Star of the Sea

by Joseph O'Connor

  He came to have an image of Laura and himself as actors in a play somebody else had written. There was courtesy in the text, it was mannered and restrained. A critic might have given an admiring notice. She spoke her lines; he spoke his own; rarely did either player interrupt or fluff the script. But it didn’t feel like an actual marriage. Rather it came to seem like living on a stage set and wondering whether the audience was really out there past the limelight; and if it wasn’t, exactly whom the performance was for.

  The literary evenings continued but Merridith found them a trial and eventually commanded that he wanted them to stop. He was surprised by the intensity of Laura’s defiance. He could make his own decision as to whether to attend them, but they would certainly not stop: it was wrong of him to ask it. She was not some lifeless chattel to decorate his existence. She had married a husband and would not have a master.

  ‘Is a man to be gainsaid in his own house?’

  ‘It is my house too.’

  ‘They are a waste of time and a waste of money.’

  ‘My time is my own. And so is my money. I shall waste them or spend them precisely as I see fit.’

  ‘What does that mean, Laura?’

  ‘You know very well.’

  ‘I certainly do not. Please enlighten me.’

  ‘When you can say the same things about yourself, you may give lectures. In the meantime I shall do exactly as I please.’

  Sometimes when they argued, and they began to argue often, she would say she did not know why he had married at all. Neither of them uttered it, but they both knew the reason. It was little enough to do with Laura Markham.

  Often at night, in the middle of one of the soirées, or after his wife had retired to her bedroom, he would slip from the house and walk down Tite Street; those few hundred yards which led to the river. To stand quietly alone on the bank of the Thames – it brought the relief which only water brings. London at that time could still be tranquil at night; the certain blissful peace found at moments in cities when all around seems nothing but fiery noise. There were moorhens in the shallows on the long summer evenings, swans gliding past on their progress up to Richmond. The water, and the moorhens, would remind him of Ireland, the place of his boyhood: perhaps his only home.

  And often as he stood at that muddy, peaceful river, he would find himself remembering a girl he had once known. The sound of flowing water seemed to raise her like a spirit. He wondered if she thought of him. Probably she didn’t. For God’s sake, why would she? Better things to do.

  As youngsters they had gone walking in the meadows of Kingscourt, through the woods and the boglands, up the reefs of Cashel Hill. He would bring along the chart made by one of his ancestors, an exquisite delineation of ‘The Propertie of Merridith’. For all its fine detail and beautiful draughtsmanship, the maker, a seaman, had done it as a kind of joke. The estate lands of Kingscourt were drawn as water; the seas at its edge were rendered as dry land. It showed courses for yachting in the Maumturk Mountains, the safest paths for marching over Roundstone Bay. A madman, she said, as she laughed at the subverted perfection. And she had shown him things he owned which appeared on no chart. A yew tree whose berries were said to heal fevers. A rock where a saint left the imprints of his knees. A well at Tubberconnell often visited by pilgrims. The few times she pointed to some feature he knew already, he would pretend not to know it, because he liked to hear her explain it.

  She had loved that strange chart. In the end he’d had to give it to her. And he loved her exegeses of boulders and crags. They had strolled the fathomed slopes, the contours and flatnesses, the wheatfields that led to the sea at Kilkerrin. Cruelty and bloodshed have walked with cartographies; with gods, too, and their soldierly saints. Such plottings seemed distant from the cliffs of Kilkerrin. That was the place where he pictured her now: gazing out towards Inishtravin Island – ‘Inishtravin Lake’ on his forefather’s chart – as though it had appeared in the night. She seemed to find beauty in ordinary things: the coconut smell of a gorse bush, the spiral of a cockleshell, the glint of the lighthouse on Eeragh Point. Her laughter skimmed the billows of Ballyconneely Bay, bouncing towards the horizon like a slate-stone. The whole world seemed fresh to her, as it would to a child. She wasn’t a child, and neither was she a saint. But he had never once seen her do an act of deliberate cruelty.

