The Star of the Sea (11 page)

Usually all he wanted was to watch her undress. It was odd, she supposed, but men often were. Most men were queer as a five-legged dog. When they took off their masks that was all they were. The howling of a drunkard in the filth-strewn street was not so crude as what some of them wanted.

The dishonesty of how it had begun was below him, she thought, an insult to her intelligence, as much as to his own. Late one April night he had knocked on her door and slunk in with his sketchpad, saying he would like to draw her. A sour odour of whiskey was colouring his breath. He wondered if she might possibly ‘permit him that privilege’. His choice of language had been unexpected, for they were unusual words to be spoken by a master to his servant. She had sat by the window and permitted him that privilege. A loosening of the hair was all he required that night. And the next night he had come up the stairs again. It was not his house but the house of his friends. ‘A temporary shelter’, was how he had put it. His friends were in Switzerland, walking in the snow. He moved like a man in another man’s house. After ten minutes of drawing, another privilege was requested.

I wonder, Mary, if it might be possible. If you’re uncomfortable
at all I would absolutely. Friends since the days of childhood and so on. Brotherly sisterly. No suggestion of any sort of sordid. Just the bare arm perhaps. The light on your shoulder. If you could possibly unbutton unhook untie. Contrast of tones. Nothing more. Overall composition so important to get right. Not a matter of the material itself, do you see, but of the way the material is composed.

Without replying, she had removed her robe and nightgown. She could not bear to listen to any more lies.

It was the first time he had seen her naked body but he had said nothing and the silence had not surprised her. He wanted it to be regarded as a normal situation; a stripped woman, a clothed man watching her; his clothes and his art a kind of disguise, as much, perhaps, as her nudity. He had held a stub of charcoal up into his eyeline, squinting solemnly as he gauged her measure, closing one eye and then the other. As though she were an arrangement of bottles on a windowsill. The fact of her exposure was not to be mentioned: nor the careful manner in which it had been commanded. There was no sound at all, just the faintness of his breathing and the scuff of the charcoal moving across the paper. Grey the charcoal; grey his face. And after a while he had quietly moved his sketchbook from the ends of his knees and into his lap. She had looked away, then; down through the window. Down into the filth-strewn Dublin street. And he had kept drawing. And kept on looking. And the subject kept looking away.

The next night he returned, and most nights afterwards. At midnight she would hear his faltering footsteps on the bare stairs which led to the servants’ attic. The timorous knock. The rancid reek of liquor. Ah. Mary. I hope I’m not. I thought we might. If you’re not too tired. Perhaps the divan. Or with the pillow under. You’re sure now, are you? And once again if it isn’t asking. Natural beauty of the unclothed womanly. Nothing of which any of us should ever feel the slightest. Greatest of artists down through the ages. Maybe with your back turned. The sheet around. A little degree lower if you feel quite comfortable. Perhaps if I moved just a tiny bit closer. You don’t object? Better light.

There was a time when she had thought to go to her mistress about it. (‘Mistress’ was such an interesting word.) But she knew what would happen if she dared to do that. It would not be Lord
Merridith who would be flung from the house to walk the streets or beg for a bed. In these everyday situations of privilege granted it was never the master who was ordered to go. She was one of His Lordship’s charity cases: the local girl he rescued from beggary in Dublin. She knew her role and he knew his. As though they were characters in a hymn.

Very occasionally if he was badly drunk, he would ask for permission to touch her. She had the idea that it somehow pleased him to ask; it enabled him to pretend what was happening was consensual. That appeared to be important to him: that she didn’t mind, or at least that she kept it quiet if she did. Some men found in their power a reason for arousal; others were aroused by the fiction of parity.

He never asked to be touched himself. He wanted to look and to touch: nothing else. Mostly he seemed not to find her body actually stimulating but a kind of problem he did not understand; as though its declivities and enfoldings and hardnesses and softnesses were geometrical conundrums he had to decipher. His whisperings and murmurs barely stopped for a moment.
It’s all right, is it, Mary? Please say if it isn’t. We’re friends, aren’t we, Mary? You don’t object?
He caressed her with his fingertips, as something fragile and valuable, a precious possession that was worth protecting. An object from his father’s collection of rare and extinct animals. An auk’s egg, perhaps; a dinosaur’s skull.

