The Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  Through my ragged pedagogue the young people explained they had heard it reported by many before that a Captain may perform a marriage at sea. I advised them (again through Swales) that in actuality this is not the position (despite the romantic stuff of ladies’ fiction). Indeed I may discharge no legal ceremony of any kind (with the exception of a funeral or the execution of a prisoner in time of war); and I advised them they must needs wait until we reach New York and there seek a Credential of License from the city authorities. (As Captain Bligh used to put it, ‘a sea-wedding is only legal until the ship returns to port’.) Whatever the fashion in which Swales explained it, they looked most crestfallen to learn it. An approximation of the words he uttered to them is this: ‘Shay dear on budduck knock will bresh beah lefoyle.’1

  I enquired as to the matter of how long they had known each other. They answered but a fortnight, having met on the ship. (He is of the Blasket Islands, she of the Arans.) I then asked if they had heard of the wise old adage: ‘He who weds in haste shall repent at his leisure’; and they said they had, so Swales attested, but had fallen helplessly in love. The youth is eighteen yrs, the girl a year younger; a dark-headed ‘colleen’ with the comeliest eyes I ever saw. One could conjecture how easily the poor lad must have been set to swooning; she reminded me of my own wife, in fact, at a tender age.

  Again I advised that I had no authority to perform such a ceremony and said they must be patient another eleven days; adding that it was not very long to wait, especially for a happy couple who wished to spend all of eternity together. They went away, looking mighty downcast, but Swales requesting to remain behind for a moment.

  We shared a little joke about the silliness of youthful ardour. Had I a guinea, I remarked, for every pretty girl I ever wished to wed after two weeks of kissing and boyhood foolery, I should be the richest man in Great Britain now. He gave a mighty laugh and clapped me about the back in a rather familiar way, which I did not like. And he then said he had hoped to see me on deck over the last few days or nights and had waited for a long time but had not succeeded in seeing me until the fortuitous coincidence arose this morning of the young couple & cetera. I explained that I was rather occupied with matters below, my happy pastime of managing the ship by times interfering with my paid employment as chief barterer of falderols with the passengers, but I hoped we might soon have an agreeable little talk.

  Swales said he truly was most anxious to find a position with Lord Kingscourt if possibly he could; and there was not all that long a time remaining of the voyage. His fear, he explained, was that as soon as we arrived at New York, Lord Kingscourt and his family would commence their further travels and he might lose his opportunity.

  I said I had mentioned the matter a couple of nights previously but Lord Kingscourt had no need, the family already possessing a maidservant. But he had given me five shillings to give to Swales, with his blessings. This I duly handed to him. But the ingrate did not seem very happy to receive it. When I asked him what the deuce could be the matter now, he replied that he could not eat five shillings, nor even ten thousand. At that I bade him good-day. Many and great are the obligations of captaincy, but to procure employment for presumptuous dolts does not lie among them (as yet).

  As he went away (and others came in), Leeson told me that he had been pestering him for several days to come in; announcing he and I to be bosum friends & cetera. I said it were a pity I could not divide myself into replicas, so that every last waffler on the ship could have one of me. Like a worm, Leeson said. (But I think he meant no offence.)

  Later, in the evening, whilst taking the readings on the foredeck, I observed the young man who had wished to marry, now tenderly canoodling with a quite different goddess; a pretty little Helen with a halo of golden tresses. So Paris of the Blaskets would appear to have recuperated from whatever disappointment he felt! Yet such are the ways of younger love. Hot as the sirocco when first it blows up; but it cools just as quickly, or alters direction.

  Thought he had heer’d speak of Bonaparte; didn’t know what he was; thought he had heer’d of Shakespeare, but didn’t know whether he was alive or dead, and didn’t care. A man with something like that name kept a dolly [a prostitute] and did stunning; but he was such a hard cove that if he was dead it wouldn’t matter. Had seen the Queen but didn’t recollec’ her name just at the minute; Yes, he had ’eered of God, who made the world. Couldn’t exactly recollect when he’d heer’d on him. Had never heer’d of France, but had heer’d of Frenchmen; Had heer’d of Ireland. Didn’t know where it was, but it couldn’t be very far, or such lots wouldn’t come from there to London. Should say they walked it, aye, every bit of the way.

