The Star of the Sea (5 page)

‘Oh dear, oh dear. Hard thing at her age.’

‘Quite.’

Wine was poured. Bread was offered. A steward brought a tureen and began to serve the vichyssoise.

Lord Kingscourt was finding it difficult to concentrate. A worm of pain corkscrewed slowly through his groin: a stone-blind maggot
of piercing venom. He could feel his shirt sticking to his shoulders and abdomen. The Dining Saloon had an ashy, stagnant atmosphere, as though pumped dry of air and filled up with pulverised lead. Against the cloying odour of meat and over-bloomed lilies another more evil stench was trying to gain. What in the name of Christ was that filthy smell?

The Surgeon had clearly been in the middle of one of his interminable stories when Merridith had arrived. He resumed telling it now, chuckling expansively, enfeebled by duckish clucks of self-amusement as he gaped around at the dutifully simpering company. Something about a pig who could talk. Or dance? Or stand on its hind legs and sing Tom Moore. It was an Irish peasant story anyway: all of the Surgeon’s were.
Gintilmin. Sorr. Jayzus be savin’ Yer Worship
. He tugged his invisible forelock and puffed out his cheeks, so juicily proud of his facility for imitation. It was something Merridith found hard to stomach, the way the prosperous Irish were never done lampooning their rural countrymen: a sign, they often claimed, of their own maturity on matters national, but in truth just another form of cringing obsequiousness.

‘Will you tell me now,’ the Surgeon chortled, his bright eyes streaming with excess of mirth, ‘where else could that happen but darlin’ auld Oirland?’

He spoke the last three words as though in inverted commas.

‘Wonderful people,’ agreed the heavily perspiring Mail Agent. ‘A marvellous logic all their own.’

The Maharajah said nothing for a few long moments, grim-faced and bored in his stiff robes. Then he muttered a few gloomy syllables and snapped his fingers to his personal butler who was standing like a Guardian Angel a few feet behind him. The butler brought over a small silver box, which the Maharajah reverently opened. Out of it he took a pair of spectacles. He looked at them for a moment, as though surprised to have found them there. Cleaned them with a napkin and put them on.

‘You’ll remain at New York for some time, Lord Kingscourt?’

It took a moment for Merridith to realise whom the Captain was addressing.

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I mean to go into business, Lockwood.’

Inevitably Dixon gave him a look. ‘Since when did the gentry stoop to working for a living?’

‘There’s a famine in progress in Ireland, Dixon. I assume you stumbled across it on your visit there, did you?’

The Captain gave an apprehensive laugh. ‘I’m sure our American friend meant no offence, Lord Kingscourt. He only thought –’

‘I’m quite aware of what he thought. How can an Earl be fallen low as a tradesman? In a way my dear wife often thinks the same thing.’ He looked across the table at her. ‘Don’t you, Laura?’

Lady Kingscourt said nothing. Her husband went back to his soup. He wanted to eat it before it coagulated.

‘Yes. So you see my predicament, Dixon. Not a man on my estate has paid rent for four years. My father’s death leaves me with half of all the bogland in southern Connemara, a great deal of stones and bad turf, a greater deal of overdue accounts and unpaid wages. Not to mention the considerable duties owing to the government.’ He broke a piece of bread and took a sip of wine. ‘Dying is rather expensive,’ he smiled darkly at the Captain. ‘Unlike this claret. Which is muck.’

Lockwood glanced uneasily around the table. He wasn’t accustomed to dealing with the aristocracy.

A young woman had begun to pluck the ornate harp that was sitting near the dessert table in the middle of the saloon, beside the dripping ice sculpture of Neptune Triumphant. The melody sounded tinny and just slightly out of tune, as harp music habitually sounded to Merridith, but she played with a seriousness he found affecting. He wished the Dining Saloon were empty except for himself and the young woman. He would have liked to sit there and drink for a while: drinking and listening to the out-of-tune music. Drinking until he felt nothing.

Connors? Mulligan? Lenihan? Moran?

Earlier in the day, through the cast-iron bars that fenced off the people of steerage from their betters, he had noticed a man he had often seen in the streets of Clifden. The fellow was in chains, and either drunk or half mad, but Merridith still recognised him, he wasn’t mistaken. He was a tenant of Tommy Martin’s at Ballynahinch. Apparently – so the Methodist minister from Lyme
Regis had said – he had been flung in the lock-up for being drunk and violent. Merridith had been quite astounded to hear it. That wasn’t at all how he remembered him.

