The Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  2 Following a very long courtship which was often ‘broken-off, Lady Emily did indeed marry Sir John Millington, ninth Marquess of Hull, but the marriage was dissolved after four years. There were no children. Professor Merridith did not marry. Her many publications include Essays on the Rights of Women (1863), The Cause of Learning (1871), Education and the Poor (1872) and several volumes of writings on pure mathematics. She co-edited The Higher Education of Women by Emily Davies (1866) of whom she was a close friend. – GGD

  3 Lord Kingscourt’s mention of ‘Yahoos’ and ‘Houyhnhnms’ is an allusion to Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. The Yahoos are an ape-like race of degraded savages found on a rural island which is a colony of Houyhnhnm Land. The Houyhnhnms are rational horse-like beings who have enslaved the Yahoos as beasts of burden. Interestingly, Gulliver remarks: ‘the Houyhnhnms have no Word in their Language to express any thing that is Evil, except what they borrow from the Deformities or ill Qualities of the Yahoos’ (IV: 9; 11). – GGD

  4 Hullify’ is a reference to ‘doohulla’, a game with impenetrably complicated rules and scoring system devised by the Merridith siblings in childhood. It involved cutting out words from newspapers or other unwanted documents and forming a diamond-shaped grid of interlocking anagrams from their letters. Remarkably similar to the modern day ‘crossword puzzle’, an amusement as yet unknown in the 1840s. ‘Doohulla’ is the English name of a district in Connemara. Dumhaigh Shalach in Gaelic. ‘Mound of Willows’. – GGD

  5 Lord Kingscourt might have been disconcerted to learn that the tune is a traditional Irish march entitled ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Alps’. – GGD

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE STORY-TELLER

  THE ELEVENTH EVENING OF THE VOYAGE; THEN SOME PARTICULARS OF THE TENTH; AND RETURNING TO THE ELEVENTH BY WAY OF CONCLUSION. A SEQUENCE WHICH MAY BE SAID TO HAVE THE PATTERN OF A CIRCLE; IN WHICH TWO ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN THE AUTHOR AND HIS ADVERSARY ARE DESCRIBED.

  32°31′W; 51°09′N

  — 10 P.M. —

  Grantley Dixon paused by the door to the Smoking Saloon. A strange piercing sound like the screech of a gull had stopped him just as he had reached for the handle. But above him he could see no bird of any kind. It came again; a faint but mordant shriek that twisted its way right into you somehow. He walked to the gunwale and looked over the side. The ocean churned up at him, black and frothing.

  It wasn’t coming from steerage or from anywhere on the ship, but Dixon had been hearing the sound for two days. He had asked others about it and everyone seemed to have noticed, but nobody could say just what it might be. A spirit, some of the sailors laughed, seeming to enjoy his lubber’s unease. The ghost of a witch-doctor, ‘John Conqueroo’, who had died of a fever down in the lock-up back in the times when the Star was a slaver. A mermaid moaning to entice them to doom. A siren riding the tail winds and waiting to pounce. The Captain’s Mate had expressed a more rational view. Air in the ’tween-decks of the weary old ship. A trick of the air, sir. Breeze in the gully-holes. An old bucket the age of the Star had been refitted many times, usually quickly and not very well. Behind every panel was a tangle of ancient fittings, rusted pipes, split timbers, rotted spars burrowed hollow by woodworm and rats. Sometimes, when the wind caught, you would swear the ship was singing. You could think of the ship as a floating flute, sir: the wrecked organ of a once great cathedral. That was how the Mate liked to think of it himself.

  The little man with the club-foot was watching from behind the gates. He was always watching; that poor limping tramp. Waiting to beg, Dixon supposed. The hobo looked up at the sky and uttered a small cough. Turned. Sneezed. Shuffled back into the shadows. Curious fellow in many ways. Seemed to have no friend; no need for any company. Appeared to find the ship a place of curiosities. Dixon had seen him earlier, at dusk that evening, staring at the portside wall of the wheelhouse. Someone had daubed it with a strange graffito. A capital H enclosed in a heart.

