For Chris, in the rain
Everything is on its way to the river.
Ted Hughes
Contents
ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
TWO
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
THREE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Also available by Niall Williams
ONE
The Salmon in Ireland
Chapter 1
The longer my father lived in this world the more he knew there was another to come. It was not that he thought this world beyond saving, although in darkness I suppose there was some of that, but rather that he imagined there must be a finer one where God corrected His mistakes and men and women lived in the second draft of Creation and did not know despair. My father bore a burden of impossible ambition. He wanted all things to be better than they were, beginning with himself and ending with this world. Maybe this was because he was a poet. Maybe all poets are doomed to disappointment. Maybe it comes from too much dazzlement. I don’t know yet. I don’t know if time tarnishes or polishes a human soul or if it’s true that it’s better to look down than up.
We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling. That’s how it seems to me, being alive for a little while, the teller and the told.
In Faha everyone is a long story.
You anything to the MacCarrolls over in Labasheeda?
To begin you must be traced into the landscape, your people and your place found. Until they are you are in the wrong story.
My mother is MacCarroll.
I was thinking that. But you are . . . ?
Swain. Ruth Swain.
Swain?
We are our stories. The River Shannon passes below our house on its journey to the sea.
Come here, Ruthie, feel the pulse of the water, my father said, kneeling on the bank and dipping his hand, palm to current, then reaching up to take my hand in his. He put our arm into the cold river and at once it was pulled seaward like an oar. I was seven years old. I had a blue dress for summertime.
Here, Ruthie, feel.
His sleeve darkened and he rowed our arm back and let us be taken again, a little eddy of low sounds gargling as the throat of the river laughed realising what a peculiar thing was a father and his daughter.
When it comes to Clare, when it passes our house, the river knows it is nearly free.
I am plain Ruth Swain. See me, nineteen, narrow face, MacCarroll eyes, thin lips, dull hazelnut hair, gleamy Swain skin, pale untannable oddment, bony, book-lover, reader of so many nineteenth-century novels before the age of fifteen that I became exactly too clever by half, sufferer of Smart Girl Syndrome, possessor of opinions and good marks, student of pure English, Fresher, Trinity College Dublin, the poet’s daughter.
My History in College: I came, collapsed, came home again. Home – hospital, home – hospital, the dingdong of me. I have had Something Amiss, Something Puzzling, and We’re Not Sure Yet. I was Fine except for Falling Down. I have been Gone for Tests, Not Coming Right, Terrible Weak, Not Herself, and just A Bit Off, depending on the teller and whether loud or whisper, in Nolan’s shop or on the windowsill of Prendergast’s post office after Mass. For the record, I have never been Turning Yellow, never been complaining of the bowels, intestines or kidneys, never been spotted, swollen, palsied, never wetting, bleeding, oozing, nor, God-forgive-me, Bitch of the Brouders, raving. Mine is not the story. I am plain Ruth Swain, bedbound, here, attic room beneath the rain, in the margin, where the narrator should be, between this world and the next.
This is my father’s story. I am writing it to find him. But to get to where you’re going you have to first go backwards. That’s directions in Ireland, it’s also T. S. Eliot.
My father was named Virgil by his father who was named Abraham by his father who once upon a time was the Reverend Absalom Swain in Salisbury, Wiltshire. Who the Reverend’s father was I have no clue, but sometimes when I’m on the blue tablets I take off into a game of extreme Who Do You Think You Are? and go Swain-centuries deep. I follow the trail in reverse, Reverends and Bishops, past the pulpit-thumpers, the bible-wavers, the sideburn and eyebrow-growers. I keep going, pass long-ago knights, crusaders and other assorted do-lallies, eventually going as far back as The Flood. Then in the final segment, ad-breaks over and voiceover dropped to a whisper, I trace all the way back to God Himself and say Who Do You Think You Are?
We are Swains. I read an essay once where the critic complained there was a distance from reality in Dickens’s characters’ names. He didn’t know Dickens couldn’t sleep. That he walked the graveyards at night. He didn’t know Moses Pickwick was a coach-owner in Bath, or the church register at Chatham lists the Sowerberry family, undertakers, or that one Oliver Twiste was born in Salford, and a Mr Dorrett was confined in the Marshalsea prison when Dickens senior was there. I know, weird that I know that. But if you lie in bed all day with nothing but books you won’t be Class One Normal yourself, and anyway Swains don’t do Normal. Open the phonebook for County Clare. Turn to S. Run your finger down past Patrick Swabb the hurling chemist in Clarecastle and Fionnuala Swan who lives by the vanishing lake in Tubber, and before you get to Sweeney there we are. Between Sweeney and Swan we’re the only entry, between the Bird King and the last daughter of Lir: Swain. The world is more outlandish than some people’s imaginations.
