Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Inside, sir. Inside! Don’t come out until you’re called.’

  He had found dry clothes and eaten all his soup. After an hour, the storm had levelled down a little. The Chief Steward had knocked on his door with a message from the Captain. All passengers were strictly confined for the rest of the day. No exceptions whatsoever were permitted. The hatches were about to be battened down.

  He had tried to settle, to read again, as the pitch of the ocean flung breakers against the porthole and the shrill of the wind surged up and down the roof. But the novel had not done much to improve his spirits.

  Yes, it had passion or passion of a sort: the usual tiresome show-off gushiness. Here and there it managed to stagger into weary life, only to be crushed by the weight of the prose style. Like most first novels, like Dixon’s own, it was an attempt at a story of physical love. But it was wildly over-ambitious, peopled by puppets. The way it so flagrantly strained for its effects let it down. Reading it was like trudging through a peatbog in Connemara. A few startling flowers among a wilderness of sog.

  I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails!

  Sweet Christ.

  How could yet more of this sludge be pumped into the world when his own carefully constructed pieces had been rejected? Newby had been correct to think it would fail. No critic in his right mind would give this eructation a good notice. It was confused, improbable, disjointed, vague. Precisely the quality for which he had striven in his own writing – a respect for the actual meanings of words – was entirely and woefully missing from this.

  And yet, he knew, Laura would love it. She who had damned with the faintest of praise would adore this florid and juvenile monstrosity; this compendium of adjectives and schoolboy neuroses. She would think it ‘aesthetic’, high-minded, moving. It was laughable, sometimes, the way she prattled on. If he didn’t love her so much, he often thought he would detest her.

  The book sat on his desk: a silent accusation. The man who had committed this little crime against beauty had succeeded where Grantley Dixon had failed. It didn’t matter that the critics, if they noticed it at all, would give it the beating it plainly deserved; nor even that nobody would buy it except lonely old spinsters. His novel was a fact. It could not be cancelled.

  Like that bloodsucker Merridith and his so-called drawings. Those prettified daubs of his family’s victims, hanging in his hallway like a huntsman’s stuffed heads. And the leeches of London would pause and admire them. How elfin, the Irish. How utterly enchanting. Really he captures them terribly well.

  In a hundred years’ time those drawings would exist. So would The Grand Pacha’s Cruise in the Viceroy’s Yacht. Dickens’s absurdities. Trollope’s stupid lies. Nobody would be reading them but that wasn’t the point. Long after Dixon and his ambitions were dust, aeons after Laura had shunned him as a flop, those books would still exist to deride his memory. They would still be facts when he had become a fiction.

  He had taken down the box containing the manuscript of his story collection. Opened it, half wishing it might have disappeared. Removed the block-like slab of paper. Read the first line aloud to himself.

  Galway is a place in love with sorrow.

  Now he saw that beside the phrase Newby had inked three small red question marks. Perhaps he had a point. The sentence wasn’t a good one. It was unlikely that any place could actually be ‘in love’ with sorrow. He knew what he had meant but those words did not say it. Indeed, a place couldn’t be described as having any emotions at all. Newby was right. It was lazy and vapid.

  He scratched it out and made a couple of fresh attempts.

  Galway should properly be re-named ‘Sorrow’.

  ‘Sorrow’ might well be a better name for Galway.

  Galway. Death. Sorrow. Connemara.

  He ripped out the page and threw it away. Opened his notebook and tried to write.

  All afternoon he had sat at the desk, drinking Bourbon County whiskey and trying to write. He drank until his bottle was drained to the dregs, until evening darkened down like a stain on the porthole. When his candle started to flicker, he lit another on the end. But his metaphors were useless: stale and insulting. Nothing had come. Words as mud. The harder he tried, the more hopeless the task. Dixon was facing an undefeatable reality. The Famine could not be turned into a simile. The best word for death was death.

  And the fact was symptomatic of a wider problem. He knew what it was and had known for months; ever since the shattering moment he had walked into Clifden Workhouse and looked at the sight before him.