  Dixon wondered what Merridith wanted to speak to him about, but already he felt he had some idea. Perhaps this would be the night when the truth might come out. It was time it did. The lies had gone on too long. The sneakings and petty deceptions of adultery, the aliases and skulkings and railway station hotels. Perhaps last night’s altercation between himself and his rival had brought matters to a head, or were about to do so now. Really it was time for such arguments to stop. They had become an almost nightly occurrence and were causing embarrassment to Laura and to others. These things could be discussed in a civilised way. He only wished he were feeling less exhausted and depressed.

  A fortnight before boarding the Star of the Sea, Dixon had spent a whole day doing the rounds of the London publishers. Hurst and Blackett. Chapman and Hall. Bradbury and Evans. Derby and Dean. They sounded like teams of music-hall comedians and for all they had offered him, they might as well have been.

  Three months earlier, at considerable cost, he had employed a secretary to make multiple copies of his collection of short stories. They were based on his recent tour of Ireland and Grantley Dixon had worked hard on them.

  Late at night in his rooms at the Albany he had honed the manuscript over and over. He had tried to make his style a degree less constricted, to put away the objectivity required of the journalist; to allow his feelings to show a little more. And when he had finished, he had read one of them aloud to Laura, one afternoon just after they had been to bed, assuring her that he would appreciate an honest appraisal of his efforts.

  ‘Your efforts?’ she smiled.

  ‘Of the story,’ he said.

  But she hadn’t liked it.

  They had argued about it.

  She had accused him of being blinded by the desire to record facts. Art was about the creation of beauty. An important painter, a truly interesting writer – he took the stuff of ordinary life and turned it into something else. Mr Ruskin had recently said as much in a lecture she had attended in Dublin.

  ‘You’re saying I’m not an artist?’

  ‘You have a wonderful talent for journalistic narration, of course. Your descriptions of landscape, for example – they’re accurate. And your polemical stuff is really very strong. But an artist is somehow in a higher league. I don’t know. He comes at reality from a sort of angle.’

  ‘Like your husband, you mean.’

  ‘I don’t say that. But yes, he draws well.’

  ‘Better than I write, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s fair, Grantley.’

  ‘So what’s fair? Our having to meet like thieves?’

  ‘Just – why can’t you be happy with what you have? Come back to bed, you silly boy.’

  But he hadn’t wanted to go back to bed. Somehow her critique had emasculated him. Perhaps it was simply that he had revealed a need to be appreciated and nobody since his childhood had ever made him do that. The spat had coloured the rest of their evening. Little had been said in the restaurant or at the recital. Even as he saw her off for the midnight Kingstown boat train, it had hung between them like an unspoken sin. They had bade farewell with a careful handshake as they always did in public; but it had seemed to Dixon a little more careful than was necessary. It was only after the train had pulled away that he had felt he should have apologised.

  He had been determined to prove her wrong about his work. She would never love a man who wasn’t an artist; anyone who knew her would know that fact. She mightn’t know it herself, but one day she would discover it. Dixon couldn’t bear to think about what might happen then.

  Everywhere he went, his book was refused. Too long, too short, too serious, too sketchy. Stories not believable. Characters not real. As if to mock him, on his way to his last appointment, he had seen that idiot Dickens strolling along Oxford Street doffing his topper like a victorious general among the plebeians. People were rushing up to him and shaking his hand, as though he was a hero instead of a charlatan; that saddle-sniffing ringmaster of Bozo beadles, of Harrow-toned orphans and vulture-no
sed Jews. God, it was dismal how they lapped it up. Please, sir. We want some more.

  Dixon had met the publisher Thomas Newby at one of Laura’s literary evenings. He had seemed a reasonable, intelligent man and was known for getting out his editions with speed when he wanted to. But his firm was small and couldn’t pay much. Still, Dixon thought, at least it would be a start. Little did he know he was to be disappointed again.

  ‘I’m not saying it’s bad or anything like that, dear Grantley. It’s strikingly written in its own sort of way. I just found it a bit preaching. Morbid type of thing. All that stuff about poor Pat and his donkey, you see. Fine for the newspapers. You’d expect it in the newspapers. But the reader of fiction wants something else. Horse of a different colour entirely.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘A good old thumping yarn to sink his tusks into. Kind of thing you’ve done here gets him down in the dumps. You want to read some of this cove of mine, Trollope. You’ve seen his Macdermots of Ballycloran, have you? Now he does the poor but he sort of smuggles them in.’