Sometimes he made small mewls of appreciation, like a whimpering tom clawing at its prey. She would close her eyes while he touched her and imagine being somewhere else. It helped quell her desire to weep or vomit. She would think about the faces of people she had known, the sound of a bell on a Sunday morning; the way a tolling bell causes ripples on a lake. She would say to herself:
it will be over soon. It means I will not starve. That is all it means
. Loathing him was something she attempted to avoid. Since he deserved no part of her, she tried to feel nothing.

One night he had begun to kiss her breasts.
Mary, I love you. I have always loved you. Have mercy on me, Mary; forgive me what I did
. She had looked down as his lips moved to one of her nipples, and quietly she had said without moving away: ‘I would rather you did not do that, My Lord.’ A moment had passed. She wondered if he
would rape her. But he had nodded without saying anything and clambered to his feet. Gone back to his sketchpad as though nothing had happened; as though he had only knelt down to tie a bootlace.

Each time she undressed seemed a revelation to him. He would gape at her like a man who has just been stabbed in the heart, and who knows, in that instant, that his death is certain. Often she wondered about himself and his wife. He was like a man who had never seen a naked woman. When surely he must have. Was it possible he hadn’t? Surely he must have seen Lady Merridith’s body? They did not sleep in the same bed any more, she knew; but they had made two children together, after all.

Three weeks ago was the last time he had come to her quarters; the night he had returned to Dublin from closing his house in Galway. He had been like a different man that night. She was tired that night. His sons had been troublesome. When she had opened her dressing gown the way he usually wanted, he had asked her to stop, just to sit and talk for a while.

There was a darkness in him she had not seen before; not the gloom of lust but that of culpability. He had sworn to her that what had happened would not happen again; that he was ashamed of his conduct and meant to make amends. The phrase ‘what has happened’ he kept repeating, as though it had happened like weather happens. What had happened was completely unforgivable, he said; so he had not come to dare to ask for forgiveness. Merely to say how sorry he was, and to vow on the lives of his children not to bother her again. He had been very weak. His private life was unhappy. He had given in to his unhappiness and weakness: to his shame. Loneliness had led him to actions he now deeply regretted. It was no excuse at all for such unmanly behaviour but the past could not be altered by remorse, however necessary. If there was anything she needed – anything at all – she only had to say what it was and he would help her.

‘I need no help from anyone,’ she had answered quietly.

‘We all need it sometimes, Mary.’

‘Not me, My Lord.’

He hated it whenever she called him ‘My Lord’. It reminded him of realities he would rather forget.

‘The boys – would be most upset if you did not want to come
to America. We should all be upset, Mary. You have made such a difference. They have not had the easiest time of late.’

‘Nothing remains for me here. As Your Lordship knows well.’

‘So you’ll still come, then. That is happy news. Will you take a position with us there?’

‘I will leave your family’s employment the moment we arrive at New York. I ask only what I am owed in wages, and a reference.’

‘Mary.’ He bowed his head slowly and gazed at the knotted floorboards. ‘Do you think me an animal? I imagine you must.’

‘It is not for a servant to have thoughts of her master.’

He could not bear to meet her eyes. ‘So very much has happened between you and I, Mary. Perhaps there is some way we could make a fresh beginning. Maybe think on times when we were younger and happier. I find the thought unendurable that my disgraceful actions would end our friendship.’

‘Are you finished with me, My Lord? I would like to sleep.’

He looked up at her, then, as though he didn’t know her. The clock on her dresser struck for half-past one. He rose heavily from the chair and stared around the room; as a man who has taken a wrong turning in a museum. Placed his sketchbook on the washstand and quietly crossed to the door. Pausing in the doorway, without turning he had said: ‘Will you shake my hand, Mary? For old times’ sake.’

She made no reply. He nodded a few times. Closed the door behind him with the softest of clicks. She heard him descending the rackety staircase; the squeak of the door to the portrait landing.

Inside the cover of the sketchbook was a five-pound note folded into ragged quarters. She had burnt the book without further examination and given the banknote to a charity for the starving.

