Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  He had managed to light a fire in the deadened ashes of the hearth and they had lain down in front of it to be together. The room was cold as a tomb but his body was warm. After they had kissed and embraced for a while, he had made to touch her thigh but she had gently moved his hand away.

  ‘I can’t today, my kitten. Let’s just kiss.’

  His smile had melted like snow off a rope.

  ‘Are you all right, Mary?’

  ‘Fossiliferous. Honestly.’

  ‘I’ve not offended you? I didn’t mean to take liberties.’

  ‘You didn’t, you daw.’ She kissed him again. ‘It’s my time.’

  He beamed benignly. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Do you not know what happens to a girl once every month?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Think.’

  He shrugged. ‘Pocket money?’

  She looked at his confused face. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It happens once in the month. It’s to do with the moon.’

  ‘The moon?’

  ‘She gets a visitor. That’s the guest I have now.’

  He stared at the space around her as though looking for a Guardian Angel.

  ‘They never mentioned this at Winchester College Hampshire?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Mary. Not that I heard.’

  ‘Maybe you should ask one of your sisters about it.’

  ‘They do it too, do you think?’

  ‘Every woman does.’

  ‘Aunt Eddie?’

  ‘Jesus. Would you stop it.’

  ‘Does it have a name?’

  ‘Some call it “The Curse”. It has other names, too.’

  ‘Sounds dashed inconvenient, whatever it is.’

  ‘Not nearly so inconvenient as not doing it, I can tell you.’

  ‘How do you mean, M-Mary?’

  ‘Ask one of your sisters.’

  In late September he went back to school in England. Sometimes he had written her what she knew must be love-letters only because he had drawn hearts and Cupids in their margins. She had been too ashamed to tell him she did not know how to read. The Presbyterians ran a hedge college near Toombeola Bridge, an informal school for the children of tenants; but her father said he didn’t want her mixing with Presbyterians. She didn’t know why Presbyterians were reckoned to be dangerous; the great Wolfe Tone had been a Presbyterian; he had fought and died for Ireland as captain of the revolutionaries in ’98. But she didn’t want to vex her father. So she had taught herself the skill of reading that autumn and winter, with a primer she borrowed from the parish priest; the black stains of ink on the blue-lined leaves of copybook slowly revealing themselves as declarations of fidelity and love.

  Winchester. Hampshire. England. Great Britain. He had not disappeared; you could see it on the atlas. His co-ordinates were measurable and so were her own, but the distance between them seemed vaster than degree.

  She pined, Mary Duane; she understood the word now. Her boy sent her drawings of England’s wildflowers: forget-me-not, lad’s-love, love-lies-bleeding. She sent him back meadowsweet, heathers from the mountain. Ferns from their grove in the Glendollagh wood. She missed him so much that she became mopy and argumentative. Connemara seemed barren as a withered nest without him. At night she lay in the bed she shared with two of her sisters, waiting for them to stop whispering and finally fall asleep, so her fingertips could begin their delicious imitation of David Merridith’s caresses. She wondered if he ever did the same. Boys often did, she had sometimes heard it whispered. She imagined her hands were David Merridith’s hands. And she sent the thought towards him that his own hands were hers. She pictured her thought flying over the sea to England, a thought like a tiny golden star, soaring over Ireland, across the dark sea, down through Wales, trailing sparks in its wake, over the glimmering cities of the English night, the chimneystacks and factories, the palaces and slums, into his room at Winchester College where he slept in a bed with heather-dusted sheets. Her dreams about him became wilder and stranger. Soon they had a fieriness she began to find frightening. She told them – some of them – to the priest in confession. He was a happy young priest, the kind who sings at weddings. All the girls fancied him. He’d go easy on you in confession. But he hadn’t gone easy on Mary Duane.

  He had said such imaginings were the worst kind of evil, a poisonous affront to the Virgin Mary. ‘That sin causes Our Lady to weep,’ he had insisted. ‘Every time it is committed Our Mother’s heart is pierced with a burning sword. For a young woman to defile her own God-given body is a tremendous victory for Satan.’

