History of the Rain (8 page)

The Paradise Complex means you keep trying to make heaven on earth. You’re never satisfied. And that’s the crux, as the Philosopher Donie Downes says. See also: The Jerusalem Syndrome.

Grandfather couldn’t take the easy option. He couldn’t close his eyes and come up with one of those imaginary paradises of which there are so many accounts in my father’s library. Here’s Lucian in his
True History of the Isles of the Blessed
(Book 1,989,
Utopias of the Mind
, Crick & Howard, Bristol) who said he’d seen a town made of gold and streets paved with ivory and the whole encircled with ‘a river of superior perfume’. It never got dark there, and it never got light, but was in perpetual twilight and permanent springtime. Vines in paradise fruited once a month according to Lucian. There were 365 waterwells, 365 honeysprings, 7 rivers of milk, 8 rivers of wine (sorry, Charlie, no chocolate factory) and the people wore clothes of cobwebs
because their bodies were so insubstantial
. Look in Virgil’s
Aeneid
, Book VI (Book 1,000, trans. J. W. Mackail, Macmillan, London) where he talks about the Elysian Fields. What about heading there, Granda?

There are any number of imaginary gardens, most of which though were pooh-poohed by Sir Walter Raleigh, who after all that voyaging probably had what Mina Prendergast channelling Shakespeare called an unbuttoned scent, but whose ego was capacious enough to write
The History of the World
. Sir Walter pointed out that Homer’s description of the garden came from Moses’s description, and that in fact Pindar, Hesiod, Ovid, Pythagoras, Plato and all those chaps were actually a bunch of plagiarists who added to Old Moses their own Poetic Adornments. The real heavenly garden was copyrighted to Moses, and that was that. The rest was poppycock, Your Majesty.

Thank you, Walter, have a cigarette.

No. Grandfather wasn’t taking any route into the Imaginary. It was too easy. This was going to have to be actual grass-and-stones Paradise.

So Abraham laid Meath up against the Impossible Standard and began moulding the place into the dream version. He was going to do the So-Like-Paradise-You-Won’t-Believe-it’s-Not-Paradise kind of thing. Maybe there was already Something There to Work With, as that witch with the yellow highlights Miss Donnelly said to my mother at a parent–teacher meeting. Even so it can’t have been easy.

First of all he was, you know, an Englishman.

And as I said there weren’t exactly a whole load of those coming one-way to Ireland those days. The first Tourist Board was still meeting in some little room in Merrion Square and working on the posters and slogans.
Civil War Over, Come Visit. We won’t kill you. Promise
. Second, he was,
sshssh
, Not Belonging to Our Church (O Divine Lord) and third, after his Oxford education he didn’t know one side of a cow from the other. (Reader, there
are
sides. When I was five Nan showed me. She carried a three-legged stool and plonked it down next to Rosie, head-butting in against Rosie’s side and reaching in for the udder. You go from the opposite side and Rosie will break your wrist. Such a cow.)

The thing is, the Philosophy has a No Complaint clause. You can’t cry out and you can’t say
this was a dreadful mistake
.

You have to just do better.

And so that’s what he did.

It took years, but eventually Grandfather got Ashcroft House & Lands into a condition of Absolute Immaculacy, and sent his invitation to the Reverend.

I am alive. Come on over and visit
, only in fancier English.

Then he waited.

The Reverend was already Old Testament ancient by now. In my mind he blends into Herbert Pocket’s father in
Great Expectations
, Old Gruffandgrim, banging with his stick on the floor for attention. The Reverend had already used up whatever life was in his body by putting up the big mileage of hurrying Elsewhere and so by this stage he was mostly parched paper over thin little struts. He couldn’t believe Our Lord hadn’t taken him Up yet. Honest to God. He was all prayed up and confessed, boarding pass printed, and waiting in the priority queue.
Sweet Jesus come on
, as Marty Finucane shouts in Cusack Park whenever the hurlers are feeling the effects of forbidden Saturday-night Guinness and firing the sliothers wide into the Tesco carpark.

