The Star of the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page A

tune, as harp music habitually sounded to Merridith, but she played with a seriousness he found affecting. He wished the Dining Saloon were empty except for himself and the young woman. He would have liked to sit there and drink for a while: drinking and listening to the out-of-tune music. Drinking until he felt nothing.
    Connors? Mulligan? Lenihan? Moran?
    Earlier in the day, through the cast-iron bars that fenced off the people of steerage from their betters, he had noticed a man he had often seen in the streets of Clifden. The fellow was in chains, and either drunk or half mad, but Merridith still recognised him, he wasn’t mistaken. He was a tenant of Tommy Martin’s at Ballynahinch. Apparently – so the Methodist minister from LymeRegis had said – he had been flung in the lock-up for being drunk and violent. Merridith had been quite astounded to hear it. That wasn’t at all how he remembered him.
    Corrigan? Joyce? Mahony? Black?
    He would come in to Clifden on a Monday morning to sell turnips and kale with father, a smallholder: a pugnacious little jockey of a typical Galwayman, full of spit and strength and snap. What the hell was his name? Fields? Shields? A widower, anyway. Wife died in ’36. He’d scraped a living for himself and seven children out of a perch of quartzite shale on the slopes of Bencollaghduff. Ridiculous to say, Merridith had often envied them.
    He knew himself how ridiculous that was. And yet the father was clearly so proud of his son. There was a tenderness between them, an embarrassed affection, even though they were never done goading each other. The farmer would accuse his son of idleness; the son would retort that his father was a drunken gawm. The man would clip his son across the head; the son would fling a half-rotten turnip at him. The women of Clifden would congregate around their rickety stall as much to watch them trade imprecations as to buy what meagre goods they offered. Abusing each other had become a kind of pantomime. But Merridith knew that was all it was.
    Meadowes?
    Very early one December morning, driving the phaeton to meet his sister off the mail-coach at Maam Cross, he had seen them kicking a ragged football in the middle of the empty marketplace. The morning was still: a little misty. Their stall had been set up near the gates of the church, the turnips polished like gleaming orbs. The whole town was asleep except for the father and son. Leaves were drifting in the deserted streets; the fields in the distance were silvered with dew. He remembered it all now, as he sat in the Dining Saloon, plunging through the rolling darkness of the sea. The strange beauty of everything in the Connemara morning. Their shadowed forms gliding through the mist like celestial beings. The thuk as one of them would hoof into the ball. The muffled shouts. The impish obscenities. The extraordinary music of their unrestrained laughter echoing against the high black walls of the church.
    In all his childhood Lord David Merridith had never kicked a football with his own father. He wasn’t sure his father would have recognised a football. He remembered saying as much to his sister when he met her off the Bianconi that morning, weighed down with Christmas parcels and boxes of candied fruits; brimming with news and gossip from London. The way she had laughed and agreed with his remark. Probably, Emily said, if Papa had ever seen a football, he would have rammed it into a cannon and tried to shoot it at a Frenchman.
    He wondered where his father was now. His body was buried in the churchyard at Clifden; but where was he ? Was there any shred of truth to it, after all, the pietistical absurdity of life after death? Could the story be metaphor for some other, more scientific reality? Would the sages of the coming times be able to decode the allegory? And if such a truth existed, how did it work? Where was Heaven? And where was Hell?
    Am I all my fathers? Are they all me?
    Three weeks before