Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  Hampshire was across the sea from France. It wasn’t just historic; it was ‘steeped in history’. It was widely valued for its chalky cliffs, the pleasant character of its charming people and its fascinating formations of fossiliferous rocks. (‘Mother of Christ,’ said Tommy Joyce. ‘You’d sprain your lips.’)

  Winchester was the county town. King Alfred had died there and Henry III was born there. It was whispered by many in the world of letters that the authoress of the widely noted and delightful entertainments Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice (‘published under the mysterious note ‘by a lady”) resided within the county of Hampshire. The celebrated Mr Brunel, inventor of engines, resided nearby, at Portsmouth. Lord Palmerston, the Secretary at War, had his family seat at Romsey. King Arthur’s round table could be witnessed in Winchester. It hung on the eastern bastion of the city’s Great Hall, that noblest exemplar of magnificent construction whose mighty stones and oaken beams sang the stirring hymn of England’s glory; the genius of her people from commoner to king. (‘There’s a spake for you now,’ Tommy Joyce sighed dreamily. ‘The genius of her people from commoner to king.’)

  Nobody celebrated came from Connemara. There were no singing stones, no magnificent constructions. No literary whisperings. No tables hung on walls. No kings had been born there, or lived there, or died there; if they had, it was so long ago that nobody remembered their names. No inventors, no authors, no Secretaries at War. What a wonderful place Hampshire must be.

  The rules of Winchester College Football were complicated. The teams had mysterious or indecipherable names. Scholastics versus Inferiors. Old Tutors versus The Worlds. Nobody had ever written down the rules, but you had to learn them anyway or the shags would biff you. They’d dig you; they’d prune you; they’d give you a pandying. (‘Shag’ was the English word for a cormorant; also a friendly name for an English boy.) A shag had to stand in the middle of a field and hold up the ball while shouting: ‘Worms!’ That, said David Merridith, was one of the rules. To know the rules was to know a language, though no book existed from which they might be gleaned.

  The food at Winchester College was horrible. ‘Bloody ghastly’, according to David Merridith; a wonderful word Mary Duane had never heard before, yet one she thought sounded like its own meaning. (‘Ghaarst,’ you might groan, if you were being sick, for example.) But some of the fellows were decent chaps. There were a lot of other shags from Arland there, and they knocked about together no matter what happened. They weren’t ghastly. They were blooming bricks.

  Stones sang in Hampshire. Bricks bloomed.

  But David Merridith didn’t. Often he came back from Hampshire sickly and pale. He would take off his neatly pressed worsted trousers, his Winchester College blazer and schoolboy’s cap, and don the rough clothes he wore at home in Connemara: the peasant’s canvas britches, the bawneen ‘bratt’ or smock. He seemed to think they concealed his status but for some reason they tended only to underline it. A boy in a disguise nobody believed in, an actor playing a part he didn’t understand, he would trudge every rocky field and quaking bog, every pot-holed road and tortuous boreen, each of the thirteen villages on his father’s estate, speaking the Irish he had learned from his father’s servants.

  The tenants found it difficult to attune to his changing accent; the exotic music of Connemara Gaelic spoken in the tones of the English public school.

  ‘Ellorn,’ he’d say, meaning oileán: an island. ‘Rark’ was his way of pronouncing radharc, a view. ‘Rark. Rark.’ He sounded like a shag. He was a shag. The shaggiest in Galway. Many of the people simply couldn’t understand him. Mary Duane was one of the few on the whole estate who could make out what on earth he was talking about. Even when speaking in his native English, his brogue was harder to decipher now. ‘Wistpawt’ had become his word for ‘Westport’. ‘Arland’ he’d say, when actually he meant Ireland. (Some of the people thought he was saying ‘Ourland’ and thereby making some political point. They tended merely to nod and back away, smiling.)

