The Star of the Sea (22 page)

There is something of a distance between Laura and myself at present, but this I put down to her not wanting to be away from London at Christmas, her favourite time of year, as you know, with the parties and the balls and all the rest of it. But no doubt it is nothing to worry about anyway. She is, as ever, a blooming brick.

The weather has been changeable in the extreme (very stormy this morning) and has brought back memories to your silly brother of his heroical navy days – when he got repeatedly, astonishingly and rather embarrassingly saesick [
sic
!] on his first and only proper voyage: a training run down to the Canaries and back on a three-masted clipper which had been kicked about the Med by one N. Bonaparte Esquire and was now approximately as waterproof as an antique bath sponge. I recall an old gunner from Longford discreetly confiding a traditional remedy,
id est
: to swallow a lump of pork fat tied to a string, then quickly yank the string back up. BEJAYZIS! I almost choked myself to death in the process and had to be given mouth-to-mouth resuscitation by a Spaniard. Not an experience I should care to repeat.

‘Kiss me, Hardy,’ the other chaps used to say to me afterwards, as a ballyrag. I don’t think they knew your bleary brother was the son-and-heir of ‘Battlin” Lord Merridith who had scrapped alongside Nelson at Trafalgar. Of course I attempted never to trade on that. Perhaps I should have done. Might be an Admiral now if I had!

I was sorry to hear about the creditors. What ghastly bores they are. Tell them your big brother said he would come around if they bothered you again and punch ’em in the chops. Seriously, I will see what may be done directly we get to New York. I think
there is a branch of Coutts over there, but if not there will be some other bank which will be able to help. No matter where you go, there is always a bank.

Speaking of bores, you can’t imagine how many of that species are roaming about First-Class: rather like wildebeest wandering the backstreets of Timbuktu, only twice as ugly and thrice as forlorn. You would simply die with hilarity if you had to endure them. Laura and myself have a great laugh about it every night together. I must say I should be lost without her.

That American gobshite Dixon whom you met at one of Laura’s evenings is on board and proving every degree as tiresome as ever. (You met him the night Dickens came. Remember he was prattling on about the novel he was doing?) I believe Aunt Eddie described him as ‘debonair’ – Dixon, I mean, certainly not Dickens – but there is no accounting for taste.

I should like to write more but it is getting stormy (
Heigh-ho
, the wind and the rain) and I shall have to get into bed and reach for the pork fat. Ah, me.

Don’t worry, old thing. Everything will be fine. I know it doesn’t always look it at the moment but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

Gaudeamus igitur.

I miss you so.

Your loving bruvving,

Davey

PS: I heard an old tar whistling this the other evening. Didn’t Johnnyjoe Burke used to lilt it sometimes?

⁵

To whatever part of the world the Englishman goes, the condition of Ireland is thrown in his face; by every worthless prig of a philosopher, by every stupid bigot of a priest.

The Times
, March 1847

¹
Letter bequeathed to G. G. Dixon by Professor Natasha Merridith of Girton College, Cambridge (the noted suffragist), September 1882. ‘Rashers’ was a family nickname for Lady Natasha. Lord Kingscourt was in the habit of referring to both Lady Natasha and Lady Emily as his ‘little sisters’ (or, as here, ‘little blisters’) presumably as a mark of affection; but in fact both were older. (Lady E. by two years, Lady N. by thirteen months.) – GGD

²
Following a very long courtship which was often ‘broken-off, Lady Emily did indeed marry Sir John Millington, ninth Marquess of Hull, but the marriage was dissolved after four years. There were no children. Professor Merridith did not marry. Her many publications include
Essays on the Rights of Women
(1863),
The Cause of Learning
(1871),
Education and the Poor
(1872) and several volumes of writings on pure mathematics. She co-edited
The Higher Education of Women
by Emily Davies (1866) of whom she was a close friend. – GGD

³
Lord Kingscourt’s mention of ‘Yahoos’ and ‘Houyhnhnms’ is an allusion to
Gulliver’s Travels
by Jonathan Swift. The Yahoos are an ape-like race of degraded savages found on a rural island which is a colony of Houyhnhnm Land. The Houyhnhnms are rational horse-like beings who have enslaved the Yahoos as beasts of burden. Interestingly, Gulliver remarks: ‘the
Houyhnhnms
have no Word in their Language to express any thing that is
Evil
, except what they borrow from the Deformities or ill Qualities of the
Yahoos
’ (IV: 9; 11). – GGD