Since that night he had barely uttered a word to Mary Duane. She supposed he was afraid she might tell his wife. He was the saddest breed of man in the living world; the kind to whom women seem a kind of crucifixion. But the women around him would always be sadder. He was thirty-four now. He would never change.

Perhaps it was something to do with his mother. She had left him in Ireland for the first six years of his life and returned to London to live with her people, taking her two daughters but not her son. Nobody knew why. It didn’t matter any more. Mary Duane’s own mother had been employed to take care of him then.

‘
Buime
’ in Irish: a wet nurse, or a nursemaid. A woman protecting children; a seasonal mother. ‘Nanny’ was the English word for a woman who did such work. The same as the noun for a female goat. For all its beauty, its churchy magnificence, English could be a strange language sometimes. Mary Duane of Carna; daughter of the nanny. She was now a nanny herself.

She thought she could remember the first time she had set eyes on Laura Merridith’s future husband. On her fifth birthday her mother had taken her up to the big house at Kingscourt. The rooms smelt of leaf-mould and beeswax polish. They were crammed with gleaming silverware and strange stuffed animals; faded paintings of earls and viscounts, barons and countesses, generals and dowagers, all long dead now and buried at Clifden, but who had once lived here, in Kingscourt Manor. A portrait of Lord Merridith in his magistrate’s robes was hanging on the landing that led to the music room. Another, much bigger, the full length of a wall, showing him in his scarlet sea-clothes and feathered black hat, hung in the library like a poster for the circus. A grand piano sat in the drawing room. (A drawing room was not a place for people to draw.) ‘Sébastien Erard’ was the man who made the piano – her mother showed her the graven gold letters. The carpet on the staircase was a bleached-down red, patterned with a crest of crossed swords and a gryphon.
Fides et Robur
was the Merridith family motto. ‘Faith and Strength’ in the Latin language. The family of Duane possessed no motto and she wondered what it might be if they ever acquired one. There was a stand for umbrellas in the storm porch beside the front door. It was made from the foot of an elephant.

Lord Merridith was waiting by the hearthstone in the dining room with his hands behind his back and his feet a yard apart. He looked like one of Christ’s apostles, with a neat, white beard and a severe mouth and eyes that seemed to smoke their way into you. He was bald as an egg and had no eyebrows. A bomb had exploded beside him at Trafalgar and burnt the hair off his head but not his beard. He had seen Admiral Nelson shot through the spine. He had helped to carry Admiral Nelson’s coffin. His eyebrows and his hair had never grown back. There was a model of a ruined tower on a plinth by the sideboard. He was planning to build it in the Lower Lock meadow, near to the hillock where the Faerie Tree stood.
Why anyone would want to build a ruin was something Mary Duane could not understand, but her mother had told her to ask no questions. Lord Merridith had an interest in ruins and ruination. He was entitled to an interest in whatever he liked.

At first she had found him too frightening to talk to. But soon he had smiled and ruffled her hair. Somewhere inside him was an intense kindliness; she could see it. Like thinking you could make out coins at the bottom of a muddy river.

There were crusted, leaf-sized blisters on the backs of his hands, speckled with smears of pale pink lotion. He had given her a black penny and told her a joke she didn’t understand, because he told it in English, and she didn’t know much English at that time. He had poured her a tumbler of lemonade from a pitcher, wished her the compliments of a happy birthday. (Many Happy Returns. What did it mean? Did it mean she could come to the house when she liked?) Then he had pointed to a sad-looking boy who was squatting beneath the vast mahogany table, humming quietly and playing with a hoop: a priesteen of a fellow in velvet britches. ‘That’s my Admiral of the Fleet. Hup, hup! Stand to attention and say good day, won’t you, David. Where’s your manners, for heaven’s sake?’ (Her mother had told her what an Admiral of the Fleet was – the name of a beautiful English butterfly.)

He was five; like she was. Maybe he was four. He had tottered across the room and given a solemn little bow to Mary Duane and then to his nanny. Lord Merridith and Mary Duane’s mother had laughed. And the boy had looked up at his father with a puzzled expression, as though he couldn’t comprehend just why they were laughing; as though he himself, like Mary Duane, was listening to a language he did not know.