But no Sweet Jesus showed up.

(If you went to the Tech, you’ll spot a theme.)

The Reverend lived on, thought a little more deeply about life being purgatory, and banged on the floor with his stick.

When at last he got the letter he lifted old Up-Jut and did some nostril-narrowing. It wasn’t attractive. He squinted through the snowy dust of his spectacles to read his son’s name and when he saw
your son Abraham
he had to squint harder.

There it was: your son Abraham.

He thought all this time his son was in Heaven interceding for him.

He thought Abraham had gone there in the first rank of Dead Heroes from The Great War and by now probably had the skintone of those creamy alabaster plaques they have in the big Protestant churches.

But no, he was
in Ireland
.

Sweet Jesus come on
.

Now, I’m not going to say it was because the Reverend thought mucky Irish ground would give him foot rot, nor that it was because he couldn’t say the word
Ireland
without distaste, though both were probably true. Despite the efforts of the Tourist Board, Ireland in those days was not in Top Ten Countries to Visit, and for English people it was all but
verboten
as the Pope would say.
Ireland?
Catholics and murderers, the Reverend would have thought. Ungrateful blackguards, we had not the slightest appreciation for the eight hundred years of civilised rule of His Majesty and to show our true colours once the English had departed we’d set about killing each other with hatchets, slash hooks and hedge shears.

Ireland?
Better that Abraham was in Hell.

Pursuing the image, the Reverend posted the letter through the grille of the fire and began some shallow breathing. The damp boggy idea,
Ireland
, sat on his chest.

Within a week he was dead.

Amen to him.

Awomen also, as Denis Fitz said half a second after the congregation at midnight Mass before in Faha we moved midnight to half nine.

Grandfather’s response to the Reverend’s refusal to visit and subsequent death took an original form; he stopped believing in God, and started believing in salmon. Plans in this world were pointless. Pointless to have imagined he could ever have fulfilled his father’s dreams or achieved the Impossible Standard.

Grandfather forsook the world for fishing.

In fairness, perhaps there was a deeper point; perhaps secretly it was to out-Christian the Reverend by going back to basics: to Peter the Fish, to Paul the Church, is that how it goes? I’m not great on the Bible, though we have a nice one (Book 1,001, King James Edition), black and soft with the kind of feather-light pages they only use in bibles, as if paper for bibles can only come from this one place, and the pages are thinned down to a fineness that feels holy somehow so that even turning them is kind of sanctifying. Either way, whatever the reason, the Salmon it was. Grandfather stopped all work on Ashcroft House & Lands, walked out the French doors, went down across the lawn, called the workers together and to the collected jawdrops and head scratches told them stop, stop trimming the hedges boys, no more mowing the hay, pack up, go home.

There’s a photograph of Grandfather when he’s about thirty-five. He’s in a white shirt buttoned to his chin and his face has an expression of wild impatience. His lips are so tight you’d think he was afraid he’d dribble out some awful medicine if he cracked them. He resents the moment of the pose, he wants to escape it, that Elsewhere business again, and already in his chin you can see the Reverend coming. You can see the angle of the nose, the furrow between the dark eyes, and you know the old man is arriving in his skin. There’s going to be no way to escape him.

But Grandfather is going to try. Yes sir. He’s going to apply the What-would-my-father-do to everything, and then choose the opposite. So, instead of settling down into the dull acceptance of midlife, instead of comfortable complacence and respectability, he takes his rods and strides out the gates of Ashcroft accompanied by two bounding wolfhounds. He leaves the house to its own devices, which means weeds, mould, mushrooms in the basement, broken panes in the upstairs bedrooms, flies, snails, mice and a family of trapped rooks.

He begins on the two Black Castle sections of the Boyne River. In the notebooks he kept of his catch there are brackets beneath the salmon he caught and the name Mr R. R. Fitzherbert.