  He loved to speak in the Irish language. He would address her mother as ‘Woman of Duane’, her father as ‘Friend’ or ‘Esteemed Person’. As he entered their cabin he would grin and announce: ‘Christ between us and all harm!’ He’d say ‘the Lord bless all here’ in the Gaelic idiom, and ‘God and Mary be with you’ for hello or good morning. Her father found it strange and faintly annoying. ‘He’d give you an ache the way he carries on. And as for God-bless, he’s a God-blasted Protestant. He doesn’t even believe in God.’ Her mother had told him not to be blethering like a geck, but her father thought David Merridith’s behaviour suspicious. ‘He wants to be something he’s not,’ he’d say. ‘He’s fish, that gossoon, and he wants to be fowl.’

  ‘Just because they teach manners at Winchester College,’ said Mary.

  ‘Manners Makyth the Man,’ her mother said.

  ‘It was founded in 1382,’ said Mary.

  ‘So was my arse,’ her father said bleakly.

  Seasons passed. He took up drawing. She would happen upon him sometimes on her way to the market or returning from the well at Cloonisle Hill, seated with a sketchpad and a box of charcoals. He had a talent for capturing the rocky landscape especially, its sense of implied drama and sudden changes of light. A few scrawls of his chalk and you’d see it materialise: marl, shale, sea-wrack, basalt, the marbling of pebbles like bullets in the fields. Buildings, too, he was able to draw, with an exactitude Mary Duane thought almost miraculous. His people were always a little too idealised; stronger and courtlier than they were in the flesh. But people were already his favourite subject, the tenants and servants and workers on the estate. It was as though he was drawing them as he wanted them to be: not quite as they were, or ever had been. Perhaps not even as they would have wanted to be themselves, for he never asked them that. He simply drew them.

  For all his pallor and delicacy he was growing up handsome, not at all like his stony-faced father. People often said of David Merridith: ‘His mother will never be dead while that lad lives.’ The broth of your father. The spit of your mother. The cut of your sister. The ghost of your aunt. His manner was gentle, amiable to everyone; though only when drawing a portrait could he look anyone directly in the eyes. A small occasional stammer, and the blushes it caused him, made him appear more timorous and incapable than he was. Though oddly he never stammered while talking in Irish; perhaps, Mary thought, because he had to think more clearly before speaking a language not his own.

  For some reason bees and wasps stung him often. Perhaps he was simply more careless than others; or maybe there was some sweetness in his blood that attracted them. Whatever the cause, it seemed to happen daily. She would see him sometimes in a distant field, thrashing at the air around his head, jumping and flapping in a crazy jig. To some on the estate he was vaguely amusing – ‘a long drink of water’ or ‘a great stuttering dodo’ – but to Mary Duane, his companion of childhood, he had the heartbreaking beauty of an angel in a prayer book; the strange loveliness of something becoming extinct.

  Once, in the summer of her seventeenth birthday, they had gone for a walk together in the sprucewoods up by Glendollagh Lake. As usual he was talking about his school. He was explaining that the name for a shag who had attended Winchester College was ‘an old Wykehamist’; but you didn’t have to be old or from Wycombe to be one. (Depending on certain mysterious circumstances, being from Wycombe might in fact rule you out.) You could be an old Wykehamist at the age of eighteen, and you could be an old Wykehamist if you came from Connemara. David Merridith’s father was an old Wykehamist, for example, and soon David Merridith would be one himself.

  It sounded to Mary Duane like a terrible insult. ‘Shutup out of that, you auld Wykehamist, before I puck you.’ But she thought she’d better not say that. Saying it might be ghastly.

  Some of the shags at school had sweethearts. They would write letters to their sweethearts and send them little poems. A fellow called Millington Minor often
wrote the poems. No, he wasn’t actually a miner (though funnily enough his father did own a mine). If you gave Millickers Minimus a smoke or a sixpence, or ordered your fag to polish his galoshes, he’d compose you a poem that would cross your eyes.

  ‘I suppose you’ve a rake of sweethearts yourself then, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know, quite,’ he quietly answered.

  ‘You don’t know much, so. Do you, mister?’

  ‘There’s a girl I like a lot. I don’t know if she knows it.’

  ‘Is she pretty, so? Your little sweetheart.’

  ‘She’s the prettiest girl from here to Dublin.’

  ‘Is she indeed? That must be nice for her.’

  ‘Prettiest in the whole of the world, I dare say.’

  ‘You’d be as well to tell her how you feel then, wouldn’t you, mister?’