  There was another important matter for young women to consider. Young men couldn’t control themselves. They had feelings which young women didn’t have. A woman was a glacier, melting slowly, but a man was a volcano of boiling passions. Every man on earth had to carry that cross; even Pope Pius himself in Rome. That was how Almighty God had designed it, but the devil could step into the picture if invited. To ensnare some young man in an occasion of mortal sin could have disastrous consequences for his soul and his body. The asylums of every city in England were howling with men who had been ruined by women. Better a millstone were tied around a girl’s neck and she be flung into Dog’s Bay than to coax a young man to a lustful temptation which he lacked the mental apparatus to resist. As for his physical apparatus, the less said the better. When Satan stood up it was time to run.

  She had found the priest’s words, if anything, quite exciting. She knew that was wrong, and probably sinful; and she didn’t want to make Our Lady weep, at least no more often than was absolutely necessary. But it was hard to push out of her head for any length of time the picture of David Merridith in the grip of demonic arousal.

  But she tried. She tried to put David Merridith out of her mind completely. She agreed to go blackberrying with Noel Hilliard, a boy of her own class from Commander Blake’s estate, but felt nothing at all for him despite his pleasantness and strength, his eejity jokes and his skill with mimicry. He was broken-hearted the night she told him their only future was as friends. He had pleaded with Mary Duane to be given another chance: a chance to make her happy. So many kinds of love existed in the world; surely she had one kind for him. There was simply no point, she had said to Noel Hilliard. It wouldn’t be fair on him. He deserved a girl who could love him truly. Her own heart belonged to another.

  One morning that autumn she had gone with her father to buy a slaughtering knife at Ballyconneely Fair. Along the road they had happened upon a group of men watching Lord Kingscourt’s stallion covering a mare in a meadow, its sinewed haunches bucking and nostrils flaring. Strange laughter between the men as they watched. They were passing a pipe from one to the other. Strange laughter and few words.

  That night she dreamed of the molten sword, burning as it pierced the bared heart of Christ’s mother. When she woke up at dawn she was trembling and wet.

  Her eldest sister, Eliza, was courting by now: a nice boy from Cushatrough who worked a conacre out by Barnahallia Lake. Mary Duane asked if she had been intimate with her fiancé.

  ‘No,’ said her sister. ‘We look at the flowers.’

  How would a girl avoid getting pregnant, Mary Duane asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just wondering.’

  ‘That’s all you better be doing, you rip. You’re not so big that Mammy won’t redden your arse for you.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You know fine well what it means. Little holy innocent.’

  ‘So. What’s the answer?’

  ‘You get off the horse at Chapelizod.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know the way, if you were riding from Galway to Dublin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Chapelizod is just before Dublin.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well you make him hop off the horse at Chapelizod.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Or you hop off t
he horse yourself. It depends.’

  Geography, it seemed, was also a language: its syntax more complicated than English.

  Sometimes she caught sight of her brothers’ bare bodies. One evening she saw her father’s too, when he was washing himself in the brook after a day clearing stones on the mountain. She wondered if David Merridith would have that pallid pouchy look, like a gawky gannet plucked of its feathers, that seaweedy cluster between his legs. Would his belly be pudgy or taut as a drum? Would his rear be saggy or like two onyx eggs? The other realms of his body, where it pleasured him to be touched: what were they called? Did they even have words? The places of her own body where his hands had brought her such bliss as to make her tremble and cry out his name: what were the names of those? The helpless kisses and sighs shared at such moments, were they some kind of secret, unspeakable language? Did all lovers cry out each other’s names? Eliza and her fiancé? Her mother and father? The mother of Jesus and her carpenter husband: had they cried each other’s holy names as Mary Duane had done with her boy?

  The smell of cut grass brought his body to mind; the buzzing of bees began to make her feel weak. In church she found herself staring up the crucifix, as though a new sun had arisen in the sky over Connemara and was bathing the land in a stained-glass light. The naked Christ wasn’t just holy: he was beautiful, too. His alabaster thighs and powerful shoulders. The tendons of muscle tautening his forearms. If you saw him in Clifden Market instead of hanging off a tree, you’d fancy the drawers off him. You mightn’t be able to stop at Chapelizod. You’d have to keep going. Till you ended up in Holyhead. She glimpsed hidden meanings in the rubrics and the prayers. This is my body. The word was made flesh. With my body I thee worship. Was it sinful to think that way? Probably it was. Poor Virgin Mary would be practically hysterical. But then again, she’d had plenty of practice over the years.