  East London street trader to the journalist Henry Mayhew Name unknown

  1 A curious remark. Possibly, according to a number of scholars of Gaelic, including Samuel Ferguson Q.C. of Belfast, ‘Sé deir an bodach nach bhfuil breis bia le jail.’ In English: ‘The churl [or old fool] is saying that no extra food is to be had.’ The word ‘bodach’ (pronounced ‘buddock’) may be related to ‘bod’, a low Irish colloquialism for the male genitalia. The usage is not unknown in Connemara. – GGD.

  CHAPTER XIX

  THE THIEF

  IN WHICH THE READER IS OFFERED, FOR HIS MORAL EDUCATION, A SHOCKING CHRONICLE OF THE DESCENT OF PIUS MULVEY INTO A SWAMP OF RUFFIANISM AND VILLAINY; AND OF THE INEVITABLE CONSEQUENCES WHICH MUST ATTEND SUCH A COURSE.

  The night Pius Mulvey walked out of Connemara, a hurricane struck the west coast of Ireland, felling twenty thousand trees in under six hours (according to the London Times for the following day). The winds were fearful but the trees did the damage. They blocked the roads and tumbled into rivers; pulverised farmhouses, cottages, churches. The tornado raged up and down the western littoral, from the Skellig Islands off the coast of Kerry in the south to the northernmost tip of County Donegal. Scores of bridges collapsed or were swept away. Two men in Sligo were killed by a landslide, a woman in Clare by lightning. An aristocrat from Cashel, up at New College, Oxford, wrote in an edition of the student newspaper that the country might never look the same again.

  Mulvey walked the two hundred miles from his home to the great city of Belfast in the County of Antrim, a journey which took him the best part of a month. He had never set foot in any city before, let alone one as stately and commodious as this. So prosperous, so gracious, so large was Belfast that people sometimes argued about exactly where it was; part of it in Antrim, another part in Down, everyone wanting to claim his piece. The river was so beautiful they wrote songs in its praise: the lovable old Lagan that severed the town in two. The vast granite alcazars which sentried the square seemed as wonders in Mulvey’s eyes, fortresses of marble and imperial columns; the innumerable rows of redstone houses specially built for the labouring classes no less a matter of jaw-dropping awe. They gave you a house. They gave you neighbours. If Connemara was Antarctica, Belfast was Athens. So it seemed to Pius Mulvey. The vast flag of empire on the Town Hall turret was the size of his father’s field back home.

  He made his way down to the bustling docklands where he found employment on a labouring gang for a time, widening and deepening the harbour. It was work he liked, uncomplicated and healthy; unlike Connemara farming, you could see the results of it. Your back might be aching by the time you knocked off; your muscles pulped, skin peeling with cold, hands blistered as those of a stigmatised hermit; but at the end of the week you got a fistful of shillings and they seemed a sweet balm to the pain. Food was plentiful and cheap in the city. If you wanted drink it was easily had; not the toxicant poteen of northern Galway, but smooth mellow ales and warming malts.

  Nobody in the port cared if you came or went. Mostly they were coming or going themselves. Raised in the practically incestuous closeness of Connemara, Mulvey found the anonymity of the city a bliss. The freedom of conversation with an affable stranger: the chap who was only talking to you to kill a little time. A companion who wanted nothing and offered nothing
in return. You might never set eyes on each other again and that meant you could parley without fear of a comeback. Or the freedom to engage in no conversation at all, but at least to be faced with a choice on the matter, which usually you weren’t on a mountainside in Galway. The exquisite silence of the city late at night. To saunter the ways of the sleeping metropolis; to hear your echoed footsteps on black, wet stone; to catch sight of the distant moonlit hills through a gap at the end of a terraced street, before heading back to your dockside hut with a bottle. It seemed to Pius Mulvey the life of a god.

  His mother had spent a fortnight in Dublin as a girl. Any time she spoke of the customs of the city she remarked disapprovingly and deeply suspiciously that it was a place where you could truly be yourself. But it seemed to Pius Mulvey that you could be anyone you chose: that the city was a blank folio on which your past might be redrawn. ‘Palimpsest’ was the English for a document written in the place created by the erasure of another. He came to think of Belfast as Palimpsestia, County Antrim. There was no reason to confine yourself to being yourself. And soon enough, he discovered in Palimpsestia, there were plenty of reasons to be someone else.