⁴
Hullify’ is a reference to ‘doohulla’, a game with impenetrably complicated rules and scoring system devised by the Merridith siblings in childhood. It involved cutting out words from newspapers or other unwanted documents and forming a diamond-shaped grid of interlocking anagrams from their letters. Remarkably similar to the modern day ‘crossword puzzle’, an amusement as yet unknown in the 1840s. ‘Doohulla’ is the English name of a district in Connemara.
Dumhaigh Shalach
in Gaelic. ‘Mound of Willows’. – GGD

⁵
Lord Kingscourt might have been disconcerted to learn that the tune is a traditional Irish march entitled ‘Bonaparte Crossing the Alps’. – GGD

T
HE
ELEVENTH
EVENING OF THE
V
OYAGE; THEN SOME
P
ARTICULARS OF THE
TENTH;
AND RETURNING TO THE
ELEVENTH
BY WAY OF
C
ONCLUSION
. A
SEQUENCE WHICH MAY BE SAID TO HAVE THE
P
ATTERN OF A
C
IRCLE;
IN WHICH TWO
E
NCOUNTERS BETWEEN THE
A
UTHOR
AND HIS
A
DVERSARY ARE DESCRIBED
.

32°31′
W
; 51°09′
N
— 10
P.M
. —

Grantley Dixon paused by the door to the Smoking Saloon. A strange piercing sound like the screech of a gull had stopped him just as he had reached for the handle. But above him he could see no bird of any kind. It came again; a faint but mordant shriek that twisted its way right into you somehow. He walked to the gunwale and looked over the side. The ocean churned up at him, black and frothing.

It wasn’t coming from steerage or from anywhere on the ship, but Dixon had been hearing the sound for two days. He had asked others about it and everyone seemed to have noticed, but nobody could say just what it might be. A spirit, some of the sailors laughed, seeming to enjoy his lubber’s unease. The ghost of a witch-doctor, ‘John Conqueroo’, who had died of a fever down in the lock-up back in the times when the
Star
was a slaver. A mermaid moaning to entice them to doom. A siren riding the tail winds and waiting to pounce. The Captain’s Mate had expressed a more rational view. Air in the ’tween-decks of the weary old ship. A trick of the air, sir. Breeze in the gully-holes. An old bucket the age of the
Star
had been refitted many times, usually quickly and not very well. Behind every panel was a tangle of ancient fittings, rusted pipes, split timbers,
rotted spars burrowed hollow by woodworm and rats. Sometimes, when the wind caught, you would swear the ship was singing. You could think of the ship as a floating flute, sir: the wrecked organ of a once great cathedral. That was how the Mate liked to think of it himself.

The little man with the club-foot was watching from behind the gates. He was always watching; that poor limping tramp. Waiting to beg, Dixon supposed. The hobo looked up at the sky and uttered a small cough. Turned. Sneezed. Shuffled back into the shadows. Curious fellow in many ways. Seemed to have no friend; no need for any company. Appeared to find the ship a place of curiosities. Dixon had seen him earlier, at dusk that evening, staring at the portside wall of the wheelhouse. Someone had daubed it with a strange graffito. A capital H enclosed in a heart.

Dixon wondered what Merridith wanted to speak to him about, but already he felt he had some idea. Perhaps this would be the night when the truth might come out. It was time it did. The lies had gone on too long. The sneakings and petty deceptions of adultery, the aliases and skulkings and railway station hotels. Perhaps last night’s altercation between himself and his rival had brought matters to a head, or were about to do so now. Really it was time for such arguments to stop. They had become an almost nightly occurrence and were causing embarrassment to Laura and to others. These things could be discussed in a civilised way. He only wished he were feeling less exhausted and depressed.

A fortnight before boarding the
Star of the Sea
, Dixon had spent a whole day doing the rounds of the London publishers. Hurst and Blackett. Chapman and Hall. Bradbury and Evans. Derby and Dean. They sounded like teams of music-hall comedians and for all they had offered him, they might as well have been.

Three months earlier, at considerable cost, he had employed a secretary to make multiple copies of his collection of short stories. They were based on his recent tour of Ireland and Grantley Dixon had worked hard on them.

Late at night in his rooms at the Albany he had honed the manuscript over and over. He had tried to make his style a degree less constricted, to put away the objectivity required of the journalist; to allow his feelings to show a little more. And when he
had finished, he had read one of them aloud to Laura, one afternoon just after they had been to bed, assuring her that he would appreciate an honest appraisal of his efforts.

‘Your efforts?’ she smiled.

‘Of the story,’ he said.

But she hadn’t liked it.

They had argued about it.

She had accused him of being blinded by the desire to record facts. Art was about the creation of beauty. An important painter, a truly interesting writer – he took the stuff of ordinary life and turned it into something else. Mr Ruskin had recently said as much in a lecture she had attended in Dublin.