  One day David Merridith would be old and tired. Would he be so beautiful then? Or ugly like his aunt? Would he grow into his father, a crabby auld bastard eaten up with bitterness and guilt? That was what her own father said about David Merridith’s. A bully devoured by his rancour.

  She remembered the last time she saw him before he went away to New College, Oxford. (New College, needless to say, was very old.) His father and Tommy Joyce had gone to Clifden for the day. The house was empty. They had it to themselves. She had bathed and put on fresh clothes and tied a ribbon in her hair. As she walked up the drive to Kingscourt Manor, her longings seemed to whirr before her like a congregation of birds. She was thinking carefully about the map of Ireland; the road which led from Galway to Dublin; the detours, excursions and notable delights which might be enjoyed along the way.

  David Merridith himself had opened the front door. He had just returned from the tailor’s in Galway and was dressed in a manner that made him hard to recognise. A mortarboard hat and long black gown, a smart black frock coat and a creamy coloured bow tie, an emerald green waistcoat with porcelain buttons. ‘Subfusc’ was the name for the clothes he was wearing. Everything in his life seemed to need a name.

  ‘I don’t really feel like a walk today, Mary.’

  ‘Do you want to kiss me again so?’

  ‘That would be nice. But to be honest, I’d better not.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be able to control yourself, no?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘You’re a volcano of boiling passions. I know.’

  He had touched her face; the curve of her cheekbone. ‘I’d never want to do anything bad to you, Mary.’

  She had kissed his fingertips. She could see he was nervous. ‘Would it be so bad when there’s love between us? We could be careful.’

  ‘Careful?’

  She kissed the side of his mouth in the lingering way she knew he liked. ‘I know a way of being careful. It will be all right. Don’t worry.’

  But he had pulled away, his features bleached with anxiety, and walked slowly across the room as though in a daze. He opened the piano lid. Closed it again. Began shifting around the ornaments on top of the sideboard.

  ‘Is something the matter, David?’

  A bee was circling around his head. He flicked it away with the back of his hand.

  ‘We’ve known each other a long t-time, haven’t we, Mary.’

  ‘Since 1382,’ she said. But he didn’t laugh.

  ‘What’s wrong, David? Is something after happening?’

  ‘My f-father has told me not to be seen with you in future.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He says it’s a question of duty, Mary.’

  ‘What duty is it would interfere with our friendship?’

  ‘You don’t understand. He says it’s my duty. And if I don’t agree, he’ll send you and your family away.’

  ‘He couldn’t send us away,’ she said angrily. ‘We’re the Duanes.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘My father’s people are on this land a thousand years. It’s himself’ll be sent away if he starts that kind of talk.’

  ‘He could send you away if he wanted,’ David Merridith said quietly. ‘He could send you away tomorrow morning. And anyway, Mary – there’s something else.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It was your f-father who asked him to tell me this.’

  She had been too shocked to say anything at all for a while.

  ‘He seems to feel – it’s unfair in some way. When you look at the whole picture. Mary, are you listening?’

  ‘You said it was what you and I wanted that mattered.’

  ‘I know. I know. But honestly, Mary.’

  ‘You’ve changed your mind? You didn’t mean what you said? All those dozens of times that you said it?’

  ‘I just think, Mary – when one looks at the whole picture.’

  She thought about the bee, sinking its sting into your flesh. They died when they stung you. They could only do it once.

  ‘Take this, Mary. Please.’

  He had reached into the pocket of his porcelain-buttoned waistcoat and offered her a handful of blackish half-crown coins. Tears were running down his face as he held them towards her.

  That was the only time she had ever struck him; maybe the only time she had ever struck anyone. He had stood like a statue while she slapped his face, bearing her blows without saying a word. She didn’t know how many times she must have slapped him. If she’d had a knife, she would have murdered him then. Gashed him in the throat like a slaughterman felling an ox.

  It still shocked her to think about it. The violence of that moment.

  Not the way she had slapped him. But the way he had let her.

  Even under attack, there were rules.