  It was there that he began to go by an assumed name. A kindly Protestant comrade with whom he shared lodgings had discreetly confided a few of the rules. Belfast was changing. People were talking ‘auld nonsense’. He’d have no truck with bigotry and never had. A man’s own religion was business of his own; the world would be a deal happier if it stayed that way. But it was important for a Roman Catholic to be careful now. Certain territories of the city were not to be walked by the bearer of a name as richly suggestive as Pius.

  For a while, he became his own brother; but being Nicholas Mulvey seemed a kind of indecency; too severe an act of colonisation. And anyway ‘Mulvey’ was still a little too Papish for most employers to be able to stomach. To settle on the right name proved difficult in the extreme. As John Adams he was a stevedore for almost four months; as Ivan Holland a cattleman’s helper; as Billy Ruttledge a deck-hand on a pilot’s tug. Waterfront life was various enough to allow such frequent christenings.

  As William Cook he was mate to a longshoreman who loved the Lord, and who persistently encouraged Mulvey to love him too. Mulvey had as little interest in finding Jesus as he hoped Jesus had in finding Mulvey, but he loved to listen to the extraordinary poetry his superior spoke. Dancing was ‘back-legs fornication’; whiskey or porter ‘the devil’s buttermilk’. People didn’t die, they ‘fell asleep’. Pope Pius was ‘Captain Redhat’ or ‘Johnny Longstockings’.

  He was a Justified Bible Protestant, the longshoreman would say, separated unto the gospel by Holy Ghost Power. Mulvey didn’t know what ‘justified’ or ‘separated’ might mean in such a spiritual context; why justification was a necessary aim, nor from which heavy impositions separation might be required. But to be able to talk like that about your religion seemed a thing that could give you a reachier punch. He was baptised an Evangelical in a tent in Lisburn and went to Mass in Derriaghy on his way home the same night, his clothes still sodden from the earlier immersion. Neither rite had revealed much of Holy Ghost Power to him; but as his father used to say when he had a few drinks taken, you couldn’t expect bloody miracles when you were talking about God.

  In time Mulvey began to grow weary with port life, its new mistrusts, the mutual suspicion now growing among the men, and he decided to try his luck in some other place. It was Daniel Monaghan who signed on the cattleboat that plied across to Glasgow. It was Gabriel Elliot who came back the following month, having found no work whatsoever in that impoverished city, and many of the same tensions which quietly throbbed in Belfast.

  Physical labour bored him now and he wondered how else he might procure a living. He began to go about the pubs of the dockside at night, singing to the drinkers the ballad he had composed. He learned to adjust it to the requirements of his audience, to tread carefully within the multiple borders of Belfast. If the drunks were Protestant he would make the insulted sergeant a lazy Irish Catholic begging for a hand-out; if they were Catholic he would cast him as a bible-thumping vicar prowling for converts among the reverently starving. When it was finally discovered, as he knew it must be some time, that essentially he had been singing the same song to the two opposing sides, both came together in fleeting coalition to have him beaten unconscious and slung from the city.

  He woke up under a tarpaulin on the deck of a coalboat with his pockets empty and his clothes in shreds. Men were talking a language he did not know; a curious vowelly tongue he took to be German. It took him a while to realise that actually it was English but spoken in an accent he had never heard. They dropped their aitches and exaggerated their consonants. ‘Ed’ was a head. ‘Gored’ was God. Norsemen, maybe. Latter-day Vikings. Or perhaps they were Americans, Mulvey thought. Americans were known for such swagger and braggadocio. It was only when their Captain proposed a toast ‘to the very good elf of King Willum’ (Gored blissim) that Mulvey understood who the strange creatures were. The beings after whom the language was named.