  ‘We’re not all Trollopes,’ Dixon said bitterly.

  ‘I’m a businessman,’ said Newby. ‘I have to be.’

  Dixon picked up a book that was lying on the desk and read the words from its gilded spine. ‘Sixteen Years in the West Indies by Lieutenant-Colonel Capadose. Volume Two.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘That’s the best you can do, Tom, is it?’

  ‘Damned interesting little read as a matter of fact. Kind of thing you should take a crack at yourself, if you want my tuppence worth. Swear off the fiction and blaze away with the facts.’

  ‘The facts?’

  ‘Collection of impressions of the Emerald Isle. Mist on the lakes. Jolly swineherds with queer wisdom. Pepper it up with a few pretty colleens. Do it in your sleep. Don’t know why you won’t.’

  ‘You do know there’s a famine in Ireland now, do you?’

  ‘I’d be happy to send your royalties to a fund, if you like.’

  Dixon plucked another volume from the escritoire and witheringly read its title: ‘The Grand Pacha’s Cruise on the Nile in the Viceroy of Egypt’s Yacht.’

  ‘People like escapism,’ Newby said quietly. ‘Don’t be so hard on them, old lad. It’s only a book.’

  Dixon knew he was right. He was almost always right. It was one of the more annoying things about him.

  ‘Speaking of fleeing to happier climes, a little bird tells me you’re returning to the colonies presently.’

  ‘I’m going to Dublin for a few days first.’

  ‘Ah. You’ll be seeing La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’

  He wondered what knowledge or gossip might lie behind the phrasing. Newby was a man who tended to know what was going on.

  ‘I may do. I may not.’

  ‘I heard she was in town the other week.’

  ‘Was she?’

  ‘Saying farewell to her Papa, I believe. Before setting out to break the hearts of America. Another little injection of funds required, one doesn’t doubt.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Tis whispered about the town that the Noble Merridith is busted. Famine’s ruined him. Warrants out for his committal. Without her daddy’s lucre My Lord might be in the debtors’ clink by now.’ He gave a profound sigh and rubbed his large nose. ‘Bloody shame for Laura. One in a million. Must say I miss her a lot now she’s gone.’

  ‘If I run into her in Dublin I’ll pass on your best.’

  The publisher nodded and tossed him a package of books. ‘Give her those, would you? Tales of passion among the ruins.’ He peered at Dixon and gave an arch smile. ‘Laura enjoys a touch of romance, I’m told.’

  Dixon could feel a blush warming his neck. He looked at the book on top of the parcel. ‘He any good? I might be able to place a review.’

  ‘For the ladies, dear boy. Vicar from up north. As for his merits, not so convinced as I was. Only getting up 250 copies.’

  Two hundred and fifty copies, he sourly said. Dixon would have given one of his limbs for that.

  ‘You really can’t take the stories? Not even if I do another edit?’

  Newby shook his head.

  ‘What about the novel? You’ve had it for a year.’

  ‘Can’t do it. Like to. Just honestly can’t. Simply not my variety of thing. Wish you luck with it elsewhere. Try Chapman and Hall.’

  ‘Tom.’ Dixon attempted a man-to-man laugh. ‘The fact is, Tom, I’ve been a bit stupid about all this. Made a few errors of judgement, if you like.’

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘I’ve sort of said it to people already. That it’s to be published early in the new year.’

  ‘Oh that. Yes. I’d heard you’d been saying that.’

  Dixon looked at him.

  ‘Apparently Laura mentioned it to someone when she was over the other week. “Glowing with pride” for your achievement, so I’m told.’

  The window of the office gave a rattle in the breeze. Dixon found himself staring at the rug on the floor; its frayed motif of crowns and unicorns. A girl came and went with a tray of coffee. When he glanced up again, Newby was avoiding his eyes. ‘Grantley – I hope I can speak as your friend. I beg you to be careful. Merridith is no fool. He puts it on when it suits him but I wouldn’t make assumptions.’

  Newby gave a quiet and oddly sour laugh.