  She would be twenty-eight now. Her appearance would have changed. Already she might be grey and her face might be wrinkled, for they aged early, the women of Connemara: the rain and the salt wind leathered their skin. Or she might be like her mother, more beautiful in age; turf-dark, stonish, strong with self-possession and strong with the possession of all she had survived. He wondered if she had married; whether she had even remained at Kingscourt. Born a poorer man, he might have married her himself. All he had owned had come to disown him; but that was to judge himself lightly, and he knew it. He had not had the mettle to break out of his prison. He was too young to do it, and too afraid. He had murdered her trust for no other reason than obedience: his crippling and crippled desire to please. Out of hunger for love he had thrown love away. In a way he had used her as bait.

  And when the bait didn’t work, when his father didn’t bite, he had used Laura Markham as weapon. He had married her mainly because he could not be stopped from marrying her. He was not a cowed boy, he was beyond control; would pay any price to prove his manhood. Marriage, for Merridith, had been a feat of vengeance, but an act that had only imprisoned its kicked-down perpetrator even as it seemed to have given him liberation. What had made him a freeman had also enslaved him: the slavery all the worse for being self-imposed.

  The laudanum he was prescribed for sleeplessness rarely did its job; when it did, it gave him dreams almost as unbearable as his nightmares. Blizzards of shimmering opalescent colour that made him feel as though swimming through tar. Opiate tinctures and lozenges were suggested by his apothecary, but still the dreams were fearful dazzlings; exhaustions of images he did not understand. Finally the family physician showed him how to inject: how to use a tourniquet to bulge out the vein, how precisely to hold the syringe and exert the correct degree of pressure on the plunger. Injecting, said the doctor, was the better remedy for insomnia, as well as a safer way to use the medicine. It was well known that you couldn’t become addicted to opium if you injected. Injecting was the procedure of the gentleman, he advised; the method the doctor himself always used.

  In February 1841, Queen Victoria celebrated the first anniversary of her marriage. A thief escaped from prison, having battered a guard to death. A journalist from Louisiana began to appear at London soirées. An aristocrat from Galway had just become the father of a baby whose parents had exchanged barely a word in months. Born six weeks early, he was nevertheless healthy; but the marriage he was born in was by now at death’s door. On one occasion constables came calling at his home, alerted by the neighbours to the sound of a furious argument. The night of his christening, no entry appears. The choices made by diarists as to what will be included tell us much, so we think, about contemporary times. Perhaps what is excluded tells us more.

  Merridith’s journals record that it was in February 1841 that he began to roam the East End of London at night. He would leave his fine house and walk eastwards down the riverbank and into a world which imagination could not have fashioned. And sometimes as he drifted the deafening streets he would think of a song he had known as a child; a ballad often sung him by Mary Duane’s mother, about the girl who puts on the clothes of a soldier and goes among soldiers to find her love.

  The diaries become difficult, even chaotic at this point, often written in a fantastically meticulous code, a combination of Connemara Gaelic and ‘mirrored writing’. Whole weeks are left blank or filled in with false details, which must have taken hours to contrive. Other entries abound with violent self-loathing; fevered charcoal sketches of the quarter that was to become his haunt.1 The flavour arising from those terrible pages is fearsome indeed
: unforgettably so. The scribbled pictures are haunting: the work of a man in torment. One thinks of the fresco of The Punishments of Hell which once looked down on their creator’s marriage bed.

  Freak shows, carnivals, rat-killing dogs; gin palaces, hock-shops, ‘suicide saloons’; bookies’ stalls and faith healers’ fit-ups; evangelicals’ booths and revival meeting teepees; mediums’ nooks and fortune tellers’ bunkers, where people who had little future of any kind would pay what they couldn’t afford to be assured that they did. The local myth was of life’s predictability, the commodity most enduringly sought after by the poor. Healing, salvation, an unforgettable experience might be yours. Deliverance was for sale, or certainly winnable, if only you had the gumption to buy a ticket for the draw. The one tiny gamble you didn’t want to take might well be the miracle that would make you rich. ‘Who knows?’ said the parasites. It could be you.