  He remained in his hiding place for one more day, only venturing out when land became visible. The natives greeted his appearance with wails of cheerful surprise, but did not beat him or kick him or fling him into the water, at least one of which courses he had expected them to take. Instead they fed him and gave him to drink, bucked him up and pronounced him a good’un. He was addressed as ‘my covey’, ‘my chum’ or ‘my china’, all terms seeming to connote fellowship among them. It was explained to the traveller exactly where he was, the names of the undiscovered lands he could discern in the distance. Foulness Island. Southend-on-Sea. The settlement of Rochford whose peoples were warlike. The ancient, tribal homelands of Basildon, Essex.

  Fabled Sheerness. The Isle of Sheppey. They sailed up the Thames estuary, past Purfleet and Dagenham, Woolwich and Greenwich, the Isle of Dogs, Deptford and Limehouse, Stepney and Shadwell, through the fallow swirling fog that lay on the docks. Until the fallow fog parted like the curtains of some gargantuan theatre, and there stood London, city of cities. Majestic in the dusk, biblically colossal, for all her millions of twinkling lights, forlorn as a faded prima donna in borrowed jewellery. Stupefied Mulvey could not even speak. The diva might have dubious origins, but already he was conquered.

  Into the docklands the slow ship wended, by Wapping and Pennington to St-George-in-the-East; the surface of the river like a sheet of beaten gold; the dome of St Paul’s a Croagh Patrick of copper. His rescuers wished him good fortune as they tied up at the dock. He stepped off the steamer and tottered away. The sailors chuckled with their waiting wives and put his gait down to a case of poor sea-legs. But the diagnosis was wrong. The voyager was love-drunk. He hoped he would never be sober again.

  Two urchins, little mudlarks, were dicing on the quayside, warbling a ballad of dauntless highwaymen.

  Oh, my name is Fred’rick Hall,

  And I rob both great and small;

  But my neck shall pay for all,

  When I die, when I die.

  Pius Mulvey made the sign of the cross. Never again would he have to be baptised.

  For two years Frederick Hall lived in the East End of the city, earning his bread by swindling and robbing. It was simpler than singing, and much more profitable, and much less likely to result in a beating, at least if you used your common sense. Gentlemen came into the quarter late at night to find girls, and they were such easy prey that Mulvey could scarcely believe his luck. If you appeared in an alleyway and said you had a pistol, the mark would hand over his pocketbook with scarcely a word. If you took out a cudgel he would do anything you asked. And if you sidled up behind him just as he was leaving a brothel – just as he was buttoning up his flies and thinking to himself that he had got away with it again – and if you gently said at that precise moment: ‘I know where you live and I will tell your wife,’ he would practically beg you to take everything he had and thank you afterwards for having taken it.


  Soon Mulvey discovered an interesting thing: that the easiest way to acquire money was simply to ask for it. He would single out a gentleman who looked a little uneasy in the street – a novice, perhaps, in the etiquette of the East End; some poor old duffer who had the horn so bad you could practically see it twitching through his Savile Row britches. Mulvey would amble up to him with the most empathetic smile he could muster and hold out his arm like a welcoming maître d. ‘I’ve a nice little Judy just around the corner, sir. Beautiful thing she is; breasts like peaches. Shall I go and fetch her for you, sir? Her rooms are nearby. Nice and discreet. She’ll do anything you want.’ Sometimes there would be a moment of nervous hesitance and Mulvey would quietly repeat the word ‘anything’. The gentleman would hand over a couple of hot coins and Mulvey would thank him and walk directly into the nearest pub, certain of not being followed into it by the toff. And certain, in the event he might ever be wrong, that no man would publicly ask for the whore he had been promised. No gentleman, anyway. They had to live by the rules. You could turn their rules to your own advantage; that was the secret on which London’s existence was predicated. Immigrants lived or died by their knowledge of that secret and Frederick Hall understood it better than most.

  He loved the city of London like most people love a spouse. Its inhabitants he found decent, fair-minded, tolerant; conversational when sober and wildly generous when drunk; far more hospitable to outsiders than he had been led to believe. What helped was that most of them were outsiders too; many living with the knowledge that they might be again. To walk the streets of Whitechapel was to walk around the world. Jews with black ringlets and skullcaps and beards; sloe-eyed women in fabulous saris; Chinamen with pigtails or conical hats; navvies with skin so richly black that in a certain light it appeared blue as the Atlantic at dawn. Often it struck him as profoundly correct that the Irish term for a black man was fear gorm: a blue man.