The Star of the Sea (27 page)

There was a frightening tenderness in the way she said it. She was unhappy, she said; had been unhappy for some time. She felt he must be terribly unhappy, too, but she was finding his indifference impossible to tolerate. Indifference was poison in a troubled marriage. Anything could be survived in a marriage but that. She said the word ‘anything’ as though it was significant to her, a cloaked invitation for Merridith to confess.

‘I’m not indifferent,’ he had said instead.

‘David, my love,’ his wife had mildly answered. ‘We have not spent a night together in almost six years.’

‘Christ, this again. Do you never tire?’

‘David, we are married. Not brother and sister.’

‘I have had things on my mind. You might have noticed that.’

‘I have had more opportunity than I ever needed to notice. And to wonder and be frightened about what they might be.’

‘What does that mean, Laura?’

When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. ‘You’re not an old man, or a little boy, after all. I assume you must still have all the normal feelings you once had for me.’

‘What does
that
mean?’

‘Has some other person come into your life? Please tell me if that has happened.’ She took his hand in hers and held it. Even to himself
his hand felt dead. ‘If mistakes have been made, they can be forgiven, David. Forgiveness can be possible with love and truthfulness. None of us is a saint; certainly not myself.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Is that an answer or another evasion?’

There were only two ways he could think of to react: a shout of bogus anger or a mask of placidity. ‘Of course there’s nobody else,’ he calmly said, though he didn’t feel calm, he felt like running from the room. He was afraid that if he stayed he might tell her everything.

‘Then I don’t understand. Can you help me understand?’

Whenever she approached him as a woman to a man, he had brushed her away or made some excuse. He had made her feel ashamed to want what was beautiful, the small, shared intimacies of married life: the closenesses which had once brought them such happiness and friendship. He had made her feel a whore for wanting to love him. He had become private, secretive; completely unattainable. It had started long before the death of his father, but ever since then he had been much worse. It was as though he himself had died, she said, or perhaps had become afraid to live.

Something was terribly wrong with him; she could see that clearly. Often she had tried to help him, but had obviously failed. Being married to him required a passivity she didn’t have any more; like standing on a pier and watching a ship sink in the bay, knowing you were entirely powerless to save it. But she wouldn’t wade in further and risk being drowned herself.

There were practical matters to consider, too. Her trust fund had been exhausted by what had happened at Kingscourt. To pay the fares to Quebec of seven thousand tenants had cost more than would have maintained the family for two years. There had also been the cost of evicting them: the driver-men’s fees. Her father had said he was extremely worried about her situation and could not continue bailing them out. If he discovered she had also gone into her capital he would be absolutely furious and cut off all her funds. He would find out soon enough that she had sold the children’s stocks and shares. There was simply no telling what he might do then.

‘David, I may as well tell you: he has advised me to leave you.’

‘What the Hell business is it of his?’

‘It is none of his business, of course. But he worries. He says he has heard things which do not make him happy.’

‘These riddles you talk in. What am I expected to say? Perhaps if you gave me the crimes I am charged with, I might be able to enter a defence.’

‘He has not been specific. He merely says I am to be careful. Sometimes he says you are not what you seem.’

‘Well he seems like an ass and he brays like an ass. You can tell him from me, I shall see him in the libel courts if he doesn’t learn to shut his braying mouth.’

‘David. Please. We need to be courageous. We have made our best efforts. We must know when to stop.’

It had taken every bit of Merridith’s persuasiveness to convince her to give him one last chance. America would be good for them, the fresh start they needed; a means of putting all that had happened behind them. Jonathan and Robert needed tranquillity now. They had been through enough; they deserved to have both their parents.

‘If you think they have had both their parents in recent times, you are sorely mistaken, David.’

‘Please, Laura. One last chance.’

Now it was morning the conversation seemed absurd: as though it had never happened or had happened to someone else. He wondered would she mention it. Would she pretend they hadn’t spoken? Perhaps he should fetch her a warming cup of tea. He’d go down to the galley and organise it with the cook.

As he passed the open door of his son Robert’s cabin he saw Jonathan was in there: and he wished he had not. He was hauling a yellow-stained sheet like the folds of an old wedding dress and trying to cover his sleeping brother with it.

‘What are you doing in Bobby’s room, Jons?’

The boy froze and gaped up at him, his face brightening with shame. His mouth opened and closed. He dropped the sheet.

‘Nothing,’ he said. He sucked his gums.

‘What kind of nothing? Answer me this minute.’

‘I was just …’ He shrugged and pushed his hands into the pockets of his britches. ‘I wasn’t doing anything. I was…’

He fell guiltily silent and looked at the floor. Merridith gave a sigh. It wasn’t fair to set a trap for him. He could see what the child
was doing; he didn’t need to keep asking him. He came slowly into the cabin and picked up the ruined sheet.

‘Told me you hadn’t wet in the bed, old thing. There’s no need to go fibbing about it. Let alone planting the evidence on Bobs.’