  Everything in the East End was deferrable, for a price. Boredom; poverty; thirst; hunger; disappointment; lust; loneliness; loss, even death itself and death’s finality. Here was the mirrorland where your loved ones never died but merely slipped into the unseen room. From there they could assure you of continuing tenderness if you’d only cross the palm of the seer.

  Deliverance was shouted from the doorways and the shadows, a cry that drew him like gravity. Here in the alleyways of Cheapside and Whitechapel were the fancy houses of late-night whispers at his club. Often he had wondered about those basements and back rooms where women pleasured men or gave them pain. Some men liked pain, Merridith knew that; to be beaten, spat upon, whipped, degraded. And others elected to administer degradation. He had encountered such brutes in his navy career; had once risked a court-martial for daring to intervene.2 Violence was an aphrodisiac for certain men: they found the infliction of torture arousing. How terrible the fall before resorting to that: how bestial and severed the man from his emotions. Merridith was thankful he was no such monster, that his own frantic hungerings were at least so ordinary.

  For a handful of coins they would do anything that was asked. Not that he would dream of asking them to touch him. He was too much the gentleman to ask for that, and anyway, as ever, he could scarcely bear to be touched. To watch them undress was what he preferred, and there were establishments to cater for that desire, as for all others. To sit in the shadows with his eye to a spy-hole and watch that happening, again and again. A normal man at his normal leisure. A man with an eye for beauty.

  In some of the establishments, they were too young: they were children. The children he would always send away. Then the madams would send in more, or send in old women dressed like children. He stopped going to places like that.

  But there were other places. There were always others. He found a place that suited him better and soon he was going there almost every night. It was a place for men, the madam said. Normal, manly, civilised men. There were no frightened children and no old women: no lashes, no debasements, just beautiful ladies. Fresh and natural, hand picked like orchids: the kind you would see in a painting by a Master. There was really no difference, the madam contended, between her own refined establishment and the National Gallery.

  He would shake with desire as he watched from the darkness, his breath misting the glass which separated watcher from watched. Sometimes he would inject himself while he observed the undressing women. A bee-sting of pain. A small convulsion in the flesh, like an attack of pins and needles but much more sudden, and then relief oozing his marrowbones; crushed ice in a desert.

  If his wife enquired as to where he was going at night, which by now she rarely bothered to do, he would say there was a game of cards at the club. Other invented alibis are included in the journals, almost always with minutiae of times and venues: often with long accounts of entirely fictional conversations. A gathering of the Friends of the Bethlehem Asylum. A committee meeting of a charity for ‘Fallen Girls’.3 A dinner for Old Wykehamists which never took place. Early in the autumn of 1843 she said she would like to take the boys to Sussex for a few weeks. He raised no objection and that was just as well for she had already packed their bags and ordered up the coach. Viscount Kingscourt told a friend he was unsure if she would return, adding, perhaps truthfully, that he did not care any more.

  One night the girl was Irish who stripped in the booth: dark-eyed, from Sligo, with black hair that shone, and when she quietly enquired if he wanted anything else from her, David Merridith found himself saying he did. She opened the lock and pulled back the partition. ‘There now, alannah,’ she whispered as she kissed him. ‘Come in to me, sweetheart, and show me how you love me.’ What happened was over in even less time than it had taken to think of a lie when she asked him his name. Afterwards the girl had risen from the divan and quickly washed at a metal bowl in the corner and left the compartment without uttering a word. Returning to Tite Street just before dawn, her client looked down from Chelsea Bridge and contemplated throwing himself into the Thames. It was only the thought of his children that stopped him.

