight.

  A special bridal incarnation of the Enda doll – in a veil of real Honiton lace and a white Spitalfields satin train – was put about in selected stores, selling almost as well as ‘Miss Oona-the-fairy and her breastbone harp’. To accompany the bride, there was a limited edition made of a somewhat idealised doll of Mr Rainfleury: tall, slim and shapely, and therefore recognisable chiefly from the droop of his moustache.

  There was no exotic honeymooning, for the Swiney Godivas’ bookings were solid. Whenever Enda murmured about the postponed wedding journey, Mr Rainfleury kissed her nose and chuckled, ‘In God’s good time, my poppet.’

  And Berenice glowered near by, clenching and unclenching her fists.

  Enda and Mr Rainfleury were immediately set up in their new Dublin townhouse, in all possible cosiness and convenience because it was the twin of our own, and adjoined it. Mrs Hartigan was persuaded to housekeep the two establishments, with an extra parlour maid provided on both sides of the dividing wall. At the Rainfleury residence, the drawing room was occupied by his extensive gentlemen’s collection of long-haired dolls in glass cabinets to which even Enda was not permitted a key.

  ‘You have made it lovely, so,’ breathed Ida, walking around Number 2 Pembroke Street. It was hardly necessary to get to know the place, being that it was a mirror of Number 1.

  With Mrs Hartigan ruling both households, Enda’s duties were few. She devoted herself to collecting white Belleek porcelain writhing with seashells and coral, provoking Berenice to set up a rival collection of Killarney-work boxes in bog-oak and arbutus, with motifs of harps, round towers and wolfhounds. Enda matched her twin’s purchases, item for item, with rigour.

  In fact Enda kept her old room with us, because her new husband was very frequently absent on Swiney Godiva Corporation business, sometimes for a week at a time. Mrs Hartigan declared that it would be madness to run up the expenses on two houses when one was nearly empty, and wouldn’t it be best for Mrs Enda to hie herself back to Number 1 and her sisters when her husband was away?

  Enda confessed that she did not like to sleep alone at Number 2 with the gentlemen’s collection of long-haired dolls in the study below her bedroom: ‘All those eyes that never close. They glitter in the dark, you know!’

  Enda was with us so much that it was sometimes possible to forget the awkward ceremony that had unSwineyed her and made her the unlikely Mrs Rainfleury.

  Yet as winter mellowed into spring, the marriage imposed itself more. Enda took to referring to ‘Mr Husband’, no matter how pompous it sounded in the context of an informal family visit. As often as possible, and particularly whenever Berenice was listening, Enda reported him an ardent consort, even when Darcy cautioned her for a ‘midden mouth’ or Ida wept and covered her ears or I took notes with a warning look on my face. There seemed to be a matrimonial conspiracy afoot, for Mr Rainfleury also took every opportunity – when Berenice was not present – to speak approvingly of his own uxorious nature.

  The Rainfleurys’ domestic felicity was embodied in the frequent exchange of hair keepsakes, though naturally most of the giving was on Enda’s side: his sparser locks necessitated materially smaller gifts. Mr Rainfleury’s monocle hung on a chain made of Enda’s hair and his watchband was plaited too. Enda was inordinately proud of a filament of ‘Mr Husband’s’ moustache set in glass on a gold ring. The flimsy morsel floated like a primeval mosquito fossilised in amber. Enda never tired of telling how she shaved ‘Mr Husband’ each morning, though such events were likely unproductive on the whole – his growth of beard was less pronounced than Darcy’s. Enda boasted constantly of her spouse’s unfailing chivalry.

  ‘He will not let me pick up a handkerchief if I drop it!’ she marvelled. ‘And have you seen how he hands me into the carriage as if I were a queen?’

  Mr Rainfleury, if present, kept his eyes modestly downcast whenever Enda delivered her praises.

  As well he might, for the sister he really craved, now that he should not have her, was Berenice.

  The love affair between husband and sister-in-law must have commenced, I calculated, almost immediately after the marriage. It would appear that it was accomplished in carriages and in back rooms of theatres where Mr Rainfleury was on indulgent terms with the management, or in hotel rooms rented by the hour.

  It became clear to me, if not to my sisters, that many of Mr Rainfleury’s business trips – allegedly to Ulster for his doll-dress fabrics – in fact took him only as far as the other side of Dublin. Whenever Enda was lodging with us, Berenice was often strangely absent, having developed an unlikely passion for studying French and Italian at the Royal Irish Academy in Dawson Street. Three months after the wedding, through the handsome iron rai
lings, I glimpsed Berenice and Mr Rainfleury promenading the gravel outside St Stephen’s Green. Berenice clung to his arm with wifely decorum, looking up into his moustache with a meek sweetness I was unaccustomed to seeing on her face. I hid behind a bush until they passed, watched them arrive at the Shelbourne, and tried to let my imaginings leave them at the door.