‘I know, Pops. I didn’t mean to.’

‘Very disappointed, Jonathan. I thought we didn’t tell each other fibs, you and me.’

‘I’m sorry, Pops. Please don’t tell.’

Probably he should start into a lecture now, but for some reason he didn’t have the stomach for it. This early in the morning seemed a poor time for superiority, and anyway the child had had enough lectures already. ‘Run along and fetch some hot water, then, like a good scout. We’ll wash it out together. What about that?’

His son looked up at him with a wrenching hopefulness. ‘You won’t peach on me, Pops? You promise?’

‘Of course I won’t.’ He rubbed the boy’s cheek. ‘We chaps don’t go tattling like girls on each other, do we? But no more porky-pies in future or it’s into the stocks.’

The boy hugged his leg and tottered gratefully from the cabin. And at that moment something depressing caught Merridith’s attention. By the porthole, the imprint of a single dirty palm; a smallish hand, but maybe a man’s; the kind of mark that might have been made by a greasy glove.

He would ask Laura to speak to Mary Duane about it. Really, things were difficult enough just now, but there was no reason at all for the place not to be kept clean.

Ireland’s famine was the punishment of her imprudence and idleness, but it has given her prosperity and progress.

Anthony Trollope,
North America

T
HE
THIRTEENTH
OR
MIDDLING
DAY OF THE
V
OYAGE;
IN WHICH THE
C
APTAIN RECORDS CERTAIN
CURIOUS SUPERSTITIONS
(NOTABLY COMMON AMONG
S
EA-FARING MEN) AND COMES TO THE PROTECTION OF THE
WOMEN
OF
I
RELAND
.

Saturday, 20 November, 1847
Thirteen days at sea remaining

L
ONG
: 36°49.11′W. L
AT
: 51°01.37′N. A
CTUAL
G
REENWICH
S
TANDARD
T
IME
: 11.59 p.m. A
DJUSTED
S
HIP
T
IME
: 9.32 p.m. W
IND
D
IR
. & S
PEED:
N.N.W. (342°). Force 4. S
EAS:
Restless. Many large whitecaps. H
EADING:
S.S.E. 201° P
RECIPITATION AND
R
EMARKS:
Extremely heavy fog. Visibility diminished to 400 yards. We have slowed to two knots.

Last night nine of our brothers and sisters were gathered, and this morning were committed to rest in the deep. Carmody, Coggen, Desmond (x2), Dolan, Murnihan, O’Brien, Rourke and Whelehan.

A great ‘growler’ iceberg was sighted this afternoon at a distance of approximately half a mile; the size of a large London house, more or less. A multitude of the steerage passengers came up to look and marvel, never having seen such a sight before.

The cook, Henry Li, has come to me with a scheme by which we might relieve the sufferings of some in steerage without incurring expense to the company. (Heaven forfend.) A quantity oftentimes remains uneaten on the plates after supper and luncheon in the First-Class Dining Saloon. Bones, gristle, rinds and suchlike but sometimes fats or the skins of fish. He proposes, rather than to throw
these leftovers away, or to make of them pigswill (as is usually the practice), that he stew them down to a soup to be given to the hungry, which would be in the nature of an assistance to them. I think it a compassionate notion and have agreed that he should do it. (Indeed, it ought make any Christian man feel rueful that a pagan displays more fellowship than many of the saved.)

There is a very strange and horrible smell about the ship tonight. I do not mean the usual odour emanating from steerage where the poor people must contend as well as they can; but something much worse and quite pestilential. It beggars description.

I have ordered the whole vessel swabbed down with brine and vinegar but the abominable stink continues even as I write. I never experienced anything like it before; an overpowering reek of utter putrefaction such as one might expect to encounter from the sinkholes of an ill-kept shambles. Nothing was found rotting in the front hold or cargo hold. I am quite at a loss as to know what to do; it is greatly distressing the passengers and some of the men. For such a phenomenon to come upon us on this day of all others is a very unfortunate circumstance which will only bring alarm.

The middling day of any voyage is regarded as unlucky, as on its own is the thirteenth day. For both to fall together, as they do this day, is regarded as particularly ill-fated by seamen. One sailor, Thierry-Luc Duffy of Port au Prince, refused to leave his quarters and come on to his watch this morning, insisting that the combination of forces indicated ‘voodoo’. (Today is also Saturday, the day of ‘the black sabbath’ in that eerie superstition.) He said to Leeson that he had been hearing a queer catlike or birdlike scream in the night. He is a very agreeable man usually, of near my own age, and we have sailed many voyages together; there is a good and long established friendship between us; so I went down to the men’s berths to see what might be done. He said this day was unholy and he would not work. I said it were sacrilege to prattle in this manner and next he would be broiling his mother to be eaten for supper by himself and Baron Samedi. (That aristocratic gentleman seems to be the voodoo-men’s devil; but he wears a top hat to conceal his horns, like half the House of Commons.) At that he laughed but still would not work.