  As the sunrise reddened his solitary bedroom he forced so much laudanum into his biceps that he slept for almost all of the day. The servants did not intrude. They knew better by now. He dreamed he was his father as a newly married man: the morning he had found his own father’s body hanging from the Faerie Tree in the Lower Lock meadow. When finally he awoke he injected again, so agonisingly deep that his needle touched bone; then he rose and dressed and went to his club to dine and returned to Cheapside just as night was falling on the East End. (Though as he puts it himself in one of the journals: ‘[T]he night does not fall there. Rather it lifts up; raising the stone of daylight under which Whitechapel crawls.’) The establishment he preferred had been raided by the police; its madam arrested and sent into Tothill Prison. But there were other establishments. There were always others.

  He came to know every sidestreet and back lane of Whitechapel as a prisoner would know every brick of his cell. He carried a map of it around in his mind and he walked it like a pilgrim in a back-to-front fable, condemned to know less the more he walks. Somewhere in the labyrinth was waiting what he needed. The Irish girl. Another girl. Two girls together. A man and a girl. Two men, maybe. Often he would enter an establishment at random; always he found quickly that he could not stay. The moment whatever he suggested became available, he immediately stopped wanting it and would have to leave.

  What precisely he was seeking can never be known; and if a striking remark from the diaries contains any clue, it is possible he had little enough idea himself. He had heard it said often in his navy career that a hanged man experiences erection at the moment of death. It was how David Merridith had come to feel now. ‘Choked, strangled; a deathly stiff.’

  He began to take more and greater risks. Soon even Whitechapel was not enough for him. Spitalfields. Shoreditch. Mile End Road. He drifted down to Stepney where the entertainments were darker; eastward into Limehouse where children carried weapons; down towards the riverfront, around Shadwell and Wapping, where even the police were afraid to venture at night. At least once he described himself as a journalist from Ireland; another time an Oxford professor of criminology; the owner of a brigantine; a manager of boxers; a man on the search for his runaway fiancée. Many years later he was still remembered on the docks; the wolfish aristocrat known as ‘Lord Lies’.

  A city skulked in the shadows of a city. In the culverts and warehouses, boys would fight dogs; drugged women could be hired for the price of a newspaper. But women were not the interest of the prowler any more. ‘Woman delights me not, nor man either,’ he wrote, paraphrasing Hamlet in the masquerade of madness. The opium you could find there was strong and raw, straight off the ship from China or Afghanistan, illegal to buy without government licence but thrown around the wharfage like rice at a wedding. A single half-grain caused the stars to explode; a pod of grains made you think your heart was bursting. David Merridith chewed it by the juicy mouthful, until his tongue blistered up, and his gums and palat
e bled, and he flew like a death angel through the clouds over London. He came to like the tang of his own mouth’s blood. Sometimes he thought he had no heart left to burst.

  Between Sutton Dock and Lucas Street was Hangman’s Quarter, a plot of rubbled and rat-swarming wasteland where the girls were half dead with hunger and disease. Often he tried to speak to them, to give them money or food, but they did not understand that by now he only wanted conversation. Some of their images appear in his manic drawings; their faces like grave-cloths hanging on fists, blackened by the cudgels and boots of their pimps. It became his place of final resort. Every night ended in Hangman’s Quarter. He never went near the women now; he watched from the ruins as they fought and touted. And he drew those mastered women like a knife draws blood.

  Perhaps watching them and being there carried the risk he needed now. Risk as narcotic. It made him feel he existed.

  One night a constable approached him in the Mile End Road and said this was no place for a gentleman to allow himself to be seen. Merridith tried to appear affronted at what he called the impertinence, but the officer – an Irishman – quietly persisted. The way he kept calling the aristocrat ‘sir’ made it abundantly clear who had the power here. ‘A gentleman might even find himself blackmailed, sir.’

  ‘I don’t care for the tone of your insinuations, Constable. I merely got lost on my way home from a walk. I was dining with my father at the House of Lords.’

  ‘That Your Honour may find his direction, so. Next time perhaps you’ll accompany me to the station. I can show you a little map the Sergeant keeps in the cells.’