  Mr Rainfleury, I thought, you are half a husband and a whole goat.

  My next thought was, Berenice, how could you?

  And then, How do they dare so in public?

  Then I realised that no one but a Swiney – or a Mr Rainfleury – could tell Enda and Berenice apart. The adulterous couple was outrageously, uniquely and perfectly safe from gossip.

  They were safe from me too. I would not add to Enda’s miseries by publicising them. So I told no one, not even my tribeswoman Oona, that Mr Rainfleury was buttering his bap on both sides.

  Yet Mrs Hartigan knew. I was certain that she knew – because the afternoon after I saw the adulterers in the park, I observed the housekeeper tucking something that rustled into the pocket of Mr Rainfleury’s second-best brown coat that hung permanently in our hall press. She did so furtively, even though she was unaware of my watching from behind the dining-room door. As soon as Mrs Hartigan began her descent to the kitchen, I was out in the hall with my hand in the coat pocket. I drew out a packet labelled: Vulcanised Rubber Gentlemen’s Prophylactics, E. Lambert and Son, Dalston, London. In the other pocket was a note from Berenice, suggesting a meeting at four the next day in the usual place.

  The brown coat was the lovers’ post office, I realised.

  I rattled the packet of vulcanised rubber with appalling images studding the backs of my eyelids. I dared not break it open. Such devices were forbidden in Ireland, though they were to be had. Mrs Hartigan would have needed to procure them personally, of course, as it was in those days even illegal to order ‘obscenities’ through the post. I imagined her holding out her hand for them at Mr O’Mealy’s pharmacy. Then Standish O’Mealy must know too. And he in turn must send a boy to England – to Dalston – to obtain his supplies. My heart contracted with compassion for my beloved Enda. So many conspirators against her marriage!

  If Enda knew, she kept very quiet about it. And if Mr Rainfleury felt uncomfortable or anxious, well, it did not manifest itself in any diminishing of his girth or in less sparkle in his small eyes. Only once, I saw him overcome by sentiment, when the two sisters exchanged a hard word about an oversalted boeuf en daube.

  We were dining en famille, that is, with all our hair let down, and Mr Rainfleury nestled in perfect happiness among us in a flowered silk dressing gown with a purple velvet cap on one side of his head. We were disposed along tribal lines around the elegant walnut table of the Rainfleury household. ‘Mr Husband’ sat opposite Enda, our hostess and so the notional purveyor of the beef. Berenice sat beside her lover. Waiting for a moment’s lull in the clattering of cutlery, Berenice spat out a mouthful of daube onto her sister’s white damask tablecloth.

  ‘Vilely salty, it is. Morbidly salty. How can anyone dine off such sour meat? That thing you call a wife serves you ill, Augustus. Have you noticed she’s left the luncheon cruet on the table? At dinnertime?’ Berenice looked disparagingly at Enda’s reddening skin. Then she reached across the table with a grotesque slowness to overturn Enda’s beloved Belleek salt-holder, smashing two of the delicate seashells that decor­ated it.

  ‘There’s a sweet sister for you, Mr Husband,’ Enda smirked at Berenice. ‘Mrs Hartigan will be hours whitening that cloth next door. As they say, it is a lonely wash that has no man’s shirt in it.’

  That is one for Enda, I thought.

  Mr Rainfleury choked on his wine, coughing till the tears spilled out from under his lids. He rose and stumbled over to his wife. He reached for a hank of Enda’s hair to wipe his eyes, allowing a sudden shocking insight into their matrimonial intimacy. At the sight of it, Berenice upended her chair and ran downstairs. We heard a door slam, and boots battering the cobbles abroad. When we came home, Berenice was locked in her room and would talk to none of us for two days.

  But she was eloquent about her feelings in the note I intercepted in the post office coat, which smelled of lies in its armpits and pain in the pocket where Berenice had left a letter and a shredded rose. The tear-stained page throbbed with:

  This killing, killing betrayal, the worst yet in a line of betrayals! Why must you live within an ass’s roar of us, so that Enda can flaunt you at me every day?

  Mr Rainfleury replied with due tenderness, and promises of a special treat. He concluded:

  If only the toss of the coin had gone the other way, my darling. But it did not, and here we are. There were always three figures in the Garden of Eden, poppet. We must manage as best we can.

  I thought, And who is the corrupting serpent?