  CHAPTER X

  THE ANGELS

  THE EIGHTH DAY OF OUR VOYAGE: IN WHICH THE GOOD-HEARTED CAPTAIN MAKES A DANGEROUS ACQUAINTANCE (THOUGH HE DID NOT KNOW IT AT THE TIME, NOR UNTIL IT WAS TOO LATE).

  Monday, 15 November, 1847

  Eighteen days at sea remaining

  LONG: 26°53.11′W. LAT: 50°31.32′N. ACTUAL GREENWICH STANDARD TIME: 00.57 a.m. (16 November). ADJUSTED SHIP TIME: 11.09 p.m. (15 November). WIND DIR. & SPEED: N.E. 47°. Force 5. SEAS: Tumultuous. HEADING: S.W. 225°. PRECIPITATION & REMARKS: Big weather. Intermittent severe showers of sleet since dawn. This day we start into our second week out of Cove.

  This dreadful day fourteen steerage passengers died, making a total of thirty-six since commenced this voyage, and were buried according to the rite of the sea. Four of those who expired today were infants; one of those had lived only twenty-one days on this earth. A fifteenth passenger, a poor fisherman of Leenaun whose brother fell asleep in Jesus yesterday, lost his reason and took his own life by drowning.

  May God in His forgiveness have mercy upon their souls.

  Eight suspected of Typhus in the hold this night. One suspected of Cholera.

  A piglet was today stolen from the cages on the upperdeck. No doubt the First-Class passengers shall somehow survive the deprivati
on of his flesh. I have ordered all the beasts to be guarded from now on.

  This evening I was walking near the fo’c’sle at dusk, oppressed by a heavy mood of melancholy. The deaths of any are hard to bear, but the deaths of the young, the little children especially, seem almost a ridicule of our lives. I confess it is difficult at such painful moments to believe that Evil does not govern the world.

  I was attempting my prayers in contemplative silence, as is my preferred custom of years, when I came upon one of the steerage passengers, on his hands and knees by the First-Class gates, and most violently ill from the sea. This is a curious and noteworthy character, his behaviour oftentimes odd. Though badly afflicted with a deformed foot, he is fond of walking the ship by night, and is known among the men by the sobriquet of ‘The Ghost’.

  On seeing me approach, the poor polliwog rose quickly and went to the rail, where he leaned over very far, and was soon in a state of substantial misery, saying good morning and good day again to his supper. I gave him a pint of freshwater I happened to have about me in a flask, and an observer might have imagined it were vintage champagne from his gratitude. A more pleasant fellow I never met in my life, though a little strange in his appearance, his hair particularly.

  He said he was finding the voyage vexatious to his economy, never having been into open seas previously. His father had been a fisherman in County Galloway in Ireland but had never ventured far out from the land, the waters in that part being so abundant with fishes and crustaceans that he never had need. His father, said this amusing little fellow, was known in the locality as ‘the fisherman who never went to sea’. At that I gave a laugh. And as I laughed myself, he laughed too, and began to look more relieved in his countenance.

  He and I conversed for a time about matters of the weather and such and such and he was agreeable, not taciturn at all, despite what the men say about him; speaking English in a most melodious and charming way. I asked if he would teach to me a couple of examples of his own language; for example ‘good morning, sir’, ‘I bid you good day, madam’, ‘land’ or ‘sea’ and various other ordinary things. And I would note them down in a phonetical way; for I had oftentimes wished to have a few phrases of that tongue, so as to be able to speak them to passengers as a little sign of friendship and thereby put them at more of their ease. ‘Awbashe’ and ‘murra’ are the words for the sea. ‘Glumree’ means ‘the waves’. ‘Jee-ah gwitch’ is ‘good-day’. But they have two score and upward of words for land, depending on what sort of land is being spoken of.1 ‘Tear’ is one of them (pronounced in a fashion so as to rhyme with ‘year’). ‘Tear mahurr’ is ‘my father’s land’. He took from the pocket of his greatcoat a handful of soil which he shewed me. It was a handful of his father’s land at Connermara. ‘Tear mahurr Connermawra’ I ventured, and he smiled. It was a matter of good luck to have carried it along with him. I said I thought it a pleasant custom and indeed hoped it might bring him fortune (though it were better he trusted to prayer than to fetish).