My actual great-grandfather I never met, but because of him the Swain side of the family are what Nan Nonie calls Queer Fish. Out of the mists of my night-time unsleeping I sometimes see him, the Reverend. He too cannot sleep and walks away from a shadow church at marching pace, striking out past a graveyard where the headstones tilt like giant teeth and the stars are bared. He cannot get where he is going. His burden is an intense restlessness that will not let him lie down, and so while his lamb-wife Agnes sleeps on the very edge of their bed the Reverend walks the night. He walks twenty miles without pause. From him escapes a low murmuring hum that may be prayers. Hands behind his back, he is like a man with Business Elsewhere, and none of those he passes, lost souls, rumpled shades, dare delay him. He has the Swain jaw, the sharp up-jut, the grey beard-line that though he shaves twice daily remains like a half-mask he cannot take off. I see him, pacing out past the yew tree in the churchyard. What his business is, where he goes to meet it and how exactly it is transacted are all enfolded in the mystery of ancestors. He can only be followed so far. Above the tree I sometimes throw a fistful of stars, hang a crescent moon, but for my moon and stars the Reverend does not pause; he paces on into the dark, and then is gone.
/> Just a brief shiver of great-grandfather.
What the Reverend bequeaths to our story is the Swain Philosophy of Impossible Standard. In the year eighteen hundred and ninety-five he leaves it to his son at the christening, dipping the boy into the large cold name Abraham, and stepping back from the wailing, jutting the jaw. He wants his son to aspire. He wants him to outreach the ordinary and be a proof to God of the excellence of His Creation. That is how I think of it. The basis of the Philosophy of Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can’t ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do. You have to keep polishing your soul ahead of Entering the Presence. Something like that.
And Grandfather Abraham began polishing straight away. By age twelve, nineteen hundred and seven, he was a medal magnet. For Running, One Hundred Yards, Two Hundred Yards, Long Jump, Hop Step and Jump, Grandfather was your man.
Then he discovered the Pole-vault.
In St Bartholemew’s School for Boys (established 1778, Headmaster, Thomas Tupping, a man notable for nothing but having eight too many teeth and lips that never touched) Abraham took the Reverend’s restlessness to new heights, tearing down the runway with his lance and firing himself into the sky.
And that’s where he arrives in my imagination, my mad grandfather, a blur-boy of white singlet and shorts, short sharp hair, blue eyes, charging like a knight towards an invisible enemy. There’s no one watching. It’s just him after school on a grey afternoon. Blackbirds have settled on the playing fields. The bounce of his stride echoes in the pole. It’s not fibreglass but wood. The wind must think it’s a mast and he a sail too small for lifting.
His pace quickens, his knees lift, the blackbirds turn. Down the cinderway he comes, crisp crunch-crunch-crunch, man on the end of a stick. Mouth pursed out and open he blows a wind-note with each step, whuu-whuu-whuu, announcing himself, warning the air that he is coming. His eyes are locked on the concrete trap. It’s his entranceway. The pole lowers, wavers slightly. A hard clack is the last sound Grandfather hears on earth.
And here he is, Abraham in lift-off, his soul bubbling as he climbs, entering the upper air with perfect propulsion and ascension both. An instant and he no longer needs the pole. Hands it off. It falls to ground, a distant double-bounce off the solid world below. The blackbirds take fright, rise and glide to the goalmouth. Amazement blues my grandfather’s eyes. He’s at the apex of a triangle, a pale angular man-bird. His legs air-walk, his everything unearthed as he crosses the bar above us all. There is a giddy gulp of the Impossible and he sort of rolls over in the sky, pressed up against the iron clouds where God must be watching. His mind whites out. His body believes it is winged, has vaulted into some other way of being. Abraham Swain is Up There and Away, paddling the air above the ordinary and just for a moment praying: let me never fall to earth.
Chapter 2
Mrs Quinty says I have Superabundance of Style and must trim back. She was once my English teacher and comes now Tuesdays and Thursdays from the Tech after she finishes. I’m on her rounds. I’m her Tuesdays with Ruth (and Thursdays). Because of me Mrs Quinty will be taking the bypass around Purgatory and shooting straight on into Heaven.
She predicts a Brilliant Career for me if I will only Trim Back.
I will also need to stay alive.
Before she comes upstairs to my room she has a few words with my mother about My Condition.
Mrs Quinty is a small tight bow. I mean, tight. Everything is to be kept neat and precise. But since the departure of Mr Quinty, a lorry driver with black curls who left our narrative some time previous, she now fears something secretly loosening in her all the time. To address this she frequently gives herself a little pull in, a little sharp tug on her blouse or jacket that goes unremarked in these parts because people know her circumstances and allow for oddities. If Mr Quinty had Passed On it would have been better. If he had Gone to His Reward. Mrs Quinty would cope; she suited widowhood, and had the wardrobe. But as it was, despite Tommy Quinty being heavily pregnant with eighteen years of Victoria Sponge, Lemon Drizzle, Apple Upside Down, Rhubarb Custard Tart and Caramel Eclairs, a brazen long-legged hairdresser called Sylvia in Swansea Wales managed to overlook the Collected Cakes and see only the black curls of the same Tommy.
He stopped in for a Do, Nan says, and he’s not Done yet.