For duties to His Majesty I suppose, maybe for going away and getting Him something nice, the Virgin Islands or something, The King had given Mr Fitzherbert all the fish that passed there – To you the fish, to you the chips, same as the Bible only English-style – and my grandfather was scrupulous enough to record which of Mr Fitzherbert’s salmon he took, and with which flies.

I have his Salmon Journals, which were the workbooks for his book. They are here in my father’s library, pressed flattish between
Don Quixote
(Book 1,605, Vintage Classics, London), a kind of genius Spanish miracle, and
Salar the Salmon
(Book 1,606, Henry Williamson, Faber & Faber, London), a book so good that reading it you feel you’re in a river. Each journal is carefully kept, blue marbling inside and blackly leatherbound like a Lesser Bible. The first time I opened one I felt indecent. I love the feel of a book. I love the touch and smell and sound of the pages. I love the
handling
. A book is a sensual thing. You sit curled in a chair with it or like me you take it to bed and it’s, well, enveloping. Weird I am. I know. What the Hell? as Bobby Bowe says to everything. You either get it or you don’t. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt
company
, not only the company of the writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were
worn
in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds; these were the literal original Facebooks, the books where faces had been, and I just loved it, the whole strange sense of being aboard a readership.

I know, I know. I’m not an e-person or an iPerson. Maybe I would be if we weren’t in the five per cent. The Minister says the whole country is Broadband now, except for maybe five per cent. Hello? We’re not even Narrowband. And what with having a predilection, as Thomas Halvey says, for the nineteenth century, I’m older than old-fashioned, I know. No, whatever way they built Faha down in a hole beside the river, we can’t get Broadband. We still get calls from somebody in the Philippines offering us Best Internet Deals ever. We let them talk to Nan. She can keep them on for an hour. It’s a sort of granny-sitting.

But look, here is one of my grandfather’s Salmon Journals. Feel that. Smell that. The pages have a water warp, a buckled edge like a river wave. The paper is a heavy old stock smooth under your hand. Some pages clump together as if the recording was made in rain. The handwriting is neat and done in blue ink that is now faded lavender.

SALMON

Week of June 12th, 1929

18lbs 6oz (Jock Scot)

19lbs 4oz (Blue Jock)

15lbs 11oz (Collie)

14lbs 8oz (Collie)

21lbs 3oz (Gudgeon
)

It goes on, pounds and pounds of fish, page after page of pale ink. I wondered what Mr R. R. Fitzherbert thought of Abraham taking all his salmon. Maybe he didn’t know. He lived in Nottinghamshire. I have wondered if my grandfather ate them all, if the Swain jaw was partly a fish-face, and I’ve pouted at the mirror for half an hour one afternoon when I first became sick just to see if I could see the salmon leaping out in me.

For how long can a man go fishing? I asked Mrs Quinty, but she thought it was some cloaked reference to Tommy and the Hairdresser, that once Tommy had caught Sylvia he’d get tired or bored or not be able to sustain himself as Phyllis Lillis says, you know, in what Hamlet calls Country Matters. But what I was actually asking was: fishing. How long could my grandfather be happy getting up in the morning heading out with his rod to go fishing?

Because, Dear Reader, that’s all he did.

He fished for salmon.

He pretty much let the house and grounds go Rackrent (Book 778,
Castle Rackrent
, Maria Edgeworth, Penguin Classics, London). From the first salmon of the season to the last weary fish returning upriver in the autumn Abraham Swain was there, standing thigh-deep in the river proper, a little swirl of broken water in his wake and his line laying soft swished question marks in the air overhead.

Even the wolfhounds became bored. When they saw him lift his rods they would trot back across the front hall and flop down, their great hair and bone masses immovable and hearts conflicted in the classic dog dilemma of loyalty to their master and knowing he was do-lally. Grandfather let them be, and the hounds commenced what was to be the business of the remainder of their lifetimes, chewing to straggling ropes the various oriental carpets and, when these proved too fibrous a diet, laying sideways and gnawing jag-toothed the pitch-pine floorboards.