Corrigan? Joyce? Mahony? Black?

He would come in to Clifden on a Monday morning to sell turnips and kale with father, a smallholder: a pugnacious little jockey of a typical Galwayman, full of spit and strength and snap. What the hell was his name? Fields? Shields? A widower, anyway. Wife died in ’36. He’d scraped a living for himself and seven children out of a perch of quartzite shale on the slopes of Bencollaghduff. Ridiculous to say, Merridith had often envied them.

He knew himself how ridiculous that was. And yet the father was clearly so proud of his son. There was a tenderness between them, an embarrassed affection, even though they were never done goading each other. The farmer would accuse his son of idleness; the son would retort that his father was a drunken gawm. The man would clip his son across the head; the son would fling a half-rotten turnip at him. The women of Clifden would congregate around their rickety stall as much to watch them trade imprecations as to buy what meagre goods they offered. Abusing each other had become a kind of pantomime. But Merridith knew that was all it was.

Meadowes?

Very early one December morning, driving the phaeton to meet his sister off the mail-coach at Maam Cross, he had seen them kicking a ragged football in the middle of the empty marketplace. The morning was still: a little misty. Their stall had been set up near the gates of the church, the turnips polished like gleaming orbs. The whole town was asleep except for the father and son. Leaves were drifting in the deserted streets; the fields in the distance were silvered with dew. He remembered it all now, as he sat in the Dining Saloon, plunging through the rolling darkness of the sea. The strange beauty of everything in the Connemara morning. Their shadowed forms gliding through the mist like celestial beings. The
thuk
as one of them would hoof into the ball. The muffled shouts. The impish obscenities. The extraordinary music of their unrestrained laughter echoing against the high black walls of the church.

In all his childhood Lord David Merridith had never kicked a football with his own father. He wasn’t sure his father would have
recognised
a football. He remembered saying as much to his sister when he met her off the Bianconi that morning, weighed down with Christmas parcels and boxes of candied fruits; brimming with news and gossip from London. The way she had laughed and agreed with his remark. Probably, Emily said, if Papa had ever seen a football, he would have rammed it into a cannon and tried to shoot it at a Frenchman.

He wondered where his father was now. His body was buried in the churchyard at Clifden; but where was
he
? Was there any shred of truth to it, after all, the pietistical absurdity of life after death? Could the story be metaphor for some other, more scientific reality? Would the sages of the coming times be able to decode the allegory? And if such a truth existed, how did it work? Where was Heaven? And where was Hell?

Am I all my fathers? Are they all me?

Three weeks before embarking on the
Star of the Sea
, Merridith had locked up the house in which he and his father and grandfather had been born, shuttered up its shattered windows, closed it and locked it for the last time. He had handed the keys to the valuer from Galway and walked around the empty stables for a while. Not a single former tenant had turned up to see him off. He had waited until dusk but nobody had come.

Accompanied by his bodyguard – the man had insisted – he had ridden out from Kingscourt to visit his father’s grave at Clifden, only to find that it had been desecrated again. The granite sea-angel had been smashed in two, the words
ROTTIN BASTARD
whitewashed across the tombstone, along with the emblem of those who had put them there. His grandfather’s grave and those of the ancestors had all been marked with the splattered badge of their loathing. Merridith’s own name appeared on several of the stones, and those ones, too, had been defaced. His mother’s tomb alone had not been touched, a pardoning which had merely made the despoliation around it seem starker. But looking at the scene, he had been able to feel nothing. Only the misspelled words had truly taken his attention. Did they mean that his father was rotten or rotting?