  ‘They teach it to them, you know; in the public schools. How to put on like a cheerful idiot while all the time they’ve got their hands sliding around your neck. “Old chum” this. “Jolly jolly” that. But they’d butcher half of India to keep themselves in tea.’

  ‘I wish I’d never met her sometimes. Life would be easier.’

  The older man rose from behind the desk and offered his hand. ‘And I wish I could do your novel. But really I mustn’t.’

  ‘Can you give me some kind of direction?’

  ‘Just – many are called, brother, but few are chosen. Scribble me up the old observations some time and I’ll certainly take a peep. “An American in Ireland”. Something like that. Here. Look. Take this one, too.’

  It was Evenings of a Working Man by John Overs, with a preface by his friend and mentor, Charles Dickens.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You really should. Now, that is a book. Bloody marvellous thing, Dickens’s prologue especially. The way that rascal writes – it makes one want to sing.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like anything about the poor.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Newby seriously. ‘He puts in jokes.’

  Dixon had wasted all of yesterday on the northern vicar’s dreary novel. The wind was high and the sea choppy and Laura had said she wanted time to be alone. She was acting very strangely since they had boarded the ship, making excuses to avoid speaking to him or being in his company. Perhaps she was right to want to be alone. The skulking was making him irritable; tattering his nerves.

  The morning had begun with reasonable calm: a glitter of cold sunlight on a greygreen of water. He had sat outside the Breakfast Room intending to kill a few hours in reading. A single drop of rain had smacked the title page as he opened the cover. Within five minutes the sky had darkened to the colour of lead.

  ‘Put up the lifelines. And get the passengers below.’

  Sailors were already running. Lightning flickered in the bulbous thickness of the clouds; it lit them up in a crackling explosion. A powerful gust buffeted the mainmast, sending reverberations down to the maindeck and shattering crockery and glasses in the Breakfast Room behind him. The ship gave a nauseating undulation; a lurch; a sway. The shutters were being wound down, the canopy chained up. A steward hurrying past with a stack of chairs had shouted at him to get below but Grantley Dixon had not moved.

  The music of the ship was howling around him. The low whistlings; the tortured rumbles; the wheezy sputters of breeze flowing through it. The clatter of loose wainscoting. The clank of chains. The groaning of boards. The
blare of wind. Never before had he felt rain quite like it. It seemed to spew from the clouds, not merely to fall. He watched the wave rise up from a quarter of a mile away. Rolling. Foaming. Rushing. Surging. Beginning to thicken and swell in strength. Now it was a battlement of ink-black water, almost crumpling under its own weight; but still rising, and now roaring. It smashed into the side of the bucking Star, like a punch thrown by an invisible god. He was aware of being flung backwards into the edge of a bench, the dull crack of metal against the base of his spine. The ship creaked violently and pitched into a tilt, downing slowly, almost on to beam ends. A clamour of terrified screams rose up from steerage. A hail of cups and splintering plates. A man’s bellow: ‘Knockdown! Knockdown!’ One of the starboard lifeboats snapped from its bow-chain and swung loose like a mace, shattering through the wall of the wheelhouse.

  The boom of the billows striking the prow a second time. A blind of salt lashed him; drenched him through. Waves churning over his body. The slip of his body down the boards towards the water. A shredding skreek of metal on metal. The grind of the engine ripped from the ocean. The ship began to right itself. Snappings of wood filled the air like gunshots. The wail of the klaxon being sounded for clear-all-decks. The man with the club-foot was helping a sailor to grab a woman who was being swept on her back towards the broken rail. She was screaming in terror; grasping; clutching. Somehow they seized her and dragged her below. Hand by hand, gripping the slimy life-rope like a mountaineer, Dixon made it back to the First-Class deckhouse.

  Two stewards were in the passageway distributing canisters of soup. Passengers were to retire to their quarters immediately. There was no need for concern. The storm would pass. It was entirely to be expected. A matter of the season. The ship could not capsize; it never had in eighty years. The lifebelts were merely a matter of precaution. But the Captain had ordered everyone to remain below. Laura looking pleadingly at him from the end of the corridor, her terrified sons bawling into her skirts. The three of them being grabbed by an angry-faced Merridith and dragged into her cabin like sacks.