History of the Rain (3 page)
Two-handed, Mrs Quinty lifts the glasses free of the minor parsnip of her nose, holds them just in front of her and scrutinises the dust gathered there. Rain makes bars of light and dark down her face and mine, as if we’re inside the jail of it.
Mrs Quinty draws out her handkerchief, polishes, scrutinises again, finds more of the dust or smears school-life produces and cleans further. ‘What have you been reading, Ruth?’
I have already eaten all of Dickens – Pickwick to Drood. I can tell you why Charles Dickens is the greatest novelist there ever was or will be and why all great novelists since are in debt to
Great Expectations
. I can remember things you’ve forgotten, like when Pip drank so much tar-water he went around
smelling of new fence
, or when Mr Pumblechook was proud to be in the company of the chicken that had the honour of being eaten by the new gentleman Pip. I read that book first in the class of Miss Brady over in Faha N.S. where there was this wire-rack library with rag-eared paperbacks donated by parents, along with a full set of
Guinness Book of Records
1970–80. But it wasn’t until Mr Mason when I was fourteen that I understood it was the Best Book Ever.
I’ve read all the usuals, Austen, Brontë, Eliot, Hardy, but Dickens is like this different country where the people are brighter, more vivid, more comic, more tragic, and in their company you feel the world is richer, more fantastic than you imagined.
But right now I’m reading RLS. He’s my new favourite. I like writers who were sick. I like it that my father’s first book was
Treasure Island
, a small red hardcover Regent Classics (Book 1, Purnell & Sons Ltd, Paulton, Somerset) with the stamp on the inside page:
Highfield School, First Prize
.
I like it that Robert Louis Stevenson said that to forget oneself is to be happy, that his imagination sailed him away into adventures while his body was lying in his bed with the first stages of consumption. I like it that he called himself an inland castaway, and that as a young man he decided he wanted to go walking around some of France, sleep out à la belle étoile
with a donkey
he christened Modestine and who, he wrote, ‘had a faint semblance to a lady of my acquaintance’ (Book 846,
Travels with a Donkey
, Wadsworth Classics). I know that lady too.
I myself am going to write
Travels with a Salmon
when I get further downriver.
I want to tell Mrs Quinty all this, but just say: ‘Robert Louis Stevenson.’ And then, by way of passing comment, add, ‘I want to read all these books.’
‘
All?
’ She looks around at them, in proper terms my father’s library, but really just the enormous collection of books he accumulated which has now been brought up to my room and stacked from the floor to where the angle of the skylight cuts them off.
‘They were my father’s. I’m going to read them all before I die.’
Mrs Quinty doesn’t approve of any mention of dying. From her sleeve she takes the handkerchief and applies it with a light brushing to beneath her nose where the deadly word may be lingering. She catches what must once have been her lower lip in her top teeth. There is a little pinking, a flush of feeling that the powder on her cheeks cannot camouflage. She looks at the wild stacks, the ones that rise behind the others, so it seems we are in a sea and there are waves of books coming towards the boat-bed and somewhere in there my father has gone.
She doesn’t quite know what to say.
‘I don’t quite know what to say,’ she says.
‘That’s all right, Mrs Quinty.’
Against the cresting of emotion she tightens herself a bit more. She pulls in her narrow shoulders and presses her knees together and she actually seems to go
in
a little. I am sorry for upsetting her, and allow a time when we both just sit here, me in the bed and she beside it, and we let the sounds of the rain take the conversation away.
‘Well now,’ Mrs Quinty says, giving herself a little tug. ‘That is a lot of rain.’
And neither of us speaks again for some moments, we just sit up here in this sky-room flowing with rain. Then I turn to Mrs Quinty and nod towards the books that all smell of fire and rain and I tell her, ‘I am going to read them all because that is where I will find him.’
I left my boy-blur in the air.
Always, you’ll be glad to know, from his vaults Grandfather landed; but always with an unsayable disappointment.
He excelled at the school of Mr Tupping and so was quickly moved to another. The Standard rose. He was moved ahead a year, and still excelled. He came home on holidays with glowing reports but the Reverend was in his church or out seeking the few roads in Wiltshire he hadn’t foot-stamped yet. The Philosophy allows for only one result: we fail the Standard. We suck small hard-boiled stones of disappointment in everything. The Swain face is narrow and, in the case of my aunts, seems to chew its own cheeks.
Abraham went to Oxford to Prepare for Life, which was the Reverend’s term for what Abraham was to do while waiting to get The Call. He was to go up to Oxford and read Classics – which were not in fact the red hard-covered James Fenimore Cooper’s
The Last of the Mohicans
(Book 7, Regent Classics, Somerset), the fat full water-swollen
Oliver Twist
(Book 12, Penguin Classics, London) that has come unglued at Chapter the Forty-Fifth, ‘Fatal Consequences’, and smells amazingly like toast, or even Tolstoy’s
Master and Man
(Book 745, Everyman edition, New York) which belonged once to someone who left no further mark on this world other than the peculiarly rigid handwriting with which he wrote
belongs to Tobias Greaves
on the flyleaf of that stiff paperback. It turns out that Classics meant none of these but a lot of Greek and Latin in slim matching volumes in red or green hardcovers with glossy cream pages intent on sticking together and sealing themselves for good.
Read and wait; that was the plan.
God had a good few clients in those days and He hadn’t had anyone invent mobiles or texting yet so it took time to get around to calling them each individually at whatever they were doing, so you just had to wait. The Vocation would come in due course; the Reverend was sure. Abraham was going into the Ministry. After all, Soul-polishing was the family business.
So my grandfather waited. He read his load of Latin. He found one of the venerable poles they had there in Oxford and with it he reached New Heights.