  He had no clear recollection of the next half-hour. Only the voice of the elderly constable who had led him up through the landings and corridors. Through the mist of pestilence and disinfectant, the darkened rooms where people were brought to die. The men died in one ward, the women in another. To allow them to die together was a breach of the rules. There was no ward as such for the children to die in, so they died in an outhouse near the bank of the river. Babies were allowed to die with their mothers, and then they were taken away to be dumped. And when their mothers died, if it could possibly be managed, they were dumped in the same pit as their newborn babies. The constable explained how the system worked; but his voice was fearful, as though he did not want to speak. And Dixon remembered not being able to speak himself, and thinking: this has never happened before; many things have happened but never this. He had tried to hold on to that one graspable thought, his very dumbness a tiny rock in a hurricane. Everything else came in disconnected pictures: thrown out of sequence, jumbled and split. A hand. An elbow. The twig of a human limb. An old man’s naked back. Blood on the flagstones. A gutter in the flagstones. A rack of shrouds. A girl’s shorn hair in a metal sink. A boy rocking in a corner with his hands to his face.

  Sounds, too, were part of the memory; but he did not like to remember the sounds. Only the constant of the constable’s voice, a gently spoken man, like Dixon’s grandfather, but the gentleness diseased with dread and shame. In one doorway an artist had been seated at an easel, trying to draw whatever was happening inside. A middle-aged Corkman, he had been commissioned by a London newspaper to go to Connemara and make pictures of the Famine. He was weeping very quietly as he tried to draw. Wet smears of charcoal had darkened his eyes, as though he was weeping oil, not tears. His hands were trembling as they attempted to form shapes. And Dixon had been afraid to look at whatever was happening in the room. In the end he had not; he had simply walked away.

  Now he looked at some of the sketches he had torn from the London journals in the half-thought he might somehow arrange for their publication in America. The emaciated faces and twisted mouths. The tormented eyes and outstretched hands. This was not happening in Africa or India but in the wealthiest kingdom on the face of the earth. Shocking the images: but nothing to what he had seen. They were not even close to what he had seen.

  Nothing had prepared him for it: the fact of famine. The trench-graves and screams. The hillocks of corpses. The stench of death on the tiny roads. The sunlit, frosted morning he had walked alone from the inn at Cashel to the village of Carna – the sun shone, still, in this place of extinguished chances – and found three old women fighting over the remains of a dog. The man arrested on the outskirts of Clifden accused of devouring the body of his child. The blankness on his face as he was carried into the courtroom, not being able to walk with hunger. The blankness when he was found guilty and carried away. The blankness of a man who had become an untouchable. Dixon had no words for it. Nobody did.

  And yet could there be silence? What did silence mean? Could you allow yourself to say nothing at all to such things? To remain silent, in fact, was to say something powerful: that it never happened: that these people did not matter. They were not rich. They were not cultivated. They spoke no lines of elegant dialogue; many, in fact, did not speak at all. They died very quietly. They died in the dark. And the materials of fiction – bequests of fo
rtunes, grand tours in Italy, balls at the palace – these people would not even know what those were. They had paid their betters’ accounts with the sweat of their servitude but that was the point where their purpose had ended. Their lives, their courtships, their families, their struggles; even their deaths, their terrible deaths – none of it mattered in even the tiniest way. They deserved no place in printed pages, in finely wrought novels intended for the civilised. They were simply not worth saying anything about.

  He had slept for a few hours through a fervency of nightmares. He saw himself clinging to the up-ended deck of the Star. Suddenly up to his waist in blood. A hand had clutched him hard by the hair, pulling him back. He grabbed at the sodden sleeve. An aged Negro in a ragged greatcoat, a tattered scarf around his neck. In his arms an ashen child with paper-white eyes. The insistent pointing of the black man’s finger. The cell at the end of the cold stone corridor: the room into which he could not bear to look.

  At eleven o’clock he had decided to go to the Smoking Saloon, thinking another drink might do a little to ease his nerves.

  Since his visit to Connemara, it usually did.