  So Berenice’s happiness and Enda’s marriage had been mur­­dered by the toss of a coin. I resolved to write such a scenario into our next show, and began the sketch immediately. I took a hate upon that coat of his that knew too much. The next time he took tea with us, I asked, ‘Mr Rainfleury, did you know that you have forgotten your brown coat in our hall press? With the summer coming in so early this year and the evenings so light, perhaps you’d like to take it to your own home?’

  Berenice whispered, ‘It does no harm here,’ and Mrs Hartigan dropped the teapot. In the wet mess and exclamations that followed, the coat was no more mentioned. But it never again held any secrets. The guilty couple and Mrs Hartigan must have found themselves a new post office, one I never discovered, despite industrious investigations.

  The marriage between Mr Rainfleury and Enda proved barren for more months than one might expect, at least to listen to Enda’s many and indelicate hints about their mutual sensual felicity, each one of them sending Ida and Oona into fits of wriggling and grimacing. Berenice’s face was taut with keeping in her fury.

  I saw the doctor arriving next door every few weeks and noted Enda’s anxious face at certain times of the month. Enda admitted to Oona and myself, ‘Just a little baby, is all I want. Do you not want to be favourite aunts yourselves?’

  Perhaps to deflect attention from the lack of an interesting event, Enda regaled us with stories of Mr Rainfleury’s collection of portable moustache-curlers with heating devices, and the protector he wore at night to keep its supple walrus droop. The masterpiece was the German-made Schnurbartbinde, a device confected of silk, two leather straps and soft twin webs, which kept the precious taches in a state that King Wilhelm himself would not have despised, despite his well-known facility for sneering. We could also see for ourselves that whenever he must imbibe, Mr Rainfleury produced his moustache cup, which prevented any liquid from running down his whiskers.

  On the last Sunday in August, Mr and Mrs Rainfleury arrived at Number 1 for a family dinner, with Enda looking happier than usual. Leaving Mr Rainfleury to his post-prandial cigar, we were scarcely out of the room before his wife was yawning theatrically. ‘Didn’t get a wink last night.’ She taunted Berenice with sundry sunny observations of married intimacy and its blessings. I knew she would die rather than hurt anyone else that way. With Berenice alone, Enda lacked decency or mercy. ‘Do you know what he says? He says he climbs up my hair to my narrow tower, just like a prince. He says it is because of my hair that he can ascend. My hair gives him potency!’

  Berenice shot back, ‘The prince who climbed up the tower and had doings with Rapunzel left her with child. Manticory wrote it, remember? So when the witch cast her out in the wilderness, Rapunzel gave birth to twins. If Augustus is so potent with you, why is it that you beget bother-all, Enda?’

  Berenice had fallen into a trap.

  ‘Actually,’ said Enda, showing all her teeth as she did only when talking to her twin, ‘the doctor has just confirmed it. And my baby will grow up to hurt you better than I ever could, brown bitch heifer.’

  Berenice sat down sharply, her mouth working but nothing co
ming out.

  ‘Enda!’ said Oona. ‘That is surely no way to introduce a dear little baby there!’

  Darcy mused, ‘I reckon you can still dance until the sixth month, Enda. Then Manticory will write you sitting-down parts. With cloaks. We needn’t lose any bookings at all before your confinement.’

  I protested, ‘But what if Enda does not feel so well in herself ?’

  ‘You can write death scenes for her. We’ll put her in a bed under a quilt. She can groan to her heart’s content.’

  Berenice clutched her own belly and vomited. In fact, for the next two months, it was she who exhibited all the heinous signs of morning sickness: the faintness and disembowelling nausea. Enda prospered, fattened and bloomed on her triumph, carrying her belly like a precious vessel in front of her.

  Chapter 18

  The baby died inside Enda in the fourth month.

  Enda curled herself up in a cocoon of unbound hair and wept.

  Her husband and her twin disappeared for long hours. I cursed Mr Rainfleury and Berenice even more. Where were they? It was not a time to steal a triumph.

  And, I wanted to tell Berenice, this triumph is tawdry, screwed out of a dead baby.

  But Berenice suffered too, every time Mr Rainfleury left her at the door to Number 1. And of course I could not utter a word of my bitterness to Enda, who was still bravely pretending not to know what was going on between her husband and her twin. Enda lost the next baby, and the one after, and every other child conceived inside the marriage. Those babies who might have been conceived on Berenice were prevented by Mr Rainfleury’s vulcanised rubber.

  In the interweaving of Swiney hair and Swiney destiny, that first foetus and all the other dead babies who followed it were other strands in the plait of hatred and intimacy that bound Enda and Berenice.