You’d think that with him being so often that bit nearer the sky, and having that big-hint name,
Abraham
, he’d have gotten The Call right away. It was like he was knocking at the door. I suppose God might have thought it was a bit forward of him. He might have thought Abraham had a case of the Mickey Nolans who Nan says thinks three fingers of hair gel and pointy shoes makes him The Chosen One. Ever since it worked on Pauline Frawley, hoisting her skirt up four inches in the Ladies in Ryan’s before going out to shake her altogether in front of him to TJ Mooney’s version of Neil Diamond, he’s convinced he’s God’s Gift.
Well, anyway, turns out God had enough gifts right then, and didn’t have any great need for Abraham Swain. There was Grandfather sitting in the library all morning reading his lyric verse in Latin, his Catullus and Horace and getting on first-name basis with the Hendecasyllabic, the Lesser and Greater Asclepiad, the Glyconic, those boys, and in the late afternoon vaulting himself like an offering up against the damp skies of Oxford, as if he was shouting
Helloooo Lord
.
But no, The Call didn’t come. The Almighty Fisher wasn’t fishing.
I suppose the son of a different Reverend might have faked it, might have gone home and said
yes Dad, He hooked me Wednesday
, but my grandfather was a Swain, and he expected perfectly clear and personal communication because the whole Philosophy is based on the notion that one thing alone is for certain: God meets the Standard.
When He calls you you’re Called.
And so my grandfather couldn’t lie. He thought maybe The Call would come in a church and so he spent a fair bit of time in the evening candles. And from his kneeling intensity some soul-absorption must have happened, genetically unmodified, because our family has paid a small fortune to chandeliers Rathbone & Sons, Dublin, and we have the only house in Faha whose curtains smell of candle wax.
(I thought I should call our village something else. I spent a whole week writing names in the back pages of an Aisling copy. Musical ones like Shreen, Glaun, Sheeda, mysterious ones like Scrapul, meaningful ones like Easky, which is fishy, or Killbeg, which is basically Small Church. I was going to use Lisnabrawshkeen which is the village in the skinny white paperback of
The Poor Mouth
(Book 980, Flann O’Brien, Seaver Books, New York) and has the opening line ‘I am noting down the matters which are in this document because the next life is approaching me swiftly’ but every time I said Lisnabrawshkeen I felt I was spraying a little speech impediment at the reader.
Lisnabrawshkeen
. I was afraid of using Faha because if these pages get out in the world there’ll be right roolaboola, not because of scandal, not because of outrage, but because everyone will try to find out if they’re In It. In these parts to be in a book is still something.
‘Will I get a mention?’ Father Tipp asked me, sitting in beside the bed, tugging both knees of his trousers to protect the crease and, in the Good Cause of Less Ironing, giving display to the scariest three inches of white shin you ever saw. That priest is a lovely man, but his skin is seriously
white
.
To be Left Out of the Narrative is catastrophe altogether.
What did you do to her to be Left Out
?
I can imagine the long faces, like the man in Pickwick who found fly buttons in his sausage.
Irish people will read anything as long as it’s about them. That’s what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we’ve gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves. We are simply amazing. So, even while I’m writing these words in my copy, there’s a whole throng, Allens Barrys Breens Considines Cartys Corrys Dooleys Dempseys Dunnes Egans Flynns Finucanes Hayes Hogans and – don’t even begin the Macs and Os – all angling over my shoulder in the bed here to see if they’re In.
The Ark.
Sit back. Leave room. If I live I’ll get to you all.)
God couldn’t get to Abraham Swain, but He sent a message. He sent it queerways through a nineteen-year-old called Gavrilo Princip who was waiting by the bridge over the innocent River Miljacka in the city of Sarajevo. The message went loudly from Gavrilo’s gun into the passing head of Archduke Ferdinand and from there out through the mouth of Lord Kitchener in England. It was a fairly blunt system actually, download speed slower than Faha dial-up, but one hundred thousand men a month got the message and signed up to fight For King and Country. My grandfather heard it in a crowded room in Oriel College where pale young men with no practical knowledge of the world but the gleaming white foreheads of those who handled beautiful ideals voted en masse to join the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. They poured out into the night afterwards, the starlight, the spires, Mr Alexander Morrow, Mr Sydney Eacrett, Mr Matthew Cheatley, Mr Clive Paul (these and all The Fallen listed in the index of Book 547,
The Gleaming Days: History of the Ox & Bucks
, Oxford), all of them feeling like jumping, like dancing, as if for each a weight had been replaced by a lightness, as if that’s what it meant,
Light Infantry
. You signed your name on the line and you felt a little lighter, a little
ascension
. Life was not so heavy after all. Now you only had to go and tell your parents.
Abraham prepared his speech on the train. He wrote out separate Key Phrases on different pieces of paper and laid them on the table. The problem was The Swain Way allowed for no vanity. He couldn’t say:
I have to Save My Country
. He couldn’t say:
God wants me to do this more than that
. It couldn’t be that becoming a soldier was in any way better than becoming a Reverend.
A sticky wicket, Alexander Morrow said.
Abraham decided he’d go with Not Yet. God didn’t want him to go into the Church just yet, first there was this war business, Father, and it would be vain and self-serving if he thought himself better than others.
He’d use The Swain Way against itself.
He got off the train and walked up past the graveyard and the tilting tombstones with that look of Elsewhere. This is the thing about the men in this family; they all look like they are on some Secret Mission. They’re here with you and doing the ordinary everyday but secretly all the time some part of them is away, is thinking of their mission. It’s the thing women fall in love with, the elusive bit that they think they can fish back out of the deep Swain pool. But that’s for later. I’ll get to Women & Swains later.
Abraham told his mother Agnes and she excused herself from the room the way ladies did those days so she could go and Have a Moment while a wolf ate her heart.