  Merridith had been sitting alone in the dimly lit saloon, leafing through a pile of crumpled old newspapers. He seemed to be scissoring out the headlines and arranging them into some kind of order. The alcove in which he was slouched was illuminated by a candle; he was squinting closely to make out the smaller letters. A bottle of port was sitting on the table beside him. To judge from his dishevelled state he had drunk most of it already. Seeing Dixon nearby, he gave a snuffle of contempt.

  ‘The lofty bard has descended among the mortals.’

  ‘I won’t be among you very long, don’t worry.’

  ‘Back to the old Muse,’ he quietly slurred. ‘Rather insatiable lady, is she not?’

  ‘Feel like a battle of wits tonight, do you, Merridith?’

  ‘Oh I wouldn’t fight a battle with an unarmed man. That’s not how we do things in England.’

  ‘You’ve done it in Ireland often enough.’

  He gave a smile of inebriated loathing. ‘Ah, the bard’s beloved Erin. The only place on God’s earth best understood by foreigners.’

  ‘And what the Hell are you? A loyal native?’

  ‘Well my family has lived there since about 1650. A while before the white man stole America from the Indians. I wonder whether you feel you should go home, too. I assume you must. Only logical, really.’

  Dixon looked down at him. Lord Kingscourt stared back blearily.

  ‘Whither then, pilgrim? When you repatriate yourself?’

  ‘Your argument is as ridiculous as everything you say.’

  ‘Speak their own language at any rate. Sort of think it’s important to any true understanding. Must have learned a smattering before going there, did you? Matter of professional pride, I expect. Not to go unarmed into the field and so on.’

  The candlelight was throwing inky shadows across his face, deepening his cheekbones and the sockets of his eyes. Dixon said nothing. Suddenly he felt badly drunk himself. Shaky. Queasy. Afraid he would vomit. A scorch of whiskey acid came burning at his throat. Merridith grinned up at him like a hanging judge.

  ‘Ar mhaith leat Gaeilge a labhairt, a chara? Cad é do mheas ar an teanga?’

  ‘And what is the Irish for starvation, Your Lordship?’

  ‘Gorta. A hunger. You don’t even know that much?’

  ‘I don’t speak Swahili either but I know cruelty when I see it.’

  ‘So do I, sir. I was brought up seeing it.’

  ‘I notice you didn’t die of it all the same.’

  ‘Is that my latest crime, sir? That I didn’t die? Is that to be added to everything else?’

  The roar made the stewards turn and stare. A spume of saliva was running down his chin. His face was purple with wrath and hatred.

  ‘You’re drunk, Merridith. And even more pitiful than usual.’

  ‘Would you like me to die? Why don’t you kill me? Damned convenient, wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘My own mother died of famine fever, Dixon. Your beautiful Muse ever bring that small fact to your attention? Caught it while feeding our tenants in ’22. So I don’t need your pompous lectures on cruelty.’

  The ship tilted and gave a lugubrious sound, as though the force of some impact had made it rock. The door of the saloon flung itself open and slammed closed again.

  ‘Saved a good many others in Galway, too. Mostly from the estate of a true-blue Irishman who would pimp Saint Bridget for two bob an hour. Well, it’s not very important of course. Means nothing really.’

  ‘I meant no offence to your mother. Now I’ll bid you goodnight.’

  ‘No, don’t let it bother you.’ He kicked a chair towards him, but Dixon did not sit down. ‘Let us discourse on literature. Tell me a story.’

  ‘Merridith – ’

  ‘So the famous novel is to be set in Swahili-Land now, is it? How utterly marvellous. How fabulously outré. When we were all expecting the magnum opus to put an end to hunger in Ireland, it now seems to have transmogrified into something else.’

  At that point the Maharajah had entered the saloon, accompanied by the Reverend and Wellesley the Mail Agent. Their eyes were shining with the particular excitement of land-men who have survived a storm at sea. They nodded at Merridith but he didn’t nod back. Again the violence in his voice was rising, as though spewing from some animus he could not control.

  ‘I wonder what is the Swahili word for a spoiled poseur. A coddled fool who prattles of literature while others have the guts to make it. Who mocks the efforts of others to end people’s sufferings but does damn all to actually end them himself. That is a word you might know, I think.’