  He chuckled lightly, as though conceding something. ‘Probably. Sh-shouldn’t wonder.’

  They walked on for a while, going deeper into the woods. Everything was quiet, dark as a cathedral: dark with the incense of meadowsweet and pine. ‘To pine’ was an English verb for worrying or mourning; but here was a refuge where no one could pine. The syrupings of sap lay glazed on the bark. The carpeting of spruce needles and ferns underfoot. Reverence hung over the Glendollagh woods and it seemed a blasphemy to break it by speaking. She could hear the sound of his breathing beside her, the chirrup of a starling in the branches above. They wandered the otherworld, afraid to awaken it. And suddenly he had tripped on a mossy log and tumbled down a bank into a tangle of briars and foxgloves, slicing open his lip and the back of one wrist. Trying to come back up he had slipped again, and thrust out his hand to grab for help. She had taken him by the elbow and hauled him up hard; his muddied fingers gripping her bare, tanned forearm. It was the first time since childhood that they had touched each other.

  He had clambered from the ditch, panting with effort and staggered forward clumsily into her arms, a deep blush colouring his mortified face. Green eyes like his mother’s. Like beautiful marble. You could catch the fever from somebody’s eyes.

  Somehow they had ended up holding hands. They walked on through the wood, now intertwining their fingers. He started talking about drawing, but she wasn’t really listening, even though she was managing to talk back sometimes. Draw: to represent; to tie; to suck; to be in a stalemate; to attract as though by magnetism. Soon they came to a clearing which poachers used for setting their snares. A small brook was gurgling over the white granite rocks. She let go his hand and went to the water; cupped her fingers and took a drink. When she rose again and turned, he was looking at the Twelve Bens in the middle distance, as though he had never seen them before.

  Nothing had been said for a few long moments. The rules were complicated. But then nobody had ever written them down.

  Winchester.

  Hampshire.

  Winchshire.

  Hampchester.

  He bowed his head and began toeing a loose stone, sometimes glancing up at her through his long tousled fringe, uneasy as a hart in a wood full of huntsmen. His fall had left a smear of blood on his upper lip, the saffron of a wild lily streaked across his cheek. He put his hand in his pocket and absent-mindedly pulled out the lining, pretending suddenly that he was looking for something. The birds stopped their twittering. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. The sun came out from behind the trees. A filigree of gold seemed to shine around him.

  ‘Could I k-kiss you, Mary?’

  They had kissed for a few minutes and then begun to touch. After a while they had loosened their clothes. Mary Duane realised that she would always remember what was happening now. The deepness of the cleft where his collarbone was. The smell of his sweat like new-mown grass. The extraordinary feel of his Adam’s apple between her lips. The shocking prickle of stubble against her neck and uncovered shoulders. She would remember his nervous hands touching her abdomen and navel, and then meeting the stonish hardness of her ribs. Then the wetness of his mouth on her small bared breasts, the heel of his wrist against her thigh; the astonishing softness of the mounds of his palm causing her to shake with gentle pleasure and grasp his wrist. His hand was like air. She could nearly feel the corrugations of his fingerprints. How he kissed her mouth while he touched and caressed her. The sounds of pleasure coming from her mouth and into his. His tongue like a marshmallow. The grind of their teeth. The knead of their lips. Her hands on his face. The down of blond when she kissed his chest. And the strangeness of the things she wanted to do. To bite his shoulder. To suck his nipples. The aromas of their bodies and the aroma of crushed ferns. The tang of dandelion milk on his sunburnt skin. He had not wanted to be touched himself– at least, he hadn’t asked to be. But when she had touched him tentatively through his half-opened britches – the anguish in his eyes, their lock on her own – he had begun to softly weep, then begged her in a whisper not to stop. He had clasped to her like an ivy as his pleasure overcame him, measured her neck and breasts with kisses.

  Afterwards they lay in each other’s arms. Grey light was dappling through the dark green leaves. The air smelt loamy, of turfsmoke and rain. A corncrake gave its peculiar cry. She felt no shame, no remorse of any kind. Really she felt nothing, but a new kind of nothing: the kind that gave her joy to feel it. It had started to rain but had stopped just as suddenly. After a while she had fallen asleep.