Although everyone in the parish knows this since Martin Conway took the Under-Sixteen-and-a-Halfs over to a match, stopped in Swansea for chips and toilets and saw Tommy in an outrageous quiff, powder-blue blazer and white shoes, no one lets on to Mrs Quinty. As if by secret agreement it was decided Tommy Quinty would drop out of all conversation. Sometimes he’s in a whisper down in Ryan’s or a joke out at the Crossroads on the night of a forty-five drive when the tarts are served, but for the most part he has Left the Narrative.
But in doing so he left Mrs Quinty a chill. Also migraine attacks, tinnitus, inflammation of the ear, Eustachian catarrh, occasional left-sided deafness caused she will tell you by retracted membrana tympani, swelling of glands, lacunar tonsillitis, dizziness, disorders of the digestive system – All Sorts – and what she herself diagnosed as cheese-breath.
Mrs Quinty suffers. Of illnesses she has whatever is going. Her only hope is to keep the little bow of herself tight and teach on. The teaching keeps her going. When I was her pupil a hundred years ago her classes were notable for being the only ones in which absolute silence reigned. Even though her frame was diminutive and her dress sense very Costume Drama, everyone knew: you don’t mess with Mrs Quinty. She came in and the first thing she did was open the windows. It could be hail and gale outside. Mrs Quinty opened the windows. Then she took out these little wipes and wiped down the surface of the desk. That lady brought with her her own environment.
Still, the Tech was the last place you’d think she should be. The native population of that school was at no point under the control of Mr Cuddy. Perplexity at managing teenagers had given him a face like the letter Z and he kept it largely in his office where he pursued more available consolations by solving crossword puzzles. From school-life, one example: one Christmas week the crib was set up in the Assembly Hall, a life-size alabaster Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, two not-life-size camels, two lambs, one cow, one donkey, and three very Islamic-looking Magi. They were laid out on a bed of genuine hay (used) that Jacinta Dineen brought in her bag. Then, while Mrs Murphy in Room 7 was synthesising ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, Baby Jesus was kidnapped. A ransom note was left in the hay. It said: ‘We have Jesus.’
Mr Cuddy called in every student for questioning – Have you seen Jesus? – and eventually announced that unless Jesus was returned immediately there would be no Christmas Mass.
Baby Jesus did not return. He had not been seen on any of the school buses heading in the general direction of Kilrush or Kildysart or Ennis and so it was concluded: Our Lord was still in the Tech.
The First Years were recruited to help look for Jesus. Every desk, cupboard, locker was opened. But nobody could find Him.
Another note appeared in the hay. It said: ‘Stop serching’.
By this stage the whole school was on the side of the kidnappers and false sightings were announced hourly. Jesus was in the Chemistry Lab. He was in the Girls’ Changing Room before Games. He was taking French Oral with the Sub Miss Trigot.
That lad is everywhere, Thomas Halvey said.
Mr Cuddy decided to call the kidnappers’ bluff; he reversed himself and said Christmas Mass was going ahead anyway. He figured when the parents came in Baby Jesus would be back in his crib. The Mass would shame the kidnappers into surrendering their hostage.
It didn’t.
We all attended that Mass with the crib on the altar and, in the place of the Infant, a lamb on whose forehead someone had taped the word ‘Jesus’.
No, the Tech is the last place you’d expect to find Mrs Quinty. But somehow the teaching saves her from herself. In the classroom she’s invincible. It’s ordinary life she finds har
d.
When Doctor Mahon asks her why she doesn’t retire from teaching on Medical Grounds her answer is: I have My Cross.
When she comes in downstairs Mrs Quinty rests her cross and asks my mother what I am on. Like Synge on Aran I hear the world through a neat knothole in my floor.
‘Is her mouth very dry? Mine was terribly dry.’
‘Did you bring any cake?’ Nan calls from her seat by the fire. Nan is Mam’s mam, she’s a Talty, ninety-seven or ninety-nine, is shrunk to a doll-sized grandmother with large hands and feet. She has what Margaret Crowe calls the All-Simons, which is basically a refutation of the invention of time; all time is the same to Nan, she has that most remarkable of skills, the habit of living, and has it so perfected now that death has given up and gone away. In her Foxford blanket and ancient pampooties Nan is part-Cherokee, part-Mrs Markleham in David Copperfield. Mrs Markleham was the one who was nicknamed The Old Soldier, a little sharp-eyed woman who always wore the one unchangeable hat. Mrs Markleham’s was ornamented with artificial flowers and two hovering butterflies; Nan has the same sharp eyes and hers is a man’s tweed cap. It’s flat and old and faded, but plays a part later on.
‘How is she doing today?’
‘No change, really,’ Mam says.
As politeness dictates, the conversation goes on, but we have no time for it. Mrs Quinty tightens up and brings herself up the stairs. Thirteen steep steps, more a ladder than a stairs proper, rising from the up-slope of the flagstones across from the fire and up over the dresser. For a woman with so many illnesses she has a firm step, even carrying her cross. Here she comes.
‘Now,’ she says when she enters the room. She says it as though she’s bringing herself into focus, or as if to herself she’s announcing her own landing in this bedroom with the big rough handmade bed, the skylight and the three thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight books.
It allows her to regain her breath, to consider the racing of her heart, some murmurous inner pulsing – gall bladder? – and to adjust her eyes to entering the sky.
History of the Rain Page 1