  ‘Merridith, I’m warning you – ’

  ‘You’ll warn me of nothing, you nauseating hypocrite! Put your hand on me again and I’ll shoot you like a dog!’

  By now the Reverend had nervously approached.

  ‘Lord Kingscourt, sir, you’re a little upset. Can I – ’

  ‘You can take your pieties and your pity and stick them up your scriptural arse. Do you hear me, sir? Get out of my sight!’

  ‘Quite the hero,’ said Dixon, when the Minister had gone. ‘Courageously taking on a man twice your age.’

  ‘Tell me, old thing – do you know the word “nigger”?’

  ‘Shut your mouth. This instant. You drunken scum.’

  ‘A word you would have heard in your boyhood, I imagine. “Come over here, Nigger. Little Grantley wants his gumbo.’”

  ‘I said shut your mouth.’

  ‘Were many of the slaves on your family’s plantation Swahili? I imagine they must have been. Didn’t they teach you any? Or perhaps Bwana felt it rather below himself to mix with them, did he?’

  ‘My grandfather was an opponent of slavery all his life. Do you hear me?’

  ‘Did he rid himself of the lands which slavery purchased for his ancestors? Give back his inheritance to the children of those who made it? Live as a pauper to ease his conscience or the coffee-house pretensions of his mewling grandson? Who is so deeply ashamed of what pays for his vittles that he aches to find greater atrocities in the accounts of others.’

  ‘Merridith – ’

  ‘My father fought in the wars that ended slavery throughout the empire. Risked his life. Wounded twice. Proudest thing he ever did. Didn’t ponce on about it, just bloody did it. My mother saved thousands from starvation and death. While your servants were calling you “Little White Massa”. Write one of your imaginary novels about that, old thing.’

  ‘What the Hell do you mean – imaginary novels?’

  ‘You know very well what I mean.’

  ‘Are you calling me a fake, sir?’

  ‘Fake is a rather coarse American barbarism. More of a sickening liar, really.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Is it wrong? If it is, let me see it, why don’t you?�
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  ‘See what?’

  ‘Your famous novel. Your great work of art. Or perhaps it simply does not exist. Like your right to lecture others on the crimes they have committed in order to mask the guilt of your disgusting own.’

  Dixon became aware of the Chief Steward hauling him back. The powerful grip of a man trained in trouble. Two sailors had also come in and were standing behind him. Rain was running down their ragged oilskins. The lights were turned up to a stinging white dazzle. Merridith’s look of repulsion faded to a haughty smirk.

  ‘Caressed your little nerve, have I Grantley, old thing?’

  ‘Lord Kingscourt, sir,’ said the steward firmly, ‘I shall have to request that you enjoy yourself in a more peaceful manner.’

  ‘Of course, Taylor, of course. No difficulty at all. Just a little friendly discussion among fellow oppressors.’

  ‘We conduct ourselves in a certain manner in the saloon. The Captain feels strongly about standards and such.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right.’ He slumped back into the alcove and refilled his glass untidily, spilling a slop of port down the crystal stem. ‘Speaking of which, would you be good enough to ask Massa Dixon to vacate the premises immediately?’

  The steward looked at him.

  ‘He is in breach of the rules. A tie is compulsory in the saloon in the evening. As any gentleman would already have known.’

  Lord Kingscourt raised his glass and shakily drank, his free hand touching the table as though he thought it might disappear. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the light, but Dixon could have sworn there were tears in his eyes.

  When the man with the club-foot had shambled away, Dixon entered the saloon and pushed closed the door to the gusting gale. Merridith was at the gaming table, cutting the cards; sharing a joke with the unsmiling Chief Steward. He was sitting on a stool with his back to the door but when he saw Dixon enter he beckoned in the mirror, still going at the steward like a bore on a train.

  ‘Do you see,’ he was saying, as Dixon approached, ‘with a very good word-puzzle, it is all in the way the material is composed. To me, the inventor of a pastime is a national treasure. I venerate him as I esteem Victoria Regina Magnifica.’