  When she awoke he was lying beside her and muttering some words. Tá grá agam duit, a Mhuire. Tá grá agam duit. A zizzing of bees could be heard in the glade. She had pretended for a while not to realise what he was saying. ‘I love you, Mary,’ spoken in Irish.

  They had buttoned their clothes – he had turned away discreetly as she fastened her skirt – and walked back together through the fields to Kingscourt. In the distance the trawlers were heading out towards Inisheer for the night. A calf was running after its mother. Another calf was blowing; swinging his head. The cow came stately down to the shallows and started to drink from the rushy water. Two tiny figures were tedding hay on the hillside. Weary men trudging towards home from the bogland, loys and shovels over their shoulders like rifles. Very unusually, he wasn’t talking.

  She wondered if he was embarrassed, or shocked by her willingness. Perhaps he might think a bit less of her now. The girls in the village said it was best to hold back with a boy, even if you had feelings for him: even if you loved him. A decent boy would respect you for holding back.

  He had stopped at one point and picked her a handful of purple loosestrife. They had moved into each other’s arms and kissed again: less urgently now, more courteously than before, with the knowing tenderness of adults.

  ‘Suppose you hate me now,’ he quietly said.

  ‘I could no more hate you than hate myself.’

  ‘You promise it, Mary? I couldn’t bear it if you did.’

  ‘Of course I do, you great daw.’ She kissed his beautiful mouth and moved his fringe out of his eyes. Being allowed to touch him seemed a kind of blessing. ‘Don’t worry. Everything is all right.’

  ‘I – just couldn’t stop. I’m sorry. Please don’t think badly of me, Mary.’

  ‘I didn’t want you to stop. I couldn’t stop either.’

  ‘Is there a word?’ he asked. ‘For what happened today?’

  ‘Winchester College Football,’ she said. Mainly because she did not know what else she might say.

  Every day that summer they went walking in the woods by Glendollagh Lake. Winchester College Football was often played. She would think about playing it when she woke up in the mornings and last thing at night before going to bed. One day in late July he went to Athlone with his father. Lord Kingscourt was buying a new brood mare. She missed him as though he had gone to America. She tried to envision all the things he would see on the journey: to look at the world through David Merridith’s eyes.

  At moments of the day when she wasn’t near him, she found herself imagining what he might be doing. She pictur
ed him dressing, having his breakfast; undressing again to take his bath. What a beautiful sight, to see him fully naked; but that had never happened; he was shy about his body. At Winchester College, he had explained to Mary, a boy was never allowed to be completely undressed. Even in the bath he had to wear his underdrawers. When she asked him why, he had become more embarrassed. Certain Hunnish practices had sometimes gone on at Winchester College, which it would be better if she did not know about.

  His protectiveness about the secrets of Winchester touched her. She took it as a sign of wider things, a confirmation of her womanliness in David Merridith’s view. She had seen her father act in a similar manner towards her mother when the subject of England in general had come up. He had witnessed carry-on as a young man in England the like of which no married woman should want to discuss. Her mother would laugh at him and shake her head. He would chuckle back archly and grab her and kiss her. And Mary Duane knew that this was love. The thing not said.

  The matter of silence.

  CHAPTER IX

  THE MAP OF IRELAND

  IN WHICH WE CONCLUDE OUR POOR TRILOGY OF THE EARLY LIFE OF MISS DUANE; THE DEEPENING OF HER AFFECTIONS; AND CERTAIN SHOCKING EVENTS.

  One afternoon while they were strolling the wheatfields at Kilkerrin, a squall had rushed in from the bay and caught them by surprise. They had taken shelter in an abandoned house near the edge of a glade; the cabin of a family who had emigrated to Liverpool. They had looked for a while around the sad little rooms, at the mouldering crockery, the pictures on the walls. The Sacred Heart of Jesus. Patrick banishing the snakes. A calendar torn from a Stockman’s Almanac. A chipped enamel plate was sitting on the table, a knife and spoon placed on it like the hands of a clock, as though someone was expected home at any minute. But nobody would be coming home again.