He wondered about that now: the awful inadequacy of his response. And what precisely had they meant to say, these men who had ruined his father’s grave? Their symbol was an H enclosed in a
heart, but what heart was it that could violate the dead? ‘Hibernian Defenders’, his bodyguard had explained; the name the local troublemakers gave to themselves. Another name they went by was ‘the Liable Men’, primarily because they dealt out liability; also they were gruesomely reliable in doing so. And Merridith had quietly pretended not to know these etymologies already, had feigned his usual interest in the customs of the indigenous, as though the constable had been enlightening him about jig steps or fairytales. Had they truly hated his father quite so much? What had he done to deserve their repugnance? Yes, he had been an inflexible landlord, in the latter years especially; that was undeniable. But so had most other landlords in Ireland, and in England too, and everywhere else: some far worse and many more cruel. Didn’t they know, these night-stalking mutilators, how much his father had tried to do for them? Couldn’t they understand he was a man of his time, a conservative by instinct as well as politics? That politics and instinct were often the same thing, in the pebbled fields of Galway, in the statued halls of Westminster. Probably in every other place, too. ‘Politics’ the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.

For some reason Merridith found himself thinking about his children: a memory of his younger son as a baby, sobbing in the night with the pain of teething. The puppet-stuffed nursery in the London house. Stroking the child’s head. Holding his hand. A blackbird hopping on the rain-spattered windowsill. The tiny fingers tendrilling around his own, as though mutely to plead, ‘stay with me’. Like Christ in the garden. Watch with me one hour. The heartrending smallnesses we finally want. Strange thought that Merridith’s father had been a baby once. And in the minutes before he died he had seemed so again; that vast, indignant, iron-hearted seaman whose portrait hung in galleries all over the empire. He had reached out his frail, white hand to David Merridith and squeezed his thumb as though trying to break it. There was fear in his eyes; gleaming terror. And David Merridith had wanted to say, It’s all right. I’ll stay with you. Don’t be afraid. But he had not been able to say anything.

As though waking from a sleep that has lasted too long, he realised the people around him were talking about the Famine.

The Mail Agent was loudly contending with Dixon. ‘The landlords aren’t all bad, you know, dear boy. Many of them subsidise their tenants to emigrate.’

The American scoffed. ‘To rid their estates of the weakest and keep the best.’

‘I suppose they must run their lands as a proper business,’ attempted the Captain. ‘It’s a hard thing for everyone, but there it is.’

The thrown-back glower was wholly predictable. ‘And is it proper business to accommodate the steerage passengers as you have on this vessel?’

‘The passengers are treated as well as my men can hope to treat them. I must work within the constraints laid down by my owners.’

‘Your “owners”, Captain? And who might those be?’

‘I mean the owners of the ship. The Silver Star company.’

Dixon nodded grimly, as though having expected the answer. He was the kind of radical, so Merridith assumed, who is secretly relieved that injustices exist; morality being so easily attainable by saying you found them outrageous.

‘He has a point, Lockwood,’ the Surgeon said. ‘Those people down in steerage aren’t Africans, after all.’

‘Nig-nogs are cleaner,’ the Mail Agent chuckled.

The Surgeon’s sister emitted a hiccup of tipsy laughter. Her brother gave her an admonishing glance. Quickly she arranged her features into an expression of sorrow.

‘Treat a man like a savage and he’ll behave like one,’ Merridith said. His voice had a tremble that frightened him a little. ‘Anyone acquainted with Ireland should know that fact. Or Calcutta or Africa or anywhere else.’

At the mention of Calcutta some of the company surreptitiously glanced at the Maharajah. But he was busy blowing on a spoonful of soup. A surprising thing to do, perhaps, given that the soup was already chilled.

Grantley Dixon was staring at Lord Kingscourt now. ‘That’s rich, Merridith, coming from you. I don’t know how a member of your class can sleep at night.’

‘I sleep very well, I assure you, old thing. But then I always peruse your latest article immediately before retiring.’

‘I am aware that your Lordship has learned how to read. Since you wrote to my editor to complain about my work.’

Merridith gave a low-lidded, disdainful grin. ‘Sometimes I even snore a little and keep my wife awake in bed.’

‘David, for heaven’s sake.’ Lady Kingscourt was blushing. ‘Such talk at the dining table.’

‘Quite a sight, the periodic eruption of Mount Dixon the Lesser. As for when your long-awaited novel finally delights us all by appearing, no doubt I shall find it as conducive to tranquillity as the rest of your effusions. I dare say I shall sleep like Endymion, then.’

Dixon didn’t join in the round of uneasy laughter. ‘You keep your people in abject penury, or near it. Break their backs with work to pay for your position, then put them off the land with no compensation when it suits you.’